In The Line, a look at the failings of the federal government’s promises to fix the badly broken Access to Information system:
Sometimes, Line readers, though we always strive to be fair, we cannot deny that certain politicians are just fun to skewer. Because some of them are just terrible, terrible people, and while we polite Canadians don’t normally report too much on the personal lives of our elected leaders, well, what can we say? When you can, within responsible journalistic bounds, give a dirtbag a hard time for falling down on the job, hey. Life is good!
Patty Hajdu, the federal minister of health, is actually … perfectly pleasant. This isn’t unheard of in our politicians, but it’s rare enough to mention here, all to make very clear that we take no particular pleasure in reporting on her pathetic performance this week. But report it we must. And pathetic it surely was.
Under sharp questioning by Tory MP Michelle Rempel Garner, Hajdu very carefully and deliberately aimed a soon-to-be-banned .44 Magnum revolver at her foot, waited a dramatic second for effect, and then figuratively blew her poor extremity to smithereens. Rempel Garner had been asking about the abysmally broken state of the federal access-to-information systems, and Hajdu, with all-too-Liberal scorn, stood up and declared:
Mr. Speaker, I have spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadians since the pandemic was first announced, when COVID-19 arrived on our shores. In fact, not once has a Canadian asked me to put more resources into freedom of information officers. What they have asked me for is to ensure that all the resources of Canada are devoted to one thing, and that is the health, safety and economic prosperity of our country. We are going to continue to make sure that Canada has the most robust response possible.
There are two gigantic problems with Hajdu’s answer there.
The first is that Canada’s access-to-information regime is notoriously dysfunctional, and her government has long admitted that. Indeed, fixing this disgrace was a major plank in the party’s 2015 platform.
In the years since, the government has effectively accomplished the square root of zero.
