Jason “Bumbles” Kenney bumbled again. Will he ever learn or say sorry?

Garfield Marks

Published

5 years ago

4 minute read

April 2 2015 this article from the National Post came out;

Jason Kenney has long been considered the Conservative party’s best approximation of an heir apparent; a dauphin, if you will. In a caucus notably lacking in strong performers, save for the Prime Minister and a handful of ministers, Mr. Kenney is a star.

Or was.

For it has been reinforced lately, most recently Wednesday, that this minister has a potentially crippling Achilles heel; his very confidence and combativeness, coupled with instant access to social media, lead him to one snafu after another. Making matters worse, having erred, Mr. Kenney is incapable of apology. The words “I’m sorry” apparently cannot pass his lips without causing him to spontaneously combust. In this, the Defence Minister neatly personifies what ails his party as it heads into a make-or-break election; a clench-jawed refusal to admit error or consider fair criticism until the last grainery has been burned, the last well salted and the last bridge bombed.

That was in 2015, now in 2021 it appears nothing has changed.

Last week Ontario’s Finance Minister was stripped of his position when the media disclosed he was in the Caribbean over Christmas. Alberta’s Premier, once referred to in Ottawa as Mr. Bumbles, looked at his government and many Cabinet Ministers, Senior Staff and MLAs including Red Deer South’s Jason Stefan was in fact also out of the country.

Unfortunately Ontario’s Premier Ford only had 1 member lacking the moral compass to stay home, Mr. Bumbles had many.

The Minister in charge of rolling out the vaccine was in Hawaii, coincidentally our vaccine roll out was one of the slowest in Canada. Our bumbling Premier offered;”We weren’t expecting the vaccine til January” so it is Trudeau’s fault that we got vaccines early. He went on to brag that starting now, we are vaccinating 3,000 people per day. With a population of 4.5 million that means we will all be vacinated in 1500 days or about 4 years.

Mr. Kenney still bumbles along, with denials, blaming others, doubling down and refusing to take responsibility or to apologize.

He says he never directed them directly, not to travel even though it has been on the government website.

Some may offer that the Premier is a hands off Premier, more in it for the prestige and photo ops, but his party UCP should get off their high horses and live with all us common folks. You know the ones you warned could be fined $1,000 if we go to Grandma’s house. Does UCP stand for Upper Crust Party? It fits.

Mr. Premier if you want to distance yourself from the moniker; “Mr. Bumbles”. Do something, Take action. Take control of your government.

I remember when Former Premier Prentice and Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith were seen as “too smart by half”. They lost.

Will you last through any more Bumbles? I would try to do your job. Just saying.

Garfield Marks

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The city is growing? The population isn’t, so is it growing?

Garfield Marks / 3 years ago

Dear Council; Reinstate the Arterial Road connection from 22 St. & 40 Ave. to Molly Banister

Opinion / 3 years ago

Molly Banister extension is before council again on Monday for the umpteenth time. Exhausting.

Media

Carney speech highlights how easily newsrooms are played by politicians

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

The Rewrite

Peter Menzies

Plus! Global’s oops on Trump in the crosshairs and assuming what Stephen Harper thinks may not be the best idea!

It has never been easier, thanks to the internet, for journalists to check if they are being played for fools. But due either to sloth, neglect, habit or servility – pick one – way too many lack the motivation to use a search engine.

Instead, they frequently accept the role of featherheads manipulated by politicians staging one of the oldest scams in the Machiavellian playbook, the recycled “news” announcement. I say “featherheads” (patsies was another option) because, for instance, Prime Minister Mark Carney can book news network time for a full half hour speech that is nothing more than a rehash of everything he’s been saying for the past 10 months and still lead newscasts and make the front pages.

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Here, I must pause to credit the Toronto Star. It, like other news organizations, received an embargoed copy of Wednesday’s speech in advance. It read it, saw that it contained no news and did not put a report on its front page. Others such as National Post and the Globe and Mail tried desperately to find a fresh angle within the speech but put it on their front pages anyway. CBC threw everything it had into it and CTV also led with it and tried its best to make it sound like news had happened.

Now, I am a reasonable and fair-minded person, so I would not be reacting were it just this incident that captured my attention. The PM is speaking, everyone gets excited, you review and lock in your story lineup and, ya, I get it. Been there, done that. But this was part of a troubling pattern that has emerged.

For instance, the government’s “plan” to hire 1,000 more Canadian Border Services guards was first announced in the Liberal election platform last spring. It was then, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, re-announced “April 10, April 28, June 3 and August 12.”

That Blacklock’s report was published Oct. 14 and focused on Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s insistence he was “not responsible” for the promised hiring that hadn’t happened yet. Two days later, Carney announced that the previously announced and re-announced plan would be announced again in the Nov. 4 budget. And the day after that – Oct. 17 – Anandasangaree announced his ministry would be doing what he said a few days previously wasn’t his responsibility and hiring 1,000 new border guards – over the next five years. A similar pattern of announcement and reannouncements took place regarding the government’s plan to hire 1,000 more RCMP officers, also not immediately but eventually. Then, last week, Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne announced a financial crimes agency would be up and running by next June. This, too, was reported as a new initiative even though the government first committed to that agency in 2021.

While not all news organizations rise to the bait, this widely carried Canadian Press story is an example of how easily the public can be misinformed by reporting that lacks proper context. Re-announcements are presented as “news” despite there being no news other than “politicians repeat what they said before to keep their names in the news.” Media that go along with this pattern of manipulation allow themselves to be accused of defining news as anything the government wishes to present as news, something about which – now that media are subsidized by politicians – they should be more cautious.

The nation needs journalists to tell the whole story or, as Robert Maynard, founder of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, put it:

“The first thing about journalism is about accuracy and fairness, but that’s not enough. It has to be about context, it has to be about depth.”

Speaking of headlines, Global News deserves a long stare and shake of the head for the one it slapped on its report of the “No Kings” protests held last weekend.

Seemingly oblivious to the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk and two attempts on the life of US President Donald Trump, Global initially went with the above illustrated “Trump in the crosshairs” headline before changing it to “No Kings Day rallies draw hundreds of thousands of protesters.” The updated version made no reference to the initial version.

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There was quite a stir within the punditry when Dimitri Soudas, defrocked Conservative comms guy and former pal of notorious floor-crosser Eve Adams, wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star criticizing party leader Pierre Poilievre. Rather than go with the disgruntled former employee angle, the Globe and Mail’s Larry Martin led the pack in leaping to a conclusion:

“Soudas wouldn’t have written this attack on Poilievre without Stephan (sic) Harper’s okay,” he posted. “It means the knives are out to get PP and they are big knives that could kill his leadership.”

Martin, who has had a very distinguished career, hadn’t confirmed what he assumed Harper was thinking and was quickly schooled by Anna Tomala, the former PM’s spokeswoman.

“Mr. Soudas does not speak on behalf of Mr. Harper,” she stated curtly.

Martin did not delete his original post but while to his credit he did post an update, it’s unclear his blushes were spared.

CTV, meanwhile, declined to include Tomala’s Harper statement in its report on Soudas’s op-ed.

Retired CTV reporter Alan Fryer, meanwhile, gave his past employer a blast on X after it delivered this headline: “Carney is going ‘where the puck is going to be’ in first trip to Asia as PM.”

Fryer’s world-weary response?

“My Lord, the headline. A leader couldn’t hope for a more compliant media.”

Finally, two commentators for news organizations were subjected to harm and intimidation last week and we learned that a third had been threatened in August. Terry Newman of National Post posted that she would be contacting police, Ezra Levant of Rebel News was laid out at a protest in Dublin and it was discovered that Brian Passifume of the Toronto Sun faced a death threat in August. I checked to see if the Canadian Association of Journalists (which has abandoned X) had something to say on their behalf. The CAJ’s most recent web post regarding abuse of journalists was on Sept. 25 in defence of Isaac Peltz of theindependent.ca and William Wilson, who writes for therover.ca.

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(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)

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Business

Canada’s economic performance cratered after Ottawa pivoted to the ‘green’ economy

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jason Clemens and Jake Fuss

There are ostensibly two approaches to economic growth from a government policy perspective. The first is to create the best environment possible for entrepreneurs, business owners and investors by ensuring effective government that only does what’s needed, maintains competitive taxes and reasonable regulations. It doesn’t try to pick winners and losers but rather introduces policies to create a positive environment for all businesses to succeed.

The alternative is for the government to take an active role in picking winners and losers through taxes, spending and regulations. The idea here is that a government can promote certain companies and industries (as part of a larger “industrial policy”) better than allowing the market—that is, individual entrepreneurs, businesses and investors—to make those decisions.

It’s never purely one or the other but governments tend to generally favour one approach. The Trudeau era represented a marked break from the consensus that existed for more than two decades prior. Trudeau’s Ottawa introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the government termed the “green” economy.

The scope and cost of the policies introduced to actively pick winners and losers is hard to imagine given its breadth. Direct spending on the “green” economy by the federal government increased from $600 million the year before Trudeau took office (2014/15) to $23.0 billion last year (2024/25).

Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects (Bill C-69), banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia (Bill C-48), proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.

Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs.

Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the “green” sector, a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1 per cent. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6 per cent of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating.

And Ottawa’s initiatives did not deliver the green jobs promised. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, and the sector now represents less than 2 per cent of total employment.

Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Simply put, rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation. Consider that Canadian living standards, as measured by per-person GDP, were lower as of the second quarter of 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, we’re poorer today than we were six years ago. In contrast, U.S. per-person GDP grew by 11.0 per cent during the same period.

Median wages (midpoint where half of individuals earn more, and half earn less) in every Canadian province are now lower than comparable median wages in every U.S. state. Read that again—our richest provinces now have lower median wages than the poorest U.S. states.

A significant part of the explanation for Canada’s poor performance is the collapse of private business investment. Simply put, businesses didn’t invest much in Canada, particularly when compared to the United States, and this was all pre-Trump tariffs. Canada’s fundamentals and the general business environment were simply not conducive to private-sector investment.

These results stand in stark contrast to the prosperity enjoyed by Canadians during the Chrétien to Harper years when the focus wasn’t on Ottawa picking winners and losers but rather trying to establish the most competitive environment possible to attract and retain entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and high-skilled professionals. The policies that dominated this period are the antithesis of those in place now: balanced budgets, smaller but more effective government spending, lower and competitive taxes, and smart regulations.

As the Carney government prepares to present its first budget to the Canadian people, many questions remain about whether there will be a genuine break from the policies of the Trudeau government or whether it will simply be the same old same old but dressed up in new language and fancy terms. History clearly tells us that when governments try to pick winners and losers, the strategy doesn’t lead to prosperity but rather stagnation. Let’s all hope our new prime minister knows his history and has learned its lessons.