FIRST READING: Canada's Afghan allies abandoned, China doesn't want you to vote Tory

Plus, why Ontario Tories are avoiding Erin O'Toole

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Publishing date:

Aug 27, 2021 

A screen grab shows people carrying an injured person to a hospital after an attack at Kabul airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan August 26, 2021. 

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Canada has officially stopped evacuating people from Afghanistan, with the last RCAF C-17 lifting off from Kabul Airport in the wee hours of Thursday morning, Ottawa time. After a delayed evacuation effort that ultimately was only able to airlift 3,700 people from Kabul, there are believed to be hundreds of former Canadian allies left behind who now face retribution from the Taliban. While Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau touted Canada’s efforts on the campaign trail Thursday, both Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh characterized the operation as a failure.

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An estimated 8,000 Afghans applied for Canadian asylum, including many who worked for Canadian Forces during their deployment to the country. Only a fraction of those made it aboard the RCAF airlift, which primarily evacuated Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Although some may have made it out on other evac flights or fled Afghanistan by other means, it is not yet known how many of the 8,000 were left behind.

Compounding the horror in Kabul was a pair of Thursday suicide bombings among the crowds outside the airport. Twelve U.S. service members were killed in addition to untold numbers of Afghan civilians who had been seeking asylum from Taliban rule.

Writing for The Line, Kevin Newman — who has been leading efforts to try and evacuate Afghan interpreters — noted that the bombs went off in the sewage canal where Canada had specifically been instructing its asylum seekers to gather. Of Newman’s Afghan contacts, “they are now completely abandoned to their fate. Soon we can expect to hear if some of them are now dead,” he wrote.

Responding to a question at a campaign event, O’Toole said that if elected, he would order Canadian flags on federal buildings raised. The Maple Leaf has been at half-staff since June, following the discovery of unmarked graves believe to contain the bodies of children who died at Indian Residential School. “We should be proud to put our flag back up,” said O’Toole.

It’s Paul Martin! Canada’s 21st prime minister doesn’t comment on politics all that often these days, but Montreal-area Liberal Marc Miller dug up the 82-year-old for a photo on Wednesday. The wealthiest man ever to be prime minister (his net worth was north of $200 million while in office), Martin was head of a minority Liberal government that was defeated in 2006 by the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

Word leaked out last week that Ontario Premier Doug Ford had called a truce with Trudeau under which neither would disparage the other throughout the length of the election. Now, according to the Globe and Mail, that has extended to Ford ordering his Progressive Conservative ministers to avoid being seen with O’Toole altogether.

Trudeau tried to hold an off-the-record conversation with reporters from Global News and the Globe and Mail in the back of the Liberal campaign plane. The reporters, however, said “no.” “There should be no off record talks between leaders and journalists on any of the campaigns,” reporter Robert Fife said in a tweet.

Remember the Orange Wave, the tide of sudden Quebec support for the NDP in 2011 that ended up making them the Official Opposition? Alexandre Boulerice does; he’s now the Orange Wave’s lone survivor. “I miss my NDP friends. Bring me back two or three friends and I’ll be happy,” he said from the campaign trail this week.

While Chinese ambassador Cong Peiwu told The Hill Times he didn’t want to meddle in the Canadian election, he urged Canadians not to vote for anyone who is “hyping up issues related to China or smearing China.” When asked if he was urging a vote against the Tories, Peiwu replied, “Some people put their personal political interests above the interests of the Canadian people.”

Like most Beijing officials, Cong Peiwu doesn’t have a lot of direct experience with elections. 

LET’S POLL

And now Nanos has put out its first poll showing the Conservatives in the lead. With the Tories at 34.4 per cent and the Liberals at 33.6 per cent, the result would still be a Liberal minority government if an election were held tomorrow, but it’s yet another sign of rising Conservative fortunes. The Nanos poll is also terrible news for the PPC and the Greens, both of whom are languishing below five per cent.

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Although, aside from the Conservatives, the PPC are really the only ones who haven’t seen their support drop noticeably since the election call. PHOTO BY NANOS

SOLID TAKES

Basically everyone has had a go at trashing Maryam Monsef for referring to the Taliban as “our brothers” in an official government briefing, so here’s some of the highlights. Zahra Sultani, a former Afghan refugee living in Toronto, dismissed Monsef’s claim that the term was a harmless cultural reference. “To call someone ‘brother’ in Afghan culture is to recognize a mutual deep respect for them,” wrote Sultani. Tasha Kheiriddin compared the Liberals’ bungling of Afghanistan to the way the Syrian refugee crisis helped sink the Conservatives’ re-election efforts in 2015. Matt Gurney didn’t take issue with Monsef’s Taliban “charm offensive” so much as he saw it as indicative of a government that has been troublingly non-urgent in its treatment of the Afghanistan humanitarian crisis.

John Ivison, who is following the Liberal campaign, noted the dissonance of bombs going off in Kabul while Justin Trudeau campaigned in Quebec City promising an extra $42 per month to seniors.

The Conservatives have been pushing a whole bunch of pro-labour policies not typically associated with conservatives, such as expanding Employment Insurance or even making it easier to form unions. Adam Zivo sees it as perfectly natural that the Tories should try to steal labour votes from the left, given that traditional pro-labour parties like the NDP have become increasingly dominated by “bourgeois bohemians.”

Ken Boessenkool is an old-time Reform Party-er and Stephen Harper advisor. He looked at the NDP’s surging numbers in Alberta and surmised that it may be a bad portent for Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Despite its usual habit of spending generations as a one-party state, Alberta may be turning into a place where left and right-wingers realistically vie for power.

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The NDP might be more open to working with a Conservative minority government than it would seem, according to David Akin. O’Toole is way more centrist than his predecessor Andrew Scheer, to the point of introducing policies that almost seem cribbed from Jack Layton.

GO RIGHT TO THE SOURCE

If you are a Canadian stranded in Afghanistan, you received an email from Global Affairs this morning noting that “Canada’s evacuation operations have now ended” and advising you to “shelter in place.” Read the full letter here.