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Former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour, second from right, releases the final report of an independent review into sexual misconduct in the Canadian military, in Ottawa on May 30, 2022. Also in attendance is Minister of National Defence Anita Anand, Chief of the Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre and Deputy Minister of National Defence Bill Matthews.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

The story Louise Arbour tells about the militarys handling of sexual misconduct is a tale of an insular organization so resistant to change and outside ideas that it needs external actors to monitor its behaviour on many levels.

That goes beyond moving the prosecution of criminal sexual offences to the civilian justice system to having the Canadian Human Rights Commission handle cases of sexual harassment in the military, appointing an external monitor to review progress in the Canadian Armed Forces, and maybe even scrapping Canadas military colleges.

Thats needed, Ms. Arbour tells us, because the military has a long history of responding to reports and recommendations with a flurry of activity that ticks off boxes to claim things are being done, while little real change occurs. That happened after the Somalia inquiry in the 1990s, the former Supreme Court justice reported, and that happened after former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps delivered a shocking report on sexual misconduct in the military in 2015.

Yet this tale still leaves one wondering about the folks who were supposed to be providing external oversight to the military all along, but didnt: the government. In particular, that means Justin Trudeaus Liberal government and his defence minister from 2015 to 2021, Harjit Sajjan.

Now, it is a good thing Mr. Trudeau seemed to recognize this failing, albeit under the duress of political controversy. His government appointed Ms. Arbour. A new minister, Anita Anand, was tasked with delivering reform.

Better late than never. Maybe.

The problem now is that Mr. Trudeau and his ministers still dont seem to have found the guts to oversee the military. You know beyond rhetoric. It is a basic duty of the government of the day to ensure civilian control of the military, but the Liberals have been too distracted, and too scared, to exert control.

They feared digging into the details of military matters Mr. Sajjan didnt even seem to think it was his job and stirring up disputes with generals that promised more political headaches than rewards. But by now, after a mountain of allegations of sexual misconduct against high-ranking officers, youd think there isnt much choice.

On Monday, it wasnt clear the fear is gone. Or that the pattern that Ms. Arbour decried the military responding with a flurry of activity, and bodies, and paper directives that dont really change much wont be repeated.

Ms. Anand said she accepted all the recommendations in Ms. Arbours report, but she deployed a significant amount of bafflegab to cloud the fact she wasnt actually committing to implement all of them.

She said she would immediately adopt about a third of them, 17, including appointing an external monitor. She said shed ask senior officers and officials for a plan on whether and when the rest can be put into practice. It turns out accepting isnt the same thing as doing.

Handing over complaints of non-criminal sexual harassment in the military to the Human Rights Commission? The brass wont be keen. Ms. Anand didnt commit. Will the government really consider closing the Kingston, Ont., and Saint-Jean, Que., military colleges? General Wayne Eyre, the Chief of the Defence Staff, suggested the brass is aligned with Ms. Arbours report on that. What does that mean? Theyll study it.

Governments dont have to accept every recommendation, of course. But the obfuscation, and vapid claims of alignment, are unsettling signs.

Luckily, Ms. Arbour, sitting beside Ms. Anand and Gen. Eyre at Mondays news conference, made a point of warning against the oft-repeated pattern of delay, deflect and dodge.

One of her recommendations is that Ms. Anand formally declare which recommendations she wont pursue. If something is not going to happen, lets just say it, Ms. Arbour said. She added that she is wary of recommending more oversight bodies because it detracts from the political responsibility of people like Ms. Anand.

That is the crucial element. And at this point, we still have to doubt the political will.

Ms. Anand delivered a seize-the-moment admonition that if things dont change in the Canadian Armed Forces now, Canada might end up with a military that cant fulfill its mission. But thats a warning that she should deliver to her fellow cabinet ministers, and Mr. Trudeau. After all, theyre supposed to be in charge.

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Will the Liberals finally find the guts to oversee the military? - The Globe and Mail

OTTAWA An outspoken critic of the Liberal government's online streaming bill received funding from two of the biggest digital platforms in the world.

Scott Benzie, founder of Digital First Canada, told a parliamentary committee on Monday that his organization, which advocates for online creators, is partly funded by YouTube and TikTok.

The revelation prompted Liberal MP Chris Bittle, parliamentary secretary to Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, to accuse Benzie of having an "extreme conflict of interest."

The MP said representing digital first creators while taking money from the platforms was "almost like starting a union and taking money from management."

Bittle also accused Benzie of concealing that he was funded by the platforms when he appeared before the committee previously.

Benzie, also the executive director of Digital First Canada, told the committee he had informed the Heritage Department he had received funding from platforms.

In an interview on Tuesday, Benzie said he had not tried to conceal that his organization received private funding. He said the money came from a store and the two platforms and totalled "less than $100,000."

"Mr Bittle took that time to attack the organization for something that he already knew and wasn't a secret," Benzie said in an interview. "It's not something that we were trying to hide."

He argued that the MP could have spent the time asking about the content of the bill instead.

Benzie said he set up Digital First Canada before receiving funding earlier this year from the platforms and was "going to do it anyway" and would be "doing this without them."

The advocate has been one of the most vocal critics of Bill C-11, which aims to modernize the Canadian Broadcasting Act to include streaming platforms such as Netflix and YouTube.

He has expressed concerns that the bill and its predecessor, known as C-10 and which failed to pass before the 2021 election, could apply to user-generated content, such as amateur videos posted on YouTube.

His opinions have been cited in the House of Commons by MPs, and the issue of user-generated content has become a central issue in debates about the bill, including in the heritage committee, which is currently scrutinizing C-11.

Benzie is registered to lobby the Heritage Department on legislation that would affect online content creators.

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said Canada's online creators are "incredibly talented."

"Most of them are self-employed independent workers. Sadly, their livelihoods are in the hands of tech giants, who can deplatform, demonetize, demote or censor their content at will."

Benzie told the committee that most of the advocacy group's funding comes from the Toronto-based Buffer Festival, an annual event showcasing online video creators.

He said he disagreed with tech giants on various issues, including on the topic of more transparency of platforms' algorithms.

Both YouTube and TikTok said Digital First Canada has given a voice to online content creators.

"In both the C-11 and C-10 debate, digital creator voices were barely consulted or considered. Digital First Canada provided a forum to defend and raise their voices," said Lauren Skelly, YouTube spokesperson. "We support their efforts in defending Canadian creators during this critical time."

A spokesperson for TikTok said: "We're proud to support Digital First Canada's advocacy on behalf of independent online creators whose interests aren't otherwise represented by existing guilds or associations."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 31, 2022.

Marie Woolf, The Canadian Press

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Vocal critic of Liberals' online streaming bill partly funded by YouTube and TikTok - Rocky Mountain Outlook - Bow Valley News

Ontario Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca holds a rally in Scarborough, Ont., on May 29.Chris Young/The Canadian Press

We can safely predict that the Liberal Party will improve its standing in the Ontario Legislature after the June 2 election. But that may not save its leader, Steven Del Duca. And the party itself could be in serious trouble.

Lets take a look at the electoral landscape in the final days of the campaign.

Pretty much everyone agrees that Doug Fords Progressive Conservatives will form the next government. 338Canada.com, which weights and aggregates polls, had the Conservatives at 38 per cent on Sunday. Philippe J. Fournier, who runs the site, projects a Conservative majority government of better than 80 seats.

The Tories appear likely to dominate in the 905, the band of suburban seats surrounding Toronto, named after their area code. A virtual sweep of the 905 just about guarantees any party a win.

With 27 per cent of the popular vote, the Liberals are ahead of the New Democrats, who have 23 per cent. But the 338Canada projections have the NDP taking 25 seats and the Liberals only taking 15, enough to achieve party status in the legislature, which they lost after the past election, but still a distant third-place result.

Thats because the NDP vote tends to concentrate in city centres and in Northern Ontario, while the Liberal vote is more evenly spread out. This makes things both frustrating and tantalizing for the Liberals.

The NDP vote is highly efficient in the 20-25 per cent range. Thats why it can surpass the Liberals at this point, Mr. Fournier told me. However, the NDP vote is highly inefficient in the 25-30 per cent range, unlike the Liberals.

If the Liberals could manage to win a few more points in the popular vote, vote splits at the riding level could start to work in their favour. They could steal a bunch of seats from the PCs, form the Official Opposition and maybe even deprive Conservative Leader Doug Ford of a majority government.

But unless they can pull off that surge, the Liberals appear doomed to languish in third place in the seat count, again.

There is more worrying news for the Grits. Mr. Del Duca seeks to enter the legislature through the 905 riding of VaughanWoodbridge, which he once held. But he was defeated in the previous election by 8,000 votes, and the 338Canada riding projection has it as a toss-up.

Coming third in the seat count and losing his own riding could cost Mr. Del Duca the leadership.

Since this is Andrea Horwaths fourth campaign as leader of the NDP, both opposition parties might be replacing leaders. If so, which party would be more likely to unseat the Progressive Conservatives could depend on which leader each party chose.

For most of the provinces history, the Liberals have been one of the two governing parties, along with the Progressive Conservatives. Most recently, they governed for 15 years under premiers Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne.

But the NDP formed a government in 1990 under Bob Rae. It is currently the Official Opposition. After June 2, it could be the Official Opposition again. If so, anyone who wants to donate to the progressive political party most likely to unseat the Tories would have good reason to send that money to the NDP rather than the Liberals.

This portrait of Liberal woes may be undeservedly bleak. As my colleague Jeff Gray reports, the Liberal Leader has done a good job of paying down the partys debt and establishing a solid platform. If the Grits win back party status, and if Mr. Del Duca can find a way to get himself into the legislature, he could continue to lead the party and that party could reassert itself as the governing alternative to the PCs.

But the strength of the Liberal Party, in any province or nationally, is also its weakness. It caters to a broad coalition of voters, grouped on either side of the political centre and committed to pragmatic, responsible, mildly progressive government.

But that coalition is always at risk of evaporating, if voters decide they want either a more emphatically progressive or emphatically conservative alternative.

Either with Mr. Del Duca or with someone else, the Liberals need to get back in the game. Otherwise, voters might forget about them altogether.

Want to hear more about the Ontario election from our journalists? Subscribe to Vote of Confidence, a twice-weekly newsletter dedicated to the key issues in this campaign, landing in your inbox starting May 17 until election day on June 2.

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The future of the Ontario Liberals is at stake on June 2 - The Globe and Mail

Pressed on why the Liberal Party had failed to resonate with many female voters, Ley said that women didnt hear much of what we were saying.

Newly elected deputy Liberal Party leader Sussan Ley said she wanted to have honest conversations with women after female voters abandoned the party.Credit:James Brickwood.

They didnt believe, perhaps, that we were focusing enough on them and their lives. But again, many women actually did support us and Ive heard from many of those women and in my regional electorate of Farrer, I had a 7 per cent to party swing towards me.

Labors ranks have swelled by an extra six women, taking their total female-held seats to 35. At the same time, women in the Liberal Party now hold just 9 seats, down from 13 in the last parliament.

The Senate tipped over half female representation during the last term of parliament, but has boosted its ranks further. It will have 57 per cent women once the new senators take their seats in July.

Labor has had quotas for female representation in winnable seats since the mid-1990s with the level ratcheted up over time, while the Liberal Party has had a long-held resistance to quotas.

Asked whether she would advocate for quotas for women, Ley said it was a matter for the partys state divisions as she indicated she was open to discussing quotas with merit.

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Quotas on their own sometimes overlook the issue of merit. You only have to look at the women in our party to know that merit played a very strong role in all of their presence in this building, she said.

Senior Liberal senator Anne Ruston said the partys wide-ranging review into its election loss would examine why voters abandoned the party but said more could be done to support women to run for office.

Affirmative action to make sure that weve got broad diversity in the party is very important as we rebuild because we are the alternative government, she said.

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Record number of women in the 47th parliament, as female voters shun Liberals - Sydney Morning Herald

It has become a tradition for the Trudeau government: Whenever a mass shooting occurs, it immediately announces more gun-control measures.

It did it in 2020, when in the days after the murder of 22 people in Nova Scotia, it announced a ban on ownership of many semi-automatic assault-style rifles, and said it would bring in a mandatory buyback program for those weapons.

The Liberals did it again last week, in the heightened emotional aftermath of the killing of 19 children in a Texas elementary school, when they announced their intention to take new gun-control steps.

On the plus side, hey, at least in Canada we have a government that responds to mass shootings by talking about preventing more of them unlike the United States, where it is preordained that yet another slaughter of children will not change American gun laws.

But using such episodes to sell Canadian gun-control policies overlooks the fact that the biggest and most persistent gun-violence problem in Canada is not mass shootings. Its the daily tally of individual violent crimes involving firearms, especially handguns. And the Liberals have done little to stem the growing number of these less-newsworthy crimes.

A Statistics Canada report released last week says that, since 2009, the per capita rate of firearms being pointed at someone in the commission of a crime has nearly tripled, and the rate at which guns are fired with intent to kill or wound is up fivefold.

In rural areas, there were notable spikes in firearms-related crimes in 2019 and 2020, mostly involving long guns. But its in cities and suburbs where crime is most likely to involve a firearm usually an easy-to-conceal handgun. Statscan says 63 per cent of firearm-related violent crimes in urban areas involved handguns in 2020.

These trends are starkly reflected in Canadas largest city, whose rate of gun crime is about average for the country (and lower than Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon and Calgary). The Toronto Police Service reported this month that 286 people have been killed in shootings, and 1,185 people have been injured, since 2015.

The Liberals, quick to rush to the podium after mass shootings, have mostly offered half-baked measures in response to the much larger number of Canadians harmed by mundane, day-to-day gun violence.

Their most talked-about plan involves passing the buck to municipalities, by giving them the right to ban handguns. Toronto could ban handgun ownership and sales, while municipalities next door do not. Its nonsensical. A more sensible proposal would be for the federal government to ban handguns nationwide, as this page has argued before.

There should also be increased penalties for smuggling and trafficking illegal guns, and tightened border controls. Canadas rules to screen legal gun owners are necessary and effective, but theres a large and growing problem of illegal guns flowing in from the U.S. Thats why, as we recently wrote, those who want tougher gun control and those who want to go after criminals with illegal guns are both right.

The Liberals should also listen to an idea from the Toronto Police Service. It proposed this month that the federal government require bail hearings for people charged with the most serious firearm offences be heard by judges, instead of by justices of the peace. Its a move the police say would clearly convey Parliaments view of the seriousness of these offences.

Toronto police also suggest that Ottawa amend the Criminal Code so that someone who opens fire in a busy public place can be charged with first-degree murder if they kill an innocent bystander.

There is no one magic bullet that can make gun crime disappear. But Canada has done a few things right, and the way forward includes more of the same: smart gun control that screens owners while respecting law-abiding hunters; a focus on the flow of smuggled and illegal guns; criminal laws that target gun crime; and a society with a strong economy, education system and social safety net, to minimize the incentive to turn to crime.

More proposals from the Liberals to, for example, limit the magazine capacity of long guns may be welcomed by the public especially in light of the Texas tragedy. But they would be, once again, ignoring this countrys most deadly and widespread gun crimes.

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Globe editorial: Canada has a real gun violence problem, but it's (mostly) not the one the Liberals want to talk about - The Globe and Mail