Current Liberal House Leader Mark Holland has spent nearly his entire career in politics except for one four-year gap after losing a close race in the 2011 federal election. That loss was so crushing he attempted to take his own life.
Politics
Naheed Nenshi: Time will tell on Danielle Smith
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A few weeks from an election in Alberta, and Danielle Smith has surpassed all expectations – not in a good way. Nonetheless, she remains the favourite to win, albeit with a very narrow victory. While there has been much news lately on recent items such as her botched affordability payments plan, or wasting $80 million and counting on off-brand children’s medication from Turkiye that no one is buying, it’s worth taking a look back at her record since coming to power just six months ago.
Her time in office has been so delightfully wacky there’s just too much to cover. She’s tripled down on the Alberta Sovereignty Act while admitting that she would follow any Supreme Court rulings on its constitutionality, and admitting she will likely never use it.
Since everyone knows the Act cannot achieve what she says it can within the confines of the Constitution (indeed, one of the authors of the strategy, Barry Cooper, has written that its unconstitutionality is ”exactly the point”), many Albertans are left wondering “what the hell is she doing?”
The same question has been asked again and again since Smith was elected by a razor thin of her own party in a surprisingly close race. (She got 53.7% on the final ballot, but about 5500 members who voted in the first ballot declined to rank either her or her final opponent, so she ended up with almost exactly 50% of votes cast.)
There are so many greatest hits to choose from; indeed, it seems every time she opens her mouth, something bizarre drops out.
On Day One, for example, she called unvaccinated people “the most discriminated group” that she’s witnessed in her lifetime.
‘WE WENT TO UNIVERSITY TOGETHER’
It’s worth noting that she’s a few months older than I am. We went to university together. Residential schools existed for the first half of our lives, as did apartheid.
Gay people could not marry. Today, in a city that is 44% non-white, BIPOC people in Calgary do not always have access to the same opportunities as their majority counterparts. Hate crimes, including acts of antisemitism and Islamophobia, are massively on the rise across Alberta.
Heck, Smith even named the largest cabinet in Alberta history, and could find room for only four women and three non-white people, one of whom is the minister of trade, immigration and multiculturalism, another of culture. At least she didn’t relegate the women to the status of women portfolio – because there isn’t one.
She attempted to clarify her comments about discrimination, highlighting that, since her grandmother had “Cherokee relatives,” she has Indigenous ancestry and understands discrimination.
Notably, she did not apologize and instead doubled down, vowing to make vaccine status a protected class under the Alberta Human Rights Act (does this mean your hairdresser can’t be required to be vaccinated against Hepatitis B, or a firefighter who lives in close quarters with others, against measles? Who knows?). Of course, she has not actually done so, having perhaps received some legal advice.
False claims of Indigenous ancestry have cost so many people their reputations and careers. Smith merely shrugged off an investigation from APTN finding no proof, with a breezy reference from her press secretary about “family history” perhaps being wrong and the fact that she hasn’t done “a deep dive” on her ancestry.
She was forced to apologize for another gaffe, in which she parroted Russian talking points about Ukraine and NATO being responsible for the invasion and suggesting that if only Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (which it did in the 1990s) and just ceded some territory to Russia, all would be fine.
Before her advisers reminded her that Alberta has one of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world, she blamed the controversy on the media digging up things she had said long ago, while she was wearing a different hat.
However, the comments were made last year, when she had declared she would run for the leadership of the UCP.
When she finally did apologize, she noted that one of her great-grandparents (not the Cherokee-adjacent one) fled Ukraine and that she, like so many Albertans, is proud of her Ukrainian roots.
However, even in that simple statement, she suggested her great-grandfather’s journey fleeing Communism was what has shaped her views and why she hates “socialists” so much. Only one small problem: he left Ukraine before the Russian revolution and the Communist victory. Oh well, close enough.
And there’s the constantly changing story on whether she interfered with criminal prosecutions of those facing not just COVID-related charges, but those involved with alleged criminal activity around the blockade of the Coutts border crossing.
Regardless of which of her explanations one believes (and it’s impossible for more than one of them to be true. She calls it “imprecise” language, others call it “lying”), she has admitted to far more than Justin Trudeau was accused of doing during the SNC Lavalin affair.
The only thing she has not done is replace her Attorney General – because she has no one to replace him with. (He’s under investigation for bad behaviour from the Law Society himself, but that’s yet another story)
How in the world did we get here? There are two schools of thought: one is that Smith is simply incompetent (she’s never been in government before and has only worked in media, lobbying, and politics, other than washing dishes and light bookkeeping at her family restaurant).
Indeed, amongst University of Calgary grads of the early 1990s there are active group text debates on whether she’s always been like this or if something has broken.
The other school says this is all an act. That like Boris Johnson or her political idol Ron DeSantis, she’s putting us all on.
She herself has lent credence to this theory. In an attempt to change the channel, she told a press conference that she sees journalism as a form of entertainment, focused on getting clicks and ratings. Therefore, she shouldn’t be held responsible for anything she said or espoused as a talk radio host.
Setting aside the cynicism of this statement – was she always playing her listeners for chumps? Will they abandon her when they figure it out or is she counting on their blind loyalty? – there is a political strategy here.
Shortly after taking office, she again said the quiet part out loud, suggesting that the math meant she could get a bare majority by sweeping rural Alberta and more or less ignoring Calgary and Edmonton.
She believes, therefore, that there is an audience for her extremism in rural Alberta and in cities such as Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer and the Grande Prairie region (all of which elected NDP members in 2015) to bring her back to the Premier’s office.
She may well be right. Polls consistently show a deadlocked race, with a small lead for the opposition NDP. However, the NDP must run a perfect campaign and win every seat they are competitive in, while the UCP has much more room for error.
‘THE LURE OF KEEPING POWER IS SEDUCTIVE INDEED’
Her caucus knows this. While they grumble loudly in private, they have fallen behind their leader in public, even on issues such as the Sovereignty Act that they had previously angrily denounced. The lure of keeping power is seductive indeed.
Many of them understand that all but one of the last five Conservative premiers have been removed by a party revolt after winning an election but before finishing the term. Many of them figure that they’ll be rid of her soon enough, so why put their necks out now?
Time will tell if Smith proves to be a good premier after all, but one thing is certain. She has done what I would have thought impossible: she’s made many Albertans long for the leadership of Jason Kenney.
Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi wrote this opinion column for CTV News
Police in Hong Kong have detained dozens of people on charges of “breaching public peace”, including a woman carrying a bouquet of flowers and a man who held a candle, during a crackdown on commemorations of the anniversary of the bloodshed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Restrictions in Hong Kong have stifled what were once the largest vigils marking the anniversary of the bloody crackdown by Chinese troops on pro-democracy demonstrators, leaving cities like Taipei, London, New York and Berlin to keep the memory of June 4, 1989, alive.
Near Victoria Park on Sunday night, the previous site of yearly vigils, hundreds of police conducted stop and search operations, and deployed armoured vehicles and police vans.
Police took away more than a dozen people at the scene, according to the Reuters news agency, including activist Alexandra Wong, 67, who carried a bouquet of flowers, a man who held a copy of “35th of May”, a play on the Tiananmen crackdown, and an elderly man standing alone on a street corner with a candle.
“The regime wants you to forget, but you can’t forget… It [China] wants to whitewash all history,” said Chris To, 51, who visited the park in a black T-shirt and was searched by police.
“We need to use our bodies and word of mouth to tell others what happened.”
In a statement, police said 11 men and 12 women aged between 20 and 74 were detained on suspicion of “breaching the public peace at the scene”.
A further four people had been arrested on Saturday for “seditious” acts and “disorderly conduct”, and four more on suspicion of breaching the peace.
‘Shameful campaign’
Discussion of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square – when China’s Communist Party sent in troops and tanks to quash peaceful protests – is highly sensitive for Chinese authorities and commemoration is forbidden on the mainland.
Hundreds – by some estimates, more than 1,000 – were killed.
Commemorations of the event have also become increasingly off-limits in Hong Kong since China imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020, effectively barring anyone from holding memorial events.
After the enactment of the security law, Tiananmen-related visual spectacles, including statues at universities, were also removed. Three leaders of the group that used to organise the vigil were charged with subversion under the law. The group itself was disbanded in 2021 after being informed by police that it was under investigation for working on behalf of foreign groups, an accusation the group denied.
Most recently, books featuring the event have been pulled from public library shelves.
Ahead of the anniversary, senior officials in Hong Kong warned people to abide by the national security law but refused to clarify if commemoration activities were illegal under the legislation. Authorities also tightened security across Hong Kong, deploying as many as 6,000 police, including riot and anti-terrorism officers, according to local media.
Following Sunday’s arrests, the office of United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said in a tweet that it was “alarmed by reports of detentions” in Hong Kong and called for the “release of anyone detained for exercising freedom of expression & peaceful assembly”.
Amnesty International also condemned the detentions, saying the use of colonial-era sedition charges against activists and the persistence of non-conforming voices “lays bare the futility of the authorities’ attempts to enforce silence and obedience”.
It added: “The Hong Kong government’s shameful campaign to stop people marking this anniversary mirrors the censorship of the Chinese central government and is an insult to those killed in the Tiananmen crackdown.”
Despite the anniversary crackdown, some Hong Kong individuals and businesses quietly marked June 4.
A shop gave away candles, while a bookstore displayed Tiananmen Square archival material. Jailed Hong Kong activist Chow Hang-tung, one of the leaders of a group called The Alliance, which used to organise the June 4 vigils, said on Facebook that she would hold a 34-hour hunger strike.
‘Clear conclusion’
In Beijing, meanwhile, Tiananmen Square was thronged with tourists taking pictures under the watchful eyes of police and other personnel but with no obvious sign of stepped-up security.
Ahead of the anniversary, a group of mothers who lost their children in the Tiananmen crackdown sought redress and issued a statement renewing their call for “truth, compensation and accountability”.
“Though 34 years have passed, for us, family members of those killed, the pain of losing our loved ones in that one night has tormented us to this day,” the group said in a statement released by the New York-based watchdog Human Rights in China.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, when asked about the government’s response to events around the world to mark the anniversary, said in Beijing on Friday that the government had already come to a “clear conclusion about the political turmoil in the late 1980s”.
In democratically-governed Taiwan, the last remaining part of the Chinese-speaking world where the anniversary can be marked freely, hundreds attended a memorial at Taipei’s Liberty Square where a “Pillar of Shame” statue was displayed.
Kacey Wong, an artist who is among dozens of Hong Kong residents who have moved to Taiwan, said more than 30 years of commemorating the 1989 protests had made it a part of life.
[“Detained” below]
Wong said an artist friend, Sanmu Chen, had been detained along with others while attempting to stage a public street performance in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong.
“So, it’s all engrained in our subconscious that we should care and practise our sympathy towards other people who are yearning for democracy and freedom,” Wong said.
Taiwan Vice President William Lai, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate in next January’s election, wrote on his Facebook page that the memory of what happened in Beijing in 1989 must be preserved.
“The event commemorating June 4 has continued to be held in Taipei, which shows that democracy and authoritarianism are the biggest differences between Taiwan and China,” he said.
Vigils were also held around the world, from Japan to Australia, with people standing with candles next to images of the brutal crackdown.
In Sydney, dozens of demonstrators rallied at the Town Hall, chanting “Free Hong Kong”, while holding up yellow umbrellas, the symbol of pro-democracy protests since 2014, and placards.
US Consulate in #HongKong lit candles all across building windows in memory of the #TiananmenMassacre on #June4th.
“The only place in Hong Kong that could light a candle on #June4th.” Thank you @USAinHKMacau. #悼念無罪 #Tiananmen1989 #6434 pic.twitter.com/XkNimPgtyq
— Frances Hui 許穎婷 (@frances_hui) June 5, 2023
And in London, before marching to the Chinese embassy, protesters staged a re-enactment featuring a blow-up tank and women dressed in white, emulating a statue to liberty set up on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
A 59-year-old poet from China’s Sichuan province told the AFP news agency at the Trafalgar Square rally that his family fled soon after the Tiananmen crackdown.
“Chinese people in my generation know what happened but the younger ones, not really,” said the man, who declined to be named for fear of Chinese reprisals.
“Their parents, their grandparents, need to keep up the knowledge and we all need to remember at events overseas like this.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he is committed to keeping David Johnston in place as Canada’s special rapporteur on foreign interference, despite a majority of MPs voting to call on him to resign.
Trudeau said in Toronto Friday that he looks forward to public hearings the former governor general is expected to hold “across the country” over the coming months before he releases a final report by the end of October.
“He is taking very seriously this question and he is digging into the facts,” Trudeau said.
The House of Commons passed an NDP motion earlier this week, with the support of Conservative and Bloc Quebecois MPs, that urged Johnston to step aside and asked the government to call a public inquiry.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in Winnipeg today that Johnston has to go but wouldn’t name a potential replacement.
“All the parties in the House of Commons should come together and agree on someone who is not partisan, not connected to any party leader and who has a track record of objectivity, preferably as a judge,” he said.
Poilievre has criticized the special rapporteur role as a “fake job” and questioned Johnston’s ability to objectively scrutinize the Liberal government’s handling of alleged foreign meddling because of his ties to the Trudeau family.
Poilievre is refusing to review a classified portion of Johnston’s initial report into foreign interference, saying it would prevent him from publicly criticizing the federal government on the subject.
Johnston has defended his integrity and downplayed his connections to the prime minister, saying this week he intends to stay on in his role.
“When I accepted the mandate to act as independent special rapporteur, I did so with full knowledge of the fact that the work ahead would be neither straightforward nor uncontroversial,” Johnston said in a media statement earlier this week.
“I deeply respect the right of the House of Commons to express its opinion about my work going forward, but my mandate comes the government. I have a duty to pursue that work until my mandate is completed.”
Trudeau accused Poilievre and Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet of letting political arguments and political attacks get in the way of facts.
“They have refused to get security briefings on the actual facts surrounding the intelligence and the question of foreign interference, because they want to continue to smear a man of unimpeachable integrity and deep commitment and service to Canada,” Trudeau said.
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Life after public office is not always a stream of plum assignments. Dealing with defeat can be devastating
Holland told the story of that loss last October while testifying before the procedure and House affairs committee. He made the shocking public admission of his suicide attempt in front of his peers.
“Because I had thrown my entire universe into this enterprise at the expense of unfortunately a lot of other things I should have taken better care of, I was in a really desperate spot,” Holland said during his testimony.
Attempting to end his life served as the “genesis” of Holland seeing his life differently and “reframing the choices” he faced.
When Bill Morneau resigned as Finance Minister in 2020 he went on to a fellowship at Yale, joined CIBC’s board of directors and wrote a book released earlier this year. Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney landed at Calgary law firm Bennett Jones. While many Canadians assume life after politics is a stream of board appointments and plum assignments, it isn’t always an easy landing. Being an elected official is a unique profession as the job’s singlemost important qualification is appealing to people and garnering the most votes on election night. Being defeated can be a devastating blow to one’s self worth.
You put your heart and soul on the line, and when you lose, it’s hard not to take it personally
Mark Holland
Holland told the National Post that being a politician in an all-encompassing career, and having it suddenly taken away was traumatic. “It’s so much part of your identity, that it takes a while to get over,” he said.
Léo Duguay, who until 1988 represented the Winnipeg-area riding of Saint Boniface-Saint Vital for the Progressive Conservatives, said that Holland’s experience is not uncommon among former MPs transitioning to private life after politics.
“Some were very lucky, I was one of them. Some people right away find a job and something they like, and they’re good,” he said.
“Some people never expected to lose — so there’s that shock of people you thought were your friends and supported you and voted for you, to find that a whole bunch of people didn’t vote for you, and you’re out.”
Dugay, who has served as president of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians, said depression and suicidal thoughts aren’t unheard of among their ranks. “For the people who lose, and even those who planned their loss, the shock is much greater than they thought,” he said.
Tiziana Casciaro, a professor of organizational behaviour at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said “transitional trauma” is a very real phenomenon, rooted in the gain and sudden loss of power. “It’s a basic need that we all have, to feel that we are in control, to some extent, of our existence, that we can influence the world around us,” she said.
“When you’re in politics and voted into office, you’re given control over resources that many value, and therefore you become important in their eyes.”
“You don’t have to put your name out there in front of thousands or millions of people — depending on the scope of the election — and be judged by them. In a sense, you’re much more vulnerable.”
Some have no idea how to look for a job, because they’ve never done that
Léo Duguay
While MPs who’ve accumulated at least six years of service qualify for a government pension, Dugay said about 40 per cent of former parliamentarians aren’t eligible. In nearly all cases, MPs who resign or are voted out are eligible for a one-time severance allowance of 50 per cent of their annual salary, as well as access to transitional benefits including education funding.
For Sue Barnes, who represented London-West for the Liberals for 15 years, the realities of her narrow October 2008 election-night loss hit fast.
“One of the things that affected me immediately was going from masses of emails and your calendar being filled every weekend with events … because somebody’s replaced you,” she recalled.
Barnes said she experienced feelings of grief over her loss for at least a year. “Not for the job, but what it meant to me,” she explained. “The connection to people working hard and solving problems —I really missed the intellectual stimulation of the job.”
People don’t know what to say to you — it’s very socially isolating
Holland, who lost by less than 3,300 votes to Conservative candidate Chris Alexander in the 2011 election, had similar recollections.
“You move from your calendar and phone constantly being filled to suddenly all of that being displaced and being completely silent,” he said. “You realize how voracious this life is, how much it takes over so many elements of your life, and you’re left to fill those back in.
He also found that after leaving office some people just avoided him. “It’s not that people don’t like you anymore, it’s just awkward,” he said. “People don’t know what to say to you — it’s very socially isolating.”
Casciaro, who co-authored a book on the topic titled Power for All, said serving at the will of the people — and suddenly having those same people take your power away — can impact one’s sense of self-worth.
While Holland would eventually run again and win in 2015, he spent much of his four-year hiatus rebuilding his life.
“When you do this work, as a member of Parliament, there’s no plan B,” he said. “It is all-consuming, you give every inch of yourself, you don’t have time to plan what you would do if you were to lose — you can’t go into an election thinking you might lose.”
She recognizes that her pension-eligible years of service left her in a better spot financially than others, which she credits with giving her some options.
“I loved the work, but I was exhausted by it,” she said. “It catches up to you after a while.”
If you’re thinking about suicide or are worried about a friend or loved one, please contact the Canada Suicide Prevention Service at 1.833.456.4566 toll free or connect via text at 45645, from 4 p.m. to midnight ET. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911.
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