Plus, more vacationing politicians Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. The slow drip of elected people who holidayed outside Canada keeps dripping. Yesterday, the federal Tories admitted one of their own, Ontario MP David Sweet, tended to a property he owns in the United States. In a cruel twist, Sweet had been the chair of the Commons ethics committee. No more. Don Plett, the opposition leader in the Senate, travelled to Mexico. The party said he "reflected on his decision to travel and immediately made arrangements to return home" several days later. In Alberta, two cabinet ministers resigned amidst what the Western Standard called "a political bloodbath never seen before" in the province. Once the dust settles on jet-setting politicians, the conversation will undoubtedly move back to vaccines—namely, how quickly the feds can deliver doses to provinces that can do the actual inoculating. Ontario in particular has come in for glaring scrutiny after vaccinating about 42,000 people according to the latest data—even though somewhere around 100,000 doses are reportedly sitting in freezers. The convoluted federal-provincial vaccine rollout virtually guarantees a sprinkling of blame for all underperforming corners. Tory MP Michelle Rempel Garner blamed the Trudeau government for falling behind various other countries. But the feds claim to have distributed 423,000 doses to provinces, who've collectively administered only 28.4 per cent of them. The national debate on who's gumming up the works will be messy. Maclean's associate editor Claire Brownell offered a blunt assessment : "Imagine if instead of getting outraged about MPs travelling we got outraged about their management of the pandemic and some of them got fired for that instead." The CEO rich list: The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published its annual C-suite hall of shame, which crunches the numbers on the Canadian top executives with the most generous pay stubs. By yesterday at 11:17 a.m., just two-plus hours into the first workday of the year, the average top earner took home the equivalent of the average Canadian earner's annual pay. That's a full hour later than last year. The CCPA's Harper's Index of stats also found the Top 100 list included as many women (four) as men named Paul. The report estimates that 14 of the 100 actually saw their remuneration increase during the pandemic. The National Research Council's Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre made headlines three times last year—first, when the facility was primed to retool to produce hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses a month by November; and second, when the Chinese government refused to send a vaccine candidate from CanSino Biologics to the NRC for testing in the summer, which pushed back the re-tooling timeline . Last September, an NRC briefing note described the results of an "evaluation of the Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre in March 2020." Maclean's got the briefing note, almost fully redacted. The agency cited section 26 of the access-to-information law, which says the document is likely to be made public within 90 days. We'll keep an eye out. Last year, this newsletter alerted you to the Department of National Defence's plan to buy a bunch of "fanfare trumpets"—an amusing name for an instrument—at an estimated cost of $70,000. Well, the military went overseas and got a deal. A British company run by Richard Smith, an instrument maker who wrote a doctoral thesis on trumpet acoustics, won the contract at a cost of $58,784.22. The local Yorkshire Post had this to say about the man: "Unconventional, maybe; eccentric, perhaps; but then few scientists in their field can claim to have charted new territories of knowledge like Richard Smith."
Moving on, sort of: After more than a decade with the NDP, Parliament Hill mainstay George Soule has taken his talents to the labour movement. Soule, who ran comms for Jagmeet Singh, is the new legislative staff rep for the United Steelworkers. He and former MP Rosane Doré Lefebvre, who fell in love on the Hill, recently welcomed a newborn to their family. Soule says the new gig, which comes with slightly improved hours, will give him a "little extra time." Haiku for 2020: In a special New Year's Eve edition of the Politics Insider, we asked you to encapsulate an entire year in a three-line stanza. You emailed us dozens of five-seven-five submissions. Here are two that said it all: Unprecedented
Resilient together
We will hug again
—Brent Horst, St. Jacobs, Ont. I survived, walking,
My faithful dog, Rowan,
Always, by my side.
—Deborah McLean, Iroquois, Ont. —Nick Taylor-Vaisey | 