In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, Matt Gurney returns from a leave to care for his wife and wonders if he’s missed anything over the last two weeks. Turns out he has. It’s his first chance to sit down with Jen Gerson and talk about the Alberta referendum, and Jen — finally having gotten some sleep — offers her concluding thoughts on … all that. Matt gives his reactions and asks Jen a fairly basic question: what, exactly, was the point of the whole exercise? They agree that Danielle Smith doesn’t come out of it looking particularly good. They also agree she might just skate anyway, especially since the separatists lost so badly that a lot of them might just move on to the next grift.
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Next, your hosts turn to the catastrophe at CFB Wainwright, where some of the worst instincts of Canadian governance were on full display. The safety of the troops and care for the families of the fallen obviously come first. But the disaster also became a textbook example of how Canadian institutions respond to emergencies by smothering transparency. Matt and Jen go through what was known, what was revealed and, yes, read aloud what may be the worst official communication ever produced by a Canadian government comms person. Matt also responds to criticism that the military probably didn’t yet know the answers to the questions The Line wanted answered. There’s just one problem with that defence: someone leaked The Line the memo. They knew. So ....
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Finally, Matt offers a personal update on the family medical emergency that took him away from the podcast. He’s still figuring out how much he can and should say publicly, but he has some broader thoughts about Canada’s health-care system. It turns out all the clichés are true: it can be astonishingly good and absolutely awful at the same time. Matt also has some very sharp and specific criticisms of one group of hospital professionals. He thinks the problems there are serious enough that they could end up collapsing the system, literally. Canadians will die because of this; Canadians are already dying of it, and Matt got to watch one of those deaths with his own eyes.
The harder question is what anyone can do about it.
All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast.
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Please sign up at those options not just for this episode, or future episodes of The Line Podcast, but so that you can also receive our other podcast series, On the Line, which releases new episodes every Tuesday morning. In case you missed it, here is last Tuesday’s episode, where Jen Gerson speaks with Patrick Lennox, author of On Treason, a new book examining the moral and political consequences of betraying one’s own country.
That’s all for now! Talk to you guys soon.
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