Canadian News

OTTAWA — The confidence vote drama may have receded for now, but a committee standoff over WE documents and an ongoing ethics commissioner investigation are a reminder that the issues that nearly triggered an election last week are still alive and percolating in Parliament.

The Liberals have once again filibustered the House of Commons finance committee over the issue of redactions applied to the government’s WE Charity documents, dragging out the meeting for eight hours on Wednesday. The chair, Liberal MP Wayne Easter, suspended the proceedings that night due to “health and safety reasons.”

The meeting resumed late Thursday afternoon but the first part of it was conducted in camera, which blocks the public from viewing the discussions.

Thursday also brought news that Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion is dropping his investigation into whether the WE Charity trips taken by former Finance Minister Bill Morneau were an improper gift. As first reported by CBC, Dion has now informed Morneau that he accepts Morneau “genuinely believed” he’d reimbursed the 2017 travel taken in Ecuador and Kenya by himself and his family.

Morneau hastily wrote a $41,000 cheque to WE in July after informing the finance committee he’d just realized he’d never paid back the expenses. Morneau resigned as finance minister and as an MP a few weeks later, saying he wanted to run to be secretary of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

However, the ethics commissioner is still investigating Morneau for not recusing himself from cabinet discussions on having WE Charity administer the $900-million Canada Student Service Grant program, despite the fact one of Morneau’s daughters worked for WE and another had spoken at WE Day events.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also being examined by Dion for not recusing himself despite his own family’s payments for speaking at WE events. It is not yet known when Dion will release his report, but it could arrive later this year.

• Top public servant offers to explain to finance committee why WE Charity documents were redacted
• Bloc MP sides with Liberals, attempt to unearth Trudeaus' WE Charity speaking contracts fails by one vote

Regardless, the opposition parties are determined to continue with their own study into the matter. At issue in the finance committee are the thousands of pages of government documents related to the WE scandal that were disclosed to the committee in the summer.

The documents were redacted by public servants before being handed over; the opposition parties have protested that this was a breach of their parliamentary privilege, as their motion had directed the redactions be done by the independent House of Commons law clerk.

The Liberals are attempting to address the complaint by having the Privy Council Clerk Ian Shugart appear at the committee to explain the redactions.

“Conservatives, Bloc and NDP are ready to find public servants guilty of breaching privileges of MPs without even giving them a chance to explain their actions,” said a statement by Government House Leader Pablo Rodriguez on Wednesday. “Liberals believe in due process. The opposition should do the right thing and let the Clerk of the Privy Council and his non-partisan public servants explain themselves.”

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre told the  National Post that the Liberals’ proposal does not address the opposition’s complaints.

“The Conservatives propose a compromise: the government should give all of the WE scandal documents unredacted to the neutral parliamentary law clerk so that he can report back to Parliament within a week on whether any of the documents have been improperly withheld,” he said.

“Mr. Shugart is a fine man, but he is hired and fired by the prime minister. He is dependent on the prime minister for his job. No one who the prime minister can fire should be in charge of determining what documents are released about the prime minister’s scandal.”

As of Thursday, there is no end in sight to the standoff, which is preventing the finance committee from doing its usual work of pre-budget consultations.

Meanwhile, the Commons health committee is preparing its sweeping investigation into the government’s COVID-19 response, an investigation that will eventually be supported by a trove of government documents ordered to be produced by the end of November by a Conservative motion passed earlier this week. The committee is scheduled to meet Monday to begin preparing a witness list and a timeline for meetings.

The Liberals have warned that the investigation risks exposing commercial information and thus threatens the government’s ability to procure vaccines, personal protective equipment, and other pandemic-related supplies. The Conservatives say this concern is overblown and that redactions can be made to protect commercial sensitivity.

Although the Liberals had previously deemed a Conservative motion on the WE affair to be a confidence matter, they ultimately decided not to make the COVID-19 motion a confidence vote. That means the investigation is taking place without the risk of triggering an election — at least for now. The Liberals always retain the option of calling an election on their own, regardless of whether a confidence vote has taken place.

• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com | Twitter: btaplatt

OTTAWA — Canada’s auditor general says her office needs at least $31 million in additional funding to fulfil its watchdog mandate, more than twice the amount requested by her predecessor three years ago.

“The money is absolutely necessary in order to deliver our mandate the way we’d like to. As of now, we are focused on auditing the government’s response to the pandemic as well as its infrastructure plan, but the government is still doing a lot of other work and spending and purchases elsewhere,” Auditor General Karen Hogan told members of the federal public accounts committee Thursday.

“So we need the money to be able to modernize our office as well as expand the list of subjects we could audit.”

Hogan told MPs her office sent an official notice to the government in July requesting $25 million in permanent funding be added to its roughly $88-million budget.

But that amount doesn’t include the cost of the benefits and accommodation for all the new employees her office hopes to hire with the extra funds. She estimated those extra costs to total just over $6 million.

Hogan told parliamentarians that major audits expected to be published in the upcoming months would be delayed, such as the audit on the Liberals’ infrastructure plan as well as the government’s response to the pandemic.

The delays are due both to the lack of funding as well as the added complexity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Delivery of most non-COVID-19-related audits is also being affected, she added.

“When it comes now to the work that we’re doing on the COVID response, I think the biggest impact is capacity within the departments and our office,” Hogan explained.

“We’re seeing that it’s taking us a lot longer to deliver audits, mostly motivated by the desire to find that right balance with departments as they provide the much needed assistance to Canadians and try to help us deliver on our mandate,” she said, adding that the biggest slowdowns were with Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

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This is far from the first time an auditor general pleads with parliamentarians for more money, though Hogan’s request is significantly higher than her predecessors’.

In 2017, then-Auditor General Michael Ferguson requested an additional $10.8 million, arguing that it was necessary to accommodate the increased workload imposed by the Trudeau government, such as auditing a plethora of new public agencies and projects.

The government gave Ferguson’s office the increase in 2018, but it was not repeated in 2019 or 2020.

Since then, MPs on the public accounts committee calculate that Ferguson and his successors have requested an increase in funding no fewer than 15 times.

Because so much time has past since Ferguson’s original budget ask, Hogan said her office now needs more than twice that amount to be able to hire a sufficient number of new auditors, bring the office’s technology up to speed and modernize how the office communicates its work with Canadians.

“With the passing of time, there is obviously a need to increase the request. For years, we did not invest in our IT systems and, when it comes to technology, we don’t just have a fixed capability gap. As time passes, the gap grows and it becomes increasingly expensive to modernize our systems,” Hogan explained.

This time, Hogan said she’s quite optimistic that her office will get the permanent funding it’s requesting.

“The conversations I’m having with senior government officials are very encouraging. We have received many questions that we answered. That back-and-forth is what is inspiring confidence in me, and leads me to believe that they have heard us and they are open to our request,” the auditor general said.

• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter: ChrisGNardi

EDMONTON — A conservative legal group is challenging new restrictions on gatherings in Alberta, saying they are a violation of Charter rights to assembly. The province implemented the group gathering restrictions this week as it faces record-breaking numbers of new COVID-19 cases.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, headed by lawyer John Carpay, has been involved in a number of high-profile cases over the years and has recently taken up a number of anti-COVID-restriction causes.

The Justice Centre is also representing Canada Galaxy Pageants, a beauty pageant for women and girls based in Toronto, against a new human rights complaint made by Jessica Yaniv, a transgender person.

“We’re publicly objecting to new restrictions on Charter freedom to associate,” said Carpay in an interview with the National Post.

As yet, they aren’t filing a lawsuit or anything of that nature — just raising objections.

On Monday, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province’s chief medical officer of health, announced private gatherings would be capped at 15 people in Edmonton and Calgary, in response to surges in COVID-19 cases that are putting a strain on the hospital system and leading to the deferral of surgeries and other medical services.

As of Thursday afternoon — before Hinshaw’s daily case update — there were 126 people in Alberta hospitals with COVID-19, 19 of them in ICU. There were 4,793 active cases, and 313 Albertans have died.

Carpay argues most of the deaths and severe cases were among the elderly — the average age of death is 82 — and therefore it’s difficult to justify the restrictions.

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Carpay contends the order is based on “cases” of COVID-19, “including thousands of ‘cases’ among people who are not experiencing any symptoms or illness,” he said in a statement about the challenge. He argues today’s cases include completely healthy people who have a positive test, and he disputed the reliability of PCR testing.

Alberta Health Services says the National Microbiology Lab found Alberta’s tests to be 100 per cent accurate.

Hinshaw’s order says voluntary measures in Edmonton haven’t successfully brought the case counts down, necessitating more stringent steps.

Carpay sees it otherwise. “It’s a fundamental freedom that I have as a citizen to invite 16 or 20 people over to my house if I so choose, if we choose to associate with each other,” he said.

“Whether it’s six people or 10 people or 20 people, when the government tells you how many friends you’re allowed or not allowed to have over to your house, that is a very obvious and very direct infringement of freedom of association,” said Carpay.

In her media briefings, Hinshaw has repeatedly pointed out the majority of COVID spread in the province is because of private gatherings, and restrictions protect those who are vulnerable to the disease, as those who are less vulnerable can pass it on to elderly relatives, for example. She has said the current spike in cases is due to families gathering for Thanksgiving celebrations.

Hinshaw has also said the long-term effects of catching COVID-19, even among younger people who aren’t hospitalized, ventilated or dead, are not yet known

In a news release, Carpay said the disease hasn’t killed the early projections of 32,000 Albertans, so it’s not as deadly as initially claimed.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson

A coronavirus variant that originated in Spanish farm workers has spread rapidly through much of Europe since the summer, and now accounts for the majority of new Covid-19 cases in several countries — and more than 80 per cent in the UK.

An international team of scientists that has been tracking the virus through its genetic mutations has described the extraordinary spread of the variant, called 20A.EU1, in a research paper to be published on Thursday.

Their work suggests that people returning from holiday in Spain played a key role in transmitting the virus across Europe, raising questions about whether the second wave that is sweeping the continent could have been reduced by improved screening at airports and other transport hubs.

Because each variant has its own genetic signature, it can be traced back to the place it originated.

“From the spread of 20A.EU1, it seems clear that the [virus prevention] measures in place were often not sufficient to stop onward transmission of introduced variants this summer,” said Emma Hodcroft, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Basel and lead author of the study which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The scientific teams in Switzerland and Spain are now rushing to examine the behaviour of the variant to establish whether it may be more deadly or more infectious than other strains. Dr Hodcroft stressed that there was “no evidence that the variant’s [rapid] spread is due to a mutation that increases transmission or impacts clinical outcome”.

But she emphasised that 20A.EU1 was unlike any version of Sars-Cov-2 — the virus that causes Covid-19 — she had previously come across. “I’ve not seen any variant with this sort of dynamic for as long as I’ve been looking at genomic sequences of coronavirus in Europe,” she said.

In particular, the teams are working with virology laboratories to establish whether 20A.EU1 carries a particular mutation, in the “spike protein” that the virus uses to enter human cells, that might alter its behaviour.

All viruses develop mutations — changes in the individual letters of their genetic code — which can group together into new variants and strains. Another mutation in Sars-Cov-2, called D614G, has been identified which is believed to make the virus more infectious.

Joseph Fauver, a genetic epidemiologist at Yale University who was not involved in the research published on Thursday, said: “We need more studies like this to find mutations that have risen to high frequency in the population, and then reverse-engineer them to see whether they make the virus more transmissible.”

The new variant, which has six distinctive genetic mutations, emerged among agricultural workers in north-east Spain in June and moved quickly through the local population, according to the study.

Tanja Stadler, professor of computational evolution at ETH Zurich who is part of the project, said that analysis of virus samples taken from across Europe in recent weeks showed they were derived from this same variant.

“We can see the virus has been introduced multiple times in several countries and many of these introductions have gone on to spread through the population,” Prof Stadler said.

Iñaki Comas, head of the SeqCovid-Spain consortium that is studying the virus and a co-author of the study, added: “One variant, aided by an initial super-spreading event, can quickly become prevalent.”

The researchers concluded that the “risky behaviour” of holidaymakers in Spain — such as ignoring social distancing guidelines — who “continue to engage in such behaviour at home” helped the spread of the new variant.

The research showed that the new variant accounted for more than eight out of 10 cases in the UK, 80 per cent of cases in Spain, 60 per cent in Ireland and up to 40 per cent in Switzerland and France.

Stringent lockdowns in the early part of the year helped bring the initial Covid-19 surge under control, with new cases substantially reduced over the summer.

But the virus has spread rapidly back through Europe in recent weeks in a resurgence that has forced national leaders to introduce painful new restrictions on social activities.

The U.S. president is not elected by a majority of the popular vote.

Wait a minute, say that again?

You heard me. Under the Constitution, the candidate who wins the majority of 538 electors, known as the Electoral College, becomes the next president.

The candidate who wins a state’s popular vote typically earns the support of that state’s electors, who are chosen by state legislatures. Each state is allocated a different number of electors based on census results.

Winning 270 electoral votes or more puts you in the White House. And because some states carry more electors than others, it is possible — and perfectly legitimate — for a candidate to lose the popular vote but win the election. That’s why presidential candidates typically focus on winning states like Texas (38), Florida (29) and New York (29) as opposed to Vermont, Wyoming or Alaska, which all have just three electoral votes. Winning three states can mean 96 electoral votes or just nine.

Out of the last 45 contests, five have produced commanders-in-chief who did not win the majority of the popular vote, including George W. Bush in 2000. In 2016, Donald Trump lost the national popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 2.87 million votes, but secured 304 electoral votes to her 227.

Why are there 538 electors?

There is one for every seat in Congress — 100 senators and 435 representatives — plus three for the unrepresented District of Columbia.

Here, in descending order, is the number of electors pledged by each state:

55: California

38: Texas

29: Florida, New York

20: Illinois, Pennsylvania

18: Ohio

16: Georgia, Michigan

15: North Carolina

14: New Jersey

13: Virginia

12: Washington

11: Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee

10: Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin

9: Alabama, Colorado, South Carolina

8: Kentucky, Louisiana

7: Connecticut, Oklahoma, Oregon

6: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nevada, Utah

5: Nebraska, New Mexico, West Virginia

4: Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island

3: Alaska, Delaware, D.C., Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming

Total: 538

When does this voting take place?

While we’re all accustomed to finding out who won on election night, the president is not formally elected until the electors cast their votes. They always meet the Monday after the second Wednesday in December following the election. This year, the electors will meet on Dec. 14 to cast their votes. Both chambers of Congress will meet on Jan. 6 to count these votes and officially name the winner.

Electors are “pledged” to a presidential ticket based on the results of the popular vote in each state or district. In most cases, all of a state’s electors go to the candidate who gets the most votes in the state; Maine and Nebraska also use the results at the district level to allocate a share of their votes.

But, yet, it’s not that straightforward. “Faithless electors” can still cast their vote against the candidate that they are pledged to vote for. Seven such “faithless electors” actually voted in 2016 for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged: two in Trump’s column and five in Clinton’s.

The rules, you see, are enshrined in the U.S. constitution. But so, too, is the power the states have to decide amongst themselves how to follow them.

That sounds like a potential can of worms, especially with the U.S. as divided as it currently is?

You could be onto something.

As mentioned earlier, the candidate who wins each state’s popular vote gets that state’s electors. Typically, governors, in advance, have certified the results in their respective states and shared the information with Congress.

But some academics have outlined a scenario in which the governor and the legislature in a closely contested state submit two different election results. For example, battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina all have Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures.

According to legal experts, it is unclear in this scenario whether Congress should accept the governor’s electoral slate or not count the state’s electoral votes at all. And while most experts view the scenario as unlikely, there is historical precedent.

The Republican-controlled Florida legislature considered submitting its own electors in 2000 before the Supreme Court ended the contest between Bush and Al Gore. In 1876, three states appointed “duelling electors,” prompting Congress to pass the Electoral Count Act (ECA) in 1887.

Under the act, each chamber of Congress would separately decide which slate of “duelling electors” to accept. As of now, Republicans hold the Senate while Democrats control the House of Representatives, but the electoral count is conducted by the new Congress, which will be sworn in on Jan. 3.

If the two chambers disagree, it’s not entirely clear what would happen. The act says that the electors approved by each state’s “executive” should prevail. Many scholars interpret that as a state’s governor, but others reject that argument.

The law has never been tested or interpreted by the courts.

Ned Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, called the ECA’s wording “virtually impenetrable” in a 2019 paper exploring the possibility of an Electoral College dispute.

My head is kinda spinning. Is there anything else that could throw a spanner in the works?

Well, yes, now that you ask.

It’s unlikely, but another possibility is that Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as Senate president, could try to throw out a state’s disputed electoral votes entirely if the two chambers cannot agree, according to Foley’s analysis.

In that case, the Electoral College Act does not make clear whether a candidate would still need 270 votes, a majority of the total, or could prevail with a majority of the remaining electoral votes — for example, 260 of the 518 votes that would be left if Pennsylvania’s electors were invalidated.

“It is fair to say that none of these laws has been stress-tested before,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer who represented the Bush campaign during the 2000 dispute, told reporters in a conference call on Oct. 20.

The parties could ask the Supreme Court to resolve any congressional stalemate, but it’s not certain the court would be willing to adjudicate how Congress should count electoral votes.

And what if it was found that neither candidate has secured a majority of electoral votes?

This scenario would trigger a “contingent election” under the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. That means the House of Representatives chooses the next president, while the Senate selects the vice president.

Each state delegation in the House gets a single vote. As of now, Republicans control 26 of the 50 state delegations, while Democrats have 22; one is split evenly and another has seven Democrats, six Republicans and a Libertarian.

A contingent election also takes place in the event of a 269-269 tie after the election; there are several plausible paths to a deadlock in 2020.

Any election dispute in Congress would play out ahead of a strict deadline — Jan. 20, when the Constitution mandates that the term of the current president ends.

Under the Presidential Succession Act, if Congress still has not declared a presidential or vice presidential winner by then, the Speaker of the House would serve as acting president. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, is the current speaker.

This all sounds so complex. Is there an easier way?

Maybe.

Debate has long raged in the U.S. about this antiquated, and some would say skewed, system. Many would prefer a president elected by the popular vote, with 61 per cent of Americans saying in a 2020 Gallup poll they would like to abolish the electoral college altogether.

But John Fortier, director of government studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and author of the 1983 book “After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College,” said Americans have never felt strongly enough about the issue to do much about it.

“I do think the American people have almost always been against this, or at least if they thought they were starting from scratch, (they would) prefer a system that’s more of a national popular vote,” Fortier said. “It’s on people’s minds, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the highest thing, the thing that they most want to change.”

Barry Fadem is president of National Popular Vote, a non-profit association on a mission to make the results more reflective of the will of the people. National Popular Vote has come up with Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to allocate electoral college votes in accordance with the national popular vote.

“No offence (to Canada), but we consider (the U.S. election) the most important election in the world,” Fadem told the Canadian Press.

“Yet the rule that we are known for around the world — whoever gets the most votes at the end of the night is the winner — doesn’t apply to the most important election the world, and no justification can be made for it today.”

So far, 15 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the compact, for a total of 196 electoral votes. Fadem said he believes they can get to 270 before the 2024 election.

With files from National Post Staff

Canada Dry settled in court for $200,000 with a B.C. man who claimed the company falsely advertised its ginger content to have medicinal properties.

Most of the $200,000 will be going to a legal foundation.

The plaintiff, Victor Cardoso, started a class action lawsuit on Jan. 21, 2019, on behalf of all Canadians outside of Quebec, arguing that Canada Dry’s label was misleading. This came after similar lawsuits were filed in the U.S. Shortly afterward, two similar cases popped up in Quebec and Alberta.

Cardoso alleged that t he marketing of the ginger ale as “Made from Real Ginger” was deceptive because the product contained no ginger, according to court documents. The argument was later shifted to the ginger ale containing “negligible” amounts of ginger.

“They do buy actual ginger, but then what they do is they boil it in ethanol, and that essentially destroys any nutritional or medicinal benefits,” Mark C. Canofari, one of the lawyers from Boughton Law Corporation who represented Cardoso’s claim, told CTV News .

Ginger is commonly used as an herbal remedy. There’s strong evidence that ginger can relieve nausea, as well as weaker evidence for other benefits, such as acting as an anti-inflammatory.

The owners of the ginger ale, Canada Dry Mott’s, produced documents showing it was made with ginger derivatives. The fact that the ginger ale contained a derivative took a lot of steam out of the lawsuit, regardless of how much was actually present in a given can of Canada Dry ginger ale.

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After two years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses, the settlement won’t even cover the legal fees. Consumers won’t be compensated in any way and there’s no sign that Canada Dry will change its advertising. According to the court documents, Canada Dry Mott’s Inc. “expressly denies liability and is not required to change its product labelling or advertising for products marketed in Canada.”

The resolution applies to the Alberta lawsuit and heads off further suits filed with the same claims of false advertising.

Of the $200,000, approximately $100,000 will go toward legal fees, even though Cardoso’s counsel spent more than $220,000 researching and litigating the case at $950 per hour. The lawyers accepted the case on a contingency basis, meaning they could only pursue a share of the settlement — between around 30 and 40 per cent.

Cardoso and the Alberta plaintiff, Lionel Ravvin, will get small honorariums of $1,500 to recognize the work they did researching for the case.

The B.C. judge argued that courts need to avoid the perception that only lawyers benefit from legal proceedings.

“I am concerned that an award whereby counsel receives more than the amount being paid… on behalf of their collective client class could be viewed adversely by the public,” Justice Karen Douglas wrote. “The ultimate purpose of the class action vehicle is to benefit the class, not their lawyers.”

The remainder of the $200,000 will go to the B.C. Law Foundation, a non-profit organization that does work such as providing legal aid and funding law libraries.

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government will take a cautious approach as election results roll in south of the border next week, but it won’t weigh into the fray.

American voters are already casting ballots by mall and in early polling locations, but many will vote on Election Day next Tuesday. Trudeau said the government will be watching the results on election night, but they won’t have anything to say.

“Like people in countries around the world, Canadians are watching closely the elections in the United States and like people around the world we won’t be commenting on possible outcomes.”

He said the choice is for Americans to make and whatever happens his government will work with the new or returning U.S. administration.

“We will continue to stand up and defend Canadian interests, look for greater opportunities for cooperation and look to deepen the already close ties between Canada and the United States, regardless of the outcomes.”

Trudeau met virtually Thursday with European Union officials, including President of the European Commission Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen and president of the European Council Charles Michel.

Michel echoed Trudeau and said they welcome closer relations with the United States.

“We are totally convinced that it’s good for the future, if it’s possible, to have a staunch alliance with the United States. This is our choice, our political will and we will respect what will be the choice made by the American voters.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump has refused to say if he will respect the result of the vote and has made sweeping and unsupported accusations that the electoral system is fraudulent.

Trudeau was asked how the government will respond to a disputed vote in the U.S. and said he is confident the U.S. will be able to sort out a winner and the government will remain silent until it does.

Trudeau said it can take time, as it did in 2000, for the U.S. to determine a winner, but the government will wait to offer congratulations until there is a clear victory.

The European Union is in lengthy negotiations with the United Kingdom on a post-Brexit trade deal. Trudeau also declined to offer an opinion on those talks.

Canada has a trade agreement with the European Union and Trudeau said he hopes to have a similar relationship with a post-Brexit Britain.

“Canada is extremely pleased to be the only G7 country that has a free trade deal with every other G7 country and we would certainly like to keep that,” he said.

“The U.K. is engaged in many different negotiations right now. But Canada is certainly there to ensure this certainty that can be given to British companies, at least with Canada as other things are worked out in a more complex way.”

Twitter: RyanTumilty

Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com

Don’t expect herd immunity to save us the COVID-19 pandemic, warned a Russian professor after he deliberately infected himself twice with COVID-19 virus to study the resultant antibodies.

Dr. Alexander Chepurnov, 69, caught the virus for the first time in February while on a flight from France to Novosibirsk with a stopover in Moscow, but was able to recover back home in Siberia without hospitalization.

After recovery, he took a test that detected the presence of antibodies in his system, which he and his team at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Novosibirisk decided to study.

They observed “the way antibodies behaved, how strong they were and how long they stayed in the body,” he told the Daily Mail . But the number of antibodies in his body decreased rapidly, he noted, and three months after he first fell sick, the team could no longer detect any present in his system.

Curious to see what would happen in the event of a re-infection. Chepurnov became his own human guinea pig and deliberately exposed himself to COVID-19 patients without protection. Six months after his first infection, his body’s defences fell and he was again sick with coronavirus.

“The first sign was a sore throat,” he told the Daily Mail.

The second infection was much more serious and Chepurnov had to be hospitalized. “For five days my temperature remained above 39C. I lost the sense of smell, my taste perception changed,” he said.

By the sixth day of the illness, a CT scan of the lungs was clear. By the ninth day, a followup X-ray showed double pneumonia.

However, by the end of two weeks, the virus was no longer detected in the nasopharyngeal tract — the upper throat behind nose — nor in other samples.

Based on his own experience, Chepurnov concluded that it is futile to hope that herd immunity could stop the spread of COVID-19. A vaccine, he said, could garner immunity, but it would be temporary.

“We need a vaccine that can be used multiple times, a recombinant vaccine will not suit,” he said.

Currently, adenoviral vector-based vaccines — vaccines designed to insert a modified COVID-19 gene into the human body to provoke the production of spike proteins that will keep the individual immune against the real virus — are at the forefront of the global race to find a solution to the raging pandemic. However, several researchers, including Chepurnov have expressed concerns that repeated shots of the vaccine could backfire, triggering an immune response against the vaccine instead of the real virus.

“Once injected with an adenoviral vector-based vaccine, we won’t be able to repeat it because the immunity against the adenoviral carrier will keep interfering,” Chepurnov told the Daily Mail.

Shipping company UPS said it has found the package destined for Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which he said contains ‘damning’ documents relating to Hunter Biden.

Carlson said on his show Wednesday night that he had obtained more documents relating to Hunter Biden, but said they were lost in the mail.

On his show, Carlson said he received a “collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family.” Without going into any details about their contents, he said they were “authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning.”

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

On October 14, the New York Post published a report stating that they had obtained emails from the laptop of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The Post alleges that in 2014, Hunter leveraged his father’s position as U.S. vice president in an attempt to increase his pay as a board member at Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Carlson said the unspecified documents were being sent to him in Los Angeles from New York, but they never arrived. He said that the delivery company, which he did not name, said the package “had been opened and the contents were missing.”

“As of tonight the company has no idea, and no working theory even, about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign,” he said.

Oh for f*%! sake, seriously? Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers. https://t.co/6yllQu7pU0

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) October 29, 2020

Later that day, a UPS spokesperson told Business Insider that the documents had been located and were sent back to Carlson.

“After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging for its return,” the spokesperson said.

After his segment aired, many people began to doubt Carlson’s claims.

“Oh for f*%! sake, seriously?” tweeted Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers.”

Business Insider said that Fox News did not respond to comment as to why no other copies of the documents were saved.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show Wednesday night that he had obtained more documents relating to Hunter Biden, but said they were lost in the mail.

On his show, Carlson said he received a “collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family.” Without going into any details about their contents, he said they were “authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning.”

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

On October 14, the New York Post published a report stating that they had obtained emails from the laptop of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The Post alleges that in 2014, Hunter leveraged his father’s position as U.S. vice president in an attempt to increase his pay as a board member at Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Carlson said the unspecified documents were being sent to him in Los Angeles from New York, but they never arrived. He said that the delivery company, which he did not name, said the package “had been opened and the contents were missing.”

“As of tonight the company has no idea, and no working theory even, about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign,” he said.

Oh for f*%! sake, seriously? Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers. https://t.co/6yllQu7pU0

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) October 29, 2020

After his segment aired, many people began to doubt Carlson’s claims.

“Oh for f*%! sake, seriously?” tweeted Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers.”

According to Business Insider , UPS came forward and said it was the provider that lost the package and was investigating the matter.

Business Insider also said that Fox News did not respond to comment as to why no other copies of the documents were saved.

Steve Ladurantaye, a former journalist at the Globe and Mail and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has resigned from a media job in Scotland following allegations of inappropriate behaviour, reports British newspaper the Times.

The complaints against Ladurantaye, who was working as the head of news and current affairs at STV, the Glasgow-based broadcaster, came from female staff members, the Times reports.

Ladurantaye had joined STV in 2018. Prior to that he was well-known in Canadian media circles, working as a media reporter at the Globe and Mail and as a top editor at the CBC.

Ladurantaye left the Globe and Mail in 2013, and following a brief stopover at Twitter Canada, joined the CBC as the managing editor of The National nightly news broadcast in 2016.

He left the CBC in 2018, in the fallout over an appropriation controversy on Twitter that impacted several high-profile Canadian journalists.

After that, he crossed the ocean, landing with STV in Glasgow.

In a piece for the Royal Television Society, Ladurantaye wrote he’d received a job offer to “uproot my life and move across the ocean to lead a newsroom in a country I’d rarely visited, full of stories I’d (mostly) never heard.”

He writes about the professional challenges of working in Scotland, and the different newsroom culture.

“The professional challenges have been daunting, and the cultural changes intimidating. Has it been worth it?” he wrote. “Oh, aye.”

An STV spokesperson told the National Post by email that Ladurantaye “has resigned as STV’s Head of News and Current Affairs for medical reasons around mental health, for which he is receiving treatment.  Deputy Head of News, Linda Grimes Douglas, will oversee STV’s news and current affairs operation.”

“We take complaints about inappropriate conduct at STV extremely seriously. We will always investigate fully, while respecting the duty of care we owe to all parties involved,” the spokesperson added.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson

A children’s soccer club in Chilliwack, B.C. has hired a security guard to supervise their games after their COVID-19 contact tracing staff were harassed by parents on the sidelines, the CBC reports .

A staff member went home in tears after a parent berated and verbally abused them for trying to take contact tracing information, the chair of the club says.

Chilliwack FC put in place contact tracing and limited crowd sizes at their games and events to try and comply with health guidelines. The result was behaviour from the parents described as “horrific and borderline violent.”

“The abuse and poor behaviour must stop!!!! (sic)” reads a statement posted to Chilliwack FC’s website . “Enough is enough!”

The soccer club hired Allegiance 1 Security to make sweeps of the games and venues to protect their staff and ensure that parents are following their COVID-19 policies and behaving appropriately. Their contact tracers can now call security if they’re in need of assistance.

“We’ve had people come up to the contact tracers’ table and say, ‘I’m bleeping fine, I don’t need this, you don’t need my information,'” club chair Andrea Laycock told the CBC. “They roll their eyes, say, ‘this is ridiculous,’ they scream and they yell.”

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Chilliwack FC started up a fall season for kids between the ages of four and nine. In their return to play statement, the club asked spectators to wear a mask going in and out of the venue and whenever social distancing isn’t possible. Parents are encouraged to drop off and pick up only, but the club allows for one family member to stay at a time.

“Our next step would be one none of us ever want to go to, and that would be banning parents from the field,” said Laycock. “‘OK parents, you can’t behave, it’s time to stay home.'”

As of Oct. 28, there are 2,700 active COVID-19 cases in B.C. The Fraser Health region, where Chilliwack is located, is one of the province’s leading hotspots. Of the new 287 cases across B.C., the Fraser Health region accounted for 67 per cent.

B.C. Premier John Horgan shocked many, including his governing partners in the Green Party, when he called a snap election last month.

And while many felt voters would punish Horgan and the NDP for heading to the polls during a pandemic, breaking an agreement with the Greens in the process, the NDP now has a majority government.

Dave is joined by Vancouver Sun legislative columnist Rob Shaw to talk about the motivation behind calling an election, why the NDP didn’t take a hit politically, and what it means now that Horgan has a majority government.

Subscribe to 10/3 on your favourite podcast app.

#distro

Over the summer, as the rest of the country opened up and slowed down, and the specter of COVID-19 began to fade, life inside Ontario’s large medical laboratories continued to accelerate on a kind of perpetual motion pace, building speed and building size without ever slowing down, no matter what came in, who showed up or whether anyone could find any room for the new machines.

In Mount Sinai Hospital, in Toronto, Dr. Tony Mazzulli, the hospital lab’s microbiologist in chief, was busy hiring techs, finding supplies and keeping one wary eye on the fall. Mazzulli, like other lab leaders, public health experts and infectious disease specialists, knew that when the weather changed, a spike in COVID cases would follow. He spent the summer working with colleagues in his own lab and across the system to process the samples coming in every day while continuing to expand an ad hoc lab network that had already mushroomed in capacity multiple times since March.

“The labs really didn’t get a break through the summer at all,” said Dr. Kevin Katz, the medical director of Toronto’s Shared Hospital Lab, one of the largest in the province. “The volumes just kept going up, up, up. On the hospital side and across the whole system, everybody was able to take a little breath. The labs just kept grinding and implementing and growing.””

The Sinai lab alone overtook a classroom, added machines and technologists and expanded into a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation. It grew from a COVID rounding error in March, capable of processing 600-700 molecular PCR tests in a day, to a pillar of Ontario’s COVID testing system. By late spring, the lab’s technologists were analyzing 3,000 to 4,000 tests every day, Mazzulli said. They already had the space, staff and equipment to handle as many as 10,000 samples daily at that point and plans were in place to bring that number up to 17,500 by mid October.

For a time, the lab seemed on track to meet that target. Then it “sort of derailed for a number of reasons,” Mazzulli said. At Sinai, they couldn’t find enough trained staff; Ontario has long had a chronic shortage of licensed laboratory technologists. Testing supplies, too, were an endless issue, and not just for Sinai. “We have grappled with every single piece that we use for the testing process,” said Dr. Larissa Matukas, the head of microbiology at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. “Just when you think you have reagents, they disappear. Just when you think you have the plastic wear, it’s gone.”

For Sinai, one of the biggest issues was literally just space. The lab wasn’t physically big enough for the job it needed to do. So months before the fall rush, Sinai, along with other big labs, asked the Ontario government for the money it needed to expand. And for months, according to Mazzulli, the province sat on that request. “We got approval to go ahead and purchase the equipment, but they didn’t get approval to make the renovations to the lab,” Mazzulli said. “And so until that came in (in September) our hands were a bit tied.”

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When the fall COVID rush did arrive, on schedule and as predicted, Sinai had the staff and the equipment ready, but they didn’t have the room. “We do have four analyzers sitting in storage, which we can’t bring in physically to the lab until the renovations are done,” Mazzulli said in early October.

Sinai wasn’t the only lab in that position. Hospital and public health labs submitted a budget proposal outlining the anticipated surge and the money needed to deal with it sometime in either late spring or early summer, said one source with deep knowledge of the system. But it wasn’t approved until after the second wave hit in the autumn. “Heels were dragged,” the source said. “And that’s awful. Because it’s not a light switch. You don’t just say, ‘Great, I’ve got the money. I can increase the diagnostic testing capacity.’ It doesn’t work like that. It takes about two to three months.”

The province has since taken steps to cut the number of tests coming in, but the backlog, while it lasted, took a brutal toll on Ontario’s COVID fight. “As recently as two weeks ago, we were getting less than 20 per cent of positive cases reported to us within 24 hours from the labs, and less than 50 per cent of cases reported to us within two days,” said City Councillor Joe Cressy, who chairs the Toronto Board of Health.

At that speed of return, the testing system was all but cosmetic. It was like giving a virus that doesn’t need any kind of edge a 50-metre head start in a 100-metre dash. “To put it simply, the combination of insufficient testing, coupled with delays in lab reporting, significantly constrained our ability to do contact tracing and our collective ability to prevent a significant second wave,” Cressy said.

The second wave of COVID-19 overwhelmed multiple parts of Ontario’s pandemic response system. When schools reopened in the fall, testing centres across the province were crushed by the surge in demand. The province scrambled to make more swabs and pop-up centres available. But that effort didn’t make the bottleneck disappear. Instead, it just moved it further down the line.

By late September, the network of public health, hospital and private labs that process COVID tests in Ontario was dealing with tens of thousands more samples every day than it could push through in any 24-hour-period. The result was an ever-growing backlog of unprocessed tests that peaked at more than 90,000 in early October.

The Ontario lab system has been a mostly invisible player during the pandemic. But if there’s one thing the fall surge made clear, it’s that nothing else in the system, not testing, not tracing, not suppression of the virus itself, can work if the labs fall behind. The autumn backlog then stands as both a critical failure and a crucial opportunity to learn. The virus isn’t going away soon. More waves will come. So what went wrong, and why?

To better understand those questions, the National Post spoke to the heads of some of Ontario’s most important labs in the public health, hospital and private systems, as well veterans of Ontario Public Health and leading outside experts. Together they paint a picture of a system doing often extraordinary things despite immense barriers and sometimes iffy provincial leadership.

“I actually think that we’ve done this in lightning speed. This is unprecedented,” said Matukas at St. Michaels. “It is unprecedented for us to expand lab capacity at the pace that we have over the past seven months. I know we’ve been using that word a lot during this pandemic, unprecedented…. But I have never participated in anything that moved so fast, so quickly and still maintained the level of quality and robustness it would have if we had done this more slowly and meticulously.”

Like many aspects of Ontario’s COVID response, those efforts have been hampered by both chronic issues — some of which go back decades— and a provincial leadership that critics say has moved too slowly, too often during the pandemic.

Those critics argue the province should have seen the fall surge coming and acted sooner to both cut demand for testing and prepare labs for the surge. “It’s a simple volume versus capacity issue,” said Dr. Dominic Mertz the medical director of infection control at McMaster University in Hamilton. “We knew that with respiratory virus season starting, we would have many more people symptomatic, regardless of what COVID is doing. So we anticipated that. But the ramp up of testing capacity hasn’t happened. The focus was, I would say, on other things over the summer.”

The province’s months-long delay in approving new infrastructure funding was part of that failure, lab leaders agree. But it wasn’t everything. “Certainly money is one of those factors that if we had it sooner and earlier it would have helped us to maybe secure more stuff, more real estate, those renovations, and certainly get to where we need to get to,” said Matukas. “But then we still have all the other things like, where are the human resources? Where are the supplies and reagents? And what are we doing to really manage the demand?”

The simplest thing the province could have done, critics argue, wouldn’t have cost any money. In fact, it would have saved cash. The province waited until after the testing system was overrun this fall to walk back the message that anyone who wanted a test could get a test. That was a crucial error, many experts believe. “There’s really only two categories of people who need testing. And those are individuals who are symptomatic and individuals who have been in contact with somebody who is known to have COVID,” said Matukas.

All those unneeded tests made the fall surge worse. But even without them, the labs would almost certainly have been overrun at some point. Matukas said the best estimates for how many people are walking around with COVID-like symptoms during cold and flu season in Ontario are somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000. The province has never been able to sustain daily testing even at the bottom end of that range.

Why not? Supplies are a big part of it. Molecular PCR tests are incredibly resource intensive. And almost everyone on earth right now is competing for those same resources. “It’s basically amplified from what it was in March,” said Dr. Vanessa Allen, Public Health Ontario’s chief of medical microbiology and laboratory sciences.

One problem that has cropped up repeatedly since March is that some of the best, most efficient instruments for processing COVID samples operate on proprietary systems. The Public Health Labs, for example, use several machines manufactured by Roche, the Swiss health-care giant. A single, high-throughput Roche instrument can handle up to 3,300 tests in 24 hours. But the catch is they only work with Roche supplies.

This isn’t just a Roche issue, either. All the proprietary instruments from the major manufacturers work that way. And all of them, at some point during the pandemic, have had supply chain issues. “All of the supplies: pipette tips, plates, reagents, tubes, just everything … is under pressure.” Katz said. “If you run short of one piece of that whole process, the whole line comes to a halt.”

To reduce that friction, the Public Health Labs, under Allen, have been buying exclusively non-proprietary instruments since February. That allows them to mix and match supplies for different parts of the operation from different suppliers, some of them domestic. But the so-called open systems just aren’t as powerful as the best proprietary machines. A single, open-system instrument, fully stocked and staffed, can only process 1,854 samples in a day, just over half what the Roche machines can do. “When we do have reagents (the Roche machines) are phenomenal workhorses,” Allen said. “So we’re not ready to abandon them entirely.”

Staffing, too, has been a constant problem. A molecular PCR test is not a simple procedure. It’s not like a pharmacy-bought pregnancy test. It takes real expertise to both conduct and interpret.

Most of that work has to be done by licensed laboratory technologists. But since at least the 1990s, Ontario has had a severe shortage of those kinds of techs. The issue, according to Michelle Hoad, the chief executive officer of the Medical Laboratory Professionals Association of Ontario, goes back to a decision made in the 1990s to close seven of the province’s 12 programs for training technologists. At the time, she said, there was a view that as lab processes got more automated, fewer humans would be needed to work in each lab. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Garth Riley, who retired as a senior director of Ontario’s Public Health Labs in 2015, said that issue was known and talked about at the highest levels of the organization for most of his tenure there. “And it still hasn’t been addressed properly in my opinion,” he said. There have been more recent warnings, too. For the last 18 months, Hoad and her colleagues have been meeting with the government, trying to get them to do something about it. “I don’t think it was taken as seriously as it should have been,” she said. “And then COVID hit.”

There is only so much the labs can do about the shortage now. To help with the load, some retired technologists have come back to the job. Labs have also shifted some tasks to less specialized assistants. The technologists that are available, meanwhile, have been working incredible hours. “They are the unsung heroes of the pandemic,” Katz said.

But staffing is just one of several chronic problems that have long dogged Ontario’s public health lab system. Those issues have almost certainly hurt its ability to the respond to the pandemic, Riley believes.

After SARS, the public labs were incorporated into the new, arm’s length Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, the precursor to today’s Public Health Ontario. The labs at that time, “were kind of an unwanted child,” Riley said. For a time they flourished in their new, quasi-independent home. But within a few years, the government began to claw them back in. Eventually, Riley said, “you couldn’t spend a penny without getting the approval from the ministry of health. And as a lab, working with the ministry of health was always challenging because these people did not understand laboratories.”

Money was another constant issue. “The public health labs were always underfunded. And the budget was capped for several years,” said Dr. Natasha Crowcroft, who was Public Health Ontario’s chief science officer until late last year. That left the network already over-stretched and underfunded when the pandemic hit.

Crowcroft, who now works for the World Health Organization in Geneva, blames successive governments for that problem. But she thinks Ontario’s public health leadership bears some responsibility too. “The strategy of the organization when it ran into financial problems was to try and keep quiet about them so they didn’t get into trouble with the government,” she said. “And I think that strategy … is what meant that they were not in a good position when this hit. When other organizations were pushing back against cuts, Public Health Ontario wasn’t. So I think there has been a failure of leadership.”

Those budget constraints have had a real impact. Almost two decades after SARS, to cite one example, Ontario came into the COVID-19 pandemic still without any kind of unified, digital system for the different labs to communicate with each other. As a result, the public health, hospital and private health labs are still manually filling out and filing tens of thousands of paper requisitions every day.

It would be hard to exaggerate how big a data problem this has created. “Colleagues of mine at another lab said that for every lab technologist (working) they have 2.4 people doing data entry,” Allen said. At Mount Sinai, the lab took over an entire, 1,000 square-foot classroom just to house 20 new data staff.

That this issue is still lingering, even now, doesn’t surprise Riley. “The public has a short memory. The government has even a shorter memory,” he said. “So that’s sort of how we got to where we are.”

Even given all those problems, many observers believe that what Ontario’s laboratories have accomplished over the past seven months is nothing short of remarkable. They’ve built, effectively from scratch, a coordinated network of labs from different organizations and different cultures that is now performing tests at a speed and on a scale never before seen in this province.

The massive backlog that happened in the fall was the result of long-term problems that were exacerbated by short-term issues, some of them preventable, some not. “I think what happened there was that there was a mismatch between just the pure capacity on the instruments and the labs and the number of tests that were being collected and coming in,” said Katz.

The Ford government could have done more to prevent that from happening, It could have spent more money, sooner, to bring more lab capacity online. But that doesn’t take away from the things those working in the system have managed to do. “We have really moved a lot of mountains together,” Allen said. “But there’s still a long way to go and I’m not downgrading that.”

The National Post sent a list of detailed questions to Ontario Health, Public Health Ontario, and Health Minister Christine Elliott’s office about this story. David Jensen, a spokesman for the ministry of health, replied with a statement that did not address the questions specifically. The province, he pointed out, has increased its testing capacity from 4,000 to almost 40,000 a day and continues to lead the country in both tests completed and daily testing capacity. The government has also invested over $1 billion to expand the lab network, secure supplies and hire staff.

On the decision not to restrict testing earlier, he wrote: “Earlier this year our broad range approach to testing helped us determine if and where COVID-19 was spreading. What we found was that it wasn’t widely circulating in any community. This was an important decision to target our resources to those experiencing symptoms, protect the most vulnerable and support outbreak investigations.”

For Riley, all of this feels a bit like deja vu. “These things tend to be cyclical,” he said. “They repeat themselves. After it’s all over, he believes, there will be royal commissions and expert reports. “Everybody will be running around and coming up with ideas and plans,” he said, “and then 20 years from now, we’ll be in the same boat, with a different bug.”

• Email: rwarnica@nationalpost.com | Twitter: richardwarnica

Barbra Streisand was the official inspiration behind Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay hit, according to an unearthed 1971 “interview” with late blues star Tony Glover.

The two friends exchanged letters, in which notoriously private Dylan opened up about his songs and career, and now the lost correspondence has been discovered and is set to go under the hammer at a Boston, Massachusetts auction.

The letters reveal Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, changed his name because he worried about anti-Semitism, and wrote Lay Lady Lay for Streisand — a music myth that the singer/songwriter has never publicly addressed.

It has long been believed Dylan wrote the tune for the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy, but the singer told Glover he created it as a tune for Streisand, without elaborating on the nature of their relationship.

Experts at R.R. Auction, who are selling the letters, claim the correspondence was supposed to be part of an Esquire magazine article, but Dylan lost interest and the piece was abandoned.

Glover, who befriended Dylan when they were both struggling musicians in Minneapolis, Minnesota, died last year, and his widow put the documents up for auction.

Bidding is to begin online on Nov. 12.

Watch the video or read the transcript for everything you need to know about the fight over the Safe Third Country Agreement.

Canada and the United States signed the Safe Third Country Agreement in late 2002. It came into effect in 2004. The pact was part of a parcel of border security agreements signed between the two countries in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Most people agree this was something Canada asked for. The agreement applies both ways, but the net effect, or at least the net goal, has always been to limit the number of people entering Canada from the United States who can apply for refugee status.

The idea is that if you’re fleeing persecution or war, you should ask for asylum in the first safe country you arrive in. What that means is that most people who try to cross into Canada from the U.S. cannot seek asylum here. The rules say they should do it in the United States first.

The pact doesn’t apply to people with close family members already in Canada, or to people with valid Canadian travel documents. It doesn’t apply to unaccompanied minors or to most people facing the death penalty in the United States or any other country.

It has also never applied to the entire Canada-U.S. border. That’s the exception that has been making news since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

People call it a loophole, but that’s not totally accurate. This has always been the way the agreement was designed to work. If you make a refugee claim at an official border crossing, like the peace arch bridge outside Vancouver, Canada can turn you back, as long as you don’t qualify for one of the exceptions. If you cross into Canada anywhere else along the U.S. border, Canada is still obliged to process your claim.

Why? Well, part of it is logistical. Canada’s southern border is huge and almost entirely undefended. You can’t physically stop everyone from walking over if that’s what they really want to do. And once people are in Canada, you can’t just throw them out again, not without some kind of legal process.
People have always crossed into Canada from the U.S. And vice versa between the official crossings, rarely have they done so in massive numbers.

That changed after 2016. Since then, thousands of people have walked into Canada, a huge number of them at one dead end street in New York state, and asked for asylum. That led to calls from all sides of the political spectrum to modify or even scrap the Safe Third Country Agreement entirely.

Conservatives have long argued that Canada should find a way to apply the agreement across the entire border, either by renegotiating the pact or simply declaring the whole border an official crossing. Refugee advocates meanwhile, say the United States is no longer a safe country, if it ever was, and that it’s morally untenable for Canada to keep turning asylum seekers from the U.S. away.

That argument gained new currency in the summer of 2020, when a federal court judge effectively threw out the Safe Third Country Agreement on those specific grounds. The federal government has since appealed that ruling, which was put on hold until January 2021. If it does come into effect as planned, the government argued, Canada could see a massive new influx of asylum seekers.

What the government may well be doing is buying time until a new administration takes over in the United States. Should Joe Biden replace Donald Trump next January, the federal government will likely argue in a full appeal that the facts on the ground have changed.

But the bar for placing this kind of ruling on hold is a high one. And the lawyers arguing the other side say the government hasn’t come close to meeting it.

What is clear is that the fight over the Safe Third Country Agreement is not going to end any time soon, no matter who wins the presidential election.

National Post

Timeline of the Safe Third Country Agreement

Here’s a timeline around the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) and the issues it has sparked in Canada.

2002: Canada and the U.S. sign the STCA. Its goal is to “manage the flow of refugee claimants.” It acknowledges that both countries offer substantial refugee protections and, therefore, asylum seekers can’t arrive in Canada and then file claims in the U.S., or vice versa — they have to seek sanctuary where they first arrive, with some exceptions. But the deal only applies at formal land, sea or air crossings.

2004: The STCA comes into effect.

2007: A judicial review of the STCA is launched before the Federal Court by the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International Canada, the Canadian Council of Churches, and John Doe, an anonymous refugee claimant in the U.S. who claimed that if it weren’t for the deal, he would have applied for refugee status in Canada. The Federal Court rules the U.S. refugee record at the time did not meet Canadian requirements, and the designation of the U.S. as a safe country was unreasonable. The decision was overturned on appeal for technical reasons.

2016:

April: Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP begin noticing an increase in the number of people coming into Canada at unofficial border crossings, expressly for the purpose of claiming asylum.

November: Donald Trump is elected as president of the United States, with immigration reform — including a crackdown on immigrants and refugee seekers — one of his key promises.

December: National attention focuses on Emerson, Man., a small town not far from the U.S. border, where asylum seekers are crossing into Canada in frigid winter conditions. Calls begin for Canada to address the STCA, with advocates pointing out that people are crossing irregularly in order to get around the deal: they can file refugee claims in Canada as long as they don’t enter from the U.S. using a formal border point.

2017:

January:

— Trump issues one of his first executive orders as president. Best known as the “Muslim ban,” it barred entry to the U.S. for people from certain countries. But it also lowered the number of refugees to be admitted to the U.S., suspended the refugee admissions program for three months and suspend the acceptance of Syrian refugees indefinitely. Protests broke out immediately, including chaos at airports as travellers were detained and visas revoked. The order would be challenged in court.

— Calls immediately emerge for Canada to suspend the STCA. Federal government says it is monitoring situation.

— Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posts a message on Twitter seen as a response to Trump’s decision: “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.”

— Border crossers in Manitoba report they are fleeing the U.S. over concerns about American immigration policy.

March:

— Federal government prepares for a possible surge of border crossers, as numbers rise not just in Manitoba but in Quebec and Ontario.

— The Liberal cabinet begins mapping out strategies and contingency plans, including the use of the military and empty government buildings to house and process incoming refugee claimants.

— Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen tells MPs that political instability in the U.S. is not necessarily the main driver of asylum seekers, noting that many who crossed into Manitoba had actually been in the U.S. less than two months.

June:

— A surge in asylum seekers crossing into Quebec on what’s known as Roxham Road begins.

July:

— Nearly 3,000 people are intercepted in Quebec alone as number of asylum seekers continues to rise.

— The Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International and the Canadian Council of Churches announce they will again attempt to challenge the legality of the STCA in Federal Court. They are joined by an individual called “E,” a Salvadoran woman who fled her home over fears of gang violence but was turned away from Canada because she tried to file a refuges claim at a formal border crossing. She believes she will not receive refugee protection in the U.S.

August:

— Federal government announces an “ad hoc intergovernmental task force on irregular migration” tasked with managing the asylum seeker influx. It includes provincial representation.

— Members of Parliament from Spanish and Haitian backgrounds are sent to the U.S. to try and dissuade people from coming to Canada through unofficial border points, amid fear of misinformation campaigns circulating in the U.S. that are encouraging people to come north.

December: In all of 2017, 20,593 people are apprehended by the RCMP crossing into Canada between official ports of entry.

2018:

February:

— Federal budget sets aside close to $200 million over two years to deal with processing of asylum claims.

— Trump administration begins practice of separating minors from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, drawing international condemnation.

July:

— Former Toronto top cop Bill Blair given new cabinet portfolio with responsibility for border security, which will handle asylum seeker issue.

— Parties in Federal Court case file flurry of evidence, pointing to recent changes in U.S. law — including the end of people being able to claim domestic violence as grounds for asylum — as more evidence U.S. no longer safe for refugees. The applicants argue “returning refugee claimants to the U.S. and exposing them there to a serious risk of arbitrary, lengthy detention and refoulment (deportation), Canada violates their charter rights.”

December: 19,419 people are apprehended by the RCMP between ports of entry for all of 2018.

2019:

March:

— Blair says he is talking with U.S. about closing the loophole in the STCA.

— Federal budget invests $1.18 billion over 5 years, starting in 2019-20, and $55 million per year thereafter to “enhance the integrity of Canada’s borders, and to process an increased number of asylum claims in a timely manner.”

July: American decision to severely restrict refugee claims from those who cross into the country via Mexico again sparks demand for Canada to amend or suspend the STCA. Federal government continues to say it stands by the definition of the U.S. as a “safe country” for refugees.

October: Liberals are elected to a minority government. Platform promises effort to “modernize” STCA.

November: Federal Court hearing begins.

— The Canadian Press

OTTAWA – The Liberal government will turn off the spending taps eventually, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said Wednesday, but not until Canada is through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking to the Toronto Global Forum, Freeland outlined the government’s fiscal approach to fighting the pandemic arguing Canada has to spend aggressively to keep the economy going.

“We want to give our businesses and our households a bridge, so that as many of them as possible make it through viable and intact,” she said.

She said the Liberals guiding principle on the economy is that beating COVID is key to a successful financial rebound.

“Our economy will only be able to recover fully once we have defeated the virus.”

Earlier this month, Freeland announced extensions and changes to both the commercial rent subsidy program, as well as the wage subsidy into 2021. She said the pandemic will mean restaurants will have to operate at reduced capacity or even close at times and that businesses can’t get back to normal until there is a vaccine.

“It’s just not practically possible, never mind fair, to ask workers to stay home or businesses to shut their doors without providing them with the financial support they need.”

The government’s last update in the summer projected Canada would run a $343 billion deficit in 2020, pushing the country into more than a trillion dollars in debt for the first time in its history. Those numbers didn’t include some of the expansions to programs the government offered up last month. Freeland said new projections on the country’s finances would be coming soon.

The government has also promised a fiscal update this fall, but no date has been set for that.

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Freeland said she is aware that the level of debt is a concern for many Canadians, but said the government can afford it. She said with interest rates so low, even this massive amount of debt doesn’t weigh heavily on the country’s balance sheet.

“Canada’s interest charges as a share of GDP today are at a 100-year low,” she said.

The Liberals have previously set so called “fiscal anchors” to guide their spending. The first in the 2015 campaign was three $10 billion deficits before a return to balance. This was followed by a goal to keep the debt to GDP ratio below 30 per cent.

But during the pandemic, as the red ink flowed across the government’s balance sheet, there has been no discussion of any anchor to their spending.

Freeland made it clear the government would return to a more measured approach after the pandemic.

“I am not among those who think Canada should have a fling with Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that deficits don’t matter for a government that issues debt in its own currency,” she said. “We will resume the long standing time-tested Canadian approach with fiscal guardrails and fiscal anchors that preceded this pandemic.”

She did not specify what those guardrails or anchors would be. She said the government would focus on measures in the months ahead to get through the pandemic and then to relaunch the Canadian economy to bring back as many jobs as possible.

Today, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland shared the economic rationale driving Canada’s response to #COVID19 and outlined our strategy for a robust, lasting recovery.

Read the full speech ⬇️ https://t.co/yvY4whPf66

— Deputy Prime Minister of Canada (@DeputyPM_Canada) October 28, 2020

On Tuesday in the House of Commons, prior to Freeland’s speech Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre said the government wasn’t being serious about the country’s finances. And no fiscal anchor would make sense if the Liberal government wasn’t prepared to actually tie it to the boat.

“All those anchors have since been abandoned, in fact we haven’t had a budget in well over a year, the longest period ever,” he said.

Unlike the 2008 recession or other economic shocks, Freeland said there is no one to blame for this pandemic and it would be cruel for the government not to help Canadians weather the storm.

“We didn’t get here because of greed or recklessness. The market isn’t correcting for a flaw. This was a completely exogenous shock,” she said.

She also said supporting families now means they will have the money to spend when the pandemic ends and can bring the economy back swiftly.

“Once the virus is vanquished, our rebound will be more rapid and more robust.”

• Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com | Twitter: ryantumilty

Around the mid-point of her virtual speech to the Toronto Global Economic Forum, Chrystia Freeland stopped and said the thinking she had outlined was “entirely uncontroversial.”

The finance minister was right – protecting Canadians’ health, jobs and living standards by using aggressive federal stimulus is an article of faith for politicians across the spectrum.

Nobody believes Ottawa should have watched families and businesses go broke during the pandemic.

But it was the rest of her speech – and what was missing – that is more problematic.

Freeland said her rural, northern Alberta roots means she is not steeped in the ideas of “helicopter money” but that Canada can afford its current spending spree because interest charges, as a share of GDP, are at 100-year lows.

She said the “terror and triumph” of the debt crisis in the mid-1990s was formative for a generation of Canadians. “But it is a poor general who fights the last war,” she said, implicitly dismissing criticism from those who were in the trenches during those messy battles, people like former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge and ex-TD Bank chief economist, Don Drummond.

Freeland said not one of the factors that drove the fiscal crisis in the 1990s holds true today. “Doing too little is more dangerous and potentially more costly than doing too much.”

That is arguable; the fact that budgetary constraints remain an intrinsic foundation of economics is not.

Today, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland shared the economic rationale driving Canada’s response to #COVID19 and outlined our strategy for a robust, lasting recovery.

Read the full speech ⬇️ https://t.co/yvY4whPf66

— Deputy Prime Minister of Canada (@DeputyPM_Canada) October 28, 2020

Thankfully, she said she has no truck with Modern Monetary Theory, the idea that deficits don’t matter for governments that issue debts in their own currency.

Freeland said the expansive approach to fighting the pandemic “will not be infinite,” which is a relief.

The government will impose limits upon itself, “rather than waiting for the more brutal external restraints of international capital markets.”

But her boss Justin Trudeau has already revealed there will be no fiscal anchor in the fall update – a sentiment she echoed.

Freeland argued against “premature fiscal tightening.”

But that presents a false dichotomy – austerity or remaining adrift without a fiscal anchor.

We have no idea what the government thinks would be a reasonable deficit target going forward (Drummond calculated recently that recurring $100 billion budgetary shortfalls would take the debt to GDP level to 63 per cent and program spending to more than 15 per cent of the economy.)

Nor was there anything in Freeland’s speech to suggest how Canada will lay the foundations for the green, innovative, inclusive economy to which she aspires.

By happy coincidence, the Business Council of Canada released its own economic growth plan on Wednesday, filling in many of the gaps missing in the finance minister’s speech.

The council pointed out that Canada is in far less rosy shape than Freeland would have her audience believe. As a country, what we are producing is not covering what we are consuming, meaning we have a persistent current account deficit, as well as a fiscal deficit. We have an aging population, a problem growing firms to global scale and lagging business investment.

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Some of the solutions were in train before the pandemic hit – attracting immigrants with specialized skill sets; retaining international students and increasing the labour force participation of women.

But in other areas, the conditions necessary for a robust recovery are worse than they were just a few years ago.

Canada’s business investment trails the OECD average and is eclipsed by spending in the U.S. “Canada has a reputation (for being) difficult and extremely time-consuming to get large capital projects off the ground,” said the report’s authors.

The latest Bank of Canada monetary report , released Wednesday, offered little comfort on that front. Uncertainty is expected to act as a “significant drag” on investment decisions. The oil and gas sector is not forecast to return to pre-pandemic levels during the projection period – after a 30 per cent contraction in 2020, the Bank expects investment to grow by just two per cent in 2021/22.

Worse, Canadian companies are now expanding outside the country, rather than investing in Canada (direct investment abroad in 2019 outweighed foreign direct investment by $804 billion.)

Other required fixes are long-standing and well-known – increased spending on broadband coverage, enhanced inter-provincial trade (current restrictions act like a 6.9 per cent tariff), more competitive personal income tax rates and streamlining an inefficient regulatory process.

But for all Freeland’s talk that the government has a plan – “We have a compass. We know how to get to a safe harbour and what to do when we get there” – there was very little on Canada’s approach to the digital economy.

It is a subject on which the Trudeau government has, as is its wont, talked a good game but made little progress.

Investment in intellectual property as a share of the economy has actually declined in Canada since 2005, compared to a sharp rise in the U.S.

Earlier this week, some members of the Council of Canadian Innovators, a business group focused on helping tech firms scale up, complained that innovation has barely been mentioned since the government set up its superclusters initiative.

The CCI and the new Business Council report both recommend that the government tilt the playing field toward fledgling tech companies by favouring home-grown firms in its procurement policies.

The Business Council lamented the number of promising companies leaving Canada. “It’s as though we were training high potential athletes, only to send them abroad to win Olympic medals for other countries,” it said.

The report suggested that individual departments and agencies, including the Canada Space Agency and the Department of National Defence, support procurement-led innovation.

“Government cannot avoid decisions about which market outcomes they prefer…Full market neutrality is not possible,” it concluded.

The Liberal government has never been shy about picking winners and losers. It should have no qualms about an industrial strategy that secures anchor clients offering a steady source of revenue for promising firms.

The post-COVID world promises to be one in which states take a more active role to ensure self-reliance. Canada cannot ignore those sea changes.

To this point, the government has been silent on the world beyond the pandemic, apart from an over-reliance on low interest rates as justification to keep spending.

But that is no substitute for sustained economic growth, about which the finance minister had little to say.

With the deficit on track to reach at least $343 billion this year, the cheery scenario she painted is not borne out by the facts.

Closer to the mark is the Business Council’s conclusion: “Canada’s economy is more fragile now than at any time since the 1930s.”

• Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

Don Mazankowski, a former deputy prime minister and longtime Conservative powerbroker in Alberta, has died at age 85.

His death was announced in the House of Commons, which observed a moment of silence in his memory on Wednesday.

Mazankowski — often known simply as “Maz” — ran a car dealership in Vegreville, Alberta, before running for federal office in 1968. That began a 25-year career in Parliament that included serving in several top cabinet roles in the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, including finance minister and deputy prime minister. Mulroney called Mazankowski his “minister of everything.”

After retiring as an MP, Mazankowski stayed deeply involved in public policy, including chairing former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s Advisory Council on Health, and was a key player in the 2003 “Unite the Right” negotiations that produced the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

“He was a giant,” Mulroney told the National Post on Wednesday.

During his time in politics, Mazankowski was a powerful western voice in the Progressive Conservative caucus and a key ally of Mulroney. He’s considered to be among the most influential deputy prime ministers in Canadian history, serving in that role from 1986 to 1993, quarterbacking much of the government’s agenda and advocating the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

“Maz became the chief operating officer of the government,” Mulroney told the  Post. Mulroney said he was often away from Ottawa during this period due to free trade negotiations and the Meech Lake Accords, and Mazankowski became his voice in Parliament.

“He spoke for me and chaired many sensitive cabinet committees,” Mulroney said. “Mazankowski was a House of Commons man. He would take on tough partisan issues … He was a superb leader and politician. He was excellent with cabinet colleagues and MPs.”

Mulroney listed off a long line of government policies that Mazankowski helped shape due to his Western Canadian advocacy, including transferring the National Energy Board headquarters from Ottawa to Calgary and privatizing Petro-Canada and Air Canada.

A  Maclean’s profile of Mazankowski in 1986 said that despite his key role in government, “Mulroney’s new deputy is by all appearances without personal enemies.”

“In Ottawa, Mazankowski at first became part of a group of western Tories with a wild and woolly reputation under the unofficial leadership of fellow Albertan Jack Horner,” the profile read. “But Maz maintained a less rambunctious manner. He became known for dark suits, a ready smile and an earnest speaking style — and for developing respect and friendships in the fractious Tory party.”

Mazankowski was born in the tiny Alberta town of Viking, about an hour east of Edmonton, to parents of Polish descent who immigrated from the United States.

“In 1960 he moved to Vegreville and opened an automotive business with his brother, Ray,” says Mazakowski’s biography on the Alberta Order of Excellence website. “His life and career took on a new direction when he met Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was traveling through Vegreville on a speaking tour. Inspired by Diefenbaker’s insistence that the West play a meaningful role in the nation’s business, Don began working behind the scenes in local politics.”

After his retirement from politics in 1993, Mazankowski went on to serve on a wide array of private and public sector boards. He delivered a report on health care reform for Alberta Premier Ralph Klein in 2001 that made wide-ranging recommendations to manage the cost of the health care system.

He also established the Don Mazankowski Scholarship Foundation, served on the board of governors of the University of Alberta, and chaired the Institute of Health Economics and the Canadian Genetics Diseases Network. The Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, opened in 2009, carries his name.

Mazankowski would also play an important role during the “Unite The Right” negotiations in the early 2000s, serving as a Progressive Conservative emissary during talks with the Canadian Alliance that eventually created the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

He was given a long list of awards, titles, and honorary degrees over his life. He was inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2003, and in 2013 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest level. He was part of a small group to have been given the title of Right Honourable in 1992, an honorific normally reserved for those who served as prime minister, governor general or chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Mulroney called Mazankowski, “the salt of the earth from Vegreville, Alberta.”

“To me, he turned out to be indispensable,” Mulroney said. “Few will match him in history.”

With files from John Ivison

• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com | Twitter: btaplatt

A Canadian senator, who has stirred controversy in the past, violated American law when, in May, she donated to U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.

Ontario Sen. Lynn Beyak made a $300 contribution to the Republican National Committee, public records from the American Federal Election Commission show .

In the records, Beyak listed her occupation as retired and her address as a P.O. box on Davis Point Rd.  in Dryden, N.Y., however, no such road or address exists in the rural New York town. Vice News, which first reported the story, also stated there is no Lynn Beyak in the American town.

The senator lives in Dryden, Ont., and Vice reports that a phonebook listing that matches the address in the donation receipt belongs to Beyak.

At the time of her donation, she was still a member of the Canadian Senate.

American federal laws prohibit campaigns from soliciting or accepting contributions from foreign nationals who do not hold U.S. citizenship.

Parsing through financial disclosures, Vice reports that there is no indication that Beyak holds dual citizenship or owns property in the states.

Beyak’s office confirmed to Vice that the senator did send in the political donation, however the money “is being returned in its entirety, simply because (the contribution) was erroneous.”

The RNC must report all returned donations but has not reported returning the senator’s contribution.

Since former prime minister Stephen Harper appointed Beyak to the Senate in 2013, she has had a series of controversies.

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In 2017, the Conservative Senate caucus expelled her after she called for the creation of a program in which Indigenous peoples could receive cash if they relinquished their protected status and land.

In February, sitting as an independent, Beyak was suspended for the remainder of the parliamentary session because she did not complete the anti-racism training she had been directed to undergo.

Beyak’s suspension ended when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament in the summer.

Beyak is back on the government payroll, collecting her full $157,600-a-year salary, and has access to Senate resources, CBC reported .

In Canada, senators are appointed until their mandatory retirement age of 75 and it can be difficult to remove a senator from his or her post.