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These are the top stories:
Michael Kovrig’s glasses have been confiscated as China escalates pressure on Canada
The imprisoned Canadian diplomat, on leave from Global Affairs, has been in detention along with entrepreneur Michael Spavor since last December. And while they were recently moved from solitary confinement to a detention centre, sources say they’re still subjected to interrogations and kept in rooms with 24-hour light.
The removal of Kovrig’s reading glasses comes as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he is “confident” that U.S. President Donald Trump followed through on his promise to raise the issue of the detained Canadians with China’s President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit last weekend. Trudeau also said he spoke with Xi about the detentions.
Meanwhile, Beijing continues to strongly back Hong Kong’s chief executive. China called protesters’ occupation and vandalizing of the city’s legislature “serious illegal acts that trample on the rule of law and endanger social order.” Beijing’s influence over the semi-autonomous region has come under scrutiny as protesters forced the stalling of a controversial extradition bill.
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Despite warning signs, Canada’s EDC provided loans for a Colombian dam project
Ottawa’s export-credit agency provided a $466-million loan to the company behind a dam that was hit by a disaster last year when a tunnel burst, forcing 25,000 people to flee their homes. EDC says there was no reason to suspect the project was risky, but a Globe investigation reveals experts had warned of a disaster well before the 2018 incident.
The fresh details come as a federal review found EDC’s disclosure practices fall far short of other financial institutions and that the agency isn’t obligated to consider the environmental or human-rights impacts of its loans.
Four of six judges recently appointed to New Brunswick courts have links to a Liberal minister
Dominic LeBlanc was part of the cabinet approval process for five of the appointments which occurred over the past eight months (he is currently on medical leave for cancer treatment).
The links raise fresh questions about partisanship in judicial appointments two months after The Globe reported bench candidates are put through a private party database called the Liberalist.
Three judges named to superior courts in New Brunswick in the past eight months made contributions of $400 each in 2009 to pay down debt from LeBlanc’s unsuccessful Liberal leadership bid. Each of the judges have since made multiple donations to the Liberal Party.
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
The executive who once headed Ford and Chrysler died at 94. Lee Iacocca became Ford’s youngest president at 46; after being fired in 1978 he went on to take over Chrysler, rescuing it from bankruptcy in the middle of a recession. Hailed as a visionary, there was even talk of him running for president of the U.S. in 1988.
The RCMP reassigned a Saskatchewan officer after a video surfaced online showing him threatening to kill a man during an arrest. The footage prompted calls from First Nations to fire the officer and charge him. For its part, the RCMP said it relocated the officer to non-front-line work pending an investigation.
SNC-Lavalin should still be offered a DPA, Quebec’s Economy Minister says. Pierre Fitzgibbon also said his province would consider giving the company financial support if needed. Canada’s Attorney-General, David Lametti, has said a deferred-prosecution agreement on fraud and bribery charges is still a “legal possibility.”
MORNING MARKETS
Stocks mixed
Action on world markets focused on bonds on Wednesday, with a fresh slide in benchmark debt yields on simmering global trade war and recession fears, central bank easing bets and ebbing oil prices. Tokyo’s Nikkei lost 0.5 per cent, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng shed 0.1 per cent, and the Shanghai Composite declined 0.9 per cent. In Europe, London’s FTSE 100, Germany’s DAX and the Paris CAC 40 were up by between 0.6 and 0.8 per cent by about 6: 15 a.m. ET. New York futures were up. The Canadian dollar was at 76.31 US cents.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
The real carbon tax is the money provinces are spending on lawyers
Globe editorial: “It’s fair to say at this point that the conservative-led movement to discredit Ottawa’s carbon-pricing regime is in tatters. Two courts in two different provinces have now ruled that the regime is constitutional. At the same time, the climate-change plans introduced by provincial governments that oppose carbon pricing, as well as by the federal Conservative Party, are being criticized for their lack of effectiveness.”
Boris Johnson is not a British Donald Trump
Niall Ferguson: “Though born into a wealthy family, Trump was and remains a social outsider, sneered at by Manhattan’s Upper East Side. When he announced his bid for the presidency four years ago, Arianna Huffington announced that she would cover his campaign in her website’s entertainment section. Johnson was already a member of Britain’s social and political elite before he even got to Oxford.” Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
TODAY’S EDITORIAL CARTOON
(Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail)Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail
LIVING BETTER
Why banning e-cigarettes isn’t a solution to teen vaping
In a bid to curb the rise of vaping by teens, San Francisco is banning the sale and purchase of e-cigarettes. But adopting simplistic measures won’t address this complex issue, André Picard writes: “Banning sales will only make it more likely that young people will turn to the black market, and get unregulated, and likely more dangerous, devices.”
MOMENT IN TIME
Franz Kafka is born
(Bridgeman Images)ONE-TIME USE ONLY WITH STORY SLUGGED NW-MIT-KAFKA-0702
July 3, 1883: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” So begins, Franz Kafka’s best-known story, The Metamorphosis, which famously tells the tale of a man turned into a bug, whose most pressing concern is getting to work. The novella was just one of the several twisted stories Kafka wrote that reflect the absurdity of modern life. The writer, who was born 136 years ago into an upper-middle-class Jewish family, had a strained relationship with his parents. His father was domineering and his mother didn’t understand his desire to become a writer. As a young man, he worked as an insurance clerk, but it frustrated him and left him little time to do what he loved: write. The soulless job is thought to have helped inspire some of his work. Although he would write multiple books and dozens of short stories throughout his life, he kept many of them to himself and burned others. Before he died at 40, he instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy his works, but Brod saved and published a majority of them after the writer’s death. – Matthew Lapierre
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