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Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will table a budget today that promises $10-billion to make housing more affordable for Canadians, provides $8-billion in new defence spending and aims to spur economic growth through green initiatives and a small-business tax cut.

Business leaders have called on Freeland to rein in big-ticket spending to combat rising inflation, and to present an urgent action plan in the budget that makes economic expansion and productivity top priorities.

Freeland’s budget message is expected to be that spending on plans for housing and the green economy will boost economic growth. The affordable housing plan is the centerpiece of the budget. A senior federal source said it addresses concerns about the cost of living, and will help attract skilled immigrants at a time when businesses face huge labour shortages.

In addition to platform priorities, there will also be new money for Canada’s military, and action to address NDP priorities, such as dental care, that were part of a March co-operation agreement between the minority-government Liberals and the New Democrats.

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Canada's Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, following decades-long tradition, tries on a pair of shoes purchased a day ahead of her delivering the 2022 Budget, at L'Intervalle footwear store, in Ottawa, April 6, 2022.BLAIR GABLE/Reuters

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Documents reveal why Ottawa dropped appeal for Catholic Church to pay residential-school survivors

The federal government abandoned its 2015 appeal of a court ruling that released the Catholic Church from its financial obligations to residential-school survivors because it believed there was a “low likelihood of success,” according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail.

For almost seven years, Indigenous leaders have sought answers to why Ottawa dropped its legal action against the Catholic Church, which was short $21.3-million in a fundraising campaign meant to benefit survivors. Documents released last week by the Department of Justice through an access-to-information request provide some insight into the decision.

Indigenous leaders have said the decision to abandon the appeal has had long-lasting consequences for the reconciliation process between Indigenous communities and the Catholic Church.

Amid death and destruction, Chernihiv residents never gave up

Deep below the classrooms of a vocational school, hundreds of Ukrainians clung to life in the darkness of an unlit boxing gym for weeks as Russian forces held their city under siege, pounding it with rockets and bombs.

At one point, nearly 500 people took shelter in this place in Chernihiv, in a city without electricity or running water, during winter months when many homes had no heat.

They fashioned candles out of sunflower oil, bits of cloth and sardine cans. They sat on mattresses playing Monopoly and card games beside the boxing-ring ropes. They divided into teams, each with its own leader, and apportioned work: Cleaning the basement. Maintaining the outhouses dug into the school grounds. Emptying the chamber pots provided for children and people with mobility problems. Sourcing water from a nearby river. And they cooked.

Chernihiv, a city of 250,000 that is one of Ukraine’s most historic centres, is situated 60 kilometres from Belarus. It was among the first places Russian troops reached in their invasion of Ukraine. When the city refused to bend to an initial attack, Russian forces encircled it, stifling the flow of goods and firing on those who evacuated.

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ALSO ON OUR RADAR

Quebec bill on academic freedom says no words are off-limits: The Quebec government says university professors should be able to use any words they deem necessary in the classroom, provided those words are used in an academic context and meet standards of ethics and science. In response to controversial debates over the limits of acceptable speech on university campuses, the government has introduced a bill that it says is aimed at protecting academic freedom.

Spring thaw will test B.C. flood barriers: November’s storms left British Columbia’s Tulameen River full of junk: mobile homes, travel trailers, pieces of concrete culverts and a destroyed train bridge, a yellow bus, a blue truck, a white SUV and something that might be an ATV. Elsewhere, on the Coldwater, the Nicola, the Similkameen, the Coquihalla, the Thompson and the Fraser rivers, the province has identified 270 clusters of storm debris. The race is on to clean up all of this in the coming weeks, before this winter’s higher-than-average accumulated snowpack begins to thaw.

Ottawa approves Bay du Nord oil development: Ottawa has approved a new oil development off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, just one week after the federal government said the oil and gas sector needs to cut its emissions nearly in half by the end of the decade.

Acclaimed Canadian conductor dies in a hit-and-run collision: Social-media tributes poured in from the Canadian classical music community yesterday after the death of Boris Brott, the renowned composer, symphony conductor and founder of the Brott Music Festival. Brott, who died after being hit by a car in Hamilton, was 78.


MORNING MARKETS

U.S. Treasury bond yields slipped from multiyear highs today and equities showed signs of steadying after Federal Reserve minutes released the previous day did nothing to add to the rate-hike momentum already priced into markets. Asian shares earlier took their cues from Wall Street’s selloff and fell to one-week lows while Japan’s Nikkei index dropped 1.7 per cent. But markets gradually steadied, and a pan-European stock index rose 0.4 per cent. In midday trading, Britain’s FTSE 100 slipped 0.18 per cent, Germany’s DAX rose 0.35 per cent and France’s CAC 40 was 0.48 per cent higher.


WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT

Editorial: “Looking away from a glaring problem and hoping it will somehow just take care of itself is never the wise option. But that seems to define the headspace that Canadians and their governments are in, 25 months into the pandemic. And that’s a problem.”

Mark Zelmer and Jeremy Kronick: “People have many happy expectations of cryptocurrencies as they look for ways to conduct their financial affairs outside the traditional financial system. They hope that, as crypto and its supporting blockchain technology mature, there will eventually be no delays in settling their transactions, cheaper cross-border transactions and no pesky fees on bank accounts, among other advantages. Many also imagine that crypto assets can protect them from rising inflation. That, however, is one benefit crypto assets do not offer.”


TODAY’S EDITORIAL CARTOON

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Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail


LIVING BETTER

A dramatic increase in home-buying power can be yours, but it comes at a price

When the government makes it harder to get a mortgage, you can bet the ranch that creative lenders will find workarounds. That’s essentially what Equitable Bank did with its new Advance Mortgage. And home buyers will be hard-pressed to find a bank mortgage that affords more purchasing power than this one. But is high-leverage financing sensible, given the risks ahead? Let’s first look at why it even exists.


MOMENT IN TIME: APRIL 7, 1927

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American telecommunications executive President of AT&T Walter Sherman Gifford participates in a video telephone call at Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York, April 7, 1927.Federal Communications Commission/PhotoQuest / Getty Images

First transmission of one-way video phone

Long before FaceTime, Skype or Zoom had become common vernacular, predating the features we now find on virtually every messaging app on our mobile devices, the first video call in recorded history was a bit of a doozy. It was an early April occurrence in 1927 when one call from Washington to New York revolutionized the prospect of videotelephony entirely. Herbert Hoover, then the secretary of commerce and later president of the United States, video-called officials at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (now AT&T Inc.). “Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history,” Mr. Hoover said, looking into a small black box as he spoke into the telephone mouthpiece. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect.” This was a public demonstration with much fanfare, attended by dozens of newspaper reporters and engineers from the Bell Telephone Laboratories. But at the time, the video portion was merely one-way, with only those in New York able to see Mr. Hoover. A two-way system emerged precisely two days and three years later, on April 9, 1930. Calling someone for a quick chat hasn’t been the same since. Temur Durrani


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