Morning Update: Ottawa to relax penalties for drug offences

Good morning,

A new federal bill would encourage police and prosecutors to treat drug possession as a health issue and reduce the criminal-justice system’s reliance on jail for a wide range of crimes. Mandatory prison terms for drug trafficking would be eliminated.

Bill C-22 tells police and prosecutors that courts are better used for crimes that endanger the public than for the simple possession of illegal drugs.

The proposed changes are also driven by a need to reduce the over-incarceration of minority groups, and by the Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Lives Matter social movements, Justice Minister David Lametti told The Globe and Mail.

Read more:

• Portraits of loss: One hundred lives, felled by an overdose crisis
• Opinion: In the face of a different pandemic, Ottawa is again refusing to listen to the science
• Latest: As Canada’s overdose deaths soar, the safe-supply debate enters a new and urgent phase

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Human rights: China’s actions in Xinjiang

Irwin Cotler, a former Liberal justice minister and a leading voice on human rights, is urging Justin Trudeau to take steps to recognize that China is conducting acts of genocide against its Muslim minority. Trudeau has appointed Cotler as his special adviser for Holocaust remembrance and combatting anti-Semitism.

MPs are preparing to vote Monday on a Conservative motion to recognize China’s conduct as genocide. The Prime Minister said this week that he was reluctant to describe China’s conduct as genocide while the NDP, Bloc Québécois and Green Party have indicated that they would support the motion.

• Opinion: Trudeau said Canada committed genocide. Why won’t he say the same of China?

Progress made in restoring electricity in Texas, but water crisis persists

Power was restored to more homes and businesses in Texas on Thursday after a deadly blast of winter overwhelmed the electrical grid and left millions shivering in the cold. In the state, just under 500,000 homes and businesses remained without power, down from about three million.

The extreme weather was blamed for the deaths of more than three dozen people, some while trying to keep warm.

Authorities ordered seven million people to boil tap water before drinking it, because the cold damaged infrastructure and pipes. As of last night, there are many people still in need of safe drinking water.

Also:

• Thousands of sea turtles unused to the plunge in temperatures have been washing up on the beaches off the southern coast of Texas.
• Texas Senator Ted Cruz took his family on vacation to Mexico as his home state was paralyzed by the deadly winter storm.

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ALSO ON OUR RADAR

Domestic vaccine production was never a possibility for 2021: Mark Lievonen told the House of Commons industry committee that the international supply chains that Canada is relying on to inoculate the population were the only option for the country.

Horgan condemns rise in hate crimes against East Asians in Vancouver: New police data presented at yesterday’s Vancouver Police Board meeting show these incidents began rising after lockdown measures to combat the pandemic last March, with a total of 98 cases in 2020 compared with a dozen the year before.

Purpose bitcoin ETF has record opening day of trading: Investors bought and sold more than $260-million of shares throughout the day. By the end of the day, the fund had about $160-million in investor assets.

Successful landing of Perseverance rover: NASA’s rover has opened its robotic eyes on a tantalizing landscape on Mars – one that scientists hope will answer the question of whether a planet that once had all the ingredients to sustain life actually saw life emerge.

Cameco’s legal victory seen as rebuke to CRA: The Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the CRA’s appeal of lower-court decisions that had sided with Cameco Corp. over a potentially ruinous tax dispute over how the uranium producer dealt with its overseas profits.

MORNING MARKETS

World shares seek direction: Global shares struggled to avoid a fourth straight day of losses on Friday as data showed euro zone business activity slowing in February, while German and British 10-year bond yields touched multi-month highs, driven up by bets on rising inflation. Just before 6 a.m. ET, Britain’s FTSE 100 was little changed. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 gained 0.45 per cent and 0.46 per cent, respectively. Japan’s Nikkei lost 0.72 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 0.16 per cent. New York futures edged higher. The Canadian dollar was trading at 79.07 US cents.

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WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT

With vaccinations about to ramp up, this is the wrong time for provinces to reopen

Editorial: “It will be much more effective to ride out the remainder of winter with the current limits on interactions, bring case numbers down further, let vaccination numbers rise higher – and then begin an enduring reopening.”

Sorry, snowbirds, there is little sympathy for your plight back home

Gary Mason: “That is their decision, of course. But when they return, they’d better not bemoan the cost of their quarantine or the weather.”

Building back better requires more women in international trade

Claire Citeau and Nadia Theodore: “Women have a golden opportunity to play a key disruptor role in the global trading system: to challenge the status quo toward a system in which more of the people affected by the rules are decision-makers in fashioning them.”

TODAY’S EDITORIAL CARTOON

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LIVING BETTER

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Bra tops and lingerie: what we wear in public is changing

Women who have eschewed wearing a bra with their work-from-home outfits over the past year may find it hard to embrace underwear dressing. But there’s no denying that the interest in off-duty comfort heightened by the pandemic has blurred the line between what we wear in public and private.

MOMENT IN TIME: Feb. 19, 1944

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German POWs recaptured at local dance

In October, 1943, 440 German prisoners of war, captured in North Africa, arrived at the newly built Whitewater camp in the heart of Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park. The men were there to cut wood for the domestic fuel market. There was no enclosed compound or guard towers; the boundaries were marked by red blazes on a ring of outlying trees. Authorities believed that the isolated location of the camp would discourage the men from trying to escape. And they were right. Only one prisoner repeatedly tried to escape. But some of the men grew tired of their forest prison and would wander outside the southern park boundary at night, usually to visit small immigrant communities, before returning to camp in time for morning roll call. The Veterans Guard decided to put an end to these nocturnal visits and carried out a raid one February evening in 1944. Five men were found at a community dance, while another two were caught doing a jigsaw puzzle with a school teacher. The “escapees” had ordered watches from the Eaton’s catalogue and converted them to compasses to find their way about in the dark. Bill Waiser

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