Good morning,
NDP MP Christine Moore says she is planning to sue Glen Kirkland, a realtor and veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, for defamation for telling media outlets that their brief involvement was not consensual. Mr. Kirkland told media last week that there was a power imbalance when the two first met a few years ago – she an MP, he a witness testifying at a parliamentary committee – and that the two times that Ms. Moore visited him afterwards were unwanted contact. Ms. Moore characterized the time as a brief romantic relationship.
Mr. Kirkland said he did not proactively talk publicly about what happened, but that he did answer questions when reporters called him to ask about it. The story came out because of the role Ms. Moore played in getting MP Erin Weir removed from caucus over concerns that he did not read non-verbal social cues correctly.
Ms. Moore told the Canadian Press that she also plans to sue columnists Neil Macdonald (CBC), Christie Blatchford (National Post) and Rosie DiManno (Toronto Star) for writing about the issue.
This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Chris Hannay in Ottawa, Mayaz Alam in Toronto and James Keller in Vancouver. If you’re reading this on the web or someone forwarded this email newsletter to you, you can sign up for Politics Briefing and all Globe newsletters here. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
TODAY’S HEADLINES
A lobby group says they were twice called by staff of the Finance Minister to discourage them from criticizing a government bill at a parliamentary committee. “He was angry,” Steve Masnyk, principal of SkyBridge Strategies, said of the minister’s staffer.
The Supreme Court says the public can’t access any files about the decisions they make for at least 50 years after a ruling – with an option to make the deliberations secret forever.
Survivors of the Sixties Scoop are divided over a $750-million settlement approved in Federal Court to compensate Indigenous people who were taken from their homes as children and adopted into non-native families. Supporters of the settlement including Colleen Cardinal of the National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network have applauded the settlement, which they say could be an important step for healing. But the process has also led to complaints that the terms are inadequate and that not enough has been done to inform the roughly 20,000 people who could be affected.
The federal government is staying out of a court application to halt work on B.C.’s Site C hydroelectric dam, which critics say will hurt First Nations rights, damage a large swath of land and produce power that isn’t needed.
Liberal MPs are proposing more than 100 amendments to their government’s environmental assessment bill.
The federal government is giving a $500-million information technology contract without competition to IBM, the large firm also responsible for the Phoenix pay system.
A B.C. man once convicted of trying to kill an Indian cabinet minister and who made headlines after he appeared at an event with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year has been charged with threatening a radio host in Canada. Jaspal Atwal’s lawyer says he denies the allegations.
A Canadian soldier has been named deputy commander of the United Nations Command in South Korea for the first time, putting Lieutenant-General Wayne Eyre in an important role as peace talks begin in the peninsula.
And the Ontario NDP and Greens say they’ve broken a new gender barrier: more than half of the parties’ candidates in the upcoming election are women.
Lori Turnbull (The Globe and Mail) on the Liberals’ elections bill: “Even if the bill passes, political parties would continue to be subject to stricter rules than third parties in terms of who can contribute to them and in what amounts. This discrepancy creates an unintended incentive for donors, including foreign entities, advocacy organizations and the wealthy, to dump their money into the pockets of third parties.”
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on Liberals in Ottawa and Conservatives elsewhere: “The Liberals are looking for a bogeyman, someone to move left-of-centre voters to unite behind them. Their re-election strategy counts on winning part of the NDP vote, and it helps to motivate them to unite against the Conservatives. The thing is, [Andrew] Scheer isn’t scary. And [Stephen] Harper isn’t coming back. Yet Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals might make some headway warning Mr. Scheer is allied with leaders pushing the conservative agenda from provincial capitals -- possibly Alberta opposition leader Jason Kenney, a former Harper cabinet minister in a good position to become premier next year, and [Doug] Ford, a rare provincial leader who appears to annoy progressives from coast to coast.”
Andrew Cohen (The Globe and Mail) on Stephen Harper: “ Mr. Harper is returning to the unvarnished, hawkish conservative he was as an academic and parliamentarian, who managed to contain those instincts in his 10 years in office. Now, he no longer has to compromise as he once did to govern a moderate, centrist Canada.”
Andrew MacDougall (Ottawa Citizen) on Conservatives and the environment: “If you believe anthropogenic climate change is a thing, and the Tories say they do, then you have to get the anthropoids (that’s us) to learn new tricks. This is where tax is a handy weapon; most of us don’t like paying it and we tend to notice when paying one at the point of sale.”
Susan Delacourt (Toronto Star) on harassment: “It’s clearly not that much of a success to see women in the role of accused harassers. That’s not the kind of equality we’ve been seeking in the workplace. But it does break the harassment conversation out of the usual frame of a gender-imbalance discussion and get us talking about power — a vital ingredient in all this discussion of who does the harassing and who gets harassed in the political workplace.”
Help The Globe monitor political ads on Facebook: During an election campaign, you can expect to see a lot of political ads. But Facebook ads, unlike traditional media, can be targeted to specific users and only be seen by certain subsets of users, making the ads almost impossible to track. The Globe and Mail wants to report on how these ads are used, but we need to see the same ads Facebook users are seeing. Here is how you can help.
Got a news tip that you’d like us to look into? E-mail us at tips@globeandmail.com. Need to share documents securely? Reach out via SecureDrop