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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a $470-million investment on Thursday for fish harvesters.

Speaking during his daily news briefing, Mr. Trudeau said fish harvesters who expect a 25-per-cent drop in income will get support to cover 75 per cent of losses up to $10,000. Ottawa is also introducing non-repayable grants of up to $10,000 for fish harvesters who own their own businesses.

The Prime Minister also announced that as of next month some national parks will be partially reopened so people can use trails and green spaces where physical distancing is possible. Parks Canada will allow the limited reopening of day-use facilities at national parks across the country on June 1, but camping won’t be allowed until at least June 21.

This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, usually written by Chris Hannay. Michelle Carbert is taking over today. The newsletter is available exclusively to our digital subscribers. If you’re reading this on the web, subscribers can sign up for the Politics newsletter and more than 20 others on our newsletter signup page. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.

TODAY’S HEADLINES

Senator Peter Harder, formerly Mr. Trudeau’s point man in the Red Chamber, has joined the Progressive Senate Group, composed largely of former Liberal senators appointed by prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. The move that could have a major impact on how the Senate is organized in the months ahead.

The federal Finance Department is preparing a fiscal update that will be ready within weeks, even though Mr. Trudeau won’t say when his government will outline the full effect of COVID-19 spending on Ottawa’s bottom line. While the government has provided a running tally for most of the COVID-19 spending measures announced to date, it has not released a fiscal forecast since December.

Mr. Trudeau is defending his ambassador to China after Dominic Barton said Beijing’s heavy-handed diplomacy is alienating foreign countries and injuring its goodwill abroad. Mr. Trudeau told reporters that raising questions about China’s conduct is “totally normal.”

Premier Jason Kenney has put Calgary and Brooks, a city of about 15,000 people, on their own schedule for the first phase of the province’s economic restart. The Alberta government excluded the cities from parts of its aggressive economic relaunch plan because of a disproportionately high number of COVID-19 infections.

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples has submitted a court application to challenge the federal relief money that off-reserve Indigenous peoples have been allocated during the pandemic, arguing current amounts are discriminatory and inadequate.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tapped Karen Hogan to be Canada’s next auditor-general, replacing Michael Ferguson, who died in February, 2019. Ms. Hogan is currently assistant auditor-general and has worked in that office since 2006.

Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on the words Trudeau should never have forgotten to say about China’s ‘soft power’: “Canada has suddenly developed a good-cop, bad-cop approach to China. Both cops are named Dominic Barton. Neither are named Justin Trudeau. The problem with that is not that the Prime Minister’s tone is too diplomatic, but that he failed in his duty to do some diplomacy.”

André Picard (The Globe and Mail) on the need for the government to increase COVID-19 testing: “You will never get an outbreak under control if you are perplexed by the source of disease spread. The only way to resolve that is to test. Not just promise to test. But actually test. And test, and test."

Konrad Yakabuski (The Globe and Mail) on Stephen Harper’s warning about big government: “The dilemma now facing the Harper-less Conservatives is whether to align themselves with their former leader’s hard-line stand on fiscal policy when most Canadians appear to support (and even like) the big-government policies of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”

Don Martin (CTV News) on how sealing off provinces from each other borders on pandemic paranoia: “We are supposedly one country, not 10, bound together in good times and bad. Prolonged self-isolation by select provinces from the rest of the country isn’t just economically unsound and most likely unconstitutional, it’s un-Canadian.”

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