Good morning,
Justin Trudeau is set to receive an honorary doctorate next month from New York University and deliver a commencement speech to graduates.
“As Prime Minister, Trudeau is focused on creating new jobs, fostering strength out of Canada’s rich diversity, fighting climate change, and achieving reconciliation with indigenous peoples,” the university said in a press release. “A proud feminist, Trudeau appointed Canada’s first gender-balanced cabinet.”
Mr. Trudeau (or should we say Dr. Trudeau?) also received an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh last year.
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
The Liberal government has tapped film and television executive Catherine Tait to be the next president of CBC/Radio-Canada. Ms. Tait has worked on both sides of the border and is currently living in New York as president of Duopoly.
Israel has pulled back from a deal with the United Nations it announced yesterday to resettle thousands of African migrants. Canada had offered to take in nearly 2,000 of the 39,000 people.
The Liberal government’s trip to the Davos economic summit cost nearly $700,000.
The United States seems poised to make a quick deal on the North American free-trade agreement as China appears ready to retaliate with tariffs of its own. President Donald Trump continues to tweet disparagingly about Mexico and the flow of people over the border, however.
The mining and energy industries say they don’t like the Liberals’ environmental assessment legislation.
Researchers in Ontario say a real-time monitoring system at water treatment plants on First Nations reserves could significantly reduce the number of drinking-water advisories across the country.
B.C.’s NDP government came to power promising to reform the province’s daycare system with a universal, affordable system that would cost families just $10 a day. The government has started to put in place the beginnings of that plan with a series of subsidies to reduce daycare fees, but providers say the launch has been beset by delays and confusion.
Ottawa has announced more funding for transit infrastructure in B.C., part of a decade-long plan to pour billions of dollars into projects across the country. The Trudeau government has been rolling out announcements for weeks.
And a Quebec town is battling to remove the name of a British military officer, the latest incident of Canadians questioning who their public spaces are named after.
John Ibbitson (The Globe and Mail) on the Liberals’ respect for voters: “Many people who own big cars and trucks worry about global warming. But they also worry about their fuel bill. And they certainly do not need or want to be lectured to by Catherine McKenna. (And the men who typically own those pickup trucks don’t appreciate being called sexist Neanderthals by Bill Morneau.)”
André Picard (The Globe and Mail) on medicare: “The list of inconsistencies and absurdities is a long one. Coverage often depends on where you live, where you work, your age – but more than anything, public coverage is limited by historical accident.”
Frédéric Mégret (The Globe and Mail) on expatriates voting: “Citizenship is measured not by how long one spends on the territory of one’s state, but how committed one is to its ideals, how ready to give back and to invest in its political life. The idea that long-term expatriates are distant and disconnected citizens is belied by their voting record and the intensity by which some of them have, precisely, been willing to protest, including before the courts, against the denial of their rights, invoking their ‘deep and abiding’ connection to Canada.“
Don Braid (Calgary Herald) on Alberta versus the rest of Canada: “Albertans have generally tolerated the system, even though projections show the province will receive no single equalization dollar for generations. But fuzzy ‘Canadianism’ has an emotional limit. It’s reached when you realize that Ottawa, along with the province cashing the biggest cheque, won’t hesitate to flatten your own economy.”
Andrew Coyne (National Post) on cynicism: “More telling has been the government’s reversion to the mean on matters of democratic process, where what was required was, not to do things that no government had ever done before, but merely to refrain from doing things that every government had done before. Question period is the same insufferable series of non-answers, or answers to questions that were not asked, as it ever was. The Information Commissioner, in her last report, found that, notwithstanding Liberal promises of an ‘open by default’ government, access to information had, if anything, worsened.”
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