Good morning,
Vice-Admiral Mark Norman returns to court today on charges of leaking cabinet secrets related to a shipbuilding contract. He was the military’s number-two soldier, until he was suspended from his post in January, 2017, pending this investigation and trial. His friends have organized a crowdfunding campaign to help him with legal fees. The fund has so far raised $120,000, including a contribution from former defence minister (and current United Conservative Leader) Jason Kenney.
This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Chris Hannay in Ottawa, – 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 –
TODAY’S HEADLINES
The Conservative Party appears to be on the upswing in Quebec, buoyed by the struggles of the Bloc Québécois and NDP. The Conservatives recruited former Bloc leader Michel Gauthier to their campaign on the weekend. A new Leger poll shows the Tories are now in second place in support in the province – 29 per cent, behind the Liberals’ 40 per cent – which is a sharp rise from the 2015 election.
The Conservatives say they will file a formal complaint about the Finance Minister’s office allegedly bullying witnesses before they appeared at a House finance committee.
Two retired Supreme Court justices say the new 50-year embargo on documents from the top court is far too long.
Canadians are split on the controversial attestation for the Canada Summer Jobs grant, a new Angus Reid Institute poll suggests.
Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is overshadowed by as yet unanswered questions about Indigenous consent – whether it’s required and, if so, who grants it. Ongoing legal challenges could likely provide a clearer picture, as could provincial and federal legislation designed to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. That declaration, known as UNDRIP, requires “free, prior and informed consent” for resource development.
Owners of high-value homes in Vancouver continue to push back against a new property tax on properties worth more than $3-million. The B.C. NDP government says the tax will only affect a small number of people who have benefited from the province’s out-of-control real estate market, but critics have said it would unfairly target seniors and others who are barely getting by.
The federal information commissioner has resolved a thorny complaint after a decade, though the office is still struggling under a backlog of more than 3,000 cases.
Syrian refugees in Turkey awaiting news on whether they can come to Canada share their stories with OpenCanada.org – including concerns about the translators that spoke on their behalf to immigration officials.
And former prime minister Stephen Harper says he could still be leader of the Conservative Party if he wanted to be, but that that wouldn’t be good for anyone. “I was determined to establish an institutional organization that would outlive me and would not need me down the road. So I did things very different than if I’d simply wanted to amass power at all costs,” he told an American audience earlier this year.
John Ibbitson (The Globe and Mail) on Liberal (im)patience: “So perhaps the Liberals can be forgiven for tiring of this whole consultation thing. The parliamentary calendar is running out of runway. There are only 27 sitting weeks, give or take, before the 42nd Parliament is dissolved and the general election campaign begins, with almost 40 bills still making their way through the House and Senate. Some will quietly be allowed to die, but others, such as the cannabis legislation, are vital to the government’s agenda.”
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on taxing Netflix: “There’s a gulf between the way the issue is framed in Quebec and in the rest of Canada. In English Canada, the “Netflix tax” is an unpopular levy; in Quebec, it’s a levelling of the playing field to stop foreign corporations from sucking the lifeblood out of cultural industries.“
Globe and Mail editorial board on federal funding in Quebec: “Pork is and has been a staple of our nation’s political diet. That doesn’t mean we are obligated to like it, or to accept having it fed to us.”
Chantal Hébert (Toronto Star) on Andrew Scheer in Quebec: “For the Conservative leader, there is more at play here than trying to score a few byelection points at the expense of his beleaguered opposition rivals. Winning by default the second place to the Liberals in Quebec is the easy part. In the big picture, the province is undergoing what may be its most significant political realignment since the foundation of the Parti Québécois in the late sixties.”
Paul Wells (Maclean’s) on the question of coalitions after the Ontario election: “S peculating about how the legislature might compose itself after an election is pure speculation. There’s no evidence on which to base any claim you might make about how many seats each party will have. This makes it irresistible for some political observers, of course, because no prediction can be proven wrong. But it’s a pure waste of time.”
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