Canadian News

Shipping company UPS said it has found the package destined for Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which he said contains ‘damning’ documents relating to Hunter Biden.

Carlson said on his show Wednesday night that he had obtained more documents relating to Hunter Biden, but said they were lost in the mail.

On his show, Carlson said he received a “collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family.” Without going into any details about their contents, he said they were “authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning.”

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

On October 14, the New York Post published a report stating that they had obtained emails from the laptop of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The Post alleges that in 2014, Hunter leveraged his father’s position as U.S. vice president in an attempt to increase his pay as a board member at Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Carlson said the unspecified documents were being sent to him in Los Angeles from New York, but they never arrived. He said that the delivery company, which he did not name, said the package “had been opened and the contents were missing.”

“As of tonight the company has no idea, and no working theory even, about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign,” he said.

Oh for f*%! sake, seriously? Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers. https://t.co/6yllQu7pU0

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) October 29, 2020

Later that day, a UPS spokesperson told Business Insider that the documents had been located and were sent back to Carlson.

“After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging for its return,” the spokesperson said.

After his segment aired, many people began to doubt Carlson’s claims.

“Oh for f*%! sake, seriously?” tweeted Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers.”

Business Insider said that Fox News did not respond to comment as to why no other copies of the documents were saved.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show Wednesday night that he had obtained more documents relating to Hunter Biden, but said they were lost in the mail.

On his show, Carlson said he received a “collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family.” Without going into any details about their contents, he said they were “authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning.”

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

On October 14, the New York Post published a report stating that they had obtained emails from the laptop of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The Post alleges that in 2014, Hunter leveraged his father’s position as U.S. vice president in an attempt to increase his pay as a board member at Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Carlson said the unspecified documents were being sent to him in Los Angeles from New York, but they never arrived. He said that the delivery company, which he did not name, said the package “had been opened and the contents were missing.”

“As of tonight the company has no idea, and no working theory even, about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign,” he said.

Oh for f*%! sake, seriously? Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers. https://t.co/6yllQu7pU0

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) October 29, 2020

After his segment aired, many people began to doubt Carlson’s claims.

“Oh for f*%! sake, seriously?” tweeted Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers.”

According to Business Insider , UPS came forward and said it was the provider that lost the package and was investigating the matter.

Business Insider also said that Fox News did not respond to comment as to why no other copies of the documents were saved.

Steve Ladurantaye, a former journalist at the Globe and Mail and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has resigned from a media job in Scotland following allegations of inappropriate behaviour, reports British newspaper the Times.

The complaints against Ladurantaye, who was working as the head of news and current affairs at STV, the Glasgow-based broadcaster, came from female staff members, the Times reports.

Ladurantaye had joined STV in 2018. Prior to that he was well-known in Canadian media circles, working as a media reporter at the Globe and Mail and as a top editor at the CBC.

Ladurantaye left the Globe and Mail in 2013, and following a brief stopover at Twitter Canada, joined the CBC as the managing editor of The National nightly news broadcast in 2016.

He left the CBC in 2018, in the fallout over an appropriation controversy on Twitter that impacted several high-profile Canadian journalists.

After that, he crossed the ocean, landing with STV in Glasgow.

In a piece for the Royal Television Society, Ladurantaye wrote he’d received a job offer to “uproot my life and move across the ocean to lead a newsroom in a country I’d rarely visited, full of stories I’d (mostly) never heard.”

He writes about the professional challenges of working in Scotland, and the different newsroom culture.

“The professional challenges have been daunting, and the cultural changes intimidating. Has it been worth it?” he wrote. “Oh, aye.”

An STV spokesperson told the National Post by email that Ladurantaye “has resigned as STV’s Head of News and Current Affairs for medical reasons around mental health, for which he is receiving treatment.  Deputy Head of News, Linda Grimes Douglas, will oversee STV’s news and current affairs operation.”

“We take complaints about inappropriate conduct at STV extremely seriously. We will always investigate fully, while respecting the duty of care we owe to all parties involved,” the spokesperson added.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson

A children’s soccer club in Chilliwack, B.C. has hired a security guard to supervise their games after their COVID-19 contact tracing staff were harassed by parents on the sidelines, the CBC reports .

A staff member went home in tears after a parent berated and verbally abused them for trying to take contact tracing information, the chair of the club says.

Chilliwack FC put in place contact tracing and limited crowd sizes at their games and events to try and comply with health guidelines. The result was behaviour from the parents described as “horrific and borderline violent.”

“The abuse and poor behaviour must stop!!!! (sic)” reads a statement posted to Chilliwack FC’s website . “Enough is enough!”

The soccer club hired Allegiance 1 Security to make sweeps of the games and venues to protect their staff and ensure that parents are following their COVID-19 policies and behaving appropriately. Their contact tracers can now call security if they’re in need of assistance.

“We’ve had people come up to the contact tracers’ table and say, ‘I’m bleeping fine, I don’t need this, you don’t need my information,'” club chair Andrea Laycock told the CBC. “They roll their eyes, say, ‘this is ridiculous,’ they scream and they yell.”

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Chilliwack FC started up a fall season for kids between the ages of four and nine. In their return to play statement, the club asked spectators to wear a mask going in and out of the venue and whenever social distancing isn’t possible. Parents are encouraged to drop off and pick up only, but the club allows for one family member to stay at a time.

“Our next step would be one none of us ever want to go to, and that would be banning parents from the field,” said Laycock. “‘OK parents, you can’t behave, it’s time to stay home.'”

As of Oct. 28, there are 2,700 active COVID-19 cases in B.C. The Fraser Health region, where Chilliwack is located, is one of the province’s leading hotspots. Of the new 287 cases across B.C., the Fraser Health region accounted for 67 per cent.

B.C. Premier John Horgan shocked many, including his governing partners in the Green Party, when he called a snap election last month.

And while many felt voters would punish Horgan and the NDP for heading to the polls during a pandemic, breaking an agreement with the Greens in the process, the NDP now has a majority government.

Dave is joined by Vancouver Sun legislative columnist Rob Shaw to talk about the motivation behind calling an election, why the NDP didn’t take a hit politically, and what it means now that Horgan has a majority government.

Subscribe to 10/3 on your favourite podcast app.

#distro

Over the summer, as the rest of the country opened up and slowed down, and the specter of COVID-19 began to fade, life inside Ontario’s large medical laboratories continued to accelerate on a kind of perpetual motion pace, building speed and building size without ever slowing down, no matter what came in, who showed up or whether anyone could find any room for the new machines.

In Mount Sinai Hospital, in Toronto, Dr. Tony Mazzulli, the hospital lab’s microbiologist in chief, was busy hiring techs, finding supplies and keeping one wary eye on the fall. Mazzulli, like other lab leaders, public health experts and infectious disease specialists, knew that when the weather changed, a spike in COVID cases would follow. He spent the summer working with colleagues in his own lab and across the system to process the samples coming in every day while continuing to expand an ad hoc lab network that had already mushroomed in capacity multiple times since March.

“The labs really didn’t get a break through the summer at all,” said Dr. Kevin Katz, the medical director of Toronto’s Shared Hospital Lab, one of the largest in the province. “The volumes just kept going up, up, up. On the hospital side and across the whole system, everybody was able to take a little breath. The labs just kept grinding and implementing and growing.””

The Sinai lab alone overtook a classroom, added machines and technologists and expanded into a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation. It grew from a COVID rounding error in March, capable of processing 600-700 molecular PCR tests in a day, to a pillar of Ontario’s COVID testing system. By late spring, the lab’s technologists were analyzing 3,000 to 4,000 tests every day, Mazzulli said. They already had the space, staff and equipment to handle as many as 10,000 samples daily at that point and plans were in place to bring that number up to 17,500 by mid October.

For a time, the lab seemed on track to meet that target. Then it “sort of derailed for a number of reasons,” Mazzulli said. At Sinai, they couldn’t find enough trained staff; Ontario has long had a chronic shortage of licensed laboratory technologists. Testing supplies, too, were an endless issue, and not just for Sinai. “We have grappled with every single piece that we use for the testing process,” said Dr. Larissa Matukas, the head of microbiology at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. “Just when you think you have reagents, they disappear. Just when you think you have the plastic wear, it’s gone.”

For Sinai, one of the biggest issues was literally just space. The lab wasn’t physically big enough for the job it needed to do. So months before the fall rush, Sinai, along with other big labs, asked the Ontario government for the money it needed to expand. And for months, according to Mazzulli, the province sat on that request. “We got approval to go ahead and purchase the equipment, but they didn’t get approval to make the renovations to the lab,” Mazzulli said. “And so until that came in (in September) our hands were a bit tied.”

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When the fall COVID rush did arrive, on schedule and as predicted, Sinai had the staff and the equipment ready, but they didn’t have the room. “We do have four analyzers sitting in storage, which we can’t bring in physically to the lab until the renovations are done,” Mazzulli said in early October.

Sinai wasn’t the only lab in that position. Hospital and public health labs submitted a budget proposal outlining the anticipated surge and the money needed to deal with it sometime in either late spring or early summer, said one source with deep knowledge of the system. But it wasn’t approved until after the second wave hit in the autumn. “Heels were dragged,” the source said. “And that’s awful. Because it’s not a light switch. You don’t just say, ‘Great, I’ve got the money. I can increase the diagnostic testing capacity.’ It doesn’t work like that. It takes about two to three months.”

The province has since taken steps to cut the number of tests coming in, but the backlog, while it lasted, took a brutal toll on Ontario’s COVID fight. “As recently as two weeks ago, we were getting less than 20 per cent of positive cases reported to us within 24 hours from the labs, and less than 50 per cent of cases reported to us within two days,” said City Councillor Joe Cressy, who chairs the Toronto Board of Health.

At that speed of return, the testing system was all but cosmetic. It was like giving a virus that doesn’t need any kind of edge a 50-metre head start in a 100-metre dash. “To put it simply, the combination of insufficient testing, coupled with delays in lab reporting, significantly constrained our ability to do contact tracing and our collective ability to prevent a significant second wave,” Cressy said.

The second wave of COVID-19 overwhelmed multiple parts of Ontario’s pandemic response system. When schools reopened in the fall, testing centres across the province were crushed by the surge in demand. The province scrambled to make more swabs and pop-up centres available. But that effort didn’t make the bottleneck disappear. Instead, it just moved it further down the line.

By late September, the network of public health, hospital and private labs that process COVID tests in Ontario was dealing with tens of thousands more samples every day than it could push through in any 24-hour-period. The result was an ever-growing backlog of unprocessed tests that peaked at more than 90,000 in early October.

The Ontario lab system has been a mostly invisible player during the pandemic. But if there’s one thing the fall surge made clear, it’s that nothing else in the system, not testing, not tracing, not suppression of the virus itself, can work if the labs fall behind. The autumn backlog then stands as both a critical failure and a crucial opportunity to learn. The virus isn’t going away soon. More waves will come. So what went wrong, and why?

To better understand those questions, the National Post spoke to the heads of some of Ontario’s most important labs in the public health, hospital and private systems, as well veterans of Ontario Public Health and leading outside experts. Together they paint a picture of a system doing often extraordinary things despite immense barriers and sometimes iffy provincial leadership.

“I actually think that we’ve done this in lightning speed. This is unprecedented,” said Matukas at St. Michaels. “It is unprecedented for us to expand lab capacity at the pace that we have over the past seven months. I know we’ve been using that word a lot during this pandemic, unprecedented…. But I have never participated in anything that moved so fast, so quickly and still maintained the level of quality and robustness it would have if we had done this more slowly and meticulously.”

Like many aspects of Ontario’s COVID response, those efforts have been hampered by both chronic issues — some of which go back decades— and a provincial leadership that critics say has moved too slowly, too often during the pandemic.

Those critics argue the province should have seen the fall surge coming and acted sooner to both cut demand for testing and prepare labs for the surge. “It’s a simple volume versus capacity issue,” said Dr. Dominic Mertz the medical director of infection control at McMaster University in Hamilton. “We knew that with respiratory virus season starting, we would have many more people symptomatic, regardless of what COVID is doing. So we anticipated that. But the ramp up of testing capacity hasn’t happened. The focus was, I would say, on other things over the summer.”

The province’s months-long delay in approving new infrastructure funding was part of that failure, lab leaders agree. But it wasn’t everything. “Certainly money is one of those factors that if we had it sooner and earlier it would have helped us to maybe secure more stuff, more real estate, those renovations, and certainly get to where we need to get to,” said Matukas. “But then we still have all the other things like, where are the human resources? Where are the supplies and reagents? And what are we doing to really manage the demand?”

The simplest thing the province could have done, critics argue, wouldn’t have cost any money. In fact, it would have saved cash. The province waited until after the testing system was overrun this fall to walk back the message that anyone who wanted a test could get a test. That was a crucial error, many experts believe. “There’s really only two categories of people who need testing. And those are individuals who are symptomatic and individuals who have been in contact with somebody who is known to have COVID,” said Matukas.

All those unneeded tests made the fall surge worse. But even without them, the labs would almost certainly have been overrun at some point. Matukas said the best estimates for how many people are walking around with COVID-like symptoms during cold and flu season in Ontario are somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000. The province has never been able to sustain daily testing even at the bottom end of that range.

Why not? Supplies are a big part of it. Molecular PCR tests are incredibly resource intensive. And almost everyone on earth right now is competing for those same resources. “It’s basically amplified from what it was in March,” said Dr. Vanessa Allen, Public Health Ontario’s chief of medical microbiology and laboratory sciences.

One problem that has cropped up repeatedly since March is that some of the best, most efficient instruments for processing COVID samples operate on proprietary systems. The Public Health Labs, for example, use several machines manufactured by Roche, the Swiss health-care giant. A single, high-throughput Roche instrument can handle up to 3,300 tests in 24 hours. But the catch is they only work with Roche supplies.

This isn’t just a Roche issue, either. All the proprietary instruments from the major manufacturers work that way. And all of them, at some point during the pandemic, have had supply chain issues. “All of the supplies: pipette tips, plates, reagents, tubes, just everything … is under pressure.” Katz said. “If you run short of one piece of that whole process, the whole line comes to a halt.”

To reduce that friction, the Public Health Labs, under Allen, have been buying exclusively non-proprietary instruments since February. That allows them to mix and match supplies for different parts of the operation from different suppliers, some of them domestic. But the so-called open systems just aren’t as powerful as the best proprietary machines. A single, open-system instrument, fully stocked and staffed, can only process 1,854 samples in a day, just over half what the Roche machines can do. “When we do have reagents (the Roche machines) are phenomenal workhorses,” Allen said. “So we’re not ready to abandon them entirely.”

Staffing, too, has been a constant problem. A molecular PCR test is not a simple procedure. It’s not like a pharmacy-bought pregnancy test. It takes real expertise to both conduct and interpret.

Most of that work has to be done by licensed laboratory technologists. But since at least the 1990s, Ontario has had a severe shortage of those kinds of techs. The issue, according to Michelle Hoad, the chief executive officer of the Medical Laboratory Professionals Association of Ontario, goes back to a decision made in the 1990s to close seven of the province’s 12 programs for training technologists. At the time, she said, there was a view that as lab processes got more automated, fewer humans would be needed to work in each lab. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Garth Riley, who retired as a senior director of Ontario’s Public Health Labs in 2015, said that issue was known and talked about at the highest levels of the organization for most of his tenure there. “And it still hasn’t been addressed properly in my opinion,” he said. There have been more recent warnings, too. For the last 18 months, Hoad and her colleagues have been meeting with the government, trying to get them to do something about it. “I don’t think it was taken as seriously as it should have been,” she said. “And then COVID hit.”

There is only so much the labs can do about the shortage now. To help with the load, some retired technologists have come back to the job. Labs have also shifted some tasks to less specialized assistants. The technologists that are available, meanwhile, have been working incredible hours. “They are the unsung heroes of the pandemic,” Katz said.

But staffing is just one of several chronic problems that have long dogged Ontario’s public health lab system. Those issues have almost certainly hurt its ability to the respond to the pandemic, Riley believes.

After SARS, the public labs were incorporated into the new, arm’s length Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, the precursor to today’s Public Health Ontario. The labs at that time, “were kind of an unwanted child,” Riley said. For a time they flourished in their new, quasi-independent home. But within a few years, the government began to claw them back in. Eventually, Riley said, “you couldn’t spend a penny without getting the approval from the ministry of health. And as a lab, working with the ministry of health was always challenging because these people did not understand laboratories.”

Money was another constant issue. “The public health labs were always underfunded. And the budget was capped for several years,” said Dr. Natasha Crowcroft, who was Public Health Ontario’s chief science officer until late last year. That left the network already over-stretched and underfunded when the pandemic hit.

Crowcroft, who now works for the World Health Organization in Geneva, blames successive governments for that problem. But she thinks Ontario’s public health leadership bears some responsibility too. “The strategy of the organization when it ran into financial problems was to try and keep quiet about them so they didn’t get into trouble with the government,” she said. “And I think that strategy … is what meant that they were not in a good position when this hit. When other organizations were pushing back against cuts, Public Health Ontario wasn’t. So I think there has been a failure of leadership.”

Those budget constraints have had a real impact. Almost two decades after SARS, to cite one example, Ontario came into the COVID-19 pandemic still without any kind of unified, digital system for the different labs to communicate with each other. As a result, the public health, hospital and private health labs are still manually filling out and filing tens of thousands of paper requisitions every day.

It would be hard to exaggerate how big a data problem this has created. “Colleagues of mine at another lab said that for every lab technologist (working) they have 2.4 people doing data entry,” Allen said. At Mount Sinai, the lab took over an entire, 1,000 square-foot classroom just to house 20 new data staff.

That this issue is still lingering, even now, doesn’t surprise Riley. “The public has a short memory. The government has even a shorter memory,” he said. “So that’s sort of how we got to where we are.”

Even given all those problems, many observers believe that what Ontario’s laboratories have accomplished over the past seven months is nothing short of remarkable. They’ve built, effectively from scratch, a coordinated network of labs from different organizations and different cultures that is now performing tests at a speed and on a scale never before seen in this province.

The massive backlog that happened in the fall was the result of long-term problems that were exacerbated by short-term issues, some of them preventable, some not. “I think what happened there was that there was a mismatch between just the pure capacity on the instruments and the labs and the number of tests that were being collected and coming in,” said Katz.

The Ford government could have done more to prevent that from happening, It could have spent more money, sooner, to bring more lab capacity online. But that doesn’t take away from the things those working in the system have managed to do. “We have really moved a lot of mountains together,” Allen said. “But there’s still a long way to go and I’m not downgrading that.”

The National Post sent a list of detailed questions to Ontario Health, Public Health Ontario, and Health Minister Christine Elliott’s office about this story. David Jensen, a spokesman for the ministry of health, replied with a statement that did not address the questions specifically. The province, he pointed out, has increased its testing capacity from 4,000 to almost 40,000 a day and continues to lead the country in both tests completed and daily testing capacity. The government has also invested over $1 billion to expand the lab network, secure supplies and hire staff.

On the decision not to restrict testing earlier, he wrote: “Earlier this year our broad range approach to testing helped us determine if and where COVID-19 was spreading. What we found was that it wasn’t widely circulating in any community. This was an important decision to target our resources to those experiencing symptoms, protect the most vulnerable and support outbreak investigations.”

For Riley, all of this feels a bit like deja vu. “These things tend to be cyclical,” he said. “They repeat themselves. After it’s all over, he believes, there will be royal commissions and expert reports. “Everybody will be running around and coming up with ideas and plans,” he said, “and then 20 years from now, we’ll be in the same boat, with a different bug.”

• Email: rwarnica@nationalpost.com | Twitter: richardwarnica

Barbra Streisand was the official inspiration behind Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay hit, according to an unearthed 1971 “interview” with late blues star Tony Glover.

The two friends exchanged letters, in which notoriously private Dylan opened up about his songs and career, and now the lost correspondence has been discovered and is set to go under the hammer at a Boston, Massachusetts auction.

The letters reveal Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, changed his name because he worried about anti-Semitism, and wrote Lay Lady Lay for Streisand — a music myth that the singer/songwriter has never publicly addressed.

It has long been believed Dylan wrote the tune for the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy, but the singer told Glover he created it as a tune for Streisand, without elaborating on the nature of their relationship.

Experts at R.R. Auction, who are selling the letters, claim the correspondence was supposed to be part of an Esquire magazine article, but Dylan lost interest and the piece was abandoned.

Glover, who befriended Dylan when they were both struggling musicians in Minneapolis, Minnesota, died last year, and his widow put the documents up for auction.

Bidding is to begin online on Nov. 12.

Watch the video or read the transcript for everything you need to know about the fight over the Safe Third Country Agreement.

Canada and the United States signed the Safe Third Country Agreement in late 2002. It came into effect in 2004. The pact was part of a parcel of border security agreements signed between the two countries in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Most people agree this was something Canada asked for. The agreement applies both ways, but the net effect, or at least the net goal, has always been to limit the number of people entering Canada from the United States who can apply for refugee status.

The idea is that if you’re fleeing persecution or war, you should ask for asylum in the first safe country you arrive in. What that means is that most people who try to cross into Canada from the U.S. cannot seek asylum here. The rules say they should do it in the United States first.

The pact doesn’t apply to people with close family members already in Canada, or to people with valid Canadian travel documents. It doesn’t apply to unaccompanied minors or to most people facing the death penalty in the United States or any other country.

It has also never applied to the entire Canada-U.S. border. That’s the exception that has been making news since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

People call it a loophole, but that’s not totally accurate. This has always been the way the agreement was designed to work. If you make a refugee claim at an official border crossing, like the peace arch bridge outside Vancouver, Canada can turn you back, as long as you don’t qualify for one of the exceptions. If you cross into Canada anywhere else along the U.S. border, Canada is still obliged to process your claim.

Why? Well, part of it is logistical. Canada’s southern border is huge and almost entirely undefended. You can’t physically stop everyone from walking over if that’s what they really want to do. And once people are in Canada, you can’t just throw them out again, not without some kind of legal process.
People have always crossed into Canada from the U.S. And vice versa between the official crossings, rarely have they done so in massive numbers.

That changed after 2016. Since then, thousands of people have walked into Canada, a huge number of them at one dead end street in New York state, and asked for asylum. That led to calls from all sides of the political spectrum to modify or even scrap the Safe Third Country Agreement entirely.

Conservatives have long argued that Canada should find a way to apply the agreement across the entire border, either by renegotiating the pact or simply declaring the whole border an official crossing. Refugee advocates meanwhile, say the United States is no longer a safe country, if it ever was, and that it’s morally untenable for Canada to keep turning asylum seekers from the U.S. away.

That argument gained new currency in the summer of 2020, when a federal court judge effectively threw out the Safe Third Country Agreement on those specific grounds. The federal government has since appealed that ruling, which was put on hold until January 2021. If it does come into effect as planned, the government argued, Canada could see a massive new influx of asylum seekers.

What the government may well be doing is buying time until a new administration takes over in the United States. Should Joe Biden replace Donald Trump next January, the federal government will likely argue in a full appeal that the facts on the ground have changed.

But the bar for placing this kind of ruling on hold is a high one. And the lawyers arguing the other side say the government hasn’t come close to meeting it.

What is clear is that the fight over the Safe Third Country Agreement is not going to end any time soon, no matter who wins the presidential election.

National Post

Timeline of the Safe Third Country Agreement

Here’s a timeline around the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) and the issues it has sparked in Canada.

2002: Canada and the U.S. sign the STCA. Its goal is to “manage the flow of refugee claimants.” It acknowledges that both countries offer substantial refugee protections and, therefore, asylum seekers can’t arrive in Canada and then file claims in the U.S., or vice versa — they have to seek sanctuary where they first arrive, with some exceptions. But the deal only applies at formal land, sea or air crossings.

2004: The STCA comes into effect.

2007: A judicial review of the STCA is launched before the Federal Court by the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International Canada, the Canadian Council of Churches, and John Doe, an anonymous refugee claimant in the U.S. who claimed that if it weren’t for the deal, he would have applied for refugee status in Canada. The Federal Court rules the U.S. refugee record at the time did not meet Canadian requirements, and the designation of the U.S. as a safe country was unreasonable. The decision was overturned on appeal for technical reasons.

2016:

April: Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP begin noticing an increase in the number of people coming into Canada at unofficial border crossings, expressly for the purpose of claiming asylum.

November: Donald Trump is elected as president of the United States, with immigration reform — including a crackdown on immigrants and refugee seekers — one of his key promises.

December: National attention focuses on Emerson, Man., a small town not far from the U.S. border, where asylum seekers are crossing into Canada in frigid winter conditions. Calls begin for Canada to address the STCA, with advocates pointing out that people are crossing irregularly in order to get around the deal: they can file refugee claims in Canada as long as they don’t enter from the U.S. using a formal border point.

2017:

January:

— Trump issues one of his first executive orders as president. Best known as the “Muslim ban,” it barred entry to the U.S. for people from certain countries. But it also lowered the number of refugees to be admitted to the U.S., suspended the refugee admissions program for three months and suspend the acceptance of Syrian refugees indefinitely. Protests broke out immediately, including chaos at airports as travellers were detained and visas revoked. The order would be challenged in court.

— Calls immediately emerge for Canada to suspend the STCA. Federal government says it is monitoring situation.

— Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posts a message on Twitter seen as a response to Trump’s decision: “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.”

— Border crossers in Manitoba report they are fleeing the U.S. over concerns about American immigration policy.

March:

— Federal government prepares for a possible surge of border crossers, as numbers rise not just in Manitoba but in Quebec and Ontario.

— The Liberal cabinet begins mapping out strategies and contingency plans, including the use of the military and empty government buildings to house and process incoming refugee claimants.

— Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen tells MPs that political instability in the U.S. is not necessarily the main driver of asylum seekers, noting that many who crossed into Manitoba had actually been in the U.S. less than two months.

June:

— A surge in asylum seekers crossing into Quebec on what’s known as Roxham Road begins.

July:

— Nearly 3,000 people are intercepted in Quebec alone as number of asylum seekers continues to rise.

— The Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International and the Canadian Council of Churches announce they will again attempt to challenge the legality of the STCA in Federal Court. They are joined by an individual called “E,” a Salvadoran woman who fled her home over fears of gang violence but was turned away from Canada because she tried to file a refuges claim at a formal border crossing. She believes she will not receive refugee protection in the U.S.

August:

— Federal government announces an “ad hoc intergovernmental task force on irregular migration” tasked with managing the asylum seeker influx. It includes provincial representation.

— Members of Parliament from Spanish and Haitian backgrounds are sent to the U.S. to try and dissuade people from coming to Canada through unofficial border points, amid fear of misinformation campaigns circulating in the U.S. that are encouraging people to come north.

December: In all of 2017, 20,593 people are apprehended by the RCMP crossing into Canada between official ports of entry.

2018:

February:

— Federal budget sets aside close to $200 million over two years to deal with processing of asylum claims.

— Trump administration begins practice of separating minors from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, drawing international condemnation.

July:

— Former Toronto top cop Bill Blair given new cabinet portfolio with responsibility for border security, which will handle asylum seeker issue.

— Parties in Federal Court case file flurry of evidence, pointing to recent changes in U.S. law — including the end of people being able to claim domestic violence as grounds for asylum — as more evidence U.S. no longer safe for refugees. The applicants argue “returning refugee claimants to the U.S. and exposing them there to a serious risk of arbitrary, lengthy detention and refoulment (deportation), Canada violates their charter rights.”

December: 19,419 people are apprehended by the RCMP between ports of entry for all of 2018.

2019:

March:

— Blair says he is talking with U.S. about closing the loophole in the STCA.

— Federal budget invests $1.18 billion over 5 years, starting in 2019-20, and $55 million per year thereafter to “enhance the integrity of Canada’s borders, and to process an increased number of asylum claims in a timely manner.”

July: American decision to severely restrict refugee claims from those who cross into the country via Mexico again sparks demand for Canada to amend or suspend the STCA. Federal government continues to say it stands by the definition of the U.S. as a “safe country” for refugees.

October: Liberals are elected to a minority government. Platform promises effort to “modernize” STCA.

November: Federal Court hearing begins.

— The Canadian Press

OTTAWA – The Liberal government will turn off the spending taps eventually, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said Wednesday, but not until Canada is through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking to the Toronto Global Forum, Freeland outlined the government’s fiscal approach to fighting the pandemic arguing Canada has to spend aggressively to keep the economy going.

“We want to give our businesses and our households a bridge, so that as many of them as possible make it through viable and intact,” she said.

She said the Liberals guiding principle on the economy is that beating COVID is key to a successful financial rebound.

“Our economy will only be able to recover fully once we have defeated the virus.”

Earlier this month, Freeland announced extensions and changes to both the commercial rent subsidy program, as well as the wage subsidy into 2021. She said the pandemic will mean restaurants will have to operate at reduced capacity or even close at times and that businesses can’t get back to normal until there is a vaccine.

“It’s just not practically possible, never mind fair, to ask workers to stay home or businesses to shut their doors without providing them with the financial support they need.”

The government’s last update in the summer projected Canada would run a $343 billion deficit in 2020, pushing the country into more than a trillion dollars in debt for the first time in its history. Those numbers didn’t include some of the expansions to programs the government offered up last month. Freeland said new projections on the country’s finances would be coming soon.

The government has also promised a fiscal update this fall, but no date has been set for that.

• John Ivison: Freeland needs to reset her compass when it comes to Liberal fiscal strategy
• Economists call for improved spending transparency as Trudeau again refuses to set fiscal anchor

Freeland said she is aware that the level of debt is a concern for many Canadians, but said the government can afford it. She said with interest rates so low, even this massive amount of debt doesn’t weigh heavily on the country’s balance sheet.

“Canada’s interest charges as a share of GDP today are at a 100-year low,” she said.

The Liberals have previously set so called “fiscal anchors” to guide their spending. The first in the 2015 campaign was three $10 billion deficits before a return to balance. This was followed by a goal to keep the debt to GDP ratio below 30 per cent.

But during the pandemic, as the red ink flowed across the government’s balance sheet, there has been no discussion of any anchor to their spending.

Freeland made it clear the government would return to a more measured approach after the pandemic.

“I am not among those who think Canada should have a fling with Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that deficits don’t matter for a government that issues debt in its own currency,” she said. “We will resume the long standing time-tested Canadian approach with fiscal guardrails and fiscal anchors that preceded this pandemic.”

She did not specify what those guardrails or anchors would be. She said the government would focus on measures in the months ahead to get through the pandemic and then to relaunch the Canadian economy to bring back as many jobs as possible.

Today, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland shared the economic rationale driving Canada’s response to #COVID19 and outlined our strategy for a robust, lasting recovery.

Read the full speech ⬇️ https://t.co/yvY4whPf66

— Deputy Prime Minister of Canada (@DeputyPM_Canada) October 28, 2020

On Tuesday in the House of Commons, prior to Freeland’s speech Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre said the government wasn’t being serious about the country’s finances. And no fiscal anchor would make sense if the Liberal government wasn’t prepared to actually tie it to the boat.

“All those anchors have since been abandoned, in fact we haven’t had a budget in well over a year, the longest period ever,” he said.

Unlike the 2008 recession or other economic shocks, Freeland said there is no one to blame for this pandemic and it would be cruel for the government not to help Canadians weather the storm.

“We didn’t get here because of greed or recklessness. The market isn’t correcting for a flaw. This was a completely exogenous shock,” she said.

She also said supporting families now means they will have the money to spend when the pandemic ends and can bring the economy back swiftly.

“Once the virus is vanquished, our rebound will be more rapid and more robust.”

• Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com | Twitter: ryantumilty

Around the mid-point of her virtual speech to the Toronto Global Economic Forum, Chrystia Freeland stopped and said the thinking she had outlined was “entirely uncontroversial.”

The finance minister was right – protecting Canadians’ health, jobs and living standards by using aggressive federal stimulus is an article of faith for politicians across the spectrum.

Nobody believes Ottawa should have watched families and businesses go broke during the pandemic.

But it was the rest of her speech – and what was missing – that is more problematic.

Freeland said her rural, northern Alberta roots means she is not steeped in the ideas of “helicopter money” but that Canada can afford its current spending spree because interest charges, as a share of GDP, are at 100-year lows.

She said the “terror and triumph” of the debt crisis in the mid-1990s was formative for a generation of Canadians. “But it is a poor general who fights the last war,” she said, implicitly dismissing criticism from those who were in the trenches during those messy battles, people like former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge and ex-TD Bank chief economist, Don Drummond.

Freeland said not one of the factors that drove the fiscal crisis in the 1990s holds true today. “Doing too little is more dangerous and potentially more costly than doing too much.”

That is arguable; the fact that budgetary constraints remain an intrinsic foundation of economics is not.

Today, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland shared the economic rationale driving Canada’s response to #COVID19 and outlined our strategy for a robust, lasting recovery.

Read the full speech ⬇️ https://t.co/yvY4whPf66

— Deputy Prime Minister of Canada (@DeputyPM_Canada) October 28, 2020

Thankfully, she said she has no truck with Modern Monetary Theory, the idea that deficits don’t matter for governments that issue debts in their own currency.

Freeland said the expansive approach to fighting the pandemic “will not be infinite,” which is a relief.

The government will impose limits upon itself, “rather than waiting for the more brutal external restraints of international capital markets.”

But her boss Justin Trudeau has already revealed there will be no fiscal anchor in the fall update – a sentiment she echoed.

Freeland argued against “premature fiscal tightening.”

But that presents a false dichotomy – austerity or remaining adrift without a fiscal anchor.

We have no idea what the government thinks would be a reasonable deficit target going forward (Drummond calculated recently that recurring $100 billion budgetary shortfalls would take the debt to GDP level to 63 per cent and program spending to more than 15 per cent of the economy.)

Nor was there anything in Freeland’s speech to suggest how Canada will lay the foundations for the green, innovative, inclusive economy to which she aspires.

By happy coincidence, the Business Council of Canada released its own economic growth plan on Wednesday, filling in many of the gaps missing in the finance minister’s speech.

The council pointed out that Canada is in far less rosy shape than Freeland would have her audience believe. As a country, what we are producing is not covering what we are consuming, meaning we have a persistent current account deficit, as well as a fiscal deficit. We have an aging population, a problem growing firms to global scale and lagging business investment.

• Finance minister says government will turn off financial taps, but not before pandemic ends
• How do big deficits and ballooning debt impact Canadians? Here's a breakdown
• Economists call for improved spending transparency as Trudeau again refuses to set fiscal anchor

Some of the solutions were in train before the pandemic hit – attracting immigrants with specialized skill sets; retaining international students and increasing the labour force participation of women.

But in other areas, the conditions necessary for a robust recovery are worse than they were just a few years ago.

Canada’s business investment trails the OECD average and is eclipsed by spending in the U.S. “Canada has a reputation (for being) difficult and extremely time-consuming to get large capital projects off the ground,” said the report’s authors.

The latest Bank of Canada monetary report , released Wednesday, offered little comfort on that front. Uncertainty is expected to act as a “significant drag” on investment decisions. The oil and gas sector is not forecast to return to pre-pandemic levels during the projection period – after a 30 per cent contraction in 2020, the Bank expects investment to grow by just two per cent in 2021/22.

Worse, Canadian companies are now expanding outside the country, rather than investing in Canada (direct investment abroad in 2019 outweighed foreign direct investment by $804 billion.)

Other required fixes are long-standing and well-known – increased spending on broadband coverage, enhanced inter-provincial trade (current restrictions act like a 6.9 per cent tariff), more competitive personal income tax rates and streamlining an inefficient regulatory process.

But for all Freeland’s talk that the government has a plan – “We have a compass. We know how to get to a safe harbour and what to do when we get there” – there was very little on Canada’s approach to the digital economy.

It is a subject on which the Trudeau government has, as is its wont, talked a good game but made little progress.

Investment in intellectual property as a share of the economy has actually declined in Canada since 2005, compared to a sharp rise in the U.S.

Earlier this week, some members of the Council of Canadian Innovators, a business group focused on helping tech firms scale up, complained that innovation has barely been mentioned since the government set up its superclusters initiative.

The CCI and the new Business Council report both recommend that the government tilt the playing field toward fledgling tech companies by favouring home-grown firms in its procurement policies.

The Business Council lamented the number of promising companies leaving Canada. “It’s as though we were training high potential athletes, only to send them abroad to win Olympic medals for other countries,” it said.

The report suggested that individual departments and agencies, including the Canada Space Agency and the Department of National Defence, support procurement-led innovation.

“Government cannot avoid decisions about which market outcomes they prefer…Full market neutrality is not possible,” it concluded.

The Liberal government has never been shy about picking winners and losers. It should have no qualms about an industrial strategy that secures anchor clients offering a steady source of revenue for promising firms.

The post-COVID world promises to be one in which states take a more active role to ensure self-reliance. Canada cannot ignore those sea changes.

To this point, the government has been silent on the world beyond the pandemic, apart from an over-reliance on low interest rates as justification to keep spending.

But that is no substitute for sustained economic growth, about which the finance minister had little to say.

With the deficit on track to reach at least $343 billion this year, the cheery scenario she painted is not borne out by the facts.

Closer to the mark is the Business Council’s conclusion: “Canada’s economy is more fragile now than at any time since the 1930s.”

• Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

Don Mazankowski, a former deputy prime minister and longtime Conservative powerbroker in Alberta, has died at age 85.

His death was announced in the House of Commons, which observed a moment of silence in his memory on Wednesday.

Mazankowski — often known simply as “Maz” — ran a car dealership in Vegreville, Alberta, before running for federal office in 1968. That began a 25-year career in Parliament that included serving in several top cabinet roles in the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, including finance minister and deputy prime minister. Mulroney called Mazankowski his “minister of everything.”

After retiring as an MP, Mazankowski stayed deeply involved in public policy, including chairing former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s Advisory Council on Health, and was a key player in the 2003 “Unite the Right” negotiations that produced the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

“He was a giant,” Mulroney told the National Post on Wednesday.

During his time in politics, Mazankowski was a powerful western voice in the Progressive Conservative caucus and a key ally of Mulroney. He’s considered to be among the most influential deputy prime ministers in Canadian history, serving in that role from 1986 to 1993, quarterbacking much of the government’s agenda and advocating the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

“Maz became the chief operating officer of the government,” Mulroney told the  Post. Mulroney said he was often away from Ottawa during this period due to free trade negotiations and the Meech Lake Accords, and Mazankowski became his voice in Parliament.

“He spoke for me and chaired many sensitive cabinet committees,” Mulroney said. “Mazankowski was a House of Commons man. He would take on tough partisan issues … He was a superb leader and politician. He was excellent with cabinet colleagues and MPs.”

Mulroney listed off a long line of government policies that Mazankowski helped shape due to his Western Canadian advocacy, including transferring the National Energy Board headquarters from Ottawa to Calgary and privatizing Petro-Canada and Air Canada.

A  Maclean’s profile of Mazankowski in 1986 said that despite his key role in government, “Mulroney’s new deputy is by all appearances without personal enemies.”

“In Ottawa, Mazankowski at first became part of a group of western Tories with a wild and woolly reputation under the unofficial leadership of fellow Albertan Jack Horner,” the profile read. “But Maz maintained a less rambunctious manner. He became known for dark suits, a ready smile and an earnest speaking style — and for developing respect and friendships in the fractious Tory party.”

Mazankowski was born in the tiny Alberta town of Viking, about an hour east of Edmonton, to parents of Polish descent who immigrated from the United States.

“In 1960 he moved to Vegreville and opened an automotive business with his brother, Ray,” says Mazakowski’s biography on the Alberta Order of Excellence website. “His life and career took on a new direction when he met Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was traveling through Vegreville on a speaking tour. Inspired by Diefenbaker’s insistence that the West play a meaningful role in the nation’s business, Don began working behind the scenes in local politics.”

After his retirement from politics in 1993, Mazankowski went on to serve on a wide array of private and public sector boards. He delivered a report on health care reform for Alberta Premier Ralph Klein in 2001 that made wide-ranging recommendations to manage the cost of the health care system.

He also established the Don Mazankowski Scholarship Foundation, served on the board of governors of the University of Alberta, and chaired the Institute of Health Economics and the Canadian Genetics Diseases Network. The Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, opened in 2009, carries his name.

Mazankowski would also play an important role during the “Unite The Right” negotiations in the early 2000s, serving as a Progressive Conservative emissary during talks with the Canadian Alliance that eventually created the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

He was given a long list of awards, titles, and honorary degrees over his life. He was inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2003, and in 2013 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest level. He was part of a small group to have been given the title of Right Honourable in 1992, an honorific normally reserved for those who served as prime minister, governor general or chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Mulroney called Mazankowski, “the salt of the earth from Vegreville, Alberta.”

“To me, he turned out to be indispensable,” Mulroney said. “Few will match him in history.”

With files from John Ivison

• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com | Twitter: btaplatt

A Canadian senator, who has stirred controversy in the past, violated American law when, in May, she donated to U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.

Ontario Sen. Lynn Beyak made a $300 contribution to the Republican National Committee, public records from the American Federal Election Commission show .

In the records, Beyak listed her occupation as retired and her address as a P.O. box on Davis Point Rd.  in Dryden, N.Y., however, no such road or address exists in the rural New York town. Vice News, which first reported the story, also stated there is no Lynn Beyak in the American town.

The senator lives in Dryden, Ont., and Vice reports that a phonebook listing that matches the address in the donation receipt belongs to Beyak.

At the time of her donation, she was still a member of the Canadian Senate.

American federal laws prohibit campaigns from soliciting or accepting contributions from foreign nationals who do not hold U.S. citizenship.

Parsing through financial disclosures, Vice reports that there is no indication that Beyak holds dual citizenship or owns property in the states.

Beyak’s office confirmed to Vice that the senator did send in the political donation, however the money “is being returned in its entirety, simply because (the contribution) was erroneous.”

The RNC must report all returned donations but has not reported returning the senator’s contribution.

Since former prime minister Stephen Harper appointed Beyak to the Senate in 2013, she has had a series of controversies.

• Facing Senate suspension, Sen. Lynn Beyak apologizes 'unreservedly' for posting racist letters online
• Senate votes to suspend Lynn Beyak again despite her apology for posting offensive letters on website

In 2017, the Conservative Senate caucus expelled her after she called for the creation of a program in which Indigenous peoples could receive cash if they relinquished their protected status and land.

In February, sitting as an independent, Beyak was suspended for the remainder of the parliamentary session because she did not complete the anti-racism training she had been directed to undergo.

Beyak’s suspension ended when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament in the summer.

Beyak is back on the government payroll, collecting her full $157,600-a-year salary, and has access to Senate resources, CBC reported .

In Canada, senators are appointed until their mandatory retirement age of 75 and it can be difficult to remove a senator from his or her post.

OTTAWA — Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet is urging the federal government to apologize for legislation that remains controversial 50 years after its passage during the October Crisis in Quebec.

In October 1970, the Liberal government under then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau decided to suspend civil liberties by invoking the War Measures Act in response to the kidnapping of a Quebec cabinet minister and a British diplomat by members of the militant FLQ separatist group.

The legislation, passed at the request of the Quebec premier and Montreal’s mayor, saw soldiers patrolling the streets as authorities rounded up hundreds of residents under suspicion of involvement in the abductions.

In a motion put forward this week, Blanchet demanded an official apology from the prime minister for his father’s deployment of the army to arrest and detain without charge nearly 500 Quebecers.

Blanchet said he has not secured support from any other parties.

He criticized the Conservatives for refusing to call for an apology over a law that “attacked the dignity of a whole nation.”

• October Crisis: The discovery of Pierre Laporte’s body 50 years ago still haunts Canada
• Conrad Black: The October Crisis cemented democracy in Quebec

Blanchet also invoked former Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield, who backed the Liberal government in invoking the War Measures Act but later expressed regret over it.

“You cannot pretend to be deeply in love with Quebec without respecting the desire of Quebecers to receive some apologies from Her Majesty’s government,” Blanchet told reporters Wednesday.

Opposition House leader Gerard Deltell confirmed the Conservatives plan to vote against the motion on Thursday.

“For us the October Crisis is first and foremost the death of the deputy premier of Quebec, Pierre Laporte, a guy who had been elected by the people of Quebec who had been killed by terrorists,” Deltell said on his way into the Conservative caucus meeting.

The October Crisis, which culminated in the discovery of Laporte’s body in the trunk of a car, marked the first time the War Measures Act had been invoked in peacetime.

Fisherman in the Caribbean are calling for a state of emergency to be declared, after evidence emerged of an sinking oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, threatening to spill over 1.3 million barrels of oil into the ocean.

The Nabarima, a Venezuelan tanker partly operated by Italian energy giant ENI, was first noticed to be tilting in July. By August, crews discovered that water was leaking into the ship, threatening to sink it.

She is in “very poor condition,” tweeted Eudis Girot, the head of the Unitary Federation of Petroleum Workers of Venezeula on Aug. 31, warning that the tanker held about nine feet of water in her lower decks. Photos with the post showed flooding in various sections of the interior of the vessel.

Last month Gary Aboud, who represents the fishing community in Trinidad, got close enough to the tanker to show the gravity of the risk to the entire Southern Caribbean. “What we found was frightening,” Aboud said in a video posted online on Sept. 7.

The tanker appeared to be tilting at an angle of 25 degrees, Aboud said in the video, while pointing at the ship just a few feet away from him. Currently the ship is held in place by anchor chains, although it isn’t clear how strong the chains are, and how long they will be able to control the tanker. The chains “aren’t enough,” Aboud said, adding that poor weather could cause the tanker to flip.

The situation could also be exacerbated by a particularly active 2020 tropical cyclone season, which has already seen 28 cyclones, 11 hurricanes and four “major” hurricanes.

In his video, Aboud criticized Trinidad and Tobago government officials for a lack of response to the situation, which has now been ongoing for three months. An oil spill of this magnitude could wreck the livelihoods of over 50,000 local fisherman who rely on the sea, cause long term ecological harm to the biodiversity in the nearby coral reef, and pose a broader regional risk, Forbes reported.

“This requires national emergency,” Aboud said. “(I’m) calling on the government of Trinidad and Tobago to wake up and do something.”

International maritime reports have also been calling for action since early September, the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian reported, and government officials have asked for verification from Venezuelan officials on the status of the tanker.

In early September, Trinidad and Tobago Energy Minister Franklin Khan noted that initial reports from Venezuelan authorities described the vessel to be in upright and stable condition.

“The Energy Ministry through the Venezuelan Embassy has offered any assistance, technical or logistical to the Government of Venezuela that it may require. Also, the Minister of Energy is in contact with his Venezuelan counterpart for further updates as they become available,” a spokesman for Khan stated.

According to Khan, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela have a bilateral agreement which includes an oil spill contingency plan, “in the event of a genuine risk exists or an active spill occurs.” “This is the agreement that will govern the action of the Government,” he said.

Should the spill occur, it will be the fourth major oil spill from Venezuela in the past three months.

In early September, fisherman and experts confirmed that oil was leaking into the sea near Falcón State, in north-east Venezuela, from a cracked underwater pipeline linked to attempts to restart fuel production at a refinery.

The month before, photos showed beaches and mangroves around Moroccoy National Park, on the west-central Venezuelan coast, slicked in oil. The images quickly gained traction online before local officials said a clean up effort was taking place. Research released two weeks later by Simón Bolívar University attributed the oil spill to the incompetence of state authorities working at the nearby El Palito refinery, located 66 kilometres south of the park.

Kim Kardashian has come under fire from followers on her social media pages for sharing posts about a party she held on a private island for family and friends amid the pandemic.

The reality star celebrated her big day with a special instalment of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, filmed prior to the Covid-19 crisis, earlier this month but, taking to the Internet on Tuesday, she shared snaps from her recent festivities.

In the photos, it appears the party was attended by a large number of people in close proximity to one another without wearing masks – despite the ongoing health scare.

In one of the captions of the post, the star said that she had asked all of her guests, including siblings Kourtney and Khloe Kardashian, Kendall and Kylie Jenner and mum Kris Jenner, to quarantine and undergo several “health screens” before she surprised them by flying them to a private island to celebrate her special day. According to the New York Post’s gossip column Page Six, her husband Kanye West joined for the final two days, as he continues his U.S. presidential bid.

“After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time,” one tweet from Kardashian read.

The tone deaf wording of the message led thousands of Twitter users to post their own version of the same tweet, using Kardashian’s exact words with their own photos. Many of the photos involved horror movies, or movies set on islands, or both.

After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time. pic.twitter.com/PyhfxSGG8e

— Jack Whitehall (@jackwhitehall) October 28, 2020

"After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time." pic.twitter.com/K0CHPippGX

— The Sims (@TheSims) October 28, 2020

“After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time.” @KimKardashian #KimKardashian pic.twitter.com/jWXqqitJAs

— Melissa Gilbert (@MEGBusfield) October 28, 2020

After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time. pic.twitter.com/oo2RLHtN52

— Katy Brand (@KatyFBrand) October 28, 2020

“I realize that for most people, this is something that is so far out of reach right now, so in moments like these, I am humbly reminded of how privileged my life is,” Kardashian had added, but that didn’t stop fans expressing their frustration over her apparent lack of regard for the ongoing public health crisis and its financial impact.

“Very selfish when people are dying and loosing (sic) their jobs,” fired one follower. “Also doubt it very much that all 20+ people that attended isolated prior.”

Another added: “Brilliant observation! This kind of vacation is out of reach for most people COVID-19 or no COVID-19.”

“I haven’t seen ma (sic) family in 4 months because I work a public-facing job and I’m absolutely terrified of the possibility of passing Covid on to my vulnerable parents,” lamented a third fan.

“I hope you had fun pretending things were normal, but spare a thought for those of us staying in the real world.”

FREDERICTON — The man on trial for a 2018 mass shooting in Fredericton says he thought the end of times had begun and he might have to use his guns to fight his way out of his apartment.

Matthew Raymond, 50, is on the witness stand for a second day, testifying in his own defence.

He faces four counts of first-degree murder in the Aug. 10, 2018 deaths of Donnie Robichaud, Bobbie Lee Wright and Fredericton police constables Robb Costello and Sara Burns.

The defence admits Raymond shot the victims but is trying to prove that he should be found not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder.

Raymond told the court Wednesday that he thought the other residents of his apartment complex were all “demons” and that his mother was too and she had shared keys to his apartment. He said he had barricaded himself inside his apartment and interpreted noises he was hearing as threats.

“I thought I’d have to use my gun to fight my way out,” he told the court. “I thought the whole complex were now demons.”

Raymond said he thought people had been coming into his apartment unannounced and that the landlord could enter and take his guns. He said he was not sleeping and thought everyone was against him because he had staged a protest opposing immigration.

• 'I thought the end of times was in full swing,' Fredericton shooter tells jury at murder trial
• Mother of Fredericton shooter says she often advised him to see a doctor for help

Defence lawyer Nathan Gorham showed notes and calculations Raymond had in his apartment. Most had calculations ending with numbers that Raymond said were indications of serpents and demons.

One of the notes read: “You serpents picked the wrong man to test. I am not alone. He’s watching.”

Raymond said the calculations also told him that he was going to have to leave the apartment, “otherwise I was going to die there.”

Raymond said he is unable to interpret many of the calculations and notes today, because he no longer holds the strong belief in demons that guided his actions in 2018.

“I don’t know what the heck this gibberish means,” he said. “It’s gone out of my mind. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

A lawsuit alleges that billionaire investor Bill Gross played the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song on a loop to harass his neighbours after they filed complaints about his large art installation.

Gross, the co-founder of PIMCO — an investment management firm —  who’s worth $1.5 billion , and his partner Amy Schwartz, a former professional tennis player, installed an art piece on the property line of their Laguna Beach home. Their neighbours, Mark Towfiq, a tech entrepreneur, and his wife Carol Nakahara complained to the city that the tall, light-up glass installation — and the netting that protects it — partially blocked their view of the ocean.

The city’s investigation found that the art installation, along with the protective netting, violated city codes and lacked the necessary permits.

In retaliation, Gross began to blare music at all hours of the day in an attempt to get his neighbours to drop their complaints. Now, litigation is working its way through the courts after Towfiq and Nakahara filed a suit claiming they were the recipients of a “targeted campaign of harassment and abuse.”

More bizarre still, Gross and Schwartz beat Towfiq to the legal punch, filing a lawsuit against him on Oct. 13, which accused him of “peeping” on him and his wife, asking for a temporary restraining order. On Oct. 14, Towfiq and Nakahara filed their own lawsuit.

“Mr. Gross is an entitled billionaire who is used to getting his way by bullying coworkers, family and neighbours,” Jennifer Keller, the attorney who represents Towfiq, told CNN Business . “Gross filed his own complaint merely as a pre-emptive strike after learning my clients intended to seek relief from the court.”

Naturally, Gross’ lawyer had a different view of events.

“Mr. Towfiq has harassed and invaded the privacy of Mr. Gross and his life partner Amy Schwartz,” said Jill Basinger, the attorney who represents Gross, to CNN Business.

In response to the musical harassment, Towfiq and Nakahara say they had to stay either with relatives or in a hotel room twice. They were granted a temporary restraining order against Gross and Schwartz on Oct. 15. In the application, Towfiq cites a text message sent to him after he asked Gross to turn down the music.

“Peace on all fronts or (we’ll) just have nightly concerts big boy,” read the message from Gross, according to the application.

The artwork that began all the trouble was installed in 2019. It was created by artist Dale Chihuly and features tall, ornate glass-blown reeds mixed in with fish and squat spheres. Problems began this year, after damages to the piece caused Gross and Schwartz to put up the tall protective netting around the sculpture. The netting was at removed but later put back up. According to Towfiq and Nakahara’s lawsuit, Gross and Schwartz refused to discuss and resolve the problem.

• Billionaire Leon Black says he 'deeply regrets' Jeffrey Epstein ties amid report of $50M in transfers
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A hearing is set for Nov. 2 to determine if civil harassment restraining orders will be issued. Gross has been given an extension until Nov. 16 to obtain the proper permits for the sculpture. He is “in the process of getting it permitted,” Gross’ lawyers told CNN Business.

In 2014, Gross was fired from PIMCO, the firm he co-founded in 1971. Gross sued the company for wrongful dismissal in 2015. The case was settled for $81 million, which went to Gross’ charitable foundation.

It’s no crystal ball, but when trying to predict when something is likely to happen, one approach is to tap the “wisdom of the crowd” — ask many people their opinions and average their responses.

When a McGill University-led team asked 28 experts, each with an average 25 years experience working with vaccines, when a COVID-19 vaccine is most likely to be available to the general public in the United States and/or Canada, their best-case guess was June 2021 for the soonest, but more likely fall of 2021.

The experts believed there was a three-in-10 chance a safety issue would be discovered only after the first vaccine is approved that would require a boxed warning, and a four-in-10 chance that the first large field study will report a null or negative result.

“Experts predicting that there’s only a 40 per cent chance of a negative result, that to me actually sounds pretty optimistic,” said Jonathan Kimmelman, a professor and director of the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University, and the brief paper’s senior author. Historically, fewer than five per cent of non-pandemic flu vaccines tested in humans ultimately go on to get approved.

Still, “a four-in-10 chance of an undesirable thing happening, those aren’t low odds, either,” said Kimmelman, who has been puzzled by the extreme optimism of credible public health officials like American coronavirus czar Dr. Anthony Fauci who believe an effective vaccine is almost certainly near at hand, that help is on its way to lead us out of the COVID darkness.

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Despite the cheering on of the groups in the vaccine race, it’s not a sure thing that the vaccines reaching phase III trials — the final stage before potential approval — are going to deliver us back to normal. Questions are being raised about proposed FDA and international standards for COVID-19 vaccines, about how good is good enough, about the sheer logistical challenges of distributing a two-dose vaccine and getting it into tens of millions of humans in Canada alone, and about persuading the young and people at low risk of the virus to be vaccinated as an act of solidarity .

Canada is already preparing the logistics for a possible roll-out in the first half of 2021. Ottawa has signed pre-order agreements with AstraZeneca, Moderna, Quebec-based Medicago and other companies for up to 358 million doses of different COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

“Work is underway in collaboration with the provinces and territories to review the capacity and capability of the existing vaccine supply chain,” Health Canada said in an email to the National Post . “Any capacity gaps will be addressed to ensure the safe and timely delivery of vaccines,” the department said, likely in an effort to avoid the massive line-ups and botched shortages during the country’s vast H1N1 flu vaccination campaign in 2009. One of the challenges with two-dose vaccines: how to get people to come back for the second dose.

Will the shots save lives or prevent bad outcomes? We don’t yet know. According to BMJ associate editor Peter Doshi, current trials aren’t set up to tell. More than 200 vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus are under development; 11 are in phase III studies, each involving tens of thousands of volunteers, yet “none of those trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or death,” Doshi wrote last week.

The trials are double blind and placebo-controlled. No one knows who is getting the real vaccine or a pretend one. The studies are designed to end after 150 to 160 COVID infections or “events” have occurred among the study volunteers. A data safety and monitoring board would then look to see whether there were fewer infections among the vaccinated group.

Even mild infections could qualify as an “event,” Doshi wrote. “In Pfizer and Moderna’s trials, for example, people with only a cough and a positive laboratory test would bring those trials one event closer to their completion.”

What we should care about is whether a vaccine is going to prevent deaths, ICU admissions or hospitalizations, and not  mild symptoms, because they don’t matter as much from a public health standpoint, Kimmelman said. “Even if you have 50 per cent protection, we still won’t know whether these vaccines actually move the needle on the things we need to move the needle on.”

The difficulty is, hospital admissions and deaths from COVID-19 are uncommon, and it would require a large population over a longer period to accumulate enough deaths to see a difference between the vaccine and placebo group, Kimmelman said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has set a minimum target of 50 per cent efficacy for a COVID-19 vaccine, meaning a vaccine would have to be 50 per cent better than a placebo at preventing disease.

In an early-stage study, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine produced neutralizing antibodies in 45 healthy, 18- to 55-year-olds who received two vaccinations, 28 days apart, the company reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Side effects — fatigue, chills, headache or muscle aches — occurred in more than half the participants.

Dr. Jacqueline Miller, head of Moderna’s infectious diseases development, told last week’s FDA advisory panel meeting that more than 25,000 people have received both doses of its study vaccine, or a placebo, and that the vaccine was designed to evaluate Americans “at the highest risk of severe COVID disease.” Forty-two per cent of study participants are older adults or people with heart disease, diabetes or other underlying conditions, Miller added.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine, developed with Oxford University, has produced an immune response in both the young and old, Reuters reported this week. Less clear is how well an antibody response translates into how well any vaccine can actually fend off COVID.

“We just don’t know what to expect,” said Medicago president and CEO Bruce Clark. “You start asking yourself very practical questions: If something doesn’t work 50 per cent (of the time), then do we really have something? Maybe we do as an emergency response initially, but a 50-per-cent level we would have to imagine over time has to get better than that.”

But even a vaccine that works half the time offers a shot at knocking down the potency of the epidemic, Clark said, especially if it can prevent severe disease and deaths.

It’s possible vaccines with protection as low as 30 per cent could receive emergency authorization under FDA and international standards. The debate then becomes, how low can you go?

“The problem you could create is the following: You push a low-efficacy vaccine out on the grounds it’s better than nothing. Right now, you’ve got zero. Thirty per cent protection? Better than zero,” said Dalhousie University philosopher and university research professor Francoise Baylis.

“The problem then becomes what if vaccine number two is 50 per cent effective, and you’ve now already invested how much in terms of distribution to get the first vaccine into people? What do you do to the confidence of the general public and those who have already received the vaccine,” Baylis said.

“It’s a really difficult question to know at what point do you say, ‘it’s good enough.’”

It’s also not clear how well the first vaccines will prevent person-to-person spread.

SARS-CoV-2 is a lethal pathogen, Baylis said. “What’s the ideal? The ideal is we totally understand how this virus works, we get a vaccine, we know that it will stop this pathogen from being able to infect humans and we know that it lasts for a specified time, for example, 10 years, and then you get a second vaccine,” Baylis said.

The reality is that anything that gets rolled out is going to be rolled out with uncertainty. “You can’t wait until you truly understand the scope of the problem because people are dying,” Baylis said.

Authorities need to communicate those uncertainties and the public needs to understand and tolerate them, Kimmelman said. “In medicine we license drugs and vaccines all the time, despite lingering uncertainties regarding impact and safety,” Kimmelman said.

We can’t wait for absolute certainty. “The point is to make the best choices we can given the evidence we have and to continue collecting evidence so that we can revise our choices if the data turn southward.”

• Email: skirkey@postmedia.com | Twitter: sharon_kirkey

OTTAWA — A former American envoy to Canada says trade relations between the two countries are unlikely to substantially improve regardless of who wins the U.S. election, suggesting a Joe Biden presidency could be “more protectionist” than the last four years under Donald Trump.

David Wilkins, a former Republican ambassador who served under George W. Bush, said a $700-billion spending package proposed by Biden would include a raft of so-called “Buy American” provisions that would prioritize domestic manufacturers over foreign ones.

The former ambassador and other experts are largely in agreement that Canada’s trade relationship with the U.S. would be less volatile under Biden, after a bellicose Trump administration over the past four years slapped tariffs on Canadian supplies of steel and aluminum, and threatened to tear up the previous North American trade pact.

But Wilkins warned that Biden’s “build back better” plan could point to broadly protectionist instincts, which in turn would “significantly adversely impact Canadian businesses and exports.”

“Despite the tariffs on softwood lumber and aluminum and steel by the Trump administration, I think a Biden Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate, if he does get that, will be much more protectionist than a Trump administration,” said Wilkins, who was taking part in a panel discussion hosted by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.

The populist economic vision includes $700 billion in subsidies for manufacturing, clean energy, biotech and artificial intelligence, built where possible using U.S. materials and know-how “to ensure that the future is made in America, and in all of America,” the proposal says.

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The former ambassador’s comments come as Ottawa continues to grapple with Trump’s protectionist trade policies, under which U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer has placed levies on Canadian raw steel and aluminum, citing “national security” concerns.

In September, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland effectively accepted quotas on Canadian exports of unwrought aluminum into the U.S. until the end of 2020, which experts say could restrict the Canadian market should the Trump administration win re-election.

On Sept. 15, hours before Canada was preparing to unveil a number of counter-tariffs aimed at a range of American aluminum products, Lighthizer issued a surprise announcement saying that he would remove all tariffs against Canada. In return, he would limit the volume of raw aluminum Canadian manufacturers can export into the U.S. until the end of the year.

Freeland implicitly accepted the new market caps despite claiming in a press conference that “Canada does not accept quotas.”

Biden’s platform hints at removing so-called “Section 232” national security tariffs against Canada but does not mention aluminum quotas.

Also partaking in the Canadian Chamber of Commerce discussion was David MacNaughton, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2016 to 2019. He urged all trading partners in the U.S., Canada and Mexico to look past recent trade rifts and to increase ties in order to hasten a pandemic recovery.

“I just hope that everybody doesn’t retreat into their corner of the sandbox and play by themselves because this will cause both health risks and economic collapse,” he said.

All panelists were overall optimistic on the outlook for U.S.-Canada trade, even as disputes over softwood lumber and other products persist. The two countries share common interests on big questions like democratic freedoms, and are deeply dependent on one another in their respective supply chains, they said.

“We’re going be fine traders,” said Thomas Donohue, head of the United States Chamber of Commerce. “When the dust settles we’ll all get back to the business of the Canada-U.S. relationship.”

Donohue and many other industry groups in the U.S. lobbied hard against the Trump tariffs, arguing they would only increase costs for American consumers.

One of the most direct trade-related outcomes from the election is likely to be the future of the Keystone XL pipeline, proposed by Calgary-based TC Energy. Trump has long supported the project and is pushing for its progress, while Biden recently said the pipeline amounted to “tarsands we don’t need” in the U.S.

Also discussed on the panel was what a Biden versus Trump presidency would mean for the relationship between America and China, which has also soured on the trade front after leaders in both countries slapped tariffs on tens of billions in traded products.

The U.S. has been pressing its allies to resist the adoption of Chinese-made technologies, particularly the bid by Chinese telecoms giant Huawei to build a next-generation mobile network in Western nations.

“The reality is that there’s a consensus within the United States about the China situation, and I think that we’re in for at least a decade long struggle in terms of redefining the relationship between the West and China,” said MacNaughton.

• Email: jsnyder@postmedia.com | Twitter: jesse_snyder

Lily talks almost matter-of-factly now about some of her mother’s beliefs, sounding more fatigued by it all than flabbergasted.

“ ‘Nicole Kidman is a Satanist, Hillary Clinton has children hanging in her basement and Reese Witherspoon is eating children,’ ” the Queen’s University student recounts.

And there is no way to persuade the woman she’s wrong, says Lily. “It’s cognitive dissonance. It’s the most heavy case of cognitive dissonance you could ever imagine.”

Yet the 21-year-old is just one among a surprising new cohort: Canadians whose lives have been turned upside down after a family member or close friend became immersed in QAnon and its outlandish conspiracy theories.

With tie-ins to U.S. politics and adherence to bizarre, unfounded accusations against liberal, Jewish and Hollywood elites, the movement would seem like a quintessentially American phenomenon.

But on a growing Reddit forum for relatives and friends of devotees, called QAnonCasualties, numerous Canadians share tales of how the “cult” has fractured their families or marriages.

Unlike in the U.S., QAnon seems to have limited impact on Canadian politics, but relatives say it is exacting a deeply personal toll, throwing once-loving relationships across the country into disarray.

Relatives spend hours watching videos, reading social media posts or talking to other adherents, while angrily rejecting attempts to refute their strange ideas, loved ones say. And though not directly part of the QAnon mythology, believers tend to aggressively reject wearing masks and other precautions against COVID-19, even when it might put family members at risk.

Some say their Canadian family members want to vote in the U.S. presidential election, legally or not, so they can back Donald Trump.

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Two Canadians affected by the phenomenon agreed to interviews this week, though they asked that their full names not be published, fearing further family strife, ill effects on a business or abuse from Q followers.

Sarah, 35, a southern Alberta entrepreneur, said her parents are unshakeable in their beliefs, showing more faith in YouTube videos by “some guy sitting in his mom’s basement,” than verifiable facts.

“They look at us like we’re the idiots who believe the message from above without questioning it,” she said. “You can come at them with academic articles and news sources from a variety of different places, and all they’ll say is, ‘That’s the elite’s agenda,’ and they don’t believe it because it’s fake news.”

On the Reddit page, another Canadian woman painfully describes how she tried to get her husband to abandon his obsession with QAnon and work on repairing their relationship, to no avail. A few days days ago, she posted that she was going away for a month and undergoing therapy.

“He’s always ranting on the phone, scrolling on Twitter, YouTube on speaker,” she wrote. “He says he loves me and his family but he can’t give up QAnon. It is the hill he will die on … 7 year relationship destroyed with 2 kids under 3, all for this bullsh–.”

Lily says QAnon appears to have spread in Canada. In addition to her own mother, she cites a former boss and his wife, high school friends and fellow university students who have been drawn into the network.

“You’d be surprised how many people are silently watching this sh– in their basement,” she said. “I know people in my personal life who are university educated, in Queen’s Commerce, who are in this. It’s not all hillbillies and hicks and conservative weirdos … That’s the most astounding thing about it to be honest.”

Criticism of the left by the right, and vice versa, is a natural and healthy part of democracy. QAnon is something else. The loosely connected web of conspiracists is convinced that a “cabal” of Democratic Party politicians and other liberal elites are kidnapping, sexually abusing and even cannibalizing children. They see Donald Trump as a sort of saviour working to defeat the evil. The theories have been traced back to an anonymous poster — Q — on the 4Chan website who claimed to be a senior U.S. government official with top-secret clearance.

About two dozen Republican congressional candidates in the Nov. 3 election have voiced support for QAnon, while Trump himself has refused to disavow the movement.

Yet the FBI has called it a potential domestic terrorism threat, and a bi-partisan bill in the U.S. House of Representatives condemned the fantastical ideology.

QAnon has had some peripheral impact on Canadian public life. Before a man was charged with ramming a truck full of guns into the grounds of Rideau Hall, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is living, the company he owned had posted QAnon material on Instagram. In Quebec, conspiracy theorist Alexis Cossette-Trudel espoused QAnon beliefs on popular YouTube videos, which were removed by the site’s owner recently for spreading misinformation about COVID-19.

A September anti-mask protest in Montreal featured a plethora of QAnon signs and T-shirts.

Lily describes a gradual evolution in her mother’s mindset, from being a liberal, feminist single parent as recently as 2015, to believing vaccines are dangerous, developing a hatred for government and, this spring, diving deep into QAnon.

She’d spend eight to 10 hours a day on her smartphone, alienating most of her extended family and friends, the daughter says.

In March, she insisted Lily come home early from university, warning that the military was planning to force people into quarantine.

“I sobbed,” she recalls. “I have to worry about getting sick and dying, I have to worry about my exams. I have to worry about all these real world things, and then I have to worry about my mother who has joined a cult.”

Sarah said her own parents have always been “alternative” and skeptical of government but also liberal, supporters of alternative energy. But as the pandemic lockdown began this spring, they too embraced QAnon, believing that all Democrats — politicians in another country — were evil and that elites were draining the bio-chemical adrenochrome from babies, another peculiar aspect of the theory.

And they insist COVID-19 is nothing to fear, refusing to wear masks or social distance, even though their daughter is now pregnant and therefore immune-compromised. Sarah says she, her husband and toddler may boycott family Christmas as a result.

The situation is “heartbreaking,” but she said she had one hope for a better future with her parents — Trump’s defeat next Tuesday.

“If he does not … continue to be president I hope it will be a quick fizzle,” she says about the movement. “Because QAnon will have less fuel to add to its fire.”

• Email: tblackwell@postmedia.com | Twitter: tomblackwellNP