National Post

OTTAWA – The Canada Revenue Agency wants to know the identity of every client of a major Canadian cryptocurrency trading platform as part of its effort to fight tax fraud and the underground economy.

In a September filing to the federal court, Canada’s tax agency is asking a judge to force Toronto-based crypto trading platform Coinsquare to hand over information and certain documents about all its clients since the beginning of 2013.

In its filing — the first of its kind involving a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange — the CRA says it needs all the information to ensure that Coinsquare’s customers have “complied with their duties and obligations” under Canadian tax laws.

In other words, CRA wants to make sure that the firm’s clients have declared all their income, paid their fair share of taxes and haven’t used cryptocurrencies to hide assets.

The details contained in the few documents available from the federal court are scarce, but all this likely means that CRA wants to know which Canadians have been trading on Coinsquare’s platform, and then compare it to their past tax filings.

If a Canadian trader on Coinsquare has not declared any cryptocurrency revenue or trading to CRA, then the agency may decide to further audit that person or organization, said David Piccolo, a tax lawyer at Tax Chambers.

“CRA could use this information to essentially try to verify or to match certain transactions with what was reported” in Canadians’ tax filings, Piccolo said in an interview.

“Then CRA does their internal risk assessment (to determine) whether these are worth pursuing in audit.”

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Because the case is in front of the federal court, CRA spokesperson Charles Drouin refused to comment on the Coinsquare request specifically.

The agency also refused to say if the decision to seek Coinsquare’s client list has anything to do with significant penalties imposed by the Ontario Securities Commission on the company and several of its executives earlier this year.

The provincial regulator imposed $2.2 million in sanctions and costs against the firm for having significantly faked its trading volume, then tried to cover it up all the while firing a whistleblower that flagged the issue internally.

But as a general comment, Drouin says the CRA considers that there is a “high” risk of tax fraud, evasion or any other type of tax crime within cryptocurrency trading.

There is also no doubt for CRA that cryptocurrencies are a growing part of the underground economy.

“Given the pseudo-anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies, the scope of non-compliance with Canadian tax obligations is difficult to measure; however the CRA presumes the opportunity for non-compliance to be high,” the CRA spokesperson said in an email.

According to Piccolo, CRA’s move is significant because it’s the first known time the agency has actively sought out such an extensive amount of information from clients of a cryptocurrency trading platform.

But he says it will also be a test of the agency’s ability to process the likely massive amounts of data that generally accompanies cryptocurrency transactions. If all goes well, he says we can expect more of these kinds of requests from the tax agency.

“What’s actually relevant is Coinsquare apparently has about 200,000 plus accounts,” Piccolo explained. “CRA can approach these kind of large-scale projects because they’ve been increasing their capacity to handle large chunks of information.”

The tax expert also says this kind of request, if successful, can be a strong deterrent to other Canadian traders who think CRA won’t ever find out they’re engaged in virtual currency trading if they never declare it themselves. Regardless of how Coinsquare responds, the agency’s demand needs to be approved by a federal court judge.

Lately, the CRA has been increasingly warning “crypto” users and traders that they would be subjected to much more scrutiny because of virtual currencies’ potential use to hide revenue, launder money and ultimately dodge paying taxes.

In 2018, the CRA established a dedicated cryptocurrency unit that conducts audits focused on “risks related to cryptocurrencies as part of a broader Underground Economy Strategy,” the CRA said.

In early 2019, the agency told Montreal-based Journal de Montréal that it was working on 54 criminal investigations related to offshore tax evasion, and that virtual currencies were a growing part of the alleged offenders’ strategies.

“The phenomenon has begun. Some of our investigations have a cryptocurrency component, like in cases where a person’s revenues were put into a cryptocurrency wallet,” the newspaper quotes Stéphane Bonin, then the CRA’s director of criminal investigations.

In a statement, Coinsquare CEO Stacy Hoisak said that they were reviewing the CRA’s request and had not yet decided if they would fight it before the court.

“Coinsquare maintains a robust customer verification process, and we understand our customers comply with all applicable Canadian laws relating to their cryptocurrency trading activities,” she added.

• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter: ChrisGNardi

The U.S. reported 103,000 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday, the biggest single-day increase in cases since the start of the pandemic, led by several Midwestern states which tallied near-record daily numbers.

The jump in national cases, from 86,500 on Tuesday, beat the previous record set on Friday of 97,000, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project.

Wednesday’s tally took the total number of infections over the past seven days to almost 623,000, a record for any seven-day period since the disease began spreading in the U.S. earlier this year. The U.S. has averaged about 89,000 cases a day over the past week.

President Donald Trump has sought to blame the rising case count on increased testing, but the new infections have also been accompanied by a sharp rise of people currently in U.S. hospitals. On Wednesday the number of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients hit a three-month high of 52,049, threatening to strain resources.

While average daily death rates remain lower than during the early stages of the pandemic, they have ticked up in recent weeks.

Despite the national outbreak coming just as Americans went to the polls to vote for Trump or his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the presidential election, exit polls appeared to suggest that voters were less concerned about the pandemic than other issues, including the health of the economy.

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About one in six voters said the coronavirus pandemic was their most important issue of the election, according to a CNN exit poll, lagging about a third of voters who nominated the economy as their main issue, or about one in five, who cited racial inequality.

Several of the election’s battleground states were among those hardest hit by the new outbreak, particularly in the Midwest.

Wisconsin, which was bitterly fought over by Trump and Biden, reported a one-day record 5,935 cases on Wednesday, as did Minnesota and Indiana with more than 3,600 new infections apiece.

Illinois and Ohio reported among their biggest single-day jumps, with increases of 7,538 and 4,071 respectively, according to COVID Tracking Project data.

Pennsylvania, which was one of the most contested states in Tuesday’s vote, reported 2,795 new cases on Wednesday, 80 shy of its record increase on Tuesday.

Nationwide, the U.S. had a further 1,116 deaths due to coronavirus, down from 1,529 on Tuesday, which was the biggest daily increase in fatalities since mid-May. The Tuesday death toll was higher than any one-day total seen during a summer surge that washed through sunbelt states.

OTTAWA — Opposition members of Parliament grilled Treasury Board Minister Jean-Yves Duclos about the government’s COVID-19 measures, after a recent report lamented Ottawa’s “lacking” transparency on its massive emergency spending plans.

In a study that NDP MP Matthew Green called a “bombshell report,” the Parliamentary Budget Officer on Wednesday said that Treasury Board officials had declined to provide crucial details to the PBO in its review of the Liberal government’s pay equity program, which aims to level out pay disparities between men and women in the public service.

A second report by the PBO, also released Wednesday, found shortcomings in the level of detail provided on $79 billon in proposed government spending, making it “more challenging for parliamentarians to perform their critical role in overseeing Government spending and holding it to account,” the report said.

On Wednesday evening, Green and other members of the Government Operations and Estimates committee called on Duclos to justify the findings in those reports, and to provide more detailed accounts of COVID-19 spending measures thus far.

“With a Treasury Board and a government that claims to be open by default, how do you justify not getting to the PBO the critical information allowing them to provide back to Parliament the critical analysis on the federal pay equity?” Green asked Duclos.

The PBO report said that Treasury officials “refused to share” data on the costs of the program, which it estimates will cost $621 million per year to cover additional wages and pensions for almost 390,000 public servants. Those estimates did not include the other 900,000 employees in federally regulated industries like airlines, telecoms, banking and public broadcasting.

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The findings come as PBO officials and other observers share growing frustrations around Ottawa’s willingness to track its spending plans months into the pandemic.

“This language, that you refuse to disclose information or data is damning, sir, and I’d like for you to answer why you wouldn’t cooperate with [the PBO],” Green told Duclos in committee.

The minister provided few answers as to why they did not provide data on the pay equity measures, saying only that his office needed to be “respectful both of our relationship with bargaining agents and our relationship with people.”

In a response to questions from the National Post, Treasury officials claimed that providing detailed information about the estimated costs of the program would undermine negotiations with agencies and Crown corporations. They said cost estimates for the Pay Equity Act will be released after negotiations come to an end.

Conservative MP Kelly McCauley questioned why the government has not yet posted detailed spending accounts of its COVID-19 measures online, where it can be easily viewed by the public.

Duclos said spending accounts had already been made available online, a claim that McCauley said was “the opposite of what the highly esteemed Parliamentary budget officer stated” in its recent report.

The PBO said that while broad spending commitments have been kept up to date online, those vast pools of cash have not yet been broken down into finer details for professionals or the public to view.

“As of the publication of this report, there is currently no public document published by the Government which provides a complete list of all measures announced to date, or updated cost estimates,” the report said. “There is also no consistency to which organizations publicly report on the implementation of these measures. Some organizations have proactively published this data, while others have not.”

Those concerns over the transparency of federal funding come as the projected deficit in 2021 is expected to stretch well over $343 billion, easily the highest on record. Projected deficits in the years following are projected to narrow substantially.

“While the sum of these measures is significant, the amount of information that is publicly available to track this spending is lacking,” the PBO said in its report.

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

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump profess to be men of faith, but the Christian vote and how it aligned in the 2020 U.S. presidential election is a complicated matter, to say the least.

While much of the discussion of American religion happens in the context of right-wing evangelicals, Christians in America are considerably diverse. But according to figures in pre-election and exit polling, they make up significant chunks of the voting public, and possibly enough to change outcomes: Forty-four per cent of all registered voters in the U.S. are white Christians; seven per cent are Black Protestants, and five per cent are Hispanic Catholics.

Biden is a Catholic, and attended Mass early on election day. Trump, despite affiliating with far-right evangelical pastors, grew up in a Presbyterian church, he says, and now considers himself a non-denominational Christian, according to an interview he gave to Religion News Service in late October.

In the lead-up to voting day, various religious and faith-based groups lobbied voters. Evangelical pastors, for example, were openly praying for Donald Trump’s re-election. The group CatholicVote.org warned Catholics that a Biden victory would mean fighting “taxpayer funding of abortions,” according to a report in the National Catholic Register, a conservative Catholic newspaper.

Exit polling done for NBC News (among voters who have completed voting or reached by telephone), showed that among Catholics,  51 per cent voted for Biden, compared to 47 per cent for Trump. Among those who identify as Protestant — this would combine various denominations — 37 per cent voted Biden, compared to 62 per cent for Trump.

The NBC data also breaks down race-based religious data: Among white Protestants, 73 per cent voted for Trump, and 26 per cent voted for Biden.

White Catholics voted similarly, if not as strongly, with 56 per cent voting for Trump, and 42 per cent voting for Biden.

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In Pew Research Center polling of voter intentions from October, 78 per cent of white evangelical Protestants intended to vote for Trump.

Fifty-three per cent of white Protestants who were not evangelical intended to vote for Trump and 52 per cent of white Catholics also intended to vote for him. A full 90 per cent of Black Protestant voters supported Biden, according to the Pew polling, while 67 per cent of Hispanic Catholics also supported Biden.

Compare this to the 2016 data, when 64 per cent of white Catholics voted for Trump. That’s an eight-point drop in Trump support.

In 2016, Trump received significant support from Christian voters: 56 per cent of Protestant voters — comprising multiple denominations — voted for Trump, compared to 39 per cent for Hillary Clinton, according to Pew Research Center data. Catholics voted similarly: 52 per cent voted for Donald Trump versus 44 per cent  for Hillary Clinton.

These numbers provide a hint of some of the religious drama that’s now being seen.

“I think the white Catholics are really the story today,” said Ryan Burge, a professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. “I think that really matters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three states that look like they’re going to flip from red to blue this time.”

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

Whether Joe Biden becomes the next president of the United States or Donald Trump has a second term, there is bound to be a whole lot of drama between now and January, 20, 2021, the day of the 59th presidential inauguration.

So, what actually happens next?

First off, are the results we know right now official?

No, states have a variety of different deadlines by which to certify their results. Since results are tabulated and released in a  chaotic fashion across the country, it’s left up to the media to keep track of what is going down.

“That includes its massive network of reporters and stringers nationwide who call thousands of state and county officials and check in on many official election websites across the nation,” according to an essay at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a journalism research organization. This isn’t new: The Associated Press has been doing this since 1848.

The first big date: Dec. 8, 2020

So, let’s quickly rehash how the U.S. voting system works. Elections are run by the states. In each state, there are a number of “electors” in the electoral college, and the number of them varies by state. There are 538 electoral college “votes” up for grabs nationally. A majority of those determine who becomes president — not the popular vote.

That said, in every state except two — Maine and Nebraska — all electoral college votes go to the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state.

December 8th is the deadline by which, under federal law, states must resolve any issues with these electoral college votes.

“That effectively gives states more than a month after Election Day to settle any challenges to their popular votes, certify a result and award their electoral votes,” explains the Pew Research Center.

While “electors” are selected differently across the country, they are generally chosen to represent their party — there are Democratic and Republican electors. More than 30 states have laws that say electors must vote for the candidate that represents their party. That said, if some 30 states have these laws, some 20 states do not. This is where we end up with something called a faithless elector, which means an elector might vote for, say, Donald Trump, even if the state popular vote swung in favour of Joe Biden.

States could, in theory, choose to replace electors if any hiccups occur. At any rate, Dec. 8 is when all this is supposed to be sorted.

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Next up: Dec. 14th

The voting day for president and vice-president. “The electors meet in each state and cast their ballots for president and vice president,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

This is when the faithless elector wrinkle could come into play. But it’s important to know that this only really matters in a close electoral college race. If it’s a blowout, a few rogue electors won’t matter.

But this has happened recently. In 2016, five Democratic electors voted for people who weren’t Hillary Clinton: One voted for Bernie Sanders, three for Colin Powell (former Secretary of State), and the last for Faith Spotted Eagle, a member of the Yankton Sioux Nation in South Dakota. (Three other faithless elector votes were invalidated).

On the Republican side of things, two Texas electors voted for John Kasich, who had run against Trump for the nomination, and another voted for Ron Paul, the Libertarian party candidate.

Dec. 23rd

By this date, the states must send their electoral college votes to the president of the Senate, who is Vice-President Mike Pence.

Jan. 3rd

Those who’ve won their Senate and House of Representative races will be sworn in on this date. They’ll be in their seats by Jan 6th

Jan. 6th

This the date when Vice-President Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, will meet with the Senate and House of Representatives to count up the electoral votes to determine who becomes the next president.

At this point, the winner of the election officially becomes the “president elect.”

From the period of Nov. 3rd until inauguration day on January 20th, Donald Trump will be a “lame duck” president. This basically means the president has lost influence over other politicians, he’s lamed.

If this feels like a long time to wait for a new president be heartened: Before 1933, when the 20th Amendment was adopted, the lame duck period lasted until March.

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

How low is the opinion of Donald Trump in the rest of the industrialized, democratic world?

So low that a survey earlier this year found people in 13 other countries thought less of Trump than they did of the autocratic, rights-abusing rulers of China and Russia. Canadians gave him only a slightly higher rating than the average won by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

But no matter who wins Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, one thing is clear: Americans themselves still support Trump in proportions similar to what they did in 2016, despite four years of turmoil and controversy.

Opinion polls, which once again seem to have been considerably off the mark, had suggested Democrat Joe Biden would win the popular vote by eight percentage points. There were even murmurings of a Biden landslide.

Instead, Trump trailed by just two points — similar to the relative gap last time when he beat Hillary Clinton.

It all raises the question: Why does close to half of the U.S. electorate – more than 65 million people – buck the global trend and still consider Trump presidential material?

Exit polls offer some clues. Barely a quarter of respondents said they judged the candidates on personality traits, and people rated the economy as a more important issue than the pandemic. One expert says Trump forcefully made the case that the Democrats posed an existential threat to U.S. culture.

For liberals, it remained bewildering.

“We wanted to see a repudiation of this direction for the country,” Democratic strategist and CNN commentator Van Jones lamented Tuesday night. “And the fact that it’s this close, it hurts. It just hurts.”

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The election’s final outcome remained up in the air late afternoon Wedesday, though Biden seemed to be building a path, barely, to victory in the Electoral College.

The Democrat led the popular vote by 50.3 to 48.1 per cent for Trump, virtually the same margin as 2016, though both candidates captured more votes amid record turnout.

“Certainly it’s not the blowout that we expected, or that some people expected, and what the polls foretold,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University and expert on U.S. conservatism.

He credits in part Trump’s campaign in 2020, which insisted Biden was a far-left Trojan horse who would turn the U.S. into a sort of northern Cuba, while letting Black Lives Matters protesters run amok.

“Trump has really been masterful at tapping into the idea that the other side is this left-wing socialist enemy that is going to destroy American culture,” said Dallek. “He’s really tapped into this alternative media universe — Fox News, Breitbart, Daily Caller … and created an alternate reality that is fed by these media.”

Nationalist and nativist movements have gained some momentum in other countries recently, but that doesn’t mean Trump has many fans there.

In its regular, multination poll earlier this year, the Pew Research Center found that confidence in the current U.S. president had sunk to 16 per cent on average in those countries. That’s the lowest for any American president since Pew began the surveys 20 years ago.

About 20 per cent of Canadians said they felt confident in Trump. Across the 13 nations, Xi and Putin won average ratings of 19 and 23 per cent respectively.

Regardless of the merits of his actual policies, Trump’s first term has been marked by deeply controversial behaviour, from prodigious telling of falsehoods to hesitating to condemn white supremacists, praising international autocrats and using his office to try to obtain political favours from a foreign leader.

But exit polls suggest those kind of character issues may have had limited impact.

Asked what was important in voting for a leader, just 27 per cent of voters pointed to personality, versus 73 per cent who chose the candidate’s stance on the issues.

And while Biden hammered constantly at Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, that theme may not have resonated widely. Asked about what issues were most important, 35 per cent mentioned the economy, followed by racial equality (20 per cent), the pandemic (17 per cent) and crime and safety (11 per cent), according to the exit polls .

The Democrat also emphasized his desire to bring Americans of different political stripes together. But “uniting the country” (19 per cent) rated last, below being a strong leader (32 per cent), “caring about people like me” and having good judgement, as an important quality for the president.

When the online polling company Survey Monkey asked Americans earlier why they approved of Trump, the typical responses were that he had kept his promises, put America first, tried to get things done and reversed the Obama years.

Dallek also suggests a darker reason. While Trump was able to attract more ethnic minorities to vote for him than any Republican presidential candidate in a generation, he nevertheless strongly appeals to those Caucasian Americans who feel alienated by  progressive politics, and threatened by non-white people.

“We’re still living really in the shadow of the Civil War, and he has tapped into these racial grievances,” said the professor. “He is signaling just constantly that there is a more liberal, tolerant, urban, multi-cultural America that is coming for their culture and their country.”

That said, Dallek suggested Americans are not so divorced from their developed-world cohorts.

Biden did get three million more votes overall, he noted, and if Trump loses the presidency, he would be one of just five White House occupants in the last century to serve a single term .

(10:30 a.m. Nov. 5, corrected reference to result being up in the air to Wednesday, not Tuesday.)

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

A metal time capsule left in the ice at the North Pole in 2018 washed up on the shore of northeastern Ireland this week, floating across more than 3,700 km of water.

Crew and passengers aboard the 50 Years of Victory, a nuclear icebreaker popular for its polar expeditions, had created the time capsule as a remnant of life in the early 21st century to be discovered long into the future — three to five decades at the least, some estimated.

However the future had a deadline of its own and within two years, the cylinder lay on a beach at Bloody Foreland, located in the county of Doneland, Ireland.

Conor McLory, a surfer from the nearby village of Gweedore ,was checking sea conditions when he found it.

At first, McLory was afraid that it might be a bomb.

“When I saw it, first I thought it was a steel pipe of a ship, then I lifted it and saw there was engraving on it (written in Russian). I thought it was a bomb then,” he told the Donegal Daily . “When I saw the date on it I thought it could be somebody’s ashes, so I didn’t open it.”

Placated after a Russian friend of a friend translated the inscription and told him that it was a time capsule, McLory opened the cylinder and discovered a treasure trove of letters and poems written in English and Russian, photographs, badges, beer mats, a menu and wine corks.

One letter in English, dated Aug 4, 2018, said: “Everything around is covered by ice. We think that by the time this letter will be found there is no more ice in Arctic  unfortunately.”

One of the letters belonged to a Russian Instagram blogger in St. Petersburg known as Sveta, who agreed to a Zoom call with McLory after being tracked down. She told McLory she was surprised the cylinder had been found so quickly.

In the past 10 years, Arctic temperatures have increased by almost 1C, leading to a drastic melting of polar ice caps and sea ice. Currently, Arctic sea ice has reached its second-lowest level in the past 41 years.

A Nature Climate Change study has predicted that summer sea ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could disappear entirely by 2035.

Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, which is reported to have been at the centre of many of his crimes, is set to face the wrecking ball.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the 14,000-square-foot, six-bedroom pad, complete with huge swimming pool and sea views, was put on the For Sale list in July for an eye-watering $22 million.

“Palm Beach is going to be very happy that it’s gone,” Todd Michael Glaser, the developer who bought the mansion, told the Wall Street Journal. The home features heavily in Filthy Rich, Netflix’s docu-series examining Epstein’s life and crimes.

In total, Epstein owned six properties, including a New York City apartment. He was found hanged at age 66 in August 2019 in a Manhattan jail, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges for allegedly abusing women and girls in Manhattan and Florida from 2002 to 2005. He had pleaded not guilty.

The Miami Herald reports that any profits from the sales of the properties will go toward compensation for the financier’s victims, via the Epstein Victims Compensation Fund, which was set up in June and has used non-judicial methods to secure monies from his estate for those he harmed.

Epstein is reported to have bought the Palm Beach property in 1990 for $2.5 million. It took some time for the property to sell, the Miami Herald reports, with its reporters remarking, after a recent tour of the area, that it is “older and boxy, lacking the eccentricities of other homes on the block.” Its asking price was much lower than what other area properties would command, the Herald stated.

Glaser, the developer who bought the property, told the Wall Street Journal that he will demolish it after the deal closes next month. He bought it for $18 million — $4 million below asking. Glaser says he will replace what’s currently on the site with an Art Moderne-style home of similar size.

As well as the main area, the property contains a staff house with three bedrooms, a pool house and views of the Everglades islands.

Epstein’s isn’t the only notorious local property, the Miami Herald reports; the mansion once owned by fashion mogul Gianni Versace, murdered in 1997, sits nearby, and is often visited by tourists.

— with files from Reuters

A huge iceberg could be heading straight for a British territory in the South Atlantic sea

The Iceberg, designated A-68A, reportedly broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf three years ago, and is measured at 150 kilometres long and 48 km wide — about the same size as the British island of South Georgia it could possibly hit.

“It is absolutely huge and it’s the largest iceberg around in the Southern Ocean,” Sue Cook, a glaciologist at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, told The Guardian .

While researchers say the movement of the iceberg is hard to predict, there’s always the chance that it breaks apart before reaching the small island. The island is known to be a common magnet for icebergs, but A-68A’s massive size could lead to more serious implications.

South Georgia is home to a large population of penguins and seals, and scientists say that the iceberg hitting the island could block their food routes, which could potentially starve them in the long-term and reduce their global numbers.

“Ecosystems can and will bounce back of course, but there’s a danger here that if this iceberg gets stuck, it could be there for 10 years,” British Antarctic Survey researcher Geraint Tarling told the BBC . Tarling adds that the iceberg’s travels could have some benefits, as it moves and disperses microscopic food for plankton.

Of all the things South Georgia is known for, its bird life is among the most beloved – especially these core species. https://t.co/4aN29g3APq #southgeorgia

Picture by Dietmar Denger. pic.twitter.com/ZHDyQWtj25

— OceanwideExpeditions (@OceanwideExp) October 30, 2020

The iceberg could also be detrimental to the local economy, as it disrupts its fishing industry.

Tarling said he is trying to get the resources together to travel and study the iceberg on the South Atlantic island, in case it does crash along the shore.

Researchers have made requests to the European Space Agency for more satellite tracking of the iceberg, as many predict it could reach the island within the month.

With only six electoral votes left to win the race, it increasingly looks like Democratic nominee Joe Biden is on track to win what has been a rollercoaster of a U.S. presidential election this year. And despite several lawsuits against the vote counts, it appears the incumbent Republican president may be soon be heading out the doors of the White House.

But, if Trump were to lose, this wouldn’t necessarily be his final ride out of Washington, Bryan Lanza, a former communication director, suggested in an interview with BBC’s Radio 4 programme . In fact, the loss of a “very tight election” could strengthen Trump’s case to run for re-election in 2024.

“And the Republicans would let that happen.”

‘Biden will have the opportunity to guide this country out of Covid, and we’ll see what his successes and failures are. And there’s nobody in the Republican party that can challenge President Trump in the primaries,”Lanza said.

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Running for re-election four years after a first term would be unusual — mostly because it’s rare for an incumbent president to lose a consecutive re-election in the first place. However, while the Constitution doesn’t allow a president to serve for more than two terms, there’s no language that specifies how far apart the two terms can be.

If Trump were to run again in four years, he would be 78-years-old, the same age as Biden is now in his current bid for presidency. “So age isn’t the issue,” Lanza said.

Lanza also defended the president’s attempts to sow doubt over the counting of votes. “I don’t think it’s different from what the Democrats did when they told Americans that Russians were involved in Donald Trump’s election four years ago.”

Lanza and Trump share a long working relationship, through the 2016 election cycle and into the inauguration and transition periods into the White House. He served as deputy communications director of the Trump-Pence campaign, overseeing campaign messaging and media relations. After the 2016 election win, he joined the transition team, vetting, interviewing and recommending individuals for top cabinet and staff positions in Trump’s administration.

By February 2017, he left the White House to take a role as managing director with Mercury, a public relations firm.

OTTAWA – The RCMP cancelled a nearly $20,000 contract after the federal procurement ombudsman warned that it had been awarded to one of the force’s own employees who likely had insider information.

On October 23, 2019, Canada’s federal police force signed an $18,600 (plus GST) contract with Meaghan Potter for janitorial services at its detachment in Deloraine, Man., according to the Office of the Procurement Ombudsman’s (OPO) latest annual report.

The report does not name Potter, but the federal government’s public contract database shows only one RCMP “building cleaning” contract worth $18,600 signed on Oct. 23, 2019, and it was awarded to Meaghan Potter. Without naming the recipient, the OPO confirmed Thursday that it was the contract in question.

The problem is that the RCMP did not realize that Potter was a Deloraine RCMP employee. Furthermore, her job involved processing payments to the former janitorial service provider, reads the procurement watchdog’s report.

In other words, she likely knew exactly how much the former janitor was paid, and so was likely able to use that information to underbid and win the contract with her own employer.

It was only when the losing incumbent service provider complained to the OPO — who then brought the complaint to the RCMP — that the police force realized what had happened.

“The complainant claimed this gave the employee an unfair advantage and allowed the employee to underbid the complainant,” reads the report by Procurement Ombudsman Alexander Jeglic.

According to his report, the RCMP ordered Potter to stop working on the contract two months after the complaint. One month later, the contract was cancelled altogether.

“After we launched the review, the RCMP responded advising the circumstances of the procurement process were as stated by the complainant and, as such, the possibility of the employee having had an unfair advantage could not be ruled out,” Jeglic says in his report.

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Unfortunately for the ombudsman, because the contract was cancelled, he was legally bound to put an end to his investigation. But that did not stop Jeglic from writing the RCMP to recommend that they compensate the losing incumbent bidder who had filed the complaint.

The RCMP did not respond to questions by deadline about the contract, notably how it did not detect that it was awarded to an employee or if internal procurement rules even allow employees to double as contractors for the force.

But this procurement issue is far from the only one plaguing the federal government, Jeglic warns in his report.

The ombudsman’s office refused an interview to discuss its latest annual report, preferring instead to answer written questions.

One of the biggest issues he notes is “unnecessarily complex nature” of federal procurement, which has become a “constant source of frustration, creating overly burdensome barriers to contracting with the federal government.”

That issue has only been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced government to scramble to find personal protective equipment (PPE), transportation and logistics services, extra cleaning services for its buildings, and everything in between.

“At a time when buyers and suppliers are working together to address a pressing matter of public health, it is especially clear they should not be hindered unnecessarily,” Jeglic notes.

“Including unnecessary criteria in solicitations only because they have been included in the past and adopting a zero-risk tolerance approach to procurement is not the way forward.”

In order to diversify its portfolio of potential suppliers in the hopes of getting more and cheaper bids, the ombudsman thinks the government should increase its tolerance for risk in procurement, make its processes more flexible and eliminate “unnecessary” requirements.

Some of the solutions he proposes are as simple as creating standardized bidding documents and processes across governments.

“If each department uses unique solicitation documents and processes, it significantly increases the burden on suppliers, particularly those who supply the same good or service across multiple departments,” Jeglic warns.

“Using standardized documents and processes decreases the cost to bid for suppliers and potentially lowers bid prices for departments.”

When it comes to pandemic procurement, the OPO argues that the government should increase both delegated spending authorities for bureaucrats as well as the maximum thresholds for a department to solicit non-competitive bids (currently set at $25,000 for contracts for goods, and $40,000 for service contracts).

In a statement, Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand said that “improving, modernizing and simplifying” procurement in Canada was a key priority.

To that effect, she lauded her government’s upcoming e-procurement system, which it hopes will streamline and simplify purchasing for the federal government all the while removing most of the physical paperwork.

“Our e-procurement system will create increased efficiencies, enhancing the accessibility of federal procurement opportunities. Importantly, e-procurement will also allow PSPC to gather disaggregated data to better track the participation of underrepresented groups in the procurement process,” the minister promised.

• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter: ChrisGNardi

SENATE WINNERS:

Democrats picked up seats in Colorado and Arizona, and Republicans picked one up in Alabama in the battle for control of the U.S. Senate. Republicans held off Democratic challengers in just five of the 14 most competitive races, but final results may not be clear for some time. Here are some notable outcomes:

MAINE

Republican Senator Susan Collins, a New England moderate long known for her independence, won her fifth term after Maine House of Representatives Speaker Sara Gideon called her on Wednesday afternoon to concede one of the hardest-fought Senate races of 2020.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, held off a surprisingly strong challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, who raised $100 million for his run. “I’ve never been challenged like this,” Graham said, and later added about Harrison: “You wasted a lot of money. This is the worst return on investment in the history of American politics.” A stoic Harrison said, “We did something incredible … we proved that public office is not a lifetime job and that people are willing to hold our leaders accountable.”

GEORGIA

Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock head to a Jan. 5 runoff election after neither secured a majority in a multi-candidate non-partisan special election. The unusual race was prompted by the retirement of Republican Senator Johnny Isakson. Loeffler was appointed last year to fill his seat. The contest featured 21 candidates.

ALABAMA

Republican Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach, defeated incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones. Jones had been considered the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate. He won the seat in an upset in 2017 after Republican Jeff Sessions vacated it to become Trump’s attorney general. Tuberville defeated Sessions’ attempted comeback earlier this year.

IOWA

Republican Senator Joni Ernst defeated Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield. Ernst used her role in U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to appeal to conservative-leaning voters. Greenfield, an urban planner and real estate developer, accused Ernst of being a rubber stamp for President Donald Trump and not taking the pandemic seriously enough.

WYOMING

Republican Cynthia Lummis, 66, is heading back to Washington. She has spent decades in politics, as a former state treasurer and state legislator. She served as Wyoming’s lone congresswoman from 2009-2017 and was a founding member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. She will be the state’s first female senator.

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SENATE LOSSES: 

Democrats, who had been favoured to win the Senate majority heading into Tuesday’s election, had a net gain of only one seat to show by Wednesday afternoon. Here are some notable losses in the Senate races.

TEXAS

The state became a surprise battleground in this year’s presidential race. A challenge from Democrat M.J. Hegar could not take down veteran Republican Senator John Cornyn despite his vulnerability. Texas, once a Republican stronghold, has grown increasingly competitive as the population has grown more diverse and Trump’s polarizing presidency has alienated suburban women.

ARIZONA

Republican Senator Martha McSally failed to hold off Democratic former astronaut Mark Kelly. McSally, a former U.S. representative and U.S. Air Force combat pilot, was appointed to the seat once held by John McCain after losing her 2018 Senate bid to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.

COLORADO

Incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner could not hold off Democratic challenger John Hickenlooper. Gardner, a former U.S. representative who entered the Senate for the first time in 2015, was a vulnerable Senate Republican partly because of his allegiance to Trump in a state that has gone Democratic in the past three presidential elections. Hickenlooper, a former two-term governor and 2020 presidential hopeful, said record voter turnout showed voters were fed up with the bitter polarization in Washington.

MONTANA

Two-term Governor Steve Bullock, a former presidential candidate who branded himself as an independent-minded Democrat, could not hold off Republican Senator Steve Daines. Daines, a former congressman and software executive, is known as a reliable conservative and has touted his ties to Trump.

GENERAL NUGGETS:

POPULAR VOTE

In the nationwide popular vote , Biden on Wednesday was comfortably ahead of Trump, with about 3 million more votes . With ballots still being counted, Biden has garnered almost 70.5 million votes for president, beating a record previously held by his former boss, President Barack Obama. Obama collected 69.5 million votes in 2008. So far, Trump has received 67.8 million votes. He lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes even as he beat Hillary Clinton in electoral votes.

NORTH DAKOTA

David Andahl died of COVID-19 in October, but the North Dakota rancher nonetheless won his race for the state House of Representatives. His district has two House seats, and Andahl teamed up with another candidate, Dave Nehring, to earn endorsements. Nehring won the most votes on Tuesday, with Andahl coming in next at 35.53 per cent. The next two candidates tallied 12 per cent and 10 per cent. The local Republican Party will fill Andahl’s vacant seat until a special election.

BIDEN FIGHT FUND

Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have established a Biden Fight Fund as Trump’s campaign has asked for a recount in Wisconsin and filed a lawsuit in Michigan. Biden’s campaign manager told supporters that the campaign aims to put in place “the biggest and most comprehensive legal effort ever assembled.”

ELECTORAL COLLEGE 

The candidate who wins each state’s popular vote typically earns that state’s electors. This year, those electors meet on Dec. 14 to cast votes, one ballot for president, one for vice-president. Both chambers of Congress will meet on Jan. 6 to count the votes and name the winner. But — in the case of two different election results submitted by the governor and the legislature, under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, each chamber of Congress separately decides which slate to accept. The electoral count is conducted by the new Congress, which is sworn in on Jan. 3. If the two chambers disagree, the act says the electors approved by each state’s “executive” should prevail. Many scholars interpret that as a state’s governor, others don’t. One law professor called the ECA’s wording “virtually impenetrable” in this context. The law has never been tested or interpreted by the courts.

CONTINGENT ELECTION

A determination that neither candidate had secured a majority of electoral votes would trigger a “contingent election” under the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. That means the House of Representatives would choose the next president, while the Senate would select the vice-president. Each state delegation in the House gets a single vote.

WHAT IF THERE’S A TIE?

A contingent election would have taken place in the event of a 269-269 tie. Any election dispute in Congress would play out ahead of Jan. 20, when the Constitution mandates that the term of the current president ends. If Congress still has not declared a presidential or vice-presidential winner by then, the Speaker of the House ­— currently Nancy Pelosi — would serve as acting president.

THOSE LATE COUNTS

Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center said that Republican state legislators in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin blocked requests from local election officials to begin counting ballots as they came in or at least in advance of Tuesday to speed the reporting of the massive influx of early and mailed ballots. They apparently did this to try to prevent the count from starting, claim that voting had to be cut off or that Trump was “winning” and then try to delegitimize votes tabulated after Tuesday.

Even with a winner undeclared the morning after the polls closed, one early conclusion of the U.S. election was that Latino voters were a key part of the stronger than expected showing for incumbent President Donald Trump.

As a voting demographic, Hispanic Americans seem to have been an especially important contributor to Trump taking the 29 Electoral College votes in Florida, thanks in part to major gains in the Miami area, where Democrat challenger Joe Biden had an unexpectedly poor tally compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Texas was also regarded by Democrats as a possible state to flip blue, but Biden similarly underperformed Clinton and Texas stayed in the Republican column.

This prompts the tough insight, for Democrats especially, that ethnic groups are not uniform voting blocs. Hispanics are not a safe Democrat constituency, and treating them as such can encourage the complacency that turns voters away.

Trump improved on his results among Hispanic Americans since 2016, according to CNN exit polls, which also showed the Democrat Latino vote strong in Arizona, but weaker in Georgia and Ohio.

This stood in contrast to pre-election polling, some of which suggested Hispanic voters were 74 per cent for Biden. In some areas that held true, but nationally Trump increased his support among Latino men to more than one in three, and among Latina women to 28 per cent, in both cases higher than in 2016, according to an Edison Exit Poll.

Curiously, that same poll showed Trump doing better with all major demographic ethnic and gender categories except for white men, among whom he dropped to 57 per cent in 2020 from 62 per cent in 2016.

African American voting patterns were much less of a shock, seeming to stay closer to the projected split of being nearly 90 per cent for Biden, and with men more likely than women to support Trump.

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Trump’s success with the Hispanic demographic is also Joe Biden’s failure, as some of his fellow Democrats concede.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic U.S. Representative from New York, for example, said on Twitter she would not comment on general results “as they are evolving and ongoing, but I will say we’ve been sounding the alarm about Dem(ocrat) vulnerabilities w/ Latinos for a long, long time. There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn’t been put in.”

Partly this Republican shift of the Latino vote reflects a natural ideological alliance with white evangelical Christians, such that the Evangelicals for Trump event in Florida became Latinos for Trump.

Partly it is a general cultural conservatism, even apart from religion, such that the Trump campaign’s emphasis on law and order was an appealing message.

Many Latino voters also have experience of life under Latin American socialist dictatorships, which was a key part of the anti-Biden messaging, claiming he was in the pocket of a radical left wing socialist conspiracy and likely to support socialist strongmen like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

“The Cuban community in Miami has been through a communist regime,” said Marti Mees, a Cuban immigrant and Republican activist, in an interview with Daily Telegraph reporter Rozina Sabur about why those voters came out in force behind Trump. “We believe in law and order, we believe in family values and we believe in freedom. That’s what President Trump offers.”

NBC News exit polls had Trump taking 55 per cent of Florida’s Cuban American vote.

There is also a demographic shift at play. Pew Research projected this was the first election in which Hispanic voters are the largest ethnic minority group, narrowly overtaking Black Americans in the range of 12 to 13 per cent.

All of this is against the backdrop of Trump’s frequent comments about Mexican rapists, drug dealers, gangsters and criminals, and his Mexican border wall. His administration also pursued a policy of discouraging Latin American refugees and separating children from their parents when apprehended at the border.

But Biden had no good reply. Like any ethnic group, Hispanic Americans have internal diversity despite the broad patters. There are Puerto Ricans in New York and Mexicans in California, who are more likely to vote Democrat than Cubans or Venezuelans in Florida. There are others whose ancestry is in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, other Central and South American countries.

The concern for the Democrats is that the old way of approaching this constituency is too broad. The fear is that Democrats might have been fooling themselves by relying on polls that show, as Pew Research did in October, an increase in Hispanic voter confidence in Biden’s ability to manage important issues like the pandemic, compared to an unchanged negative view of Trump.

As of Wednesday afternoon the U.S. election was still too close to call, with many battleground states still counting ballots. Joe Biden’s prospects are still strong, given the remaining votes are likely to favour him, but the election has not been the landslide for him that many had predicted.

A big reason for that prediction was the coronavirus surging in many of the states Donald Trump needs to win; it was thought voters would likely punish Trump for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the results have been more complicated than that.

Here’s a closer look at the some of the key states, and whether Trump defied expectations despite the virus.

Florida – 29 electoral college votes

Trump badly needed to win this state to keep his re-election chances alive. As it turned out, he won it fairly easily Tuesday night by three percentage points thanks to Biden underperforming in the Miama area.

Florida’s COVID-19 situation is still precarious, as it reported 4,637 new cases and 56 new deaths on Tuesday. However, those numbers are not nearly as high as they were in July, when Florida was reporting more than 10,000 new cases daily.

The state lifted most of its health restrictions in September, including on crowd sizes for restaurants and sports events. Still, Trump hit the message during the campaign that the threat from the virus was exaggerated and Democrats would lock them back down.

“You turn on MSNBC, you turn on this network, it’s COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID,” Trump said at a Florida rally last week. “They want to scare you to try to make you vote for Biden.”

Arizona – 11 electoral college votes

Trump won this state by a four-point margin in 2016, but both Fox News and the Associated Press project Biden will flip the state blue — a key step on his potential path to victory. Trump’s campaign is insisting they still have a shot at winning this state.

Arizona reported 1,548 new cases on Tuesday and 40 new deaths, and all the metrics have been rising over the past month. But these numbers are also far below where they were in summer, when Arizona was reporting 4,000 cases daily.

The state has reopened its businesses during the fall, lifting restrictions on bars, gyms, movie theatres and other establishments on Oct. 1.

Ohio – 18 electoral college votes

Trump would have been doomed if he’d lost this midwest state, which had been seen as a toss-up entering the election. But on Tuesday night he cruised to a comfortable eight-point lead and is projected to win it.

That’s despite the fact Ohio is facing its worst surge of COVID-19 cases of the entire pandemic so far, reporting a record 4,229 new cases and 33 new deaths on Tuesday. In the spring and summer its cases had never passed 2,000 in a day.

Businesses are largely open in Ohio, operating with some restrictions on capacity. As new cases spike, Republican Governor Mike DeWine has so far resisted calls to shut down parts of the economy again, saying he doesn’t want to see Ohio turn into a “totalitarian” state.

Pennsylvania – 20 electoral college votes

Pennsylvania had a chance of being the swing state that could decide the whole election, though that appeared less likely late in the day as both Michigan and Wisconsin were called for Biden.

The state is currently in its highest COVID-19 surge of the pandemic, with a record 2,868 new cases and 33 deaths reported on Tuesday. Its Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, has been in a fight with the courts over his powers to shut down businesses, but as of November the state was largely reopen with crowd size restrictions being eased.

It may take all week before all the votes are counted in Pennsylvania due to the mail-in ballots. Trump held a sizeable lead on Wednesday afternoon, but the remaining ballots are expected to lean heavily Biden, and both candidates still have a very realistic shot at winning.

 

OTTAWA – Pollsters had projected a big blue wave would sweep Republicans out of office across the United States, but it appears to have hit the shore with nowhere near the expected force.

As of Wednesday afternoon, former vice-president Joe Biden still looked like he could garner a win, but rather than the landslide victory many pollsters had predicted he was set to pull out a close victory over President Donald Trump.

Pollsters also predicted the Democrats would take control of the U.S. Senate and keep control of the U.S. House to give them complete control over the legislative process, but most of those Senate wins were failing to materialize.

W. Joseph Campbell, a professor in the School of Communication Studies at American University in Washington D.C., said the polls raised Democratic hopes and there are going to be a lot of questions for pollsters.

“The broad expectation was, and this is a poll driven expectation, that the Democrats would have something approaching a blue wave,” he said. “It’s at best a very mixed performance for polls.”

Among the polling misses were Florida, where pollsters gave Biden as much as a five point lead in recent weeks. North Carolina also consistently showed a Biden lead, but could end up in the Trump column when the counting is complete.

In Wisconsin, where Biden is forecast to win by about half a percentage point, polls had indicated he was as many as 17 points ahead of Trump. Biden was also predicted to win easily in Pennsylvania, but that race was proving to be a nail-biter with Trump ahead for most of the day.

Republican Senator Susan Collins, from Maine, had no major polls showing she had a chance to hold onto her seat, but she still managed to beat her challenger on election day.

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Campbell said the polling misses are all across the country.

“There are all kinds of examples you can find in polls that really miscalled the race and in particular states, especially,” he said.

In 2016, pollsters were generally thought to have missed pockets of Trump supporters and underrepresented the view of non-college educated white voters in particular. Campbell said he believes it is too early to determine what went wrong this time, but he suspects it is something new.

“When polls go bad, it’s for reasons that are not shared from polling failure to polling failure,” he said.

Quito Maggi, president of Mainstreet Research, a Canadian polling firm, said he believes some Trump supporters were shy about admitting their support.

“They’re not the ones going to the rallies. They’re not waving the flags. They’re not wearing the MAGA hats, but in their heads they know they’re going to vote for Trump.”

Maggi said American polling firms are expected to deliver deep dives into the results to give results broken down across a wide group of demographics.

“Every poll that is published people expect to see not just age and gender, like what you might see here in Canada, but by income bracket, by education, by race,” he said.

Polling companies reach out to hundreds or even thousands of people, but will often get a disproportionate responses from certain demographics and have to weight their sample accordingly. For example, if a pollster reached out to 100 people and got responses from 25 women and 75 men, it would have to give more weight to the women’s response to reflect the population, because in the broader population men and women are in equal numbers.

Maggi said adding that kind of weighting to account for race, income, education as polling companies do in the U.S., increases the chance of a major error.

“When you start applying, race, income, education, all of those other factors. It’s the possibility for errors that grows exponentially.”

Maggi said pollsters in the U.S. also have to consider whether voters will actually get to the polls, because of issues around voting registration and long lines.

He said he is hopeful they will be able to figure out what they have been doing wrong and address it for future elections.

“They’ve had two elections in a row now. They’re going to have good data to model it. So hopefully, by the next election, maybe the midterms, they’ll make the necessary adjustments.”

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

OTTAWA — A new report offers the first-ever cost estimate for a Liberal policy that aims to ensure men and women receive equal pay, after Ottawa declined to provide details on the legislation in 2018.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that the Liberal government’s equal pay policy will cost taxpayers $621 million per year, covering about 390,000 public servants in Canada. That estimate does not include the additional 900,000 workers who fall under federally-regulated industries like airlines, telecoms, banking, and broadcasting, among other things.

Crown corporations including Canada Post, Bank of Canada and the newly-formed Trans Mountain Corporation will also fall under the new equal pay provisions. The $621-million hike amounts to a roughly one per cent increase on the $45 billion Ottawa spends every year on wages and pensions for public employees.

Yves Giroux, the PBO, said his office pulled together the estimates without the help of Treasury Board officials, who declined to provide any internal data for the program, citing Cabinet confidence.

He said he was unsure of the merit of those claims, but warned that the Liberal government should avoid using cabinet confidence as a catch-all to withhold information that would useful to the public.

“If the data exists, and it’s been used internally or in other formats, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should remain a secret just because it was discussed at cabinet,” Giroux said in an interview.

A spokesperson for Treasury minister Jean-Yves Duclos said Ottawa will eventually release cost estimates for the program, but said negotiations with agencies and federally regulated industries are still ongoing. The person said that making cost projections public now would “compromise future negotiations with bargaining agents.”

“It’s probably bureaucrats being overly risk averse,” Giroux said. “But there’s no way for me to be sure of that, because we haven’t seen the data.”

His comments come as the PBO on Wednesday issued a second report that lamented a broader lack of transparency by the federal government on its immense COVID-19 emergency spending measures.

It pointed out that the government has yet to lay out detailed accounts of the spending measures thus far for COVID-19, unlike past federal stimulus spending efforts, and with little excuse for the secrecy. The government’s latest spending request to Parliament, for $79 billion, has likewise been “lacking” in detail, the budget officer said.

“This lack of data is not a result of it not being available,” the PBO report said. “The Department of Finance had been providing biweekly updates to the standing committee on finance, but stopped when Parliament was prorogued in August.”

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has repeatedly called for better transparency in government spending during the pandemic, as policymakers in Ottawa rush hundreds of billions out the door in an effort to provide a lifeline to Canadian businesses and workers hit by economic lockdowns.

A lack of detail around the gender parity program is the latest example of these shortcomings, the budget watchdog said Wednesday.

The Pay Equity Act was ultimately tucked inside the Liberal government’s 2018 omnibus budget bill, which passed the House of Commons on a 163-113 vote in late December, with most opposition parties voting against. It received royal assent without associated costs ever being supplied by government.

The changes under the act seek to achieve pay equity by “redressing the systemic gender-based discrimination” faced by women, the legislation says. Employers under the new regime must “calculate the compensation, expressed in dollars per hour, associated with each job class,” and pay employees a set amount according to the value ascribed to those classes.

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The new legislation also calls for the appointment of a “pay equity commissioner” to audit public sector pay, resolve pay disputes, and impose financial penalties on agencies and corporations that fail to meet the new guidelines.

Various studies have claimed that women tend to receive only a portion of the wages of men occupying the same roles, prompting calls from advocacy groups for regulations that would enforce gender parity.

Of the $621 million in higher pay associated with the changes, the PBO estimates that by 2023-24, $477 million more would go toward wages while the remaining $144 million would go toward public pensions.

Ongoing costs for regulatory oversight of the program is expected to be $5 million per year. Administrative costs will be $9 million annually, according to the PBO report.

The youth vote in the 2020 US presidential election swung heavily in favour of 77-year-old Joe Biden over Donald Trump, age 74, a trend that, as the votes continued to be counted on Wednesday, may have made a difference in some key battlegrounds.

The voter turnout in 2020 was unprecedented across the entire United States, according to the United States Election Project, which tracks information about the electoral system. Estimates come from exit polls — official data on turnout won’t be available until the census bureau releases it in a few months’ time. According to the  Project’s data, only five states — Hawaii, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia saw less than 60 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, while Minnesota and New Hampshire had voter turnout in excess of 80 per cent.

In every single state for which there is data, analyzed by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), a youth-focused research centre at Tufts University, young voters — defined as those between 18 and 29 years old — took up a double-digit share of the total ballots cast. CIRCLE uses AP VoteCast data from The Associated Press,

“Nearly half of all eligible young people cast ballots in the most critical election races in the country,” says CIRCLE’s analysis.

Young voters preferred Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate over Trump, the Republican candidate and current president, in 34 of 38 states for which CIRCLE had vote data.

Overall, 62 per cent of those voters cast their ballot for Biden compared to 33 per cent for Trump. These are, CIRCLE notes, figures that outpace even the votes received from younger voters by Hillary Clinton in 2016 (although the data, because of sources and year, aren’t entirely comparable.)

Peter Loewen, a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, said there’s little doubt Biden benefitted from a high share of the youth vote and higher youth turnout. But  that doesn’t mean they “delivered” the election for him or the Democrats, he said.

“It’s always hard to figure out how much differences in political behaviour due to age are because of something generational … or whether it is something that is really a life cycle thing,” said Loewen.

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In Virginia, youth voters cast 21 per cent of all ballots; in Georgia, it was 20 per cent. Georgia remained a battleground state, as of Wednesday morning, while Virginia had been called for Biden, according to Reuters.

Youth were the lowest proportion in Kentucky (10 per cent) and Louisiana (12 per cent.) Both states were projected by Reuters to be Republican victories.

William Frey, a researcher with the Brookings Institution, said there are some states where the youth vote turnout helped Biden, but it’s still too early to make those determinations for certain.

“It’s clearly the case that … the younger population is more likely to vote for Biden than they were for Clinton vis-à-vis Trump,” Frey said.

“Certainly going forward in the U.S., it’s the younger generation … is going to be the main driver for Democratic support, probably everywhere.”

Further breaking down the data, every single ethnic group in CIRCLE’s youth cohort voted in a majority for Biden: 88 per cent of Black youth voted Biden; 83 per cent of Asian youth; 75 per cent of Latino youth; and 53 per cent of white youth.

Support for Trump, meanwhile, clustered in older voters. The highest proportion of voters who cast ballots for Trump landed in the 30-to-44 age cluster, with 57 per cent of voters voting Republican. From age 45 and up, 51 per cent of voters voted for Trump.

Frey said far more seniors were expected to abandon Trump for Biden, according to polling data leading to the election. That didn’t materialize.

“I don’t think the senior surge was as big as some of the polls said,” Frey said.

However it  all turns out, Loewen said, it’s a testament to how serious the competition is in the United States and the effort parties put forward to winning votes.

“It’s just an amazingly dynamic and competitive system,” he said.

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

American voters went to the polls on Tuesday to choose between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden and cast votes in U.S. House and Senate races and state and local elections. As of Wednesday Nov. 4 at 4:30 p.m., there was no declared winner as of yet because of millions of uncounted ballots that were cast in early voting.

After Biden won Wisconsin, he had a total of 248 electoral votes to Trump’s 214, leaving both shy of the 270 needed to secure immediate victories. While Biden delivered a speech saying he is “confident” of a win, Trump wasn’t ready to give up. His campaign said it would demand a recount of the state since the margin was less than 1 percentage point.

• Get the latest news on the election result at nationalpost.com

Trump’s campaign also said it is suing in Pennsylvania and Michigan to halt vote counts that have been trending toward Biden. In both states, the Trump campaign claims it hasn’t been given meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the process for opening and tabulating ballots as guaranteed under state law. Neither filing could be immediately confirmed.

Trump holds a lead in Pennsylvania but hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots remain to be counted which are expected to push the race to Biden’s advantage. The president’s lead in Michigan evaporated earlier on Wednesday to give Biden a narrow edge. It will be almost impossible for Trump to win the election if he does not win Pennsylvania.

Trump needs at least four of the following states to pass 270 electoral votes: Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He won them all in 2016. If Biden wins any two of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, he’ll win.

This liveblog has now ended, but you can relive how election night — and much of Day 2 — unfolded below. If it isn’t displaying, click this link to access it on the National Post website.

— National Post, with files from Bloomberg, Reuters and The Canadian Press

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National Post columnists John Ivison and Kevin Carmichael discuss the divide U.S. electorate with Larysa Harapyn, and its long-lasting impacts on the Canadian economy. Watch the video below.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s campaign has dismissed President Donald Trump’s remarks as “outrageous” and “incorrect,” after the U.S. president claimed a premature victory to the 2020 election, despite millions of votes still left uncounted.

• Trump vs. Biden — who will be the next president? Get live updates

In a middle of the night speech from the White House, Trump falsely claimed that he won the U.S. election and threatened to ask the Supreme Court to intervene to stop what he called the disenfranchisement of Republican voters, without offering evidence that any wrongdoing had occurred.

“Frankly, we did win this election,” he said, noting that he held a lead in a number of states whose results were still uncertain. “So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump meant, as states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and others are counting legally cast votes. It is also routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day.

The unusually large number of absentee ballots cast due to the coronavirus pandemic meant counting wasn’t complete. The unresolved outcome risks stoking tensions further in the U.S., beset by an economic downturn and the raging virus.

As of 6 a.m. New York time Wednesday, Biden holds a narrow lead with 224 electoral votes while Trump had 213, leaving both shy of the 270 needed to secure immediate victories.

Trump’s comments immediately drew criticism from Biden’s campaign and at least one of the president’s allies. Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement that Trump’s remarks were “outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect” and “a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.”

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a close Trump ally, told ABC News he disagreed with Trump’s remarks about the election results and said, “There’s just no basis to make that argument tonight. There just isn’t.”

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, speaking at 12:30 in the morning Eastern Time on Wednesday, said it was going to take time to figure out the winner of the presidential race, but that the Democrats are feeling good about Tuesday night’s results.

“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won the election, that’s the decision of the American people,” he said.

The former vice-president, coming out to cheers and honking car horns, made his remarks as the race for president remained tight, with multiple networks and newswires holding off on declaring several key battleground states for either candidate.

In the lead-up to election day, there was much speculation that Trump would prematurely declare victory. The president remained quiet online for much of Tuesday, until coming to life just after Biden spoke, saying he, too, would soon speak.

Trump tweeted, without providing any evidence, that, “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter subsequently curtailed the spread of his tweet, telling readers that it contained disputed information.

We placed a warning on a Tweet from @realDonaldTrump for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy. More here: https://t.co/k6OkjNXEAm

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 4, 2020

The road to victory for Biden, as of early Wednesday, remained unclear. Ditto for Trump, although there were very few surprises when compared to results from 2016. No states, as of the time Biden took to the mic, had switched hands from 2016.

Both men still have paths to victory, though it appears that Biden has more options than Trump does. Trump needs at least four of the following states to pass 270 electoral votes: Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He won them all in 2016.

If Biden wins any two of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, he’ll win.

There were few surprises among states where the AP announced winners, with Republican and Democratic states generally falling in line, despite expectations for several upsets. The only other Electoral College vote to flip so far, besides in Arizona, came from a congressional district in Nebraska that backed Biden after favoring Trump in 2016.

Trump won Florida, a crucial prize in the race to the White House that closed off Biden’s hopes for an early knockout in the election. The president also won Texas, which Democrats had hoped might turn blue and entirely reshape the electoral map.

Trump significantly outperformed in one of Florida’s most populous counties, Miami-Dade. After losing the county four years ago by 29 points, he lost by less than 8 to Biden.

The county is diverse, with large Cuban and Venezuelan populations Trump has courted by raising diplomatic and economic pressure on the socialist regimes in those countries. He accused Biden of sharing the regimes’ politics.

Trump won Ohio and Biden won Minnesota, states that each candidate had sought to take from the other but wound up politically unchanged from 2016.

Ohio was the first of several battleground states decided in the race.

Biden carried Minnesota even though Trump held multiple campaign rallies in a state he narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Biden’s strength in the urban parts of the state kept it in the Democratic column.

Trump holds small leads in North Carolina and Georgia, though there are votes outstanding in each. Trump won both states in 2016.

In addition, Biden won Nebraska’s second congressional district, Minnesota, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Delaware, District of Columbia and New Hampshire, according to the AP.

Trump won Nebraska’s other four Electoral College votes, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Missouri.

Nebraska is one of only two states, with Maine, that award an Electoral College vote to the winner of each congressional district. Trump won two districts and Biden won one. Trump won the state overall, giving him Nebraska’s two remaining Electoral College votes.

Maine’s second congressional district remained too close to call.

Even if Democrats yet claim the White House, a “blue wave” they hoped would also give them control of both chambers of Congress may fall short.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, was re-elected, the AP said. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, was re-elected despite a Democratic challenger who badly out-raised him, and Senator Doug Jones, an Alabama Democrat, was defeated by Republican Tommy Tuberville.

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, defeated Senator Cory Gardner, giving his party one pickup. Other contested Senate seats remain undecided.

Biden is winning over Latino and African-American voters in numbers similar to Clinton four years ago, and is narrowing Trump’s margin among White voters, early exit polls from the AP show.

Trump had a 12-point lead among White voters in Tuesday’s election. Network exit polls four years ago showed him with a 20-point advantage among those voters. Biden led among Latino voters 30 points, Black voters by 82 points, and women by 12 points.

In several key states, waits to process mail-in ballots — which are expected to lean Democrat — will mean delays in knowing the true winners, and could perhaps see victories materialize for Democrats in unexpected states.

“It ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted,” Biden told supporters in Delaware. “Keep the faith guys, we’re gonna win this.”