Canadian News

Did they forgive him, or did they believe him?

Nearly 70 million Americans cast their votes for U.S. President Donald Trump, despite Democrats’ harsh criticisms of his handling of the pandemic. “A disaster” and “all these idiots” is how he described infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health officials. “Don’t be afraid of COVID,” he urged Americans.

Should Joe Biden emerge victorious, his challenge will be convincing millions of Americans that COVID-19 is, in fact, a big deal.

With only four per cent of the world’s population, the U.S. has accounted for 20 per cent of global deaths due to the pandemic. The virus rages across the American nation — more than 100,000 new confirmed cases Wednesday; an average of nearly 900 deaths daily over the last week. The U.S. has suffered 235,000 deaths. Modelling is forecasting 100,000 or more as Americans move into the cold months of winter.

“We’re not in a good place,” Fauci said on a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) podcast last week.

From the beginning of the pandemic, Trump minimized the threat, federal scientists and mask-wearing, removing his own mask on a White House balcony after COVID-19 put him in hospital.

One fallout? Psychological denial has become a genuine public health crisis in the U.S., physician and novelist Dr. Austin Ratner, and Nisarg Gandhi of Saint Barnabas Medicine Center in Livingston, NJ argue in The Lancet.

“Never before have so many citizens had so much access to information and simultaneously protested public health recommendations with such full-throated denial of the medical facts,” they write in their case for engaging psychoanalysts to help treat “mass denial and mass non-adherence” to medical advice.

• Surging COVID-19 cases were expected to hurt Trump's chances in key states, but the results have been mixed
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Some 66 per cent of Republicans believe the pandemic has been overblown and made into a bigger deal than it really is, compared to 15 per cent of Democrats and 39 per cent of Americans overall, according to a Pew Research Center poll released last month.

Canadians shouldn’t be smug. We’re not as polarized but we’re becoming more so, says University of Alberta professor of health law and policy Timothy Caulfield. Nearly one in four Canadians think the threat of COVID-19 has been exaggerated, including the need for physical distancing, finds an online poll by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies.

We’re less enamoured with public health officials than we used to be — “the perception that public health authorities have done a good job is starting to decrease,” Caulfield says. Fewer than half of us say we’ll get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as one becomes widely available, while a quarter believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon in a Chinese lab, according to a survey by Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication.

“Some of these things may seem absurd and it may be frustrating for those of us who are adhering to the science, but it’s clearly having an impact,” Caulfield said. People who are willing to buy into misinformation are less likely to adopt preventive practises like distancing and wearing a mask, and given that cases are going up, on both sides of the border, “it really demonstrates the incredible science communication challenge in front of us,” Caulfield says.

The election saw the highest voter turnout in the United States in more than a century. The pandemic absolutely made Trump vulnerable, said Harvard sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol. “It’s not easy to unseat an incumbent, an American president, if the economy is going well, no matter how controversial he is to large sections of the population.”

But red and blue America has experienced the pandemic in different ways. “Let’s take the first six months,” Skocpol says. Initially it was experienced as a New York City-area, northern California and west-coast-type crisis hitting mainly racially diverse, urbanized populations, Skocpol says. “A lot of the rest of the country could think, ‘well, that’s too bad, but it doesn’t have too much to do with me .’”

“And yet because the Trump administration refused to get on top of it early on, it ended up doing the most extreme kind of call for shutdowns, along with many governors, by March and April, and that caused a lot of people out there in the heartlands of America, particularly in the non-metropolitan areas that are the base of the increasingly radicalized American Republican party to think, ‘well, they’re telling me that all the businesses that my neighbours and I work in or go to have to close down and maybe go under, and it’s not even something that’s happening that much in my community.’”

The pandemic arrived slowly in medium cities and smaller towns, and when it did arrive, it often arrived in a nursing home or prison, or some other context that made it seem as if it the virus could somehow be contained, Skocpol says.

Trump’s base is middle-aged workers or middle-income men who may respond differently to the crisis than their wives or mothers, Skocpal adds. In the final month of the campaign, when Trump said “I beat this crazy, horrible, China virus,” that he was in “great shape,” that he was “immune” — when he made a show of whipping off his mask, it was like a “tribal political statement,” says psychiatrist Dr. Allen Frances, “a red badge of courage.”

The most interesting paradox? “The reddest and most loyal Trump states are precisely the ones that have the highest rates of new cases, death and suffering,” Frances, a professor emeritus and former chair of psychiatry at Duke University said in an email to National Post .

Issues like the economy, COVID and science denial are shaped by partisan predispositions, says Matthew Lebo, chair of Western University’s department of political science. For a Republican, “voting against the Republican would be to deny part of their identity,” so they rationalize being OK with everything else.

“To side with Joe Biden is to deny part of their identity. So, they reach for things that help rationalize that, such as believing Donald Trump if he says there’s going to be a vaccine next month, or that this really isn’t affecting anybody …. Or we can’t shut everything down.”

The coming months are scary to think about, Lebo says. Should Trump lose, “he’s still going to be in charge for two-and-a-half months. Especially with COVID raging worse than ever, it could be the worst two-and-a-half months of his presidency, and his worst behaviour of his presidency. There’s nothing at all reining him in anymore.”

The pandemic’s surge in the U.S. will keep the border closed that much longer and will probably be a source of infections for people crossing the border for necessary reasons, Lebo says. “The numbers are horrible.”

A fair number of Trump’s supporters probably do know the virus is dangerous, Skocpol says. But Trump is a showman, “a seller of hopes and dreams. And what he was doing was tapping into the yearning of a lot of his core followers to get on with it — to get out of the house. To stop cowering before this virus. To get the economy going again.”

It’s not going to take very much to improve upon Trump’s handling of the pandemic, she says. Biden has promised widespread and free testing, ramped up contact tracing, emergency paid leave for those exposed to or sick with the virus, support to workers, families and businesses. Skocpal, a self-described liberal, is confident Biden can build cooperation across all levels of American government to deal with the COVID crisis and get vaccines distributed when they become available.

Biden needs to make his health messages bipartisan, Lebo, of Western University, says. “He needs to stand up to Democrats and Republicans and say, ‘this is what the science says. Put your mask on.’ That would be a great start.”

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

The legal plan was no secret. It was clear all along.

If U.S. President Donald Trump could not claim the presidency instantly on Election Night, he would litigate it over the following weeks, nurturing state and federal lawsuits into a Supreme Court final showdown. Those were the options, as he laid them out. His victory would be clear, or his defeat would be fake, and it would mean Democrats had stolen the presidency through a massive conspiracy of voter fraud.

Trump had already declined to commit to orderly transition, and in the final campaign days he vowed to “go in with lawyers” if it seemed like he lost. He intended to win, as he said at a Pennsylvania rally last week, either on Election Day Tuesday “or, thank you very much Supreme Court, shortly thereafter.”

So it came to pass on Friday, as vote count totals in Pennsylvania and Georgia tilted ever more blue and, even with some ballots uncounted and official tallies several days off, it appeared Democratic former Vice-President Joe Biden was winning.

Trump’s campaign was still claiming eventual victory on Friday morning, and notably it was the lawyer, not the manager, who issued the statement. General counsel Matt Morgan said the election is not over. He said volunteer Trump observers of ballot counting were denied meaningful access in Pennsylvania, and ballots were “improperly harvested” in Georgia, where state officials have announced a recount.

Trump is also seeking a recount in Wisconsin, according to a statement from campaign manager Bill Stepien, due to the close vote, but also “reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results.”

“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump said on Twitter on Thursday, cryptically, possibly referring to his campaign’s failed petition that day in a Philadelphia federal court to stop vote counting in Philadelphia, where the vote skews Democrat.

• U.S. Supreme Court may not have final say in presidential election, despite Trump threat
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State Republicans in the Democrat-led city had claimed election officials were not respecting a ruling from a state appeals court earlier in the day that ordered access for observers to within six feet of the poll counting. The federal judge seemed “exasperated” according to an Associated Press report, and said 60 observers for each party in the city’s convention centre ought to be able to comply with the new rules.

“Really, can’t we be responsible adults here and reach an agreement?” said the judge. “The whole thing could be moot.”

It was not the only place Trump lawyers sought orders to stop counting votes. In Michigan, the Trump campaign also asked a judge to stop counting absentee ballots on the grounds that observers were wrongly excluded from the review process. A judge denied it in a televised hearing, in part because the votes were already counted.

Referring to these cases and others, Trump set out the broad strokes of his legal grievance in a White House address Thursday night, which several networks cut off, when he made unsubstantiated claims that “illegal” votes had “rigged” the vote for Biden.

It was a legal plan that aimed for the Supreme Court, to which Trump recently appointed Amy Coney Barrett, whose hasty Senate confirmation gave Republicans a stronger majority of support on the top court.

“Ultimately I get the feeling judges are going to have to rule,” Trump said from the White House Thursday night. “There’s tremendous litigation going on and this is a case where they’re trying to steal an election, they’re trying to rig an election.”

Democrats took a combative tone to the suggestion.

“The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House,” said Biden campaign manager Andrew Bates in a Friday morning statement.

Legal disputes in the U.S. do not typically go directly to the Supreme Court, so there was talk of litigation in lower courts, which could be appealed up, such as in Nevada over reports of votes from dead people or people who had not lived in the state for at least a month.

The Trump campaign also had a lawsuit dismissed Thursday in Georgia, over 53 absentee ballots in Chatham County around Savannah, and whether they were received on time. Two observer witnesses for the Trump campaign said they had seen ballots being moved late, but officials testified all were properly time-stamped and had arrived before the deadline.

But there is another way into the Supreme Court, rather than from the bottom up. There is an existing case on the issue of mail-in ballots and their potential exclusion from the count, so the legal road is already paved.

The morning after the election the Trump campaign filed a motion to intervene in this existing case from Pennsylvania.

Prepared by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, the motion raises the concern that the recent “unconstitutional expansion” of mail voting could cause uncertainty about vote results.

The Supreme Court last week declined to hear the state Republican party’s challenge of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that left in place a three-day extension to count mail-in ballots, provided they were mailed before Election Day.

The Supreme Court declined to hear an expedited appeal. Justice Samuel Alito wrote, however, that the petition remains before the court, and that by denying an expedited hearing, they were not denying the request to segregate ballots received after election day, so they could be invalidated if the Supreme Court’s review ever became necessary, and the lower ruling overturned.

“That time has come. Given last night’s results, the vote in Pennsylvania may well determine the next President of the United States. And this Court, not the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, should have the final say on the relevant and dispositive legal questions” the Trump campaign petition reads.

No decision has been made, nor has the Supreme Court indicated when to expect one, as it might have other things to consider.

But it would not be unfamiliar territory for the Supreme Court, whose ruling after the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore stopped a recount in Florida and handed victory to Bush.

OTTAWA  – Ending COVID-19’s assault on Canada will require an effective vaccine and the government has already decided who will get it first and is looking to set up a massive logistics operation to deliver it across the country.

Earlier this week, the arm’s length National Advisory Committee on Immunization recommended elderly people, specifically those over 70, be first in line for the vaccine, followed by health care professionals and then essential workers like police, firefighters and grocery store employees.

It also suggests making sure the vaccine is available early to people in close quarter facilities, like meat-packing facilities, prisons and homeless shelters where the virus has been able to spread quickly.

In a statement this week, Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said she was confident that Canadians will understand that some people have to be at the front of the line.

“Throughout this pandemic, we have seen people come together to protect those most at risk,” she said. “We know Canadians will understand the need to prioritize some groups during the early weeks of COVID-19 vaccine roll-out until there is enough vaccine for everyone who wants it.”

The advisory committee also recommended the government take into account how quickly and where the virus is spreading when the vaccines become available and whether some vaccine candidates may be more effective in certain populations.

Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious disease specialist in Hamilton, Ont., said given their mortality rates to the virus, putting the elderly first makes sense.

“If you’re gonna put bang for the buck, for the people that are gonna deal with the brunt of the disease that need an intervention now, it’s going to be that,” he said.

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He said vaccinating everyone in long-term care homes for example won’t solve the problem, but it will be a major benefit to the people living there.

“Anything is better than nothing and if you roll it out correctly, even a small supply can have very profound implications for a locked-off population,” he said.

The advisory committee also recommends considering potentially targeting people with specific conditions, like obesity and heart disease, for early vaccination, but says there is still a need for more evidence before settling on a policy like that.

Chagla said they know that older, obese people often do poorly with the virus, but it is not universal.

“We still don’t know why one 50-year-old who’s obese goes to the ICU and the other 50 year old doesn’t,” he said.

He said one thing that could be worth considering as a vaccine rolls out is targeting people that have been identified as potential superspreaders. He said early research has shown most infected people spread the virus in a limited fashion, while others spread it aggressively, so called superspreaders.

He said prioritizing those people might do a lot to bring down overall cases.

“if you prioritize that group, even though it seems counterintuitive, because they’re the healthiest? Would you get a significant amount more of community control.”

Through one-off deals and the government involvement in the COVAX facility, an international partnership, Canada potentially has access to a dozen vaccine candidates, but no vaccine has so far cleared clinical trials.

The logistical challenge of shipping millions of doses of vaccine are also on the government’s mind and companies have until Monday to respond to a tender for the project with the government planning to award a contract before the end of the month.

Monday’s deadline is for companies to indicate how they will meet the government’s demands, with further negotiations on price to come if the firms can prove they can actually do the job.

The scale of the project is immense. Canada has purchased access to more than 300 million potential vaccine doses, to be sent to the provinces and territories beginning as soon as January and running well into 2022.

Some of the vaccine candidates may prove unsuccessful and others may arrive too late to be useful, but the government has to have a logistics plan that can handle any of the potential vaccines.

The rollout of the flu vaccine this month in Ontario has led to shortages as more people than normal seek a shot.

Some of the vaccines will be delivered to Canada, while others have to be picked up from pharmaceutical companies in Europe. The government wants the winning bidder to have warehouse space all over the country, enough to be able to quickly move the vaccine to places where it is needed.

The government said it is confident Canadians will be getting deliveries on the same timeline as our allies provided the vaccines meet Health Canada’s approval.

“Canada’s proactive approach to securing access to a diversity of COVID-19 vaccine candidates has put us in a strong position, with first deliveries on track to arrive during the beginning of 2021,” said Procurement Minister Anita Anand in a statement. “Our anticipated delivery schedules are in line with the EU, Japan, Australia, and other jurisdictions.”

All of the vaccine candidates have to be kept cold adding another layer of complexity to the process. Up to 20 million doses of one Pfizer’s vaccine candidate for example have to be kept below -80C, while the company is handling distribution of that vaccine the government is arranging regular deliveries of dry ice to keep it cold.

Another 56 million doses of vaccine will have to be kept frozen at around -20C and then an additional 200 million doses need to be kept between 2C and 8C. The government is looking for the winning bidder to be able to provide refrigerated warehouses and a detailed inventory tracking system to handle it all.

Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and an expert on health care logistics, said the challenge of distributing the COVID-19 vaccine will be unlike anything governments have had to deal with.

“It is like setting up Amazon Prime type of daily delivery capabilities nationwide, but not over a four-year planning horizon,” he said.

Proposal documents show the government is looking to have a contract with one entity to handle the full process, leaving the potential for companies to team up into consortiums.

A briefing for the project was attended by airlines like WestJet and Air Canada, shipping firms like FedEx and Purolator and pharmacies like Shoppers Drug Mart. The government wants whoever wins the bid to be ready to go by Dec. 15. and to have systems in place to track deliveries.

Yadav said it will be difficult for a single company to have the tools and expertise for the whole process and he suspects companies will work together.

“Those are the kinds of mixes and matches that need to happen and the combinations of how people will come together to offer the best solution.”

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

This past April, as rising COVID-19 cases forced a new sense of anxiety onto our plates, the second anniversary of the Toronto van attack retreated into an online memorial to prevent a mass gathering at the site of the deadly attack, even though the scene of this outdoor crime stretched over an agonizing two kilometres.

In an online broadcast, Toronto Mayor John Tory spoke of the city’s resilience after a rented van was driven with purpose into pedestrians along the busy stretch of Yonge Street. “We will not be broken,” Tory said. “Let us take inspiration, both from those we lost and from the heroes who responded to the tragedy, as we rise to the challenges of today.”

The loss from that spring day certainly still hangs heavy, as the trial for the man behind the wheel of the van finally begins on Tuesday, Nov. 10, as do the challenges.

Just as the online service was unavoidably inadequate because of its physical isolation — for there is no better way to mourn the dead than to cling to the living for comfort — physical distance will be a feature of the criminal trial as well.

The moment a decision by the Superior Court of Ontario’s chief justice limited the number of people in any physical courtroom in Toronto to just 10 due to COVID-19, it was clear the van attack trial could not possibly fit.

A trial is not an insignificant endeavour. It speaks to society’s desire for justice that such effort and expense is exerted to hold people accountable for crime. It would take 10 people just to run this show, by the time the court staff, lawyers, accused and guards are accounted for, let alone everyone else who has a huge stake in its outcome.

With 10 people killed and 16 seriously injured in the attack, there is an army of victims and victims’ family and friends who may want to witness the trial, to see the wheels of justice finally start turning. Many more lives were touched, including witnesses, people who rushed to help, and those who could have been among the dead.

And because the nation, and indeed many around the world, are watching this case — not only for its magnitude of pain but also its nexus to a peculiar brand of dangerous ideology — the need for space for reporters to be the eyes and ears of the public would require at least the full allotment of seats as well.

And so it was decided the trial will be held electronically

The judge, lawyers and other court officials will be connecting by Zoom video teleconferencing. The accused will be logged in on a video link from jail.

The hearings will not be publicly broadcast, but a live feed of it is open to members of the public at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, at 222 Bremner Ave., in rooms 718B and 716. Everyone must remain masked, pass a COVID-19 screening questionnaire and observe social distancing, the court said late Friday.

Over the course of weeks, perhaps as little as two but possibly three times that, events surrounding April 23, 2018, will be in sharp focus once again.

Alek Minassian, who turned 28 on Tuesday, of Richmond Hill, Ont., is the killer.

• ‘It was time that I stood up to the Chads and Stacys’: What the van-attack accused told Toronto police
• 'I’m a murdering piece of s—': Alek Minassian, charged with killing 10 in Toronto van attack, has pre-trial hearing

He killed 10 people that day as he sat behind the steering wheel of a large van he rented for the purpose of running into and over whomever he could. He tried to kill 16 more.

The judge knows it. His lawyers know it. His surviving victims and the families of those who did not make it home that day know it.

He knows it, too.

In a Toronto Police Service’s booking room shortly after his arrest, a staff sergeant asked Minassian if he suffers from any illnesses.

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m a murdering piece of shit.”

That same night, during an almost four-and-a-half-hour interrogation, Minassian told Det. Rob Thomas he planned and committed the van attack as part of an “incel rebellion.”

Incel, short for involuntary celibate, is a violent ideology held by some men who feel dangerously aggrieved by their inability to attract sexual interest from women.

Beyond just anger and misogyny, however, Minassian detailed for police the structured worldview of incels and their aim of turning society upside down, so incels like him will be at the top, lording over sexually successful men and forcing attractive women into sex.

This bizarre, comic book-like narrative was what led to the van attack, he said. How did he feel, Thomas asked Minassian, knowing he just killed all these people.

“I feel like I accomplished my mission,” he replied.

So cold, so chilling. No wonder Minassian was keen not to face a jury, allowing for a rare murder trial before a judge alone.

The fact the public knows all this before his trial is also unusual.

Typically, material like the interrogation and booking video are not published before formally presented in open court at trial, but with no jury assessing the evidence, Justice Anne Molloy agreed to a legal challenge last year, mounted by Postmedia and joined by other news organizations, to allow release of the interrogation, and much of the other pre-trial material, because of its compelling public importance .

At a hearing in March, Minassian formally admitted he rented and drove a van into pedestrians and that he planned it as an attack.

Since there is no doubt he did it, the trial will focus on his mental health and his criminal responsibility.

In pretrial materials, Boris Bytensky, Minassian’s lead lawyer, said his client’s “state of mind at the relevant time and in the days, weeks and months leading up to April 23, 2018, are expected to be the central issues at trial.”

According to Section 16 of the Criminal Code of Canada, a person is not criminally responsible for a crime committed “while suffering from a mental disorder that rendered the person incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act or omission or of knowing that it was wrong.”

Video statements, personal and medical history, psychiatric assessments and testimony from physicians and those who know and interacted with Minassian over the years can all help the court decide what mental state Minassian was in that day.

His mother, in an unrelated media interview before the attack, said her son had Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. The extent of his condition and his detailed medical history are not yet known.

It is also still not certain if the incriminating booking video will be admissible as evidence for the judge to weigh when deciding his guilt. His defence lawyers argued in pre-trial hearings that it, and other items, should be inadmissible.

Molloy said she would rule on that at the end of the trial.

Because his identity and purpose are not in dispute, and since he was not charged with any terrorism offences despite the crimes being ideologically driven, it seems unlikely the online incel enablers that helped radicalize Minassian will be probed deeply.

Nor is there likely to be much eyewitness accounting from the scene.

Any victim impact statements from his many, many victims will also not be heard unless there is a finding of guilt.

These accounts would also be delivered online or in writing. The isolation and electronic distance of those words, however, could not possibly mute their heartbreak and horror.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

Canada’s veterans affairs minister Tweeted Friday that Whole Foods would be allowing its Canadian employees to wear poppies at work, after a move to initially stop the practice received criticism and prompted motions from politicians across the country.

Whole Foods had earlier said it had updated its dress-code policy last month, to specify a ban on anything other than the standard uniform, in an effort to clarify rules for employees.

“Whole Foods Market honours the men and women who have and continue to bravely serve their country,” a spokeswoman said. “With the exception of those items required by law, our dress code policy prohibits any additions to our standard uniform.”

However, after an online furore erupted against the move on Friday, it would appear the retailer has now backtracked.

“Just spoke to the Chief Operating Officer at Whole Foods,” said veterans affairs minister Lawrence MacAulay on Twitter. “Employees will now be able to wear their poppies at work.”

My statement on poppies at @WholeFoods: pic.twitter.com/oU2ATvSnto

— Lawrence MacAulay (@L_MacAulay) November 6, 2020

“The poppy represents those who’ve served, fought, and died for Canada, and it’s deeply personal to everyone here,” MacAulay said. “Glad to hear they’re changing course.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government had been in touch with the company, which has 14 locations across Canada.

“Whole Foods has made a silly mistake that I’m hoping they will correct very quickly,” he said.

Trudeau’s comments came as the House of Commons adopted a motion by unanimous consent, calling on all Canadian employers to allow their staff to wear poppies during Veterans Week, which began Thursday.

It’s disgusting and disgraceful that @WholeFoods has banned poppies for their employees. We will always stand with our veterans. Whole Foods should apologize and immediately reverse this decision. Everyone should wear a poppy #lestweforget.

— Doug Ford (@fordnation) November 6, 2020

On Twitter, Ontario Premier Doug Ford had called the grocery chain’s decision “disgusting and disgraceful,” and said Whole Foods should immediately apologize. Ford later indicated on Twitter that his government would introduce legislation to stop employers curbing their staff in such ways.

The premier’s office said details of the legislation are still being ironed out.

Whole Foods has a policy in its stores worldwide banning any “political messaging,” the Guardian reports, which has already been enforced earlier this year during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh also spoke out over the poppy move, saying, “It was wrong when they banned staff expressing support for Black Lives Matter and it’s wrong to ban the Poppy.”

Dear @WholeFoods You have no idea what you’ve done. You should fix this by end of day. God help your social media. #LestWeForget https://t.co/fNGoNGZUQq

— Mark Critch (@markcritch) November 6, 2020

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, who is a veteran, said that the past sacrifices of Canadian soldiers “provides the freedom for a U.S. grocery chain to be stupid today.”

The leader of the Bloc Quebecois, Yves-François Blanchet, said that while he disapproves of Whole Foods rule, he’ll express his disappointment by refusing to shop there, rather than legislating the problem away.

“I would rather have them let their employees wear it, but not to the point where I would make politics about it,” he said.

It was wrong when they banned staff expressing support for Black Lives Matter and it’s wrong to ban the Poppy.

Canadians shouldn't lose the right to honour the sacrifices of veterans when they go to work.https://t.co/3hEfXgASwS

— Jagmeet Singh (@theJagmeetSingh) November 6, 2020

 

A federal lawsuit filed in Boston on July 20 alleges that the supermarket chain disciplined, intimidated and retaliated against workers who wore Black Lives Matter face coverings earlier this year.

According to that lawsuit, store managers cited the company dress code, which prohibits slogans or logos not affiliated with the company, as the reason for prohibiting Black Lives Matter messages.

With files from The Canadian Press

This past April, as rising COVID-19 cases forced a new sense of anxiety onto our plates, the second anniversary of the Toronto van attack retreated into an online memorial to prevent a mass gathering at the site of the deadly attack, even though the scene of this outdoor crime stretched over an agonizing two kilometres.

In an online broadcast, Toronto Mayor John Tory spoke of the city’s resilience after a rented van was driven with purpose into pedestrians along the busy stretch of Yonge Street. “We will not be broken,” Tory said. “Let us take inspiration, both from those we lost and from the heroes who responded to the tragedy, as we rise to the challenges of today.”

The loss from that spring day certainly still hangs heavy, as the trial for the man behind the wheel of the van finally begins on Tuesday, Nov. 10, as do the challenges.

Just as the online service was unavoidably inadequate because of its physical isolation — for there is no better way to mourn the dead than to cling to the living for comfort — physical distance will be a feature of the criminal trial as well.

The moment a decision by the Superior Court of Ontario’s chief justice limited the number of people in any physical courtroom in Toronto to just 10 due to COVID-19, it was clear the van attack trial could not possibly fit.

A trial is not an insignificant endeavour. It speaks to society’s desire for justice that such effort and expense is exerted to hold people accountable for crime. It would take 10 people just to run this show, by the time the court staff, lawyers, accused and guards are accounted for, let alone everyone else who has a huge stake in its outcome.

With 10 people killed and 16 seriously injured in the attack, there is an army of victims and victims’ family and friends who may want to witness the trial, to see the wheels of justice finally start turning. Many more lives were touched, including witnesses, people who rushed to help, and those who could have been among the dead.

And because the nation, and indeed many around the world, are watching this case — not only for its magnitude of pain but also its nexus to a peculiar brand of dangerous ideology — the need for space for reporters to be the eyes and ears of the public would require at least the full allotment of seats as well.

And so it was decided the trial will be held electronically

The exact mechanics of how it will work, and how the public might be able to monitor the hearing — when it is normally illegal to publicly broadcast criminal trials — have not fully been announced.

The judge, lawyers and other court officials will be connecting by Zoom video teleconferencing. The accused will be logged in on a video link from jail.

Over the course of weeks, perhaps as little as two but possibly twice that, events surrounding April 23, 2018, will be in sharp focus once again.

Alek Minassian,who turned 28 on Tuesday, of Richmond Hill, Ont., is the killer.

• ‘It was time that I stood up to the Chads and Stacys’: What the van-attack accused told Toronto police
• 'I’m a murdering piece of s—': Alek Minassian, charged with killing 10 in Toronto van attack, has pre-trial hearing

He killed 10 people that day as he sat behind the steering wheel of a large van he rented for the purpose of running into and over whomever he could. He tried to kill 16 more.

The judge knows it. His lawyers know it. His surviving victims and the families of those who did not make it home that day know it.

He knows it, too.

In a Toronto Police Service’s booking room shortly after his arrest, a staff sergeant asked Minassian if he suffers from any illnesses.

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m a murdering piece of shit.”

That same night, during an almost four-and-a-half-hour interrogation, Minassian told Det. Rob Thomas he planned and committed the van attack as part of an “incel rebellion.”

Incel, short for involuntary celibate, is a violent ideology held by some men who feel dangerously aggrieved by their inability to attract sexual interest from women.

Beyond just anger and misogyny, however, Minassian detailed for police the structured worldview of incels and their aim of turning society upside down, so incels like him will be at the top, lording over sexually successful men and forcing attractive women into sex.

This bizarre, comic book-like narrative was what led to the van attack, he said. How did he feel, Thomas asked Minassian, knowing he just killed all these people.

“I feel like I accomplished my mission,” he replied.

So cold, so chilling. No wonder Minassian was keen not to face a jury, allowing for a rare murder trial before a judge alone.

The fact the public knows all this before his trial is also unusual.

Typically, material like the interrogation and booking video are not published before formally presented in open court at trial, but with no jury assessing the evidence, Justice Anne Molloy agreed to a legal challenge last year, mounted by Postmedia and joined by other news organizations, to allow release of the interrogation, and much of the other pre-trial material, because of its compelling public importance .

At a hearing in March, Minassian formally admitted he rented and drove a van into pedestrians and that he planned it as an attack.

Since there is no doubt he did it, the trial will focus on his mental health and his criminal responsibility.

In pretrial materials, Boris Bytensky, Minassian’s lead lawyer, said his client’s “state of mind at the relevant time and in the days, weeks and months leading up to April 23, 2018, are expected to be the central issues at trial.”

According to Section 16 of the Criminal Code of Canada, a person is not criminally responsible for a crime committed “while suffering from a mental disorder that rendered the person incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act or omission or of knowing that it was wrong.”

Video statements, personal and medical history, psychiatric assessments and testimony from physicians and those who know and interacted with Minassian over the years can all help the court decide what mental state Minassian was in that day.

His mother, in an unrelated media interview before the attack, said her son had Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. The extent of his condition and his detailed medical history are not yet known.

It is also still not certain if the incriminating booking video will be admissible as evidence for the judge to weigh when deciding his guilt. His defence lawyers argued in pre-trial hearings that it, and other items, should be inadmissible.

Molloy said she would rule on that at the end of the trial.

Because his identity and purpose are not in dispute, and since he was not charged with any terrorism offences despite the crimes being ideologically driven, it seems unlikely the online incel enablers that helped radicalize Minassian will be probed deeply.

Nor is there likely to be much eyewitness accounting from the scene.

Any victim impact statements from his many, many victims will also not be heard unless there is a finding of guilt.

These accounts would also be delivered online or in writing. The isolation and electronic distance of those words, however, could not possibly mute their heartbreak and horror.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

The Canadian Forces is looking to set up a new propaganda arm to try to influence the behaviour of people in this country.

The proposal, revealed in documents uncovered by Postmedia, are an extension of a plan from the Chief of Defence Staff to ‘weaponize’ the military’s public affairs branch

Dave is joined by Ottawa Citizen military affairs reporter David Pugliese, who uncovered the story, to walk through what this organization would do, why they’re trying to influence Canadians’ behaviour, and what this could mean for the public perception of the forces.

Background reading:   Canadian military wants to establish new organization to use propaganda, other techniques to influence Canadians

Subscribe to 10/3 on your favourite podcast app.

#distro

The race to become the next U.S. president is drawing to a close, but there are still several swing states that haven’t counted all their ballots. In addition, plenty of other, non-critical states haven’t counted all their ballots either, such as California, which is projected to go Democrat but has only counted 77 per cent of votes.

Those that are outstanding, and key to a final decision, are the following. Here’s what’s happening in each:

Georgia

As the state counted votes, Donald Trump seemed to have been ahead. Even as Trump walked into a briefing room in the White House on Thursday to falsely declare the election was being stolen, his lead narrowed to just a few thousand votes.

By Friday morning, news organizations hadn’t called Georgia, but Biden had pulled ahead by some 1,000 votes, according to Reuters.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Georgia requires election results to be certified by the end of the second week after the election (that is to say, next Friday, Nov. 13).

A recount can be requested — by either side — if the margin between the two is 0.5 per cent. These requests must be made within two days following certification — so Nov. 15.

As for lawsuits: The Trump campaign and Georgia Republicans sued, claiming ballots were being stored improperly and were being accepted after the 7 p.m. deadline on election day. The case was dismissed for having no evidence, said Ballotpedia.

Pennsylvania

Yet another state that showed, as ballots began to be counted, a Donald Trump lead. But with 95 per cent of votes counted, per Reuters, Joe Biden had pulled ahead with a 9,000-vote advantage.

Results must be reported by the end of the second week — so next Friday. Pennsylvania does have an automatic recount built in, if the margin is 0.5 per cent. Voters may also request a recount by affidavit if they can swear to elections issues that affected the vote.

Now, this is the state where there have been piles of lawsuits, compiled by Ballotpedia.

Trump, or Republicans, are suing over: deadlines for proof of identification on mail-in ballots (this lawsuit is pending); to ensure Republican poll watchers were allowed to watch the count (parties agreed, the lawsuits was dismissed); to allow poll watchers to stand within six feet of counters, which matters given the pandemic (the court allowed this); and whether a court legally extended the deadline for mail-in ballot receipt (this is pending). Another pending lawsuit pertains to voter identification on voided ballots.

• U.S. election 2020: Biden overtakes Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania, edging closer to win
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Arizona

Joe Biden has held a lead here for a few days. As of Friday morning, his lead was about 43,000 votes, with roughly 90 per cent of ballots counted, according to Reuters.

While Fox News projected the state for Biden early, multiple other news outlets have not officially called it, including the New York Times. If Biden wins it, he’ll join just two other Democrats who won Arizona in the past 120 years — Bill Clinton and Harry Truman.

Results in Arizona must be certified by the third week after election day, said the National Conference of State Legislatures. Arizona holds automatic recounts if the margin is equal to or less than 0.1 per cent of all votes. Candidates may not request a recount.

The state also featured a viral — and false — fraud alert about ballots not being counted if voters used Sharpie pens. This was false, though two voters have filed a class-action lawsuit about it, said Ballotpedia.

Nevada

Joe Biden has long been leading in this state. It’s a small lead, around 11,000 votes, with 91 per cent of votes counted, says Reuters.

Votes must be certified by the fourth Tuesday after the election, although the count — called a canvass — must be in by 10 days after.

There is no automatic recount in Nevada, but candidates may request a recount three days after the statewide count is announced.

There are some lawsuits here, too: one involves attempting to stop the use of artificial intelligence to count up ballots. The courts said that was OK, said Ballotpedia.

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

Chestnut brown, large and smooth, the multipurpose morama bean holds promise for the future of food. Native to the arid savannas of southern Africa, it’s well-adapted to harsh conditions. Widely eaten there, its flavour is reminiscent of cashew nuts when roasted. Cooks work with it in various forms: Milled into powder for porridges and drinks, or boiled with maize meal.

“From a single bean, you can obtain milk. You can obtain oil. And you can grind the bean and obtain flour, which can be really useful for baking. The potential of this plant is really incredible,” explains Tiziana Ulian, senior research leader in Kew’s Natural Capital and Plant Health department. “(Its tubers) are full of water … which is really good for the species to be able to grow in very dry environments, like in southern Africa in the Kalahari Desert.”

The morama bean is one of nearly 100 plant species Ulian and her team of researchers pinpointed as holding potential for “future-proofing” global food systems. Part of Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020 report — a collaboration between 210 researchers in 42 countries — their paper, “Unlocking plant resources to support food security and promote sustainable agriculture,” was also published in the journal Plants, People, Planet .

Ninety per cent of the world’s energy intake comes from only 15 crops; and more than half the people on the planet (upwards of four billion) rely on maize, rice and wheat as staples, according to the report. “This is really a very scary idea,” says Ulian. “We are relying on just these 15 plants while the biodiversity there is really wide.”

Kew scientists and collaborators identified 7,039 edible plant species in their research. “We keep discovering new plants every year,” adds Ulian, “so there is the potential that this number can grow more and more.”

Just 417 of these are currently considered food crops, the researchers found, leaving thousands of “overlooked and underutilized plants.” Some of which may have been grown in the past, but have fallen out of favour, others which are known locally but not globally, and uncultivated plants people collect from the wild. They may be neglected, Ulian underscores, but they are integral to safeguarding food security and achieving greater crop diversity.

“We shouldn’t just focus on a small number of species,” she says. “Not just for conservation, but it will also help our health and our food security for future generations.”

Ulian, who’s based at the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) in rural Sussex, England, stresses the need for a joint political and economic effort to provide the possibility for further research into cultivating these plants for the future.

The MSB is a subterranean collection of more than 2.4 billion seeds — making it the world’s largest cache of seeds from wild plants. “We carry out the research to look at the germination requirements — how to propagate (them) — and how to unlock their use,” she says. “Our research efforts are into understanding the diversity of wild species out there that can feed the world.”

For their work on the morama bean, the MSB has been collecting seeds with the help of a collaborator in Botswana. They’re not solely looking into the germination requirements, which help you propagate the plant, Ulian stresses, but also investigating potential products you can obtain from the species. After they compiled the list of edible plants for their report, the researchers came up with the nearly 100 “future foods” — using their collective experience rather than an algorithm to select species from all over the world.

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They highlighted five of these roughly 100 edible plants for the report: the aforementioned morama bean; akkoub, which is eaten as a vegetable in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East — fried with olive oil and garlic, pickled, or folded into omelettes; fonio, a wild grass species that grows in West Africa, which “is a potential staple food” high in iron, calcium and several essential amino acids; pandanus, a drought-resistant coastal tree which grows from Hawaii to the Philippines, and produces fruit and leaves with a variety of uses; and chaya, a shrub with “highly nutritious” leaves and shoots native to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

Humanity faces a double challenge, Ulian emphasizes: food insecurity and obesity. “Future foods” need to be able to withstand climate change, but they also have to be nutritious. “When we talk about food security, it’s not only about quantity but also it’s the quality of the food,” she adds.

In their study, the researchers looked at the edible plants’ other uses: 70 per cent are also medicinal; nearly 60 per cent can be used for materials (e.g., in construction); and 40 per cent have environmental uses (e.g., enrich the soil).

The baobab, “an iconic, charismatic plant,” found in Madagascar, northwestern Australia and various parts of the African continent epitomizes the versatility researchers were looking for. The tall, “upside-down” trees provide shade, giving them immense social significance: “There is an emotional connection to the baobab.”

It also presents a multitude of medicinal, material and edible uses: The fruit and seeds are local foods; the white pulp treats fevers and diarrhea; and the bark is used to make clothes, paper and rope. The rich local traditions associated with these potential crops, Ulian stresses, should be recognized as we look to their future uses as global food.

“Biodiversity is essential to food security and nutrition. Not only at the local level but at the global level. And it’s important to get to know and use this biodiversity — this diversity of edible plants and edible fungi. But we also shouldn’t forget the wealth of traditional knowledge about their uses and practices,” says Ulian. “I think it’s important to have a holistic view. By using this diversity, we can have a sustainable agriculture and at the same time, help protect the environment to deliver its ecosystem services. Because it’s not just the food.”

Twitter has banned Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser, after he said on a podcast that he would put the heads of infectious-diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, and FBI director Christopher Wray, “on pikes” outside the White House.

On Thursday, Bannon posted an episode of his podcast ‘War Room Pandemic” which he co-hosts with Jack Maxey. During the podcast, he falsely claimed that Trump had won the election and suggested that the president fire Fauci and Wray during his would-be second term.

Bannon then suggested that if it were up to him, he would go “a step further” than what Trump would do.

“I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats,” he said.

“You either get with the program or you’re gone — time to stop playing games. Blow it all up, put (Trump aide) Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that’ll light them up, right.”

Maxey appeared to agree with Bannon’s statements, referencing yesterday’s anniversary of the “hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia.”

“These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabited, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia,” Maxey said. “These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.”

“That’s how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it,” Bannon replied. “The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war.”

Steve Bannon calls for Dr. Fauci and FBI Director Wray to be beheaded "as a warning to federal bureaucrats"@youtube prohibits "inciting others to commit violent acts against individuals"

https://t.co/OECKxxQSzX pic.twitter.com/zBHimpUZT5

— Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) November 5, 2020

The comments by Bannon come as he is in the middle of a federal criminal case; he is accused of defrauding donors to a nonprofit group dedicated to building a wall on the southern border of the United States. Bannon denies the allegations and has pleaded not guilty.

Twitter has since suspended the account linked to the podcast, for violating Twitter rules against glorification of violence, a spokesperson told Business Insider on Thursday. Youtube has also removed the video from its site for inciting violence, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

On Friday, Facebook stated that it had also removed the video from its platform. “We removed these videos for violating our policy against violence and incitement,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement to Business Insider.

Bannon defended his comments during a later Youtube broadcast, calling the statements a “metaphor.”

“Our Youtube video has been taken down,” he said. “It’s been taken down because of my comment today about Fauci and Wray getting fired and (how) what they should do afterwards is put their heads on pikes. That was obviously a metaphor.”

Bannon’s spokeswoman reiterated his defence to CNBC, adding that the former campaign adviser “did not, would not and has never called for violence of any kind.”

“Mr. Bannon’s commentary was clearly meant metaphorically. He previously played a clip of St. Thomas More’s trial and was making an allusion to this historical event in Tudor England for rhetorical purposes,” the spokeswoman said.

“Mr. Bannon has been openly critical of FBI Director Chris Wray for weeks and has called for his firing for his failure to investigate and address Hunter Biden’s hard drive and that has been in Director Wray’s possession since in December 2019,” she added.

“In addition, Mr. Bannon has supported comments from the White House calling for the immediate firing of Dr. Fauci.”

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.”

• Coinsquare executives resign in settlement with OSC over allegations of market manipulation
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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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• U.S. Supreme Court may not have final say in presidential election, despite Trump threat

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.

• After four years of turmoil under Donald Trump, election shows half of America's voters still back him
• U.S. Supreme Court may not have final say in presidential election, despite Trump threat

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.