Canadian News

OTTAWA – The federal government wants to impose strict conditions on airline companies that may receive a COVID-19 bailout, such as limiting executive bonuses and dividend payments and agreeing to annual climate-related financial disclosures.

Sunday, Transport Minister Marc Garneau announced in a statement that the federal government was developing an aid package for the airline industry to help it stay afloat after being devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of his announcement, Garneau promised Canadians that airlines would have to commit to reimbursing clients who have cancelled flights because of the pandemic.

He also said no aid would come if airlines wouldn’t promise to maintain important regional connections throughout the country, as well as continuing to purchase key goods and services from the Canadian aerospace industry.

“Before we spend one penny of taxpayer money on airlines, we will ensure Canadians get their refunds,” Garneau’s statement read. “We will ensure Canadians and regional communities retain air connections to the rest of Canada, and that Canadian air carriers maintain their status as key customers of Canada’s aerospace industry.”

But government sources say any future airline bailout will also include many limitations on what the money can or cannot be spent on. It will also include certain financial disclosure obligations during and after the negotiations.

More specifically, they say the government will pull a page out of the conditions laid out in the Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility (LEEFF), which is a heavily criticized short-term interest bearing loan program aimed at large Canadian employers.

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To be eligible for a LEEFF loan, companies must accept a list of conditions such as limiting dividends and executive pay and bonuses all the while committing to minimizing loss of employment, sustaining domestic business activities and providing annual climate-related financial disclosures.

“The same conditions that you find in the LEEFF will be included in any and all deals that will be negotiated,” one government source explained. They were granted anonymity so as to discuss details of upcoming negotiations freely.

Sources also explained that the government would demand aerospace companies open up their books to see “how bad things really are” and to ensure that the aid package is only “exactly what they need.”

“We want aid to be the smallest amount possible,” one source summarized.

“We are still feeling the scars from the bonuses paid out to former Bombardier CEO Alain Bellemare. The government very much remembers that decision, and we don’t want that happening again,” they continued.

That is referring to a series of extremely controversial decisions by the Montreal-based company to hike executive pay and bonuses over recent years all the while it laid of thousands of workers and received millions of dollars in public funds to support its struggling aerospace division.

For example, Bombardier awarded US$32.6 million to senior executives in 2016 — a 50 per cent increased compared with 2015 — at the same time it was receiving a $372.5-million loan from Ottawa to keep its CSeries and Global 7000 programs afloat.

Earlier this year, the company came under fire again for offering Bellemare a $17.5 million compensation package after he announced he was stepping down in March.

On Monday morning, Industry Minister Navdeep Bains opened the door to simply using the LEEFF program to aid airlines, airports and other crucial parts of the industry.

“We’ll look at different options (such as) the LEEFF program in terms of liquidity support,” Bains said, noting the industry was being “devastated” by the pandemic.

To date, only two firms have received LEEFF loans since the program came into effect in May. Critics have complained that it imposes too many operating restrictions and the interest rates are well above the average from private lenders.

Regardless of the shape it would take, an airline bailout would be the first targeted commercial aid promised by the Liberals since the beginning of the pandemic in March.

And the help can’t come soon enough, according to the airline industry.

Monday, Air Canada reported a loss if $685 million for the third quarter of the year, in addition to a net cash burn of $9 million per day.

The airline also admitted to considering closing 95 additional routes (on top of the 30 domestic routes already suspended indefinitely earlier this year) until Garneau’s announcement Sunday that an aid package was coming.

“(Monday’s) results reflect COVID-19’s unprecedented impact on our industry globally and on Air Canada in what has historically been our most productive and profitable quarter,” CEO Calin Rovinescu wrote in a statement.

Mike McNaney, president and CEO of the National Airlines Council of Canada with represents Air Canada, WestJet, Air Transat and Jazz Aviation, said he was “encouraged” by Garneau’s announcement.

“Airlines are struggling to remain viable because of the economic chaos created by COVID-19. All measures have been taken to reduce costs, and revenue has fallen beyond the means of even the most extreme cost cutting measures to address. The industry will not recover without strong federal leadership,” he said in a statement Sunday.

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

Canada may no longer have to worry about a U.S. president imposing tariffs on the flimsy pretext of national security but Joe Biden’s promise to impose a “carbon adjustment fee” has the Trudeau government scrambling to ensure that Canadian exporters are not hit by any new border taxes.

The president-elect’s trade agenda calls for increased American content provisions, a $400-billion Buy American procurement policy and a carbon adjustment tax to force countries exporting goods to the United States to meet climate and environmental obligations. “This adjustment would stop polluting countries from undermining our workers and manufacturers,” says Biden’s platform.

Under Barack Obama, Canada was successful in obtaining exemptions from Buy American policies. The Trudeau government will hope Biden offers Canada a similar deal.

On a carbon border adjustment, Justin Trudeau can point out Canada has an economy-wide price on carbon, which is something the Americans do not have.

Biden’s platform is silent on the subject of carbon pricing, instead focusing on a $2-trillion investment in infrastructure, electric vehicles, zero emission public transit and carbon-free power. Online news site Axios reported in August that, while Biden supports carbon pricing, he is unlikely to pursue the policy during the current recession.

The Administration may yet argue that its planned renewable energy subsidies work like an effective carbon price.

Veteran trade lawyer Lawrence Herman suggested that a border adjustment fee will not be a tier-one issue for the new Administration for a couple of years. Imposing it legally would require Congressional approval.

Biden could use the same Section 232 provision that Donald Trump leaned on to impose his tariffs but that would open the new president to charges of hypocrisy.

That all suggests that a carbon border adjustment is not imminent. But it may be inevitable.

Support for concerted efforts to incentivize laggard countries to introduce their own carbon pricing is gathering steam.

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The European Union Parliament supports the introduction of carbon border adjustment and its environment committee reported last month that a new tariff on energy intensive imports like steel, chemicals and fertilizer should be imposed in 2023.

Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, last month recommended the formation of “carbon customs unions” by countries that already have carbon pricing, as a way of introducing carbon adjustment fees while remaining compliant with World Trade Organization rules.

Gerald Butts, vice-chairman of Eurasia Group and Trudeau’s former principal secretary, said a global carbon price will emerge from the trade process, as countries prefer to keep their own revenues, rather than hand them over as tariffs.

The Trudeau government is aware that Canada’s energy industry is exposed.

The carbon intensity of a barrel of crude oil from the oilsands has fallen by nearly a third, and is set to fall further still, thanks to new technology. But the energy involved in turning the peanut butter-like bitumen into a more free-flowing product means oilsands oil still emits more carbon than the global average.

In particular, an estimate of upstream emissions by the journal Science suggested Canada’s oil output is more carbon intensive than U.S. oil, even if certain California wells produce higher per barrel emissions than the Canadian average.

It is possible that Canada could see the price of its product driven higher by tariffs, even before the Biden Administration follows through on the promise to cancel the presidential permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline. The prospect has Canadian officials rushing to take pre-emptive action to ensure that any carbon border adjustment is North America wide.

Herman said he is sanguine about the chance for Trudeau and Biden to agree on a common approach.

He said an adjustment tax would be aimed at manufactured imports competing with American domestic goods coming from countries like China. “It wouldn’t make sense to apply it to Alberta oil because it isn’t a manufactured product, it doesn’t compete with U.S. lighter crude and it is destined for export after refining in Houston. While admittedly there’s a greenhouse gas issue here, I think it can be finessed by the focus on manufactured goods,” he said.

The chances of that happening will be aided by the warm personal relationship between Justin Trudeau and Biden, established when the American was vice-president.

The prime minister said on Twitter that he talked to Biden on Monday. “We’ve worked with each other before — we’re ready to pick up on that work and tackle the challenges and opportunities facing our two countries, including climate change and COVID-19,” he said.

The decision to invite the then lame duck vice president to Ottawa for a state dinner during a December snowstorm in 2016 now looks positively inspired — though it looked less so at the time. Biden’s praise for Trudeau as a defender of the “international rules of the road” was a red rag to the incoming president, Donald Trump, a bull who travelled with his own china shop.

But Canada may have cause to be grateful for that friendship, as it asks for presidential indulgence.

“There are lots of good relations (with the Biden camp),” said Butts, who was in Trudeau’s office when the vice president came to the capital. “It’s incredible it was only four years ago. It feels like a century.”

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

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described promising vaccine results as a potential “light at the end of the tunnel,” Monday, but he also urged caution, because there are still several hurdles to mount before the vaccine is widely available.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced Monday the vaccine it was developing with BioNTech was showing strong results. In addition to being safe, the vaccine was proving to be more than 90 per cent effective in preventing people from getting sick with the virus.

The data has yet to be independently verified, but the trial included a total of 43,538 people across multiple countries and from a wide range of ethnicities.

Trudeau said the news was encouraging, but said Canadians can’t ease up yet and still have to limit their social contacts, wear a mask when social distancing isn’t impossible and take other steps to reduce spread of the virus.

“We hope to see vaccines landing in the early next year, but between now and then it is really important that we double down on our efforts,” he said. “We need to do our part. We need to stay strong and hang in there a few more months.”

He stressed the early results from the vaccine are positive, but until it is administered it can’t help people.

“If you catch COVID in the coming days or weeks a vaccine won’t help you.”

Dr. Zain Chagla, a professor of medicine at McMaster University and expert in infectious diseases said society will still have to wait for the peer-review of the company’s research and for more safety data, but if that holds up this could be the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

“If this is the real deal signal, this is one good tool in the chest, and definitely something that starts the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

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Canada bought access to 20 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, because the vaccine requires two doses to be effective, the early supply will be enough to inoculate roughly 10 million people, about a quarter of Canada’s 38 million people. When it announced the initial purchase in August, the government said it would be pursuing options to buy more than the initial 20 million, but those deals have not yet materialized.

The U.S. has ordered 100 million initial doses with options for another 500 million doses from the company as part of its large vaccine purchase. The company has said it can produce 50 million doses in 2020 and another 1.3 billion in 2021.

Canada has bought access to several vaccines and Trudeau said part of their strategy has always been to look for multiple options.

“Canada is one of the countries around the world with the very best portfolio of potential vaccines because we know that there is a certain amount of uncertainty as to which vaccines will land first,” he said.

Chagla said even if the other vaccine candidates aren’t successful, the 10 million doses from Pfizer would be a good start.

“There’s definitely a lot you could do with 10 million doses, even if it’s only a quarter of the population,” he said. “You can definitely at least reduce the risk of hospitalization and death for the most vulnerable. You can protect the people taking care of them and then you can try to make a dent in community transmission.”

Abacus Data released new polling on Monday as well, showing that hesitancy will be another one of the challenges for a vaccine roll out.

The firm surveyed 1,500 Canadians and found 33 per cent were eager to take a vaccine, while 42 per cent would do so eventually, but wanted to wait. A further 14 per cent say they would have to be convinced and 11 per cent say they won’t take the shot under any circumstances.

The vaccine news is coming as COVID-19 cases continue to surge across the country, with high case counts in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec. Hospitals in some parts of the country are starting to feel strained and deaths are continuing to mount.

Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is one of three that have already started providing evidence to Health Canada as part of the regulatory process. In a press release, the company said they hoped to have more data in late November and could submit information to regulators in the U.S. then.

The company’s vaccine has to be kept at temperatures below – 80 degrees Celsius and that will add to the complexity of its rollout should it be successful. The government has a tender underway for a logistics firm to manage the delivery and storage of vaccines.

Pfizer is set to handle delivery to provinces and territories in Canada, but the government is looking for a company to deliver large quantities of dry ice in order to keep the vaccines cold.

Chagla said that is one of the vaccine’s challenges.

“It’s not going to be an easy vaccine to roll out in pharmacies or family doctors’ offices,” he said.

All of the other potential candidates Canada has invested in have to be kept frozen or cool, but not at such low temperatures and they could be stored in commercial refrigerators and freezers.

Chagla said he hopes to see more progress on the other vaccine candidates in time, because the Pfizer vaccine will be especially difficult to roll out in the developing world.

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

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might quit politics if Democrats continue to be “hostile” towards progressive causes, she has said in an explosive New York Times interview .

On Saturday, the Bronx native offered her congratulations to U.S. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, but slammed Democrats for blaming progressives after the party showed poorly in many of the Senate and House races that accompanied the election.

“Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, (the party) been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive,” she said.

She admitted to the New York Times that she wasn’t even sure she was going to run for re-election this year, citing “stress,” “violence” and a “lack of support from her own party” as reasons for her reluctance.

Despite her initial hesitations, Ocasio-Cortez ran for and won second term in the House, handily defeating first-time Republican challenger John Cummings. But the odds of her staying put are still precarious, she asserted.

“I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy,” she said. “When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.”

Post-election, several Democrats pointed fingers at their progressive colleagues for the party’s poor performance. Representative Abigal Spanberger, who narrowly won her seat in a conservative-leaning district of Virginia, blamed colleagues for supporting the “defund the police.” Democrats must consider the election results a “failure” and change strategies, or else they will be “crushed” in future elections, she said.

But Ocasio-Cortez said the failings came from the Democrats’ lack of core campaign abilities — not from any policy goals pursued by those further to the left of the party.

“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she said. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”

It’s clear, she said, that progressive politics do not hurt candidates.

“Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat,” she said.

She accused moderate Democrats of being “sitting ducks” and attributed their losses to inadequately-funded campaigns.

“If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign,” she said.

The support for Donald Trump, she said, is an indicator of the unrest within the U.S., and Democrats need to commit to “anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country” to prevent more white voters from shifting to the other side. “There’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that,” she said.

“Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help,” she said. “And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.”

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It’s time for the party to stop viewing her and her progressive-minded colleagues as the enemy, she said.

“This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence,” she said.

Dale Hawerchuk, arguably the greatest player in Winnipeg Jets history, was the centrepiece of the National Hockey League team throughout the 1980s. He reconnected with fans after the new Jets relocated to town in 2011 and the relationship grew stronger in the ensuing years. There was an outpouring of support for him after he announced last fall that he was battling cancer and there were high hopes for his future when a picture circulated of him in April ringing the bell to signify he had completed his last chemotherapy treatment. But the disease returned in July and he lost his battle in August. Author Geoff Kirbyson spoke at length with Hawerchuk two years ago about his time with the Jets and, in this excerpt, about his crucial role in the 1987 Canada Cup. Broken Ribs & Popcorn is dedicated to him.

Whenever the phone rang at Dale Hawerchuk’s house in the summer of 1987, he picked it up on the first ring.

Like a few dozen other Canadian hockey players, he was hoping for one of the much-coveted invitations to Team Canada’s training camp that August.

Finally, the call came. Before the question was even out of coach Mike Keenan’s mouth, Hawerchuk answered, “yes!”

“I really wanted to make that team. In ’84, I didn’t even get invited to training camp. Going to training camp in ’87 was really important to me,” Hawerchuk said.

With Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and Mario Lemieux written in stone at centre, expectations weren’t terribly high for the Winnipeg Jets centre but he had a good start to camp and raised a few eyebrows among those making the final selections.

“I remember Pat Burns coming up to me and saying, ‘we didn’t have you pencilled in here but if you keep going like this, we can’t keep you off the team.’ That was an important step for me. I wanted to be around those guys to see what made them all tick,” he said.

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Team Canada assistant coach Tom Watt, his first head coach in the pros with the Jets in 1981-82, was in his corner. Watt was quick to acknowledge that with so much skill down the middle, it was going to be tough to make the team as a centre.

“Somebody had to play on the wing,” Watt said.

When the final roster was announced, Hawerchuk’s name was there. So was Doug Gilmour’s of the St. Louis Blues. Detroit’s Steve Yzerman’s was not.

“I think it was really amazing for Hawerchuk and Gilmour to make the team as wingers. We had so many great centres. Yzerman was very critical of Keenan because he got cut from the team. I was there. He was tried on the wing and didn’t adjust,” Watt said.

As the tournament wore on, Hawerchuk’s ice time increased steadily.

With time winding down in the deciding Game 3 of the final against the Soviet Union, he was sent out with Gretzky, Lemieux, Larry Murphy and Paul Coffey for a face-off to Grant Fuhr’s left. The game was tied 5-5.

Hawerchuk, who had a goal and assist thus far on the evening, expected one of the other two centres to take the draw. After all, that’s where they made the team, right?

Gretzky looked at him and said, “nope, I’m not taking it.”

Lemieux begged off saying as a right-handed shot, this was his weaker side. It was Hawerchuk’s face-off.

“I told Mario, I’m tying him up,” he said.

Across from him was Vyacheslav Bykov, a strong face-off man and a mainstay on the Red Army team back home. He was also one of the Soviets’ leading scorers with two goals and nine assists in the tournament.

The linesman dropped the puck and Hawerchuk got his stick underneath Bykov’s and nudged the puck towards Lemieux, who was cutting across to the left boards. He then reached out with his left hand to poke it past the pinching Igor Kravchuk.

Lemieux quickly passed the puck up to Gretzky, who was darting down the left side. Murphy joined the rush on the right side, creating a three-on-one. Gretzky dropped the puck to Lemieux who glided in and ripped a wrist shot — true to the scouting report — high to the glove side of Sergei Mylnikov, who was off balance after the puck went past him and had to catch himself on his crossbar.

Hawerchuk was the first to join Gretzky and Lemieux in the celebration, leaving his feet to jump on the two of them behind the Soviet net.

Bykov was perhaps the one Soviet who could have gotten back to break it up but Hawerchuk took care of that near centre, giving him a little tug at the left hip with his stick. Bykov went down theatrically like he’d been shot by a sniper in the stands.

“It was kind of normal stuff at the time. You could always hook a guy and break his stride,” Hawerchuk said. “When I watch the video, he just tried to dive at the end in the hopes of getting a penalty. By the time he dove, I was like 15 feet away from him.”

Fuhr (mostly) agrees.

“It was a little more than a tug. You could do that back then,” he said.

Indeed, Hawerchuk said the entire series was “vicious” with the amount of hooking and slashing that took place.

“You always had to turn your body to protect yourself. There was way worse stuff going on. I wasn’t even thinking about a penalty at all. It was just a little tug and then he gave it a goofy dive afterwards.”

Watt said Hawerchuk tugged Bykov just enough that he couldn’t get back in the play.

“It was pretty quick. It wasn’t flagrant but it was enough to spin him around. It wasn’t like he knocked him down or tripped him. It was a pretty quick little move and it worked. A little larceny goes a long way,” he said.

Indeed, Hawerchuk was named the game’s most valuable player.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated president-elect Joe Biden on his win in the U.S. presidential election Saturday, as the Associated Press and CNN declares him the winner.

“Our two countries are close friends, partners, and allies,” Trudeau tweeted in a message to Biden and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris. “We share a relationship that’s unique on the world stage. I’m really looking forward to working together and building on that with you both.”

Congratulations, @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris. Our two countries are close friends, partners, and allies. We share a relationship that’s unique on the world stage. I’m really looking forward to working together and building on that with you both.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) November 7, 2020

Federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole also congratulated the Democrats on their win, tweeting “Canada’s Conservatives will always work with the U.S. to advance our common values and close economic ties.”

Biden’s victory came after the Associated Press, CNN and NBC showed him winning Pennsylvania and gaining more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to secure the presidency. Trump sought to undermine the outcome, baselessly accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election and claiming victory before the race was called.

Harris, 56, becomes the first Black and Indian-American woman to serve as vice president, a glimpse at a coming generational shift in the party.

Biden, 77, will become the oldest president-elect in U.S. history and the first to oust a sitting commander-in-chief after one term since Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992.

A Biden presidency will mean an end to nearly four years of Canada’s government having to walk on eggshells to navigate around an unpredictable U.S. president who posed a primordial threat to the Canadian economy even before he took control of the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2017.

Congratulations to @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris. Canada and the U.S. have a historic alliance. Canada’s Conservatives will always work with the U.S. to advance our common values and close economic ties. ???????? ????????

— Erin O'Toole (@erinotoole) November 7, 2020

Trump repeatedly threatened to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement before and after becoming president and Canada, along with Mexico, managed to negotiate a replacement deal that went into effect this past summer.

But not before Trump insulted Canadian farmers, Trudeau himself, and the country’s Second World War legacy by imposing punitive steel and aluminum tariffs using a section of U.S. trade law that deemed the country a national-security threat.

Trudeau and his cabinet took that personally, and the Prime Minister felt Trump’s wrath directly in June 2018 when the president called him “very dishonest and weak” on Twitter after the G7 leaders’ summit in Charlevoix, Que.

With files from Bloomberg and The Canadian Press

Even for Earl Long, the colourful Louisiana governor of the 1940s and 1950s, it was a particularly memorable quote.

“When I die,” said the politician known for his affair with a stripper named Blaze, “I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in politics.”

Long’s quip might have applied equally to that era’s politics in Chicago , where the storied Democratic machine would troll cemeteries for the names of dead people it could impersonate as voters.

Fast forward a few decades to 2000, and the mechanics of democracy in the United States were again proving messy. The presidential election that year came down to disputes over “hanging chads” on ballots and a recount bid that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

And then there is 2020, when President Donald Trump began predicting voter fraud months ago, and has only cranked up the volume on his allegations of a stolen election since the polls closed.

Experts say there’s little evidence to back up Trump’s dramatic charges, and studies show that voter fraud generally has been a relative non-issue in recent decades, despite that swashbuckling past.

But for a country fond of calling itself the world’s greatest democracy, the actual nuts and bolts of electing candidates seem to generate controversy remarkably often, a contrast to the calm, if rather dull, apparatus of voting in Canada.

“I can imagine it looking impossible to understand for people outside of the United States — ‘What the heck is going on down there?’ ” said Lorraine Minnite, a public policy professor at Rutgers University and author of 2010’s The Myth of Voter Fraud .

“With the kind of system that we have, the closer the elections are, there is more incentive to fight on the margins because it’s winner take all.”

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In a sign of that contentiousness, and of America’s admirable political transparency, many jurisdictions actually allow TV crews to record officials tallying votes or have web cams broadcasting the scene. The resulting images of staff bent over stacks of ballots, often while protesters demonstrate nearby, have become an indelible part of this race.

And the process is getting more tumultuous, says John Fortier, director of governmental studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The volume of legal wrangling over elections has skyrocketed since the 2000 dispute between George W. Bush and Al Gore over presidential election results in Florida, he said.

“And this year is setting more records,” said Fortier, who believes the Bush-Gore conflict “drew back the curtains” on intricacies of the system and inspired others to use the courts for electoral fights.

The scrappiness may not denote actual impropriety on a significant scale, but it does underscore a unique aspect of national elections in the U.S.

Rather than being administered by a central agency, they’re run by individual states (and the District of Columbia) — under dozens of different sets of rules and with varying degrees of competency.

“We are not running an election this year, we are running 51 elections,” said Fortier. “It’s a complicated, diverse system and that lends itself to these battles continuing.”

In contrast to this country — where the arm’s-length, non-partisan Elections Canada runs federal votes — that state-level electoral administration is overseen by politicians.

“Election law is effectively partisan in the United States,” said Minnite. “There’s no umpire. It’s a game between two teams … and whoever is the most powerful team gets to write the rules that year.”

Some of the variances between states, like the recent decision by many to send mail-in ballots to all voters, or accept those votes if they’re postmarked by election day and arrive later, are the focus of dispute in this election.

One or more of those 2020 legal donnybrooks could become a landmark case. For now, though, the epic fight in this modern era of election litigation is “Bush v. Gore,” as it’s known simply.

Wrangling over how votes were counted in the tight Florida race for president culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that halted a recount involving 66,000 ballots that had not gone through counting machines. The decision made Bush president.

Legal battles ensued later over voter measures that some Republican states introduced. Those governments touted them as a way to curb the number of people voting illegally, while civil rights groups argued they were designed to suppress the franchise of minorities — people more likely to vote Democrat.

Then, even before the 2016 election, Trump began claiming the vote was somehow “rigged.” He continued complaining after he won, suggesting Hillary Clinton’s advantage in the popular vote was due to illegal immigrants and other unqualified people voting for the Democrats.

He even set up an “election integrity” commission , though it was disbanded without issuing a report.

The voting friction continued with America’s 2018 mid-term elections.

In one case that actually led to the redo of an election for a U.S. House of Representatives seat, a Republican operative had voters request absentee ballots, then made sure they marked them for his candidate.

In Georgia, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams alleged there had been widespread suppression of voting, under an election department headed by her rival for the governor’s office. In Florida, now Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican, accused “liberal” elections officials in the state’s Broward county of padding Democratic votes in two close races.

Yet studies to date have consistently found little sign of widespread voter fraud. A lengthy review by the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that impersonating other voters accounted for just .0003 per cent of ballots cast, making the phenomenon “more rare than getting struck by lightning.”

“The actual empirical evidence of whether voters are committing fraud is practically non-existent,” concurred Minnite, who has given expert evidence for groups fighting alleged voter-suppression laws.

Fortier, a former fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that the “big picture” suggests actual fraud is rare. But he said there are legitimate issues around election “integrity,” such as individuals appearing wrongly on voter-registration lists.

The conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a court case last week alleging there were 21,000 names on Pennsylvania’s list of “apparently” dead people.

Trump revived the fraud issue in the lead-up to last Tuesday’s election, claiming without evidence that an expansion of mail-in balloting implemented in response to the pandemic would open the door to broad abuse.

It is true that that such voting is potentially more vulnerable, said Minnite, given that ballots “leave the custody” of elections officials in the time between someone casting their vote, and the post office delivering it.

But five states have long sent out mail-in ballots to all their citizens without major problems, she noted.

Fortier argued there are legitimate issues around the security of those absentee ballots, a topic he wrote a book about, but also said there’s little evidence of routine fraud.

The president, meanwhile, has turned up the heat on his grievances, focusing on ballots being counted after election day, though his comments are widely viewed as misleading.

There are legitimate issues for the Trump campaign to litigate, said Fortier, such as new rules in some states allowing ballots to be accepted after election day. But what’s happening now is the counting of votes that arrived on or before Nov. 3, and it makes “no sense” for the president to insist that process be stopped, he said.

Days or weeks of court challenges over the results nevertheless seem inevitable now. Moving forward, is there a way to lessen the conflict that has become a routine part of voting in America?

The U.S. Constitution gave states the power to determine the “times, places, and manner” of national elections. But the federal government could still set country-wide standards for voting, uniform rules on questions like when advance voting can start, said Minnite.

In a country where distrust of central power is deeply ingrained, though, Fortier is not convinced that is a good idea.

“If we were running elections from Washington, some of these questions might seem even more dire,” he said. “Our elections are being run by a variety of people from different parties. There is a kind of security from that.”

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

EDMONTON — The Alberta government is asking Edmontonians and Calgarians to stop hosting gatherings at home with people outside their immediate families or households, as the province announced more than 1,400 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 48 hours.

Hospitalization cases were also expected to rise in coming weeks, straining the province’s health-care system.

Premier Jason Kenney, who was a mainstay of news updates about the pandemic back in the spring, joined Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province’s chief medical officer of health, for Friday’s press conference to make the announcement.

“I know this is an annoyance and a sacrifice,” said Kenney. “But here’s the reality: If we don’t take these kinds of simple measures and make these kinds of modest sacrifices to social life, the cases will continue to grow to the point where they grow out of control.”

The measure, Kenney said, is voluntary, but is a “strong request.”

“We’re not going to be sending out police to monitor this,” said Kenney. “This is appealing to people to exercise personal and collective responsibility.”

Hinshaw announced on Thursday there had been 802 new cases in the previous 24-hour period, the largest such increase since the pandemic began. On Friday, heading into the weekend, the number of new cases was 609.

There are currently more than 6,000 active cases in Alberta, 171 people in hospital, including 33 people in ICU. Eight more people have died, bringing the total deaths in the province to 350.

On Thursday, Hinshaw said that in Edmonton and Calgary, 10 per cent of active COVID-19 cases were people who had worked while they had symptoms, while 7.5 per cent had attended a social gathering and nine per cent went to a store or business — despite repeated urgings that Albertans must self-isolate if they’ve tested positive for COVID-19.

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Private gatherings and contact within households are responsible for about 40 per cent of all active cases in Edmonton and Calgary. The restrictions on social gatherings, with some exceptions, are limited to 15 people. On Friday, these restrictions were expanded beyond Edmonton and Calgary to several other municipalities around the province.

“If you can reduce your social circle … now is the time to do it,” Hinshaw said. “It will take all of us working together and being as careful as possible to reverse this trend.

In a press conference on Thursday, HInshaw announced another change in the province’s COVID fight. “(Alberta Health Services) does not currently have the capacity to call every contact of every case in a timely way,” said Hinshaw.

Hinshaw said contact tracers would only notify contacts of confirmed cases if high-priority settings, such as continuing care facilities and schools, would be affected. Hinshaw said this will be the place until new contact tracers can be hired and trained.

In the spring, the province had only 50 contact tracers — there are now 800 people working at contact tracing, and the province is hiring another 380, Kenney said Friday.

The new measures come after weeks of increasing daily case counts in the province, and larger percentages of hospital beds set aside for COVID-19 patients becoming occupied. In parts of the province, other medical procedures such as ambulatory care visits and non-urgent surgeries and hospital transfers have been paused.

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

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.

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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.

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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
• Raymond J. de Souza: 'Sleepy Joe' may be exactly the president America needs right now

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
• If you sold or used Bitcoin last year, Canada Revenue Agency wants its due

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.

• U.S. coronavirus cases keep rising in grim march to Election Day
• Record-setting U.S. COVID-19 cases come at worst possible time for Donald Trump

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.