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Newly confirmed conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett faces a barrage of politically fraught cases in her first days on the job, as the court weighs election disputes and prepares to hear a challenge to the Obamacare health law.

In brief remarks at a White House ceremony on Monday night, Barrett declared her independence from U.S. President Donald Trump and the political process, even as the president stood behind her.

“The oath that I have solemnly taken tonight means at its core I will do the job without fear or favour and do it independently of the political branches and of my own preferences,” she said.

Her confirmation as successor to liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last month, creates a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court.

Barrett, a federal appeals court judge and legal scholar, is Trump’s third selection for the court, enabling him to remake it in dramatic fashion as part of his success in moving the broader federal judiciary to the right since taking office in 2017. Trump’s other Supreme Court appointees are conservatives Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and Barrett now joins the conservative bloc on the court, comprised of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, all Republican appointees.

But just who is Justice Barrett, what are the major issues she may be called to rule upon, and how might she decide?

Background

Barrett grew up in a suburb of New Orleans and attended a Catholic girls’ high school before graduating from Rhodes college in Memphis, Tennessee, and Notre Dame Law School in South Bend, Indiana. Her lack of the Ivy League pedigree typical of Supreme Court justices was one reason Trump chose Yalie Kavanaugh over her for the last vacancy on the court, according to a person familiar with the president’s thinking.

After law school, Barrett clerked for two conservative judges: Washington federal appeals court judge Laurence Silberman and the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. She returned to Notre Dame as a professor in 2002 and taught there full-time until Trump appointed her as a judge to the federal appeals court in Chicago in 2017. She still teaches at Notre Dame part-time.

Barrett identifies as Catholic and has often spoken publicly of the importance of faith in her life. In a 2006 Notre Dame Law School commencement speech, she urged graduates to direct their legal careers towards “building the Kingdom of God.” Barrett is also a member of a small, mostly Catholic “charismatic covenant community” called People of Praise that has adopted some Pentecostal practices such as prophesy and speaking in tongues.

During her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee two weeks ago, Barrett, a favourite of Christian conservatives, irked Democrats by sidestepping questions on abortion, presidential powers, climate change, voting rights, Obamacare and other issues.

Now confirmed to the court, she will be tasked with ruling on some of those same issues.

Here is a look at how she may lean.

Election

Formally sworn in by Chief Justice Roberts on Tuesday, Barrett joins the court with two election issues already awaiting her from key battleground states, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Firstly Trump, who nominated her, has said he expects the court to ultimately decide the result of the election between him and Democrat Joe Biden. The Supreme Court has only once decided the outcome of a U.S. presidential election — the disputed 2000 contest ultimately awarded to Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

Trump has said he wanted Barrett to be confirmed before Election Day so she could cast a decisive vote in any election-related dispute, potentially in his favour.

The justices already have tackled multiple election-related emergency requests this year, some related to rules changes prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday night, the conservative justices were in the majority as the court on a 5-3 vote declined to extend mail-in voting deadlines sought by Democrats in Wisconsin.

Last week, in a stark sign of how Barrett’s appointment could affect such cases, the court split 4-4 in a case from Pennsylvania, handing a loss to Republicans hoping to curb the counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

Republicans on Friday asked the court to block the mail-in ballot counting in Pennsylvania, knowing that Barrett was about to be confirmed.

The conservative majority even before Barrett’s appointment has generally sided with state officials who oppose court-imposed changes to election procedures to make it easier to vote during the pandemic.

Obamacare

One week after the election, the court on Nov. 10 hears a case in which Republicans including Trump are asking the court to strike down the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

The Obamacare case is the third major Republican-backed challenge to the law, which has helped roughly 20 million Americans obtain medical insurance. It also bars insurers from refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Republican opponents have called the law an unwarranted intervention by government in health insurance markets. The Supreme Court previously upheld Obamacare 5-4 in a 2012 ruling. It rejected another challenge by 6-3 in 2015.

Barrett has criticized previous rulings upholding Obamacare but said during her confirmation hearing she had no agenda to invalidate the measure.

In Biden’s statement after Barrett’s confirmation, the former vice president said Trump has been “crystal clear” about wanting to “tear down” the Affordable Care Act.

During Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Democrats focused on both Obamacare and election cases in voicing opposition to her confirmation and urged her to step aside from both. Barrett refused to make such a commitment. Justices have the final say on whether they step aside in a case.

Abortion

Barrett’s past writings and remarks on the intersection of faith and the law could again become a flash point, raising questions about whether she would overturn Supreme Court precedents on abortion rights.

Whereas Justice Ginsburg, her predecessor, was a champion of preserving a woman’s right to an abortion, Barrett says abortion is “always immoral” and has already ruled as a circuit court judge to restrict the procedure.

Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven, wrote in a 1998 law review article that abortion and euthanasia “take away innocent life.”

She joined an opinion that suggested support for two Indiana abortion laws: a requirement that clinics bury or cremate fetal remains, and a separate ban on abortions based on the fetus’s race, gender or risk of a genetic disorder such as Down syndrome. Barrett said the full Seventh Circuit should have reconsidered part of a three-judge panel’s decision to strike down the two measures.

The Supreme Court later revived the fetal-remains provision but refused to hear Indiana’s bid to reinstate the second law.

On the court, Barrett will be a new face for originalism, which focuses on the original meaning of the Constitution’s words and casts doubt on Roe v. Wade. Yet it’s not 100 per cent clear that she would overturn Roe. v. Wade; in a 2013 speech, she expressed doubt that the key 1973 decision on abortion would ever be overturned.

Until now the biggest skeptics of reproductive rights on the court have all been men. In 2014 when the court ruled 5-4 that companies can refuse on religious grounds to offer their workers the free birth control promised under the Affordable Care Act, five men were in the majority and all three female justices dissented.

Policing

In her three years as a federal appeals court judge, Barrett has consistently sided with police or prison guards accused of using excessive force, a Reuters review of cases she was involved in shows.

Barrett has written opinions or been a part of three-judge panels that have ruled in favour of defendants in 11 of 12 cases in which law enforcement was accused of using excessive force in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The Reuters review illustrates Barrett’s record on police use of force at a time of reckoning in the United States.

In five cases, the panel on which Barrett took part considered a request by police or corrections officers to be shielded from the lawsuits alleging excessive force through a controversial legal defence known as qualified immunity. The court granted those requests in four of the five cases.

A Reuters investigation published two weeks before George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police found that the immunity defence, created by the Supreme Court 50 years ago, has been making it easier for cops to kill or injure civilians with impunity.

The report showed that federal appellate courts have been granting police immunity at increasing rates in recent years.

Barrett last year threw out a lawsuit by three Black men who sued Chicago cops for pulling them over while investigating a drive-by shooting near a school. The men, who had nothing to do with the shooting, said they were targeted because of their race, citing the “racialized nature of the mockery and threats” made by one of the officers. The driver, Marcus Torry, told the cops that he was complying because he feared police brutality.

Barrett granted the officers qualified immunity because it was not “clearly established” that the officers’ actions were unreasonable, noting that the plaintiffs matched the description of the suspects “in number, race and car colour.”

In other cases, she has shown a willingness to side with plaintiffs.

In 2019, she wrote a ruling rejecting immunity for a police officer who used false statements in making the case against a murder suspect. She also joined a ruling denying immunity for officers who were accused of falsifying evidence that caused a man to be jailed for two years.

German police have tweeted that a 600-person “fetish party” that they broke up probably ended “unsatisfactorily” for the attendees, after cops said it was “time to go home.”

Alte Münze, a converted performance venue and club, hosted the party as an open-air event in the Mitte district, a borough of Berlin. Attendees purchased tickets in advance for the gig, which   allowed for a maximum of 250 people.

Police, though, shut the party down, saying that it had reached 600 attendees, many of whom were — ironically enough — not wearing masks or following COVID-19 distancing precautions.

Für ca. 600 Gäste einer Fetisch-Party in #Mitte endete diese vermutlich unbefriedigend.
Wir lösten die Feier in Amtshilfe für das @BA_Mitte_Berlin auf. Die Kolleg. der @bpol_bepo machten anschließend nochmal deutlich, dass es Zeit ist nach Hause zu gehen.#GemeinsamGegenCovid19 pic.twitter.com/sGwzHFN3L3

— Polizei Berlin Einsatz (@PolizeiBerlin_E) October 24, 2020

Alte Münze posted a statement on its site condemning the police response, arguing that the party had stayed well below the 5,000 person government-mandated maximum for outdoor events.

“It was always our top priority while planning to be compliant with the current guidelines to contain the coronavirus,” the statement read.

The statement also criticized the language in the tweet from the Berlin police, saying:

“The event served as a meeting point for the community. We find it reprehensible to declare this a ‘fetish party.”

Germany is currently caught in the midst of a rising second wave of COVID-19. On Sunday, the country registered more than 10,000 new cases for the fourth day in a row, bringing the total to 430,000 cases since the pandemic began.

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COVID-19 restrictions in Berlin include an 11 p.m. curfew on pubs and restaurants and a limit of 10 people for gatherings in public areas.

“We must call especially on young people to do without a few parties now in order to have a good life tomorrow or the day after,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a statement on Oct. 14.

The popular Germany Christmas markets — as many as 2500 across the country — are also being shut down in anticipation of the spread of COVID-19. Frankfurt became the latest city to announce the cancellation of its market. The city joins Berlin, which already announced the cancellation of its famous Christmas market at Gendarmenmarkt.

A new Day of the Dead Barbie is reigniting arguments over whether the Mexican-themed doll is a tasteful ode to the country’s traditions, or a cheap commercial grab.

Conversation began last year with the first entry in the “La Catrina” series . Now, the debate is bubbling back to the surface, with the release of the second instalment.

Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a holiday celebrated in Mexican where families gather to remember those who have died. The multi-day holiday begins in early November and is marked by visits to graveyards — not in mourning, but in celebration.

In 2019, toy company Mattel began its “La Catrina” collection of Barbies, named for the decorated skeletons created by Mexican illustrator José Guadalupe Posada. Barbie is dressed in frilly white and pink lace, her face painted to look like a skeleton in the “calavera” or “skull” style. The doll also bears a slight resemblance to Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

With the dolls listed at $75 USD on the Barbie site, the collection is aimed at adult collectors rather than children.

The doll was created by Mexican-American designer, Javier Meabe. According to the U.S. toy manufacturer , the Dia de Muertos doll “honors the traditions, symbols and rituals” of the Mexican holiday.

“My hope for these dolls is that they’re able to bring more awareness to the Dia de Muertos celebration,” Meabe told CNN . “I am beyond grateful that Barbie is now celebrating traditions and cultures that mean so much to so many people.”

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Others, though, see it differently, with experts and social media users accusing the toy company of cultural appropriation.

“The cultural, hereditary and symbolic importance that this holiday has for Mexico opens up in the eyes of the market opportunities that are exploited by these firms,” sociologist Roberto Alvarez told AFP . The Day of the Dead “should be a solemn subject,” he said.

Day of The Dead is #Iconic in Mexico - a #Barbie, in my opinion, is a degradation. https://t.co/TVMR18mqBI

— Marg Needham (@MargNeedham) October 27, 2020

 

Damn @Mattel and @Barbie quit thieving and appropriating my culture for profit.

— Lucy Morales (@lucyratops) September 11, 2020

The release of Disney’s animated feature Coco in 2017 marked another instance of a U.S. company commercialized Mexican heritage, with Disney facing an initial backlash after Disney attempted to patent the words “Día de los Muertos.”

Other U.S. brands have also bought into the hybridized Mexico-American culture. The “Catrina” Minnie Mouse and a Nike Day of the Dead collection both similarly commercialize the holiday.

For the first time, researchers in the United States have duplicated a living brain aneurysm outside the human body — a feat that could potentially alter the ways in which brain surgeons treat the condition.

It is hoped the move could reduce the time taken to decide and perform life-saving surgical procedures personalized to each patient, and so improve survival rates and patient outcomes.

An aneurysm looks like a bulge or balloon in a weakened point on the wall of a blood vessel, either in the heart or the brain. If the wall ruptures, it can lead to internal bleeding with life-threatening consequences for the patient. Aneurysms are especially difficult to both find and treat, given the delicate areas where they commonly occur.

Now, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and scientists from Duke University and Texas A&M, have developed an external, artificial duplicate in the hopes of imitating the real-life environment in which aneurysms occur.

“We looked at the problem and thought that if we could pair computational modelling and experimental approaches, maybe we could come up with a more deterministic method of treating aneurysms or selecting treatments that could best serve the patient,” William Hynes, senior study author and engineer at the laboratory, told Science Alert.

Using gelatin-fibrin hydrogel, the team 3D-printed a structure in the shape of an aneurysm and then carefully added hCMECs — human cerebral microvascular endothelial cells — to the frame. The cells spread out over the next seven days and lined the aneurysm structure, forming a living 3D-printed aneurysm.

Once the living structure was created, the team experimented on it by pumping cow blood plasma through the structure and then performing their own endovascular coiling — an operation in which a catheter is threaded through the body, to the aneurysm, via an artery in the groin. Once threaded, a coil is pushed through the catheter into the aneurysm. It is one of two methods by which doctors attempt to stop blood flow to the area of an aneurysm to prevent it from swelling and rupturing.

As a result of the coiling, a clot was formed at the site and disrupted blood flow, which meant the model worked.

“Now we can start to build the framework of a personalized model that a surgical practitioner could use to determine the best method for treating an aneurysm,” Hynes said.

There is still a long way to go before the model can be used by professionals in the field, the team stressed in its paper. The computer model of clots still needs to be finessed to both refine the living structures and better mimic the stresses placed on the walls of the impacted blood vessels.

The team also plans to feed real-world patient brain scans into the data to further refine the system’s accuracy.

Brad Wall tells an anecdote about the first time he won an election, in 1999, as a candidate for the nascent Saskatchewan Party, watching the results roll in on TV and seeing the party had won an urban seat.

“I was so jacked to get elected in my hometown,” Wall recalled in an interview with the National Post on Monday, as  Saskatchewan was headed to the polls in a provincial and pandemic election. “Turned out it was me — Swift Current was the urban seat. The definition may have shocked people and surprised people in Swift Current.”

The Saskatchewan Party has steadily grown ever since, rising from a party with a rural base to one that cruised on Monday night to its fourth straight majority win. Since 2007, when Wall first became premier, the party has dominated provincial politics, taking seats in Regina and Saskatoon and throughout the rest of the province.

The party is now headed by Scott Moe, who took over the top job in 2018, and Monday won his first victory as leader and premier. The party’s lasting popular appeal with voters doesn’t mean there are not cracks in foundations, some of them stemming from the very roots of the party itself, born out of a coalition of  Saskatchewan Liberals, Progressive Conservatives and Reform Party members.

Unlike Alberta, which has decades of conservative rule, broken up by only four years of Rachel Notley’s New Democrats, Saskatchewan has had a more varied political history — much of it dominated by the New Democrats and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which held power in the province in a significant majority of elections since 1944.

That all changed after the Saskatchewan Party was formed. And once Wall became premier in 2007, the party has hung on to power ever since and added seats each time they went to the polls: 38 out of 58 seats in 2007, 49 of 58 in 2011, and 51 of 61 in 2016.

As of Monday night, the Sask Party was leading in more than 40 constituencies, with more than 61,000 mail-in ballots yet to be counted. It is more than the 31 needed to control the 61-seat legislature. Some races in Saskatoon and Regina were too tight to call, including the Saskatoon constituency of NDP Leader Ryan Meili.

There are a number of factors that have gone into the growth of the Saskatchewan Party. One of the biggest is timing.

The Saskatchewan Party came along and rose to power when the prairie province began to turn around economically. The provincial population was growing. It became a “have” instead of a “have not” province.

“The mentality of thinking we’re the poorer neighbour to our richer cousin on the other side of the border in Alberta … that’s gone,” explained Greg Poelzer, a professor in the school of environment and sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan and an observer of provincial politics. “And I think Brad Wall was transformative for the province in changing that kind of outlook.”

Wall, the first Saskatchewan Party premier, said the economy formed the “north star” of the party’s approach to governance. And while it focused on the economy, he said the party didn’t ignore its social obligations, such as health care.

“A little good fortune helps, you have a good economic plan, focus on it and then make sure you demonstrate you understand it’s not all about pie charts and GDP — it’s about people,” said Wall, who retired in 2018.

Moe campaigned over the last month on a message to recover the economy from the COVID-19 pandemic and to introduce millions of dollars in tax credits and rebates.

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During Wall’s time as leader, the party also put a considerable amount of effort into winning urban seats, finding good candidates and overhauling the party platform.

“We basically said, ‘we’re not changing the principles of the party, but we’re going to start with a clean slate on policy,'” said Wall.

Understanding the party’s popular appeal means knowing where it came from.

The party emerged in August 1997 as a coalition of former Liberals and Progressive Conservatives who’d been trampled by NDP Premier Roy Romanow in elections through the 1990s.

“You had provincial Liberals, provincial PCs and federal Reformers, and that’s a formidable coalition,” Wall said. “They just laid that all aside, and said it’s important for us to have a united alternative to the NDP.”

That it’s a coalition, that Saskatchewan isn’t as resolutely conservative as is often thought, is a salient fact, says Poelzer. The risk, he explained, is if the harder line Saskatchewan has been taking with regards to Ottawa will alienate people in the all-important coalition.

“Where the Sask Party … has been very successful was building a broad coalition of federal Liberals and federal Conservatives,” said Poelzer. “Right now, I would argue that (the) Sask Party is on the verge of where that is starting to unravel.

“Without that liberal-centre vote and centre-right vote, the NDP would dominate elections.”

At the same time, the Buffalo Party has popped up on the right wing of Saskatchewan politics, rising on the heat generated from western alienation. There’s also the Progressive Conservative Party of Saskatchewan to contend with.

“What they’re doing is fragmenting the vote on the right and hiving it off from the Sask Party and alienating the left part of the Sask Party base,” said Poelzer.

The right does have a power base in Saskatchewan, Wall said, but he points to evidence the coalition still exists: One candidate, Chris Guerette, for example, campaigned for the federal Liberals in 2015.

“It’s got to continue to be a … big tent party,” said Wall.

With files from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and The Canadian Press

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

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals survived a confidence vote over a Conservative push to dig deeper into the WE Charity affair.

Canadians may be spared a fall election, but the political games are far from over.

Dave is joined by National Post political reporter Chris Nardi to discuss why the Liberals seemed keen to push us close to a pandemic election, why this move poses a problem for the NDP, and whether this hampers the Conservative efforts to hold the government to account.

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#distro

Netherlands war museums have been hit by teams of raiders bent on stealing their Nazi artifacts, leading a number to beef up security.

The Guardian reports that organized thieves are moving in on Dutch institutions that house Waffen-SS gear and other memorabilia linked to the Adolf Hitler regime — gear which appears to be in increasing demand worldwide. No arrests have been made over any of the raids.

In recent weeks an overnight burglary at the Oorlogsmuseum in Ossendrecht saw a trove of SS equipment taken, with one pilfered rifle worth almost $80,000. Jan de Jonge, the museum owner, told the Guardian:

“They drilled holes in the door to get the handle down from the inside. I didn’t hear anything while I was sleeping on the other side of the wall.

“SS uniforms, daggers, helmets, emblems, caps, parachutes, firearms, binoculars, you name it. There’s nothing left. The firearm is very rare, but I was able to display it in this museum.

He said the robbers had a target country in mind when they broke in.

“(It was all) German stuff, they didn’t take anything from the allies,” he said. “A French corner, English, Canadian: all intact. German material, especially clothing, is rare.”

“They took items that can be traded internationally. The collection was private property and not insured. At least 15 dressed mannequins with military uniforms were taken.”

Robbers targeted museums in a number of other Dutch cities, with museums moving, as a result, to take famous artefacts out of public view. In Loon op Zand, the local 1940-1945 War Museum put in a better security door, and took away cutlery once used by Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.

“Yesterday I took stuff from the Hitler Youth, and uniforms of the SS are also being removed,” Frans van Venrooij, owner of the museum, told the Guardian .

John Meulenbroeks of Hooge Mierde’s Museum De Bewogen Jaren, told the Guardian: “It seems like this is on request. Maybe (the items) are already with a collector who is wealthy.”

In August, the Guardian reports, some $2.3 million worth of items were robbed from Beek’s Eyewitness Museum. The men knew what they were after, the owner said; after the door was rammed in by a team of six, they made their way to certain artefacts, cutting away glass to get at the riches. Another museum in Limburg was also targeted.

“The collection consists only of original pieces and a number of masterpieces that are very rare and precious,” Wim Seelen said. “The only thing I can come up with is that someone ordered it. Many of the stolen items are so unique that you cannot sell them. Our world is a small one. As soon as something emerges from Beek or Ossendrecht, it will be immediately known.”

Is the pine-scented aroma of your Christmas tree not lifting your holiday spirits during the pandemic? Maybe a firelog scented like fried chicken might do the trick, KFC suggests.

As part of a partnership with Enviro-Log, KFC has launched its trademark 11 Herbs and Spices Firelog in Walmart stores in the U.S. on Monday for the third consecutive year as a quirky alternative for those looking to — literally — spicy their holiday season up.

In the past, the product has been a big hit with customers and sold out the past two years nationwide. Last year, the product sold out within three hours of launching, Fox Business reported.

KFC also plans to launch the product in Canada, although the date has not yet been determined.

“For the past two years we have warmed the hearts and homes of our fried-chicken fans during the holiday season with our 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog,” KFC U.S. CMO Andrea Zahumensky said in a press release.

“Although this year may look different, we hope that by expanding our exclusive partnership with Enviro-Log and Walmart, people can once again grab a fried-chicken scented firelog, order a bucket of chicken from KFC, and savor the tastes, smells and warmth of what has become our favorite holiday tradition,” Zahumensky continued.

KFC’s 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog from @envirologfire is BACK to make your yuletide smell like chicken! These sold out fast last year, so get yours now at https://t.co/2JhDqZI6du.

— KFC (@kfc) December 5, 2019

Ross McRoy, the president and founder of Georgia-based Enviro-Log, which focuses on environmentally-conscious consumer products, said fans will be ‘ravenous’ for the KFC product this holiday season. “Just don’t try to eat it!” he warned in the press release.

The product will be exclusively sold at Walmart stores in the U.S. The retail federation states that consumers will spend an average of $998 on “items like gifts, decorations and food to bring some much needed holiday cheer” to their friends and families. To do so, the NRF predicts that consumers will most likely head online or visit larger department stores.

The 11 Herbs and Spices Firelog will be available for purchase either online or in-store for $15.88 while availability lasts.

OTTAWA — The federal government’s refusal to set a new fiscal anchor reinforces the need for greater transparency around Ottawa’s towering pandemic spending plans, several economists and budgetary experts say.

In a talk with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it would be “premature” to set a new fiscal anchor in Ottawa’s upcoming fall economic update, due to a high level of uncertainty in both the national and global economies. The Trudeau Liberals are expected to table the update in November.

The move runs counter to what numerous economists and other experts have recommended in recent months, warning that Ottawa needs to outline its high-level spending plans as it risks sliding into a position of permanent budgetary deficits.

Fiscal anchors effectively outline targets for how much debt governments intend to assume. Ottawa had previously sought to maintain a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 30 per cent, which ballooned to 49 per cent this summer as COVID-19 spending continued to mount. Experts now say Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland need to re-establish a new anchor in order to sketch out their long-term budgetary plans for the country.

“There’s a cost to having effectively no fiscal plan,” said Kevin Page, head of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy and former Parliamentary Budget Officer. “And right now it’s fair to say we have no fiscal strategy.”

Page and others are sympathetic to claims by the Liberal government that the global economic outlook amid COVID-19 is so uncertain that drafting up long-term spending plans would be nearly impossible.

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But they also suggest that the failure to set a new fiscal target is part of a broader hesitancy in Ottawa to provide transparent information on pandemic spending. The federal government has not provided detailed updates on cash flows of some of its biggest programs, he said, and has instead stuck with highly generalized overviews that provide no detail about funding recipients.

Taken together, Page said, the situation amounts to an increasingly hazy fiscal outlook for the country.

“This is about where the government’s rudder is,” he said. “Where is the policy strategy that guides us through the pandemic, and to the post COVID-19 recovery? We’re missing that.”

Unlike other Western democracies including New Zealand and the U.K., Canada has yet to table a full budget since the beginning of the pandemic in March, citing economic instability. A brief budget update in early summer has served as the sole official document outlining spending plans.

The monthly fiscal monitor provided by Finance Canada outlines spending, but also doesn’t break down transactions into finer details, Page said.

His comments come after the Trudeau government had faced criticism even before the pandemic about its rising fiscal spending measures, which went toward a host of programs aimed at green infrastructure, social housing and other items. Even so, Ottawa largely kept its debt-to-GDP ratio stable as economic growth before the pandemic provided more opportunity to spend.

Rebekah Young, director of provincial and fiscal economics at Scotiabank, has recommended Ottawa set an updated fiscal anchor of 65 per cent of GDP, as well as provide itself with space to move should the economy sour amid successive viral waves.

“I would argue that because of the uncertainty, in fact, they could actually instill more confidence by providing an anchor for coming years,” she said.

“It’s another way to send a signal.”

While Canada’s federal and provincial debt levels continue to soar, however, most economists are largely in agreement that Ottawa maintains plenty of fiscal capacity to continue spending. Low interest rates have kept debt charges well below levels seen in the early 1990s.

The federal deficit in 2021 is expected to surge above $350 billion, according to the government’s last budget update.

The International Monetary Fund in its recent bi-annual economic outlook estimates that Canada’s budgetary shortfall in 2020 will reach 19.9 per cent of GDP, the highest among all Western democracies (the United States will run the second-largest shortfall with 18.7 per cent). By 2021 that shortfall is expected to fall to 8.7 per cent, but still among the largest in developed economies.

Doug Porter, chief economist at Bank of Montreal, says fiscal pressures from immense pandemic spending are uncommonly high at the moment, but don’t spell immediate trouble for the public purse.

He said longer-term spending adjustments will eventually be necessary, but said the announcement by Trudeau on Monday to defer a new fiscal anchor might be the correct course of action.

“I would say it’s not unreasonable, just because there’s so much uncertainty about where things are headed in the next six months,” he said.

“One of the worst things would be for them to reset the fiscal anchor and then have to reset it again. I think that would be pretty demoralizing for everyone.”

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

OTTAWA — After enduring nearly three weeks of Liberal filibustering, opposition MPs trying to acquire WE Charity speaking contracts involving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife were shut down Monday when a Bloc Québécois MP voted against the initiative — by mistake.

It was supposed to be a straightforward vote at the federal ethics committee to force the release of all invoices for the speeches Trudeau and his wife delivered to WE Charity in the past decade.

Opposition MPs want to verify how much money WE Charity and its affiliates have paid the Trudeau family in the years leading up to the now-defunct $543.5 million deal to have WE administer a student volunteer grant program for the government.

For weeks, the Liberal members of the committee tried to thwart the vote by filibustering, filling the time with lengthy and often irrelevant speeches, calling countless points of order and asking for more amendments on amendments than anyone would care to count.

The issue came to a head last week when the minority Liberals declared a Conservative proposal to create an “anti-corruption” committee to delve into the WE scandal a matter of confidence. Had the Liberals lost the vote, Canadians would be going to the polls.

The NDP ultimately voted with the Liberals but promised to continue studying the WE Charity scandal in committees such as ethics.

So Monday, after a bit more filibustering and a few more amendments, the Conservative motion at the ethics committee was set to pass with the support from all opposition members, who outnumbered the Liberals.

All was going as expected until the committee clerk called on Bloc Québécois MP Julie Vignola, who had replaced her colleague Marie-Hélène Gaudreau just a few minutes earlier.

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After a few seconds of silence, Vignola unexpectedly said: “I am against the motion.”

A visibly stunned NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus laughed incredulously as he cast the final vote for the motion. But it didn’t matter anymore, the nays (five) defeated the yays (four).

In a scrum minutes after the vote, Bloc Québécois House Leader Alain Therrien admitted it had all been a mistake. Their vote had literally been lost in translation, and the party was scrambling to see if there was a way to change it.

“There were many amendments that were proposed consecutively, and there were issues with translation, so there was a mistake in the vote we made. And now we are looking to see if there is a way to correct the mistake we made,” Therrien said.

In an interview, Angus said the Bloc’s vote felt like being “stabbed in the back.”

He didn’t buy Therrien’s explanation that the error was the result of translation and technical issues, particularly because the party had “unusually” swapped out Gaudreau for Vignola just before the vote.

“I can’t see that they would be that amateurish that on such an important vote, which held up the ethics committee since we returned in September., that they would send someone in and not tell her what the upcoming vote was. You know, you can’t run a ship like that. Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet knows what he’s doing,” Angus said.

The Bloc vehemently denied his allegations and said it was actively looking for ways to bring the motion back to the table.

Angus said he is planning to bring a motion to the ethics committee next week to continue studying the WE Charity scandal.

But because the committee just voted against requesting the speaking invoices, he said it’s unlikely those documents will ever make it to the committee.

“Three weeks of work that kept us up into the wee hours of the morning went out the window. And so now we are not going to get those Trudeau documents,” Angus lamented.

The Conservatives preferred not to criticize the Bloc, instead turning their frustration toward the Liberals.

“After weeks of stonewalling, the Liberals voted against transparency and blocked a parliamentary committee from receiving documents related to the WE scandal. It’s clear that Liberal MPs will do everything they can to hide the arrogance and entitlement of this prime minister,” Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett wrote in a statement.

“Conservatives promised Canadians that we would get answers on the WE scandal. We will keep this promise. I’ll leave it to the Bloc to explain why they didn’t vote for our motion at the ethics committee.”

The federal finance committee is also debating resuming its investigation of the WE Charity scandal; it’s possible that opposition members on that committee succeed in unearthing the Trudeaus’ speaking fee invoices.

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

NEW YORK/LONDON — These are tough times in the real estate market. The COVID-19 crisis has hit asset values, particularly commercial real estate in cities such as New York. Investors holding debt with upcoming maturities are preparing for tricky negotiations with their debtors.

The negotiations will be trickier if the debtor is the president of the United States.

Virtually all of Donald Trump’s debt — there is at least $1.1B of it, according to his government financial disclosures and other documents — is backed by real estate, mostly linked to a small number of buildings and golf courses that form the core of the Trump business empire. About $900M of that debt will come due in Trump’s second term, should he win the November 3 presidential election.

On paper, Trump is not particularly levered: his net worth has been estimated at $2.5B by Forbes. But the economy is still on a precarious footing, and if his debts come under strain, he could play hardball with his creditors, as he has in the past.

The situation is made more pressing for the U.S. president because his primary source of income in recent years — his work on television — “is drying up,” according to an investigation by The New York Times. Citing the president’s tax filings, the Times also said much of that income was invested in golf courses that are money losers. So while the president is asset-rich, it is unclear how much liquidity he has access to. The Trump Organization declined to comment.

The president’s creditors can be broken into five groups.

1. Trump owes $447M as part of his partnership with Vornado Realty Trust, on towers in New York and San Francisco

Trump owns 30 per cent of 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York City and 555 California Street in San Francisco, giving him a pro-rata share of the $1.5B debt on the two buildings, which comes due over the next two years. The debt is owed by the partnership, not Trump himself, but changes to the value of the debt, or any default, would directly affect his equity value in the buildings. The loan on 1290 was initially made by Deutsche Bank, UBS, Goldman Sachs and the state-owned Bank of China, but they sold it years ago, and it is not clear who the creditor is now. Nor is it clear who owns the loan on California Street. Vornado declined to comment.

California Street is a 1.8 million square foot office complex, and while the income from the property was down five per cent in the second quarter of this year, it is 99 per cent occupied, according to filings from Vornado. 1290 is a 2.1m sq ft office and retail tower in Midtown Manhattan; Vornado’s latest filings do not provide up-to-date occupancy figures for it.

The value of each building has probably taken a hit during the COVID-19 crisis. Office real estate prices have fallen five per cent and 13 per cent from a year ago in San Francisco and New York, respectively, according to Green Street, a real estate research group.

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2. The bond market: $257M in loans taken against several of the most famous Trump properties have been packaged, along with a bunch of non-Trump loans, into commercial mortgage-backed securities

The banks that originated these mortgages sold them to a CMBS trust, bundling them with other loans and transforming them into tradable debt securities. A servicer is responsible for collecting payments from borrowers. Should borrowers fail to make a payment, a special servicer steps in to get the borrower paying again or foreclose. It is these debt collectors that could be crucial should Trump’s properties fall into arrears.

In total, there are four Trump properties, all in New York, split across six CMBS deals, according to data from Trepp. Most are office buildings and condominiums. The largest is a $100M loan on Trump Tower, at 725 Fifth Avenue, which accounts for just over 10 per cent of a 2012 deal packaged by Wells Fargo.

Most of the Trump loans are small enough that they are not the driving force behind the CMBS’s performance. All the properties are up to date on their payments, according to data from Trepp. There has been little apparent impact on occupancy rates since the COVID-19 crisis began.

However, one loan — the $6.5M mortgage on the Trump International Hotel at 1 Central Park West, New York — has been flagged as being at risk after income on the property dropped dramatically. The property has two tenants, a parking garage and the now-closed Triomphe Restaurant. Should the property slip further, it will be passed to its special servicer, Midland Loan Services, part of PNC. Midland declined to comment.

3. Trump owes up to $340M to Deutsche Bank

Trump’s biggest bank lender has financed his hotels in Chicago and Washington, and his Miami golf resort.

According to Trump’s tax returns, disclosed by The New York Times, both National Doral in Miami and the International Hotel in Washington have generated big losses. The Doral suffered $162M in losses between 2012 and 2018, and the Washington hotel lost $55.5M between 2016, when it opened, and 2018.

4. Trump has at least $25M in debt with four small banks and one asset manager

All of the loans are between $5M and $25M. Most do not mature within the next four years. Two of them are mortgages on Trump family properties, in the New York suburbs and in Palm Beach, Florida; two are on Trump golf courses in New Jersey and Washington, DC; and one, which matures this year, is on a residential tower in Midtown Manhattan.

The New York apartment market has experienced a 17 per cent price decline this year, according to Green Street.

5. There is a $50M debt to Chicago Unit Acquisition Trust, secured against the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago

This debt is mysterious. The trust is a corporation owned by DJT Holdings LLC — that is, Donald J Trump. Trump appears to owe the money to himself. Asked about this unusual arrangement by The New York Times in 2016, Trump said: “I have the mortgage. That is all there is. Very simple. I am the bank.” But he is the debtor, too, and it is not a typical mortgage; it is a “springing loan,” meaning it only comes due under specific conditions — typically a credit event such as a decline in credit rating. It has been suggested that this arrangement could be part of a tax avoidance strategy.

Additional reporting by Laura Noonan in New York

OTTAWA – The Conservatives pushed a motion through Parliament Monday that will require the Liberals to disclose documents on vaccines, personal protective equipment and rapid testing, over government objections that the move could pose a risk to the country’s supplies.

The Conservatives won the vote with support from the Bloc Québécois, NDP and the Green Party, requiring the government to deliver the documents to the Health Committee within 30 days.

In addition to covering PPE and vaccines, the motion will also examine every aspect of the federal response, including the government’s decision to shut down a vital public health surveillance tool, the provision of paid sick leave, the adequacy of provincial health transfers and decisions around border closures and travel restrictions.

Prior to the vote, Procurement Minister Anita Anand said the motion would risk ongoing negotiations for essential supplies during the pandemic.

“We are in the middle of negotiation for vaccine, PPE and rapid test kits. Extensive disclosure as contemplated will threaten our ability to procure these goods,” she said. “We are in the middle of a second wave, we are in the middle of negotiations, and we are in the middle of our contracting.”

Anand was joined by drug companies, manufacturers and the co-chairs of Canada’s vaccine task force in calling for some secrecy to be maintained in the contracts until after the crisis.

In a letter to all party leaders, the co-chairs of the vaccine task force offered to brief MPs from all parties, but worried that doing so publicly would jeopardize confidentiality contracts they signed with the companies developing the vaccine.

“Without this guarantee of commercial confidentiality, it would not have been possible for us to meaningful engage with these firms nor to obtain the data needed to make evidence-based, informed recommendations,” reads the letter.

The motion allows for certain redactions for commercial confidentiality along with national security, but they would be performed by the House of Commons law clerk, rather than public servants in the Privy Council Office as the Liberals were suggesting.

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner said the government was fear mongering and the experience they had during the WE Charity scandal suggests the government cannot be trusted to censor the documents.

“The Privy Council office is an arm of the government,” she said. “I don’t believe that the government should be redacting its own documents.”

Rempel Garner said the government should welcome scrutiny, which is Parliament’s responsibility, to ensure the country is on the right track in its response.

“There is no shame. In fact, it is the job of Parliament to ask these questions, we need to understand where we’re going.”

Anand said the government was willing to release details on contracts when the risk was over and pointed to $6 billion in contracts that had already been disclosed with more to come. She said the government wanted to protect its ability to negotiate while some supplies like vaccines were still in high demand.

She warned that without the promise of confidentiality, the government could struggle to secure confidentiality.

“I do not want to be back here to explain to Canadians that because of the disclosure that we were forced to make, we were not able to secure vaccines or PPE for Canadians because our suppliers chose to walk away.”

After the vote, Liberal House leader Pablo Rodriguez said he was disappointed in the outcome, but said the government would work to meet the demands the House of Commons.

“I am disappointed that the opposition parties didn’t listen to our health experts, to people from the private sector, from the companies producing the vaccine,” he said. The public servants will do their best. They are asking for tons of documents from the same public sectors workers who are delivering for Canadians.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said the questions his party was asking were non-partisan and straightforward. He said the Liberals made this a political issue and accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of wanting an election.

“When Canadians are getting rapid tests shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Canada’s place in the vaccine queue shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Improving our pandemic response shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It’s shameful that the Liberals keep trying to make them one.”

Unlike last week’s Conservative motion that became a test of confidence, the Liberals did not make the motion a confidence vote, meaning there will be no trip to the polls as a result of the defeat.

Twitter: RyanTumilty
Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com