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BY NEIL MOSS

The Trump administration’s threat to withhold critical

medical infrastructure has an-gered Canadians and may have deepened an already open wound

BY LAURA RYCKEWAERT

The World Health Organizationhas warned of an “infodemic”

of misinformation and disinfor-

mation around COVID-19, and as authorities, companies, and individuals work to combat it, two Members of Parliament have joined an international initia-

tive aimed at calling out and fact-checking online content around the virus.

BY SAMANTHA WRIGHT ALLEN

By the time the clock tickedpast 8 p.m. on April 6, Liberal

MP Wayne Easter still had 16 calls left on his list to return, capping off another busy day wherein urgent requests have become the norm.

MPs like Mr. Easter, and their staff, report their hours being con-sumed by “case work” of constitu-ents reaching out for support and answers as COVID-19 spreads in Canadian communities.

BY MIKE LAPOINTE

Health-care workers in Can-ada’s federal prison system

are on the verge of walking off the job over coronavirus-related safety concerns, according to their union, as pressure mounts on other public servants who would be tasked with handling the early release of inmates.

“This is a very critical situa-tion that we’re trying to resolve” with the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), said Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada president Debi Daviau in an interview with The Hill Times on April 3. “Health-care workers at federal institutions have a num-ber of very serious complaints about the safety of their work-places,” including a lack of per-sonal protective equipment (PPE), safe distancing, and occupational health hazards.

“Many nurses are being asked to take temperatures without any means of protection—this is consistently occurring, where nurses are being advised to perform nursing tests without personal protective equipment,” said Ms. Daviau, whose group—the second-largest public service union—put out an April 2 press release about its concerns. “We’ve

‘The deeper the wound, the longer it takes to heal’: Trump’s threats undermine Canada-U.S. relationship, says former envoy

‘We’re all under the gun’: MPs work 24-7 in the midst of a pandemic

‘Critical situation’ in prisons as health-care workers threaten to walk over lack of protective equipment

MPs join fight to stamp out COVID-19 disinformation that’s ‘spreading faster than the virus’

Continued on page 16Continued on page 15

Continued on page 6

Continued on page 14

News

NewsNews News

Canada-U.S.

COVID-19Public service COVID-19

THIRTY-FIRST YEAR, NO. 1717 Canada’s PolitiCs and Government newsPaPer WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 $5.00

NDP MP Charlie Angus and Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith have joined one such effort, Infotagion, an international initiative launched by U.K. MP Damian Collins.

Hill Climbers

p.17

NDP MP Charlie Angus, left, and Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith have joined an international initiative working to combat the 'infodemic' of disinformation around COVID-19. The Hill Times photographs by Andrew Meade

speech: Who’s really in charge of the WHO?

Lisa Van Dusen p. 7 Andrew Caddell p. 12

Could mental health facilities be vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks? p. 4

Heard on the Hill

p.2

The Queen’s

a lesson in stalwart support

MPs across the partisan divide honoured the life of Cana-

dian activist and actress Shirley Douglas after news of her death broke on April 5.

Ms. Douglas—the daughter of past NDP leader and medi-care founder Tommy Doug-las—appeared in more than a dozen films and several TV shows throughout a career that spanned

from 1953 to 2008. She was 86 years old.

While in Holly-wood, she was active in the U.S. civil rights movement and when she came back to Canada, she cam-paigned for the

NDP to save public health care.Actor Kiefer Sutherland broke

the news of his mother’s death on Twitter: “My mother was an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life. Sadly she had been battling for her health for quite some time and we, as a family, knew this day was coming.”

“She will be deeply missed by New Democrats everywhere,” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh tweeted.

NDP MP Niki Ashton said in a tweet that “our movement and Canada has lost a brilliant progressive force in Shirley Douglas.”

She added that she’ll never forget when Ms.

Douglas encouraged the then-24-year-old candidate to “keep at it” after her first loss in the 2006 fed-eral election at the hands of then-Liberal MP Tina Keeper who she would defeat two years later.

“Her words are still with me today.”

Former NDP national director Karl Bélanger said in statement that he saw firsthand the “fierce campaigner” that Ms. Douglas was while on the trail with Jack Layton.

“Wherever she went, she was stealing the spotlight without even trying. She took her causes seriously while not taking herself too seriously. It was an honour and a privilege to have been able to wit-ness her in

action, ardently defending the health-care system her father brought to Canada,” he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that she was “a tremendous talent, a tireless advocate, and a fearless activist who never stopped fighting for what she believed in.”

Infrastructure Minister Cath-erine McKenna, Green Party parliamentary leader Elizabeth May, and longtime NDP MP Brian Masse added their tributes, among other Hillites.

What is an MP going to do while stuck at home amidst the corona-virus pandemic? Why not launch a podcast? That was Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith‘s thought.

He said that over the past six months he has had conversations in his office about launching a podcast. Now that he is working from home and having conver-sations with experts on many aspects related to COVID-19, he decided to record those chats.

“I thought why not record them and post them online so

other people can see the advice that I’ve received and hear

directly from much smarter people,”

Mr. Erskine-Smith told

The Hill Times,

admit-ting

that the podcast isn’t yet a techni-cal work of art.

So far, the two-term Liberal MP has published four podcasts. He has chatted about the Emergencies Act with University of Ottawa na-tional security law professor Craig Forcese, basic income with Uni-versity of Manitoba professor and health economist Evelyn Forget, the impact of COVID-19 on human rights with Amnesty International Canada general secretary Alex Neve, and hoops with Toronto Star sports columnist Bruce Arthur and The Athletic Canada editor-in-chief James Mirtle.

“For many people, the NBA cancellation or suspension made this a much more real issue and brought to light the seriousness of it in some ways, which I find interesting,” Mr. Erskine-Smith said.

On April 2, he was joined by NDP Charle Angus to talk about disinformation around CO-VID-19. The two have taken part in the International Grand Com-mittee on Disinformation and Fake News, which was started in

2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal.

nmoss@hilltimes.comThe Hill Times

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES2

Heard on the Hill

Politicos honour ‘fierce campaigner’ Shirley Douglas

Shirley Douglas is pictured meeting with then-prime minister Jean Chrétien in 1997 alongside her son Kiefer Sutherland, as well as then-MPs Bill Blaikie and Peter Milliken. Photograph courtesy of Jean-Marc Carisse

Shirley Douglas, who died on April 5, was a champion for public healthcare. The Hill Times file photograph

As Canadians are stuck at home pining for a warm weather trip, TVO is offering a virtual getaway with a new documentary that will take viewers up a section of the Rideau Canal.

Tripping the Rideau Canal, a four-hour documentary, takes viewers on a mid-20th century runabout to tour the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“Tripping the Rideau Canal is the antithesis of the kind of scripted reality programming that covers the television landscape today. Whatever happened on the canal that day is eau naturelle,” said Jane Jankovic, TVO’s execu-tive producer of documentaries, in a press release.

The boat trip starts near Manotick, Ont., by a 160-year-old mill. From there, the 27-kilometre voyage takes viewers north past four different locks.

Throughout the feature, there will be animated scenes to show the Rideau Canal through different periods of its history. Construction on the canal began in 1826 and was completed in 1832, linking Ottawa to Lake Ontario—at the time establishing a much-needed link between Kingston, Ont., and

Montreal, Que., in the case of an American invasion in the years after the War of 1812.

“We think this was our most im-portant task, to allow the viewer to experience the Rideau Canal with-out interruption, but also to give them enough information to have a deep understanding of this impor-tant historic waterway,” Good Earth Productions executive producer Mitch Azaria said in the release.

The documentary will be televised on April 10 at 7 p.m., and will be available to watch on TVO’s website following its airing.

Take a trip up the Rideau Canal with a new TVO documentary

by Neil Moss

An ‘Uncommons’ podcast for an uncommon time

A new four-hour documentary will give viewers an uninterrupted trip up a 27-kilometre section of the Rideau Canal. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bobak Ha’Eri

Darrell Bricker will participate in an information session on public opinion at the time of COVID-19 on April 24. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith has covered topics ranging from basic income to sports on his new podcast. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

As the world struggles to cope with the spread of the coro-navirus, a prolific pollster is hosting an online information

session to showcase how public opinion has been shifting around the crisis.

Darrell Bricker, Global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, will host the free talk on April 24 and anyone can register to ask questions about the crisis, from the public’s view of how the health-care system is coping with COVID-19, to whether people

think financial aid has been adequate.Mr. Bricker is the author of a number of bestselling books on poll-

ing and politics.A recent Ipsos poll suggested that the majority of countries polled

don’t think social distancing strategies will defeat the virus, according to a Global News report. The poll, which surveyed more than 14,000 people

from 14 countries, found that those in eight of the countries polled thought that restrictions on travel and self-isolation efforts would be ineffective.

Although 59 per cent of Canadians that were polled felt the measures would work, only 44 per cent of their southern neighbours felt the

same way.

Ipsos’ Darrell Bricker to host webinar on public

opinion during the COVID-19 crisis

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4

BY SAMANTHA WRIGHT ALLEN

Independent Senator Stan Kutcher is raising the alarm

about the looming risk of a CO-VID-19 outbreak among patients in psychiatric care, facilities that he’s warning don’t have the capacity to protect against or properly respond to infectious diseases.

As a leading psychiatrist who pioneered research and headed the psychiatric department at Dalhousie University, the Nova Scotia Senator is intimately familiar with the capabilities and limitations of the hospital wards housing vulnerable populations across the country.

The units are not designed for infection control like the rest of the hospital and the staff don’t have the same training, he said. Those with severe mental ill-nesses, both in and out of these settings, are also more likely to have the multiplying health conditions—including diabetes and heart disease—among the many health flags that increase a person’s risk of contracting COVID-19.

They are also much more likely to be homeless and much more likely to live in poorly supported en-vironments, he said. While the pro-portion of the population that has mental illness is about one in five, the proportion of Canadians with a severe illness is much smaller, between four and six per cent.

But those at greatest risk at the moment are in hospital wards, which he said are ill-equipped to respond to an outbreak. The threat of spread should be treated with the same urgency and concern as for those in seniors homes, where Canada has seen among the worst outbreaks—and deaths—and where staying away has been presented as a matter of “life and death” by Quebec Pre-mier François Legault.

“If a COVID-19 case breaks out in one of the units, the chances of it rapidly spreading is huge,” said Sen. Kutcher, who was named in 2018 to the Upper Chamber, which he said brings with it a responsibility to speak for society’s vulnerable.

It’s a “huge problem” that Sen. Kutcher said he fears is absent from political and public discus-sions—a gap he hopes to address given the great risk both to pa-tients and staff who aren’t able to practice physical distancing and other hygienic precautions with the necessary vigilance.

Though mental health delivery is at the provincial and territo-rial level, the response to a global pandemic crosses jurisdictions with the federal Health Minis-ter Patty Hajdu (Thunder Bay-Superior North, Ont.) and Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Theresa Tam offering frequent public briefings and directions. Ms. Hajdu said the government is working on a free virtual tool to support mental health in response to the crisis, and last month Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papine-au, Que.) announced $7.5-million to Kids Help Phone to meet an increased demand for services.

“This is a shared responsibil-ity,” said Sen. Kutcher, between health authorities and provincial, territorial, and federal govern-ments to come forward with solutions to mitigate risk and put supports in the community so that fewer people are admitted to the hospital. Ms. Hajdu’s office did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

‘We are very worried’The Association of Chairs of

Psychiatry of Canada, made up of university faculty chairs in the field, is preparing a briefing note to send to provincial, territorial, and federal governments. It’s a “call to action” to help vulnerable populations in response to the pandemic, including those with serious mental illness, like schizo-phrenia and bipolar disorder. Sen. Kutcher, a former chair himself, is trying to get it in the right hands this week.

“We are very worried,” said Kathleen Pajer, who chairs the department of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa.

“Any kind of contained space is bad for infection control, but psychiatric units are especially bad,” she said. For example, “little things” like having hand sanitizer on the wall aren’t possible as they could be used as weapons.

Separation is also incredibly difficult to achieve with group activities, and it’s hard for staff to remain infection-free, which in turn increases the risk for community spread. Programs developed around group activi-ties and social interaction are a central point of care, and nurses mix freely with fewer barriers than you’d see in surgical care, including that they don’t wear protective equipment.

“We don’t have capacity to make isolation rooms,” she said, and while many are working on

a regional psychiatry plan, they keep bumping up against the fact that there are no places for them to go, and inadequate access to virtual care as an option.

Psychiatrists across Canada have been trying to adapt and consider how to separate patients in wards to manage a potential influx, said Canadian Psychiatric Association president Georgina Zahirney, and there’s widespread concern about adapting to the cri-sis and continuing adequate care.

With physical distancing mea-

sures in place, group meetings are being stopped in an environ-ment where social interaction and group work are a key part of the therapy. There’s ongoing discussions about how to separate people, but that varies depending on infrastructure, she said, and presents “major challenges.”

There’s also the added clinical challenge of dealing with some hospitalized patients and their ability to process information and adopt the necessary hygiene steps, like frequent hand-wash-ing.

Long waits to enter psychi-atric wards already at capacity were a reality before the health pressures of COVID-19, making it clear to Dr. Zahirney that the current funding won’t be enough under the potential pressure on inadequate resources.

“I would be deeply concerned at current budgets they would be able to meet the needs of the mental health system over the next few months,” she said. “There’s very consistent agree-ment that we are going to be

facing a large wave of increase in mental health service demands over the next few months.”

Innovative solutions, community support needed

Governments, businesses, and community members need to find innovative ways “to get these people housing right away,” said Dr. Pajer, perhaps in hotel rooms with enough space for infection control and the means to provide virtual care.

“We’re calling on all these factions in society to sit up and take notice and start right now,” she said, especially because it’s so hard for the staff to remain infection-free, and they become people who can transmit to the community, as do the discharged patients.

“This group needs to have at-tention, so obviously the thing we want to do is keep them out of the hospital, however if we keep out of the hospital, how are you going to treat them?”

Sen. Kutcher said there needs to be an uptick in outreach activi-ties, like mobile response teams, so those in the community are be-ing helped before being admitted to hospitals.

Discussion is growing around COVID-19’s likely impact on Ca-nadians’ mental health, an amor-phous topic that Sen. Kutcher said often leaves the most at-risk out of the picture.

“Since the dawn of time, people with severe mental ill-nesses have been left behind and sadly what I see happening right now with COVID-19, a lot of the discussion around mental health is focused on how the people who are emotionally healthy are pre-pared to respond,” he said, adding the “vast majority” will be fine.

“What is being left out, as always, is what about the people who have severe mental illnesses?”

swallen@hilltimes.com The Hill Times

Patients in psychiatric care at great risk to COVID-19 outbreak, warns Sen. Kutcher ‘We are very worried,’ echoes one psychiatrist whose association is preparing a ‘call to action’ to governments.

News

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES

COVID-19

Independent Senator Stan Kutcher, pictured at an April 2019 mental health conference, says those in psychiatric care are at great risk of a COVID-19 outbreak, 'a huge problem' he'd like to see governments address. Photograph courtesy of Senate Communications

Minister of Health Patty Hajdu speaks at a daily press conference in the West Block updating Canadians about the COVID-19 pandemic on April 2. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

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“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mr. Easter, who said he’s been through plenty of dif-ficult times during his 27 years representing Malpeque, P.E.I., but nothing so “heavy or stressful” or constant as now.

“It’s much more intense because this is people’s lives. This is not a political discussion. This is people’s lives and how they put food on their table, how they avoid the mental anguish [of COVID-19]. You just got to be available,” he said, as another phone beeped in the background while he spoke with The Hill Times on the morning of April 7.

The texts and Facebook mes-sages, phone calls and emails are continuous, and it becomes a bal-ance of MPs helping the best they can while also trying to manage expectations, said Conservative MP Kerry Diotte.

“It’s coming at us from all different angles…. We’re all under the gun,” said Mr. Diotte, recalling frustrations he’s heard from Edmonton Griesbach, Alta., residents facing long phone wait times to get answers from the

Canada Revenue Agency and other departments. Even the direct MP line to Service Canada is slower, with some staff report-ing it’s taken half a week to get responses that used to take hours.

“We all know that they’re be-ing flooded. But the bottom line is, in a crisis your communica-tions should be better,” said Mr. Diotte, saying the federal govern-ment needs to “step up” its game.

Parliamentarians report being a key conduit for communications to Canadians—whether it’s public health messaging or pointing to programs making urgent support available—but also for reporting back to caucus, and government, on where gaps exist.

Even in the best of times, MPs’ days are long and interrupted at all hours, but this crisis has brought an urgency longtime Parliamentarians have never experienced before. They spoke to The Hill Times about the impor-tance of not only being available, but also being advocates for ac-tion—as four-term NDP MP Niki Ashton (Churchill-Keewatinook Aski, Man.) put it. For many, these unusual times have reinforced their fundamental role of repre-senting local needs to Ottawa, a responsibility all said they felt before, but more acutely now in a job made more complicated by the fact the House of Commons is not sitting.

Contained in home offices and on phone lines, MPs used to meet-ings and regular interactions on local event circuits in their home ridings are turning even more to social media—and creative outreach methods—to make sure that direct contact isn’t missed. Still, with their parliamentary mailing privileges suspended—which allowed constituents to

mail them free of charge, and vice versa—some worry the inability to reach every household will mean some vulnerable popula-tions’ voices get missed.

“The level of urgency of what we’re dealing with is something I feel very profoundly,” said Ms. Ashton, who is “acutely aware” of how vulnerable many are in her vast, northern riding. She said the current pandemic is giving her “flashbacks” of the H1N1 virus, the infection rate for which was six times the average for Indig-enous people in northern Mani-toba.

There’s pressure to advocate and a clear need for “urgent, tangible action” for First Nations, said Ms. Ashton, who has been hosting regular Facebook Live videos talking about COVID-19 in “our north,” an area of Canada that she said doesn’t get enough attention from Ottawa even at the best of times.

“I’ve always seen social media as critical to my work, even more so now,” she said, adding her live chats have led to a flood of mes-sages and “heartbreaking stories” that reveal how anxious people are.

“I try to convey that anxiety, stress, and worry in demanding change,” said Ms. Ashton, who is used to the 24-hour cycle of parliamentary work, but said the intensity of it now is something different. Add twin toddlers to the mix, and Ms. Ashton said she’s “fortunate” to have a partner who can care for them during the long stretches when she’s working.

MPs turning to ‘imaginative’ outreach

MPs have had to become “very imaginative” in reaching out to constituents, said Bloc Québécois

MP Stéphane Bergeron. His office organized a robo-call to Montar-ville, Que., residents to tell them his office is still operating despite being closed, and to reach out if they needed help.

“We got hundreds of phone calls in the days following,” he said, sometimes just to say thanks but also asking for infor-mation on programs, with details sometimes coming days after they’re announced by Prime Min-ister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.).

“It’s not an easy task, because the situation is not really clear, even for us, but we’re doing our best in very difficult conditions in order to support our constituents in that crisis,” he said, adding MPs are reaching out as broadly as possible through newspaper ads and social media channels.

To encourage feedback, Liberal MP John McKay’s team sends out a newsletter every week to about 7,000 subscribers, and did a “voice drop” to about 21,000 people in his riding of Scarbor-ough-Guildwood, Ont., highlight-ing a couple of pieces of key information and reiterating how to reach their phone line if people have problems or questions. He also plans to do a Ramadan and Easter message this week, as he said many in his riding are religious.

Some MPs are dividing the work and assigning a staff point-person on programs that are creating the most calls for sup-port. Liberal MP Adam Vaughan (Spadina-Fort York, Ont.) said it’s a “triage system” of sorts, wherein you break down the work and farm it out to people working remotely. One staffer focuses on policy questions, another spe-cializes in helping those stuck overseas—and then there’s the work related to his role as parlia-mentary secretary to the minister of families, children, and social development.

Though working virtually is common in a politician’s line of work, especially for MPs who vacillate between their local riding offices and Ottawa, there remains a risk that some voices will get missed. MPs who spoke with The Hill Times said it’s important to reach out to vulner-able constituents, or groups in

contact with them, as their offices are no longer an access point, and not everyone has ready access to phones or internet.

“You learn to work with that, and you just keep trying, keep trying, keep trying,” said Mr. Vaughan, before quoting the famed Canadian scholar Mar-shall McLuhan who lived in his neighbourhood growing up and was a frequent stop on his paper delivery route.

“Communication is a miracle,” qouted Mr. Vaughan, but added that “it doesn’t mean it’s impos-sible,” and politicians are adjust-ing, including by back-channeling conversations with colleagues on social media—rather than in hall-ways or on buses on the Hill—to build consensus, and doing better outreach in their ridings.

Liberal MP Rob Oliphant (Don Valley West, Ont.) echoed that need to be proactive. His team is turning to campaign techniques, like mass texting, to get the word out, and he said a group of volun-teers is being gathered to develop a telephone tree of sorts to check in on residents.

As the parliamentary secre-tary responsible for consular affairs, Mr. Oliphant said much of his constituency work has been fielded by his “tremendous” staff, while he spends 15 to 17 hours a day helping co-ordinate efforts to repatriate thousands of Canadi-ans still abroad.

“That has been my life,” said Mr. Oliphant, though he still sends out regular emails that reach about 10,000 people in his riding, and on top of the weekly COVID-19 update, he’s planned a Facebook Live event for constitu-ents, and placed ads in newspa-pers.

MPs mostly deal with gaps and problems, even in normal circumstances, said Mr. McKay.

“We are the frontlines of prob-lems. It’s a very useful role and reinforces the utility and benefit of riding-level MPs,” who can re-iterate issues being encountered during their daily caucus calls, he said.

At a policy and practical level, caucus has had a significant role in the feds’ response, because the government is in a “vacuum of information” and needs that im-mediate feedback from Canadi-ans, said Mr. McKay.

He said he’d like to see more committees set up virtually, as they could be “quite useful.” So far, only the House Health and Fi-nance committees have met since Parliament suspended, though Government House Leader Pablo Rodriguez (Honoré-Mercier, Que.) recently asked House Speaker Anthony Rota (Nipissing-Timiskaming, Ont.) to give advice about convening Parliament virtually.

Such MP meetings could fill existing gaps and formalize policy development “a little more thoughtfully than what’s happen-ing now,” said Mr. McKay, adding they could also help prevent abuse of the system, because while the government is operating in good faith, it is also, necessar-ily, operating in haste.

“There needs to be a more for-malized mechanism of feedback,” he said.

swallen@hilltimes.comThe Hill Times

MPs say COVID-19 case work is consuming their days, and they’re turning to ‘imaginative’ ways of reaching out to make sure constituents’ needs are met and their voices heard.

News

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES

COVID-19

Continued from page 1

‘We’re all under the gun’: MPs work 24-7 in the midst of a pandemic

MPs are facing a flood of calls from constituents looking for answers about programs being rolled out by the government in response to COVID-19, and are working to flag gaps. Pictured from left to right: Liberal MP John McKay, NDP MP Niki Ashton, Conservative MP Kerry Diotte, and Liberal MP Wayne Easter. The Hill Times photographs by Andrew Meade, Cynthia Münster

7

The 21st century, so far, has been the era of unprec-

edented, avoidable catastrophes. It dawned with suicide bomb-ers mothballing the banality of evil by committing mass murder on live television, welcomed its second decade with a contagion of corruption that collapsed the global financial system, and greets its third with a viral con-tagion that threatens genocidal mortality, has depopulated the

streets of major metropolises, and could bring the world’s major economies to their knees.

When a crisis is defined by its previously un-thinkable qual-ity—by change so radically transforma-tive that we are simply incapable of imagining it until we’ve wit-nessed it—per-spective can be hard to muster. How do you process, much less cope with, a reality that confounds the two components of recognition: recollection and familiarity?

By universal-izing the experience through its most basic common denominators, we can relate to the experience of people who’ve lived through simi-lar impacts, if not similar events. In the case of 9/11, the financial cata-clysm, and the COVID-19 pandem-ic, those denominators were and are shock, horror, fear, uncertainty, sadness, helplessness, and moral outrage. Perspective can mean the difference between being defeated by those emotions, individually

or collectively, or absorbing and prevailing over them to reach understanding, empathy, resolve, resiliency, and perseverance.

One of the tests of leader-ship at such moments—one way to tell the voices that are part of the problem from those that are part of the solution—is the degree to which they contribute to or detract from the efficiency of that process by generating lies, confusion, division, insecurity, and weakness or truth, clarity, judgment, strength, vision, and compassion. Of all the norms we’ve been urged to consign to

history, the corruption of that one is among the least convincing.

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor may be the single most

potent provider of historical perspective on the planet. The Queen’s exper-tise in coping with the previ-ously unthink-able dates back to her invalu-able moral and morale-boosting role, while still a teenager, in the Manichaean battle between the brutality of Nazism and the future of human freedom, pre-sided over by the man who would

be her first prime minister, Winston Churchill. At 94, after 68 years as monarch alongside 14 prime min-isters of the United Kingdom, 12 presidents of the United States, and 12 Canadian prime ministers, the Queen, as we’ve seen in the past year, has learned a thing or two about crisis management.

In her address to Britain and the world on April 5, the Queen was speaking as not just a head of state but also as a survivor—of

war, of grief, of upheaval, of dis-ruption, of political overreach, cor-ruption, incompetence, stupidity, and evil. She was also speaking as the mother of a son and succes-sor who has just proven that this virus isn’t deterred by the Royal Protection Squad and that you can recover from it. All of which gives her personal and professional perspective on this current global catastrophe a unique authority.

“While we have faced chal-lenges before, this one is different,” she said in remarks that pointedly recalled her first wartime broad-cast in 1940, with her late sister, Margaret. “This time we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour, using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal.”

“We should take comfort that, while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again,” she said, echoing the Second World War anthem by Dame Vera Lynn, at 103 another survivor of humanity’s last Ho-meric game of dominoes.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and was a Washington and New York-based editor at UPI, AP, and ABC. She writes a weekly column for The Hill Times.

The Hill Times

OTTAWA—More than a decade has passed since, during

the 2009 financial meltdown, we heard the now-resurrected re-frain: “We’re all socialists now.”

That ironic phrasing is, of course, a recognition of the real-ity that, in the worst of times, peo-ple turn to government to inject large quantities of money into the economy in hopes of resurrecting business activity.

The early stages of COVID-19 have been no different. Here, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has un-rolled the largest, most far-reach-ing bailout package in modern times, totalling an astronomical $200-billion-plus. Canada’s central bank is spending billions to keep credit from drying up in the finan-cial system and the provinces have opened up their treasuries.

But in Canada and across the Western world, medical systems are largely being proven inadequate, with equipment running out, staff shortages, and hospitals in danger of being overloaded. And millions living paycheque-to-paycheque are in danger of winding up on the street as the economy freezes up.

The lack of social infrastructure is a devastating reminder of the state of public resources and prepared-ness after half a century of inexora-ble conservative efforts to hollow out government in the name of austerity and private sector superiority.

Championed by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and often bankrolled by the super-rich, this campaign to under-

mine progressive theory in favour of a right-wing, anti-government mentality has been one of the most successful political undertakings of the age. It has taught voters to expect everything for nothing while exacerbating the negative impact for average people of profound shifts in technology and commercial patterns.

The wealthy and the CEO class have seen their fortunes expand gro-tesquely while workers have fallen behind as governments cut support programs, weakened income redistri-bution, and chopped regulation while freezing minimum wages, thwarting union participation, and bringing in tax regimes that favour the rich.

These developments have contributed to widespread eco-nomic anxiety in the West as well-paying, secure jobs have been supplanted by the gig economy, wealth inequality has reached literally incomprehensible levels, and once-thriving communities have fallen on hard times.

And the extent of this trans-formation has hardly penetrated mainstream politics. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz summed it up: “Those at the top have learned how to suck out money from the rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of—that is their true innovation.”

While the implications of the current crisis are unknow-

able, there is a school of thought that this upheaval will lead to a re-examination of this ingrained austerity mentality with an eye to rebuilding more generous, socially conscious economic and social structures. In Canada, the public is very much invested in government action and the response from po-litical leaders, particularly at the federal level, has been more all-encompassing than anything since the Second World War. It surpasses what the federal government felt necessary in the 2008-09 recession, (although Stephen Harper did set aside his small-government fixa-tion to run a $50-billion deficit).

Writing for Public Policy Forum, Sean Speer, a former adviser to the Harper government, and Robert Asselin, a former senior staffer in the current Liberal government, said, “Policymakers can no longer think about economic growth and public policy in the same way as in the past generation and a half … the idea that Canada can just rely on traditional market forces to remain competitive while everyone else is adopting more active indus-trial strategies is foolhardy.”

COVID-19 has also deeply reinforced awareness of class divisions, with many low-income workers having to confront the virus daily. Writing about how this disproportionate impact on

the poor, immigrants, and other less-privileged society members may carry over into the post-virus era, MIT Technology Review editor Gideon Lichfield said: “As with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the U.S., in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their popula-tions so intensely vulnerable.”

A similar point was made in a recent, eye-opening editorial in the Financial Times of London, which wrote: “Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis.

“Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy,” the editorial said. “They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.”

Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times.

The Hill Times

Comment

Destiny’s child: the Queen as survivor

COVID upheaval may prompt long overdue repudiation of selfishness disguised as austerity

Whatever we’re living through now, chances are Queen Elizabeth has seen worse. Which makes her perspective priceless.

The implications of the current crisis are unknowable, but there is a school of thought this upheaval will lead to a re-examination of this mentality, with an eye to rebuilding more generous social structures.

THE HILL TIMES | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020

In her April 5 address, the Queen, who has a unique authority to speak about this current global catastrophe, was speaking as not just a head of state but also as a survivor, writes Lisa Van Dusen. YouTube screenshot courtesy of The TelegraphLisa Van Dusen

What Fresh Hell

Les Whittington

Need to Know

8

When it comes to rationalizing poten-tially not-great decisions, defenders

often pull out the old chestnut of perfec-tion being the enemy of good.

A few weeks ago, this was backed by compelling statements from Michael Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program.

“If you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection. And the problem in society we have at the moment is everyone is afraid of making a mistake. Everyone is afraid of the consequence of error. But the great-est error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralyzed by the fear of failure.”

Dr. Ryan’s March 13 comments, unironi-cally, went viral. And rightfully so, because it was—and still is—a good message.

These are times in which the use of the word “unprecedented” is itself unprecedented. And to expect that the response from all or-ders of government to the COVID-19 pandem-ic is going to be note-perfect is a fool’s errand.

Everyone is trying their best to make good decisions in a whirling dervish of a situation, and that is to be commended. While the people who signed up to be politicians likely expected to have to make a few difficult choices, it’s likely many of them didn’t expect their degree of public service to mean life or death on such a massive scale during their tenure.

That said, criticism of their choices is still fair game, because this pandemic isn’t happening in a vacuum.

When he was speaking about the les-sons he learned from the Ebola crisis, Dr. Ryan also said in addition to being fast, the response has to be comprehensive.

“You need to be co-ordinated, you need to be coherent, you need to look at the other sectoral impacts, the schools, and security, and economic [impacts],” he said.

Part of that overview should consider whether there’s a bigger message being sent by the particular choices governments make. For example, last week Prime Minis-ter Justin Trudeau announced that Amazon Canada would be managing the distribu-tion of personal protective equipment to the provinces and territories. This, on its face, is a sound idea—few private companies have the pervasive network Amazon does.

The government said the company was providing this service at cost, without profit, and would be using its existing partnerships with Canada Post and Puro-lator for delivery.

But taking even one step back, it’s hard not to see the choice as rewarding a company that has a less-than-stellar repu-tation, with myriad reports of question-able business practices and poor treat-ment of its most vulnerable employees.

These are longstanding issues, not ones that have cropped up since the pan-demic was declared—though the corona-virus has only exacerbated them.

By picking a company that has had employees walk off the job in protest of the handling of COVID-19 in Amazon facilities, the federal government is also sending a mes-sage that it’s okay to endanger these workers.

When all is said and done, and “reflec-tions”—as the prime minister is wont to call them—are finished, hopefully the reward will be for the workers who put their lives on the line to ensure health-care workers had the supplies they need, by pushing Amazon to be a better employer.

The Hill Times

We’re so very focused on our own behaviour during the pandemic that

we forget: without a vaccine, developing countries are at even greater risk than ours, because it’s harder for them to do physi-cal distancing and workplace shutdowns. The further down the income ladder people live, the more important it is that they go to

work every day just to feed their families.The work we’re doing to develop vac-

cines will save lives in Canada. We must ensure Canada provides financial support to ensure all countries get equal access to those vaccines.

Randy Rudolph Calgary, Alta.

Re: “Introduction of electronic, remote voting not called for yet, but should

be re-examined by House committee, say some MPs,” (The Hill Times, April 1, p. 14). As one who frequently observes the tele-vised House of Commons proceedings, it was interesting to read the commentary from three MPs in this story regarding modernizing House procedures, particu-larly with regard to voting in the House of Commons.

The notion of utilizing either elec-tronic voting or absentee voting, or both, have been bandied about on different occasions for the past number of years. Thankfully, in my opinion, no concrete action has been taken to implement those voting procedures in the House of Com-mons, and may it be ever thus.

Both Liberal MPs quoted, namely Lar-ry Bagnell and Kevin Lamoureux, have suggested that going to electronic voting, for example, would free up more time for MPs to do other things rather than spending time in the House Chamber for recorded votes. I wonder what “other things” could be more important than having MPs being in the House Chamber and being held visibly accountable for their votes on any given issue? Isn’t that what MPs are there to do?

Some comment was made about the amount of time it takes to have a re-corded vote in the House of Commons. I certainly know one way of shortening that length of time, and that is by elimi-nating the 30-minute bell for “deferred recorded divisions.” Those are the re-corded votes on bills and other motions that have been previously scheduled to take place on a specific date and at a specific time. Thus, every MP knows days in advance that on X-date at X-time, there will be a recorded vote on a specific bill or motion. One would think all MPs would have this noted in their calendars. Why then, do the divi-sion bells have to ring for 30 minutes to call the Members into the House for the vote? MPs should already be

in their seats before the time set aside for the vote to take place. At most, all that should be required is a 10-minute reminder bell, with the Speaker shutting off the bells as soon as the 10 minutes is up in order to allow the voting to begin. Any MPs not in the House and in their seats when the bells stop ringing don’t get in until the voting is completed. In other words, “you snooze, you lose.”

That’s the system in place in both the British and Australian Parliaments. Division bells ring for about 10 minutes and as soon as the time is up, the Speak-ers order the doors locked and only those Members in their places at that time get to vote. It’s called “discipline” and it’s a process that needs to be developed and adhered to in Canada’s House of Com-mons.

In normal circumstances (when there is no pandemic) I expect all MPs to be in the House of Commons during parlia-mentary sessions doing the work they were elected to do. I don’t want to see electronic or absentee voting implement-ed, which would then allow MPs to be anywhere else but in the House and being visibly accountable to the people who sent them there.

Jae Eadie Winnipeg, Man.

Corporations stepping up shouldn’t mean their practices get a blind eye

Supporting international allies helps Canada, too

Canadian House of Commons needs discipline, not virtual voting: reader

Editorial Letters to the Editor

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES

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MPs participate in an orientation session in the House of Commons Chamber on Dec. 3. Introducing measures that would allow MPs to spend less time in the Chamber voting is a bad idea, says letter writer Jae Eadie. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

The internet is awash in con-spiracy theories that the novel

coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak was due to an accidental or deliberate escape from a Chinese facility engaged in covert weap-ons development.

A March 17 Nature Medicine ar-ticle considered the possibility that the outbreak resulted from an inad-vertent lab release of a virus under study but concluded “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

The Washington Post has de-bunked a claim that the outbreak

can be tied to deliberate bioweap-ons activity, with help from Pro-fessor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, a biosecurity expert.

Yet it was reported March 30 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scien-tists that Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release—not a deliberate release—from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.

All such claims and suspicions are so far reliant on hearsay.

Credible media sources are careful not to propagate wide-spread claims by the Chinese, including from trolls, that the virus actually originated in the United States.

But we should begin to call into question the effectiveness of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. Our goal should be not to erode its moral author-ity—to the detriment of all na-tions—but to strengthen it in the aftermath of this pandemic.

The convention, commonly re-ferred to as the BWC, established confidence-building measures (CBMs) in 1986 that aimed to “prevent or reduce the occurrence of ambiguities, doubts, and sus-picions, and in order to improve international co-operation in the field of peaceful biological activi-ties.”

The BWC includes the obliga-tion to “exchange …. information on all outbreaks of infection diseases and similar occurrences caused by toxins that seem to deviate from the normal pattern of development.”

Back in the 1980s, the release of an aerosol of anthrax spores from a Soviet military microbi-

ology facility led to the formal adoption of this CBM by the United Nations.

The problem is that few states have submitted annual reports to the UN, and when they have, their information is often too sketchy and incomplete to be useful to de-termine compliance to the BWC.

Now that much more attention will have to be paid to global pat-terns of disease—driven largely by concerns about the coronavi-rus—we will need to revolutionize the flow of information by reduc-ing non-co-operation. We need to reduce delays in information sharing from years, months, and weeks, to days and hours.

We need to act fast to provide many more direct channels for information sharing across inter-national borders from all types of medical, veterinary, and agricul-tural professionals.

The United Nations Security Council and the World Health Or-ganization (WHO) have not been able to schedule face-to-face emergency summits because physically convening all UN-recognized countries to discuss realistic strategies for quarantin-ing citizens creates problems, especially in New York City, and at international ports of entry.

But the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, has suggested nations act fast to consult using virtual meetings.

Last week, for instance, the UN delayed the 2020 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference that was planned to start in late April until sometime before April 2021.

In the future, we will need quicker international agreement on more international bench-marks for appropriate self-

quarantine measures, and stricter guidelines and strategies that cruise ships should implement when travelling throughout ports in Asia and Oceania.

Unfortunately, the People’s Republic of China was under no obligation under international law to update the number of pa-tients affected by the COVID-19 in a more open and transparent way. Global miscommunication means we have lost valuable time to take stronger steps to prevent international travellers from re-entering their own countries with-out voluntarily self-quarantining.

The WHO will need to provide more specific guidelines and requirements on protective equip-ment that should be worn, and minimum international standards that factories must meet when producing medically approved face masks and hazmat suits for health-care workers and the gen-eral public.

The United Nations Disaster Assessment and Co-ordination (UNDAC) team did travel immedi-ately to Wuhan and other areas of Hubei Province, with the permis-sion of Chinese governmental authorities; but in future crises, no such national permission should be needed before taking swift action.

If a country is too poor to pre-vent the spread of an outbreak, we need a Global Emergency Re-sponse Fund at the UN or NATO headquarters that can help pay.

Authorities must be prevented, globally, from censoring content and from refusing to share infor-mation on social media platforms, like Facebook and WeChat.

In the future, many different scenarios for accidental or delib-erate biological weapons use may be imagined. Military scenarios

often envisage the dissemination of substantial quantities of anti-human agents, like a new form of anthrax, in aerosol form.

In the case of the coronavirus, the pandemic spread from a point source that was likely due to a natural disease, not an accidental release, and certainly not a terror-ist attack with biological weap-ons. But in future, covert attacks may employ natural processes, like sneezing and coughing, to spread disease from the point of attack.

We will need more mecha-nisms that distinguish natural and unnatural outbreaks from one another.

Rogue leaders will also need to be strongly prevented from concealing the use of biologi-cal weapons. We need to deter them by using today’s crisis to strengthen tomorrow’s interna-tional norms and agreements.

Important conferences that focus on controlling weapons of mass destruction are being delayed; meanwhile we need to plan for the future by de-manding more effective global governance and international co-operation. World leaders and civil society representatives should use their cell phones and email to speedily communicate with each other.

Erika Simpson is an associate professor of international politics at Western University, president of the Canadian Peace Research Association, author of NATO and the Bomb, and peer reviewer for the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health College of Peer Reviewer. This is her viewpoint and not that of the CIMVHR.

The Hill Times

9

Comment

Our goal should be not to erode the moral authority of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention—to the detriment of all nations—but to strengthen it in the aftermath of this pandemic.

Erika Simpson

Opinion

THE HILL TIMES | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020

We don’t know how this virus began, but we know how we can learn from our response

The United Nations Security Council has not been able to schedule face-to-face emergency summits because physically convening all UN-recognized countries to discuss realistic strategies for quarantining citizens creates problems, especially in New York City, and at international ports of entry. Flickr photograph by Michelle Lee

10

OTTAWA—As Canada’s CO-VID-19 containment enters

its fourth week, with many weeks still likely to go, a bouquet to some of our political leaders for how they handled U.S. President Donald Trump’s initial efforts to limit 3M from providing N95 respirator masks to Canada.

Late last week, in a time when the world needed—and still does—co-operation, the American leader looked like he was going to prohibit these key pieces of medical equipment from entering Canada. Thankfully, that no lon-ger appears to be the case. Some good political advocacy may have helped.

When news first broke that the president was about to hit hoarder mode, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in his daily public appearances, didn’t take the bait journalists where trying to hook him with. They hoped he might offer a full throttled public con-demnation of Trump: blast him for his blatant self-interest and ap-parent ignorance that some of the N95 component parts were made in Canada in British Columbia.

Trudeau, having worked with and through the American presi-dent’s unique psyche for several years, knew that a public punch in the head would not prove help-ful in getting the N95s to Canada. The president’s jaw is glass and his skin thin, so Trudeau going after him on a personal level would have, at a minimum, led to a shouting match and masks not moving.

While Canadian officials were working behind the scenes, as the prime minister acknowledged, some of Canada’s premiers stepped up to the cameras to launch the moral-suasion of-fensive. Two of these—Premiers Doug Ford and Jason Kenney—were, at different levels during the long-ago fall election, strong foes of Trudeau, and he them.

Ford expressed disappoint-ment in the Trump administra-tion’s initial behaviour, say-ing: “We’re one big family, but they’ve cut out one part of the family now…. Still, I am so disappointed in what they are doing right now.” Kenney added: “It’s very disappointing. I would

remind our American friends and neighbours that we’ve always been there together in important moments in history.”

Neither of the critiques of-fered by Ford or Kenney were bitingly personal, something both premiers have in the past demonstrated skill in offering up. Instead, they were centred on the historical familial ties that bind the people of Canada and the United States. Both are Conserva-tive leaders known in Washington and to others in the Trump orbit. Their interventions added legiti-macy to the Canadian concern about U.S. mask hoarding.

Then a blast of late winter came at the American president from Newfoundland and Labra-dor.

The outgoing premier of the province, Dwight Ball, not normally regarded as having the best of communications skills, weighed in and weighed in hard. He evoked the memories of 9/11, when Canada, and Newfoundland and Labrador in particular, gave without question safe harbour to thousands of Americans who

couldn’t get home because of ter-rorist attacks.

Ball was forceful. He stated: “To say that I’m infuriated by the recent actions of President Trump of the United States is an under-statement,” adding that “New-foundland and Labrador will never give up on humanity. We will not hesitate for one second if we had to repeat what we did on 9/11. We would do it again.” Ball’s comments, along with Ford’s and Kenney’s, were picked up by American media outlets.

The efforts of the premiers, the prime minister’s managed public utterances, and backroom diplo-macy must have helped in resolv-ing the log jam around masks. Reports now suggest the 3M N95 masks will be readily available in Canada. Team Canada efforts do pay off apparently.

A final thought on Premier Ball, as a Newfoundlander and Labradorean I was proud he publicly called out the president the way he did. I can also con-firm if the people of my province were called upon again to help our American friends in a time of need, they would do it in the blink of an eye.

Tim Powers is vice-chairman of Summa Strategies and manag-ing director of Abacus Data. He is a former adviser to Conservative political leaders.

The Hill Times

OTTAWA—Whenever there is a crisis involving death and

destruction, one of the first reac-tions of the media is to describe it as being akin to “a war zone.” A tornado rips through an urban centre and we are told that the wreckage looks “like a war zone.”

A train derails and bursts into flames and we are told that the blazing debris is “like a war zone.”

Now, as the global COVID-19 pandemic engulfs the planet, we are once again being told that this is a “war.” True enough, the casualty count continues to mount and our health-care services are overex-tended in the battle to contain the spread of the virus. Howev-er, the analogy that this is a “war” against COVID-19 may set us on a false course for dealing with the impact of the mas-sive economic crisis that is sure to follow this initial health crisis.

Wars, by their very nature, stim-ulate economic activity. As armies are mobilized, factories ramp up production in order to equip them with weapons and munitions. Strict controls, such as the rationing of vital supplies like fuel and food, are implemented, and governments impose wage and price controls to prevent rabid inflation.

With the COVID-19 crisis we have the exact opposite course of action, in that we have strictly

enforced idleness for all but es-sential workers. Across the entire globe, we have the unprecedented shutdown of the world’s economy.

The Canadian government has already announced a stream of financial assistance packages to drip-feed businesses and workers for the duration of the shutdown in the hope that they will help jump start the economy when nor-mal life resumes. What was origi-nally announced to be a $1-bil-lion crisis-fund from the federal government was soon increased to

$27-billion and within days, that number increased to a staggering $200-billion and counting.

As for the length of the work stoppage, that was to have been a 14-day shutdown of schools and non-essential workplaces. Now we have the official cancellation of major events like parades and conferences right through to the end of June.

Even with the current govern-ment drip-feed of financial aid to suspended businesses, it is not clear how many small enterprises

will survive to be able to reopen their doors once this storm abates.

Another hazard in describing the current crisis as a “war” is that people then have a heightened expectation that the Canadian Armed Forces somehow have a role to play in this crisis. A recent poll conducted by the Conference of Defence Association Institute and IPSOS determined that nine out of 10 Canadians expect the CAF to be involved in somehow defending Canada from the CO-VID-19 pandemic.

While there may eventually be some logistics support and security enforcement tasks performed by the CAF, this is not a war: it is a health crisis. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, cleaners, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants, and truck drivers are the frontline soldiers in the battle against CO-VID-19. Not our combat troops.

The present prediction is that even with the strict rules in place for self-isolation and physical dis-tancing, some 30 to 70 per cent of Canadians will contract the virus, and of that number a small per-centage will die from the disease. Those numbers could translate into tragic proportions in even a best-case scenario.

However, one thing is for sure and that is that when the second shoe drops—the economic crunch this crisis has caused—every single Canadian will feel the impact on some level.

We need to be planning now for how best to restart the econo-my, even as we struggle to flatten the curve and curb the spread of this deadly contagion.

Scott Taylor is the editor and publisher of Esprit de Corps magazine.

The Hill Times

Comment

Team Canada shows co-operation pays after 3M mask supply threatened

The fight against COVID-19 isn’t a war, and shouldn’t be described that way

While Canadian officials were working behind the scenes to ensure Canada’s supply of 3M masks, some of Canada’s premiers stepped up to the cameras to launch the moral-suasion offensive.

Wars, by their very nature, stimulate economic activity and with the COVID-19 crisis we have the exact opposite course of action, in that we have strictly enforced idleness for all but essential workers.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES

Finance Minister Bill Morneau is pictured in the West Block for a March 18 press conference about the government’s COVID-19 response. Even with the current government drip-feed of financial aid to suspended businesses, it is not clear how many small enterprises will survive to be able to reopen their doors once this storm abates, writes Scott Taylor. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Scott Taylor

Inside Defence

Tim Powers

Plain Speak

11

OTTAWA—So, us SJWs (social justice warriors) were right all along. Seems

like building a just and equitable society where people are paid a livable wage, health care and housing are human rights, the environment is protected, labour is powerful, and white supremacy/colonial-ism and patriarchy are relegated to the annals of history is quite doable, contrary to what we’ve been told.

You’re welcome. (My dad recently called me the Gordon Gekko of social justice and I’m not sure how I feel about that.)

However, a necessary—and some would argue, a sufficient—condition for equity is a strong government, not the hobbled mess of ineffectiveness of service that has befallen the public sector as a result of fiscal conser-vatism.

SJW has become a pejorative term that fanboys of market fundamentalism, conservatism, and right-wing fascists

throw out to indicate that you’re too soft or sensitive and offended by everything and anything, hence the term, “snowflake.” The only thing is, when an inordinate number of snowflakes get together, they cause an avalanche. And boy, it’s snowing.

Last week’s column argued that neoliberal thinking (which should be an oxymoron at this point), had rendered the Canadian social safety net null and void, so much so that provincial and federal governments had to create new legisla-tion to protect workers, the same type of protection labour unions and SJWs have been fighting for.

Market fundamentalism is dead. We’re all socialists now.

Neoliberalism gave way to market fundamentalism, which is the belief that unregulated markets will solve everything, yet here we are. An extension of market fundamentalism is the belief that the private sector does everything better, which coagu-lates into the belief that government cannot be trusted and neither can its workers. Un-fortunately for market sycophants, the mar-ket is about to collapse and the only thing saving us is government; however, after decades of cuts, government infrastructure has been hollowed out to the point that the ability to deliver new and existing programs in times of crisis is questionable.

In 2012, the Harper government imple-mented the Deficit Reduction Action Plan (DRAP) to balance the federal budget, which they claimed to do without cutting

government services. The claim was that the then-government found $5.2-billion in ongoing savings,

The stupidity required to take these claims seriously, and the consequential lack of critical analysis, continues to be astound-ing. The idea that more than 19,000 public service jobs could be eliminated due to “effi-ciencies”—which is just another way to say that government is a spendthrift, wasting your hard-earned money to give to people who are less deserving than you—is prepos-terous. It is that attitude that has permeated our politics and has been the lens through which government policy is developed and analyzed. It is in the name of fiscal conser-vatism that we’re in this mess, where our services and government infrastructure are hollowed out for the perfunctory promises of efficiency. Rarely is the frequency with which these promises are analyzed from a societal perspective: is efficiency really the role of government, or is it a just and equi-table society? This is a fundamental ques-tion that relies on a view of government as being a conduit and a catalyst for societal equity, rather than a cold, callous outpost to be ravaged by the private sector whenever politically expedient.

The problem is, the effects of those cuts are being felt during a crisis that requires all hands on the government deck, only they eliminated those hands eight years ago. Instead of 19,200 jobs, the Harper govern-ment actually eliminated 26,000 federal jobs indiscriminately (another 8,900 had been

planned), rather than strategically, which re-sulted in the loss of institutional knowledge and, yes, loss of services. If you don’t have enough people with the institutional knowl-edge to deliver and service federal programs, the quality and delivery of the program will suffer. And we can see this already.

According to a 2017 case study on the DRAP by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD), contrary to the govern-ment’s insistence that no services were adversely affected by these cuts, there were impacts felt, especially by departments that are foundational to providing relief for COVID-19, such as Employment and Social Development Canada, where “the number of contact centres processing employment insurance claims dropped from 120 to 22. This led to a 40-year low in the number of unemployed people who successfully claimed EI, and led to large increases in call wait times, dropped calls, and aban-doned calls.”

Welp, that’s kind of inconvenient now, eh?The funny thing is, the Harper govern-

ment refused to disclose data regarding how services fared after DRAP, so much so that then PBO-chief, Kevin Page, took them to court. One could surmise from this resis-tance to transparency that the government knew it couldn’t back up those claims.

“The more plausible explanation is that the government had a political motive to deny service impacts and was keen to en-sure there was little public evidence to the contrary.” This assessment by IFSD, head-ed by Page, seems quite standard for the fiscal conservative set who like to perform funky mathematics that don’t hold to argue a political point. The only problem is, this argument is no longer academic in nature, it now has life or death consequences.

Erica Ifill is a co-host of the Bad+Bitchy podcast.

The Hill Times

Comment

Market fundamentalism is dead. We’re all socialists now

THE HILL TIMES | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020

Erica Ifill

Bad+Bitchy

12

OTTAWA—In February of 1997, I was the acting deputy

head of information at the World Health Organization, and was invited to a meeting of senior staff in the office of then-director-general Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima.

We were arranged in a circle in the director-general’s office at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, as it was ex-plained that Nakajima would be travelling to Iraq. Led by Saddam Hussein’s officials, he would look into the impact of sanctions and the “Oil for Medicine” program (part of the “Oil for Food” program instituted by the UN in 1995).

We were to prepare a press release, in which Nakajima would blast the United States for restricting the flow of medicine to Iraqis, as he would witness supply points where people were lined up in droves. Much of the direc-tion was given by the adviser on Iraq, a former member of Hus-sein’s dictatorship.

I was uncomfortable with writing a release before the fact, and I mentioned this to the acting head, a WHO “lifer” who didn’t want to rock the boat. Nonethe-

less, I intervened, pointing out my concerns.

“I am just a lowly information officer,” I began, “but were I the director-general of this organiza-tion, I might be reluctant to be so critical of its largest contributor.” I then suggested the trip was being orchestrated as a propaganda “coup” by Hussein. Surprisingly, Nakajima agreed: the release was distributed at the end of the trip and the criticism of the United States was expunged.

In time, the “Oil for Food” pro-gram was proven to be a scam, as Hussein’s henchmen were keep-ing the food and medicine and selling them on the black market. And Nakajima did not seek re-election to head the WHO in 1998, as the U.S. opposed his candidacy.

The story is pertinent today, as we note the egregious influence of China’s Xi Jinping in this crisis on current WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia. Many factors contrib-ute to this policy of compliance. I will try to unpack them.

The first is money. While the WHO’s budget has increased over the years, its ability to compete with

other UN organizations for donor funds has not. The dues Canada and other countries pay, called “assessed contributions,” support just one-quarter of the WHO’s more than US$4-billion budget. It needs voluntary contributions from its member-states to survive. Enter China, its third-largest assessed contributor, with money to support WHO headquarters operations, and the potential for more in the future.

The second is global politics. The role of Taiwan in this crisis is a burr under the saddle of the Chinese, as their democracy has proven more effective than communist China in eradicating the virus. Taiwan has long sought membership to the WHO, which has been vehemently opposed by China’s Xi. The refusal of Canadian doctor Bruce Aylward to answer questions about mak-ing a Taiwan a member, and his praise for China, have more than likely been directed by Dr. Tedros, as he’s known. The WHO released a statement soon afterwards to try to take the heat off Aylward, stating “the member-states, not the staff, determine the membership.”

The third is internal politics. Dr. Tedros’ election as head of the WHO

can be traced directly to China’s campaign for him in 2017. The “G-77” group of 134 developing countries is a powerful UN voting bloc, and China holds sway over many of them. Dr. Tedros will seek re-election in 2022, and he needs China’s sup-port. Its influence is not something new: his predecessor, Dr. Margaret Chan, a Canadian citizen, was put forth as the Chinese candidate.

This poisonous cocktail has left the WHO damaged, by align-ing with Xi’s mendaciousness of the perils and spread of COV-ID-19. An online petition is calling for the removal of Dr. Tedros, and demands Taiwan’s inclusion at the WHO are increasing. But despite its merits and its proven expertise in the field, Taiwan will be op-posed by China and the G-77.

As a former WHO staffer, I have the utmost respect for the professionalism of my former col-leagues, the best physicians in the world. But I am saddened their work is being tarnished by poli-tics. I am afraid the reputation of the WHO will be in tatters when the crisis is over, thanks to the in-competence and political intrigue of Dr. Tedros. He has to go.

Andrew Caddell is retired from Global Affairs Canada, where he was a senior policy adviser. He previously worked as an adviser to Liberal gov-ernments. He is a fellow with the Ca-nadian Global Affairs Institute and a principal of QIT Canada. He can be reached at pipson52@hotmail.com.

The Hill Times

A senior adviser at the World Health Organization (WHO)

was recently asked by a journalist about Taiwan’s success in combat-ting COVID-19 and whether the WHO will reconsider Taiwan’s en-gagement with the agency. Rather than answer the question, this senior adviser appeared to hang up the phone, dodged the ques-tion, and ultimately, responded by suggesting that they had “already spoken” about China.

As unfortunate as this incident was, it has given the world a new opportunity to reflect on some important questions: why is it that

Taiwan—a country geographi-cally so close to China with just more than 300 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and five deaths—is excluded from organizations like the WHO? Why is it that the mere mention Taiwan has some global officials ducking for cover?

The answer is simple: due to political objectives, China has put the international community in a vice grip when it comes to Taiwan. Beijing would sooner harm the international community’s ability to combat COVID-19 than would it allow Taiwan to be involved and make contributions in interna-tional institutions.

However, even as China at-tempts to tighten its political grip over international institutions like the WHO, more and more coun-tries are looking to Taiwan as an example. Rather than shunning Taiwan as Beijing would wish that all countries do, the international community is increasingly turning to the Taiwanese government to engage in meaningful co-operation.

Most recently, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen an-nounced that Taiwan will enhance international co-operation by donating 10 million face masks. Of these masks, seven million will go to nine European Union member states, plus the U.K. and Switzerland, that need them most, another two million to the U.S., and one million to Taiwan’s 15 diplomatic allies.

This donation of masks has led to an outpouring of gratitude, including from President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who thanked Taiwan in a Twitter post, calling the dona-tion a “gesture of solidarity” that shows we are “stronger together.”

Taiwan’s mask donation builds upon agreements with the U.S., EU, Czech Republic, and Austra-lia, on all manner of COVID-19 related matters. This includes possible co-operation on: infor-mation and best-practice sharing, vaccine development, testing kit development, personal protective equipment supplies, raw material development, and more. It is clear that Taiwan is a ready and willing partner, and that there is much to be gained by working with the island nation when it comes to battling COVID-19.

It is worth noting that Canada is interested in joining this grow-ing chorus of like-minded coun-tries. The executive director of the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei, Jordan Reeves, recently met with the president of Taiwan’s top research institution, Academia Sinica, Dr. James C. Liao. The two discussed Taiwan’s work toward developing rapid diagnostic tests for COVID-19, as well as Taiwan’s efforts toward pandemic preven-tion. The trade office believes that there are lots of things Canada and Taiwan can do to “flatten the curve.”

This recent dialogue was an important step in the right direction for both countries, and more could be done to co-operate in concrete terms. This could include increased scientific dialogue, private sector co-ordination, vaccine development, best-practice sharing, personal protective equipment supply co-operation, and much, much more.

And yet, despite such positive prospects for bilateral co-operation, there is much more work to be done in terms of co-operation through important international institutions. Had the WHO heeded the warnings of Taiwanese experts near the begin-ning of the outbreak, the COIVD-19 pandemic would have progressed far less aggressively. Despite this, Taiwan was ignored by the WHO.

The fact is, the WHO did not share the information Taiwan has provided with the world. Although the Taiwanese government has made consistent and regular attempts to participate in forums in meetings of the WHO, Taiwan is consistently ignored or rejected to participate in an ineffectual capacity.

For instance, from 2009 to 2019, Taiwan applied to attend 187 WHO technical meetings, but was ac-cepted to only 57, for a very high rejection rate of 70 per cent. This indicates that when handling Tai-wan’s participation in its technical meetings, WHO continues to re-strict Taiwan for political reasons.

Even though the WHO finally seems willing to recognize the

effectiveness of the Taiwanese ap-proach to COVID-19, the WHO still seems to be only engaging Taiwan on China’s terms. It should not be so; the WHO’s own constitution makes it clear that the “enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.” It is therefore unconscionable that the human health of the 23.8 million Taiwanese people (and indeed, the people of the world) should be im-peded by or hinge upon the political whims of apparatchiks in Beijing.

This is why the world needs a co-ordinated approach. Countries like Canada must continue (as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has done) to advocate for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the WHO. Moreover, with the annual World Health As-sembly fast approaching, we urge the international community to continue supporting Taiwan’s inclu-sion as an observer. Many Canadian Parliamentarians have stood up for this, and it is our hope that more will follow suit.

Taiwan needs the world, and as the COVID-19 situation proves, the world needs Taiwan. It is for this reason that stronger, more urgent action is needed by Canada and other like-minded countries to fight for Taiwan’s meaningful partici-pation in the WHO, as well as in other international fora such as the International Civil Aviation Orga-nization and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is past time for co-operation to prevail over narrow political preferences.

Winston Wen-yi Chen is the rep-resentative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada.

The Hill Times

Opinion

The role of the WHO in this crisis has been tarnished by politics

It is past time for co-operation to prevail over narrow political preferences

A poisonous cocktail of money and internal and global politics has left the WHO damaged by aligning with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s mendaciousness of the perils and spread of COVID-19.

Taiwan needs the world, and as the COVID-19 situation proves, the world needs Taiwan.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES

Winston Wen-yi Chen

Opinion

Andrew Caddell

With All Due Respect

Stop the SpreadCOVID-19 can be deadly.Stay home. Save lives.

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14

heard reports of nurses threat-ened with discipline if they wear a mask around inmates who are not confirmed cases.”

Very limited cleaning proce-dures, having to request cleaning supplies, and not having them readily available—including the lack of hand sanitizers and other sanitation products—are other issues, said Ms. Daviau.

“[Correctional officers] are refusing or are being [reluctant] to frisk inmates due to fear of the virus, basically allowing un-checked inmates into the health-care area,” said Ms. Daviau. “This last situation is being addressed, but it’s borne from a lack of per-sonal protective equipment and communication, and is essentially risking the lives of our health-care workers working in these facilities with violent offenders entering their safe area without a check.”

Correctional officers (COs) are the largest category of frontline correctional employees and they “maintain a high frequency of contact with inmates,” according to the government’s website. “It has been argued that the develop-ment of good relationships be-tween COs and inmates can be an important avenue for influencing offenders in pro-social ways.”

The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) is working with its partners and engaging unions in taking the necessary steps to en-sure everyone’s safety, according to spokesperson Christina Tricomi in an email to The Hill Times on April 7.

“As an added prevention mea-sure, CSC workers have started wearing masks where physical distancing is not possible. Taking into consideration infection and prevention principles, CSC has provided guidance to staff on the use of personal protective equip-ment that is meant to provide the greatest degree of protection and prevention possible for staff and offenders,” wrote Ms. Tri-

comi. “Also, for anyone working at one of our sites, CSC has issued guidance for working with an offender with either symptoms of, or who is diagnosed with, COVID-19. When they are provid-ing care and will be within two metres for an inmate, staff will put on gloves, a surgical/proce-dural mask, a face shield or eye goggles, and a gown.”

Recognizing supply and demand issues for PPE globally, CSC is taking efforts to conserve supply and reusing it where it is suitable to do so, and CSC has also continued to suspend all temporary absences (unless medi-cally necessary), work releases for offenders, and all inter-region-al and international transfers of inmates, she wrote.

“We also have modified routines across the organiza-tion to reduce staffing levels and a screening process takes place prior to the entry of critical services within our institutions. In addition, group education and programs have been temporarily suspended,” wrote Ms. Tricomi, in addition to putting into place hygiene measures as well as cleaning, disinfecting, and proper laundry and waste disposal pro-cesses.

“Our parole officers and staff in the community continue their critical work to ensure the management and supervision of offenders. We are providing direction to community staff on what measures they can take to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission,” wrote Ms. Tricomi. “Community staff have been instructed to take measures to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission, such as limit-ing visits, increasing cleaning routines and reducing capacity to ensure that residents can safely

self-isolate, as necessary, for the protection of other residents and staff members.”

“Our greatest responsibility is keeping Canadians safe. That includes all correctional staff, inmates, and the Canadian public. We know the unique risks inher-ent to prisons,” said Mary-Liz Power, spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Bill Blair (Scar-borough Southwest, Ont.). “The Correctional Service of Canada continues to take a number of preventative measures to restrict the spread of COVID-19 in federal institutions while maintaining inmates’ connections with family, friends, and support systems.”

Mr. Blair has asked both the commissioner of the CSC and the chair of the Parole Board of Cana-

da to determine whether there are measures that could be taken to facilitate early release for certain offenders, Ms. Power said.

As of April 6, CSC reported 21 positive COVID-19 tests among federal inmates, the bulk from three institutions in Ontario and Quebec.

‘We don’t want to see a situation that puts any prisoners or staff at risk,’ says Senator Pate

Independent Senator Kim Pate (Ontario) has been calling for a public-health-centred action plan that includes measures to reduce the population within prisons to help address COVID-19.

Sen. Pate said she doesn’t want see a situation that puts any prisoners or staff at risk, and that she has been getting calls from medical professionals since the first weekend after the start of widespread physical distancing who are “extremely concerned”

and said their recommendations were not being followed to reduce the numbers of people in prison.

Sen. Pate was appointed to the Senate in November 2016 after spending several decades as an advocate within the legal and penal systems of Canada, including as executive director to the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry societies from 1992 until her appointment to the Red Chamber.

“Some jurisdictions, like Ontario, did immediately say no intermittent sentences will be served in the prisons, as of [mid-March] or near that point, so that those individuals would not be potentially unwittingly introducing the virus,” said Sen. Pate in an April 6 interview. “They

also said they would start to look at temporary absence programs in Nova Scotia, and provincially, the judges sat all weekend to try and do a series of bail reviews to try and get as many people out of the remand centre and provincial jails as possible.”

“Different jurisdictions have done different things, and the problem is it’s a bit of a patch-work across the country,” said Sen. Pate.

‘Where are they going to go?’ asks parole officer rep

Union of Safety and Jus-tice Employees president Stan Stapleton said in the early-release scenario, workload concerns for parole officers, “which we have been pointing out for many years now” are top of mind for the union—as well as the risk man-agement aspect.

“We still need to do a very thorough assessment of these individuals—more thorough than normal, I would suggest, because

we are talking about people that are going to be released early, so the preparation in some of these cases would not have been done already,” said Mr. Stapleton.

Mr. Stapleton said his union has heard from many parole of-ficers who have said they are get-ting burnt out, and many that are on sick leave. He said that accord-ing to a survey last year, many parole officers indicated they were stressed out and struggling to get their work done within a 37.5-hour work week, with many putting in unpaid overtime “that quite frankly they shouldn’t be, but they do it because of their commitment and their passion for the job [and] the commitment to the offenders and to ensuring that offenders will be successful when they reintegrate into the community.”

There’s also the question of where these inmates are going to go when they are released, a partic-ular concern for some First Nations offenders, Mr. Stapleton said.

“Many of the communities have simply closed off, nobody can come in, so if we’re going to let these men and women out early, where are they going to go? Halfway houses don’t want any new people right now, so that’s another concern,” he said.

The number of inmates who could be released early won’t really have much of an impact on the safety inside the prisons, Mr. Stapleton noted.

“Now, to be fair to the individ-uals that are going to be released, it may have a huge impact on them because they are being removed from an environment that is going to be very danger-ous, and we’re already seeing cases come up within the institu-tions, and we certainly expect that it’s going to be very difficult inside the institutions to protect offenders and protect staff, quite frankly,” said Mr. Stapleton.

The union has regular discus-sions with CSC about the safety of frontline workers, and he said that the ability to maintain physi-cal or social distancing within a prison becomes very difficult, and the lack of PPE is another problem—the expectation that Corrections has of workers con-tinuing to interact with offenders without either of those is a “huge concern.”

He also said that while there has been some consultation with the union about community cor-rectional centres and community parole, there hasn’t been much overall.

Mr. Stapleton said his union has engaged the minister’s office when they’ve felt it necessary, which has “been very receptive to our concerns,” and that he regularly speaks with senior staff within Mr. Blair’s office.

“We are being [heard] at the minister’s office, but certainly not at Corrections as much as we would like. It’s always kind of been ‘this is how we’re going to do it, what do you think,’ as opposed to ‘let’s sit down, have a discussion, here’s where we need to end up, how are we going to get there.”

“We rarely have those discus-sions at Corrections,” said Mr. Stapleton.

mlapointe@hilltimes.comThe Hill Times

‘Critical situation’ in prisons as health-care workers threaten to walk over lack of protective equipment ‘The Correctional Service of Canada continues to take a number of preventative measures to restrict the spread of COVID-19 in federal institutions,’ according to the office of Public Safety Minister Bill Blair.

News

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES

Public service

Continued from page 1 Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, pictured at a West Block press conference about the government’s response to COVID-19 on March 18, has asked both the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada and the chair of the Parole Board of Canada to determine if there are measures that could be taken to facilitate early release for certain offenders. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

15

“We’ve seen misinformation in many other contexts—elec-toral contexts and certainly other health contexts—but the seri-ousness of this global challenge demands that we ensure that misinformation, disinformation is stamped out wherever possible,” said Liberal MP Nathaniel Ers-kine-Smith (Beaches-East York, Ont.), one of two Canadian Parlia-mentarians currently involved in U.K. MP Damian Collins’ interna-tional initiative, Infotagion.

Projections released by the Ontario government last week reflecting the potential impact of COVID-19 in the province under-line the need for such action, said Mr. Erskine-Smith.

“Their projections are 100,000 people could die over the course of the pandemic if there’s no pub-lic health response, and we could reduce that to 3,000 to 15,000 with a strong public health response, and government’s moving for-ward with a strong public health response depends, in the end, on an informed citizenry,” he said.

The WHO has said the “in-fodemic” around COVID-19 is “spreading faster than the virus.” In turn, it’s called on major tech companies to do more and has joined the myth-busting effort itself.

Online misinformation and disinformation—that is, inaccura-cies and outright falsehoods—around COVID-19 run the gamut: from false theories on prevention (whoever needs to hear it: blow-drying your mouth does not pro-tect against the virus), to would-be home remedies, to conspiracy theories (including over how it

started, or that the pandemic is exaggerated or entirely a hoax), to plain racism, to incorrect warn-ings over speculated government actions, shutdowns, or shortages. The disseminators of such disin-formation are a similarly broad range, from local to international.

Such content can spread quickly through social media platforms and messaging apps, from WhatsApp to Twitter to Face-book to TikTok, and beyond.

Infotagion’s website officially went live on March 30. Aimed at identifying and fact-checking disinformation being spread around COVID-19, it involves Parliamentarians from around the world, including Canada, Ireland, and the U.K., along with Ameri-can and British experts and tech companies.

From Canada, along with Mr. Erskine-Smith, NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.) is supporting the effort organized by Mr. Collins. The three have previously collaborated as part of the International Grand Commit-tee on Misinformation and Fake News, which was put together in 2018 in light of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal.

“We believe that the coronavi-rus is the first major public health crisis in the age of social media disinformation. People need to be able to check what they see if it doesn’t look right,” explained Mr. Collins in an email exchange with The Hill Times last week.

The idea is people can send in screenshots or links to “suspected disinformation” to Infotagion, which will then “check it against trusted and official sources of information” and post the results online, “creating an open archive of what people are seeing and recommendations on how they should respond to it,” said Mr. Collins. Along with dispelling false information, the hope is this archive will underline the need for “more effective action” to fight disinformation, including from big tech companies.

While there are other, “excel-lent” established fact-checking re-sources available—including from the WHO—Mr. Collins noted “they are not usually open for people to send in individual articles to be checked,” and by comparison, Infotagion is “designed to respond to individual disinformation claims.”

Claire Wardle, an expert on misinformation and executive director and co-founder of First Draft, said the level of informa-tion currently out online around COVID-19, both true and false, is “unbelievable.”

Disinformation around CO-VID-19 has followed familiar patterns, said Ms. Wardle: “We’re seeing people keyword squat on certain hashtags, we’re seeing people buying domains, we’re seeing old images resurfacing, we’re seeing disinformation that intersects with hate, particularly around anti-Asian sentiment.”

“A lot of this is exaggerated gossip, as opposed to absolute disinformation,” she said. “It’s not like, ‘if you lick your cat, you’ll be okay.’”

While “there’s a lot of kernels of truth,” she said, “you can imag-ine how those kinds of rumours could really start to have real-world impact” and contribute to a ramping up of public fear and panic.

Some world leaders, and oth-ers who hold public trust, have themselves contributed to the infodemic.

U.S. President Donald Trump, for example, has promoted the use of anti-malaria drugs—hy-droxychloroquine and chlo-roquine—to combat the virus, suggesting on Twitter on March 21 that a combination of hydroxy-chloroquine and azithromycin could be a “game changer.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has since approved chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sul-fate for “emergency use” to fight COVID-19 for those not able to participate in clinical trials, but only says these drugs “may be effective,” and that its recommen-dation is based “upon limited in-vitro and anecdotal clinical data in case series.”

The drugs remain unproven as a cure for COVID-19, and medical experts have criticized the president’s push as misguided and dangerous. On March 28, the same day the FDA issued its emergency-use approval, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a warn-ing over chloroquine phosphate, saying the drug “can cause seri-ous health consequences, includ-ing death,” citing reports of two recent deaths by individuals who

ingested “non-pharmaceutical chloroquine phosphate”—individ-uals who media reports suggest were acting on the advice of the president.

Brazilian President Jair Bol-sonaro has repeatedly down-played the virus, calling it “just a little flu,” and has also promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, incorrectly claiming it’s “work-ing in every place.” (On March 30, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all removed posts shared by the president, citing rules about post-ing harmful content, including a video message from Mr. Bolso-naro.)

Layered onto this are ques-tions being raised over official data on COVID-19, with U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly warning that China has been underreporting its infection and death rates, for example. Asked about this last week, fed-eral Health Minister Patty Hajdu (Thunder Bay-Superior North, Ont.) shot the question down, saying “there’s no indication” data from China has been “falsified in any way.”

Further muddying the waters are differing messages coming from health and government au-thorities, day to day, jurisdiction to jurisdiction, as they grapple to come to grips with the virus—for example, on whether face masks should be worn by the general public.

Add to the mix the fact that people are isolated and scared, and it’s created “this kind of a per-fect storm for misinformation to flourish, because people are less critical and they want to share information to be helpful,” said Ms. Wardle.

Ms. Wardle said her own orga-nization began monitoring disin-formation around the coronavi-rus in mid-January, and in early March, when work-from-home orders began, it became clear they needed “to pivot everything to [focus on] coronavirus.” Along with a daily newsletter and we-binar series, First Draft launched a new “Covering coronavirus” online course for news outlets on April 1.

The current experience with disinformation around COVID-19, including seeing different juris-dictions push out different levels and kinds of information to citi-zens, further highlights the need for an international co-ordinating body to address online disinfor-mation, something Ms. Wardle said her organization has been calling for for years.

“No country is going to solve this problem on its own, and the idea of working across bor-ders and with colleagues from all parties and all countries is incredibly important,” said Mr. Erskine-Smith, noting Parlia-mentarians involved in the Info-tagion initiative are all also part of a WhatsApp group, through which they swap information and ideas.

Mr. Angus said his office is “COVID 24/7 right now,” with much of his and his staff’s time taken up answering constitu-ents’ questions. In the course of this work, as he comes across questionable content related to COVID-19, Mr. Angus said he’s now flagging it to the Infotagion team to assess.

“There are patterns that we’ve seen in disinformation, there are players in the disinformation world, and certainly they’re evi-dent in the response to COVID,” he said.

Misinformation and disin-formation generally “plays on people’s fears” and insecurities, said Mr. Angus, making the cur-rent pandemic ripe for exploita-tion. “For those who believe in government plots to take away your freedoms, COVID is a perfect example to amplify that. People who are anti-vaxxers and mistrust medical authorities, well, there’s perfect avenues to say COVID is being exaggerated.”

If not stamped out, such disin-formation could prove toxic and even fatal, said Mr. Angus.

“I think information is going to win out in this, but we have to be vigilant,” he said.

Along with initiatives like Infotagion, First Draft, Ryerson University’s COVID19MisInfo Portal, and others, provincial and municipal governments and health authorities have been hold-ing regular briefings, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papine-au, Que.), key cabinet ministers, and chief medical officer Theresa Tam have been doing so daily.

The federal government also recently launched a COVID-19 app, aimed at offering up reliable information, recommendations, and resources for Canadians.

Industry, including major tech companies, have also been work-ing to retool their efforts. Both Mr. Angus and Mr. Erskine-Smith noted companies have been more responsive to such changes than in the past.

A spokesperson for Facebook said the platform has been remov-ing content related to COVID-19 that “could contribute to physical harm,” based on input from the WHO, since January—including, for example, posts discouraging against people taking appropriate precautions—noting its policies around COVID-19 misinformation “is a dynamic list that’s regu-larly evolving.” On Instagram, the spokesperson said it’s removing “COVID-19 accounts” from ac-count recommendation pushes, and is working to remove related content from the platform’s ex-plore page “unless posted by a credible health organization.” Both platforms are being “pro-actively” swept to identify and remove “as much of this content as we can.”

Twitter has increased its use of “machine learning and auto-mation” to help it “more efficient-ly” review content to flag posts that are “most likely to cause harm” or require “additional con-text,” and to “proactively identify rule-breaking content before it’s reported.” The company said it has broadened its definition of harm “to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information,” including re-moving posts that deny such guidances, describe unproven alleged cures, deny established scientific facts around the virus, or constitute unverified claims that could incite panic, among other things.

lryckewaert@hilltimes.comThe Hill Times

MPs join fight to stamp out COVID-19 disinformation that’s ‘spreading faster than the virus’ NDP MP Charlie Angus and Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith have joined one such effort, Infotagion, an international initiative launched by U.K. MP Damian Collins.

COVID-19

THE HILL TIMES | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020

Continued from page 1

16

in the Canada-U.S relationship, as politicos say the federal govern-ment needs to find alternate avenues to protect Canada’s most important alliance.

Following a weekend of uncer-tainty over whether Ontario hos-pitals would receive much needed respirator masks, 3M came to an agreement with the White House on April 6 to allow those masks to be shipped across the Canada-U.S. border.

Before the agreement was reached, Ontario Premier Doug Ford lashed out at U.S. President Donald Trump for his initial deci-sion to restrict the export of the masks.

It was the second idea floated by the Trump administration to receive rebuke from Canadian officials. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland (University-Rosedale, Ont.) said last month that the reported U.S. proposal to send troops to the Canada-U.S. border was “an entirely unneces-sary step” and Canada would view such a move as “damaging to our relationship.” In the end, the U.S. backed down on the idea.

Obama-era U.S. ambassador Bruce Heyman, who was posted to Ottawa from 2014 to 2017, com-pared damage to the Canada-U.S. relationship to a wound.

“The deeper the wound, the longer it takes to heal,” he told The Hill Times prior to the an-nouncement that the 3M masks

would be allowed to be exported.“[Mr. Trump] is working his

way to making deeper wounds with our allies,” including with Canada, he said. “There will be repair that is necessary.”

“You earn trust over time, you can lose trust very fast. … It takes a significant amount of time to gain it back once lost. So trust is the basis of the relationship and that’s been under threat with this president.”

Asked if the agreement be-tween 3M and the White House was a full or one-time exemp-tion to export restrictions, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Pap-ineau, Que.) said on April 7 that his government continues to work with the Americans.

“We’re going to continue to highlight to the American administration the point at which health-care supplies and services go back and forth across that bor-der,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters.

Liberal MP Wayne Easter (Malpeque, P.E.I.) told The Hill Times that there has been an underlying feeling among Cana-dians of “anger and frustration” towards the U.S. government.

Mr. Easter, who is co-chair of the Canada-U.S. Inter-Parlia-mentary Group (IPG), said the pandemic proves the importance of building relationships in Wash-ington beyond the White House, as well as at the state level.

“On the Canada-U.S. IPG, we just all work strenuously to en-sure that things don’t deteriorate and get out of hand as a result of some of the decisions that come out of the White House from time to time,” said Mr. Easter, who on April 3 spoke with Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the influential Senate Finance Committee and the second-highest ranking Senator as the president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate.

While that conversation was meant to be about discussing the economic conditions brought on by the pandemic, Mr. Easter said the two talked about ensur-ing their respective governments don’t make decisions that are detrimental to the other through “a knee-jerk reaction rather than something well thought out.”

Former diplomat Colin Robert-son, who sat on the international trade deputy minister’s NAFTA advisory council, said Canada has learned lessons on how to deal with the Trump administration: namely, to work around it.

He said during previous times of friction between the Trudeau and Trump governments dur-ing the NAFTA renegotiations, Canada put emphasis on outreach to governors and legislators at the federal and state levels, as well as business and labour interests, adding that Ms. Freeland was one of the architects of that strategy.

“She knows who to call. The Rolodex is there and we can pick up the phone. These are always what you want to have in an emergency. You don’t want to be meeting people or talking to people for the first time. And I think we have really embedded ourselves much more deeply into the United States as a result of the renegotiations of the econom-ic agreement,” he said.

Conservative MP Colin Carrie (Oshawa, Ont.), his party’s critic on Canada-U.S. relations and a member of the Canada-U.S. IPG’s executive, said the pandemic is certain to put pressure on the bilateral relationship.

“Canada and the United States have been best friends, neighbours, and allies for the majority of our existence. The stress of fighting this pandemic would strain even the best relationships as governments scramble to save the lives of their most vulnerable,” he said, add-ing that he doesn’t think efforts to curb the virus would lead to long-term damage in the rela-tionship, but instead to stronger ties as the two countries seek “common solutions.”

Mr. Carrie noted that the past uncertainty over the 3M shipment should serve as a sign that Cana-da needs a certain level of domes-tic production for its own vital equipment, adding that Canada should be negotiating with the U.S. for a reciprocal agreement for critical medical items.

Former diplomat Michael Kergin, who served as Canada’s ambassador to the United States from 2000 to 2005, said the threats are more of the same that have been levied at Canada since Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

“We recognize that we are dealing with an administration that is both very unpredictable, very much America first, [and] not long-term thinking in terms

of its relationship with its allies,” he said.

The list includes the threat to suspend NAFTA, which prompted renegotiations of the pact, as well as personal attacks lobbed at Mr. Trudeau. Angered by Mr. Trudeau’s statements at a 2018 press conference following the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Que., Mr. Trump called the Canadian prime minister: “meek and mild” and “very dishonest and weak.” Mr. Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, later took to U.S. cable news to say there was a “spe-cial place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out of the door.”

Whether Mr. Trump’s rhetoric will have a long-term impact on the Canada-U.S. relationship remains to be seen.

“I think if Trump is re-elected, there is a chance that things could become a little more scratchy and problematic,” said Mr. Kergin, adding that Mr. Trump has been replacing the people in Washington that un-derstand the importance of the Canada-U.S. relationship and the long-term interest that the U.S. has in managing it.

But Mr. Kergin said the strong safety net in the relationship is still present at the local and state levels, as well as with business and academic interests.

Carleton University inter-national affairs professor Fen Osler Hampson said Mr. Trump’s protectionist ideas shouldn’t have come as a big surprise for Canada.

“I think it’s fair to say that we always have to look out for our own interests. The Americans aren’t going to be looking out for them,” said Prof. Hampson, who authored the soon-to-be-released book, Braver Canada, with Derek Burney, a former Ca-nadian ambassador to the U.S., which calls for further economic diversification away from the United States.

“It’s the new abnormal,” he said. “You’ve got to be constantly on guard for surprises, uncertain-ty, drastic shocks, and that means being nimble, being adept, being smart.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin, who was appointed to the role by U.S. President Bill Clinton and served in the post from 1997 to 2001, said the things that are being done in current circumstances are not

representative of the relationship as a whole.

“I think the relationship is reasonably solid,” he said, not-ing though that the U.S. is still without an ambassador in Ottawa who could help prevent some is-sues in the relationship from com-ing to the surface.

“When we get our new ambas-sador there, that’ll help.”

Aldona Wos has been named the U.S.’s next ambassador to Canada, but she has yet to be confirmed to the post by the U.S. Senate. Previ-ous ambassador Kelly Craft left the role last fall to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Canada a casualty of U.S.’s underprepared pandemic response, says former ambassador

“[At one point] I was with President Obama in the White House,” recalled Mr. Heyman, “and he said, ‘Do you know what keeps me up at night?’ He said: ‘a global pandemic.’”

“That’s not what I expected, but I will never forget that conver-sation. I especially won’t forget it now,” the former diplomat said.

Mr. Heyman said the current U.S. president “lost precious time” to curb the virus with an interna-tional partnership when he didn’t take the threat of the virus as seriously as he should have when his intelligence advisers first alerted him to the threat.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that U.S. of-ficials had warned senior Trump administration officials in Janu-ary that the pandemic could put millions of Americans at risk.

“Had [Mr. Trump] done the work in advance then we would have had plenty of masks to go around for all the people who needed it, on both sides of our border,” Mr. Heyman said.

Along with the lack of pre-paredness, Mr. Robertson said, Canada has also been a casualty of Mr. Trump’s America First policies, adding that he didn’t think any previous U.S. president would threaten to withhold the masks from Canada.

“It doesn’t matter what admin-istration—Carter, Ford, Nixon, Clinton, Regan—they all saw the value of alliances and the impor-tance of keeping the allies a part of the alliance,” he said. “Trump just doesn’t recognize that.”

nmoss@hilltimes.comThe Hill Times

‘The deeper the wound, the longer it takes to heal’: Trump’s threats undermine Canada-U.S. relationship, says former envoy ‘We are dealing with an administration that is both very unpredictable, very much America first, [and] not long-term thinking in terms of its relationship with its allies,’ says former diplomat Michael Kergin.

News

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020 | THE HILL TIMES

Canada-U.S.

Continued from page 1

Former U.S. ambassador Bruce Heyman, left, says there will be a necessary healing process in the Canada-U.S. relationship due to the damage done by American President Donald Trump. The Hill Times file photograph and photograph courtesy of the White House/Flickr

The final instalment of Hill Climbers’ three-part run-down of Conservative

Leader Andrew Scheer’s 76-member team is diving into the 30 staffers who are tack-ling communications, digital media, video production, and correspondence coming from the leader and caucus.

Part 1 of the series focused on the 19 staff departures from the official opposi-tion leader’s office (OLO) since the last Parliament, as well as administrative staff and those most directly supporting Mr. Scheer, like acting chief of staff Martin Bélanger. Part 2 covered the OLO’s policy and research, parliamentary affairs, tour, stakeholder relations, and caucus liaison and regional adviser teams. References made to the OLO here refer to staff paid through both the leader’s office budget and that of the Conservative Caucus Services, which were roughly $4.8-million and almost $3-million, respectively, for 2019-20, who all work closely together.

Kelsie Chiasson is now acting director of communica-tions in the OLO, having stepped in follow-ing Brock Harrison’s departure post-election, as previously reported.

Previ-ously associate director of rapid response, Ms. Chiasson started in the office as a communications officer under then-interim leader Rona Ambrose, and has since also held the title of associate director of media relations. She’s been on the Hill since the Conservative Party’s time in government, having been director of communications and issues management to then-minister of state for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Rob Moore.

She helps to oversee the small team of staffers who serve as press secretaries to Conservative critics—the shadow cabinet, as the caucus calls it. They are: Christopher Martin-Chan, Mey Fung, and Mathew Clancy.

Mr. Martin-Chan was previ-ously busy as a research assistant in the office, which he first joined in 2016 under Ms. Am-brose, start-ing as an assistant for stakeholder relations.

Ms. Fung has been working in the OLO since the fall of 2017, first as an assis-tant manager of digital communications. Roughly one year later, she was promoted to her current post.

A former assistant to Manitoba Conservative MP James Bezan, Mr. Clancy has been a press secretary in the OLO since the fall of 2018. He’s also a former senior fellow with the Canadian Jewish Po-litical Affairs Committee, and spent roughly a year as a communications assistant in the of-fice of then-Conservative veterans affairs ministers, starting under Julian Fantino and ending under then-minister and now Conservative leadership candidate and MP Erin O’Toole.

As previously reported, supporting Mr. Scheer directly as English press secretary is Denise Siele, while Josée Morissette is the leader’s French press secretary.

David Murray continues as a special adviser for strategic communications. A former MP’s assistant, Mr. Murray tackled analytics for Mr. Scheer’s 2017 leader-ship campaign and subsequently joined the OLO, first under the title of research assistant. During the recent 2019 election, he was a national pollster for the federal party.

Anton Sestritsyn is working alongside Mr. Murray as a strategic communications adviser. He’s been in the leader’s office since the beginning of 2018 and previously held the title of manager of community relations. Mr. Sestritsyn is also a former executive co-ordinator of the League of Ukrainian Canadians and former execu-tive director of the International Council in Support of Ukraine.

Julie Baylon (née Pham) remains in place as a communications officer, a role she’s played for roughly the last two and

half years. Before join-ing the OLO in the fall of 2017, she was a special assistant to Ontario Conserva-tive Senator Thanh Hai Ngo.

Monitor-ing media for the team is new hire Kyle Simp-son, who

spent last summer as a government rela-tions intern at Rheinmetall Defence.

Marc Lemire, who was previously manager of digital production, has been promoted to associate director of digital and video production. Mr. Lemire has been tackling graphic design and video produc-tion for the Conservative caucus for years, starting during the party’s time in govern-ment, and his past titles include manager of creative services and associate manager of caucus services and head designer.

Ingrid Neubert continues as manager of digital media, a role she’s filled since 2017. She joined the OLO under Ms. Ambrose at the begin-ning of 2016 as a digital communica-tions assis-tant and has since also been assistant manager of digital commu-nications in the office. Ms. Neubert previ-ously served as executive assistant to Ms. Ambrose’s chief of staff as then-minister of health, and she spent the 2019 election as social media manager for the Conservative campaign.

Working under Ms. Neubert is associate manager of digital media Brittany Mathison. She joined the OLO as a digital media assistant last year.

Matthew Perry—no, not that one—is a

new addition to the office, having replaced Ms. Mathison as a digital media assistant. Mr. Perry is a former Queen’s Park staffer, having spent roughly the last year and a half as an assistant to Ontario Progressive Conservative MPP Randy Pettapiece.

Paul Dagenais remains in place as a new media developer. Mr. Dagenais has been part of the Conservative Caucus Services team—called the Conservative Resource Group (CRG) up until the start of this year—since the Conservatives were in government, starting as a junior designer for new media.

Erika Lee continues as the office’s digital production co-ordinator. She previ-ously worked in the office for years under then-prime minister Stephen Harper as project co-ordinator of creative services, but stepped away from the Hill to work in the private sector after the 2015 federal election before returning in the fall of 2017.

Evan Webster, who was previously a senior video specialist for the Conservative caucus, is now manager of video produc-tion. A former IT support staffer for the

Conservative Party, Mr. Webster first joined the caucus services office back in 2012.

Cassie Bezan, daughter of the afore-mentioned MP with the same last name, has been promoted to senior video specialist and photog-rapher. She’s been in the OLO since January 2018, starting as a video

specialist, and before then was an assistant to Conservative MP Candice Bergen.

As previously reported, Angus MacLel-lan is also a video specialist and caucus liaison.

Joel Hansen, a graphic designer in the office since 2018, has added animator and video specialist to his title. He’s working closely with graphic designers and junior animators Stéphanie Ratté, who’s been in place since 2016; Zachary Shank, who joined the OLO in November 2017; and new hire Anthony Cinerari, who’s a former digital media specialist for the Conserva-tive Party and was a digital content and marketing specialist with Sharp Electron-ics of Canada before that.

Emily Prochnau continues as a graphic designer, having done the job for the last year and a half. She took leave to do graphic design work for the federal party during last fall’s election, and is also a former graphic designer with Cayenne Creative and the Royal College of Physi-cians and Surgeons of Canada, among other past jobs.

Chase Tribble, a former content man-ager for the party, has joined Mr. Scheer’s team as a videographer. André Forget continues as a photographer.

Salpie Stepanian remains manager of correspondence for the OLO. He’s well versed in the job, having spent years as manager of correspondence in Mr. Harp-er’s office as prime minister. Going back even further, he was a correspondence superviser in then-Reform leader Preston Manning’s OLO.

Two of Mr. Stepanian’s old colleagues in Mr. Harper’s PMO continue to work under him in Mr. Scheer’s office: Craig Magu-ire, as a senior correspondence adviser, and Carolina Salas as a correspondence adviser.

Joshua Gilman, previously a writer in the office since early 2019, is now manager of written production. He’s been direc-tor of Strength to Fight, a group focused on “fighting for a porn-free Canada,” as described on its website, since 2015, and is also a former special assistant to then-citizenship and immigration minister Chris Alexander.

Catherine Mongenais is a French writer and reviser. Before recently joining the OLO team, she was office manager to both Conservative Whip Mark Strahl and to Conservative House leader Ms. Bergen.

Leslie Vir-gin remains an English writer. A for-mer writer in Mr. Harper’s PMO, she’s been with the OLO since the 2015 federal election.

Finally, rounding out the OLO team is Pa-trice Cha-

rette, who continues as translator. lryckewaert@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times

Kelsie Chiasson is acting director of communications, Marc Lemire is now associate director of digital and video production, and Salpie Stepanian remains manager of correspondence.

THE HILL TIMES | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020

by Laura Ryckewaert

hill climbers

17

The people behind the Conservative OLO’s communications, digital media shops: Part 3

Kelsie Chiasson is now head of communications for Mr. Scheer. Photograph courtesy of Facebook

Christopher Martin-Chan is one of three press secretaries for the Conservative shadow cabinet. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn

Mathew Clancy is a press secretary for Conservative critics. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn

Julie Baylon is a communications officer. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn

Ingrid Neubert is manager of digital media. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn

Brittany Mathison, pictured with Mr. Scheer. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn

Cassie Bezan is now a senior video specialist and photographer. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn

Leslie Virgin is an English writer in the OLO. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn

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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8House Not Sitting—The House has been suspended

until Monday, April 20. It is then scheduled to sit for four straight weeks until May 15. It will take a one-week break and will resume sitting again on May 25 and will sit straight through for the next four consecu-tive weeks, until it’s scheduled to adjourn on June 23. The House adjourns again for three months and will return in the fall on Monday, Sept. 21, for three straight weeks. It will adjourn for one week and will sit again from Oct. 19 until Nov. 6. It will break again for one week and will sit again from Nov. 16 to Dec. 11. And that will be it for 2020.

Senate Not Sitting—The Senate has also been suspended due to the COVID-19 virus. When it’s scheduled to return, the possible sitting days are April 20, 24, 27, and May 1. The Senate is scheduled to sit April 21-23 and April 28-30. The possible Senate sittings are May 4, 8, 11, 15, 25, and 29. The Senate is scheduled to sit May 5-7 and May 12-May 14. The Senate will break May 18-22. It is scheduled to sit May 26-28. The June possible sitting days are June 1, 5, 8, 12, 15 and 19. The Senate is scheduled to sit June 2-4; June 9-11; June 16-18; and June 22, 23, it breaks June 24 for St. Jean Baptiste Day; and it’s scheduled to sit June 25 and June 26. The Senate breaks from June 29 until Sept. 22. The Senate’s pos-sible September sitting days are Sept. 21, 25, 28. It’s scheduled to sit Sept. 22-24 and Sept. 29-Oct. 1, with a possible sitting day on Friday, Oct. 2. The possible Senate sitting days are Oct. 5, 9, 19, 23, 26, and 30. It’s scheduled to sit Oct. 6-8; it takes a break from Oct. 12-16; it will sit Oct. 20-22; and Oct. 27-29. The November possible Senate days are: Nov. 2, 6, 16, 20, 23, 27, 30. It’s scheduled to sit Nov. 3-5; it will take a break from Nov. 9-13; it will sit Nov. 17-19; and Nov. 24-26. The possible December Senate sitting days are: Dec. 4, 7, and 11. The Senate is scheduled to sit Dec. 1-3; Dec. 8-10 and it will sit Dec. 14-18.

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Featuring high-growth start-ups and leading industry experts across fintech sectors including digital banking, P2P finance, AI, capital markets, Wealthtech, pay-ments, crypto, and blockchain. July 8-9. Speakers include: Robert Asselin, senior director public policy, BlackBerry; Paul Schulte, founder and editor, Schulte Research; Craig Asano, founder and CEO, NCFA; George Bordianu, co-founder and CEO, Balance; Julien Brazeau, partner, Deloitte; Alixe Cormick, president, Venture Law Corporation; Nikola Danaylov, founder, keynote speaker, author futurist, Singularity Media; Pam Draper, president and CEO, Bitvo; Justin Hartz-man, co-founder and CEO, CoinSmart; Peter-Paul Van Hoeken, founder & CEO, FrontFundr; Cynthia Huang, CEO and co-founder, Altcoin Fantasy; Austin Hubbel, CEO and co-founder, Consilium Crypto; Patrick Mandic, CEO, Mavennet; Mark Morissette, co-founder & CEO, Foxquilt; Cato Pastoll, co-founder & CEO, Lending Loop; Bernd Petak, investment partner, Northmark Ventures; Ali Pourdad, Pourdad Capital Partners, Family Office; Richard Prior, global head of policy and research, FDATA; Richard Remillard, president, Remi-llard Consulting Group; Jennifer Reynolds, president & CEO, Toronto Finance International; Jason Saltzman, partner, Gowling WLG Canada; James Wallace, co-chair and co-CEO, Exponential; Alan Wunsche, CEO & chief token officer, Tokenfunder; and Danish Yusuf, founder and CEO, Zensurance. For more information, please visit: https://fintechandfunding.com/.

THURSDAY, OCT. 15PPF Testimonial Dinner and Awards—Join us at the

33rd annual event to network and celebrate as the Public Policy Forum honours Canadians who have made their mark on policy and leadership. Anne McLellan and Senator Peter Harder will take their place among a cohort of other stellar Canadians who we’ve honoured over the last 33 years, people who have dedicated themselves to making Canada a better place through policy leadership and public service. The gala event will be held on Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, 255 Front St. W., Toronto.

SATURDAY, OCT. 24Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner—The Parlia-

mentary Press Gallery Dinner happens on Saturday, Oct. 24, in the Sir John A. Macdonald Building on Wellington Street.

THURSDAY, NOV. 12Liberal Party National Convention—The Liberal

Party of Canada announced the 2020 Liberal National Convention will be hosted in Ottawa, from Nov. 12-15. For more information, please contact: media@liberal.ca, 613-627-2384.

Conservative Party National Convention—The Conservatives will hold a convention in Quebec City from Nov. 12-14. For more information, please contact 1-866-808-8407.

The Parliamentary Calendar is a free events listing. Send in your political, cultural, diplomatic, or govern-mental event in a paragraph with all the relevant details under the subject line ‘Parliamentary Calendar’ to news@hilltimes.com by Wednesday at noon before the Monday paper or by Friday at noon for the Wednesday paper. We can’t guarantee inclusion of every event, but we will definitely do our best. Events can be updated daily online, too.

The Hill Times

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Events

THE HILL TIMES | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2020

Extra! Extra! Read the full Parliamentary Calendar online

Ottawa quiet as parties hash out next recall of Parliament

Parliamentary Calendar

Dominican Republic hosts pre-pandemic party

The Hill Times photographs by Sam Garcia

Lithuania socializes before social distancing

The Dominican Republic Embassy hosted a national day reception on March 3 at Ottawa City Hall where guests were treated to folk music and dancing.

Rosiris Valverde Jimenez, wife of the Costa Rican ambassador; Mercy Enow Egbe Epse Azoh-Mbi, wife of the Cameroon high commissioner; and Senegalese Ambassador Viviane Bampassy.

Estonian Ambassador Toomas Lukk, Lithuanian Ambassador Darius Skusevicius, and his wife, Dorota Skuseviciene engage in a careful salutation while celebrating Lithuania’s national day at the Lord Elgin Hotel on March 6.

Canada’s Chief of Protocol Stewart Wheeler, Mr. Skusevicius and Ms. Skuseviciene.

Mr. Skusevicius and Polish Ambassador Andrzej Kurnicki.

Dominican Republic Ambassador Pedro Luciano Verges Ciman and Haitian Ambassador Andre Liautaud.

Cameroon High Commissioner Solomon Anu’a Gheyle Azoh-Mbi and Panamanian Ambassador Romy Vasquez Morales.

A man wearing a mask walks down Lyon Street in Ottawa on April 1. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

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BY PETER MAZEREEUW

Senators called for change, and called out each other about

workplace harassment in and outside of the Senate Chamber last week, while all the government’s

BY MIKE LAPOINTE

Although a recent government report shows fairly substan-

tial growth in the federal public service, as well as an increase in the promotion rate within the service for the sixth year in a row, there are concerns among both

BY ABBAS RANA

The issue of Indigenous blockades of key transpor-

tation routes in support of the Wet’suwet’en Nation is one of the biggest public policy challenges that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has faced in his political career,

and a failure to resolve the crisis to the satisfaction of most Cana-dians will raise questions about his ability to handle this politically sensitive situation and reconcilia-tion, say a former Indigenous Af-fairs minister and pollsters.

“If this doesn’t change, and improve here over the next few

days, this is going to have a huge impact on his government and on [him], for sure,” said Bob Nault, former minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in the Jean Chrétien cabinet, in a phone interview with The Hill Times.

BY NEIL MOSS

The power of American lawmak-ers to modify trade agreements

has inspired their Canadian counter-parts to look for more of their own infl uence over the trade negotiation process, say some parliamentarians.

CSG Senator Percy Downe (Charlottetown, P.E.I.) said the work

BY BEATRICE PAEZ

Legislation that would imple-ment the UN’s declaration

on Indigenous rights provides a “guide forward” in reconciling the tensions at play between the

Senators put spotlight back on harassment, ‘loophole’ blocked bullying complaint, says one

Public service hiring up, but report fi nds manager, employee concerns around feds’ new staffi ng process

Downe calls for Parliament to have power to amend new NAFTA, Liberals pledge to share objectives of future trade talks with House

UNDRIP provides ‘guide’ to resolving tensions among Indigenous communities over questions of authority, say experts

Trudeau’s handling of Wet’suwet’en blockades critical to his political credibility, reconciliation, say former cabinet minister, pollsters

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Senate & harassment

Public service

NAFTA 2.0Wet’suwet’en Prime Minister

THIRTY-FIRST YEAR, NO. 1705 CANADA’S POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT NEWSPAPER MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2020 $5.00

We’re adding to crisis in relationship

with Indigenous peoples:

Rose Lemay p. 4

Transportation policy briefi ng:

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Party Central

p.37

Todd Doherty, Ashley Morton, Philip Cross, Pedro Antunes, Roger Francis, Sara Kirk, & Alec Soucy pp. 17-25

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, pictured on Feb. 21,

2020, at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa where he

said ‘the barricades must now come down.’ The prime

minister’s credibility is on the line as he handles rail

blockades and reconciliaiton. The Hill Times photograph

by Andrew Meade

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BY SAMANTHA WRIGHT ALLEN

The Conservative Party needs a new face, fresh ideas, and to

stop rehashing old feuds, according

to some of the lesser-known leader-ship candidates who say the front-runners, former cabinet ministers Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole, are operating by the old playbook.

Beyond Mr. MacKay, Mr. O’Toole (Durham, Ont.), and two-term Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, Ont.), fi ve other declared candidates

have struggled to get much air time in a race that was ramping up even before the federal elec-

BY MIKE LAPOINTE

In the wake of the fourth anni-versary of the problem-plagued

Phoenix pay system, the federal government has reached a long-awaited milestone in the years-long saga that has left thousands

of public sector workers overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all.

On March 6, the Treasury Board announced that software

company SAP Canada had been chosen to work on a new human

BY LAURA RYCKEWAERT

After being stripped of his critic duties during the last

Parliament for voting against the party line, longtime Conservative MP Scott Reid has been entirely left off of House committee mem-bership lists this time around.

Up until this Parliament, Mr. Reid had spent 15 years as a member of the Procedure and House Affairs Committee (PROC).

“I did not request to be free from a committee assignment,” Mr. Reid (Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston, Ont.) said in an email response to questions from The Hill Times.

Mr. Reid declined an interview by phone during the break week last week on the subject, and did not respond when asked whether he believed his lack of committee assignments this Parliament was down to continued punishment for his having previously voted against the party line and for speaking out about it.

“Unfortunately, responding to these questions would involve a breach of the conventional practice of caucus confi dentiality,” he wrote.

As caucus whip, Conservative MP Mark Strahl (Chilliwack–Hope, B.C.) oversees the commit-tee assignment process. Asked about Mr. Reid’s lack of assign-ments, and whether it was part of continued punishment, in an email, Mr. Strahl said “Mr. Reid is a valuable member of the Conser-vative caucus and will continue to play an important role in it.”

‘Everything we didn’t do with Phoenix’: feds tap SAP for work on long-awaited Phoenix replacement pilot project

No committee or caucus roles, longtime Tory MP Scott Reid still sidelined after breaking rank

Deadline looms for low-profi le CPC candidates, who say party needs more fresh faces, ideas

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Phoenix pay system

House committeesConservative leadership race

The ‘traditional playbooks of smaller government, lower taxes, tough on crime,’ won’t work to widen the blue tent, says one candidate. ‘We need to break the ceiling and win the support of more Canadians.’

THIRTY-FIRST YEAR, NO. 1710 CANADA’S POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT NEWSPAPER WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2020 $5.00

pp. 6-7

Energy policy briefi ng

Deborah Harford

Carlos A. Murillo

Richard Cannings

Philippe Le Billon

Which federaldepartmentssawresults?pp. 15-26

There are fi ve lesser-knowns running to be Conservative Party leader, including, from left, Jim Karahalios, Derek Sloan, Rick Peterson, Rudy Husny, and Leslyn Lewis. Photographs courtesy of Jim Karahalios, Rick Peterson, Rudy Husny, Twitter, and Facebook

The Hill Times’ newsrooms take pride in delivering the dependable and in-depth news and analysis that decision-makers rely on.hilltimes.com/get-a-subscription

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