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Speaker Anthony Rota in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 21, 2021. Mr. Rota called the court action an urgent matter and vowed to vigorously fight the government.

Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

The Liberal government is taking the House of Commons Speaker to court, in an unprecedented move to prevent the release of uncensored documents to members of Parliament that offer insight into the firing of two scientists from Canadas top infectious-disease laboratory.

The government said in a court filing that the disclosure of this information could not only jeopardize national security but also, possibly, Canadas international relations.

The Attorney-Generals office filed an application in Federal Court on Monday requesting that information demanded by Speaker Anthony Rota on behalf of the House of Commons stay secret.

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The legal challenge against a ruling of the House stunned opposition MPs, who were notified about the court application late Wednesday afternoon. An order of the House backed by a majority of MPs last Thursday called on the Public Health Agency to produce records it has been withholding from a Commons committee for months.

Mr. Rota called the court action an urgent matter and vowed to vigorously fight the government, saying House of Commons law clerk Philippe Dufresne will prepare a legal defence.

The Speakers Office will defend the rights of the House. That is something I take very seriously, Mr. Rota said. The legal system does not have any jurisdiction over the operations of the House. We are our own jurisdiction. That is something we will fight tooth and nail to protect and we will continue to do that.

Conservative House Leader Grard Deltell said he was taken aback that the Trudeau government would go to the federal court to challenge parliamentary privilege.

If the government does not respect the orders of the House of Commons, why should Canadians respect laws voted upon by the House of Commons? he said.

In the court filing, the government said the disclosure of the unredacted information would be injurious to international relations or national defence or national security.

Mr. Dufresne told MPs before a Commons committee Wednesday that to his knowledge the Canadian government has never before gone to court to try to elude an order of the House to produce documents.

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He said the House has exclusive authority when it comes to matters that fall under parliamentary privilege.

Justice Minister and Attorney-General David Lametti distanced himself from the court proceeding, saying officials in his department evoked a section of the Canada Evidence Act that is often used in national-security matters to keep sensitive information tightly under wraps.

As Attorney-General that decision has been delegated to department officials as is the normal course, so it is not going to be a decision that is partisan in any way, he said. I will never play politics with national security.

For months, opposition MPs have been seeking unredacted records from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), that explain why Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were fired from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. The two scientists lost their security clearances, and the RCMP was called into investigate, in July, 2019. They were dismissed in January.

More than 250 pages of records have been withheld in their entirety and hundreds of others have been partly censored before being provided to MPs. They also relate to the March, 2019 transfer of deadly virus samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was overseen by Dr. Qiu.

On Monday, PHAC President Iain Stewart was called before the Commons and admonished by the Speaker for his repeated refusal to provide the requested records to MPs on the special committee on Canada-China relations, including information on the transfer of Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan facility.

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MPs had put in safeguards that would require the Commons law clerk to review the documents and redact information that could harm national security or a criminal investigation before making them public.

However, Mr. Stewart notified the Attorney-Generals office on Sunday night that sensitive or potentially injurious information could be disclosed if he obeyed the order of the House of Commons.

Former House of Commons law clerk Rob Walsh said the Federal Court should deny the Trudeau governments request.

If the court is cognizant of parliamentary privilege, which is not always the case then the governments application wont succeed, he said. This is House business; its not the courts place to interfere.

He said the government may try to argue that there is a committee created by statute the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) which has clearance to read confidential documents. NSICOP, however, is not a committee of Parliament and is under the control of the Prime Ministers Office.

The answer back to that of course is that statutory committees do not take priority over the rights of the House.

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Mr. Rota was expected to rule on a motion on Wednesday to instruct the Commons sergeant-at-arms to search PHAC offices and seize unredacted documents.

However, the Speaker told MPs that he needed more time to provide a thoughtful ruling as the House adjourned for the summer break. If an election is called before Parliament resumes sitting on Sept. 20, Mr. Rota said it would be up to the next Speaker to decide whether to proceed with the ruling.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Question Period Wednesday that he was willing to work with opposition parties to find a compromise. On Monday, Government House Leader Pablo Rodriguez said the government was prepared to allow the Commons law clerk to examine hundreds of censored documents under oversight from national-security officials.

Mr. Rodriguez also suggested MPs could also use a process followed in 2010, when the Harper government allowed a group of MPs and a panel of arbiters to determine what information could be made available to the Commons about the Canadian militarys transfer of Taliban prisoners.

The government previously said it would only turn over unredacted documents to NSICOP, which does not report to the House. Mr. Trudeau has the power to prevent the committee from releasing information to the public.

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Liberals take House Speaker to court to block release of unredacted records about fired scientists - The Globe and Mail

The Canada Recovery Benefit starts to wind down next month, with a reduction in benefits a first step toward the COVID-19 pandemic income-support program vanishing completely by the fall.

The federal Liberals have yet to spell out what will happen in the long term, beyond promising a two-year consultation period on what permanent changes are needed to employment insurance. But economists say the income-support programs constructed on the fly over the past 15 months could be used to design fixes to many long-standing deficiencies in Canadas EI system.

The CRB, introduced last fall to support self-employed workers and others who did not qualify for regular EI payments, is better attuned to the needs of the modern economy, and does a better job in creating a path back to sustained full-time employment, those economists say.

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The way the CRB is designed, its very good, says Stphanie Lluis, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo.

In a recent study published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, Prof. Lluis and her two co-authors, IRPP research director Colin Busby and University of Michigan Ann Arbor professor Brian P. McCall, concluded that the current structure of EI which claws back 50 per cent of earnings from a job starting with the very first dollar of wages provides little incentive for claimants to take part-time or casual work while still receiving benefits.

A better structure, they say, is one that allows claimants to earn some wages below a threshold without any reduction in benefits, and only then introduces a clawback at higher levels, but still allows individuals to add to their income through working.

In real life, the federal government has done just that with the CRB, which takes a much different approach than the EI system. Under EI, claimants lose 50 cents for every dollar they earn; once their earnings equal 90 per cent of their benefit, the clawback increases to 100 per cent. Every extra dollar of earnings is simply transferred to the government, eliminating any economic incentive for further work.

Pilot projects from 2005 to 2012 exempted some earnings, but then reduced benefits dollar for dollar beyond that point. That approach encouraged claimants to work, but only up to the point the clawback kicked in.

The CRB, designed on the fly during the pandemic, works much differently and looks a lot like the system that Prof. Lluis and her colleagues recommend. Under the CRBs rules, claimants can earn up to $38,000 in a tax year before benefits are reduced at all. At that point, theres a 50-per-cent clawback, the same rate as the one for EI claimants. But CRB recipients, that rate does not rise to 100 per cent, meaning there is still an economic incentive to continue working while receiving benefits.

The IRPP study suggests a clawback rate of 40 per cent, but Prof. Lluis said there is nothing magic about that number. An optimal rate could be higher or lower, and would depend on further research, she said, adding that better data are also needed on how EI claimants respond to incentives to work while receiving benefits.

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The timing of the clawback is another way the CRB is better than EI, Prof. Lluis says. Under EI, the clawback is calculated on a weekly basis, discouraging recipients from accepting full-time work lasting a short time. Not so under the CRB: Clawback calculations are done on an annual basis. So, a worker offered a short-term contract has a much stronger economic incentive to accept a job offer under the CRBs rules.

The broader reach of the CRB is another advantage compared with EI, says David Macdonald, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Part-time and self-employed workers are more easily able to qualify for benefits.

Another pandemic-spurred innovation worth keeping, he says, is the minimum payment levels established. Prepandemic rules for EI set benefits at 55 per cent of a recipients average insurable weekly earnings. The CRB pays a fixed weekly amount of $500, or $450 after a withholding tax is deducted. EI now has a $500 minimum, too, and recipients can be paid more if their insurable earnings are high enough.

A minimum weekly payment helps out lower-paid workers, particularly part-timers, Mr. Macdonald said. But Prof. Lluis and other economists have said those minimum payments could become a disincentive for claimants to return to low-paid work.

However, the government is moving to reduce CRB payments after July 17, with weekly amounts for new claims falling to $300. The CRB is scheduled to end in late September, although Ottawa has allowed for the extension of the program until as late at Nov. 20, if public-health considerations require it. And the government has extended income supports and other programs shortly before their expiry dates several times during the pandemic.

Maria Lily Shaw, an economist at the Montreal Economic Institute, said Ottawas decision during the pandemic to reduce the regional disparities in qualifying standards for EI benefits was a positive move, and should be made permanent. Ms. Shaw said a nationwide standard would make EI harder to access in the Atlantic provinces, and discourage seasonal workers from using it as a permanent source of income. You have to break the dependence thats been created, she said.

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But Ottawa did not make it harder for workers in areas of high unemployment to qualify; it made it easier for claimants elsewhere.

So far, the government has proposed just limited changes, most notably the extension to September, 2022, of the uniform national standard for qualifying for EI payments. That will make it easier for part-time workers, for instance, to access benefits.

Broader reforms will take much longer, with the Liberals saying they plan to conduct targeted consultations over two years to examine systemic gaps such as income support for self-employed and gig workers.

Any permanent change to the structure of EI will have to wait on the outcome of those consultations.

Tax and Spend examines the intricacies and oddities of taxation and government spending.

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As the Canada Recovery Benefit winds down, questions remain over Liberals' long term plan - The Globe and Mail

Pod Save America is actually one undeniably successful example of Democratic progressive messaging, but itlike most avowedly progressive mediais for self-identified politics junkies. Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting are for anyone with a TV. For much of their audiences, they are simply the news. In order to give voters the positive messages Democrats want them to receive, liberals would need to create a mass media of their own and stop outsourcing the job to the frequently hostile corporate media. The Democrats messaging problem is really a media problem.

Some political science professors summarized a recent research experiment in Politico Magazine earlier this month. Alexander Coppock, Donald P. Green, and Ethan Porter conducted a series of randomized experiments to test whether parties can win over new loyalists with ads that promoted a party rather than a particular candidate. What they found was that, with repeat exposure, people changed their partisan identification ever so slightly after seeing the ads, and that higher doses of party-promoting ads could influence peoples voting decisions and feelings about Donald Trump. Partisan identity is usually understood as a root cause of political behavior, the political scientists wrote. By moving it, we also appear to have moved real-world political decisions.

In the world of American political communications, ads promoting a party are a novelty. The researchers concluded that both parties could benefit from producing the kinds of ads we tested, and its true that neither party currently does this with conventional TV advertising. But while these political scientists framed their experiments as part of a novel ad strategy, what they were really doing was directly exposing people to particular political messages that had been designed to influence their political affinitiesand even their identities. There is already language to describe what that kind of messaging is. These political scientists independently invented party propaganda, exposed Americans to it, and discovered that it can be effective, especially with constant exposure. Conservatives dont need to learn to do this: Its how their movement sustains itself.

Amusingly, the top-shelf political ad professionals the political scientists hired to make the ads were flummoxed by the request, because no one had ever before asked them to create messaging designed to promote the Democratic Party or to convince people to associate themselves with it. Despite how familiar American liberals are with the power of propaganda when yielded by the right, it has seemingly never occurred to the most powerful of them to do any propagandizing on behalf of their own causes and party!

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Why Liberals Ought to Invest in Propaganda - The New Republic

Philippe J. Fournier: The latest federal election projection shows the Liberals falling short of a majority, with an outcome eerily similar to the results of the 2019 election

If rumours swirling around Parliament Hill in Ottawa are true, then Canadians will be called to vote in the 44th Canadian federal election late this summer or early next fall, just days before this Parliament blows its second candle in October. Crunching the numbers over the weekend, the only question that kept popping in my head is: Why?

Both the Bloc Qubcois and the NDP hold the balance of power in a Liberal-lead Parliament, hence neither party should feel any hurry to rush Canadians to the polls since both parties find themselves at their height of relevance. Time can feel like an eternity as a third or fourth party in a majority parliament.

Therefore, should an election be called, it will most likely entirely be a Liberal initiative. Cynics will say, not necessarily wrongly, that a fall election would be power-grab attempt by the Liberals: The numbers are currently favourable for the Liberal Party, and it would obviouslymuch rather spend the next four years in a majority position, not having to worry about pesky opposition MPs asking questions or making occasional threats to vote against the government in a confidence vote.

Recent precedent would also stand on the side of an election in September or October. John Horgan, Blaine Higgs and Andrew Fureyall premiers leading their respective legislature with minority status one year agochose to bet on their provinces relatively good performance at handling the pandemic, and all three were re-elected with majorities. With a significant fraction of Canadians projected to be fully vaccinated by late August, the national discussion could gradually move away from the pandemic and dive into the handling of the economic recovery, so the Liberals could understandably be tempted to cash in some karma chips before the inevitable What have you done for me lately? feeling sets in. Politicians know that voters memory tends to be short.

However, are current numbers that good for the Trudeau Liberals? Perhaps the partys internal polling is showing different trends than those of polls released for public consumption, because this weeks 338Canada federal update measures the most likely outcome as being eerily similar to the results of the 2019 federal election.

Federal polls published in the past month have shown the Liberals leading the Conservatives by margins between one and 11 points, with a current average of five points. With such numbers, the Liberals would almost assuredly win the most seats if an election were held this week, but the party would most likely end up short of the 170-seat threshold for a majority at the House of Commons. Here are this weeks averages per party:

The Liberals win an average of 163 seats, seven short of majority status, but only six seats above their 2019 results. While the Liberals remain dominant in Atlantic Canada and continue to lead in seat-rich Ontario, their only potential seat gains as currently projected would be found in Quebec, where the LPC averages 38 per cent and 41 seats. Nonetheless, let us remember that the Liberals won 35 Quebec seats in 2019 (and 40 in 2015). Given that the Bloc Qubcois support remains in relatively good shape (just under the 30 per cent mark), it is rather unlikely that the Liberals can find many more seats to gain in the province. As for Atlantic Canada, adding Fredericton from the Greens doesnt hurt (with Jenica Atwin crossing the floor from the Greens to the Liberals this week), but its unlikely to have any effect beyond this electoral districts border.

As for the Conservatives, they appear stuck in a high-floor and low-ceiling scenario that would almost assuredly guarantee them Official opposition status. In the past month, the Conservatives have polled between 27 and 32 per cent nationally, and have shown no significant gain in Central Canada where the party needs it most. If it cannot grow its own support beyond the current numbers, the only scenario in which the party wins a plurality of seats would be if the NDP outperforms its polls and expectations.

To wit: The NDPs current polling average in Ontario stands at 20 per cent, three points higher than its 2019 result in the province. Should the NDPs vote in the next federal actually match its polling results, a net gain of six to 12 seats would be entirely plausibleand most of those seats would come at the expense of the Liberals. In the past week alone, boththe Angus Reid InstituteandLgermeasured NDP support above the 20 per cent mark nationally, and even had the NDP getting the support of one in four Ontario voters (25 per cent from Angus Reid and 24 per cent from Lger). With such numbers, a complete 25-seat sweep of Toronto would be almost impossible for the Liberals (unlike in both 2015 and 2019 federal elections). Without a harvest of Ontario seats similar to those of 2015 and 2019 for the LPC, a majority would simply be mathematically out of reach for Justin Trudeau.

Naturally, the projection confidence intervals do stretch into majority territory for the Liberals. In these scenarios, the Liberals would have to outperform their current standings and hope the NDP fails to effectively get out its vote, especially in Ontario. In the waning days of the 2019 campaign, the polling average showed the NDP at 18 per cent nationally, yet it ended up with 16 per cent. This modest, but measurable two per cent gap probably cost the NDP a dozen seats from coast to coast, most of them in Ontario.We cannot discount the possibility that the NDP would fail to match its improving poll results, especially if the NDP relies on its support from younger voters (who tend to vote in lesser numbers).

Hence, with NDP support still hovering just under 20 per cent and the Bloc Qubcois still riding the CAQs coattails in Quebec, where will the Liberals find enough seats to secure a majority? Perhaps an additional seat in Manitoba? Perhaps one seat in each of Edmonton and Calgary? Maybe retake Vancouver-Granville from independent MP Jody Wilson-Raybould? Nunavut? All of these perhaps and maybes add up to a lot of uncertainty, and make for a rather poor risk to reward ratio.

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Details of this projection are available on the 338Canada page. To find your home district, use the list of all 338 electoral districts here, or use the regional links below:

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A summer election would be a risky bet for the Liberals: 338Canada - Maclean's

OTTAWA -- Floor-crosser Jenica Atwin says that the Liberal Party reached out to her about joining their caucus in May, and that she gave Green Party Leader Annamie Paul an ultimatum before she made the decision to switch teams.

In an interview on CTVs Question Period, Atwin said that she was approached by the Liberals in late May and met with nearby New Brunswick MP and senior cabinet minister Dominic LeBlanc on May 26. She said there was not a lot of negotiation.

Atwin said the move was not about political opportunism, rather that she wanted to work in a collaborative respectful environment, and that after giving Paul an ultimatum on changes needed in order to stay with the Green Party during a face-to-face Zoom call, she made her decision to leave the caucus.

I really wish Ms. Paul well and I don't want to continue to be a thorn in her side and to be difficult in any way. We have irreconcilable differences at this point, so yes, that had everything to do with it, said Atwin.

Further, Atwin said she probably would still be a Green Party MP if Elizabeth May was still the leader, and that shed still like to see the party elect more MPs despite her now being a Liberal.

In a separate interview, Paul offered a different telling of the events that led up to Atwins departure, saying that she wished she had the chance to persuade her to say.

I still have not heard from her directly about her decision, but, you know she's made it clear that she feels that she has a better home in the Liberal Party of Canada.

The catalyst for her departure from the Greens was an internal feud between MPs and a now-outgoing senior adviser to Paul over social media posts related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Atwin said she stands by her pro-Palestinian position, and was hurt by the accusation made that she was anti-Semitic. She said shes been told there is a difference of opinion among Liberals and believes there will be an opportunity within her new caucus to have a more healthy discussion and debate than was possible with her former team.

I know I'm going to a place where I'm not alone in how I feel about this issue, and that I'll have that collaboration to work through it and come to an understanding, and thats what Im very much looking forward to, she said, without naming names.

The Conservatives have sought to attack the Liberals over the move, framing it as welcoming in another anti-Israeli MP, suggesting she will be in good company.

In welcoming their newest member into the fold, both LeBlanc and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke about how confident they were that Atwin will be a positive contribution to their team.

LeBlanc said during the announcement of her floor crossing that there is enormous room for respectful conversation, for differences of opinion, within the Liberal Party.

On Friday, as The Canadian Press reported, the Liberals announced plans to convene an emergency summit on anti-Semitism, led by former Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, currently Canada's special envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.

Asked what her position was on the 11-day war, Paul cited her experience with international diplomacy and conflict prevention and said that from her perspective Canada should be doing what it can to facilitate peace and to protect civilians.

I am here to try to do the best I can to propose the best policies that I can on behalf of our members, said Paul.

Now faced with the loss of one third of the Green Party caucus, Paul said that while it may be tougher in the short-term to convince people that the party is on good footing, shes confident in the Greens ground game.

My leadership is still relatively new, we're putting in the work and I know we have some repairing to do, but we're ready to do it, and I believe that we're going to be ready for the next election.

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Liberals approached me to cross the floor, issues with Green leader 'irreconcilable': Atwin - CTV News