In the News

Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand has announced a plan to buy some 7.9 million rapid point-of-care COVID-19 tests from U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories but procurement is subject to Health Canada regulatory approval. Reporting results from other testing can take days but the molecular ID NOW test can yield results within minutes.

Canadian softwood lumber is trapped in a World Trade Organization logjam created by the U.S. The White House has announced that it will appeal a recent WTO decision favouring Canada in the decades-long softwood lumber dispute but the WTO is unable to appoint the required judges because the U.S. has blocked their appointment. Ottawa’s response is that Washington’s move “significantly reduces the security and predictability that we collectively value in international trade.”

Mamadou Konaté, a refugee from Ivory Coast who worked as a custodian in Montreal long-term care facilities during the initial COVID-19 outbreak, now is in a migrant detention centre pending deportation. As an undocumented alien, he evidently is not covered by a provincial exemption for other asylum-seekers such as nurses and orderlies who worked in the facilities.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has weighed in on complaints that RCMP policy requiring front-line officers to wear tight-fitting medical grade face masks discriminates against personnel who don’t shave their beards for cultural reasons. “The presence of diverse Canadians in our police force and all our systems of authority is something extremely important for all Canadians and it is something that I certainly hope the RCMP rectifies quickly,” he said.

An already shaky global order will deteriorate further if leaders fail to come together on human rights, climate change and other challenges, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned. “The world is in crisis, and not just because of the last few months,” he said in a recorded message to the UN General Assembly. “Not just because of COVID-19, but because of the last few decades -- and because of us.”

A majority of Swiss voters have said they want to maintain open borders with their European Union neighbours. Although not an EU member, the traditionally neutral county has treaties which facilitate access. A conservative movement had sought tighter immigration controls but the proposal was defeated in a weekend referendum.

The RCAF marked the arrival of the first aircraft of its future fixed-wing search and rescue fleet. The new fleet will be called Kingfisher. The CC-295 Kingfisher fleet will be based at four locations across Canada, in Comox, Trenton, Greenwood, and Winnipeg. The aircraft will arrive in phases as crews are trained in turn at each location.

More than a communications medium, social media is described as a “new kind of battle space” in which the forces of good are losing. “A toxic witch’s brew of disinformation, conspiracy theory, and hate continues to plague the platforms through which much of our modern information networks run,” according to a published commentary, which warns that the response from service providers is “woefully late and lacking.”

Dr. Bonnie Henry, the former Royal Canadian Navy medical officer who has become a focus of the national debate about COVID-19 as British Columbia’s provincial health officer, says she has received death threats which require security at home. “I've got a lot of very positive responses but there are many people who don’t like what I do or don’t like the way I say it or don’t like my shoes . . . and feel quite able to send me nasty notes, to leave phone calls, to harass my office staff.”

Britain has provided evidence which expected to clear the way for trial of two British expatriates held by the U.S. in Iraq. Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, who have denied the charges, are accused of belonging to an IS cell dubbed “The Beatles” who were involved in Islamic State executions of Western hostages. The evidence was handed over after Britain's High Court rejected a request by the mother of one of the suspects to block the transfer. The U.S. cleared the way for cooperation by stating that the pair would not be executed if found guilty.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was sworn in 22 September for his sixth term in office amid ongoing mass protests that his re-election earlier this year was rigged. The authoritarian leader has run the former Soviet country of 9.5 million since 1975.

U.S. President Donald Trump,  whose own handling of COVID-19 is under scrutiny as his country’s deaths from the pandemic pass the 200,000 mark, used his speech to a mainly virtual UN General Assembly today to demand that China be held “accountable” for having “released this plague on to the world.” China has dismissed Trump’s accusations as a distraction and Chinese President Xi Jinping shifted the exchange to the rising military tensions between the countries by insisted that China has “no intention to enter a Cold War.”

Pascale Cécile Véronique Ferrier, 53, of Saint Hubert, Que., has been named as the alleged source of envelopes containing poisonous ricin which were mailed to President Donald Trump and at least two law enforcement agencies in Texas. Despite pleading not guilty to federal charges 22 September, she evidently has told the FBI that she mailed nine envelopes, but there have been no reports of injury.

Amid increasing tensions between the two countries, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has offered to do a prisoner exchange with the U.S. Iran has accused many foreign detainees of in its jails of espionage while accusing the U.S. of unjustly detaining Iranians, mainly for breaking sanctions. “We are prepared to exchange all of them and all those who have been kept in jail,” he said.

The constitutionality of the federal government’s levy on carbon emissions is before the Supreme Court of Canada for two days this week as the governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario mount further appeals. Having lost lower-court challenges, the provinces insist that the levy encroaches on their jurisdiction.

A Bulgarian court has sentenced two Lebanese expatriates to life imprisonment for their role in a fatal 2012 bus bomb attack on Israeli tourists at the country's Burgas airport. The blast killed five Israelis, their local bus driver and the bomber as well as injuring 35 other persons. The accused, identified as Lebanese-Canadian Hassan El Hajj Hassan and Lebanese-Australian Meliad Farah, remain at large.

The U.S. has imposed new sanctions on 27 individuals in Iran’s defense ministry and elsewhere in its nuclear program, a move rejected by key European allies as well as Russia and China. It also imposed new sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, accusing him of having conspired with Iran “to flout the UN arms embargo.”

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has given all federal departments and agencies until the end of today to deal with a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows which was disclosed more than a month ago. The agency warns that failure to apply an update released by Microsoft could have dire consequences.

Military spouses and common-law partners are the focus of a Department of National Defence initiative designed to open up opportunities for employment in the federal public service overall. The new initiative builds on an existing platform designed to identify openings within DND.

There now are more than 30 million confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, including more than 940,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. The U.S., India and Brazil have the most cases, in that order.

The recent New Brunswick general election, which saw the Progressive Conservatives returned to power with a legislative majority, apparently can be taken as a small example of how voting can be managed as COVID-19 continues to be a national challenge. The province’s chief electoral officer reports that more than 133,000 voters chose advance polls, some 66 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots and results were clear that evening.

Newly-published results of a national public opinion poll indicate that 90 per cent of Canadians want to keep the U.S. border closed due to ongoing concerns about COVID-19. The numbers have been published as the federal government considers a further extension on its ban on non-essential visitors from the U.S.

Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados plans to remove Queen Elizabeth as head of state, which would set up her country to become a republic in November 2021, the 55th anniversary of its independence from Britain. “The time has come to fully leave our colonial past behind,” she says. “This is the ultimate statement of confidence in who we are and what we are capable of.”

With 5G becoming the next generation of mobile telecommunications, China’s involvement in the technology remains a widespread concern because of national security questions. Most of the concern is in the U.S. but it also has become a political conundrum for Canada and other allies. The Australian Strategic Policy Initiative has taken a close look at the issue.

Former U.S. Army LCol Alexander Vindman, a key witness in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, is scathingly critical of the Administration in his first published interview since he left the service. Among other things, he describes Trump as a “useful idiot” or a dupe of authoritarian regimes, and “fellow traveller” with Vladimir Putin in that he shares the Russian leader’s loathing for democratic norms.

U.S. administration official Michael Caputo used a Facebook event on the weekend to call government scientists’ handling of the COVID-19 situation seditious. The assistant secretary of health for public affairs also suggested that he personally would be a target for extremists who plan armed insurrection after the November presidential election.

Hoping to compete more effectively with China and Russia in artificial intelligence development, U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said his department will launch a new partnership with more than 10 countries, possibly this week. The goal is to “create new frameworks and tools for data sharing, cooperative development, and strengthened interoperability” among allies.

Faced with a resurgence of COVID-19, with thousands of new infections confirmed daily, Israel is gearing up for a lengthy national lockdown, beginning 18 September. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the measures would “exact a heavy price on us all” but suggested the latest numbers left him with no option despite criticism from political interests which support his coalition government.

When Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency in 2016, significant numbers of Americans indicted that they’d prefer to emigrate north. Preliminary numbers from Citizenship and Immigration Canada indicate that many fulfilled that wish. Following 6,800 in 2015, the total rose to 7,700 in 2016 and then to more than 9,000 in 2018 before settling back by a few hundred.

British trials of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Cambridge-based AstraZeneca and Oxford University are resuming after a reported side effect on a patient resulted in a pause in the testing. The university said it had received permission from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and an independent review committee.

Persons who eschew masks against COVID-19 in Quebec’s public places where social-distancing is not possible now are liable for fines up to $6,000. Effective 12 September, the measure was announced by Premier François Legault in response to regional surges in infections. “There’s a trend we do not like here,” he said two days earlier. “We cannot accept that a few irresponsible individuals put at risk the entire population.”

The International Air Transport Association expects that it will require the equivalent of up to 8,000 large aircraft to deliver enough single COVID-19 vaccine doses to the world’s population. It warns that “severe capacity constraints” on secure storage, personnel training and border controls could hamper distribution.

An Australian-led multinational team of experts says between 30 and 50 per cent of the world’s fresh water is being stolen, mostly for agricultural purposes. “Water crises constitute a challenge for humanity,” they say in a report, calling on governments to recognize the urgency by overhauling policies and regulations.

Canadian officials say they expect Ottawa to retaliate by 16 September to the U.S. administration’s 10 per cent tariff on imports of Canadian aluminum. Ottawa has threatened some $3.6 billion in countermeasures unless Washington backed down on President Donald Trump’s initiative.