In the News

In a bid to become a world leader in hydrogen exports, Australia has committed A$300 million to foster development of a “cleaner” alternative to natural gas. The new funding is part of a national hydrogen strategy unveiled last year.

The economic impact of COVID-19 in the U.S. evidently is forcing the federal government to assess the affordability of a range of initiatives. The Pentagon had already been expecting relatively flat budgets for the next few years but an explosion of spending on virus relief efforts could cause an implosion in defence spending and a revision of national security priorities.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement of a crackdown on civilian ownership of so-called assault rifles and the prospect of a similar handgun ban has drawn a sharp response from Ontario Premier Doug Ford. He has suggested that the hundreds of millions of dollars the ban is estimated to cost would be better spent on counter-smuggling efforts coupled with stiffer penalties.

Effective immediately, the sale, transport, importation and use of some 1,500 types of “assault style” firearms are now prohibited in Canada. There will be a two-year amnesty for current owners to comply with the prohibition, and Prime Minister Trudeau says that “fair compensation” will be forthcoming.

Canadian epidemiologist Bruce Aylward has been summoned by the House of Commons health Committee to testify by videolink about the World Health Organization’s handling of COVID-19. Opposition health critic Matt Jeneroux says Dr. Aylward, who led a WHO-China Joint Mission on COVID-19, could provide insight into WHO decision-making.

U.S. National Institutes of Health support for research on zoonotic transmission of coronaviruses to humans from bats has been abruptly cancelled, alarming and angering researchers. The NIH cut its grant apparently in response to unfounded suggestions by President Donald Trump and other conservative politicians and news media that COVID-19 had originated in a Chinese laboratory which employed a virologist who had been receiving NIH funding.

Tiff Macklem, a former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, has been appointed to succeed Governor Stephen Poloz, who announced last December that he would not seek a second seven-year term. Macklem left the central bank in 2014 to become Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

The U.S. wants other countries to deny overflight rights to Mahan Air, an Iranian airline under U.S. sanctions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the carrier recently delivered multiple cargos of “unknown support” to Venezuela, another regime opposed by Washington. An official in Caracas said the cargos were oil refinery equipment.

U.S. President Donald Trump says China “will do anything they can” to ensure he is not re-elected in November. Stepping up his criticism of Beijing amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, he said China faces a “lot” of possible pandemic-related consequences. A Chinese government spokesman says the election is an internal U.S. issue and has called on US politicians to stop scapegoating it for domestic political gain.

Cybersecurity professionals are warning that the White House’s approach to dealing with Huawei is undermining U.S. participation in international bodies responsible for establishing 5G network technical standards. “Continuing to cede leadership roles in these organizations and their associated processes risks a future where 5G, internet, and other standards reflect the values, interests, and priorities of nations that do not share our,” says Megan Stifel of the Global Cyber Alliance.

The Department of National Defence and NATO confirmed 30 April that an RCAF Sikorsky CH-148 Cyclone helicopter serving with a NATO task force in the Mediterranean had crashed the previous evening. Greek media say that it had taken off from the frigate HMCS Fredericton with up six persons and that one body had been recovered. NATO has not released crew details but DND says it has contracted all “primary family” members of those who were aboard.”

The crew of an Air Canada Jazz flight to Nanaimo, B.C., has reported spotting a small drone on final approach to the Vancouver Island airport last week. Identified as probably a personal-use drone, it was spotted at the same altitude just off the deHavilland Dash 8 twin turboprop's starboard wing.

Officials at NATO headquarters in Brussels are using the COVID-19 experience as a potential learning exercise to prepare better for the next pandemic. “Resiliance is . . . enshrined in Article 3 of our treaty,” says Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. “We have baseline requirements, guidelines for national resilience, including health and dealing with mass casualties.”

A relaxation of New Zealand’s five-week COVID-19 pandemic lockdown 28 April resulted in a rush at two of fast-food franchise. The long lineups of cars required police intervention to deal with the situation.

New Brunswick-based Irving Oil is seeking regulatory permission to use tankers to supply its Saint John refinery with crude oil as opposed to railway tank cars. The company has told the federal government that the COVID-19 pandemic has created significant uncertainty in its usual supply chain.

A Canadian Cyclone helicopter deployed on HMCS Fredericton has gone missing while on a NATO exercise with allies off the western coast of Greece in the Ionian Sea. DND has confirmed that a search and rescue mission is underway at this time. 

U.S. President Donald Trump is said to have been warned about the looming COVID-19 crisis in his daily intelligence briefings in January as various agencies highlighted the threat more than a dozen times. Officials are quote anonymously as saying that Trump often skips the President’s Daily Brief and has shown impatience when receiving the oral briefing.

While the 16 German states have varying approaches for easing the lockdowns imposed to contain COVID-19, cloth masks now are mandatory in most jurisdictions on public transit and in stores. However, the World Health Organization continues to suggest that masks should be worn only by persons who are displaying symptoms, have tested positive or are caring for others.

In what is described as “the first overall assessment of Canada's Arctic Ocean”, dozens of federal scientists and Inuit observers have concluded that the region may be changing faster than any other body of water on the planet, with economic and strategic implications. “As the Arctic changes, the rest of the ecosystem is going to track with those changes,” says the project's lead scientist, Andrea Niemi of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “There isn't going to be a delay.”

British intelligence agencies have been told they require computer assistance to counter a variety of threats. The Royal United Services Institute also says new artificial intelligence capabilities are critical to identifying criminal as well as military threats before they become reality.

Breaking a peace deal signed in November with the internationally-recognised government of Yemen, United Arab Emirates-backed separatists in the country’s south have declared self-rule. The Saudi-backed government has warned of “catastrophic consequences.”

The U.S. Navy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have begun studying a COVID-19 outbreak in one of its aircraft carriers in the hope of contributing to a better understanding of the pandemic. More than 17 per cent of its crew of 4,845 have tested positive.

Boeing Co. has withdrawn from a $4.2-billion deal to buy Brazil-based Embraer's commercial aircraft division. The U.S. giant accused Embraer of having not met conditions for finalizing the sale but the São Paulo-based company countered that Boeing’s financial difficulties were the reason.

The latest projection of COVID-19’s financial impact on the federal treasury and, eventually on taxpayers going forward, has topped $817 billion. It includes various public support programs for individuals and businesses as well as the knock-on effect of tax deferrals and loan guarantee programs.

A member of the government’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force says the World Health Organization set back the global response by up to three weeks by placing too much confidence in Chinese data. “I think they were a little too deferential,” Dr. David Naylor, a physician and former University of Toronto president, said in a televised interview. He also didn’t think it was “a massive amount of time lost” and those who hold that view “are simply wrong.”

Unmanned aerial vehicles designed by Draganfly Inc. of Saskatoon have been deployed near New York City in a pilot project to detect the spread of COVID-19. Draganfly has been working with the University of Southern Australia to equip its drones with sensors that can measure from nearly 60 metres not only social distancing compliance, but also body temperature, heart and respiratory rates, and whether people are sneezing and coughing in crowds.

The much-maligned middle seat in airliners with three-seat rows have become even less desirable since the advent of COVID-19. Several carriers have announced plans to not assign them to passengers for the foreseeable future and other options are being considered.

Rookie Ontario Conservative MP Derek Sloan, who’s also a leadership candidate, took to social media this week to question the loyalty of Dr. Theresa Tam, the Chief Medical Officer of Health overseeing Canada’s COVID-19 response. He asked whether the Hong Kong-born epidemiologist -- who grew up in Britain and was educated there and in Canada -- worked for “Canada or China?” Dr. Tam dismissed the comment as “noise” and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there was no place for “intolerance and racism” in Canada, but Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer declined comment on leadership candidates.

Premier François Legault has asked the federal government to send 1,000 additional Canadian Armed Forces personnel to help staff long-term care institutions in Quebec which have been hit hard by COVID-19. He says the province has unable to find enough trained workers to meet immediate needs.

A flurry of email and social media messages in mid-March to the effect that the U.S. was about to lock down the entire country is reportedly being blamed on Chinese operatives.

A Canada-U.S. agreement to extend restrictions on cross-border travel has prompted Air Canada to suspend all commercial service to the U.S., effective 26 April and until at least 22 May. WestJet also has extended its original suspension until at least 4 June 4 as well as shutting down some domestic services.

Repeated suggestions that COVID-19 ws manufactured in a high-level containment lab in China are being discounted by the World Health Organization, which said 21 April that all available evidence points to animal-human transmission as the “likely” vector. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is dismissing the notion that it had synthesized the virus or permitted it to escape.

The weekend shooting spree in Nova Scotia which left at least 23 dead, including a police officer and the gunman, has prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resurrect a promise during last fall’s election campaign to strengthen gun controls. “We were on the verge of introducing legislation to ban assault-style weapons across this country,” he said 20 April, explaining that his plan had been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. “As long as Canadians are losing their loved ones to gun violence, not enough has changed.”

Essye Miller, principal deputy chief information officer at the Department of Defense, retiring at the end of June, is to be succeeded John Sherman, CIO of the Intelligence Community. Miller, who previously held senior Army and Air Force positions, played a key role in preparing the DoD for COVID-19. Sherman, who has been at the IC since September 2017 and is responsible for ongoing IT modernization, previously was with the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.