Politics This Morning: The view from up North

Good Thursday morning, The return of Parliament is approaching. The cabinet has retreated and returned, the funding circuit has been thoroughly exercised, and committees have been ramping up. A few thousand kilometres away from the capital, one of the nation’s finance ministers has been preoccupied by one of Trudeau and co.’s priority issues: the exploitation of so-called “critical minerals.” That would be CAROLINE WAWZONEK, who handles both the finance and industry portfolios (along with a few others) for the government of the Northwest Territories. PTM caught up with Wawzonek yesterday while she was in Vancouver for a mining industry conference: more specifically, a conference for those involved in mineral exploration—the process of locating new stuff to mine. We’ll tell you what she had to say below. But first: What’s the cabinet up to? Prime Minister JUSTIN TRUDEAU is attending a Liberal caucus retreat in Ottawa, and having dinner with a head of state today. More on that below. Housing and Diversity Minister AHMED HUSSEN and Transport Minister OMAR ALGHABRA are out and about in Toronto today, where they’ll make an announcement about combating Islamophobia at the office of the International Muslim Organization. The press conference is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Odds are Hussen will face more questions about pricey contracts his constituency office has regularly awarded for communications advice to a food marketing firm run by a sibling of one of his senior staffers. His office has declined to make public details of those contracts or the work provided by that firm. Environment Minister STEVEN GUILBEAULT and Families Minister KARINA GOULD are holding a press conference of their own in Toronto at 10:30 a.m. The pair will announce funding for “projects to protect natural spaces and facilitate access to greenspace around the ” Associate Finance Minister RANDY BOISSONNAULT will hold a presser in Wabasca, Alta., today to announce funding to improve high-speed internet service in rural Alberta. In Parliament A round of preliminary meetings of Liberal MPs will take place on the Hill today. The Liberal caucus is scheduled to gather for a series of meetings on Friday and Saturday. Today, however, the Liberal women’s caucus, Indigenous caucus, and rural caucus will meet in West Block in preparation for the next two days. The prime minister will be involved with those meetings in some capacity, according to his itinerary. Two House committees are meeting today. The Transport Committee will continue its study of passenger protection this morning with a grilling of executives from Via Rail, which left some of its passengers stranded on stalled trains for up to 18 hours over the Christmas holidays amid bad weather and blockages of the rail line. You can watch that meeting here beginning at 10 a.m. Liberal MP Peter Schiefke, left, chairs the House Transport Committee. Schiefke is pictured here with Scott Wilson, a WestJet executive who testified before the committee earlier this month. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade The committee will reconvene at 1 p.m. to hear from a grab-bag of other witnesses as part of the same study. The Public Accounts Committee will also meet at 1 p.m. to look into Auditor General KAREN HOGAN’s recent report on the government’s pandemic financial benefit programs. That report concluded that the government had done a good job of getting money to stabilize households out of the door quickly, but had not done a very good job of trying to claw back money that had been paid out to those who weren’t eligible to receive it—probably somewhere between $4.6- and $27.4-billion. Hogan and senior officials from the Canada Revenue Agency will testify before the committee today. You can watch the meeting here. Have metals, need cash OK, back to Minister Wawzonek. The territory she represents is a small political player, there’s no doubt. Its total population is about the same as that of Stittsville, a suburb of another suburb west of Ottawa. But it has what it seems the whole North American continent is desperate for right now: “critical minerals.” Specifically, Northwest Territories has five of the six priority metals identified in the federal government’s “Critical Minerals Strategy”: lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and what are known as “rare earth elements.” These metals and minerals are essential components of electric vehicle batteries and other high-tech products. That’s more important than usual at the moment, because (a) the Trudeau government is trying to force auto manufacturers in Canada to ramp up electric vehicle production at lightning speed; and (b) U.S. President JOE BIDEN’s government has been pressuring Canada to hurry up and get those minerals out of the ground, so neither country will be at the economic or geopolitical mercy of the country that currently has the market on them cornered: China. This file is at the centre of much of the work being done by the federal ministers of industry, environment, natural resources, trade, foreign affairs, and intergovernmental affairs and infrastructure. Which is to say, that it’s keeping a lot of the people in the PMO busy. The trouble, said Wawzonek, is that getting proven deposits of metals and minerals out of the ground in Northwest Territories is phenomenally expensive. Before you can build a mine, you have to build a road to the mine, for example—one that can support heavy trucks. Plus, you—in this case, the company that owns the rights to the deposits—have to attract investors willing to fork over big sums of cash to get the mine built and workers paid. Caroline Wawzonek is the Northwest Territories' minister of finance. Photograph courtesy of Minister Wawzonek's office The Northwest Territories government doesn’t have the cash to bridge the gap or build all the infrastructure that would be needed to accelerate the building of those mines. “It’s not realistic for us to say that we’re going to go and build a $1-billion project of any sort,” she said. Wawzonek and her colleagues in Yellowknife were “thrilled” to see the federal Liberals set aside a lump of cash in last year’s budget that might be useful for setting some mines in motion. Specifically, Finance Minister CHRYSTIA FREELAND’s budget pledged $1.5-billion over seven years—starting in 2023-24—for “infrastructure investments that would support the development of the critical minerals supply chains, with a focus on priority deposits.” Almost a year later, however, they still don’t know where, when, or how the money is going to roll out, she said. “What is that going to mean? Is an answer I would very much like to have.” In the same budget, the government also promised money for critical minerals projects through its Strategic Innovation Fund, and a collection of other measures. Wawzonek had another reason for being in Vancouver this week. She took part in a meeting of federal, provincial, and territorial ministers responsible for cybersecurity and digital government (that’s on her plate, as well). It’s a meeting that the federal government chose not to mention to the press gallery, but one that included some useful conversations, she said, about governments working together to counter cyberattacks—the Atlantic governments get wind of them first, since they are the first to start each workday—and “interoperability” of services. To give an example of the latter: some governments have begun allowing Indigenous people to express their names without using the Latin alphabet, but those names won’t necessarily be recognized by the systems employed by the feds. What else is happening today? The king of Jordan is visiting Ottawa today. King ABDULLAH II will arrive for a two-day official visit, his sixth since taking the throne in 1999. Abdullah will meet with Prime Minister Trudeau, according to the PMO, and the two are officially scheduled to discuss peace and security in the Middle East, refugees, humanitarian assistance, women’s rights, energy, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Canada’s privacy commissioner, PHILIPPE DUFRESNE, has called a press conference in downtown Ottawa today at 11 a.m. to reveal the results of his office’s investigation into Home Depot’s sharing of customer e-receipt information with Meta, the company that runs Facebook. That sounds like something that could catch the attention of a parliamentary committee, so we'll have to stay tuned. Also today, lobby groups for Canada’s universities, student unions, and business owners will hold a joint press conference on Parliament Hill at 1:30 p.m. to warn of a “talent crisis” in the country, and call for the government to fix it. In the news The government plans to introduce “a lot” of legislation in the next few months, and will be relying on the Senate to help it get bills through Parliament “expeditiously,” Government House Leader MARK HOLLAND told CHRIS GULY. How is the new chair of the CRTC, VICKY EATRIDES, going to handle the myriad challenges coming her way? Check out her interview with IAN CAMPBELL to find out. In case you missed it High prices here to stay High inflation has been a real drag, but eventually, prices will come back down, right? Nope. The Canadian Press’ NOJOUD AL MALLEES tackled this topic in a story published earlier in the week. Economists she spoke with don’t think that deflation—the technical term for a broad-based decrease in prices—will occur once the economy settles down. For one thing, Canada has an economy driven in large part by the sale of services. The biggest input cost for service providers are salaries, which are what economists call “sticky,” meaning they don’t fall quickly with a decreased demand for labour. Therefore, service prices are unlikely to fall once the economy cools down. It’s also worth noting that the Bank of Canada would reprise its role as party pooper, and move to counteract signs of deflation: its mandate is to keep inflation in the range of one to three per cent. The price of particularly volatile goods like gasoline may fall, but on the whole, we’ll have to get used to living in a world of $8 bacon. Feds ready to fund carbon storage Natural Resources Canada opened up another phase of a project aimed at getting carbon storage and capture projects up and running in Canada yesterday. The department is taking applications for funding from proponents of research and development projects that will explore ways to store and transport already-captured carbon dioxide until mid-April. This is the second phase of a multi-stage funding project, called the Energy Innovation Program. Carbon capture and storage has been a political football of sorts in Canada, with jurisdictional feuding over who will pay for it, and opposition from some environmentalists who see it as a licence for limitless oil and gas production. Health deal not yet settled Prime Minister Trudeau issued a reality check of sorts yesterday following reports of an impending health care agreement with the provinces. Trudeau told reporters that he had invited the premiers to meet with him in Ottawa on Feb. 7, but added that the group wasn’t prepared to announce a deal on that date—instead, it would have a “working meeting.” Government-to-government negotiations typically start with public servants, who bring in ministers to make the final calls on politically sensitive points of contention. In this case, it seems likely that the health ministers have had to kick things up another level. Send your news tips to pmazereeuw@hilltimes.com. The Hill Times

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Politics This Morning

Politics This Morning: The view from up North

Plus, a king comes to town.

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