Evening Update: National security risk now a factor in research funding decisions

Good evening, let’s start with today’s top stories:

Many Canadian researchers hoping to secure federal grants for their work have a new layer of scrutiny to consider: national security investigators. Amid rising concerns about state secrets being vulnerable to prying eyes at work for foreign powers such as China, Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne has announced new rules to safeguard Canadian intellectual property.

Under the revised guidelines, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council applications will include a security risk assessment, with high-risk proposals expected to be denied funding, while medium- and low-risk research that is approved will still require mitigation processes.

The list of research topics affected includes: critical minerals, nuclear power, critical infrastructure or technology and software, as well as anything that could benefit other countries’ military, police or intelligence agencies, The Globe’s Robert Fife and Steven Chase report.

Review of pandemic early-warning system calls on Ottawa to overhaul its approach to outbreaks

An independent review of Canada’s pandemic early-warning system suggests a risk assessment office be introduced at the country’s public-health agency, among other recommendations, in its 82-page report released today. A panel of experts was assigned to review the GPHIN system following a Globe and Mail investigation into how the system’s mismanagement and overall faulty risk assessment contributed to the government’s initial underestimation of the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More on the COVID-19 pandemic:

• All COVID-19 restrictions to lift in England next Monday despite surge in infections
• Canada to donate 17.7 million AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses and raise money for global vaccination
• Countries should not order COVID-19 boosters while others still need vaccines, WHO says

British Columbia to provide regulated substances under ‘safe supply’ directive to tackle drug overdoses

Searching for ways to combat a rash of deadly overdoses, the B.C. government will require its health authorities to provide drug users with alternatives to street drugs in a new policy directive obtained by The Globe and Mail. The initiative, which falls short of expanded access advocates have been calling for, is nevertheless controversial inside the health system.

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OLYMPIC SPOTLIGHT

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For Haley Daniels and her dad, Tokyo will represent a pair of firsts. Haley will compete for Canada in the first women’s Olympic canoeing event, and her experienced gate-judge dad – a transgender woman now going by Kimberly – is believed to be the first transgender official ever to work the Games.

The pair had originally planned to share Kimberly’s truth after the Olympics, for fear of disrupting Haley’s training and preparation, but pandemic delays and a bit of serendipity linked to a Pride photo shoot changed that. “Today I can be myself,” Kimberly says now. “I always had a male and female voice in my head, and I only have that female voice.”

This story will appear in the next edition of our Olympics newsletter. Tokyo Olympics Update features original stories from Globe reporters in Canada and Tokyo, looks at Olympic moments from past iconic performances and will track Team Canada’s medal wins at Tokyo 2020. Subscribe now.

ALSO ON OUR RADAR

Fighting bad behaviour: The acting commander of Canada’s military is calling for action “beyond words” on sexual misconduct in a communiqué to Armed Forces members that lists steps such as posting culture officers on warships, developing training workshops with survivors, and a restorative justice program to be launched in the fall.

South Africa deploys army internally: The imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma has been a flashpoint for looting and rioting by his supporters, and now the army is stepping in to assist overwhelmed police in the worst violence in South Africa in years. Geoffrey York reports from Johannesburg.

Central bank’s deputy appointed: Carolyn Rogers, a veteran of financial regulation both at home and abroad, has been named the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada.

Porter enters fray: With the purchase of 80 passenger jets from Brazilian manufacturer Embraer, Porter airlines is expanding its network to more North American destinations as well as the Caribbean.

MARKET WATCH

While the main indexes south of the border enjoyed record highs on closing today, the TSX was down owing to weak energy sector and industrials numbers. Tesla rallied more than 4 per cent to help lift the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, but bank stocks also did well ahead of second-quarter earnings season.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.36 per cent to end at 34,996.18 points, while the S&P 500 gained 0.35 per cent to 4,384.63. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.21 per cent to 14,733.24. In Toronto, the S&P/TSX Composite Index closed down 24.87 points, or 0.12 per cent, at 20,233.08.

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TALKING POINTS

Has Western Canada really been mistreated?

Gary Mason: “I think Mr. O’Toole ... needs to be mindful of overplaying his hand, of using words such as ‘mistreatment’ to characterize people who have not been wronged or victimized in the way Indigenous peoples have, or in the way, say, many Muslims and other minorities in this country have. Forcing people to pay a carbon tax in an effort to stop the planet from burning up is hardly mistreatment.”

Residential school deaths from tuberculosis weren’t unavoidable – they were caused by deliberate neglect

Lena Faust and Courtney Heffernan: “As early as 1907, Peter Henderson Bryce, the physician and chief medical officer of the Department of Indian Affairs at the time, noted that the combination of poor sanitation, crowding and poor ventilation were making residential schools the perfect environment for the transmission of TB. In fact, he remarked it was ‘almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately created.’”

China’s success in fighting poverty isn’t quite the victory Xi Jinping claims it is

Frank Ching: “China’s successes in battling extreme poverty have been widely recognized. In an end-of-mission statement five years ago, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, termed the lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty ‘a staggering achievement.’ ... However, while the lot of many Chinese has been improved, the situation needs to be put in context.”

LIVING BETTER

The 10 best films of 2021 (so far) and how to watch them right now

The first half of 2021 has produced, if not a reliable in-cinema experience, a bevy of terrific movies. There’s a polarizing revolution thriller, a music doc with political fury at its centre, a genre-busting retelling of a Twitter thread, an animated comedy long on both sweetness and wit, and more.

TODAY’S LONG READ

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The future of wildfires in Canada, and their widespread and devastating implications for human health

The events in Western Canada – and Lytton, B.C., in particular – this month serve as a blunt reminder of how Canada is being affected by global warming.

Raging wildfires illustrate the implications of climate change with dramatic visual impact, write The Globe’s environment reporter Kathryn Blaze Baum and science reporter Ivan Semeniuk. But it’s the heat that precedes and sustains them, and the smoke they billow far and wide, that can have widespread and devastating implications for human health. Even people who live far from the wildfires can be exposed to poor air quality from burning biomass.

“When it looks really bad, people think it is really bad,” says Sarah Henderson, scientific director in environmental health services at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. “But it becomes unhealthy long before it looks terrible.”

Read Kathryn and Ivan’s feature here.

Evening Update is compiled and written weekdays by an editor in The Globe’s live news department. If you’d like to receive this newsletter by e-mail every weekday evening, go here to sign up. If you have any feedback, send us a note.