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These are the top stories:
The latest on the Huawei spat
A Canadian woman and her family were temporarily detained while transiting through the Beijing airport yesterday. Ti-Anna Wang, whose pro-democracy father is imprisoned in China, was en route to Toronto with a stop in Beijing when six police officers boarded the aircraft. “I was escorted off, detained with my daughter and separated from my husband for almost two hours,” Wang said. “It was a shocking, terrifying and senseless ordeal with no purpose but to bully, punish and intimidate me and my family.”
The incident appears to be China’s latest apparent reprisal against Canada in an effort to allow Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou to return home. The first retaliatory move was the detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. And this week, a Chinese court sentenced Canadian Robert Schellenberg to death on drug-trafficking charges.
Schellenberg’s case has sparked a debate inside China’s legal community about “the suspicion that the judiciary in China is merely a servant of politics,” according to Zhang Jianwei, a professor at the country’s prestigious Tsinghua University.
U.S. prosecutors, meanwhile, launched another criminal investigation into Huawei – this time for allegedly stealing trade secrets. A lawsuit argues that two Huawei employees stole information related to T-Mobile’s smartphone-testing robot.
Also, the Chinese government has publicly rejected an argument by Canadian officials that interrogators in Beijing have violated the protections owed Mr. Kovrig, a former diplomat.
“He does not enjoy diplomatic immunity. I think China’s message is very clear,” said Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, in the latest high-profile exchange of unpleasantries in a deepening dispute with Canada.
And separately, Taiwan is calling for international support against China’s “out-of-control actions," a presidential spokesman for the self-ruled island said. Beijing had said companies like Apple have “wrongly labeled” Taiwan and should take immediate actions to correct it. (for subscribers)
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Canada’s oil companies should be required to disclose the impact of climate policies, a think tank says
The global effort to combat climate change threatens the value of oil reserves, and a new report says Canadian energy companies should be required to disclose that risk to investors. Those are risks that could assist First Nations leaders who are weighing whether to invest in the Trans Mountain pipeline project. To date, the government of Canada hasn’t conducted an analysis of how the pipeline’s long-term profitability would be affected by climate policies.
“We absolutely should be doing that because otherwise we would be committing a gross disservice to First Nations communities who otherwise may not have the capacity to undertake such analysis themselves,” said Céline Bak, a senior fellow with the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development, which released the report.
The RCMP will bring in outside investigators to look into internal harassment complaints
The national force is making the change to address long-standing concerns that victims haven’t always gotten a fair hearing when their complaints were investigated by fellow Mounties. The new process will kick in later this year, after the RCMP starts working with a new civilian advisory board. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the management board will have a broad mandate, starting with the harassment issue and expanding to other areas.
University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach expressed skepticism, saying the force “has a lot of challenges serving many diverse communities. I don’t see that this independent management board would necessarily address issues like policing policies and policing priorities.”
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
British Prime Minister Theresa May narrowly survived a no-confidence vote by a margin of 325 to 306. She’s now vowing to work with MPs across party lines to present a new Brexit deal to Parliament by Monday.
Liberal candidate Karen Wang has withdrawn from a by-election race after comments about Jagmeet Singh’s cultural background. Wang was running against the NDP Leader in the Burnaby South vote on Feb. 25. In a post on social-media platform WeChat, she told supporters she was “the only Chinese candidate” and described Singh as someone “of Indian descent.”
The death toll in the Nairobi terror attack has reached 21, with Kenya’s government saying it has put an end to the siege by militants linked to al-Shabaab. The Somali extremist group said it carried out the attack as revenge for the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
MORNING MARKETS
Stocks drop
Concern over China’s economic outlook and possible U.S. tariffs on European cars dragged stocks lower on Thursday, while an anti-climactic end to the latest chapter in the Brexit saga offered sterling a moment’s peace. Fresh news was thin as European trading got underway, but traders had more than enough to digest from last 24 hours to follow Asia’s overnight dip into the red. Tokyo’s Nikkei, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and the Shanghai Composite were down between 0.2 and 0.5 per cent. In Europe, London’s FTSE 100 was down 0.4 per cent at about 6:30 a.m. ET, with Germany’s DAX down 0.2 per cent and the Paris CAC down 0.4 per cent. New York futures were also down. The Canadian dollar was at 75.29 US cents.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
Thin skin: Gillette’s poke at masculinity is barely a nick
“This latest bit of corporate feminism is a bit rich coming from Gillette, which charges women more for pink razors than it does men for blue ones. Over all, though, the message largely reflects the mainstream conversation about equity, which has finally turned to how traditional masculinity hurts men and boys, not just everyone else. It’s hardly a cutting-edge concept but still too sharp for many, as seen by the barrage of complaints that parent company Procter & Gamble was attacking men.” – Denise Balkissoon
With Wilson-Raybould demotion, Trudeau gets his priorities wrong
“While Jody Wilson-Raybould inherits a ‘deep and awesome’ responsibility – as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insisted after appointing her to the Veterans Affairs post on Monday – the move from her perch as Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister is not a lateral one. Her demotion, and the appointment of Seamus O’Regan as Indigenous Services minister, speak volumes about how this Prime Minister’s Office grades performance. It’s the difference between ministers good at virtue-signalling on Twitter and those who prioritize the ‘deep and awesome’ responsibilities of their jobs.” – Konrad Yakabuski (for subscribers)
For Indigenous kids' welfare, our government knows better; it just needs to do better
“This week, the story of a newborn baby removed from her family in Manitoba added to a litany of reports about the over-representation of First Nations children in child welfare care. The number and persistence of these stories lead many to believe this is a problem without a solution. But real answers have been on the books for decades – governments just need to implement them.” – Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada
LIVING BETTER
Lessons from grief, in three First Person essays
Following his wife’s death, Brad Spurgeon developed a new, enriching life by playing music: “After the tragedy of Nathalie’s death, by choosing life over seclusion, I have learned just how big our gift of life is when we refuse to succumb to despair.”
Elena Saplys Krakowski details her path back from a broken heart: “The heart wants reciprocation. It wants to be loved. This is most often apparent not when we are loved, but when we are, quite suddenly, left.”
Sheilah Spurr writes about what she learned from her mother’s battle with dementia: “We all live and we all die. That is a certainty. But what isn’t so certain is that we will have the freedom to make decisions about our quality of life until the end.”
MOMENT IN TIME
William Davis announces sports stadium (later called SkyDome)
(Jeff Wasserman/The Globe and Mail)JEFF WASSERMAN/The Globe and Mail
Jan. 17, 1985: The impetus behind the official announcement by Ontario Premier William Davis to erect a climate-controlled indoor athletic playground in the downtown Toronto core was laid three years earlier, when the city played host to the Grey Cup at creaky, open-air Exhibition Stadium. The game, contested by the Toronto Argonauts and Edmonton Eskimos in late November, was played in bone-chilling, rainy conditions. It was so cold that many of the fans opted to watch from covered concession areas. Davis attended that event and was at a rally the next day at Toronto City Hall where his remarks were drowned out by thousands of onlookers who were chanting, “We want a dome!” Three years later, Mr. Davis announced the construction of a new sports palace that would become the world’s first stadium with a fully retractable roof and whose main tenants would be the Argos and baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays. The facility that would originally be christened SkyDome (now Rogers Centre) was plagued by cost overruns. And by the time it first opened its doors – not to mention its roof – in 1989, the original construction cost estimate of around $150-million had ballooned to about $570-million, with taxpayers footing the bill for most of the cost. – Robert MacLeod
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Arik Ligeti