Politics Briefing: How well known are Trudeau’s ministers?

Share

Good morning,

Quick! Pop quiz. No Googling.

Who's the federal defence minister?

Who's the minister of health?

And who's responsible for international development and La Francophonie?

If you only got one of the above – congratulations! You are like most Canadians. (If you got two or three, well, you are a subscriber to The Globe and Mail's politics newsletter, so you probably know more than the average person.)

A new Angus Reid Institute poll suggests the Liberal cabinet is mostly unknown to Canadians, with only about a dozen being recognizable to more than half of respondents. Finance Minister Bill Morneau is the most well-known of the bunch; three-quarters say they are aware of him, though most of those say they have a negative impression of the job he's doing. (That result lines up with a separate poll Nanos Research had conducted for The Globe earlier this month.)

For the record, 71 per cent of Angus Reid Institute respondents knew that Harjit Sajjan is the defence minister, about half say they knew Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor and a third said they were familiar with Marie-Claude Bibeau, minister of internal development and La Francophonie.

This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Chris Hannay in Ottawa and James Keller in Vancouver. If you're reading this on the web or someone forwarded this email newsletter to you, you can sign up for Politics Briefing and all Globe newsletters here. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.

NEW - We've launched a new Top Business: Evening Edition newsletter providing a summary of the biggest business headlines of the day. Sign up for it and more than a dozen other Globe newsletters here.

TODAY'S HEADLINES

The Liberal government is set to announce its national housing strategy on Wednesday, which will address affordable housing. In advance of that, a child poverty group is urging the Liberals to do more to help the 1.2 million Canadian children living in low-income households.

The Senate has commissioned the Mint to strike 1,500 bronze medals that will be handed out to senators and Canadians who have "worked hard" in their communities.

A group of 18 families are seeking legal standing at the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The Trump administration has ended a temporary residency program that has allowed 60,000 Haitians to stay in the United States, and the Canadian government is worried that there could be another surge of refugees illegally crossing the border to seek asylum in Canada.

Calgary plans to spend another $2-million studying a potential Winter Olympic bid – but the city is giving the federal and provincial governments until the end of the year to decide whether they're in or out. If the two higher levels haven't committed by then, city councillors say they'll pull the plug on a possible bid for the 2026 Winter Games.

B.C.'s NDP government says a referendum planned for next year on electoral reform will be the final word on the issue. The province has already held two referendums on switching to proportional representation – in 2005 and 2009 – and both failed. A third vote was a key requirement in a power-sharing deal between the governing New Democrats and third-place Greens. Attorney General David Eby says next year's vote, regardless of the outcome, will settle the matter.

A Montreal wax museum will unveil today a sculpture of Justin Trudeau.

And as high salt intake affects the health of Canadians, the processed food industry continues to miss targets set by the government to reduce the amount of sodium in their products.

André Picard (The Globe and Mail) on legalizing marijuana: "The socialist NDP is embracing the free market, while the free-market Liberals seem to prefer the old-style state monopoly. That is just one of the quirky realities as the provinces and territories slowly and unsurely unveil their strategies for the commercialization of legal marijuana."

Innocent Madawo (The Globe and Mail) on Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe: "The end game is what promises intrigue. If Parliament succeeds in impeaching Mr. Mugabe, the Constitution states that the first vice-president takes over. That would have been Mr. Mnangagwa, who was fired by Mr. Mugabe. So, second vice-president Phelekezela Mphoko would have to take over, but his whereabouts are unknown. He is one of the G40 ministers who are presumed to be either in military detention or in exile."

Margaret Wente (The Globe and Mail) on free speech at universities: "If you want to understand the intellectual corruption that is eating away at our universities, listen to an audio recording made by a graduate student named Lindsay Shepherd. She is a 22-year-old teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Every senior administrator and every governor at every campus in the country should listen to it and ask themselves how far the rot has spread."

Jen Gerson (National Post) on free speech at universities: "Transphobia is a real issue; it's important that trans people have the ability to live lives as free of discrimination as possible. But if listening to a well-moderated TVO debate is beyond the ken of a university student, God help them the day they are exposed to Twitter."

Shree Paradkar (Toronto Star) on free speech at universities: "I'm not sure a topic that revolves around the identity of a marginalized group is the best choice to debate aspects of grammar. Gender-neutral pronouns are no more about just grammar than Donald Trump's tweets are about senility. They represent a larger issue of rights of people to exist without fear of discrimination, harassment and violence."

Benjamin Y. Fong (The New York Times) on climate change: "The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It's capitalism that is at fault."