Politics Briefing newsletter: First report comes today for missing and murdered indigenous women inquiry

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Good morning. We start with a report from Gloria Galloway:

The commission looking into the tragedy of Canada's missing and murdered Indigenous women will provide a glimpse today of what it has learned during its first problem-plagued year of operation.

Two commissioners, including Chief Commissioner Marion Buller, will be in Ottawa to present an interim report of their findings. The report will be a compilation and analysis of roughly 100 other such investigations that have been completed previously, and the main message is expected to be a request from commissioners for more time to complete their task.

The commission has been accused of working too slowly and of failing to adequately communicate with families and the public. It has also been hit by a series of resignations among its senior staff.

Tiar Wilson, a commission spokeswoman, said Tuesday she could not comment on personnel matters when asked if Bernée Bolton, the inquiry's third communications director, was still part of the team. Family members have been told that Ms. Bolton is no longer working for the inquiry. And she is not answering her phone or email.

The interim report will contain little, if any, of the testimony that the commission is now receiving from families of those who have died or disappeared because the hearings – with the exception of one session in Whitehorse in May – began too late to be considered in the interim document, which was due Nov. 1.

The report being released this week was in its final draft stages in August.

As it is presented to the federal government, two other commissioners will be in Membertou, N.S., wrapping up a three-day session with family members in that province.  In testimony to date, families have repeatedly described discriminatory treatment by Canadian police who, they say, have paid less attention to the disappearance of their loved ones because they are Indigenous.

Ms. Wilson said there are 905 more people registered across Canada to tell their stories.

This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Chris Hannay in Ottawa, Mayaz Alam in Toronto 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.

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CANADIAN HEADLINES

The wife and son of Sergei Magnitsky – a slain Russian lawyer who exposed corruption in Putin's regime – are in Ottawa today to meet with MPs and thank them for passing a bill targeting Russian human rights abusers. "Sergei isn't the only person in the world who went through injustice, so I am happy for anyone who gets justice. And I think that's really the main point of the law. Not to just honour Sergei, but to help other people now," Nikita Magnitsky told The Globe.

In the first half of 2017, Canada's economy was the strongest among all G7 countries. In the second quarter of the year, GDP grew at an annualized rate of 4.5 per cent. But new figures from Statistics Canada show that the economy came crashing back to reality, and actually contracted by .1 per cent in August.

The Parliamentary Budget Office is predicting a deficit that is nearly $2-billion higher than was forecasted in the federal government's fall economic update last week.

The federal government is planning on matching donations made to charities for Rohingya refugees. Around 600,000 people have fled Myanmar and headed for Bangladesh since August and Canada has pledged more than $25-million in humanitarian funding toward the issue so far this year.

The government, as part of its legalization plan, will fund a major public-awareness campaign on the dangers of young people smoking marijuana.

The Speaker of the Quebec National Assembly is urging police to either charge or release MNA Guy Ouellette, who is suspected of leaking sensitive information.

Foreign buyers are returning to Vancouver's real estate market, with new statistics from the B.C. government – the first batch of data since the summer – showing about 5 per cent of purchases in the region involve foreign buyers. The figures are the highest they've been since the B.C. government imposed a 15 per cent tax on transactions involving foreign buyers in August of last year, though still considerably lower than they were before the tax (in some cities the figure was nearly 20 per cent). The return of foreign activity places new pressure on the New Democrats to reveal their approach to the real estate market, though the finance and housing ministers have suggested that won't happen until the February budget.

B.C.'s premier says a review expected to be released this week into the multibillion-dollar Site C dam in the province's north won't be the final word on the project. The B.C. Utilities Commission plans to release the results of a review, which the NDP ordered shortly after taking power over the summer, on Wednesday. Premier John Horgan says the government still plans additional consultation with Indigenous communities before deciding whether to kill the project or press ahead.

The former leader of Alberta's Wildrose Party, Brian Jean, won't be taking an active role in the new United Conservative Party. Mr. Jean ran for the leadership of the UCP, but lost to Jason Kenney.  Mr. Jean says he plans to focus on his constituency, and he's not sure if he'll run in the 2019 provincial election.

And Alberta's legislature has voted to keep daylight savings time, rejecting a proposal from an NDP backbencher to kill it.

Thomas Juneau (The Globe and Mail) on Canada's mission to Iraq: "While recognizing its limited influence, Canada could, alongside its allies, make its assistance conditional on progress on human rights and democratic norms. In doing so, Canada could steer its assistance towards greater support for institutional capacity-building (including of security forces), reconstruction and economic development, the fostering of pluralism, and political reconciliation – which, importantly, is the only path to ultimately defeating the Islamic State."

Martha Hall Findlay (The Globe and Mail) on banning oil tankers on B.C.'s north coast: "We must not pick and choose where and when we exercise our environmental conscience – particularly when doing so favours jobs in some parts of the country but kills others. Notwithstanding incredible developments in energy technology and renewables, the world will continue to need oil for at least several decades to come. Why prevent Canada from selling what we have to the world – a concept that built this country with every other resource we are blessed with?"

Illan Kramer (The Globe and Mail) on retaining tech talent: "To keep the massive pool of talent we already attract here, we need to continue to foster a robust ecosystem with both major multinationals and burgeoning startups. Getting this right is not a question of what kinds of companies we want to create or attract – we just need more companies offering more high-value jobs located here, period."

David Butt (The Globe and Mail) on Chief Justice McLachlin's comments on sexual assault: "She is a fantastically accomplished judge, but as a reformer, she has much to learn. What should she have done? Chief Justice McLachlin should have started with the obvious: the justice system can and should do far, far better than it is doing now for sexual assault survivors. That recognition would have brought on board the key survivor constituency in this debate. Then she could have laid the groundwork for productive discourse by alluding to the universally shared values of presuming innocence and proving guilt only through credible evidence, and ended by inviting everyone to pursue improvement in service delivery by re-examining everything short of those basic principles."

Linda Nazareth (The Globe and Mail) on interest rates and youth unemployment: "If young workers are underemployed or are involuntary gig workers, it is not really because businesses find that interest rates are too high (which they are really not, by any kind of historical standard). Instead, global competition and the aftermath of recession is keeping business focused on the bottom line, and technology is offering alternative ways to get things done as well. Those are certainly issues for young workers, but they are not ones that can be fixed by moving interest rates up or down by a quarter point."

INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES

Special counsel Robert Mueller is just getting started. His goal in the ongoing investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election is to see whether any more crimes were committed that can be prosecuted. Although collusion is the buzziest word in political circles, you won't hear it as a charge because collusion "has no legal meaning whatsoever," according to one former federal prosecutor. Things you might hear: breaking election laws, obstruction of justice, lying to federal agents (what George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to).

A new and shadowy figure has emerged as a key figure in the Trump-Russia probe:  Professor Joseph Mifsud, the man that Mr. Papadopoulos was in contact with to get through to the Kremlin. Prof. Mifsud, a Malta native, was director of the London Academy of Diplomacy. Since the news broke, he's gone dark, apparently turning off his cellphone and deleting his Facebook account. One lecturer on international cultural diplomacy says that in her field  "the London Academy of Diplomacy is not known at all."

And he's not the only person with ties to the U.K. who is in the news for the probe. The Guardian is reporting that former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is a 'person of interest' in the FBI's investigation because of his ties to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. WikiLeaks, of course, published the hacked e-mails last year from the Clinton campaign.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was at The Globe's editorial board earlier this week and said his country must reimagine the war on drugs and take a health-based approach to address the problem. He told The Globe's Stephanie Nolen that the U.S. endorses the shift in strategy, amid growing cocaine use in America.

A senior official within the Chinese government's propaganda arm is defending the imprisonment of a Chinese-Canadian man. Huseyin Celil, who is from the Uyghur minority group, was a political refugee to Canada and was jailed in China in 2007. The Chinese government labels him a separatist. The senior official, Zuo Feng, criticized Canadian media for their negative coverage of China when it comes to the forced re-education of the Uyghur people.

Weeks after forming a new government, New Zealand is disallowing foreign investors from buying homes.Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's decision fulfills a key campaign promise. Similar to Canada, the country has seen home prices skyrocket recently.

Former Catalonian leader Carles Puigdemont agreed to a new election after Spain's central government took control of the area to stop the region from seceding. He and 13 members of his now-fired administration have been called to testify in response to charges of rebellion, sedition and breach of trust.

Ezra Klein (Vox) on Congressional Republicans: "[House Speaker Paul] Ryan and [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell would have you believe they are mounting a courageous defense of Congress's priorities in the face of Trump and the media's distractions — indeed, Ryan framed his comments around precisely that excuse, promising that nothing would 'derail what we're doing in Congress.' But these near-daily acts of cowardice and silence are an abdication of Congress's role, not an affirmation of it. The Founding Fathers carried a mistrust of the popular will; they understood full well that the American people might, at some point, elect a demagogue or a knave to the White House, and so they built countervailing institutions capable of binding an errant executive. Congress wasn't meant to ignore a rogue, lawless, or indisciplined White House — it was meant to overwhelm it, to contain it."

Dana Milbank (Washington Post) on the Democrats: "It would seem that the midterm election is the Democrats' to lose. And you can be sure they will try their best to do exactly that. Democrats seldom miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Several recent incidents of self-sabotage have already proven the great Will Rogers adage: 'I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.'"