Good morning,
Friday’s deadline for a North American free-trade agreement deal came and went without a deal. And now that negotiators have had a Labour Day long weekend to regroup, they are set to get back at it tomorrow. The sticking point appears to still be Chapter 19, a dispute-resolution mechanism that allows countries to challenge each other’s punitive duties. Canadian officials say they are open to weakening the chapter if need be, but the U.S. is, so far, intent on eliminating it entirely. Here’s more on how Chapter 19 works and why Canada thinks it’s important.
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 e-mail newsletter to you, you can sign up for Politics Briefing and all Globe newsletters here. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
TODAY’S HEADLINES
The day the National Gallery’s sale of a Marc Chagall painting become public earlier this year, a federal panel of art experts wrote to the then-heritage minister to express their concerns that the work of art was even allowed to leave Canada’s borders. The work of this panel – the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board – has been under scrutiny this summer after a court ruling that upended how Canada’s cultural property rules worked.
Seventeen per cent of Canadians are open and 70 per cent are closed to the possibility of a new Maxime Bernier-led small-c conservative party, a Nanos Research poll for the Globe suggests.
Thinning out the forests. New building codes. Bans on development. Prescribed burns. The Globe’s Tamsin McMahon looks what governments should do to prevent the destructive wildfire seasons in British Columbia and California. There’s a lot of blame to go around.
The court ruling that has put the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion into doubt dimmed the hopes of many in Alberta, where businesses and workers in the oil patch were pinning their homes on a long-awaited economic recovery on the project. Oil prices have strengthened and corporate earnings and consumer spending had improved, but to many Albertans, those gains now seem fleeting. The House of Commons’ natural resources…
