The main party leaders appeared on stage for the first time Thursday in a French-language debate that was at times raucous as the four men fiercely competed for votes in a province that could very well decide who is Canada’s next prime minister.
The two-hour debate, hosted by TVA, a major broadcaster in Quebec, was a chance for Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau to regain some of the momentum he had earlier this summer when polls showed he had a massive lead in the country’s second largest province.
CBC’s Poll Tracker still has Trudeau and the Liberals ahead of others in Quebec but the margin has narrowed.
The first half of the debate was dominated by talk of the COVID-19 pandemic as Trudeau asked voters to return his party to government after its stewardship of the country during this 19-month long health crisis.
Trudeau presented himself as a vaccine champion, the man who secured enough doses to get everyone eligible for a shot fully vaccinated by July, and the leader who will keep people safe in the fourth wave of this pandemic by pushing mandatory vaccines for federal public servants and the travelling public.
Trudeau said O’Toole can’t be trusted “because he won’t even force his candidates” to get a shot while out on the campaign trail.
O’Toole, who is opposed to vaccine mandates, said Trudeau was intent on dividing the country during a health crisis. O’Toole said he’s not against vaccines — O’Toole and his wife had their shots and filmed the process to encourage supporters to get theirs — but he said, “We shouldn’t force Canadians. It’s a decision for individual Canadians on a health matter.”
O’Toole has proposed deploying rapid tests instead of demanding shots for everyone who takes a train or plane. “We must find reasonable accommodations for people. We have to work together without a lot of division,” O’Toole said.
Trudeau grilled on election call
Trudeau’s three opponents piled on Trudeau for calling the election with COVID-19 cases on the rise. Trudeau’s main challenger in Quebec, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, said it was irresponsible to plunge the country into a campaign when “Parliament was working well” to pass COVID-19 aid and other bills.
Trudeau hit back saying it was hypocritical for Blanchet to criticize an election call when he and Bloc MPs voted four times against key government bills that, if they had been defeated in the Commons, would have prompted an election earlier this year when COVID-19 case counts were worse.
Blanchet scolded Trudeau for flouting public health guidelines on the campaign trail by posing for selfies and hugging some supporters. Trudeau said it must be “frustrating” for Blanchet to see Canadians “show affection for another leader.”
He’s going to take us back to the Harper targets. Quebecers want leadership on climate and you’re proposing to take us back and that’s completely unacceptable.– Trudeau
O’Toole said Canadians shouldn’t be heading to the polls with the country still in the throes of a health crisis, with B.C. beset by wildfires and Afghanistan grappling with a Taliban takeover.
He said Canadians deserve a change at the top, calling Trudeau an ethics-challenged leader who must be replaced as the country enters the next phase of this health crisis.
Trudeau said now is the right time to have Canadians “weigh in on how we’ll end this pandemic.”
WATCH | Trudeau pressed on why he called election during pandemic:
Trudeau pressed on why he called election during pandemic
3 hours ago
When asked what pandemic measures the minority Parliament he asked the Governor General to dissolve wouldn’t support, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau instead attacked the Conservatives’ vaccination policies. 1:30
“We must give Canadians the choice and Canadians deserve a working Parliament. Canadians must choose how we finish this. They must choose,” he said, saying a vote for the Conservatives would be a vote against vaccine mandates and a national child care system. “There’s a clear choice.”
Trudeau spent most of the night on the attack against O’Toole, his main opponent in the national race, who has swung from also-ran to front-runner status in the first three weeks of the federal election campaign.
O’Toole hit over two-tier healthcare
Trudeau and O’Toole sparred over health care funding with the Liberal leader raising O’Toole’s past support for more for-profit health care in Canada to help address some of the current system’s failings, claiming the Conservative leader would bring about “two-tier” health care, which, Trudeau said, would only benefit the rich.
Trudeau repeatedly pressed O’Toole to say if he’d allow private interests to take over more parts of the system, but the Conservative leader dodged giving a direct answer.
WATCH | O’Toole says he won’t dictate to provinces how to improve health systems:
O’Toole says he won’t dictate to provinces how to improve health systems
3 hours ago
When asked about health care, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole says he would leave it up to provinces to decide how to improve their health systems and reduce wait times. 1:02
“Two-tier — that’s not what Quebecers or Canadians want,” Trudeau said.
O’Toole said he unequivocally supports a public and universal system and, rather than end the current system, he’ll pump “an historic amount without conditions” into provincial coffers to help them make improvements. O’Toole said the Liberals have been twisting his words — Twitter branded a video recently posted by Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland “manipulated media — and “Canadians deserve better than that.”
Throughout the debate, Blanchet stuck to the usual separatist script — blasting the federalist parties for ignoring the unique needs of Quebec as he tried to woo voters and add to the 32 seats he won in the last election.
He said the Liberal plan to send more money to the provinces for health care and long-term care homes with some strings attached infringes on Quebec’s jurisdiction — the Liberals want national standards for these seniors residences after they were hard hit by COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic.
“We need nurses, not bureaucrats,” Blanchet said. “Just give the money to provinces so they can get the job done.”
The debate was a test for the two non-native French speakers: O’Toole and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. O’Toole’s spoken French has improved since he contested the Conservative leadership race last year and Singh is more fluent than he was in the 2019 campaign. But at times, both struggled to fully understand what the TVA moderator, Pierre Bruneau, was asking.
O’Toole spent all of Thursday in debate prep with his French-speaking staff, eschewing all campaign events in advance of the debate. Singh rented a food truck and handed poutine out to voters in Montreal while Trudeau ordered smoked meat sandwiches on Montreal’s St-Laurent Boulevard.
WATCH | Blanchet challenges O’Toole to repeat statements in English:
Blanchet challenges O’Toole to repeat things in English following French debate
3 hours ago
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet says he wants to hear Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole repeat things he said during the French-language TVA debate in English. 0:48
Singh, who, as leader in the 2019 election, saw his party’s once sizeable Quebec contingent reduced to just one seat, made a direct appeal to the province’s progressive voters. While the NDP’s policy book mirrors some of what the Liberals have also pitched, Singh said he’d actually implement the policies he is promising, while Trudeau has long promised but failed to deliver.
Medical assistance in dying
Another contentious health issue — medical assistance in dying — was another of the TVA-picked topics up for debate.
In response to a 2019 Quebec court ruling, the Liberal government passed legislation this year to extend eligibility to people whose natural deaths are not reasonably foreseeable. The Conservative platform calls for a rethink of the MAID regime, calling the current law “vague” and says that it “devalues human life” because there are no “safeguards.”
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau during the Face-à-Face TVA French language debate Thursday told viewers that O’Toole was “saying one thing to Quebecers and something else to other Canadians” on the issue of gun control. (Martin Chevalier/Agence QMI)
O’Toole said Trudeau pushed through this legislation using parliamentary tools to shut down debate. Many Conservative MPs and senators fiercely opposed amendments that would have allowed the mentally ill to use MAID to end their lives.
“They used closure on this important issue — we have to listen to the most vulnerable, the disabled and their parents. We must work with doctors to find a balance,” O’Toole said. “It’s a right, I support that, but we must have a sensible approach especially when it comes to mental health.”
Firearm legislation
Trudeau tried to brand O’Toole as a man out of step with Quebec values on guns.
Firearms have been a contentious issue in Quebec since the the Polytechnique massacre of 1989 — a non-restricted Ruger Mini-14 was used to murder 14 women at this engineering school in Montreal — and O’Toole’s opponents pounced on his platform promise to reverse the Liberal government’s cabinet order banning “assault-style” firearms, a 2020 regulatory decision that rendered more than 100,000 firearms “prohibited” overnight.
The other three leaders, who all support some form of gun control, tried to paint O’Toole as a leader beholden to the gun lobby.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh at the Face-à-Face French language TVA debate in Montreal Thursday night said that Trudeau talks big on climate change policies but does not deliver. (Martin Chevalier/Agence QMI)
In the face of Trudeau’s attacks, O’Toole said: “We will maintain a ban on assault weapons.”
However, the Conservative platform is clear that a government led by O’Toole would “start by repealing C-71 and the May 2020 order in council and conducting a review of the Firearms Act.” The May 2020 order is the “assault-style” firearms ban that outlawed some 1,500 makes and models of military-grade weapons in Canada.
That prompted Trudeau to say O’Toole was “saying one thing to Quebecers and something else to other Canadians.”
Another topic of debate Thursday was climate change. In the last election, the Conservative’s lacklustre climate plan turned off some moderate voters who wanted to see Canada take aggressive action to address environmental concerns at a time when UN scientists are warning that urgent action is needed now.
Climate change
Quebecers are among the Canadians most likely to tell pollsters that climate change is the issue they care most about. To gain vote share with Quebecers and other climate-minded voters, O’Toole has beefed up the party’s green platform. The party’s playbook calls for carbon pricing to encourage Canadians to use cleaner energy sources — but he took heat from Trudeau for his plan to rollback the country’s climate reduction targets.
If elected, O’Toole has said he will push the reset button on Canada’s climate change plan, returning to the previous national target of reducing emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Earlier this year, the Liberal government dumped that goal and committed to deeper cuts, promising to bring emissions down by 40 to 45 per cent by the end of the decade.
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet at the Face-à-Face TVA French language debate Thursday night told supporters that Trudeau’s plan to introduce legislation establishing national standards for long-term care homes was interfering in Quebec’s jurisdiction. (Martin Chevalier/Agence QMI)
“He’s going to take us back to the Harper targets. Quebecers want leadership on climate and you’re proposing to take us back and that’s completely unacceptable,” Trudeau said.
But Trudeau faced criticism for his own actions on climate. Singh said Trudeau “says the right things, he has nice words” but emissions have only gone up over the last six years of Liberal government.
The NDP leader added that Canada has the worst results on emissions of all the G7 countries, and accused Trudeau of not delivering on his environmental promises.
According to the latest report from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the country’s emissions have ticked up on Trudeau’s watch.
Watch: Highlights from the TVA French debate:
Highlights from the TVA French debate (FRENCH ONLY)
2 hours ago
Here are some of the highlights from the TVA French language debate. 2:51
In 2019, the first year of the federal carbon pricing regimen, commonly called the “carbon tax,” Canada produced 730 megatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, an increase of one megatonne — or 0.2 per cent — over 2018.
The 730 megatonnes of emissions recorded in 2019 is slightly higher than the 723 megatonnes Canada churned out in 2015, the year Trudeau first took office.
Blanchet said Trudeau can’t claim to be a climate champion when he bought a major crude oil pipeline like Trans Mountain, the now government-owned line that carries oil from Alberta to B.C. for export. The Crown corporation that owns the line is in the process of building a large expansion to nearly triple its capacity.
Trudeau said “we still need oil in Quebec and across the country” and “we’ll certainly invest all the profits in the green transition. The pipeline will help us get a better price for our oil – and that will help us with the transition,” he said.
“You can’t tell someone I’m going to mend your broken leg by breaking the other one,” Blanchet said in response.
Vancouver Canucks winger Dakota Joshua has announced he’ll miss the start of training camp following surgery for testicular cancer.
Joshua said in a statement posted to social media by the team Tuesday that he felt a lump on one of his testicles this summer and later had surgery to successfully remove the tumour.
The 28-year-old from Dearborn, Mich., said he plans on returning to play “as soon as possible” and is “working hard every day” to rejoin his teammates.
Joshua said the last several weeks have been “extremely challenging” and encouraged men to get checked regularly for testicular cancer.
The six-foot-three, 206-pound forward had a career-high 18 goals and 14 assists in 63 games for the Canucks last season and signed a new four-year, US$13-million deal with Vancouver at the end of June.
The Canucks are set to open their training camp in Penticton, B.C., on Thursday.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.
TORONTO – Coach John Herdman isn’t putting too much stock in the fact that Toronto FC, since losing 4-0 in Columbus on July 6, has posted a better league record than the defending MLS champion.
Toronto, which beat visiting Austin 2-1 on Saturday, has won four of six league outings (4-2-0) since that setback at Lower.com Field while the Crew are 3-2-2.
“I don’t put any credence (in that),” said Herdman. “I just look at their squad and I salivate.”
Its easy to see why.
Columbus provided a league-high five players to the MLS all-star game on its home field in July in defenders Rudy Camacho and Steven Moreira, midfielder/captain Darlington Nagbe and forwards Cucho Hernandez and Diego Rossi.
Herdman sees layers of talent behind those all-stars.
“You see the way that they’re able to almost carbon-copy players. One comes in, another goes out … and they feel like they have a very similar profile. So to be able to take (Christian) Ramirez out and then bring (Canadian forward Jacen) Russell-Rowe in as a power forward, you look and go ‘Whoa, that’s good to have.'”
Federico Bernardeschi was Toronto’s lone all-star.
Columbus (14-5-8) comes to BMO Field on Wednesday in third place in the Eastern Conference, five places and 14 points ahead of Toronto (11-15-3). A playoff position already clinched, the Crew are hoping to leapfrog Cincinnati into second spot.
Coach Wilfried Nancy is looking forward to matching wits against Herdman.
“John is going to cook (up) something,” the Frenchman said with a belly laugh. “I know John. When we played a game in (the) pre-season, it wasn’t a pre-season game. It was a real game. But this is John. That’s why I like him, because he’s intense all the time.”
“They’re going to try to go all-in. They’re going to try to press us, they’re going to try to match us,” he added. “They know exactly the way we want to play so we’ll have to be clever and creative also.”
Herdman, meanwhile, says TFC will have to play error-free football.
While the Crew have failed to score in their last two outings (a 4-0 loss to visiting Seattle and 0-0 draw at rival FC Cincinnati), Toronto is hurting in its backline.
Nicksoen Gomis and Henry Wingo both left the Austin game early with hamstring injuries with Herdman estimating that Gomis will be out three to four weeks and Wingo 10-12 days. Veteran Kevin Long missed the Austin game after tweaking his hamstring in training and will undergo a fitness test ahead of the game.
Shane O’Neill, meanwhile, is suspended for yellow-card accumulation.
“A tricky situation,” said Herdman.
The Crew are a formidable opponent.
Columbus is tied with Real Salt Lake for fifth in the league in averaging 1.93 goals a game. Only Inter Miami (2.32), Portland Timbers (2.00), Los Angeles Galaxy (1.97) and Colorado Rapids (1.96) score more.
And Columbus boasts the league’s stingiest defence, conceding 1.04 goals a game. In contrast, the Toronto defence is tied for 22nd at 1.76 goals a game.
Toronto has conceded 51 goals, 23 more than Columbus, which has collected more points (7-3-4, 25 points) on the road in league play this season than Toronto has at home (7-7-0, 21 points).
Columbus’ roster also includes Canadian wingback Mo Farsi, who scored in the July win over Toronto.
The Columbus game is the first of four in an 11-day stretch that will see TFC club visit Colorado on Saturday, Vancouver on Sept. 25 in the Canadian Championship final and Chicago on Sept. 28. Toronto will then close out the regular season at home to the New York Red Bulls on Oct. 2 and Inter Miami on Oct. 5.
If the playoffs were to start tomorrow, Toronto would face ninth-place D.C. United in a wild-card matchup with the winner advancing to take on the East’s top seed — currently Miami — in the best-of-three first round.
Herdman would like a different scenario, with his eyes set on overtaking seventh-place Charlotte, which has two points and a game in hand over Toronto. The seventh-place side takes on No. 2 — currently Cincinnati — in the first round.
“We’re looking up, not down at the moment,” said Herdman. “It’s a good motivation for the lads to see that next level on the table. And it has been raised. If we’re able to get to that point, it means you’re not headed down to Miami in the heat, which is a tough place to go.”
“We’ll take whatever comes,” he added. “But the critical part is to get into these playoffs. That’s the key mission at the moment.”
Toronto has not made the post-season since 2020 when, after finishing second overall in the Supporters’ Shield standings, it was upset by Nashville after extra time at the first hurdle.
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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — The Miami Dolphins placed Tua Tagovailoa on injured reserve Tuesday after the quarterback was diagnosed with his third concussion in two years.
Tagovailoa will be sidelined for at least four games. He will be eligible to return in Week 8 when the Dolphins host Arizona, but has to complete a series of tests and assessments required by the NFL’s concussion protocol before he can return to the field.
Tagovailoa was hurt last Thursday night when he collided with Buffalo defensive back Damar Hamlin. He ran for a first down and then initiated the contact by lowering his shoulder into Hamlin instead of sliding.
Players from both teams immediately motioned that Tagovailoa was hurt, and as he lay on the turf the quarterback exhibited some signs typically associated with a traumatic brain injury. He remained down on the field for a couple of minutes, got to his feet and walked to the sideline. The Dolphins diagnosed him with a concussion a few minutes later.
Coach Mike McDaniel has since cautioned against speculation on the quarterback’s future, stressing that he’s more focused on Tagovailoa getting healthy than what this latest concussion means for the team or for his career. Tagovailoa this week began the process of consulting neurologists about his health amid reports that he has no plans to retire.
Others around the NFL have offered their opinions on Tagovailoa’s future, including Raiders coach Antonio Pierce, who suggested he should retire.
“As far as Tua’s career is concerned, I think it’s an utmost priority of mine for Tua to speak on Tua’s career,” McDaniel said Monday. “Reports are reports. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just worried about the human being and where that’s at day to day. I’ll let Tua be the champion of his own career.”
McDaniel said Tagovailoa was at the team’s practice facility on Monday, greeting teammates and working with trainers.
“He’s doing good, man. Talked to him, he’s in good spirits,” receiver Jaylen Waddle said Monday. “(He’s) got the team in good spirits and everybody praying for him and hoping (for his) health.”
Head injuries have become a familiar, scary occurrence throughout Tagovailoa’s career.
In a September 2022 game against the Bills, he took a hit from linebacker Matt Milano, which caused him to slam to the ground. He appeared disoriented afterward and stumbled as he tried to get to his feet. He was cleared to return to that game and later said it was a back injury that caused the stumble. He was not diagnosed with a concussion.
Four days later, he got hit again during a Thursday night game at Cincinnati in which he was briefly knocked unconscious and was taken off the field on a stretcher. As he lay on the turf, his fingers appeared to display the “fencing response,” an involuntary motion typically associated with a brain injury. That time, he was placed in the concussion protocol.
The NFL and the players’ union made changes to the concussion protocol after those two incidents with Tagovailoa. Players who have problems with balance or stability are now prohibited from returning to a game.
Tagovailoa briefly considered retirement, but instead returned and studied ways to better protect himself on the field, including taking jiu-jitsu classes ahead of the 2023 season.
Tagovailoa has said he spoke to numerous neurologists who told him they did not believe he would be more susceptible to head injuries than any other player moving forward, nor would he be at a higher risk for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head. He was also diagnosed with a concussion while in college at Alabama.
With Tagovailoa sidelined, the Dolphins will go with backup Skylar Thompson when play at Seattle on Sunday. Miami also signed Tyler Huntley off the Ravens’ practice squad.
