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
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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
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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.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
