That’s what I tell Calgary Nose Hill Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner as we end our chat on what it’s like to be a female politician in the face of an increasingly toxic political atmosphere in Canada. The 43-year-old has been a federal politician since 2011. My interview with her about experiencing online threats, hate and abuse is certainly not her first, and she is determined not to be framed as a victim.
“I have had this interview probably 150 times in 12 years. Why aren’t we evaluating solutions after all of that time?” Rempel Garner asks. “It’s not like people haven’t raised them…It’s just that shit doesn’t change.”
She’s right: If anything, the online abuse—from threats of violence to denigrating, sexualized comments—has gotten worse for female politicians over the last few years. While there isn’t a bevy of quantitative data formally tracking the phenomenon in a Canadian context, I spoke to half a dozen current and former female politicians on the record, read through countless accounts of what online abuse looks like and looked through qualitative research on the perceptions of online abuse. The consensus: online spaces are becoming increasingly toxic for female politicians.
Though she’s cut from a very different political cloth than Rempel Garner, Winnipeg Centre NDP MP Leah Gazan similarly implores me to not have this story read like a doom-and-gloom piece. “I just don’t want this article, or these discussions to discourage people from fighting for a better world and joining in,” she says.
I’m cognizant of the conundrum of wanting to be simultaneously honest about what women in the public eye must put up with while also ensuring I’m not actively dissuading other women from pursuing public-facing roles. In late 2020, I resigned as the host of a Toronto talk radio morning show in the face of online hate and threats. As a racialized woman broadcasting her opinions, I had relegated myself to the reality that I would be met with threats and hate. But when I received an email from a listener that threatened my then one-year-old daughter with rape, I made the decision to resign from a job that I loved.
It’s not that online abuse is uniquely reserved for women in the public light—men receive threats and hate, too. But the abuse levelled at women is qualitatively different, often targeting who they are as a person and not just the work they do. Just compare the online toxicity hurled at former minister of the environment and climate change Catherine McKenna to that of her male successors in the role. From calling her climate Barbie to vandalizing her campaign office with the word c**t, the abuse and threats directed at McKenna was almost always gendered; the same cannot be said for her male successors.
“While it’s true that any woman in the spotlight is a mark for online hate, nobody is more public than politicians.”
For Black, Indigenous and other racialized women, that abuse will often hone in on race in addition to their gender. “If you’re a woman…experiencing negativity on social media, that negativity by far and away targets your social identity, in a way that’s not the case for white men,” says Erin Tolley, Canada Research Chair in Gender, Race, and Inclusive Politics and Associate Professor at Carleton University. “It’s not just general negativity about not liking their political position, it’s not liking them because they are women or because they are racialized women.”
Heidi Tworek, director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia and a member of the federal government’s expert advisory group on online harms, echoes this sentiment. During the 2019 federal election, Tworek and her colleagues looked at online incivility directed at political candidates on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. She says the difference with the abuse targeting women is that “often the abuse will be directed at them as individuals.” And that misogynistic abuse is often compounded by threats targeting race, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity.
While it’s true that any woman in the spotlight is a mark for online hate, nobody is more public than politicians. They can’t opt out of having a public profile. Being accountable and available to the public is an integral part of the gig. Politicians can certainly scale back their social media presence or walk away entirely from certain social media platforms—as Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo recently did with X, calling it a “gigantic global sewer”—but that doesn’t get to the root of the issue, providing a band-aid solution at best.
When former prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation, one of her predecessors, Helen Clark, was among the first to note that the level of toxicity Ardern faced on social media was unprecedented. “The pressures on prime ministers are always great,” she said, “but in this era of social media, clickbait and 24/7 media cycles, Jacinda has faced a level of hatred and vitriol which in my experience is unprecedented in our country.”
With Canada sliding from 56th in the world for gender parity in politics in 2021 to, most recently, 61st, there’s a worry that the increasing online incivility directed at women will only make that ranking worse—especially given the current climate in Ottawa.
In November, former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer posted a picture of two female senators in the style of an old-timey wanted poster. With the senators’ work emails and office phone numbers listed, he encouraged his followers to contact the senators to ask them why they shut down debate on a bill that would see further carbon tax exemptions for farmers. What happened next was entirely predictable: Both senators were inundated with a barrage of calls, emails and social media posts on X, with one of the senators needing to leave her home after a man threatened to come to her house.
***
DESPITE CROSS-PARTY consensus that online abuse is unacceptable, there hasn’t been much progress on the issue in Canada. Political parties and other democratic institutions have at best stood somewhat idly by as the abuse of female politicians—particularly those with intersecting marginalized identities—has gotten perceptibly worse. While the House of Commons passed a formal Code of Conduct on issues of non-criminal sexual harassment of MPs in 2015, there is no official policy that deals with the harassment of MPs online.
Nobody is more acutely aware of the many institutional failures on this front than the former Liberal MP for Whitby, Ont., and author of Can You Hear Me Now?Celina Caesar-Chavannes. For much of her four years in office, Caesar-Chavannes was on the receiving end of a torrent of anti-Black racism and misogyny as the sole Black female MP at the time.
“So 2016 was my year of being tokenized, 2017 was my year of being excluded purposefully, and 2018 was the year that was the most violent. You know, I thought I was going to die in March of 2018. I think it’s the closest I have ever come to actually wanting to kill myself,” she tells me between tears. That month, Caesar-Chavannes told former Conservative MP and current leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier to “check his privilege” after he made a critical comment about a government anti-racism initiative. She was then subjected to a deluge of racist and misogynistic online hate—much of it made worse by how our overwhelmingly white legacy political media covered her for speaking out against anti-Black racism.
“The hate these politicians received was always exacerbated whenever the women garnered more public attention for speaking out on an issue.”
That abuse only persisted through the remainder of her time in office as an Liberal MP. “Instead of waiting for the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd in 2020 to jump on the race bandwagon,…[the Liberals could have taken] what was happening to me [in 2018] seriously enough to have a conversation about race, to have a conversation about how Black women are treated in parliament,” she says.
As a former journalist and talk show host with a national profile, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth Marci Ien tells me the online anti-Black abuse she received as a journalist concerned her family. But she says it prepared her for the kind of hate that would be thrown her way as a politician. “My family was very worried and I thought this was preparation,” she says. “I thought, ‘Listen, what else can they throw at me? I’ve gone through the gamut here.’”
Gazan, Ien and Mississauga Erin Mills MP Iqra Khalid also say their own online experiences were shaped by the intersection of racism and misogyny, as the hate and abuse they received tended to factor in both. And much like Caesar-Chavannes, the hate they received was always exacerbated whenever the women garnered more public attention for speaking out on an issue.
***
MUCH OF OUR increasingly toxic political atmosphere can be chalked up to our online ecosystem. As former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt put it, “I think the exact same amount of people are annoyed at politicians as there always were, the difference is they no longer sit at their coffee shop and bitch about us. They now have the ability to confront us through social media.” Raitt adds that online platforms often incentivize people to be toxic toward politicians: “YouTube and TikTok and [Instagram] Reels…they actually encourage this kind of behaviour to get clicks.”
She’s right: The way that social media platforms are fundamentally designed has often led to divisive and potentially harmful content being disseminated at a much higher rate than other types of content. Facebook’s own internal reporting, for example, uncovered that its engagement-based recommendation algorithm effectively prioritizes divisive content. A 2019 investigation by the New York Times also found “YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.” And research conducted by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate found that TikTok’s algorithm was promoting self-harm and eating disorder content to children.
We also can’t ignore the role disinformation and conspiracy theories play in the dissemination of online threats and hate. When the disinformation or conspiracy theory in question is targeting groups that are already subject to hate, it ends up compounding the hate received. That’s why it’s imperative to stop talking about disinformation and online hate as two separate siloes, Tworek says. “It’s important for us to remember that they’re intertwined because so often we talk about them as if they’re different phenomena,” she says, “but in fact that’s really not how the dynamic works, and that’s especially true for women of colour.”
In 2017, Iqra Khalid learned an abrupt lesson in how disinformation interacts with online hate when she introduced a non-binding motion to condemn Islamophobia and religious discrimination, known as M-103. The motion called on the government to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination via three main objectives: collecting data on hate crimes for further study, condemning Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination, and having the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage study the issue of eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination.
“I’m one of the very few people in our country who is a younger woman of colour and in a position of power, so I felt like I couldn’t complain,” MP Iqra Khalid says.
Motions are not bills, and as such, they do not have any binding effect. Once debated, a motion does not force Parliament to any specific policy or action. Despite this, the motion became the subject of much heated public debate. That debate came to a head on January 29, 2017, when a man hopped up on disinformation and the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, shot up a mosque in Quebec City, killing six men while they prayed. Khalid tabled M-103 a year before the mosque shooting, but the motion was only debated on the floor of the House of Commons in the aftermath of the shooting. That debate also coincided with the Conservative Party’s leadership race, prompting many candidates to choose political expediency over principles.
“I would see… other parliamentarians who know for a fact the difference between a motion and a bill who were actively spreading disinformation to raise money for themselves,” Khalid recalls. Correcting the record didn’t help: “As much as I went and tried to explain it, to clarify the facts, the worse the vitriol got.”
Khalid received more than 90,000 hateful emails within the first two months of introducing M-103. She also had police stationed outside of her house after her home address was broadcast on a talk radio show. Later, a member of the Three Percenters—a far-right, anti-government militia group that was recently designated as a terrorist entity in Canada—showed up at her office to intimidate her. In spite of that, Khalid kept her head down and kept working. “I’m one of the very few people in our country who is a younger woman of colour and in a position of power, so I felt like I couldn’t complain,” she says.
More recently, the 2022 Ottawa convoy exemplified how conspiracy theories and disinformation don’t just stay online, and how racialized folks are affected by the far-right activists and hate symbols like swastikas and confederate flags that peppered the protests. As Minister Ien put it to me, “Not everybody understood that it was scarier for some of us, more than others.” Khalid and Gazan agreed. “I had to walk through that every day and it felt unsafe,” Gazan says.
Canada has managed to stave off a lot of the more overt vitriol and corresponding political violence we have seen in other jurisdictions. But it’s unclear how much longer we will be able to do so, as polarizing and populist political communication becomes more commonplace and as conspiracy theories and fringe online movements are welcomed into the mainstream.
***
IF WE KNOW online abuse levelled at women is a problem that needs solving, why aren’t we doing anything about it?
Lisa Raitt tells me she believes everyone in Parliament is “seized with the issue.” Both Tolley and Tworek echo that sentiment, noting that the issue of online abuse is a systemic problem and must be tackled accordingly. This means dealing with the way our online ecosystem is currently structured and incentivized.
For far too long, Big Tech lobbyists are proponents of the idea that large online platforms like Facebook, YouTube and X should be free to self-regulate. Thankfully, this is starting to change. The Canadian government has stated it intends to table online harms legislation that will subject online platforms to act with a duty of care toward Canadians. That means Big Tech companies will have to demonstrate that they have considered the risks of their products, and then demonstrate that there have been steps taken by the platforms to mitigate those risks.
As the federal government moves forward with regulating online harms, it should look to peer jurisdictions such as the U.K. and the E.U. Both have developed an approach to online harms that requires much more transparency from Big Tech in terms of how their algorithms work, as well as tackling the underlying incentives that lead to the amplification of harmful content. This includes mandated transparency reports and risk assessments, as well as algorithmic auditing powers by the regulator in both jurisdictions. Any online harms framework should also aim to bring Canada in line with the rest of the G7 and introduce intermediary liability, clarifying when platforms are liable for harms arising from content posted on their platforms by users.
There’s also plenty of work for political parties to do. As Tworek notes, political parties need to offer training and support when it comes to online abuse—and to do it in an equitable way, since some candidates are likely to deal with more online abuse than others. Tolley also points out that political parties could be smoothing the path for more female candidates by directing more party resources to them, so that female candidates have the option to hire security or even more staff to deal with online abuse.
“When you look at those financial returns you can see that when parties have an opportunity to direct party money to candidates, they tend to direct that money to white men,” Tolley says. According to reporting conducted in 2021 by CBC/Radio-Canada, three out of four candidates who ran in seats that were deemed safe for their party were white men, with white male candidates receiving 10 percent more in funding than other candidates.
Parliament can also amend election spending laws so that female politicians don’t have to choose between getting information out to voters or hiring security. Rempel Garner and her team seriously considered hiring security during the last federal election, but was told that the money spent would count toward her election spending cap.
“Parliamentarians need to be better examples of themselves than their constituents,” says Lisa Raitt.
Rempel Garner also says criminal harassment is often a gateway to physical violence, so the way Canada’s criminal harassment laws are currently structured should be getting a second look from Parliament. “For our criminal harassment laws, I think an area of study could be: are they structured enough to prevent things from happening? Or are they usually used after the fact, after something serious has gone wrong?”
And though it seems obvious, politicians need to start behaving better with one another if we’re to have any hope dialling down the temperature on our already-heated political environment. Raitt puts it bluntly: “Parliamentarians need to be better examples of themselves than their constituents.”
***
ADDING WOMEN TO change politics isn’t just some virtue-signalling hashtag. We need our political class to look like the population it serves.
Women comprise more than half of the Canadian population, yet make up just 30 percent of MPs. “For less diverse decision-making bodies, it’s not that they’re just undesirable in some esoteric sense, it’s that they’re also less effective,” Tolley says. “When you have more diversity in an institution, you get more effective public policy making because you’re taking in a range of perspectives and therefore going to be more responsive to the people that you’re serving.”
Unsurprisingly, having more women around the decision making table can have profound policy outcomes. A literature review conducted in 2020 found that, “in general, data links an increase in female representation with a higher propensity for women legislators to introduce and pass priority bills dealing with women’s issues,”wherein women’s issues are defined as issues that “directly and disproportionately affect women.” Traditionally, this has meant issues such as abortion and childcare, but this could also be reasonably extended to the issue of online harassment.
When Prime Minister Trudeau quipped “because it’s 2015” in response to a question about why he felt the need to put forward a gender-balanced cabinet, it became an instant viral moment. But eight years later, the environment for female politicians in Canada hasn’t gotten better—by some metrics, such as dealing with threats of violence, it has actively gotten worse.
That doesn’t deter Ien, Khalid, Gazan or Rempel Garner. All of them refuse to buckle in the face of online abuse hurled their way and speak of what an honour and a privilege it is to serve their communities.
As someone who opted out of a public facing role in the fire of online hate, I developed what can best be described as a resiliency contact high in speaking to these women. We owe it to them—and to the women we have failed, like Caesar-Chavannes—to make sure things are better for the next wave of female MPs.
Ultimately, the question isn’t one of what can be done—we know what we need to do. Rather, it is: Why aren’t we doing these things? After all, it’s 2023.
The New Democrats have declared a federal byelection victory in their Winnipeg stronghold riding of Elmwood—Transcona.
The NDP candidate Leila Dance told supporters in a tearful speech that even though the final results weren’t in, she expected she would see them in Ottawa.
With several polls still to be counted, Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds conceded defeat and told his volunteers that they should be proud of what the Conservatives accomplished in the campaign.
Political watchers had a keen eye on the results to see if the Tories could sway traditionally NDP voters on issues related to labour and affordability.
Meanwhile in the byelection race in the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun the NDP, Liberals and Bloc Québécois remained locked in an extremely tight three-way race as the results trickled in slowly.
The Liberal stronghold riding had a record 91 names on the ballot, and the results aren’t expected until the early hours of the morning.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
VANCOUVER – An incumbent BC United legislative member has reversed her decision not to seek re-election and has announced she’ll run as an Independent in the riding of West Vancouver-Capilano in the upcoming British Columbia election.
Karin Kirkpatrick has been a vocal critic of BC United Leader Kevin Falcon’s decision last month to suspend the party’s campaign and throw support behind the B.C. Conservatives under John Rustad.
Kirkpatrick announced her retirement this year, but said Monday that her decision to re-enter the race comes as a direct result of Falcon’s actions, which would force middle-of-the-road voters to “swing to the left” to the NDP or to move further right to the Conservatives.
“I did hear from a lot of constituents and a lot of people who were emailing me from across B.C. … that they didn’t have anybody to vote for,” she said. “And so, I looked even at myself, and I looked at my riding, and I said, ‘Well, I no longer have anybody to vote for in my own riding.’ It was clearly an issue of this missing middle for the more moderate voter.”
She said voters who reached out “don’t want to vote for an NDP government but felt deeply uncomfortable” supporting the provincial Conservatives, citing Rustad’s tolerance of what she calls “extreme views and conspiracy theorists.”
Kirkpatrick joins four other incumbent Opposition MLAs running as Independents, including Peace River South’s Mike Bernier, Peace River North’s Dan Davies, Prince George-Cariboo’s Coralee Oakes and Tom Shypitka in Kootenay-Rockies.
“To be honest, we talk just about every day,” Kirkpatrick said about her fellow BC United incumbents now running as Independents. “We’re all feeling the same way. We all need to kind of hold each other up and make sure we’re doing the right thing.”
She added that a number of first-time candidates formerly on the BC United ticket are contacting the group of incumbents running for election, and the group is working together “as good moderates who respect each other and lift each other up.”
But Kirkpatrick said it’s also too early to talk about the future of BC United or the possibility of forming a new party.
“The first thing we need to do is to get these Independent MLAs elected into the legislature,” she said, noting a strong group could play a power-broker role if a minority government is elected. “Once we’re there then we’re all going to come together and we’re going to figure out, is there something left in BC United, BC Liberals that we can resurrect, or do we need to start a new party that’s in the centre?”
She said there’s a big gap left in the political spectrum in the province.
“So, we just have to do it in a mindful way, to make sure it’s representing the broadest base of people in B.C.”
Among the supporters at Kirkpatrick’s announcement Monday was former longtime MLA Ralph Sultan, who held West Vancouver-Capilano for almost two decades before retiring in 2020.
The Metro Vancouver riding has been a stronghold for the BC Liberals — the former BC United — since its formation in 1991, with more than half of the votes going to the centre-right party in every contest.
However, Kirkpatrick’s winning margin of 53.6 per cent to the NDP’s 30.1 per cent and the Green’s 15.4 per cent in the 2020 election shows a rising trend for left-leaning voters in the district.
Mike McDonald, chief strategy officer with Kirk and Co. Consulting, and a former campaign director for the BC Liberals and chief of staff under former Premier Christy Clark, said Independent candidates historically face an uphill battle and the biggest impact may be splitting votes in areas where the NDP could emerge victorious.
“It really comes down to, if the NDP are in a position to get 33 per cent of the vote, they might have a chance of winning,” McDonald said of the impact of an Independent vote-split with the Conservatives in certain ridings.
He said B.C. history shows it’s very hard for an Independent to win an election and has been done only a handful of times.
“So, the odds do not favour Independents winning the seats unless there is a very unique combination of circumstances, and more likely that they play a role as a spoiler, frankly.”
The B.C. Conservatives list West Vancouver School District Trustee Lynne Block as its candidate in West Vancouver-Capilano, while the BC NDP is represented by health care professional Sara Eftekhar.
Kirkpatrick said she is confident that her re-entry to the race will not result in a vote split that allows the NDP to win the seat because the party has always had a poor showing in the riding.
“So, even if there is competition between myself and the Conservative candidate, it is highly unlikely that anything would swing over to the NDP here. And I believe that I have the ability to actually attract those NDP voters to me, as well as the Conservatives and Liberals who are feeling just lost right now.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Egypt on Tuesday for his 10th trip to the Middle East since the war in Gaza began nearly a year ago, this one aimed partly at refining a proposal to present to Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire deal and release of hostages.
Unlike in recent mediating missions, America’s top diplomat this time is traveling without optimistic projections from the Biden administration of an expected breakthrough in the troubled negotiations.
Also unlike the earlier missions, Blinken has no public plans to go to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this trip. The Israeli leader’s fiery public statements — like his declaration that Israel would accept only “total victory” when Blinken was in the region in June — and some other unbudgeable demands have complicated earlier diplomacy.
Blinken is going to Egypt for talks Wednesday with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and others, in a trip billed as focused both on American-Egyptian relations and Gaza consultations with Egypt.
The tamped-down public approach follows months in which President Joe Biden and his officials publicly talked up an agreement to end the war in Gaza as being just within reach, hoping to build pressure on Netanyahu’s far-right government and Hamas to seal a deal.
The Biden administration now says it is working with fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar to come up with a revised final proposal to try to at least get Israel and Hamas into a six-week cease-fire that would free some of the hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Americans believe public attention on details of the talks now would only hurt that effort.
American, Qatari and Egyptian officials still are consulting “about what that proposal will contain, and …. we’re trying to see that it’s a proposal that can get the parties to an ultimate agreement,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday.
The State Department pointed to Egypt’s important role in Gaza peace efforts in announcing last week that the Biden administration planned to give the country its full $1.3 billion in military aid, overriding congressional requirements that the U.S. hold back some of the funding if Egypt fails to show adequate progress on human rights. Blinken told Congress that Egypt has made progress on human rights, including in freeing political prisoners.
Blinken’s trip comes amid the risk of a full-on new front in the Middle East, with Israel threatening increasing military action against the Hezbollah militant organization in Lebanon. Biden envoy Amos Hochstein was in Israel on Monday to try to calm tensions after a stop in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has one of the strongest militaries in the Middle East, and like Hamas and smaller groups in Syria and Iraq it is allied with Iran.
Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged strikes across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas started the war in Gaza. Hezbollah says it will ease those strikes — which have uprooted tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border — only when there’s a cease-fire in Gaza.
Hochstein told Netanyahu and other Israeli officials that intensifying the conflict with Hezbollah would not help get Israelis back in their homes, according to a U.S. official. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks, said Hochstein stressed to Netanyahu that he risked sparking a broad and protracted regional conflict if he moved forward with a full-scale war in Lebanon.
Hochstein also underscored to Israeli officials that the Biden administration remained committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the tensions on Israel’s northern border in conjunction with a Gaza deal or on its own, the official said.
Netanyahu told Hochstein that it would “not be possible to return our residents without a fundamental change in the security situation in the north.” The prime minister said Israel “appreciates and respects” U.S. support but “will do what is necessary to maintain its security and return the residents of the north to their homes safely.”
Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, meanwhile, warned in his meeting with Hochstein that “the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action,” his office said.
In Gaza, the U.S. says Israel and Hamas have agreed to a deal in principle and that the biggest obstacles now include a disagreement on details of the hostage and prisoner swap and control over a buffer zone on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Netanyahu has demanded in recent weeks that the Israeli military be allowed to keep a presence in the Philadelphi corridor. Egypt and Hamas have rejected that demand.
The Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 killed about 1,200 people. Militants also abducted 250 people and are still holding around 100 hostages. About a third of the remaining hostages are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, said Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count. The war has caused widespread destruction, displaced a majority of Gaza’s people and created a humanitarian crisis.
Netanyahu says he is working to bring home the hostages. His critics accuse him of slow-rolling a deal because it could bring down his hardline coalition government, which includes members opposed to a truce with the Palestinians.
Asked earlier this month if Netanyahu was doing enough for a cease-fire deal, Biden said, simply, “no.” But he added that he still believed a deal was close.
___
Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.
