Don’t obsess over snide last word; goodbye will do

Olympics Latest: Britain’s Walls wins track cycling omnium

TOKYO (AP) — The Latest on the Tokyo Olympics, which are taking place under heavy restrictions after a year’s delay because of the coronavirus pandemic:

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MEDAL ALERT

Britain’s Matthew Walls won the opening scratch race of the four-event omnium and was never really challenged over the remainder of the races in winning the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics.

Of pigs and porcine politics

There’s an old saying in politics — that if you wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty, and the pig likes it. Welcome to negotiating free trade with Donald Trump.

This is the unenviable position Canada finds itself in, a year and a half into a radically changed relationship with the United States. How do you negotiate with a president who practises the art of the steal? Is it principled to compromise with corruption simply to satisfy a president who is bankrupt of any principles except making money?

Answering these questions will say as much about us as it does about them.

President Donald Trump’s latest tariff threat makes this starker. He is imposing 50 per cent tariffs on $28 billion worth of Canadian exports, covering more than 500 product categories.

Five things from Wednesday's SNC committee

OTTAWA - Five things we heard Wednesday as the House of Commons justice committee heard from Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as well as Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick and deputy justice minister Nathalie Drouin.

The committee is trying to determine whether the Prime Minister's Office improperly pushed former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to head off a trial of SNC-Lavalin for fraud and bribery by ordering prosecutors to negotiate a remediation agreement with the company.

1. The cabinet shuffle

Butts said the only reason Trudeau shuffled his cabinet in January was that Scott Brison quit politics. Trudeau didn't want another shuffle and wanted to keep it as small as possible. Butts said Trudeau needed an experienced minister replacing Brison as president of the Treasury Board and was concerned about choosing a new Nova Scotia minister without alienating other Nova Scotia MPs. SNC-Lavalin was not a consideration, he said.

Dropping the gloves to make the point

In hockey parlance, it’s called “shedding,” the moment in a game when you are forced to deal with an instigator by dropping (shedding) your gloves for an all-out brawl.

That term is a deep cut from hockey culture that Prime Minister Mark Carney — he of the “elbows up” phenomenon — may need to not only embrace but practise more often in the face of yet another round of overly punitive tariffs imposed by United States President Donald Trump.

To be fair, under Carney’s leadership, Canada has not exactly rolled over in the face of Trump’s bully-boy tactics.

Yes, Canada has made concessions to placate Trump to further a new continental trade agreement: investing more money to combat the cross-border flow of fentanyl that isn’t actually happening, stalling efforts to tax streaming companies as most European countries already do, and — most recently — giving Trump a cut of profits from the Canadian-made, Canadian-paid Gordie Howe bridge between Windsor and Detroit.

Researchers aim to help teachers de-stress

For Cori Wiebe, teaching math using online tools is getting a little bit easier every day.

At the same time, work is even more difficult — every day classes are suspended, she misses her students more.

“I’d love to be back in the classroom to have that social contact. (The distance) does make you appreciate what you had,” said Wiebe, a Grade 6-7 math teacher at Westdale School, before starting to cry during an interview about her last five weeks on the job, away from her 120 students.