It's time for answers

How did the N.S. gunman withdraw $475,000 in cash?

Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings.

This weekend's biggest scoop came from Maclean's own Stephen Maher, Shannon Gormley and Paul Palango, who discovered that Gabriel Wortman, the Nova Scotia gunman responsible for the largest mass killing in Canadian history, withdrew $475,000 in cash from a Brink’s depot in Dartmouth, N.S., on March 30. Sources with the RCMP tell Maclean's that the amount and method is consistent with how the RCMP transfers money to its confidential informants and agents, and that such a transaction wouldn't be possible for private banking customers. Despite this irregular activity, RCMP spokespeople have insisted they had no special relationship with the killer. Catch up on the full story here.

The cash raises more questions than it answers, and Paul Wells believes this breaking news, combined with the RCMP's utter lack of transparency, underscores the dire need for an immediate inquiry.

Call the cops. The inter-party war between Conservative leadership candidates Erin O'Toole and Peter MacKay is heating up: O'Toole's team is asking police to investigate MacKay's campaign, alleging the MacKay camp obtained confidential login information to steal internal data and copies of Zoom video conferences. The alleged thief is a campaign volunteer, but hasn't yet spoken to the media. MacKay spokesperson Chisholm Pothier dismissed the accusation for coming "late on a Friday of a bad week for the O'Toole campaign."

In related news, CBC News looked at the Tory caucus members backing each candidate and noticed the split was not just ideological, but also geographical and generational. MacKay and O'Toole have effectively split the caucus between them: ahead of Thursday's debate, MacKay had 43 MP endorsements compared with O'Toole's 36; Leslyn Lewis garnered six endorsements and Derek Sloan had zero. MacKay has scooped up most caucus members from Ontario and Quebec, whereas O'Toole's are from Western Canada and half of Lewis's are from Saskatchewan. O'Toole's caucus supporters are also, on average, younger than MacKay's, painting an overall picture of O'Toole's support as less experienced than MacKay's veterans, but also more future-oriented.

Who's surprised? According to the latest White House tell-all, penned this time by former national security adviser John Bolton, U.S. President Donald Trump "didn't really like" Justin Trudeau or French President Emmanuel Macron during the G7 conference in Quebec in 2018. "But he tolerated them, mockingly crossing swords with them in meetings, kidding on the straight," Bolton writes. Later, explaining the behind-the-scenes anger that fuelled Trump's furious tweet attacking Trudeau, Bolton writes that Trump directed economic adviser Larry Kudlow and aide Peter Navarro to attack Trudeau on national TV. (Recall that Navarro duly proclaimed there was a "special place in hell" for Trudeau, only to later apologize.)

Mission complete. On Sunday, members of the military began departing the long-term care homes in Ontario where they've been stationed since April. Recall that military officials were the ones who revealed the devastating conditions suffered by many long-term care home residents, including bug infestations, abuse and negligence. The troops will be returning home today and on Thursday, where they'll undergo a 14-day quarantine period. If you're in Ontario and wondering why you're seeing so many military vehicles driving around, now you know why.

In retaliation for allowing Meng Wanzhou to face a criminal trial, China has unleashed a series of diplomatic attacks on Canada this past week: they've indicted the two detained Michaels, claimed to find insects in Canadian lumber and, according to Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains, applied pressure to Canadian telecom companies to adopt Huawei's 5G technology. Bains appeared on CTV's Question Period to discuss this upcoming "economic snapshot" Trudeau promised to share last week. (On that note: stay tuned, apparently.) Evan Solomon switched gears to ask about Huawei, to which Bains replied, "Clearly they are applying pressure, and they recognize that they need to get ahead of this technology." Despite the four other Five Eyes nations taking a stand against the Chinese telecom, Bains reiterated that Canada is a sovereign nation, and the government will decide on Huawei in its own time. Why that time is not now remains a mystery.

A sorta-high bar. Minnesota is drafting its own state inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women, and it's turning to Canada for advice. Nigel Perrote, the tribal liaison for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, told CBC News that Canada set a high bar for such inquiries, but acknowleged that "one of the things we learned from Canada [is that] you have this report and you've developed this report, but there is no next step for how to move forward."

Indeed, the Canadian government has yet to act on any of the revelations from the country's years-long inquiry, previously citing the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse. (They originally planned to reveal a strategy this month, a year after the inquiry was released.) But when faced with questions from Opposition MPs on Friday, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett said the government needed to reach a consensus on what needs to happen before announcing any concrete plans, and said she hopes to release it "as soon as possible."

After less than a week of hiatus, Mexico will resume sending temporary farm workers to Canada. The Latin American nation ordered the cessation of movement last Tuesday, after three Mexican workers died in Canada due to COVID-19. Canada's 60,000 temporary foreign workers, on whom farmers rely to work its farmland, often live crammed together in low-income housing. According to a statement by the Mexican government, the two countries "reached an agreement to improve the sanitary conditions" of its workers, but no details were offered as to what that improvement looks like.

Former Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe appeared on Global's The West Block yesterday to discuss Jagmeet Singh's incident in the House of Commons last week, when the latter was booted for calling a Bloc MP racist. Duceppe's take: the NDP has disappeared from Quebec, and Singh's performance was more to garner support from the rest of Canada than to connect with Quebeckers. "I think that was cheap politics from Jagmeet Singh," Duceppe said. "It won’t help him in Quebec—and neither Trudeau, by the way."

—Michael Fraiman

Politics News & Analysis