“I am a European of German nationality. It was German Nazism and fascism that brought death and destruction upon Europe and the world, but Allied Forces brought liberty back to all of us,” she said. “We owe our democracy also to you, the people of Canada.”
Defense and national security are the throughlines connecting events on von der Leyen’s Canadian itinerary.
She was welcomed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Kingston, Ontario, at a Canadian Forces base two hours from the capital. The leaders toured a lithium recycling firm in the city, one with Canadian and European footprints, before returning to Ottawa for a dinner at the Canadian War Museum in a room flanked by tanks.
Her speech heaved heavy flattery on her Canadian hosts, praising Trudeau for his gender-balanced Cabinet before drawing her audience’s focus to her own initiatives. Before the end of her five-year term next year, she declared, “50 percent of all managers of the European Commission will be women.”
Von der Leyen praised Canada earlier in the day for doing “more than its fair share” and “going way beyond what is necessary” to support Ukraine, “compared to others.” She did not name names.
Ottawa announced Tuesday plans to ratchet up support for Ukraine by extending its engineer training in Poland. Combat medical trainers will also be sent to train forces.
In addition to the seven electrical transformers that Canada will donate to repair Ukraine’s damaged power grid, the government has pledged to give C$3 million to fund de-mining efforts in the country.
Von der Leyen will head to Washington Wednesday after a meeting with Governor General Mary Simon.
Her Ottawa visit and address is a pre-show to U.S. President Joe Biden’s upcoming visit to Canada in March, his first official trip since entering the White House.
Defense, clean energy and trade are overlapping themes expected to be addressed during Biden’s visit, which official dates have yet to be announced.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Melbourne: An Australian-Indian man pleaded guilty to one count of behaving in an offensive and disorderly manner in an aircraft, and was fined AUS$750 by a local court this week.
Hardik Patel, 46, from Rooty Hill in western Sydney, became aggressive and abusive onboard a 15-hour Air Canada flight from Vancouver due to heavy drinking, and was arrested upon his arrival at Sydney Airport earlier this month, the Daily Mail reported.
The Air Canada crew found one litre bottle of Bacardi and a water bottle containing a liquid smelling strongly of alcohol with Patel. The crew confiscated the bottles as according to the Civil Aviation and Safety Authority, airline passengers can only consume alcohol provided by cabin crew during a flight.
The crew reported that Patel had then become aggressive shortly before AC33 from Vancouver touched down.
The Australian Federal Police officers, who arrested Patel, observed he had a “flushed face and a strong alcohol odour”.
According to a statement of facts submitted in the court, Patel “had poor ability to understand instructions and indifferent demeanour, which escalated to being abusive towards police”.
When the police told him that it is an offence to consume one’s own alcohol in an aircraft, Patel’s responses were “largely aggressive and incoherent”, the Daily Mail reported.
He continued to ask police why he was arrested and “became more verbally aggressive and argumentative towards police officers, yelling and screaming and trying to engage with members of the public,” the report said.
The police then decided to take Patel into custody “for his own safety and welfare and the welfare and safety of those around him”, the statement submitted to the court said.
The Downing Centre Local Court on Monday convicted Patel and fined him AUS$750.
New Delhi: Punjab NRIs Affairs Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal on Wednesday demanded to include both the Amritsar and Shaheed Bhagat Singh International Airport in Mohali for direct flights to Canada and the US.
He said the commencement of the direct flights would ensure great facility to a large number of travellers for both sides.
Calling on Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya M. Scindia here, Dhaliwal apprised him that large number of Punjabis and Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) card holders had been living in Canada and the US since long, and that during the NRI sammelan organised by the Punjab government in December last, these NRIs sought commencement of these flights.
The state minister said there has been a persistent demand for providing direct air connectivity between Amritsar and Canada. Citing that it is of utmost significant to make direct flights operational from Amritsar to Canadian cities, the minister said presently travellers both from Amritsar and Canadian cities are hugely inconvenienced, as they have to travel to or from New Delhi or other cities in India to reach their destinations.
The Canadian government will ban, starting Tuesday (28), federal employees from using the Chinese app TikTok on official cell phones as it poses an “unacceptable” risk to their privacy and security.
Mona Fortier, chair of the Treasury Board of Canada, the public body charged with overseeing federal employees, said in a statement that effective February 28, the app will be removed from all official cell phones.
“Users of these devices will also be blocked from downloading the app in the future. After an analysis of TikTok, the Director of Information Systems Canada has determined that it poses an unacceptable level of privacy and security risk.”
Fortier justified the measure because TikTok’s data entry and collection methods “provide considerable access to the contents of the phone”.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a news conference that while the government wants to respect Canadians’ right to freedom of expression, there are also “very important principles about data protection and security for Canadians”.
“Like many countries around the world, we are carefully considering how to ensure Canadians’ safety online. And the decision is that it is best that government teams and workers do not have access to TikTok due to security concerns,” added Trudeau.
The premier also mused that other Canadians have considered the risk TikTok poses to their security “and perhaps” will act accordingly.
Likewise, Trudeau opened the door for the government to take more measures to ensure the security of official apparatus.
The ban on the use of TikTok on official Canadian cell phones comes a few days after the European Union adopted a similar measure. The United States has already banned the use of the application on official cell phones in 2022.
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
“It happened that we were a lot of new foreign ministers,” Joly said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. The Liberal politician was four months into her foreign affairs role when Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
She was not the only new face around the G-7 table. “[Liz] Truss was new. [Annalena] Baerbock was new. I was new — and [Antony] Blinken had only a year.” An affinity grew between the three women British, German and Canadian foreign ministers on a personal level, she said, as they faced a cataclysm with no end date.
“We wanted to talk to each other … We also knew that this crisis would be potentially the first crisis we would be facing — so it would define a lot of our work,” Joly said. “There is no other option than victory.”
Support for Ukraine is a rare nonpartisan issue in Canada. Demographics help to explain Ottawa’s zealous response to a war 4,500 miles away.
Canada is home to 1.4 million Ukrainian-Canadians, making it a country with the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora community after Russia. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is arguably the country’s most prominent Ukrainian-Canadian.
Freeland, who serves double duty as federal finance minister, has called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “the biggest challenge to Canada’s national security since the Second World War.”
Trudeau’s government is especially motivated to do right by Ukraine to lock up support in the Prairie and the vote-rich Greater Toronto Area, regions where Ukrainian-Canadian population is highest. Opposition Conservative MPs, who represent many of the Prairie communities where Ukrainian immigrants first settled at the turn of the century and after the First World War, are incentivized to do the same.
Joly says the threat with the war is existential for Canada. “We’ve been the architect of many of the rules that we now know, that are our underpinning international rules-based order — I hate that word — but the international system.”
Top bloc decisions
The intelligence reports warning of a potential invasion started in December.
Joly said G-7 foreign ministers wanted the alliance to serve as a “coordination group” for Ukraine. The bloc, under Germany’s presidency at the time, would share diplomatic and military information and frank talks about Europe’s dependency on Russia for energy.
But organizing allies behind closed doors proved to be difficult work.
In early 2022, the alliance decided to declassify American intelligence. The strategy was intended to “bring everybody along and to inform our population regarding what information we had at hand,” Joly said, crediting the plan for creating trust and momentum among allies.
Declassification was a hard sell for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president feared a crush of declassified intelligence materials showing Russia’s plans would stoke mass panic and deliver his country premature economic collapse.
Defense talks eventually outgrew the G-7 “coordination group.” The alliance created a new forum at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany to house Ukraine Defense Contact Group meetings, which 54 countries are a part of now.
‘Very stressful’ early days
National Defense Minister Anita Anand was sworn into her role in October 2021, the same as Joly. Anand was thrown into briefings about global hot spots, she told POLITICO, including the buildup of Russian troops at the Ukrainian border and in Belarus.
Feb. 24, she said, “was a confirmation of events that we did not want to happen.”
She had been in Kyiv just three weeks earlier to meet with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov.
“The days were very stressful,” she said.
As a rookie minister in Trudeau’s Cabinet, Anand had been tasked with procurement; the pandemic transformed her into the chief purveyor of Covid-19 vaccines, rapid tests and personal protective equipment. The two years of wrangling equipment in a crisis came in handy a year ago. “I was used to being in an environment that was urgent and where our government needed to make very effective, but quick decisions,” she said.
Anand said her modus operandi then, and since, has been to speak directly with Ukrainians, and specifically Reznikov, about the country’s equipment needs.
Then, she said, she looks at Canada’s naval and armed forces inventory, decides what needs to be procured to outfit the Armed Forces of Ukraine “and then ensures we are providing the training that is necessary on the equipment that we’re providing.”
Ottawa sent the first of four Leopard 2 main battle tanks, and training crews, to Ukraine earlier this month as the war continued to ratchet up.
Canada isn’t a nuclear power but has found other ways to contribute including sanctions, paying out C$2 billion in loans to Ukraine and sending C$320 million in humanitarian assistance.
Canada has also taken in nearly 170,000 immigrants of Ukrainian origin while approving the temporary resident visa applications of more than half a million Ukrainian nationals and their families.
The country’s military budget is notoriously malnourished if NATO’s target, that members should spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, is the yardstick used to measure might. But Canada’s Operation UNIFIER mission, deployed in 2015 to Ukraine to train the country’s armed forces following the Crimean crisis, put Ottawa in a position of being an interlocutor for other nations figuring out how to support Ukraine.
“Many countries have come to Canada — and certainly this was the case at the beginning — to ask whether we had advice for them about how they can effectively help Ukraine,” Anand said.
Canada says it wants to help with efforts to rebuild Ukraine, but there are headwinds.
“Private capital will not be interested in investing in reconstructing cities if the geopolitical risk is still there,” Joly said. The statement leaves the door open for discussions about public funding for reconstruction in an era when cost-of-living anxieties debates over government spending have pierced domestic politics as a challenge for incumbent leaders.
The conversations about long-term security support for Ukraine are just beginning around the G-7 table.
“Even after the war, Russia will still be a very dangerous neighbor,” she said, offering a grim reality check. “Particularly if Putin is in charge.”
Somewhere during the past year, the words “finding a peaceful solution” dropped from Joly’s vocabulary.
Paul McLeary contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Trudeau announced Canada will send two navy vessels to the Haitian coast as part of a surveillance and intelligence operation.
The announcement is the latest in Canada’s piecemeal response, short of the military intervention requested by acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
Trudeau said the deployment of the navy vessels is intended to deter gangs from using waterways as “an extra sphere of influence.” They will not be there to intercept migrants, he added.
“They are there to assist the Haitian National Police in their efforts to control the gang activity in Port-au-Prince and along the coast,” Trudeau told reporters, wrapping two days of meetings with Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders.
Haiti and climate change topped the leaders’ agendas.
In addition to the two ships, Canada will airlift three MRAPS (mine-resistant light armored vehicles), purchased by the Haitian National Police, to the country “in the coming days.”
The Canadian leader said his government’s focus is to intervene in an “atrocious situation” by strengthening the Haitian National Police. “What’s happening in Haiti is absolutely heartbreaking — and we need to do everything we can that will help.”
Both the White House and Canadian government have for months emphasized the need to find a Haitian-led solution to prevent the country from descending further into lawlessness.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters Tuesday that discussions continue with Canada and other partners in the hemisphere, the Organization of American States and the United Nations about what can be done to bring stability and security to Haiti.
A Haitian-led response has yet to emerge, and enduring interlaced humanitarian, political and security crises risk plummeting the country into further misery.
Canada has leaned on sanctions as a tool to choke financial flows to Haitian elites and gangs linked to violence in the country — a strategy that saw the addition of two names to its list of 17 sanctioned individuals Thursday.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
On Tuesday, the group said one of its balloons was last spotted at 12:48 a.m. on Saturday along an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. That tracks with when a U.S. F-22 used a Sidewinder missile to shoot down an object over the Yukon later that same day. Canadian officials have since said the debris will be extremely difficult to retrieve due to the frozen terrain and the remoteness of the site.
The club’s balloon had a long journey, traveling for 123 days and 18 hours of flight before — possibly — being shot out of the sky. “For now we are calling Pico Balloon K9YO Missing in Action,” the club’s website says, without making any accusations or connecting the incident to the military shootdown.
“I have no information for you from NORAD on the objects,” said Air Force Col. Elizabeth Mathias, a spokesperson from the North American Aerospace Defense Command. “I understand FBI spoke with that hobby group, and I expect the [National Security Council] task force to have more on the potential identification of the objects.”
POLITICO has reached out to the club for comment. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The brigade flies pico balloons, which are filled with hydrogen and carry a transmitter with GPS tracking. The balloons rise to 47,000 feet, the group says on its website. The Yukon object was reported to be floating around 40,000 feet.
“As we travel, our GPS is able to locate our current location, and other information is gathered depending on what chips we have on our transmitter while using other programs to gather other inflight information,” the group says on its website.
In a speech on Thursday, Biden noted that the objects are still being investigated, and he backed up previous comments from U.S. officials who said the objects probably aren’t from China and are most likely “benign.”
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” Biden said.
The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, which formed two years ago, got its name from the children’s film “Up”. The founders drew inspiration from the Ellie Badge, a grape soda bottle cap on a pin that’s a prized possession for the main character in the movie.
“There were 10 of us to start, aged 11 years old and up, kids, their parents and friends, some licensed in Amateur Radio some having an interest in science and engineering,” according to the website. “We met monthly to research and report and had our first launch on September 25th 2021.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Joly said Canada will join like-minded countries that believe a special tribunal should investigate the alleged crimes. “The ICC [International Criminal Court] and ICJ [International Court of Justice] don’t necessarily have the mandate to be able to prosecute such a crime,” she added.
Right now, for example, the ICC does not have jurisdiction over crimes of aggression.
The United Kingdom also backs the special tribunal and is lobbying other G-7 countries to join.
The United States, Ukraine’s single-largest backer in weapon and military aid during the past year at war, has yet to decide if it will endorse the tribunal.
“From our perspective, the overarching priority is that the perpetrators of these crimes be held accountable for their actions and are unable to create such havoc and destruction with impunity,” Beth Van Schaack, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, told POLITICO in a statement. “We seek to remain in lockstep with Kyiv’s strongest partners as we consider this proposal, as well as all other options for holding Russia to account.”
One of those options includes developing an international center for the prosecution of the crime of aggression in Ukraine, “which would also preserve and store evidence for future trials,” the statement read.
The special tribunal would comprise a select group invited by Ukraine to map out a way to hold Russia criminally accountable for its wartime aggression, according to details shared by the U.K.
Joly told reporters that Zelenskyy didn’t use their meeting to ask for additional fighter jets, though she noted that President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a pact when they met in Mexico in January to continue to help defend Ukraine.
Joly is next headed to the Munich Security Conference, where she’ll meet with international counterparts to discuss global security threats.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The Olympic gold medal-winning Canada head coach, Bev Priestman, is understood to be considering her future with the national team as the impasse between the players and federation over pay equity issues and budget cuts rumbles on.
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Priestman, who led the Canada women’s national team to a first major tournament victory at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, is considering her options for beyond the World Cup, which kicks off in July. It is believed that the 36-year-old, who was assistant to Phil Neville when he was head coach of England’s Lionesses, is considering a move into club football and that a number of clubs have expressed an interest.
The situation between the players and Canada Soccer has deteriorated in recent weeks, with the Canadian Soccer Players’ Association (CSPA) releasing a statement on Friday which said they are “outraged and deeply concerned” by reported funding cuts. The team captain and most capped player in the world, Christine Sinclair, tweeted “enough is enough” and said she could not represent the federation on the pitch until the situation is resolved. The decision of the players to step back prompted Canada Soccer to threaten legal action against them.
Players said Canada Soccer threatened to “not only take legal action to force us back to the pitch but would consider taking steps to collect what could be millions of dollars in damages from our players association and from each of the individual players currently in camp” if they did not commit to playing in the SheBelieves Cup hosted by the US this month.
The England captain, Leah Williamson, expressed solidarity with the Canadian players before the Arnold Clark Cup kicks off on Thursday. “One of the main issues for women’s football, for women’s sport in general, is the lack of security there is,” she said. “We’ve got to a place in England where we have progressive conversations all the time, it’s not about just being content with where we’re at. First and foremost, there’s an open conversation all the time and if we believe that we’re missing out on something or if we believe that our circumstances could be better then we’d be able to voice them. That’s most important.
“I feel like there’s a communication breakdown across women’s sport, but how can we have those progressions without it? I’m obviously grateful to be part of the FA and the way that we’ve had communication and been able to move forward to a place where we can perform. That’s all women athletes are asking for, to have the right amount of resources to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. We stand with those players. Every time those issues come up it’s not just one team, it’s a collective discussion and fight for equality.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Washington:A US F-22 fighter jet has shot down an unidentified cylindrical object over Canada, a day after another similar object was downed near Alaskan waters and a week after the American military brought down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast.
The object was shot down on Saturday over Yukon territory in north-west Canada, according to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Pentagon said that the object was first observed in Alaska the night before, and military officials closely tracked it.
The decision to shoot down the object was taken following a phone call between US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, the White House said.
“I ordered the takedown of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace. @NORADCommand shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and US aircraft were scrambled, and a US F-22 successfully fired at the object,” Trudeau said on Twitter.
The object was “cylindrical” and smaller than the suspected Chinese balloon shot down last weekend, Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand said.
Saturday’s incident follows the downing of another unidentified object on Friday over Alaska and the shooting down of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4 by a US F-22 fighter jet.
According to Pentagon Press Secretary Brig Gen Pat Ryder, North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), detected the object over Alaska late on Friday evening.
The White House said the object was closely tracked and monitored by NORAD over the last 24 hours and the President has been continually briefed by his national security team since it was first spotted.
“Out of an abundance of caution and at the recommendation of their militaries, President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau authorised it to be taken down,” the White House said, adding that Biden authorised US fighter aircraft assigned to NORAD to conduct the operation and a US F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory in close coordination with Canadian authorities.
“The leaders discussed the importance of recovering the object to determine more details on its purpose or origin. President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau commended NORAD’s and US Northern Command’s strong and effective partnership and agreed to continue their close coordination to detect, track, and defend our airspace,” the White House said.
Following the Biden-Trudeau phone call, two F-22 aircraft from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, monitored the object over the US airspace with the assistance of Alaska Air National Guard refuelling aircraft, tracking it closely and taking time to characterise the nature of the object, Ryder said.
Monitoring continued Saturday as the object crossed into Canadian airspace, with Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joining the formation to further assess the object.
“A US F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory using an AIM 9X missile following close coordination between US and Canadian authorities, to include a call today between Secretary of Defence Lloyd J Austin III and Minister of Defence Anita Anand,” Ryder said.
“As Canadian authorities conduct recovery operations to help our countries learn more about the object, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be working closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” he said.
Anand tweeted on Saturday that she had discussed the incident with US Defence Secretary Austin “and reaffirmed that we’ll always defend our sovereignty together.”
“The object was flying at an altitude of approximately 40,000 feet, had unlawfully entered Canadian airspace and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight. The object was shot down approximately 100 miles from the Canada-United States border over Canadian territory in central Yukon,” Anand said in a news conference.
“We will make sure that we leave no stone unturned in the analysis of the data,” Anand said.
Anand characterised the mission as the essence of how NORAD is supposed to work and said a decision was made to have Canadian and US planes in the air to ensure there were “sufficient assets” to ensure it could be taken down.
Gen Wayne Eyre, chief of the defence staff, said specific instructions were given to the pilots of both countries operating under the command of a Canadian general that “whoever had the first best shot” would shoot first.
Last weekend, defence officials told US media that debris from the Chinese balloon landed in 47ft (14m) of water – shallower than they had expected – near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
China has denied the balloon – which first entered US airspace on 28 January – was used for spying purposes, saying it was a weather device gone astray.
The US, however, said the balloon is part of a fleet of surveillance balloons that have flown over five continents.
After the balloon incident, Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled a planned trip to Beijing.
Chinese officials on Friday accused the US of “political manipulation and hype”.
