Marking time in the long wait for an end to the steel tariffs

Didn’t catch Canada’s weekend politics shows? Here’s what you missed. This is an excerpt from today’s Politics Insider newsletter, which you can read here.

• Ahead of the release of the federal budget on Tuesday, Labour Minister Patty Hajdu appeared on CBC’s The House. She steered away from addressing the Trudeau government’s refusal to provide a timeline for a balanced budget, and kept the focus instead on increased spending for skills training: “What people are talking to me the most about is not a balanced budget but what are we going to do about the labour shortage.” (CBC News)

• Weeks after Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. first predicted America would lift its steel and aluminum tariffs “in the next few weeks,” David MacNaughton is still confident the tariffs will be nixed. When? “In the next few weeks. … It’s not just because I think we’ve done a good job of improving our relationship with the United States,” he said on Global’s West Block. “These tariffs are hurting them.” (Global News)

• On CTV’s Question Period Jagmeet Singh continued his push for a national public inquiry into the Trudeau government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin file.  “The fact that high-ranking people in the Prime Minister’s office don’t care about political interference and don’t care about legality shows that this is a Prime Minister and a Prime Minister’s Office that does not care about the rule of law.” (CTV News tweet)

• Liberal MP Francis Drouin continued to argue on Question Period that there is no point in having Jody Wilson-Raybould testify about what happened after she was shuffled out of the role of attorney general. “The Prime Minister has already lifted client cabinet confidentiality for the time that the attorney general was in the attorney general’s role and all the testimony that we’ve heard at committee predates January 14,” said Drouin. Not so, replied host Evan Solomon, noting that Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts as well as Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick, not to mention Trudeau, all spoke about events following that date: “You know who the only person is who hasn’t been able to speak about that? Jody Wilson-Raybould.” (CTV News tweet)