Justin Trudeau calls Nancy Pelosi Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. As Democrats in Washington officially retained control of the House of Representatives, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered his congratulations to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A readout of their conversation mentioned eagerness north of the border to work together on "trade, Buy America provisions, and energy cooperation." The PMO's sneaky hint at Canada's energy priorities came in a link, posted beneath the readout, to the Canada Energy Regulator's Keystone XL project page. Yesterday, Trudeau also came out against a permanent universal basic income modelled on the CERB that's helped millions of Canadians during the pandemic. The CERB, he said, is "not a measure that we can automatically continue in a post-pandemic world." Today's prime ministerial agenda includes three virtual events with Liberal MPs across Ontario, a phone call with the King of Jordan, Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, and another weekly call with premiers. Expect a little bit of tension on that last one, given the PM's message to the provinces on their COVID response. This should be the NDP’s moment to shine: So why isn't it? Marie-Danielle Smith, writing in Maclean's, says the party's federal leader has solid ratings among voters and, unlike a certain governing party, no serious ethical quagmires. The NDP's social media game is on point. And the caucus has forced through billions in emergency pandemic aid. Shouldn't they be popular? The labour movement is on the rise. Environmental issues are widely recognized as urgent. Socialism is attracting star power, at least south of the border. Yet at this critical juncture, when it should be surging, the NDP’s polling numbers have barely budged, sputtering at around 17 per cent over the course of 2020. The failure to capitalize on this moment ultimately falls at the feet of Jagmeet Singh. As strategists try to pull him in wildly different directions, what is his plan to turn things around? Can he? It's a small world: The Globe and Mail reports that one of Chrystia Freeland's senior staff, Leslie Church, has agreed to an ethics screen. Church, the policy director to the deputy PM and finance minister, is married to lobbyist Sheamus Murphy, whose clients include pharmaceutical companies working on a COVID-19 vaccine—though his firm hasn't lobbied the feds on that topic. Church's last gig was chief of staff to Procurement Minister Anita Anand. But the ethics commissioner had not, until recently, recommended a screen. (A deep dive into federal ethics disclosures reveals that Tory leader Erin O'Toole recently disclosed a gift: a rancher hat from Dr. David Chalack "offered on the occasion of a tour of a cattle feed lot located in Okotoks, Alta.") The deep-benched Biden transition: For now, pending a flurry of presidential election challenges, that transition is on hold. But Paul Wells, taking stock of the hundreds of officials who've lined up to carry the torch of government into a new Joe Biden administration, finds a feature in that system that Canadians might typically think of as a bug: I read dozens of biographies of these members of the Biden transition, and while it’s true that most of them used to work for Obama or Bill Clinton, they’ve had to spend the last several years out doing useful things in some corner of the real world. Very few of them have been lobbying, even though by my reading of the relevant rules, most of them wouldn’t have been barred from it. Instead they’ve been in universities, think tanks, labour unions, social-service organizations, pressure groups, and, in many cases, private business. On every Remembrance Day, the Ottawa Citizen profiles a member of the Canadian military who died while they served. Their subject is drawn from an automated Twitter account, developed years ago by journalist Glen McGregor, that tweets the name of a fallen soldier once an hour, every single day. Yesterday at 11:11 a.m., that account churned out the name of Flight Sergeant Thomas Lloyd Joseph Norrie, and the paper was off to the races. Check out the Citizen's crowdsourcing efforts as they raced to tell Norrie's story in today's edition. Four more years! In the days following the U.S. presidential election, when most of the world was fixated on close results in Pennsylvania and Georgia, the feds reappointed David Johnston as debates commissioner for another four-year term. For his trouble, he'll be paid a princely stipend of $675-800. —Nick Taylor-Vaisey | 
