The former PM's wife was as private as they come Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. Yesterday, Aline Chrétien, the wife of former prime minister Jean Chrétien, passed away at 84. She has been credited as one of the most influential personal advisors to the PM during his decade in power, in which time she pushed him to appoint a first-ever female to head the Supreme Court, as well as a female deputy prime minister. But Chrétien shied from the spotlight herself. Shortly after her husband's big win in 1993, she granted her only English-language media interview to Maclean's (you can read the whole piece from our archives here ), making absolutely clear that she valued her privacy above all else: A kaleidoscope of personalities has occupied the role of prime minister’s wife. As the 16th, Aline is neither as powerful as Zoë Laurier, the legendary dispenser of charitable patronage, nor as fiercely self-sufficient as Maureen McTeer, a lawyer and author. At 58, Aline says she has no ambition to forge a separate public identity. She certainly has no wish to exert the authority of her American counterpart, Hillary Clinton. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she says. “I am not elected, for one thing.” Small victories. On Friday, Canadians could quietly celebrate a minor achievement in the COVID era: the first day without a coronavirus death in six months. The lack of media attention the story received may reflect the pessimism many Canadians are feeling as summer weather ends, patios wrap up and flu season approaches. Our total COVID numbers are still on the rise, after all, with an increasing number of new cases announced daily. (The day after our zero-death landmark, we tallied seven more deaths .) Nonetheless, it's something, especially looking at Canada comparatively to the rest of the world. As André Picard of the Globe and Mail noticed, the story got way more play in the U.S. than in Canada. Panorama panned in pandemic. The pandemic has highlighted deficiencies in a number of critical areas, not the least of which is health care infrastructure. The National Post reports that various Canadian governments, since the post-SARS days of 2004, have invested $147 million into a health care software called Panorama, which was designed to share public health data and spot viral outbreaks. But it's not being used in the fight against COVID-19. Part of this is owing to the hodgepodge way in which provinces and territories gather their own information, which the government is currently relying on to track COVID cases nationally. Mitigating further damage will be the sole focus of the Liberal government's latest cabinet retreat, which kicks off today. While Justin Trudeau has made perfectly clear he wants to leverage this opportunity to create a new green economy, in the meantime, keeping Canadians afloat takes priority. The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted all the ways in which Canada's social safety net is lacking, and one solution being promoted by Liberal MPs is a universal basic income. Ahead of the Liberal convention this November, several MPs have put forward a resolution for the party to adopt a UBI as a top priority. The idea's urgency and support means that, unlike the 500-odd resolutions proposed for the convention, this one will definitely get debated and voted on. Another key pandemic-related resolution is the creation of a national, enforceable standard for long-term care. Of course, none of this will be decided before Trudeau's throne speech on Sept. 23. The Prime Minister is expected to announce additional support for childcare and other health care services, including funding for long-term care homes. Whether or not that will lead to a fall election is anyone's guess—but, as Paul Wells writes in the latest edition of Maclean's, Trudeau's insistence that this disaster is actually a fabulous opportunity should worry Canadians. I get worried when I hear the Prime Minister mimicking snake-oil pitches. This government—this Prime Minister—reliably do their worst work when they become so passionate about something they decide they needn’t fill in the details for anyone. Accountability doesn’t mean shouting buzzwords over your shoulder while you sprint. It is tiresome to have to repeat this. The debt that keeps growing. Former Liberal MP Raj Grewal, who resigned in 2018 after news broke that he had accumulated more than $1 million in gambling debts, is now facing four counts of breach of trust and one count of fraud from the RCMP for allegedly not reporting his million-dollar personal loans to the ethics commissioner. Naturally, Conservative and NDP critics jumped at the chance to tie Grewal's behaviour to Trudeau's own ethics violations. Still sliding. Since Conservatives elected Erin O'Toole as their new leader, there have been six polls asking how Canadians intend on voting, should an election creep up this fall. As Philippe J. Fournier writes in his latest 338Canada column for Maclean's, the Liberals are still leading in seat counts, but the margins have been thinning for weeks. While the Liberals still hold the upper hand on the popular vote projection, the model has the LPC (34 per cent on average) and CPC (32 per cent) in a virtual tie, which is a stark contrast to the double-digit lead the Liberals enjoyed from May to early July. Allegations of nepotism and conflicts of interest surrounding the WE-charity may not have brought the government down in the way opposition parties would have hoped, but it did take a toll on the Liberals’ numbers. The Americans are coming, the Americans are... already here? According to new data from the government, the phenomenon of Americans who, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, announced they were abandoning their country to seek refuge in Canada was actually a real thing that some people did . Immigration Canada noticed a clear uptick in numbers starting literally the month Trump was elected: looking at Americans applying for permanent residency in Canada, the 600-per-month average that previously held steady spiked to 829 in November 2016. Annually, the number of PR applications from American citizens shot up from around 6,800 in 2015 to more than 9,000 in 2017, where it's held ever since. Anecdotally, immigration lawyers have fielded way more calls after Trump's election than they did before, though some are just scouting options. As one lawyer told CTV News, "That is a big step, to actually leave a country and go to another country over a guy that might not even be there next year." —Michael Fraiman | 
