The case of the curious payments Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. The Globe and Mail reports that the Liberals have paid American voter outreach company NGP VAN $1 million in parliamentary funds since 2016, raising questions about whether the party could be using tax dollars for election-related activities, which is forbidden. The paper has obtained a contract that shows the company being paid US$13,500 a month from the LRB, a taxpayer-funded office that supports Liberal MPs. The paper previously reported similar payments to related firm Data Sciences. Data Sciences is owned by Tom Pitfield, a childhood friend of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the party’s chief digital strategist during elections. Mr. Pitfield’s wife, Anna Gainey, was Liberal Party president from 2014 to 2018. Melissa Cotton, managing director of the LRB, said Data Sciences is being paid to provide “support and technical guidance to MPs’ offices” in using NGP VAN software for constituency casework. Election vibe: Justin Trudeau was in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., on Monday to give a steel plant up to $420 million to phase out coal-fired steelmaking in what looks like electioneering, the Canadian Press reports. Today will see another election-style announcement when Transport Minister Omar Alghabra announces a new high-frequency rail corridor connecting Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, CP reports. Trains on a new, dedicated line could go up to 200 kilometres an hour. Why the election framing? Polling shows the Liberals have a "pretty irresistible" lead, Ipsos pollster Darrell Bricker told the Hill Times. “They haven’t got a competitor who’s even remotely close—and their main opponent, the Conservative Party, has changed its leader to change its fortunes, and it hasn’t. In our polling Erin O’Toole is running eight points behind Andrew Scheer in the last election.” Frank Graves, president of Ottawa-based Ekos Research Associates Inc., said that if he were advising the Liberals, “I would go as soon as possible—as early as mid-July.” Mr. Graves said he believes the election call will come, as widely expected, next month with voting day in mid-to-late September. The Conservatives are polling badly, but the NDP is doing OK, perhaps because of Jagmeet Singh's TikTok game, the Star reports. Maclean's contributing editor Philippe J. Fournier breaks down the Ipsos poll and sees worrying trends for the Conservatives, including the Liberals leading among both men and women voters and among all age groups. Fournier also points to other recent polls showing O'Toole's unfavourable ratings. Analyzing federal polls since the 2015 election, one rule of thumb was that the CPC enjoys a hard floor of 30 per cent of national support—a floor higher than any other party at the federal level, including the Liberals. Yet, in 11 federal polls fielded in June, CPC support was measured between 26 and 30 per cent. Indeed, in the past month, the 30 per cent mark has been the CPC’s ceiling, not its floor. Stop the arson: Residential school survivors called for an end to arson attacks on churches on Monday, CBC reports. Jenn Allan-Riley, a 60's scoop survivor and the daughter of a residential school survivor, said the acts of vandalism are sowing discord between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada. "Burning down churches is not in solidarity with us Indigenous people," Allan-Riley told the press conference. "Whoever is doing this, you're going to wake up a very ugly, evil spirit in this country," she said. The head of a civil liberties group is being criticized for seeming to call for more such fires, Global reports. There have been at least seven fires at six B.C. churches since the initial discovery of the remains of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Five of those churches were completely destroyed, and RCMP are investigating the fires as suspicious. Good vaccine news: Writing in Maclean's Patricia Treble reports that a big pre-print study from Ontario suggests that the vaccines used in Canada—Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca—are very effective against the four big variants of concern. “Our findings suggest that even a single dose of these three vaccine products provides good to excellent protection against symptomatic infection and severe outcomes caused by the four currently circulating variants of concern, and that two doses are likely to provide even higher protection,” the authors concluded. The study’s results showed that being fully vaccinated gives a person roughly the same protection against Delta as Alpha, Beta and Gamma. The data shows that the vaccines are doing even better than previous studies suggested against the variants in terms of symptomatic infection as well as hospitalization and death. N.S. premier had DUIs: Iain Rankin disclosed Monday he had two drunk driving charges nearly 20 years ago, which looks like it might be clearing the air ahead of an election call, Global reports. Reflecting on McKenna: Russell Wangersky has a thoughtful column in the Regina Leader-Post reflecting on the retirement of Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna, who received more than her fair share of sexist abuse. I don’t care if you don’t like McKenna’s party. I don’t care if you don’t like her policies or her beliefs. I especially don’t care if you think you have some kind of right to say what you like because “she works for me.” No one deserves to be personally attacked on the job. Because women in senior positions in politics—and at many levels in journalism, for that matter—undergo personal attacks on a level no one should have to endure. Pierre tops Justin: Justin Trudeau's late father is more popular than his son, a poll shows. The poll also shows that Quebec Premier François Legault is so popular he even beats Doug Ford in Ontario. — Stephen Maher | 
