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      US military shoots down fourth flying object over North American airspace

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      US military shoots down fourth flying object over North American airspaceIncident involved third unidentified object downed by US and Canadian jets in recent days, and follows shooting of large balloon claimed by China The US military shot down a fourth flying object over North American airspace in a week on Sunday over Lake Huron in Michigan, confirmed the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer.The high-altitude unidentified object was the third to be downed by US and Canadian fighter jets in as many days, starting with a vessel about the size of a small car off the coast of Alaska on Friday, followed by a similar flying object over Yukon in Canada on Saturday. On 4 February, a large balloon which has been claimed by China was shot down off the coast of South Carolina.Shortly before news broke of the Lake Huron intervention, a Democratic Congress member from Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, revealed that she had heard from the US department of defense that the US military was keeping “an extremely close eye” on movements in that area. “Just got a call from [the defense department],” she posted on Twitter. “Be assured that all parties have been laser-focused on it from the moment it traversed our waters.”Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said on Twitter that federal officials were “tracking an object near [the state’s] airspace”.“I’m glad to report it has been swiftly, safely and securely taken down,” Whitmer’s tweet added.Earlier in the day the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had restricted civilian air traffic over Lake Michigan, as there were local reports of military jets in the area, but lifted them after a brief time. The FAA didn’t immediately say why it put the restrictions in place.More details soon …TopicsUS newsUS politicsUS militaryCanadaMichigannewsReuse this content More

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      Schumer says Chinese ‘humiliated’ after three flying objects shot down

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      Schumer says Chinese ‘humiliated’ after three flying objects shot down‘Chinese were caught lying’,’ says Senate majority leader as US and Canadian military scramble to recover pieces US and Canadian military are continuing to search by sea and land amid hostile weather conditions in a scramble to recover portions of three flying objects shot down over North American airspace in the past week.The Democratic majority leader of the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that he had been briefed by the White House and that officials were now convinced that all three of the flying objects brought down by air-to-air missiles this week were balloons. He put the finger of blame firmly on China.“The Chinese were humiliated – I think the Chinese were caught lying,” he said. “It’s a real setback for them.”Hours later a spokesperson for the White House national security council tried to tamp down some of Schumer’s rhetoric, saying it was too early to characterise the two latest flying objects shot down over Alaska and Canada. Definitive answers would have to wait for the debris to be recovered, the official said.Schumer said that US military and intelligence agencies were “focused like a laser” on gathering information on the flying objects and then analysing what steps needed to be taken to protect American interests in future. He called it “wild” that the US government had no idea about the balloon spying program until just “a few months ago”.US and Canadian personnel are now scrambling to retrieve elements of the balloons from all three crash sites. In the most recent case, an unidentified flying object was taken down within Canadian airspace on Saturday by F-22 fighter planes with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad.Canadian military on Sunday were attempting to reach pieces of the vessel in a remote, rugged area of Yukon. The object, described as cylindrical, had been flying at 40,000ft in Canadian territory and was considered a risk to civilian air traffic.Searches by US military are also continuing in difficult circumstances off the coasts of South Carolina and Alaska in the wake of the two previous interceptions. Some debris from the first balloon to be destroyed, the largest of the three objects, was shot down on 4 February about six miles off the South Carolina coast.Underwater survey and recovery teams have already retrieved pieces from the ocean floor 50ft down. The fragments are now being taken to military laboratories for analysis.US officials have told reporters that stormy seas are slowing the mission. The Chinese government has admitted that this balloon was its own, insisting though that it was used only for weather research.The Pentagon has disputed the characterization, saying that early indications suggest that the balloon was carrying powerful equipment that could intercept communications. The balloon, flying at 60,000ft, was tracked by US military for several days as it traversed the national airspace, having initially been spotted off the coast of Alaska on 28 January.The air force decided to wait until it was over the Atlantic before shooting it down out of concern for civilians on the ground, the Pentagon said.Schumer defended that decision on Sunday against mounting criticism from Republicans who have castigated the Joe Biden White House for failing to act immediately. By following the balloon across the country, the US had gained “enormous intelligence” on what the Chinese were doing, he said.Schumer predicted that the entire object would be pieced back together in coming days. “That’s a huge coup for the United States,” he told ABC’s This Week.A third search is being carried out in treacherous conditions off the coast of Alaska near Prudhoe Bay, a major oil drilling community. A flying object described by US officials as being roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle car was shot down by F-22 fighter jets using a Sidewinder air-to-air missle on Friday afternoon.Bits of the vessel have landed in frozen sea in an area of snow and ice which is very hard to navigate amid sub-zero temperatures. Retrieval teams are using helicopters and HC-130 search-and-rescue planes because naval boats are unable to reach the location.The confluence of three downed flying objects in a week has raised tension and jangled nerves on both sides of the US and Canadian border. As a sign of the jitters, late on Saturday night, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) closed parts of Montana’s airspace to air traffic after a “radar anomaly” was reported.Norad fighter jets were sent to scour the skies but reportedly found nothing. However, on Sunday, a Montana congressional representative, Matt Rosendale, tweeted slightly different information, saying military officials had advised him that they were confident an object was there and that it was not an anomaly.Additionally, on Sunday, the FAA similarly restricted civilian air traffic over Lake Michigan as there were local reports of military jets in the area but lifted them after a brief time. The FAA didn’t immediately say why it put the restrictions in place.The trio of flying objects has also generated political stresses internationally and domestically. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, postponed the first visit to Beijing by a senior American diplomat since 2018 in response to the high-altitude intrusion of the Chinese balloon.US officials have told news outlets that they have tracked the balloon program to a number of locations inside China.On the Chinese end of the billowing dispute, local news outlets cited by Bloomberg News reported on Sunday that China’s government was preparing to bring down an unidentified flying object said to have been spotted over the port of Qingdao. Fishermen in the surrounding area had been told to be alert, according to the reports.At home, the US congress has also seen rising tension between the new Republican leadership of the House and the Biden administration over the handling of the spy objects. Republicans were critical of the Pentagon’s decision to allow the Chinese balloon to fly across the heartlands of America before bringing it down, though they have been less forthright about explaining how it was that at least three suspected Chinese spying vessels entered US airspace under Donald Trump’s previous presidential administration apparently undetected.The Republican chair of the House intelligence committee, Mike Turner, on Sunday called on the Biden administration to be aggressive in its stance on the flying objects. “I would prefer them to be trigger happy than to be permissive,” he told CNN’s State of the Union.“This administration now needs to declare that it will defend its airspace.”Turner said that the three aerial objects in short succession exposed the gaps in US defenses. “What’s become clear in the public discussion is that we don’t really have adequate radar systems, we certainly don’t have an integrated missile defense system,” he said.TopicsUS militaryJoe BidenChinaUS politicsCanadaAlaskaEspionagenewsReuse this content More

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      Hazel McCallion, No-Nonsense Canadian Mayor for 36 Years, Dies at 101

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      Tough, pragmatic and brusque when she had to be, she helped transform Mississauga from a sleepy Toronto suburb into one of the country’s largest and most dynamic cities.Hazel McCallion, who as the longest-serving mayor in Canadian history transformed the sleepy Toronto suburb of Mississauga into a multicultural dynamo and the country’s sixth-largest city, died at her home there on Jan. 29, nine years after she ended her 36-year run. She was 101.Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and a close friend of Mrs. McCallion’s, said she died from pancreatic cancer.When Mrs. McCallion first won office, in 1978, Mississauga was a sprawling centerless community of about 250,000 people, little more than an extension of Toronto, its much larger neighbor to the east. Today it has a dense downtown core of skyscrapers, robust arts institutions and 750,000 people.And while Mississauga in the 1970s was overwhelmingly white, the city is now one of Canada’s most diverse, drawing immigrants from East and South Asia.Mrs. McCallion did not just survive but thrive through 12 terms by blending thrifty pragmatism with open-armed populism.Though she leaned slightly to the political left, she did not hew to a party platform or ideology. Her singular goal was to bring prosperity to Mississauga, which she did by keeping budgets trim — the city rarely carried debt or raised property taxes — and being unafraid to assert her city’s interests against its neighbors or in the Ontario provincial government.A copy of The Streetsville Booster, a community newspaper founded by Hazel and Sam McCallion, from 1978, the first year she ran for mayor of Mississauga. She won that election and went on to serve 12 terms.Cole Burston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Hazel McCallion does not caution,” the magazine Toronto Life wrote in 2003. “She berates. She harangues. She, well, bites off people’s heads.”But if politicians and bureaucrats feared her, voters loved her.After she decided not to run for re-election in 2014, she picked her successor, Bonnie Crombie, who won handily. No one was surprised: Mrs. McCallion left office with an 85 percent approval rating. They called her Hurricane Hazel, a tribute to her brash style more than a reference to the weather disaster that killed 80 people in Toronto in 1954.Her reputation was cemented just months after she took office, when a train carrying tons of toxic and flammable chemicals overturned near the middle of Mississauga. She immediately ordered most of the town, some 220,000 residents, to evacuate. Over several days she was there alongside the police and firefighters, ushering people to safety, undeterred by an ankle sprained along the way.And when it was over, she was fierce in her demand for damages.“It will be an astronomical sum,” she told reporters, “and somebody is going to get the bill.”Mrs. McCallion played professional hockey in the 1930s, and she remained the picture of ruddy health through her time as mayor, a fact that endeared her to voters. Even into her 80s, she carried a hockey stick in her car trunk, in case she came across a game. She fished, hiked and once, when she was 87, biked five miles to work to promote alternatives to driving.Mrs. McCallion in an undated photo. She won re-election repeatedly without campaigning or fund-raising, and she never faced serious opposition. Tara Walton for The New York TimesShe had come to politics from a career with an engineering company, starting in 1964 as a candidate for a municipal office in Streetsville, a village within Mississauga’s borders. After the two entities, along with a few others, combined to create the city of Mississauga, she moved effortlessly into the mayor’s office after defeating the incumbent by just 3,000 votes in her 1978 race.She never faced another serious opponent, and in two of her elections she didn’t face one at all, winning by acclamation. She did this without campaigning or fund-raising; she encouraged supporters eager to open their wallets to give to charity instead.“I don’t run a campaign, as you know,” she told the Canadian Press news agency in 2010. “I’m there with them four years. I don’t wait for an election to come along to campaign.”She was Mississauga’s chief booster, promoting it as a dynamic place that welcomed the businesses and the influx of immigrants entering Canada in the 1970s and ’80s.She was not without critics, who considered her imperious and even dictatorial. And she conceded that she kept a tight grip on the Mississauga City Council, allowing little dissent, at least in public.In 1982 and again in 2009, she was accused of failing to disclose conflicts of interest: first when land she and her husband owned was included in a possible development project, and later when she lobbied for a hotel project in which one of her sons was an investor.The first instance was not illegal at the time, and the second, which did go to court, was thrown out by a judge in 2013. Taken together, it was a record her defenders considered remarkably clean for a political career that began before most of her voters were born.A selection of McCallion memorabilia at the 2022 exhibition. “Having time on my hands is not acceptable,” she once said when asked if she thought about leaving office.Tara Walton for The New York TimesHazel Journeaux was born on Feb. 14, 1921, in Port-Daniel, a small town on the Gaspé Peninsula in southeast Quebec. Her father, Herbert, ran a fishing and processing company, and her mother, Amanda (Travers) Journeaux, was a nurse.The family moved to Montreal when Hazel was still a child, and after high school she took secretarial and business classes before being hired by M.W. Kellogg, an engineering company.She spent several years as a professional hockey player in Montreal, cementing a lifelong love for the sport. She played center for a team sponsored by Kick, a cola brand, and made $5 a game, the equivalent of about $65 in U.S. dollars today. In 1987 the Women’s World Hockey Championship named its trophy the Hazel McCallion World Cup.Her hockey career ended in 1940, when Kellogg opened an office in Toronto and she was sent to manage it.She married Sam McCallion in 1951. He died in 1997. She is survived by her sons, Peter and Paul; her daughter, Linda Burgess; and a granddaughter.Mrs. McCallion spent more than two decades as a manager with Kellogg before leaving to work with her husband and his printing business, and to get involved in politics in Streetsville. After three years on the village council, she was elected mayor of Streetsville in 1970.After the creation of the city of Mississauga, she served on its council for four years before being elected mayor in 1978 at age 57.Before, during and after her time as mayor, she led a backbreaking workday, rising at 5:30 and starting meetings at 7. She swatted away questions about leaving office, even long after most people her age would have retired.“Having time on my hands is not acceptable,” she told The Toronto Star in 2001, when she was 80. “If I quit, I’d have to find something very challenging to do. And what could be more challenging than being mayor?”After she finally did end her run as mayor in 2014, at 93, she continued to work. She served as the first chancellor of the Hazel McCallion Campus of Sheridan College, a Toronto-area technical school; she advised Mr. Ford, the Ontario premier; and she oversaw the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, a job that in 2019 took her on a tour of the world’s busiest airports.In a 2022 interview with the newspaper The National Post, she summed up her philosophy by recalling something her mother would ask her when she was young: “What do you want to accomplish in life? Do you want to be a follower or do you want to take advantage of opportunities to be a leader?” More

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      François Legault Wins Re-election in Quebec

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      Voters in Quebec gave a second term to Premier François Legault, who has shifted the province from a once fervent-independence movement to a nationalism focused on French Québécois identity.MONTREAL — Voters in Quebec overwhelmingly re-elected Premier François Legault to a second term on Monday, embracing his appeals to French Québécois identity in a campaign marked by heated debates over the inflow of immigrants to Canada’s French-speaking province.Mr. Legault’s party, Coalition Avenir Québec, won a majority of seats in the provincial legislature — significantly increasing its share of seats to 93 from 76 — with an agenda that emphasized an identity-based nationalism and pro-business policies, but set aside the long-held separatist goal of turning Quebec into an independent nation, according to preliminary election results after polls closed at 8 p.m.With his victory to another four-year term, Mr. Legault, 65, who co-founded a successful budget airline before entering politics and is known for his pragmatism, continued to reshape Quebec’s political landscape. The two parties that had enjoyed a lock on the province since the 1970s — the federalist, pro-business Liberal Party and the separatist, social democratic Parti Québécois — came in a distant second and fourth respectively.For Canada’s federal government, which is already facing a brewing separatist movement in the oil-rich province of Alberta, the electoral results in Quebec could lead to more demands by Mr. Legault for greater control over immigration policy and other potentially hot-button issues.Mr. Legault’s party won 43 percent of the popular vote, compared with 37 percent in 2018, and 93 seats in the 125-seat National Assembly, according to preliminary results. His support was strongest in the suburban and rural districts that are home to the highest percentage of French Québécois voters, according to polls before the election.In Montreal, the multicultural and ethnically diverse city that has sometimes been a punching bag for Mr. Legault’s allies, his party was expected to come in second place behind the Liberal Party.During the five-week campaign, Mr. Legault accused Montrealers of “looking down’’ on the people of Quebec City, the provincial capital, in one of several comments that, critics and opponents said, were meant to acts as wedges between the French Québécois majority and the province’s English-speaking and other ethnic, racial and religious minorities.Enjoying strong approval ratings thanks to his economic policies and his leadership during the pandemic, Mr. Legault appeared to want to coast to re-election by running a low-key campaign that both the French and English news media described as lackluster.But the polarizing issue of immigration became one of the campaign’s dominant themes, and its most divisive, after Mr. Legault linked immigration to violence and extremism. He apologized for his remarks, but later described increasing immigration as “suicidal” for Quebec’s French identity.Immigration is not a major political issue for much of the rest of Canada, with the federal government planning to significantly increase the number of immigrants allowed into the country over the next few years to fill labor shortages. But in Quebec — the province with the greatest control over immigration policy — the arrival of immigrants is seen as altering the French Québécois’ linguistic and Roman Catholic heritage.Mr. Legault wants to maintain an annual cap of 50,000 immigrants permitted to settle in the province of 8.7 million. With Quebec also facing labor shortages as well as a low birthrate and an aging population, some political opponents and most business groups want that level raised by tens of thousands more.Mr. Legault started his political career in the separatist, social democratic Parti Québécois, which, for decades, led the province’s independence movement. Fighting on behalf of a French-speaking majority that had felt historically oppressed by an economically dominant English-speaking minority, the Parti Québécois identified with liberation movements throughout the world.But even as Mr. Legault has pushed aside the idea of independence, he has tapped into an identity-based nationalism that, critics say, marginalizes the province’s non-French Québécois minorities. In his first term, Mr. Legault’s government has further restricted the use of English and has banned the wearing of religious symbols by some government workers in public places, in a move that, critics say, effectively targeted veiled Muslim women.If Mr. Legault has reshaped Quebec politics, his strong popularity among French Québécois voters has nearly wiped the separatist Parti Québécois off the electoral map. According to preliminary results, it won only two seats in Monday’s election. More

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      In Quebec, the Independence Movement Gives Way to a New Nationalism

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      In Monday’s election, residents of a town that was once a stronghold of the independence movement are expected to back the province’s popular premier, who has embraced a nationalism based on French Québécois identity.L’ASSOMPTION, Quebec — Residents in the small city of L’Assomption, Quebec, once overwhelmingly backed the province’s bid to break away from Canada in order to establish a French-speaking, independent nation.On Monday, though, they and much of the rest of the province are expected to strongly back the re-election of their popular premier, who has abandoned calls for independence — and instead has embraced a nationalism based on French Québécois identity.“It’s a conservative nationalism that recalls the themes of culture, history and memory,” said Jacques Beauchemin, a sociologist and a leading intellectual behind this shift. “It’s a return to the meaning of identity.”But to critics, this nationalism threatens the cohesion of the increasingly diverse province by taking aim at immigrants, English speakers and other minorities.In its four years in office, the government of the premier, Francois Legault, has banned the wearing of religious symbols like the Muslim veil in some public areas and has further restricted the use of English. In his campaign for the election, Mr. Legault has doubled down on the issue of immigration, describing it as a threat to Quebec society — a stance at odds with that of the federal government, which is planning to increase immigration sharply over the next few years.The position is also at odds with the stance of Montreal, the multicultural city where the premier’s popularity is comparatively weak.“With this electoral strategy, Mr. Legault is deepening the divide between Montreal and the rest of Quebec,’’ said Gérard Bouchard, a historian and sociologist who is a leading intellectual in the province. “The result of this strategy is to marginalize immigrants and ethnic minorities who are concentrated in Montreal.”A spokesman for Mr. Legault declined a request for an interview.Quebec’s premier, François Legault, is expected to easily win a second mandate.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesMr. Legault’s brand of nationalism departs sharply from the ideology behind the left-leaning secessionist movement, which sought autonomy for the French Québécois majority that felt historically oppressed by an English-speaking minority. That movement identified with progressive liberation movements throughout the world and was backed by young, urban voters in Quebec.A onetime businessman who co-founded a successful budget airline, Mr. Legault started his political career in the separatist, social democratic Parti Québécois, a group ideologically opposed to the federalist, pro-business Liberal Party. But a decade ago, Mr. Legault altered the political landscape when he founded a new party, Coalition Avenir Québec, which offered a third way. Rejecting secession from Canada, his party blends an identity-based nationalist agenda with pro-business policies.In places like L’Assomption, and among older French Québécois voters, his ideas have especially caught on.“He has spoken about the notion of being Québécois, about our pride and culture,’’ said Sébastien Nadeau, the mayor of L’Assomption.Mr. Legault — who represents the electoral district that includes L’Assomption — also partly owes his popularity to his economic policies, to the paternal figure he assumed during the pandemic and to a divided opposition, said Lisa Maureen Birch, a political scientist at Laval University and an editor of a book on the premier’s first term.Sébastien Nadeau, the mayor of L’Assomption, said that the recent arrival of immigrants was both a source of inspiration and fear.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesIn his campaign, Mr. Legault has had to backpedal several times after making comments that, his critics say, reveal the divisiveness of his nationalism. When Mr. Legault was questioned at a campaign stop about racism and the case of an Indigenous woman who died after filming herself being abused by hospital staff, he accused members of her Atikamekw First Nations community of not wanting to fix problems on the ground but of seeking to revive a pointless debate on systemic racism, which the premier denies exists in Quebec’s institutions.He later apologized to the woman’s family.Mr. Legault, who wants Quebec to gain more control from Ottawa over immigration policies, also apologized during the campaign after linking immigration to violence and extremism. And he apologized last week, after his immigration minister falsely said that “80 percent of immigrants go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.’’L’Assomption is a city of 24,000 people, nearly all of French Québécois origin. A river of the same name snakes around the city center, winding its way across a suburban and rural region with towns and roads with names pointing to Quebec’s Roman Catholic heritage.In the 1995 referendum on independence from Canada, 64 percent of the voters in L’Assomption’s electoral district said yes. In 2018, 57 percent voted for Mr. Legault, with the candidate of the pro-independence Parti Québécois finishing third.Located about 30 miles northeast of downtown Montreal, L’Assomption has only recently experienced the demographic changes that have affected Montreal for decades, said Mr. Nadeau, the mayor. Immigrants who used to rent in Montreal have started buying houses in the area as they seek more space, he said, adding that L’Assomption’s first ethnic restaurants opened just in recent years.Ralph Lorquet, 39, arrived in Quebec from Haiti when he was 16 and grew up close to L’Assomption, in Repentigny. Six months ago, his family took over this space from a defunct Portuguese restaurant and opened Lou Lou’s Casse Croûte, serving homemade Haitian fare. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times“Here, 10 years ago, we didn’t have a Haitian cafe or a Portuguese restaurant,” Mr. Nadeau said, adding that the immigrants’ arrival was both a source of inspiration and fear.On L’Assomption’s main commercial strip — which is called the Boulevard of the Guardian Angel and is lined with shops that give it a village-like feel — Normand Parisien, 68, a retired city employee, said he believed that L’Assomption was representative of a traditional Quebec and its psyche.“We feel threatened by multiethnicity because we’re a pretty homogeneous society,” said Mr. Parisien, who went to Montreal once a week to attend plays and modern dance performances before the pandemic. “It doesn’t frighten me that much personally. But all of this goes with language and religion; it’s all related. It’s who we are.’’The Legault government’s passing of the law banning the wearing of religious symbols was a response to this fear, especially of Muslim immigrants, Mr. Parisien said.“They don’t resemble us,” he said. “It’s a fear of the stranger.”In places like L’Assomption, and among older French Québécois voters, the premier’s ideas have especially caught on. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesOthers, like Nicole Robillard, 60, a retired hospital worker, said Mr. Legault was protecting French Québécois against immigrants who are trying to impose their values.“Why do people come here and try to change our culture? Why do they want to take away our crucifixes?” Ms. Robillard said, referring to the removal of the cross from the provincial legislature in 2019.Mr. Legault initially argued to keep the crucifix, saying it was not a religious symbol, but changed his position after the passage of the law on religious symbols.Critics say the law targets Muslims and fuels the debate over the place of veiled Muslim women in Quebec society. It embodies the transformation of Quebec nationalism, which saw itself as linked to other global liberation movements, into a reactionary force, said Jean-Pierre Couture, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa.“It has triggered — in the public debate, on the streets and in the metro — abuses against people who wear religious symbols, and that’s been transformed into votes at the ballot box,” Mr. Couture said. He added that the enemy of Quebec nationalism — American imperialism or an English-speaking Canada in the past — was now the veiled Muslim woman.Mr. Bouchard, the historian, traces the shift in Quebec nationalism to the separatists’ razor-thin loss in the 1995 referendum. The premier at the time, Jacques Parizeau — who also represented the electoral district of L’Assomption — blamed “money and ethnic votes” for the loss.Quebec’s changing nationalism is reflected in L’Assomption, a city of 24,000 people, nearly all of French Québécois origin.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesMr. Legault has described increasing immigration as “suicidal” for Quebec’s French identity — rejecting appeals by business leaders worried about the effects of a labor shortage and the province’s low birthrate.At Assomption-de-la-Sainte-Vierge Church — a Roman Catholic Church attended by aging French Québécois and younger immigrants from South America and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the Rev. Greg Ciszek worried about the effects of this anti-immigrant nationalism on the future of Quebec. It was a change from the Quebec he had come to as a 9-year-old immigrant from Poland, said Father Ciszek, now 41.“Now immigrants arrive and experience a rejection in part, a devaluation of their dignity,” Father Ciszek said.“If Quebec society wanted to perpetuate its French Canadian identity,” he said, “all it needed to do was have more children.”The Rev. Greg Ciszek said he was worried about the effects of anti-immigrant nationalism on the future of Quebec.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times More

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      Why Canada Races on Gun Policy When America Crawls

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      As Congress once more struggles through acrimonious and so far fruitless negotiations over gun reforms in the wake of a mass shooting, Americans may find themselves looking north in befuddlement.Canada’s government has begun moving to ban handgun sales and buy back military-style rifles — dramatic changes in a country with one of the world’s highest gun ownership rates outside of the United States, expected to pass easily and with little fuss.Ask Americans why Canada’s government seems to cut through issues that mire their own in bitterness and frustration, and you might hear them cite cultural differences, gentler politics, even easygoing Canadian temperaments.But ask a political scientist, and you’ll get a more straightforward answer.Differences in national culture and issues, while meaningful, do not on their own explain things. After all, Canada also has two parties that mostly dominate national politics, an urban-rural divide, deepening culture wars and a rising far-right. And guns have been a contentious issue there for decades, one long contested by activist groups.Rather, much of the gap in how these two countries handle contentious policy questions comes down to something that can feel invisible amid day-to-day politicking, but may be just as important as the issues themselves: the structures of their political systems.Canada’s is a parliamentary system. Its head of government, Justin Trudeau, is elevated to that job by the legislature, of which he is also a member, and which his party, in collaboration with another, controls.If Mr. Trudeau wants to pass a new law, he must merely ask his subordinates in his party and their allies to do it. There is no such thing as divided government and less cross-party horse-trading and legislative gridlock.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada with government officials and gun-control activists, during a news conference about firearm-control legislation in Ottawa, Ontario, on Monday.Blair Gable/ReutersCanada is similar to what the United States would be if it had only a House of Representatives, whose speaker also oversaw federal agencies and foreign policy.What America has instead is a system whose structure simultaneously requires cooperation across competing parties and discourages them from working together.The result is an American system that not only moves slower and passes fewer laws than those of parliamentary models like Canada’s, research has found, but stalls for years even on measures that enjoy widespread support among voters in both parties, such as universal background checks for gun purchases.Many political scientists argue that the United States’ long-worsening gridlock runs much deeper than any one issue or the interest groups engaged with it, to the basic setup of its political system.The Perils of PresidentsThe scholar Juan Linz warned in a much-discussed 1990 essay, as much of the developing and formerly Soviet worlds moved to democracy, that those countries not follow what he called one of the foundational flaws of the United States: its presidency.“The vast majority of the stable democracies in the world today are parliamentary regimes,” Dr. Linz wrote.Presidential systems, on the other hand, tended to collapse in coups or other violence, with only the United States having persisted since its origin.It’s telling that when American diplomats and technocrats help to set up new democracies abroad, they almost always model them on European-style parliaments.Subsequent research has found that parliamentary systems also perform better at managing the economy and advancing rule of law than presidencies, if only for the comparative ease with which they can implement policy — witnessed in Canada’s rapid response to gun violence or other crises.Gun control activists during a rally in Washington last week.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesAmerica’s legislative hurdles, requiring cooperation across the president, Senate and House to pass laws, are raised further by the fact that all three are elected under different rules.None represents a straight national majority. Presidential elections favor some states over others. The Senate tilts especially toward rural voters. All three are elected on different schedules. As a result, single-party control is rare. Because competing parties typically control at least one of those three veto points on legislation, legislation is frequently vetoed.Americans have come to accept, even embrace, divided government. But it is exceedingly uncommon. While Americans may see Canada’s legislative efficiency as unusual, to the rest of the world it is American-style gridlock that looks odd.Still, America’s presidential system does not, on its own, explain what makes it function so differently from a country like Canada.“As long as things are moderate, a presidential system is not so bad,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist who studies political reform.Rather, he cited that America is nearly alone in combining a presidency with winner-take-all elections.Zero-Sum ContestsProportional votes, common in most of the world, award seats to each party based on its share of the vote.Under American-style elections, the party that wins 51 percent of a race controls 100 percent of the office it elects, while the party with 49 percent ends up with nothing.This all but ensured that politics would coalesce between two parties because third-ranked parties rarely win office. And as those two parties came to represent geographically distinct electorates struggling for national control, their contests took on, for voters, a sensation of us-versus-them.Canada, too, has winner-take-all elections, a practice inherited from Britain. Still, neither of those countries hold presidential contests, which pit one half of the nation against the other.And in neither country do the executive and legislative branches share power, which, in times of divided government, extends the zero-sum nature of American elections into lawmaking, too. And not only on issues where the parties’ supporters disagree.Mourners gathered at Newtown High School in Connecticut in 2012 for a service for those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.Luke Sharrett for The New York TimesIn 2013, shortly after a gunman killed 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., polls found that 81 percent of Republicans supported background checks for gun purchases. But when asked whether the Senate should pass such a bill — which would have required Republicans to side with the then-Democratic majority — support dropped to 57 percent. The measure never passed.The episode was one of many suggesting that Americans often privilege partisan victory, or at least denying victory to the other side, over their own policy preferences, the scholar Lilliana Mason wrote in a book on partisanship.“Even when policy debates crack open and an opportunity for compromise appears,” Dr. Mason wrote, “partisans are psychologically motivated to look away.”Unstable MajoritiesStill, there is something unusual to Canada’s model, too.Most parliamentary systems, as in Europe, elect lawmakers proportionally. Voters select a party, which takes seats in the legislature proportional to their overall vote share. As a result, many different parties end up in office, and must join in a coalition to secure a governing majority. Lawmaking is less prone to gridlock than in America but it’s not seamless, either: the prime minister must negotiate among the parties of their coalition.Canada, like Britain, combines American-style elections, which produce what is not quite a two-party system in those countries but is close, with European-style parliaments.As a result, Canada’s prime minister usually oversees a legislative majority, allowing him or her to breeze through legislation even more easily than in European-style parliaments.Handguns on display in Maple Ridge, British Columbia.Jennifer Gauthier/ReutersThis moment is an exception: Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party controls slightly less than half of the House of Commons. Still, his party dominates a legislative alliance in which he has only one partner. Canada also includes a Senate, though its members are appointed and rarely rock the boat.But the Canadian system produces what Dr. Drutman called “unstable majorities,” prone to whiplashing on policy.“If you have a 52 percent margin for one party, and then you throw the bums out because four percent of the vote went the other way, now you’ve moved completely in the other direction,” he said.Gun laws are a case in point. After a 1989 mass shooting, Canadian lawmakers passed registration rules, but phased them in over several years because they were unpopular among rural communities.Those rules were later abolished under a Conservative government. Though Mr. Trudeau has not reimposed the registry, he has tightened gun laws in other ways.In a European-style system, by contrast, a four-point shift to the right or left might change only one party in the country’s governing coalition, prompting a slighter policy change more proportional to the electorate’s mood.American liberals may thrill at the seeming ease with which Canada’s often-left-leaning government can implement policy, much as conservatives may envy Britain’s more right-wing, but similarly rapid, lawmaking under a similar system.But it is the slow-and-steady European model, with its frustratingly incremental advances, that, over the long run, research finds, tend to prove the most stable and effective. More

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      in Elections

      At 101, and After 36 Years as Mayor, ‘Hurricane Hazel’ Is Still a Force in Canada

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      After playing pro hockey in the 1940s, Hazel McCallion entered politics at a time when few women held high office, leading a major Canadian city through epic growth. Her endorsements still matter.MISSISSAUGA, Ontario — On Valentine’s Day, she first took a call from Justin Trudeau. Next, she joined Ontario’s premier at the unveiling of a new commuter train line to be named in her honor.By 4:30 p.m. that day — her 101st birthday — Hazel McCallion had arrived at a shopping mall, where she took a seat in a rocking chair behind a velvet rope at an exhibition about her life and began accepting bouquets and tributes from dozens of fans.Slightly taller than five feet, Ms. McCallion commanded attention from towering well wishers, just as she has commanded respect in Canadian politics for decades.She has been a force in Canadian politics for longer than just about anyone alive, even though she began her career in middle age.She mounted her first campaign for elected office in 1966, five years before Mr. Trudeau, the prime minister, was born.When in 1978 she was first elected mayor of Mississauga, a Toronto suburb, her City Hall office looked out on cows.By the time she left office, 36 years later at the age of 93, the fields had been replaced with condo towers, a college campus, a transit hub and shopping centers in what is now Canada’s seventh largest city, granting her a moniker she isn’t so fond of, “the queen of sprawl.”An exhibition about Ms. McCallion’s life at the Erin Mills Town Center in Mississauga, Ontario.Tara Walton for The New York TimesShe prefers the nickname “Hurricane Hazel,” an ode to her brash style — though a devastating storm with the same name, which killed about 80 people around Toronto in 1954, was still fresh in local memory when she earned it.Just months into her first term, she gained a national profile for managing a mass evacuation of close to 220,000 residents after a train derailment in 1979.The dramatic event was ordained the “Mississauga Miracle” because of the success of the emergency response after two-dozen rail cars transporting hazardous chemicals erupted in flames at an intersection in the city.No one died, and one of the few people injured was Ms. McCallion, who sprained her ankle rushing around to work on the evacuation. She had to be carried into some meetings by emergency responders.“A job was to be done,” Ms. McCallion said, “and I did it.”As mayor, she was known for an uncompromising leadership style, a take-no-prisoners bluntness and a political independence that meant she never ran under the banner of any party.“It’s not like she’s had consistent positions all these years,” said Tom Urbaniak, a professor of political science at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia and the author of a book about Mississauga’s sprawl during Ms. McCallion’s time in office. “She was very, very pragmatic and that was part of her political recipe.”A photo of Ms. McCallion on display at an exhibit entitled “Hazel: 100 Years of Memories.”Her hockey skills were also renowned — she played professionally — and in the political arena, they translated into a willingness to deliver bruising checks on opponents.“Everybody sort of genuflected to Hazel because she was this little dynamo,” said David Peterson, a former Liberal premier of Ontario between 1985 and 1990. “She’s a team player, if she’s running the team. But I can’t imagine having Hazel in a cabinet,” he added. “She’s not a comfortable follower.”She was 57 when she became Mississauga’s mayor, at a time when there were few women holding significant political office in Canada.But sitting for an interview in the living room of her home in Mississauga a few days after her 101st birthday celebrations, Ms. McCallion was characteristically curt in dismissing discussion of any of the sexism she may have encountered.“I’ve had very strong male support because I’m independent,” she said. “And they know that I am not a wallflower.”In her successful first campaign for Mississauga mayor, her opponent, the incumbent, regularly repeated patronizing references to her gender, which helped rally support for her. She defeated him and never lost an election after that, coasting to victory in most subsequent elections by outsize margins.Mississauga’s city hall, the former workplace of Ms. McCallion.Tara Walton for The New York TimesHer home in Mississauga is decorated with the mementos and celebrity photos one might expect from such a long political career. Less typically, hockey jerseys with numbers commemorating her 99th, 100th and 101st birthdays are hung over the spiral banister across from her dining room.Among all the objects, she said the one she holds most dear is a clock from her hometown, Port Daniel, on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. The youngest of five children, Ms. McCallion was born in a farmhouse and grew up during the Great Depression.“When you have to leave home at 14 and you’re a Depression kid, you have to become completely independent,” she said. “You don’t call home for money.”She spent her high school years studying in Montreal and Quebec City, and credits her mother, a nurse, for instilling in her the confidence to take on the world. She later finished secretarial school, got a job managing an engineering firm’s office in Montreal — and started playing professional hockey for five dollars a game.She played from 1940 to 1942 in a women’s league with three teams and was known for her speed on the ice. She had to get two bottom teeth replaced following a stick to the mouth in a particularly rough game. In her 2014 memoir, “Hurricane Hazel: A Life With Purpose,” she wrote, “Considering the dental cost, I guess I broke even on my professional hockey career.”The engineering firm relocated her to Toronto, which had no women’s league, so she stopped playing hockey for pay, but continued to skate, fast, until about three years ago. She left the firm after more than two decades to help her husband manage his printing business, and she became more involved in the business community of Streetsville, Ontario, at the time an independent suburb of Toronto.Ms. McCallion and her late husband Sam.Tara Walton for The New York TimesA signed photo from Celine Dion hangs in Ms. McCallion’s kitchen.Tara Walton for The New York TimesShe said she was frustrated by the boys’ club running the town and was appointed to its planning board, eventually chairing it. She served as mayor of Streetsville from 1970 to 1973, before it was amalgamated with Mississauga.Her husband, Sam McCallion, died in 1997. The couple had three children. “I had a wonderful husband,” Ms. McCallion said. “He stood back. He looked after his business, and he let me look after the politics, so we worked extremely well together.”As Mississauga grew rapidly during her time as mayor, her tenure was not without its detractors. She became known for stamping out expressions of dissent at City Hall, with the political horse trading occurring in private, which made for blandly accordant council meetings, said Mr. Urbaniak, the political scientist.“Some of the serious conversation and debate unfortunately happened behind closed doors in order to try to present this unified front,” Mr. Urbaniak said. “It seemed a little eerie.”Perhaps a product of so many decades spent in politics, Ms. McCallion tends to talk in aphorisms and mantras: No decision is worse than a bad one, make everyday count, negativity is bad for your health, have a purpose. And her favorite: “Do your homework.”“I’ve had very strong male support because I’m independent,” Ms. McCallion said. “And they know that I am not a wallflower.”Tara Walton for The New York TimesOne of the rare times she seemed to have not done her homework led to conflict-of-interest allegations and a subsequent court case that was dismissed by a judge in 2013.Ms. McCallion claimed to not have known the extent of her son’s ownership stake in a real estate company that proposed to develop land near City Hall into an upscale hotel, convention center and condominiums. The project was scrapped, with the land used instead for the Hazel McCallion campus at Sheridan College.“Unfortunately, my son, he had heard me talk so often that we needed a convention center in the city core,” she said. “He attempted to do it and tried to convince others to support him.”In her memoir, Ms. McCallion insists that she always put the interests of residents first and denounces the multimillion dollar cost to taxpayers for a judicial inquiry “so that my political opponents could try to extract their pound of flesh from me.”Since retiring as mayor in 2014, she has kept an exhausting schedule — rising at 5:30 a.m., supporting campaigns for local causes and making frequent stops at the exhibition, or as she calls it, “my museum,” to meet with community groups.People continue to seek out her presence and her political blessing, including Bonnie Crombie, whom she endorsed — some say anointed — to take her place as mayor.Ms. McCallion spends a good amount of time at the exhibit, one leg crossed over the other in her rocking chair, receiving visitors who thank her, she said, “for creating a great city.”“If you build a sound foundation,” she said, “then nobody can ruin it.” More