Hillary Clinton: friend or foe to Canada?

On The House midweek podcast, Chris catches up with NPR reporter Tamara Keith on the Hillary Clinton campaign trail. What might a possible Clinton presidency mean for Canada? The co-host of NPR's Politics podcast fills us in on the latest controversies to hit the Democrat campaign this week — and shares the three questions she'd like to ask Clinton to clarify. 

• Analysis: Hillary Clinton's edge over Donald Trump gets less comfortable
• Hillary Clinton email scrutiny continues as 15,000 more documents are reviewed
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On the Clinton Foundation's political headache

"It is dominating headlines this week. The other challenge, from a journalistic perspective, is that Hillary Clinton hasn't had a press conference, a formal opportunity to take questions from reporters, in more than 260 days. So there's a lot of pent-up demand to ask questions about this. 

I think that if we could get into the Clinton campaign's mind, they would say, 'why do a press conference, why take questions, when all we're going to be asked about is the Clinton Foundation and the emails?'"

I think that if we could get into the Clinton campaign's mind, they would say why do a press conference, why take questions, when all we're going to be asked about is the Clinton foundation and the emails?

On the email controversy

"She's never had a satisfying answer on the email question. Her answer generally has been, 'I was following the rules, it was a mistake, I regret it.' But she just hasn't been able to extinguish [the question] in any way. Regardless of how this election turns out, we are likely to be continuing to hear about Hillary Clinton's emails well past election day."

On Canada-U.S. elections under a possible Clinton presidency

"I think [relations] would continue as they are under President Obama. The big question mark would be trade, and whether she would modify the position that the Obama administration has had. The interesting thing about trade and the thing we won't know unless she's elected ius that often candidates for President have expressed anti-trade views, or views that are stand-offish, and then they get into office and then suddenly they're signing trade deals or participating in negotiations. So one question is if she'd change her posture towards TPP and NAFTA as President."

The Liberals said they'd 'end the war on science' — so what have they done?

The Liberals came into power promising to end what they called 'the war on science'. 

But in reality, a year removed from the election campaign, what has that amounted to? What has happened to key promises like "unmuzzling scientists" and creating a chief science officer?

For starters, watch out for an announcement on the latter promise in the near future, says Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan.

"We've just finished the analysis. I'm hoping we have an announcement in the next while that we will be launching the search for the chief science officer. We want to open this up to Canadians," Duncan, who holds a PhD in geography, says. 

She adds the role of the chief science officer will be to provide advice to cabinet ministers, and that her own role is "to be a champion for science, for scientific evidence, and for researchers across this country."

Duncan's mandate letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau outlined her responsibility to ensure government scientists can speak freely about their work to the media, and that their analyses are considered in decision-making.​

"The big thing is that scientific evidence is at the cabinet table," she says.