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Canada Today: Political Donations, a Young Captain and Top Films

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada with supporters in Kingston, Ontario, on Jan. 12. Mr. Trudeau took off on a nationwide tour that included town hall-style events.Credit...Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

Recently, we looked at two situations involving how Canadian politicians raise money and the murky world of conflicts of interests in politics.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was already under scrutiny for attending small fund-raisers, where the price of admission was a donation of 1,500 Canadian dollars. Now that’s been followed by an ethics investigation of his family’s vacation on a private island owned by the Aga Khan, the billionaire philanthropist and spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims.

While his office didn’t acknowledge any direct connection with the investigations, Mr. Trudeau passed on a return appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in favor of a cross-Canada roadshow. It’s focused on small towns and cities, and appears to be an attempt to demonstrate that the prime minister doesn’t just hang around with wealthy people and Liberal party donors.

I wrote about Mr. Trudeau’s stop at a packed banquet hall in Peterborough, Ontario. While not everyone got to ask a question — the crowd was so large that might have taken more than a day — there was clearly no attempt to prescreen those who did. So Mr. Trudeau faced some tough and pointed challenges.

While Mr. Trudeau’s answers, which included acknowledging that he doesn’t have pat solutions for some problems, generally pleased the crowd, things looked less promising for Kathleen Wynne, Ontario’s Liberal premier. There was considerable anger in the room about increases in electricity prices in the province.

Several people in Peterborough and some readers online have told me that they don’t view the fund-raisers and Mr. Trudeau’s vacation as particularly important issues. Tell us what you think.

Out in British Columbia, Dan Levin looked into the pay arrangements of Christy Clark, the premier. On top of her taxpayer-funded salary of 195,000 dollars, Ms. Clark receives another 50,000 dollars from a fund financed by donors to her Liberal Party. (The province’s Liberal Party is not affiliated with Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party but is a right-of-center group with links to the federal Conservative Party.)

Mr. Levin found that unlike many other Canadian provinces, British Columbia has no limits on political donations. “Much of what is considered business as usual in British Columbia is illegal elsewhere in Canada,” he wrote.

The story prompted debate in the province and several news outlets interviewed Mr. Levin about his findings.

Timekeeper Kathleen Beckett profiled Dan Tanenbaum, a Toronto watch collector. Many of Mr. Tanenbaum’s watches come from Derek Dier, a dealer in London, Ontario, who also supplied vintage watches to the producers of “Mad Men.” When he isn’t establishing internet start-ups or buying watches, Mr. Tanenbaum builds tiny motorcycle models out of watch parts.

Ice Time Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers is the youngest National Hockey League player to be a team captain. McDavid, who turned 20 this week, had a truncated N.H.L. debut last season. “Now closing in on 100 games and already past 100 career points, McDavid has earned the admiration of his contemporaries and hockey’s old guard,” Andrew Knoll wrote of the player who many see as a generational talent.

Film Time The Toronto International Film Festival has issued its annual list of what a panel of experts determined to be Canada’s best films of 2016. They’re now playing in the Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival. For Canada’s 150th anniversary, some classics of Canadian cinema are also on the program at the Toronto screenings. Adam Cook has gone through the latest selections and found that some entries “may appear in step with preconceptions of Canadian film identity, but a majority are notably fresh.”

Border Security Stephen R. Kelly, a retired United States foreign service officer who was stationed in Canada and Mexico, said in an Opinion essay that a much better alternative to the wall with Mexico that President Donald J. Trump has proposed can be found in Canada. It is, he said, the longstanding system in which American border agents prescreen travelers at Canadian airports. If Parliament approves, that system will soon be expanded and American agents will be allowed to carry guns in Canada. “The best way to secure our border is not to wall off our continental neighbors, as the president-elect has promised to do with Mexico, but to actively engage them,” Mr. Kelly wrote.

Here are some articles from The Times over the last week, not necessarily related to Canada and perhaps overlooked, that I found interesting:

—In The New York Times Magazine, Lily Brooks-Dalton offered an essay about a motorcycle trip with two other women through British Columbia and Alberta.

—Steve Hayes may not own a car but he does have 13,500 automobile marketing brochures, most of which are about to go to auction.

—Wayne Barrett, the muckraking columnist who challenged politicians and developers, including Donald J. Trump, over four decades on the pages of The Village Voice in New York has died at the age of 71.

—The company that makes Vegemite, the yeasty spread that only Australians seem to love, is being sold by its longtime American owner to an Australian cheesemaker. “Hugh Jackman, an Australian, once compared it to something scraped off the floor of a gas station,” Michelle Innis reported.

A correction was made on 
Jan. 21, 2017

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the premier of British Columbia. She is Christy Clark, not Christie.

How we handle corrections

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for over a decade. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

Tell us what you think at CanadaToday@nytimes.com. And, using the link above, please subscribe to the email newsletter version.

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