Happy Victoria Day! You’d think a long weekend would mean a slower news cycle, but Ottawa rarely takes a full day off — here are a few headlines worthy of attention this evening.

The U.S. undersecretary of defence said Monday that the United States is pausing a long-standing military board, claiming “Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defence commitments.”

In a post on social media, Elbridge Colby said his department is pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defence “to reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defence.”

The board was established in 1940 and is an advisory forum for U.S.-Canada bilateral defence co-operation.

Colby said the United States can “can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality” in the post, where he shared a link to a transcript of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Carney never mentioned U.S. President Donald Trump during the widely applauded speech where he described a “rupture in the world order.”

The Canadian Press has more. 

Also, the federal government has lost its request for an extension to implement the terms of the Nicholas ruling.

In a decision released Friday, the B.C. Supreme Court rejected Ottawa’s application to delay the deadline until October, ramping up the pressure to pass Bill S-2 when the House resumes sitting next week.

That bill would make changes to comply with last year’s B.C. court decision, which ordered Ottawa to restore Indian status to the descendants of enfranchised First Nations peoples.

Ottawa was requesting a six-month extension.

A request last month to extend the deadline to the end of the May to wait for the decision was granted.

The feds have 30 days to appeal. If that period elapses with no further extension granted, the Nicholas ruling will go into effect.

Marco Vigliotti has more. 

Conservative MP Michael Chong is travelling to Taiwan this week in a self-described bid to assert Canadian sovereignty.

Travelling on his own expenses, the former cabinet minister says the trip is to show solidarity with Taiwan, and also to spite China’s ambassador to Canada.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail last month, Beijing’s envoy to Canada said any MPs travelling to Taiwan would risk damaging the new partnership between the two countries Prime Minister Mark Carney signed this year.

In a news release, Chong said Canadians “do not take direction from a foreign government about where Canadian MPs can travel internationally.”

Chong said he will be meeting with Dr. Lai Ching-te, President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and officials at the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei.

CP’s got this one too. 

In Other Headlines

Internationally

Elsewhere, the world is becoming less resilient to outbreaks of infectious diseases, experts have warned, as health authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda scramble to contain an outbreak of Ebola.

The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a report published on Monday that “as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent they are also becoming more damaging”, warning that pandemic risk is outpacing investments in preparedness and “the world is not yet meaningfully safer”.

Disease outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the climate crisis and armed conflict, while collective action is being undermined by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial self-interest, the report said.

The GPMB is a group of experts established in 2018 by the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) after the first large scale Ebola outbreak in west Africa and just before Covid-19. Its latest findings come amid global attention on the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship and a day after the declaration of an international public health emergency after at least 87 Ebola deaths in the DRC.

The Guardian has more. 

Meanwhile, ⁠Russian drones have hit two ships in the Black Sea approaching ports in Ukraine, including a Chinese-owned vessel, one day before Russian President Vladimir Putin heads to Beijing to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

Ukraine’s seaports ⁠authority said the strikes hit two civilian vessels on Monday, one under a Marshall Islands flag and the other under Guinea-Bissau’s flag, both of which were heading to ports in the Odesa region.

The Ukrainian navy ‌reported a strike on the KSL Deyang, the Chinese-owned cargo ship with a Chinese crew under the Marshall Islands flag. It posted a photograph of the ship showing its name with one of its sides partially charred.

Russia has regularly attacked civilian vessels in the port area of Odesa, a vital maritime hub for Ukrainian agricultural exports, since it invaded Ukraine four years ago. Monday’s attack comes just before Putin’s two-day trip to Beijing, where he is to have talks with Xi.

Read more from Al Jazeera. 

In Other International Headlines

The Kicker

Canada’s rapper and former Degrassi cast Drake released his latest album, Iceman, last Friday.

This newsletter writer is still letting the album thaw out before forming a cogent take, but Canadaland took the moment to ask a broader question: why hasn’t Canada fully embraced on of its biggest global stars?

More from Canadaland here.