Canada faces Switzerland today at the FIFA World Cup, while Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks with U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of the NATO Summit.

Carney’s office issued a one-sentence statement about today’s call that does not say what the two leaders discussed.

Turkey will host the annual summit July 7 to 8 in its capital Ankara.

The summit comes after Trump launched a costly war with Iran and as Ukraine gains momentum in the war with Russia.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan will visit Canada on Thursday and Friday ahead of the NATO summit.

Carney and Trump spoke to each other this month at the G7 summit in France but did not have a formal meeting, and Carney has not always reported his conversations with Trump.

The Canadian Press has more. 

Also, the federal government is moving to designate Nunavut’s Grays Bay road and port, the Mackenzie Valley highway in the Northwest Territories and a nuclear waste repository in northwestern Ontario as the first projects of national interest under the Building Canada Act.

Consultations are expected this summer, with official designations to potentially follow in the fall.

The national interest status carries benefits, most notably a single conditions document replacing the separate permits that would otherwise be required across multiple federal departments.

The federal government’s ability to fast-track the review of the projects has its limits, though. For the Arctic projects, the assessments fall under co-management boards created through modern land claims agreements.

Northwest Territories Finance Minister Caroline Wawzonek pushed back on concerns that the federal government could pressure Indigenous and territorial governments to speed up approvals, saying fast-tracking “gets a bit of a bad name.”

Aya Dufour has more. 

The Yukon government says cellular service in the territory continues to have persistent “deficiencies,” with negative implications for public safety, emergency response and economic activity.

The territory’s government sent letters to Bell Canada CEO Mirko Bibic, CRTC chair Vicky Eatrides, and Industry Minister Mélanie Joly last week outlining long-standing concerns about “coverage gaps and service instability” in Yukon.

The letter to Bibic says mobile services in the territory are not “discretionary,” but rather “essential public infrastructure” due to Yukon’s climate and geography, where unstable cell service heightens risks compared to more populated areas.

The letter to Eatrides says the regulator should consider using “regulatory levers” and other tools to improve services in the territory, where remote areas have been marginalized in the context of “national network strategies.”

CP’s got this one too. 

In Other Headlines

Internationally

Elsewhere, dozens of Israelis from the country’s security, political and cultural elite have threatened legal action against their government over support for Jewish terrorism and an “ideology of ethnic cleansing” in the occupied West Bank, according to a leaked letter.

Two former prime ministers, former heads of all the Israeli security services, former judges, a Nobel laureate and the country’s most revered living novelist were among the signatories to a “final warning” over violence against Palestinians.

They demanded immediate action to “eradicate Jewish terrorism”, cataloguing years of attacks – including murder, sexual assault, theft, arson and desecration of the dead – by civilian and military perpetrators who acted with “almost complete impunity”.

The campaign of extreme violence against Palestinians broke Israeli and international law, put Israel’s security at risk, isolated the country internationally and fuelled antisemitism around the world, they said.

The Guardian has more. 

Meanwhile, roughly an hour before President Trump was set to sign bipartisan housing legislation on Capitol Hill alongside the Republican leaders of both chambers, he imploded the plan in a social media post, denying his party a key affordability-focused win to promote ahead of the midterms.

Trump wrote in the post on Wednesday that he would not sign the legislation until Congress passed the strict voter ID law he has been pushing for months, the Save America Act.

The last-minute swerve is just the latest example of Trump abruptly changing course, leaving his colleagues on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to deal with the fallout.