We’re starting off this evening’s newsletter with the Senate.

The federal Liberals are set to make legislation to extend a pause on the federal fuel tax a top priority when Parliament resumes sitting later this month.

It’s expected to easily clear the House of Commons as the Liberals hold a majority and the opposition Conservatives are fighting to claim credit for the idea in the first place.

But what about the Senate?

A spokesperson for Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the minister is already holding talks with MPs and has begun “engaging” with members of the Senate on supporting the bill.

John Fragos said Champagne wants the bill to pass quickly, but it’s ultimately up to the senators to determine the pace of their own study.

While the bill hasn’t been introduced yet, the government has publicly posted the draft version, consisting of only several passages.

Marco Vigliotti has more. 

Also, splitting the rent with a roommate has long been one way to make living in a major city more affordable. But even as asking rents fall across most of Canada’s major rental markets, that may still not be enough.

An iPolitics analysis found average asking rents for a two-bedroom fell year-over-year in six of seven major cities examined. But half the cost of a two-bedroom would still eat up nearly 39 per cent of the median individual income in Vancouver and 36 per cent in Toronto, compared with about 20 per cent in Edmonton.

Between 2001 and 2021, roommate households were the fastest-growing household type in Canada, having increased by 54 per cent – it rose 14 per cent in 2016 alone, according to Statistics Canada.

The analysis compared average asking rents for two-bedroom apartments with median individual incomes, vacancy rates and year-over-year changes in asking rent across seven cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa/Gatineau, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal and Winnipeg.

Sydney Ko reports. 

The immigration minister has quietly ended a policy that helped some refugees sponsor their children or partners for permanent residency, while offering refugee advocates no explanation for the change.

The temporary policy allowed certain refugees to sponsor family members who were not initially declared on their own applications.

Under current rules, a permanent resident normally is barred from sponsoring a family member if they did not name them in their documentation.

Permanent resident applicants are required to declare all immediate family members for medical and security screening purposes, even if they aren’t coming to Canada.

Advocates and academics successfully argued those rules created gaps that could prevent children and LGBTQ+ partners from being sponsored for permanent residency.

The Canadian Press has more. 

In Other Headlines

Internationally

Elsewhere, Yemen’s rampant Houthi forces have captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait, expanding their control of the narrow waterway, one of the ​world’s vital shipping routes.

The Iran-aligned Houthis took control of the volcanic island after forces allied to the UN-backed, Aden-based government left in the latest of a dramatic series of reverses along Yemen’s west coast in recent days, including the loss of the port city of Mocha on Thursday.

Saudi Arabia, which supports and bankrolls the official Yemen government, mounted air raids on Houthi positions in Mocha on Friday.

The Bab al-Mandab strait links Asia to Europe via the Red Sea and Suez canal. Perim island, also known as Mayun, divides the waterway in two, close to its narrowest point. The United Arab Emirates, a former Saudi ally in the anti-Houthi coalition, had been building an airbase on the island before ending its active involvement in the conflict in January.

The Guardian has more. 

The worst measles resurgence in the U.S. in decades keeps growing. Vaccination rates keep falling. Flu, COVID-19, and RSV keep coming back. Against this backdrop, many public health experts are worried about the reliability of health information coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Red flag. Red alert,” says Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned last year as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protest what he called political interference at the agency.

Daskalakis and other independent public health authorities around the country are alarmed by how the CDC handled two deaths that Pennsylvania state officials recently blamed on measles. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the unprecedented step of questioning the deaths, and the CDC removed them from the agency’s website.

“When they raise doubt on the adjudication that a state may have made around a death, that is highly problematic,” says Daskalakis. “This is dangerous.”

Read more from NPR. 

In Other International Headlines

The Kicker

And finally… the Conservatives may be fighting a trade war, but there appears to be a little friendly fire at home, too.

As Pierre Poilievre tours the U.S. making the case for tariff-free trade, Conservative MP Jamil Jivani took to social media to lament that those who “should be offering an alternative to the Liberals” are instead trying to appease people in power.

He didn’t name names… but Jason Kenney  called him out for trying “to step on Pierre’s tour-de-force trip by posting a self-indulgent video casting himself as a martyr,” without “a kind word to say about his leader’s efforts, or a critical word to say about Trump’s daily attacks on Canada.”

More from CBC.