NightOwl

Canada is looking for a bigger security role in Asia and has made forging deeper ties with Japan and South Korea a priority. As its defence commitments expand at home and overseas the country is expanding military spending.

"Next year, my defence budget will rise by 27% over this year, and, frankly, in the next three or four years, our defence spending will triple," Blair said.

But Salem said elected officials have an obligation to engage with their constituents. He said Plante could deal with online harassment by blocking individual accounts or reporting them to the police. "When we decide to be public figures, that goes with the position," he said. "When we want to be representative of the population, we have to be representative of the whole population."

Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, director of the fundamental freedoms program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a "blanket prohibition on comment" is an unreasonable limitation of people's freedom of expression. Instead, she said, elected officials should evaluate inappropriate comments on a case-by-case basis.

"I would say that elected officials with significant resources shouldn't have their cake and eat it too," she said. "In that if they choose to have access to and to use social media platforms in the context of their public work, they should also accept that their constituents might want to comment on their work on that very public platform."

But researchers say focusing on the environmental impacts and potential health harms of the finished products alone hides their actual environmental impact. Manufacturing Teflon and other fluoropolymers uses other, more dangerous PFAS chemicals. These compounds are known to contaminate the environment surrounding manufacturing facilities, said Rainer Lohmann, a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

"Basically, anywhere where there's a major fluoropolymer producer, they seem to have succeeded in contaminating the entire region with their production process," he said.

The ministry's move to remove fluoropolymers from its proposed rules suggests those industry lobbying efforts have worked, MacDonald said. Using a study with self-declared ties to the chemical industry to back up the ministry's decision to exclude fluoropolymers "just kind of shows a little bit of what's happening behind the scenes in terms of where the government is taking the industry's word," she said.