Amal Attar-Guzman: On foreign policy, Canada must adapt to a changing landscape - The Hub - "Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claim in 2015 that “Canada is back,” it did not turn out quite the way. While the government did demonstrate some international leadership in relocating 25,000 Syrian refugees in 2015, conduct moderately successful USMCA negotiations, and gain international fame and traction from Trudeau’s Rolling Stones feature, which led to a fleeting moment when non-Canadians were actually interested in Canada, other foreign policy objectives fell short. From tense relationships and issues with China and Saudi Arabia, to our failed Mali peacekeeping mission, to a historic low number of peacekeeping missions since Mali, to decreased spending on foreign aid, which sat at 0.27 per cent of GNI — way below the international benchmark of 0.7 per cent of GNI. And this was all before the loss of a United Nations Security Council seat to Norway and Ireland. While Canadian foreign policy has benefited for some time from a fairy tale narrative, like most fairy tales, it’s not reality. There are many reasons why our foreign policy has not been robust in recent years, but a contributing factor has been a lack of political attention. That reality was extremely clear during the last federal election... During the 2019 English-language debate, foreign policy was barely discussed, and was mostly forgotten while the politicians were throwing jabs at each other. The only time foreign policy was really discussed was during the 2019 French-language debate but of course that debate was not totally accessible to voters, given that most Canadians do not speak French. Months after the federal election, I completed my major research paper with disappointing results. In the time period from August to November 2019 (which covered the pre-election and election period), foreign policy issues made up less than 9 percent of the Globe and Mail’s election coverage. While it’s understandable that these issues may not dominate the news, it still seemed too low."
Trudeau defends tweet after Twitter labels Liberal attack video ‘manipulated media’ - The Globe and Mail - "A video Liberal Chrystia Freeland posted to Twitter about Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s stand on privatized health care has been labelled “manipulated media” by the social media giant, but Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is standing by the post."
Terence Corcoran: Two climate activists take charge of Canada's resource economy. What could go wrong? - "The new climate minister is Steven Guilbeault, co-founder of Équiterre and a longtime Greenpeace campaigner whose image appeared in last week’s inquiry report into the slippery funding and activities of groups that aimed to kill Alberta’s energy economy. So now Canada has twin green climate activists aligned to run the most important aspects of modern economic policy. As minister of natural resources we have Wilkinson, whose political ambition has been and continues to be focused on curbing, managing, reducing, controlling, limiting and generally shutting down as much of the country’s carbon-emitting natural resources as is possible... The role of the resource minister was expanded last January when the prime minister issued a revised mandate for Seamus O’Regan, then natural resources minister, that essentially converted the department into a climate control operation. The pre-election signal was clear. Climate was cited 14 times in the department’s revised raison d’être, with resource development assigned a back-seat — or no seat at all — in a ministry now dedicated in the future to supporting the following partial list of initiatives and objectives: large-scale building and home retrofits; the Clean Power Fund; help communities transition out of coal; encourage policies to make zero-emissions vehicles more affordable, along with charging stations and zero-emissions batteries; support investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy storage and next-generation clean energy and technology solutions, including in Indigenous communities; implement the Net-Zero Accelerator Fund to transform to a net-zero future; create good-paying and long-lasting jobs; and to stop biodiversity loss, including by planting two billion trees. What Canada now has, in the wake of Justin Trudeau’s post-election cabinet shuffle, is a twinned portfolio linking environment/climate and natural resources into a unified force under two activists — one environmental, the other corporate. Wilkinson’s business background is as a subsidy-seeking green energy executive... How radical will Canada’s climate policy become under a minister who in the past has called for shutting down Alberta’s oilsands, stopping pipelines and locking in resources? The radical side of Canadian politics seems to be in charge in Ottawa... Guilbeault’s recent ministerial history at Heritage Canada suggests he is capable of massive overreach, incapable of getting things done by attempting to do things the government should not be doing. He has been the lead minister on Ottawa’s bungling and still-born (so far) attempts to regulate and control the internet and free speech. His plans have come under attack from all corners of the ideological spectrum... installing radicals and climate-first activists who have a track record of extremism to the most important portfolios in the cabinet today suggests a level of risk-taking and commitment that puts the Canadian economy on a dangerous track"
Ron Butler on Twitter - "Since the Federal Election and other than officially breaking his promise to bring in a Federal Foreign Buyers Tax the government has done ZERO to address housing affordability ZERO ... Nothing No Homeowners Bill of Rights, no CMHC changes... Nothing...
If you ask me why.... I really don't know the answer, the most obvious conclusion is he just doesn't care, it has zero importance to him Climate, equality. Other things are just more important than the next generations of his citizens ever owning a home. But please: just don't be fooled next election. Everything Justin says about housing affordability will be a lie. Don't be fooled forever"
Breaking election promises is standard practice for Trudeau
GUNTER: Yet another nail in the coffin of Canada's energy industry | Toronto Sun - "Coal produces “unacceptable environmental effects.” Plastic is “toxic.” The oilsands should be “phased out” and pipelines aren’t worth fighting for (except, of course, for the ones that bring gasoline, propane and other fuels to Ontario and Quebec right before a federal election). With an announcement Friday that Ottawa was effectively proclaiming federal jurisdiction over all thermal coal-mining projects, so the feds could protect fish and Indigenous people, the Trudeau government has hammered yet another nail in the coffin of Canada’s energy industry. Just how do the federal Liberals propose to fund their Great Reset without the revenues from Canada’s resource industries, let alone heat and light every home in the country, fuel every truck that delivers food to grocery stores, and power greenhouses, factories and public transit?... here’s the irony of ironies: Small Canadian businesses will no longer find contracts servicing mines. Canadian workers will no longer find well-paying jobs digging coal. But the Port of Vancouver will remain the largest coal-exporting port on the continent. Most of what ships through Vancouver is thermal coal. From American mines... To top it all off, the Liberals don’t even charge their carbon tax on all the Yankee coal that ships from our coast. Justin Trudeau and his cabinet are utterly clueless when it comes to economic and fiscal management. Remember when they refused to go to bat for the Keystone XL pipeline with the Biden administration at the beginning of this year? This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Yes, officially, the federal government was pro-Keystone. But their response to U.S. President Joe Biden cancelling the project was mostly a shrug and a rollover back to sleep. But over its effective lifespan (about 40 years), Keystone would have generated about $400 billion in economic activity, about 12 per cent or more of which would have accrued to governments in the form of taxation. That’s nearly $50 billion for public services. But the Trudeau government is more wedded to its shallow, showy environmentalism. They seem obsessed with being the world’s “green” Boy Scout. They are barrelling us headlong into an economic disaster. Housing prices are going up because of government decisions at all level (not because of foreign buyers). Add in slower economic growth because of federal “green” policies, plus higher income taxes and carbon taxes, and it’s hard to know how people currently under 40 will ever be able to buy a home. Then there is Canada’s income discount. Once again the gap between American and Canadian salaries is growing, made all the wider by lower taxes and lower cost of living in the US. (American’s make more and get to keep more of what they make.)"
Canadians should 'assume' next federal election will be under increased threat compared to 2019: Liberal minister - " According to Leblanc, elections tend to by lightning rods for those who want to sow disinformation and discord within Canada, and that is only amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. “COVID-19 has given energy to different state actors and non-state actors who want to disrupt and sow discord and divide societies or agitate racism and hatred. We’ve seen very ugly examples of that around the world”"
Naturally, this didn't happen - except if you look at what the liberals did (e.g. using covid as a wedge issue and the usual SJWism)
Kelly McParland: Trudeau's climate crusade ensures oil profits won't be invested in jobs - "the prime minister revealed he was entrusting the climate change portfolio to a man with a history of radical environmental activism and anti-oil zealotry... Anyone who lived through the challenges of the 1970s, when a sudden spike in oil prices sent economies around the world into a tailspin, knows how bleak the impact can be. Spiralling inflation is a weapon for destroying jobs, businesses, hopes and ambitions on a frightening scale. Inflation mixed with slow growth produced a decade no one who remembers it wants to repeat. Trudeau is gambling that won’t happen. Like his father, he shows no deep interest in, or understanding of economics. Throughout his years in office, he’s borrowed and spent at unprecedented levels in a seemingly blind conviction that somehow it will all work out in the end... Smart people with large amounts of money to invest don’t think Trudeau’s dream will come true, and certainly not without an enormous amount of disruption. In particular, they don’t believe the shift to renewables can be made in the timelines being touted by governments in Ottawa, Washington or Europe. They think demand for fossil fuels will remain high, greatly aided by scarcities already in evidence, and that the squeeze will last for years to come. They see huge money to be made from government failures."
Trudeau-appointed librarian ordered purge of online historical archives - "chief archivist Leslie Weir told employees at Library and Archives Canada to purge thousands of pages, including a biography of Canada’s first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald. “We need to discuss having a disclaimer on the website about having content that may offend people. I feel very strongly about that,” Weir said in an email on June 9, 2021... Employees at the department voiced their concerns that Weir’s criteria for what was offensive were too vague. “The only direction we received from Leslie was ‘offensive content,’” said a manager... Weir’s criteria for offensive history included any page that erased Indigenous people, had “outdated terminology,” and anything that “lacked Indigenous perspectives and/or that ignores or dismisses the impact of colonialism.” “The result will be that a lot of stuff from our website disappears rather quickly and nothing substantial will be up to replace it immediately,” wrote Giebrecht in a June 8, 2021 email. Canadians first became aware of the historical purge after a Macdonald biography disappeared from the federal government’s website. Soon after, the biographies of five other prime ministers were also scrubbed."
The excuse is that indigenous groups complained but that they never called for censorship, but that misunderstands optics and the difficulty of overhauling website content
GUNTER: Trudeau government running Canada's economy into the ground | Toronto Sun - "Through a combination of fiscal incompetence and economic cluelessness, our federal Liberal government is running the national economy into the ground, largely in the name of “green” fantasies — and their Great Reset on social spending. The economy is not producing the jobs the Liberals predicted. What would they expect when they’re paying young people — still — almost as much not to work as they would make working? And the money is steady — at least until September. Government COVID aid is an incentive not to work, but irrational and ever-changing lockdown rules are just as job-crushing. One is federal (aid), the other (lockdowns) is provincial... the Trudeau Liberals are so utterly out of their depth at managing public funds and economic policy that even as Canada emerges from the pandemic we will struggle to rebound financially. The main reason this is no surprise is that many of the very same people crashlanding the Canadian economy today were senior advisers in the Ontario Liberal government that nosedived that province’s economy in the 2010s as a result of an expensive, useless Green Energy Act. That little experiment with Economy-by-Suzuki gave Ontario the highest industrial energy prices on the continent and the highest per capita debt of any province, state or territory in the world. It cost manufacturers 200,000 jobs, doubled household electricity rates, generated just one-fifth of the “green” jobs forecast and — in the ultimate irony — produced no reduction in emissions. Now Justin Trudeau and many of Ontario’s green-plan architects are trying to repeat their “success” at the federal level. Lord help us. Closing down Canada’s energy sector, as the Liberals are intent on doing, robs governments of important tax revenues that would help pay for annual deficits of $150 billion to $300 billion. Without oil and gas revenues, the tax burden for paying for all that spending and borrowed money shifts onto middle-class families. There are fewer jobs, higher energy prices and a lower standard of living — all across Canada, not just in Alberta. Excess borrowing simply exacerbates those problems. It drives up interest rates, which in turn drives up the cost of homes and cars, as ordinary consumers compete with governments for loans. That drives up inflation, which wears away at incomes and standards of living. And if it drives up taxes too far (on either the rich or the middle class), that leads to a brain-drain of talented and innovative people to the States."
Opinion: Federal budget: Spend. Spend more. Then spend more than that - "the budget isn’t really much of a budget, in the sense that it engages with difficult questions of prioritizing spending and weighing the trade-offs. Those may be necessary exercises in a world of scarce resources, but apparently Freeland does not inhabit such a world. Instead, the only difficult choice she appeared to face in crafting this astonishing document was how to cram in as many different spending promises as possible into its 724(!) pages. In a world where the having and eating of one’s cake are not mutually exclusive, the sky’s the limit. So, in addition to the well-telegraphed centrepiece commitment of $30 billion for government daycare (not to be confused with the existing $25 billion in direct payments to parents), there’s also money for businesses, employees, students, seniors, green tech, border security, cyber security, infrastructure, farmers, housing, research, transit, climate change and for empowering communities, among dozens of other things. Of course, there isn’t actually money for all of these things: that’s why the deficit came in at $354 billion, pushing the federal debt past $1 trillion. Critics will protest that the pandemic is a temporary phenomenon and that if associated measures are wound down as planned, the deficit will drop to a mere(!) $154 billion next year. The only problem with this claim is total spending isn’t being wound down. Quite the opposite: budget projections show that by 2026, total spending will be $466 billion. That’s up a whopping 29 per cent from the $362 billion spent in the Liberals’ last pre-pandemic budget in 2019. Even assuming they can hold the line on spending for the next five years — hardly a safe bet given their pre-pandemic track record — the deficit will still be at $30 billion, debt interest payments will cost taxpayers $39 billion annually, and the federal debt will have ballooned to an eye-watering $1.4 trillion. Canadians understand that this math doesn’t add up. A recent survey revealed that fully 82 per cent of them agreed that to earn their vote in the next election a party must “have a reasonable plan to get back to balanced budgets in a timely manner.” Apparently, the Trudeau Liberals are among the other 18 per cent. After nearly six years in office, they have demonstrated time and again, in budget after budget, that they only have one weapon in their policy arsenal: borrow and spend more money. It was their approach before the pandemic, so it will be their approach (but more so) after the pandemic. When the economy has been weak, they have spent because they must; when the economy has been strong, they have spent because they can. No matter the context, their response is always the same: spend; spend some more; and then spend even more than that. This approach to governing has culminated in a budget that sets Canada on a path to fiscal danger, with its plunge into permanent, unfunded spending increases and structural deficits. Future generations will pay a heavy price."
Opinion: Federal budget gives money to all, without a path to real economic growth - The Globe and Mail - "Whatever else it may be, this budget is certainly long: at 739 pages and 232,903 words, by far the longest in Canadian history. The previous record was 528 pages, in 2015. The great Paul Martin budget of 1995 took only 197 pages to rescue Canada’s finances from disaster, while the landmark tax reform budgets of the late 1980s averaged less than 120. By comparison, this budget takes more than 200 pages just to describe its impact on gender equality, inclusion and other “quality of life” measures. But then it had to be long, because this budget is about everything. I mean this in the most literal sense... The word “support” appears nearly 1,000 times in the budget; “benefit” or “benefits” more than 1,300; “gender,” 740, “Indigenous,” 831. By comparison, the word “growth” appears just 280 times; “productivity,” 39, “competitiveness,” 13. So you begin to get a broad picture of the government’s priorities, or rather the lack of them. It is very concerned to see that no individual, household, corporation, activist group, charity or church picnic in the country is omitted from the rolls of those owing their livelihood to the federal government and their gratitude to its current stewards. It is rather less concerned with how any of this will be paid for... If growth is on such a hot tear just now, what need remains of the $100-billion in “stimulus” the government has been pitching since the fall? The answer, predictably, has been to jettison the label (number of times the word “stimulus” appears in the budget: 12) while keeping the spending. To be sure, the budget talks of “kick-starting” the economy and “punching our way out of” the recession that its own figures show is already over. But it seems less concerned with growth, at least as conventionally measured (see “quality of life”), than “healing the wounds,” preventing “scarring,” and other therapeutic benefits. Alas, it’s economic growth that pays the bills... There’s an answer to all this gloom: growth. Not the short-term kind we are currently experiencing, rebounding after the recession, but sustained, long-term growth in our productive capacity. What does the government have to say on this front? It acknowledges, briefly, that it is a problem. “Budget 2021,” it intones, “recognizes that the government needs to take action to protect Canada’s long-term economic growth prospects.” But as to actual solutions? More of the same approach, mostly, that has brought us to our current pass, with growth projected to average barely 1.5 per cent annually over the next 30 years. There’s a lot of talk about “investing” in infrastructure, for example, of a kind that “pay dividends” in future years. But probe a little deeper and you find that a lot of this is “social infrastructure” that even the government can’t pretend will boost growth much."
William Watson: Without this federal budget our finances would be in pretty good shape - "The fiscal effects of COVID could be over reasonably quickly. But the government has deliberately chosen the fiscal equivalent of the “long-COVID” that is afflicting many COVID victims. It’s dragging out the effects — with the difference that it’s volunteering for the long version, which no one in the real world does... the new tax break for solar-heated swimming pools has got to be the coolest item in the budget. (Pools are intrinsically cool, though heated ones, um, less so.) Unfortunately, this policy item is not costed. And it’s not quite a new tax break: rather, it’s removal of an exclusion from a previous tax break for solar- and bio-powered doo-dads. Strange, though, that in a budget that imposes new sales taxes on $100,000-and-up cars and planes and $250,000-and-up boats, classifying them as “luxury” items only purchased by the notorious top 1 per cent of income earners, solar-heated swimming pools get a tax break. The internal debate between the government’s Greens and its Jacobins must have generated its own heat. (As for me, I am going nowhere near any plane that costs only $100,000.) Solar-heated pools exemplify the problem with not sticking to simple climate policies, such as “impose a carbon tax and then retire from the field”: you end up having to make fine distinctions over a wide range of activities. As former Soviet bureaucrats could tell you, it goes with the central-planning territory."
Jack M. Mintz: There are no more fiscal anchors holding back the Liberals after this budget - "The federal budget had little in the way of tax increases except higher employment insurance premiums after three years — hardly surprising if the Liberals are planning to trigger an election soon. There will be about $12 billion more in taxes from some large companies over the next five years with the new digital service tax, limits on interest expense and other measures to limit international tax avoidance. Meanwhile, tax reductions are provided to the working poor and for small business investment. Economic growth will be boosted little by these tax measures. Instead, Freeland believes that public spending on climate change, business subsidies and child care will boost growth and productivity, which is, at best, debatable. In this budget, encouraging business investment is takes a backseat to spending. And the absence of a strong fiscal anchor will mean perpetual deficit financing, at least until it can’t go on any longer and the chickens come home to roost."
NP View: Chrystia Freeland's shortsighted, selfish budget - "the high deficits are set to continue for at least the next five years. As a result, the federal debt is projected to grow by $715.7 billion between 2019 and 2026. That’s on par with the total national debt when Canada celebrated its 150th birthday in 2017. For perspective that was the total debt racked up after we built a transcontinental railroad, won the First World War, survived the Spanish Flu pandemic, weathered the Great Depression and beat the Nazis... “In today’s low interest rate environment,” she writes in the budget, “not only can we afford these investments in Canada’s future, it would be short-sighted of us not to make them.” This is the talk of a cheap salesman, not the finance minister of a serious country. Low interest rates alone are no reason to take on more debt and more risk. In the mid-1990s, Canada narrowly escaped a debt crisis, following a quarter-century of heavy deficit spending, for which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father was largely responsible. Federal spending was slashed by a disruptive 14 per cent between 1995 and 1998, which could have been avoided had restraint been practised all along. In 2010, we saw how things could have gone much differently, when Greece experienced a sovereign debt crisis. The country’s budget deficit had been increasing over the preceding decade, representing nearly seven per cent of gross domestic product in 2007, while its public debt was over 100 per cent of GDP. The state of its finances left it unable to withstand the shock of the Great Recession, causing it to collapse in spectacular fashion. As a result, the Greek economy was in recession until 2017, the longest of any advanced capitalist economy in history, the political system was thrown into chaos, the economy shrank by a quarter and unemployment hit 25 per cent. The Greek experience highlights one of the big risks of sustained deficit financing and high debt loads: it decreases a country’s ability to deal with future crises. As we are all now acutely aware, unexpected events can, and do, happen, and may require large increases in government spending to mitigate their effects... According to the budget’s projections, by 2025, we will be paying nearly $40 billion a year just to service the debt — double what we paid last year. To put that into perspective, it’s about the same amount the federal government paid in 2019 through the Canada Health Transfer, which represents about one-third of provincial health-care spending in this country."
'Tax the rich' plan won't help pay Canada's record debt, analysts say - "This could be a risky strategy for the country, which piled on new debt at a faster pace than any of its Group of Seven peers during the pandemic. The high level of indebtedness could limit Canada’s ability to manage long-term challenges that require massive government funding, like transitioning from a fossil fuel-reliant economy to a green one. A far higher debt-to-GDP ratio post-pandemic means Canada has far less wiggle room to respond to the next crisis, be it economic, trade, climate or health-related... Fitch has already stripped Canada of a triple-A credit rating, but S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service still give Canadian debt the highest rating... “Nothing related to the cost of the pandemic … will be repaid by the current generation. And that’s very bold and risky,” said Don Drummond, the Stauffer-Dunning fellow at Queen’s University. Canada is not unique in looking to tax the wealthy to pay for COVID-19-era spending. But countries like the United Kingdom are making an effort to start paying down debt as part of their new tax plans, and Western European nations are signalling public debt levels won’t rise forever. Canada’s gross debt-to-GDP ratio jumped 36 per cent last year to 118 per cent amid massive government transfers of aid to individuals and businesses, by far the largest increase of the G7 group of wealthy nations... Trudeau’s Liberals failed to score a majority in the Sept. 20 election and continue to be dependent on the left-leaning New Democrats (NDP) to pass legislation. That party could pressure the Liberals into more spending in exchange for their support. The Liberals have pledged to increase the corporate tax rate for big banks and insurers, as well as introduce an extra payment by those same businesses to help pay for the economic recovery. The government also plans to impose a minimum tax rule for top earners... “We had a lot of fiscal space, a lot. And we used a lot of it on the pandemic,” Dominique Lapointe, senior economist at Laurentian Bank, said, referring to the government’s record stimulus to support the economy. “People are now worried because we used that fiscal space and we’re still continuing to introduce new measures.”"
Ginny Roth: Massive-spending Liberal budget cynically ignores health-care transfers - "We recall that when the Liberals were not in government, we were told that increasing health transfers to the provinces was of the utmost importance. It was explained to us at the time that if only Prime Minister Stephen Harper could get over himself and actually meet and engage with the provinces and territories, he would understand what compromise and collaboration meant. If only he would quit imposing his ideological austerity agenda on the provinces, we might actually be able to live up the promise of the Canada Health Accord, best-in-the-world universal health care, Tommy Douglas’ legacy and so on... we know the Liberals are eager to meddle in the nitty gritty of locally delivered social services. Their commitment to do just that on childcare is the marquee item in their budget. The government is also savvy though, and while the Liberals can campaign on and take credit for cheap childcare spaces, they will bear little blame for our over-burdened health care system"
Rex Murphy: Liberals' dangerous arrogance didn't begin and won't end with internet-regulation bill - "I’ll end with the words of one who was previously vice-chairman of the CRTC, Peter Menzies. C-10 “doesn’t just infringe on free expression, it constitutes a full-blown assault upon it and, through it, the foundations of democracy.”"
Chris Selley: The calls for rethinking restrictions are coming from inside the Liberal house - "Liberal MP Joël Lightbound went rogue on COVID policy, which is to say he politely questioned Justin Trudeau’s policies and performance. Lightbound noted “with regret,” and correctly, that the empathetic face of the Liberal government — the Justin Trudeau who rejected the idea of requiring vaccination to attend a Toronto Raptors game — vanished at the first sign of political gain to be had. “I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions,” Lightbound averred, again correctly. He suggested it might not be the acme of insanity to drop the vaccination requirement for truckers crossing the border. At the very least, he argued, Ottawa should be offering Canadians a clear “road map” out of the pandemic: Which current measures will be abandoned and under what conditions? This is precisely what Ottawa should be talking about. It’s precisely what nations’ capitals around the world are talking about. Heck, it’s what federal Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam was talking about last week: Everything from vaccine passports to border measures needs to be “re-examined” in recognition that “this virus is not going to disappear,” she argued at her weekly media briefing. Instead we’ve been fighting about trucks and chasing rabbits down holes... he’s saying the blockaders aren’t real Canadians. If anything I’m surprised it didn’t produce more outrage than it did. Over at Team Orange, some New Democrats want to make “hate symbols” illegal... The idea is at best redundant — the Criminal Code already bans “wilful promotion of hatred” not just through oral and written speech but via “gestures, signs or other visible representations” — and at worst unconstitutional: The Supreme Court famously ruled that even Ernst Zundel’s outright Holocaust denial wasn’t illegal on its own. It would be some leap to determine that the flag of the Confederacy, or of the German Reich, met that threshold just by existing... no Ottawa Liberal wants to be seen even remotely agreeing with the Ottawa truckers on anything. As I write this, Jason Kenney, the premier of Alberta (where trucks are jamming up a U.S. border crossing), is being assailed on social media for announcing a new “path back to normal.” “Translation: I’ve surrendered to the insurrectionists who are blocking trade flows on our southern border,” Alberta journalist Max Fawcett tweeted. Meanwhile, the rest of the world reopens. We’ll get there some day, presumably."
Liberal Lightbound calls out government for 'divisive' COVID policies | Toronto Sun - "“I’ve heard from a lot of people wondering why just a year ago, we were all united, all in this together,” Lightbound said. “Now that we have one of the most vaccinated populations in the world, we’ve never been so divided.”... he accused the government of painting all the protesters with the same brush and having no desire to adapt its policies to reflect the evolving science of the pandemic. Mandatory vaccination for truckers, he said, is a policy that is “against recent World Health Organization recommendations and for which we have no figures as to what we are trying to accomplish in an epidemiological point of view.”... he has become uncomfortable with the government’s tone around the pandemic, saying it “went from a more positive approach to one that stigmatizes and divides people.” The government, he continued, should provide Canadians with a clear and measurable road map detailing when federal restrictions related to the pandemic will be lifted. Lightbound said Canadians are confused to see other countries such as Ireland and Spain — which have lower vaccination rates than Canada — dropping all restrictions. “People are worried that measures which ought to be exceptional and limited in time are being normalized with no end time, like vaccine passports, mandates and requirements for travellers,” he said. “They are worried because they feel it’s becoming harder and harder to know where public health stops and where politics begin.”"
A covid hystericist claimed that countries dropping covid restrictions only did so because they had higher vaccination and booster numbers than Canada. So much for that (the US is an especially good counter-example)
Third Liberal MP asks Trudeau government for a plan to lift restrictions | The Post Millennial - "Liberal Anthony Housefather has become the third MP of his Party to ask Trudeau to lift the restrictions... Although notably weaker than the two previous MPs, Housefather's statement is significant given Housefather is a close ally of Justin Trudeau... Lightbound said that he condemned all displays of hate that have occurred during the protest, but has since seen a diverse array of people, including blacks and Sikhs. Lightbound said that he would avoid using "easy and absurd labels" to generalize the group... Yves Robillard joined fellow Liberal MP Joel Lightbound in criticizing the Trudeau government's "politicized" and "divisive" handling of the COVID-19 pandemic."
Liberals, NDP reject Tory motion requesting COVID-exit plan - "The House of Commons has voted down a Conservative motion asking the government to table a plan to end all COVID-19 restrictions by the end of the month... Before the vote, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he thought the motion asked that all restrictions be lifted immediately, rather than asking for a plan to end them... Liberal MP Joël Lightbound broke party rank and voted in favour of the Conservative motion... Despite voting against the Conservatives’ proposal, Singh has also urged the Liberal government to produce a plan to leave the pandemic behind. “We absolutely believe the federal government should work with provinces and territories and public health officials to develop this plan, and then present it to Canadians,” he said Monday. “Canadians need to know. They’re frustrated (and) they’re angry.”"
David Jacobs on Twitter - "Headlines: Trudeau lies about SNC scandal
Butts: Scheer is a white supremacist!
Headlines: Trudeau groped a woman
Butts: Scheer is a homophobe!
Headlines: Trudeau wears blackface
Butts: Scheer is a gun lover!
Starting to see a pattern? #Cdnpoli"
Justin Trudeau on Twitter - ""It’s hard not to feel disappointed in your government when every day there is a new scandal.""
Ironic
LILLEY: Trudeau Liberals always viewed the pandemic as 'opportunity' | Toronto Sun - "“I really believe COVID has created a window of political opportunity,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said at the Liberal convention last weekend during a discussion on a national childcare plan. Somehow, I don’t think the families of the more than 23,000 Canadians who have died from COVID would appreciate hearing this pandemic described as a political opportunity. I doubt the roughly 700,000 people currently unemployed as a result of COVID, or the more than two million people who Statistics Canada says had their hours and wages cut, would see this pandemic as an opportunity. Nor the countless businesses hurt or shuttered as a result of everything we’ve been going through. For the Trudeau Liberals, though, all they see is an opportunity to remake Canada in their own image. Never-ending government spending means there is no social program we can’t afford... 57% of Canadians in a recent poll said they want the government focused on the pandemic response rather than restructuring society."
