Opinion: Liberals face political oblivion with Trudeau at the helm - The Globe and Mail - "More than a decade ago, Justin Trudeau took a dispirited, strife-torn, third-place Liberal Party and recreated it in his own image, winning election after election after election. There are few voices of dissent within the party because the voices who matter all matter because of him. But the latest polls show the Liberals headed for, not just defeat, but decimation in the next federal election. Even the most die-hard Trudeau loyalist must be starting to wonder whether it’s time for a change at the top. The Conservatives opened up a substantial lead over the Liberals last summer and have held it ever since. That lead may even be growing... Nik Nanos has 46 per cent of Canadians saying Mr. Trudeau has done a poor job as Liberal Leader, compared with 25 per cent who rate his performance as excellent. When asked how the Liberals could best increase their chances of winning the next election, 39 per cent said the answer is to replace Mr. Trudeau. Only 3 per cent thought the party’s best option is for him to stay... One of the most important jobs of a political leader is to leave their party in decent shape for their successor. Stephen Harper not only reunited the conservative movement and provided almost 10 years of government, he left the Conservative Party with solid finances and 99 seats in the House after his 2015 election loss."
Justin Trudeau on X - "All the moms and dads out there: Look out for your Canada Child Benefit – monthly payments are going out tomorrow. To learn more about these payments and when they go out each month, click here: https://t.co/wVldUnxSTk. We’re always going to be there for you and your family."
Brian Lilley on X - "Anyone else get the feeling that Trudeau now regularly posting about payments to Canadians is all about him trying to tell voters, “I give you money, so I want your ballot!”"
Trudeau leading Canada down woke path to impoverished nation - "I have interviewed NDPers, and Liberals, but few will now come forward to agree with anything that the Canadian government is pushing. As a former 40-year resident of downtown Toronto, I meet many friends and former neighbours, and we always end up talking politics. Many harbour a dislike for Pierre Poilievre, but cannot explain why. When I counter with the facts proving that this Justin Trudeau government is totally incompetent, they are now at the boiling point where they agree... This party can no longer be a vehicle for one person’s vainglorious ego, masquerading as a socialist green party, leading Canada down the woke path to an impoverished and insignificant country that was once destined to be a prosperous player. The Liberal Party of the 21st century needs to think of ways to protect freedom in a world where governments are threatening to control not only every action, but every choice that people make. In a society where institutions and community and history are being diminished daily, the rehabilitated Liberal Party must foster the means to prevent this preening bureaucracy from reducing citizens to a flock of sheep. In other words — liberty... Canadians are not a dependent people relying on federal government handouts to every taxpayer, given in an attempt to bribe voters to re-elect it out of gratitude, leaving the country’s finances not much better than those of a bankrupt pot-peddler. We do not need a government dictating that roads for trucks and cars are passe. It is time that Canadians move on from this Kim Kardashian School of Government, where talent-starved selfie-posers have replaced men and women who can administer, in a serious and responsible manner, the laws and economic policies of our nation."
Polarisation means you just hate the other side, even though you can't say why
Poilievre attacks Trudeau over Nazi tumult; Tories abandoning Ukraine, PM retorts - "Rota resigned after Yaroslav Hunka was invited to — and lauded at — a speech in the House of Commons by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy. Media reports now say Trudeau's office also invited Yaroslav Hunka to a reception in Toronto in Zelenskyy's honour that same day. Hunka, a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran, fought for a voluntary unit created by the Nazis during the Second World War. In question period, Poilievre said Trudeau himself called for Rota to step down amid the tumult — and urged him to follow suit. "Will he hold himself to the very same standard and admit that he's not fit for office?" the Conservative leader demanded."
Meme - Pierre Poilievre @PierrePoilievre: "So Trudeau lied again. For months he's been saying that only the Speaker invited the former Nazi to the Ukrainian President's visit. It caused global embarrassment & a Russian propaganda win. Trudeau threw the Speaker-another "random Liberal" the bus for the failure. Now we learn Trudeau's office invited the former Nazi to meet the Ukrainian President."
Josh Ryan 🍁🍎 on X - "Trudeau lasted 11 minutes and 10 seconds into Question Period today. He fled after the issue of his personal invitation to the SS Waffen Nazi was brought up."
Norman Spector on X - "Back in the day, a PM would have stood in his place and apologized to the House for [inadvertently?] having misled MPs"
Ottawa 'failed' to manage ArriveCAN app: auditor general - "Canada’s auditor general has concluded that the federal government “repeatedly failed” to follow proper practices at every stage of launching the ArriveCAN app, driving up costs for a tool with a price tag that cannot truly be known due to lax recordkeeping. “As a result of the many gaps and weaknesses we found in the project’s design, oversight, and accountability, it did not deliver the best value for taxpayer dollars spent,” wrote Auditor General Karen Hogan in a report... Hogan found, among a litany of issues, that the CBSA’s “disregard for policies, controls, and transparency in the contracting process restricted opportunities for competition and undermined value for money.” Ottawa has come under intense scrutiny for its decision to work with GC Strategies, an Ottawa IT firm that received millions to work on the app despite the company outsourcing much of the project to other subcontractors."
EDITORIAL: Enough’s enough. It’s time for heads to roll - "serious allegations against Health Canada employees warranted an RCMP investigation. In fact, the Mounties are already probing allegations of misconduct with contracting links to ArriveCan. In January, federal Procurement Ombudsman Alexander Jeglic released a report that found outsourcing companies listed subcontractors who did no work were repeatedly awarded contracts. He said the criteria used to solicit bids were, “overly restrictive and favoured the CBSA supplier.” In more than three-quarters of the bids, the contractors did no work. Through an order paper question, Conservative MP Jeremy Patzer found out that five of eight Health Canada executives working on the ArriveCan project received bonuses totalling $342,929 for the two fiscal years, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. How can it be that the government actually rewarded those involved with this $54 million boondoggle? They should be facing disciplinary action, not walking away with tax-funded bonuses. This is part of a litany of questionable spending and cronyism by Justin Trudeau’s government. Remember the $900 million WE Charity fiasco, where insiders with cosy ties to the Liberal government got a sole-sourced contract to run a youth employment program? More recently, questions have come up about Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), an agency that provides government funds for green start-ups. In October of last year, Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne suspended the fund after the release of a report by an external agency hired to probe whistleblowers’ allegations. Their report raised concerns about SDTC’s awarding funding to agencies that “appeared to be ineligible,” and conflicts of interest in senior executives."
Lorrie Goldstein on X - "Based on how badly they screwed up ArrivCAN can you imagine what they're going to do with pharmacare?"
Brian Lilley on X - "Exactly this. Do you want Justin and the bureaucrats in charge of this part of your health as well?"
Opinion: On ArriveCan, the question is not just who did what, but why? - The Globe and Mail - "We generally rely on the Auditor General to get to the bottom of things. When all else fails, when it seems whatever appalling frenzy of government extravagance has lately come to light must elude even comprehension, let alone remedy, there is always the consoling hope: wait until the AG reports. But such was the inconceivable disarray at the Canadian Border Services Agency, which had what one might loosely call “responsibility” for the ArriveCan program, that even the AG, Karen Hogan, and her crack team of auditors were left grasping at air, unable to answer the most basic questions about it. What we know is that to build the ArriveCan app, whose purpose was merely to gather information from international travellers as they arrived, including whether they had been vaccinated for COVID-19, the agency neither used in-house staff nor simply hired a developer, but farmed it out to a shadowy coterie of contractors, kitchen-table operations with no staff or offices, who charged millions in return for no work other than to hire a load of other contractors, some of whom appear to have done little or no work themselves. The lead contractor, GC Strategies, was initially hired, not only without a competitive bidding process, but without even submitting a proposal. When at length the contract was put out to tender, the company was allowed to advise on the terms, which ended up being so closely tailored to its advantage that no other firm even bothered to put in a bid. To add to the impression of coziness, senior staff at the CBSA were invited by the company to expensive dinners, whisky tastings and other events, which they failed to report to their superiors. But beyond that all is murk. Who made the decision to hire them, and why? Why were there so few records kept of where the money went, or what it was spent on? How were contractors allowed to invoice without specifying what work they performed? The AG cannot even say beyond a first approximation how much the whole thing cost: the report puts the figure at $60-million, give or take about $12-million. Suffice to say it was considerably more than the $80,000 first estimated.
Criticism from business groups: A variety of industry groups blamed the app for adding to widespread travel delays in the spring of 2022 as pandemic restrictions eased. The International Air Transport Association called for Canada to drop the ArriveCan requirement in an effort to reduce the delays that plagued Canadian airports in the spring and summer of 2022. Tourism agencies complained the app was too onerous for travellers, especially for those older and less tech-savvy.
Concern from the U.S.: In August, 2022, U.S. lawmakers and mayors from cross-border cities said ArriveCan disincentivized travel and harmed the flow of commerce.
Experts weighed in: Zain Chagla, an infectious disease physician, said in May, 2022, the logic behind vaccine mandates for travellers no longer made sense. Matt Malone, an assistant professor at Thompson Rivers University’s Faculty of Law, argued that the mandated use of ArriveCan was a "capricious use of government power."...
If, after all, a number of individuals at the CBSA, as it appears, took it into their heads to hand out large contracts on such dubious grounds, with such slipshod controls, and with so little in the way of a paper trail, the logical next question to ask is not just how they could have gotten away with it for so long, but why it would even have occurred to them to try. Whether those involved acted out of corruption or incompetence, there must first be an enabling culture within the organization: one that led them to believe it was okay to behave this way, or if it was not okay, that they would not be caught. Either way, we should not be so foolish as to imagine this would be the only such incident to arise from such a culture. Indeed, the opaque, multilayered contracting model that so inflated costs on the ArriveCan project appears to have been used more widely, at least at the CBSA... The numbers involved in the ArriveCan affair may be eye-popping, but they are a speck of dust compared, say, to the costs of building a dozen frigates for the Navy (original cost estimate: $26-billion; current estimate: $84-billion, and counting). Which is just one part of one project – the National Shipbuilding Strategy – in one department... the problem is the culture. And if the culture in the public service, or some part of it, is rotten, then it is clear in our system who must ultimately be held to account: the responsible minister, and the government to which that minister belongs."
How we would shock the Canadians from just 10 years ago - "In 2014, the notion of men menstruating was still so rare that even in left-leaning publications it mainly appeared as a form of feminist argument. “If men menstruated, would periods still be taboo?” reads a 2015 column published in The Guardian. It was a 2016 program by the McGill Student’s Society that represented one of the first documented instances of tampons being stocked in men’s washrooms. The term “people who menstruate” would not appear in a Postmedia paper until 2015, when it appeared in an Ottawa Citizen op-ed. And since we’re on the subject, in 2014 there were no inmates with male genitalia housed in women’s prisons. While a trans woman could request transfer to a women’s facility, they first required genital surgery. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an order-in-council which abolished that requirement in 2017.
Canada certainly wasn’t a bastion of housing affordability in 2014. In fact, one of the first public statements ever made in the House of Commons by Justin Trudeau was about how nobody could afford shelter anymore. “Access to affordable housing is a major challenge for Canadian families,” he said in 2008. In the spring of 2014, the CMHC reported that the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Canada was $930 – about $1,182 in 2024 dollars. The most recent edition of the Rental Market Report had two-bedroom rents at $1,359 for those who lived in a purpose-built rental building. If you’re one of the growing number of Canadians renting out a condo, on the other hand, the average rent on a two-bedroom is $2,049. And given that CMHC only tracks average rent prices, these are well below what’s been posted in rental listings. According to Rentals.ca, the average listed rent on a two-bedroom is now $2,300.
In 2014, there was exactly one safe injection site in Canada: Vancouver’s InSite, which had opened in 2003. It wouldn’t be until 2017 that similar sites began opening in Toronto and Montreal, in part as a reaction to the widespread dissemination of fentanyl. Now, Health Canada counts 39 official safe consumption sites... The overdose situation in 2014 was also dramatically different from today – it wasn’t even being referred to as a crisis. In B.C. – the acknowledged epicentre of the crisis – 369 people died from fatal overdoses in 2014. Last year, that figure was 2,511 – an eight-fold increase.
It was a 2015 Supreme Court decision, Carter v. Canada, that set the country on its current path of hyper-liberalized MAID. This was the one that struck down Criminal Code provisions against physician-assisted suicide on the grounds that they violated Constitutional guarantees on the “security of the person.” What’s notable about the decision – given what was to come – is that it gives almost no consideration to the notion that physician-assisted suicide might be liable to abuse, or might be sought out by Canadians whose main underlying condition was that they were poor or lacked proper medical care. The decision dismissed any notion that the policy could “descend the slippery slope into euthanasia and condoned murder.”...
The federal debt at the end of the 2014 fiscal year was $612.3 billion – about $780 billion in 2024 dollars. As of the most recent count, it is now north of $1.2 trillion. In other words, Canada has almost run up enough debt in the last 10 years to equal the accumulated debt of the preceding 147 years."
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again!
I remember when left wingers were claiming Trump was responsible for everything that happened during his presidency, simply by virtue of being President
Canada’s National Private-Sector Childcare Destruction Program - "Despite the fact for-profit daycares such as Blossoming Minds are denied access to most provincial subsidies by City of Toronto fiat – one of many ways in which governments discriminate against her sector – Moser’s facility was habitually filled to capacity and her wait list grew to nearly 600 names. Whatever ideological reason the city may have had for shunning her, it’s obvious the parents she served didn’t feel likewise... the finer points of the Canada-Ontario deal make it impossible for her to continue to operate Blossoming Minds as an economically-viable business. This is because it would give hostile city bureaucrats sweeping power over her day-to-day operations as well as her long-term survivability. The deal all-but-ensures an absence of profit throughout the entire for-profit sector... Given how similar deals have rolled out in other provinces, making it impossible for private-sector operators to participate may have been the federal government’s intention from the start. Such a stance may cater to the small but vocal cadre of childcare activists who claim for-profit childcare is somehow untrustworthy or illegitimate. But this ideological position comes with big costs. As Moser and many other providers point out, actively pushing entrepreneurs out of the federal childcare plan will not create a non-profit utopia. Rather, it will doom the entire national daycare project to chaos. Unless most provinces take immediate action to embrace the private sector, Canada will end up with a two-tier childcare system marked by massive country-wide waiting lists, huge disparities in fees and many, many angry parents. Anyone who questions the likelihood of such a scenario need only look to Quebec. The same thing happened there 25 years ago... Despite the federal government’s stance favouring non-profit delivery, it bears mention that in all provinces non-profit and for-profit centres are subject to identical regulations, licensing procedures and inspection criteria. And in most provinces the private sector forms the backbone of the existing system; in Atlantic Canada, Alberta and British Columbia it represents a majority of all spaces. Since childcare is a provincial responsibility, putting a national childcare plan into action required a series of federal-provincial agreements, called Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care agreements (CWELCC). Given the facts of Canadian federalism, each CWELCC is different. But they all bear evidence of Ottawa’s dislike for private daycare operators, and in situations where the federal government had substantial leverage in negotiations, it appears it was able to impose this on the final deal... private operators will not be paid for many large and unavoidable costs that all business owners face. This includes property taxes, debt and mortgage payments, professional fees and retirement packages. Further, the deal gives municipal bureaucrats control over how owners run their business, including setting a maximum allowable profit margin. They will even have the power to dictate when owners can replace broken toys or paint their walls. “There is no room for any profit,” Moser asserts, dismissing the notion of a maximum profit level. “It would be as if we were owned by the government.”... an industry comprised primarily of women entrepreneurs is being “exploited” in such fashion. “Women business owners are being railroaded into handing over their business to government”... “Alberta’s deal really supports private operators and is not limiting expansion.”... Another unique feature of Alberta’s deal is that it adds a parental income test to the $10 per day rate. This is a nod to voluminous evidence that heavily-subsidized daycare spaces are traditionally snapped up by well-off parents who can better negotiate waiting lists. A sliding scale of subsidies ensures that a greater share of the childcare benefits go to low-income families who actually need it. If the goal of the national childcare program is to increase accessibility for parents by increasing the number of new spaces while keeping costs low, then the Alberta approach clearly makes the most sense... Today the Quebec childcare system is majority for-profit according to official provincial figures. This despite the fact it is repeatedly held up as an exemplar by non-profit activists and the federal government... even after the massive influx of new childcare spaces over the past decade from for-profit operators, Quebec is still short 50,000 spaces... Beyond their ability to respond quicker to changing demand, entrepreneurs also save taxpayers money. Non-profit organizations must rely on slow-moving government grants and other fundraising efforts to build a new centre... private sector operators in Quebec also receive 10 percent to 15 percent per child less in subsidies than CPEs. And CPEs are exempt from some municipal and provincial taxes as well. Yet the entrepreneurial sector still meets the same standards – and makes money. “We are providing a service that is efficient, high-quality and costs the government less,” Alahmad says. Shouldn’t that be the goal of all public policy?"
From 2022. But the left hate the private sector, so
Something to Cry About: The Disastrous Rollout of Canada’s $10-a-Day Childcare - "researchers at Cardus, a social policy think tank, have calculated these budgeted amounts are nowhere near sufficient to cover future demand. By 2026 they estimate there will be unfunded costs of at least $4 billion annually, and potentially much more. With unsubsidized childcare costing as much as $60 per day, Ottawa’s plan to provide it at a fraction of its real cost will surely stretch the existing system to its breaking point. If the federal government doesn’t vastly overspend, either the provinces will have to cover the tab, or the promise of universal, affordable childcare will soon fall into ruins. Whatever the final costs several years from now, however, the evidence from across the country shows clearly that the current flood of government spending and spectre of public control have not provided parents with cheap or accessible childcare. Rather, the story is one of endless crisis... Just two years after the federal government launched the single biggest spending commitment on childcare in Canadian history – a multi-multi-billion-dollar plan that explicitly calls for a dramatic increase in Canadian families’ access to cheap childcare – a greater percentage of children are currently being cared for at home by their parents than was the case in 2019... Families receiving subsidized childcare may actually be left worse off under the new arrangement since expanded government control reduces their ability to make their own childcare choices... there are widespread shortages everywhere. And even among families who have enrolled their children in childcare, there has been a material increase in their difficulty in finding it... the number of parents having a hard time finding childcare has increased by approximately one-third. This is one of the reasons why it’s no exaggeration to call the Trudeau Liberals’ new childcare policy a calamity... Among infants younger than 1, the proportion waiting for childcare increased from 38 percent in early 2022 to 47 percent in 2023. The constant refrain of Canadians suffering from record waiting times for health care can now be adopted by parents as well... When measuring costs, what counts is the total bill. Childcare does not become more “affordable” by forcing everyone to pay for it through higher taxes instead of parents being allowed to purchase it voluntarily. All this new payment arrangement means is that by turning the spending decision over to government, individual families have lost control over both how their money is spent, and how much they spend in total... Alberta has made some effort to accommodate for-profit private-sector childcare centres, which account for about 70 percent of the province’s spaces. Unfortunately, the latest funding agreement – which childcare operators have until the end of this month to sign – is undoing all this goodwill... this is not solely an Alberta, or for-profit issue. In Ontario, for example, YMCA, the largest non-profit childcare operator in the province, is also complaining that the current funding arrangement with the province is untenable. “The current approach to revenue replacement funding is insufficient, leaving many non-profit operators with deficits and uncertain outlooks,” the YMCA said in a statement... cui bono, or who benefits from all this chaos? There are two obvious groups. First is the cabal of childcare advocates and progressive politicians who have long praised the ideological benefits of an exclusively non-profit childcare system. These voices are animated by a profound distaste for profit-making of any kind. If their plans have produced a chaotic shortage of spaces, that is simply proof that even more subsidies will be required in the future. The second group of beneficiaries are those public-sector unions whose membership will soon grow as legions of new unionized childcare workers replace those for-profit, non-union operations currently being squeezed out of the system. Judging by experience in Quebec, these unions will soon use their new-found powers to shut down the economy as they leverage ever-greater wage demands from the system. As for the losers, that’s the rest of us forced to pay for another disastrous government takeover of a once-robust, market-based industry."
The serious problem of excluding private care in Canada’s child-care system - "Statistics Canada says of the families using non-parental care, only about a third use the type of child care the federal-provincial $10-a-day agreements fund. Consider also the many families providing care for their own kids, foregoing additional wages whilst Canadians earning $180,000 annually gain access to subsidies for licensed daycare spaces. Frankly, Canada’s national daycare system excludes many more Canadians than it includes. Statistics Canada data tells us that whether a child care is public, not-for-profit, or private does not register when parents make child-care choices. Parents simply expect lowered fees... The usual rationale for prioritizing not-for-profit care is its supposed superior quality. However, given government’s assault on the ability to own or expand a private centre, for-profits are now becoming not-for-profit. So, the same owners offer the same service under a different model. One provider who preferred anonymity said, “They lease back their furniture. They contract out their kitchens. They contract out their transportation… Some of them contract out their ECE staff.”... No matter the type of child care she starts, Pasmore points to government ineptitude. “It’s been a difficult process to get the grants. There’s a lot of back and forth where the government does not even understand its own process. A real lack of understanding that things cost money. And that there are real people behind this.” When for-profit centres simply become not-for-profits, it undermines the reigning orthodoxy in child-care research, which is that not-for-profit child care is of higher quality. But that doesn’t stand up to greater scrutiny. Firstly, quality discussions, especially on Parliament Hill, are riddled with conflicts of interest. The overwhelming majority of committee witnesses were publicly funded, either being part of government or a government-funded association—both of which stand to benefit financially from a system that favours public/not-for-profit care. Likewise, labour unions, which would also gain members from unionized staff in a public child-care system, played an outsized role in Parliamentary testimony. The quality discussion is also incomplete. In his Parliamentary Committee brief, economist and public system advocate Gordon Cleveland included a chart that shows Quebec’s government considers for-profit care centres to have “inadequate” quality more often than public centres. However, the chart doesn’t tell us why this is so. Is it the for-profit status, or is it that these providers don’t receive the benefit of the provincial subsidy? Indeed, a 2005 report showed “evidence claiming to show a quality difference between for-profit and non-profit in Canada tends to ignore the fact that many provinces discriminate against for-profit child care by denying them grants and subsidies available to non-profit centres. When these factors are taken into account, there is no statistical difference in quality between the two sectors nationwide.” The biggest quality difference is not based on the profit motive, but rather is between family and non-family care. A major 2007 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study in the United States assessed all non-maternal care. It found all centres have the lowest quality of care. “The highest level of positive caregiving was provided by in-home caregivers, including fathers and grandparents, caring for only one child, closely followed by home-based arrangements with relatively few children per adult. The least positive caregiving was found in centre-based care with higher ratios of children to adults”... Despite a $30 billion federal commitment, Canada has not had a robust child care quality discussion... Canada’s real conundrum is that the desire for accessibility, affordability, and high-quality care is simply impossible. Independent researcher and political columnist Rahim Mohamed says we can’t have all three. “Quebec managed to reconcile low fees with accessibility (all things considered) but sacrificed quality. B.C., so far, has been more deliberate/selective in rolling out its child care program but hasn’t created spaces at a fast-enough pace for the public’s liking.” (British Columbia public daycare advocacy group $10aDay.ca recently advertised that “only 3 percent of families have access to a $10-a-day childcare program.”) Public system advocates are in a bind. They can have majority public care accessible only to a slim minority. Or they can have a broadly accessible system that they believe is lower quality. Provinces are also in a bind, having signed restrictive agreements. But there is hope. The agreements the provinces signed include a clause about renegotiation in 2026, noting it is “the opportunity to review and course correct, if required.”"