Brian Lilley on X - "Justin Trudeau has been PM for almost 9 years but at the NATO summit he repeatedly blamed Stephen Harper for Canada not meeting our NATO spending target. Under Trudeau spending had gone up $246 billion from $289 billion to $535 billion but defence only went up about $8 billion."
J.L. Granatstein: Trudeau’s submarine charade - "Pressed hard, Prime Minister Trudeau finally told the world that Canada would honour its pledge to NATO in 2032. That is eight years and at least two elections hence! But the prime minister did make an announcement that gratified some listeners. Canada, he said, was considering the purchase of up to twelve submarines with an under-ice capability... Canada has no capacity to construct submarines, and the country’s shipyards are struggling to build destroyers, icebreakers, and supply ships. This means that submarines will need to be purchased from European or Asian shipyards with experience in building them. (There will be a certain irony if the RCN, having fought against U-boats in two world wars, ends up with German submarines.)... There is little point in acquiring new submarines if there are no crews to sail in them, and with the fifteen new destroyers planned and just beginning construction, the senior service’s personnel needs must be a top priority. That need will not be met until the Canadian Armed Forces’ problems with recruitment are fixed, and that problem has bedevilled the military for decades... So what did Trudeau mean when he said that Canada was looking at acquiring a fleet of a dozen submarines? Not much. He and his government will be very unlikely to be in power when any order is placed, let alone when finished subs are delivered. The RCN today does not have enough personnel to operate its little squadron of mostly inoperable submarines, and the recruitment process is so messed up that the situation could be even worse by the 2030s when the first new submarine might be ready. Very simply, the prime minister’s remarks meant nothing. They were not a promise, not a pledge, only a way, he hoped, to tamp down the criticisms from NATO’s members, to quiet the grumblings from the RCN’s ranks, and to possibly redress unfavourable recent polling on his government’s foreign policy. Some Canadians might believe he meant that Canada will get new submarines, and we can all hope that he did. But this government does not believe in deliverables for defence"
Airplane food cost over $220 on Trudeau's Indo-Pacific trip - "New records show that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s six-day Indo-Pacific trip in September 2023 had a catering bill of more than $223,000... Meals on-board the plane included beef brisket with mashed parsley potatoes with truffle oil, pan fried beef tenderloin with port wine sauce, braised lamb shanks with steamed broccoli and boiled baby potatoes, and baked cheesecake with pistachio brittle. In a statement to National Post, Canadian Taxpayers Federation federal director Franco Terrazzano drew parallels to Gov. Gen. Mary Simon’s infamous March 2022 trip to Dubai, where she and her 29 guests incurred a $100,000 inflight catering bill over the course of a week... A special request was also made to stock the plane with Flow Water, a brand of premium alkaline spring water. According to the CTF the product is a Trudeau favourite that has shown up in his personal grocery expenses... “Is the government running a secret contest to see who can order up the most expensive meals while flying around the world?” Terrazzano said. “Someone should let the prime minister know the government promised to cut down on fancy airplane food because Trudeau doubled Simon’s outrageous tab.”"
Liberals are revolting against Trudeau. I heard it myself - "The environment minister was in Toronto this week to meet with Members of Parliament who were awestruck by Monday’s upset defeat in the Toronto–St Paul’s byelection. He spent Thursday working the phones with Liberals across the country trying to take stock of how bad things really are. I know this because Guilbault did some of this work in public, in the Via Rail business lounge, as he sat next to Canada’s least-recognizable columnist: Me... Another MP told me there are now increasing demands inside caucus for something tangible to happen.“There is a general view that there needs to be changes in cabinet and PMO,” the MP said.They identified half a dozen ministers who they believed should be demoted or dropped from caucus entirely, including some of the most senior members of Trudeau’s team.The tone I’m hearing from caucus is steelier than it has been in the past. At the end-of-session retreat last June, MPs began to make their displeasure heard. The elected Liberals were increasingly frustrated at being marginalized and ignored, particularly as Canadians were growing fed up with nine years of Liberal rule. Trudeau promised he had heard those concerns. That caucus “ended on a high note,” Guilbeault said on one call.A year on, all those complaints remain. Never mind the mounting problems facing the country, the prime minister is having a hard time connecting with the MPs who delivered him three successive election wins. Things are likely to get worse. There are four more byelections on the horizon, including three Liberal seats — two, in Halifax and B.C — the Liberals are likely to lose. But the most stinging loss would be in LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, a traditionally safe Liberal seat in Montreal that former justice minister David Lametti won with ease in the last three elections. One influential Montreal Liberal told me the party is almost certain to lose the seat to Craig Sauvé, a popular city councilor running for the NDP. This is the big, and possibly final, test of Trudeau’s leadership. If he can’t convince his own caucus that he is capable of change, how can he possibly convince the country? When he ascended to the helm of the Liberal Party in 2013, Trudeau told his team that the days of internal squabbles and out-of-touch politicos were over. “Canadians want better leadership and a better government,” he insisted. “Canadians want to be led, not ruled.”"
Trudeau says ‘lots of conversations’ ongoing after shock byelection loss - "Trudeau’s comments on Wednesday come as some Liberal MPs and a former cabinet minister in recent days have called for him to resign in the wake of the byelection upset... An Ipsos poll done exclusively for Global News last month found support for him is close to “rock bottom,” with nearly seven in 10 Canadians saying it’s time for Trudeau to step down. The poll, which surveyed 1,001 Canadians between June 12 and 14, also showed 75 per cent of Canadians want another party to take over from the Liberals."
Capital gains tax hike: here are three positives - "anytime the general public is talking about taxation... The second positive is that if you spend even a short amount of time trying to understand the dynamics of what’s at play, you can quickly see the deceptive nature of this government and the cheerleading by ideological academics who lack practical and business experience... The third is that it’s apparent that most centrist and reasonable Canadians have had enough of poor policies that favour divisive and vile politics, or the constant push for equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Reasonable Canadians are demanding change."
Matthew Lau: Auditing the federal daycare program would expose high costs, long waitlists - "A May 21 headline in Now Toronto advises parents to put their unborn children on waitlists now since “many Toronto parents are very frustrated over lengthy waitlists for daycare programs.”... The story quotes a mom and early childhood educator who cannot find care for her own children and says waitlists at her centre doubled when the Manitoba government announced it would roll out the $10 per day program... Noticing a pattern? Here’s a one-line summary of the audit report: the Liberals spent tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on childcare and made it less accessible than ever."
Michael Higgins: Trudeau ensured influence of IRGC will be felt in Canada for decades - "The Liberal government’s failure for six years to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorists has been “a huge disaster,” according to a Vancouver human rights lawyer. Mojdeh Shahriari said the IRGC have been able to spread their tentacles into Canadian academia and professional institutions and have been working to undermine the social and cultural fabric of the country... “It’s the same issue with respect to China, how they have been operating. The Islamic Republic is no different.” There is also no difference in how the Trudeau Liberals have tackled the problem of China and Iran: they have stonewalled; denied there was an issue; played the race card against critics; hid behind “national security”; been secretive and furtive, and delayed taking action. All this has allowed the agents of China and Iran to work against Canadian interests, to undermine our way of life and to subvert society. This is a betrayal of Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must bear responsibility for failing to crackdown on those who seek to destroy the values we cherish. “This is not who we are,” is a constant refrain from Trudeau. Well, who are we? What are we? What are our values? Why do we hold these values dear? And will those values be the same in ten or twenty years when the influence of the Chinese and Iranian agents have permeated all aspects of Canada?... as Shahriari pointed out in an interview with the National Post, “I n terms of the evidence before the Liberal government, nothing substantial has changed since six years ago. We all know that in 2020 the IRGC shot down (Ukrainian airlines) PS752, killing all 176 passengers, including 55 Canadian citizens. “If that wasn’t sufficient evidence, I don’t know what else the Liberal government was looking for.”... She said a “lax immigration” system had allowed IRGC members, their families as well as Iranian officials, from the very top to mid-level, to get visas to Canada and establish themselves here. “So it has been a huge disaster, in my view. In 2018, Parliament unanimously voted to immediately list the IRGC and I never heard any reasonable explanation from the Liberal government why they were dragging their feet. “Something political has changed for them in terms of their calculation of the cost benefit of listing the IRGC.” Shahriari said Liberals may have been feeling the heat from voters worried about the “pro-Hamas” protests across Canada. “And we know that the IRGC is the godfather of Hamas,” she said"
A major upset. Five Tweets on the Conservatives winning the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election - "the Conservatives won the Toronto-St. Paul’s riding for the first time since the 1980s. The midtown urban riding has long been considered one of the safest Liberal seats in Canada... Several pollsters and pundits contended before the byelection results trickled in that a Conservative win and a Liberal loss in the riding may pressure Prime Minister Trudeau to step down as Liberal leader and indicate a future majority Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre... Chrystia Freeland gave a speech where she claimed that the Conservative choice in the Toronto-St. Paul’s race was “cold, and cruel and small.” She also implied that voting for the Conservatives, whom she called “the alternative,” would be a vote for austerity and a lack of belief in Canada. It was received by many online eye-rolls. The by-election results were not solidified until the day after the vote, which might be attributed to the near-metre-long ballot consisting of 84 candidates. An activist group called the Longest Ballot Committee has taken responsibility for many of the independent candidates on the ballot, saying they are “having fun and breaking records until the electoral reform promised is delivered.” During the 2015 election, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau promised that vote would be the last one under the first-past-the-post system... David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data, finds that the Conservatives can flip upwards of 50 Liberal seats in Ontario alone, based on the historic outcome of the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election."
Sean Speer on X - "Is the Liberals’ leftward lurch here to stay? It seemed like this week almost more than any before it, one could envision a world in which Justin Trudeau was no longer the Liberal Party leader or Canada’s prime minister. New polling from Ipsos that showed nearly 70 percent of Canadians think it’s time that he step down signaled that we may soon be entering a post-Trudeau era. Speculating about what politics will look like when he’s gone is a bit fraught—especially since he continues to say that he’s not leaving—but it’s hard not to consider in light of his decade-long dominance over Liberal politics and the country’s politics more generally. As we discussed on this week’s Hub Roundtable, it’s pretty clear that Trudeau has shifted the Liberal Party to the Left of its previous spot on Canada’s contemporary political spectrum. It was an effective political strategy in the short term. It helped the Liberals to marginalize the NDP and climb from third to first in the 2015 election. But in hindsight, it set up the incoming Trudeau government with a poor governing framework. Its understanding of the country was rooted in as series of bad trade-offs: redistribution over growth, the symbolism of identity politics over slow yet steady egalitarian progress, a knee-jerk skepticism of Canadian history over a considered patriotism, and a soft power view of the world over the hard power realities of today’s geopolitics. The Liberal Party’s departure from its historic centrism has of course manifested itself in public policy including, most recently, the Trudeau government’s reversal of the Chrétien government’s capital gains tax reduction. But it’s also reflected in its people too. Think of John Manley, Martha Hall Findley, Bill Morneau, or my good friend, Robert Asselin, who’ve become isolated from the party that they dedicated so much of their professional lives to. The question, then, is whether the post-Trudeau era will double down on the party’s leftward trajectory over the past decade or restore a centrist equilibrium that has served it so well over the decades. There’s a good chance, to be honest, that it continues to the lurch to the Left. One gets the sense that the party’s centre of gravity has fundamentally shifted. The old “blue Liberals” constituency is smaller and less galvanized than its more progressive wings. From my outsider’s point of view, that would be a regrettable development. Although I’ve worked in partisan politics, I’ve never been much of a partisan. Partisan victories come and go but shifts in ideas can be far more durable and significant. Think for instance of the Chrétien government’s continuation of the market reforms started by the Mulroney government. There’s a good case in fact that the 2000 Fall Economic Statement (which lowered the capital gains tax rate) is one of the most conservative policy documents in modern Canadian history. There’s a reason why the Fraser Institute and other market-oriented think tanks refer to the 1990s as the era of the Chrétien consensus. The point is if it’s Liberals or Conservatives implementing good policy, we ought to be indifferent. We should be in favour of good policy. Period. One hopes therefore that in the eventual post-Trudeau era, the Liberal Party can shift back to the sensible centre and restore itself as a voice for competitiveness, growth, and balanced tax and fiscal policy. Time will ultimately tell whether such hope is misplaced."
DeepDive: The capital gains tax hike will hurt the middle class too - "The strongest argument in favour of increasing the capital gains inclusion rate is linked to past corporate tax reform... dividends have become more highly taxed compared to the personal tax on capital gain realizations. Given the higher dividend tax rate, companies have an incentive to pay capital gains rather than dividends to investors... While an increase in the personal capital gain tax rate reduces one distortion, it increases others... there is a tax disadvantage for a corporation to earn corporate capital gains taxes compared to dividends, which has been widened by the budget. Companies will try to avoid paying taxes on corporate capital gain realizations by structuring transactions to pay inter-corporate dividends instead. Further, corporate capital gains will now be more highly taxed than personal capital gains below $250,000. This will encourage investors to hold equity directly rather than through a corporation, introducing a new distortion in the tax system. This is not the end of the story. Capital gains taxes result in a higher tax on risky assets compared to non-risky investments since the government is more likely to share the gain but not investment losses. Also, the capital gains tax not only applies to gains from reinvested after-tax profits but also inflation—thus, the effective tax rate on real capital gains is higher than on nominal capital gains. Capital gains taxes on realizations encourage investors to hold assets for a longer period even though investors should rebalance their portfolio of investments to earn higher returns (the so-called “lock-in” effect). Overall, the capital gains tax advantage may be more ephemeral than real. Capital gains are “lumpy” since assets are not disposed on a regular basis... if large capital gains are realized only once or twice during a person’s lifetime or at death, many more Canadians, some with middle incomes, may be affected by the proposal on a lifetime basis. The extreme case would be tax filers who only appear once in their lifetime with capital gains of more than $250,000 in a particular year... most tax filers report capital gains quite infrequently. Of the taxpayers who claim more than $250,000 capital gains in a year, many would otherwise have middle-class or modest income... As a share of Canada’s tax filer population, those impacted by the new capital gains proposal on a lifetime basis is 1.26 million or 4.3 percent of tax filers compared to the budget estimate of 0.13 percent... corporate capital gains taxes discourage acquisitions and mergers in markets, which protects management from takeovers. In a recent paper on mergers and acquisitions, corporate capital gains taxes were found to reduce acquisitions by $1.1 billion annually in Canada, resulting in an economic loss of annual synergy benefits equal to $300 million each year... Both corporate and personal capital gains taxes will reduce business investment and therefore fall on capital owners or be shifted onto consumers through higher prices or workers as lower wages. Governments will lose other tax revenues as well... Capital gains taxes, especially at the corporate level, will impact equity values and reduce both dividends paid to shareholders as well as the capital gains on disposing equities held in private and public firms. Overall, 4.74 million individual investors in Canadian companies will be affected, representing 15.8 percent of all filers. Other Canadians will also be affected as equity held by pension plans, registered retirement plans and other non-registered saving in equity or real estate can be impacted too. To the extent that capital gains taxes discourage investment, the broader economy is affected including worker incomes and government reliant on tax revenues generated by business activity."
Five Tweets on the pushback against the capital gains tax increase - "The Trudeau government says the move is all about fairness and equity and that it will be only the richest Canadians who will be asked to pay more. They say only 0.13 percent of the population (40,000 Canadians), with an average annual income of $1.4 million, will pay more on their capital gains... Echoing the prime minister, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland gave a bizarre speech last week in which she described what seemed to be a near-apocalyptic scene, should the Liberal government’s capital gains changes not be enacted. She asked Canadians if they “want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry. Do you want to live in a country where a teenage girl gets pregnant just because she doesn’t have the money to buy birth control?” “…Do you want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury, but must do so in gated communities behind ever higher fences, using private health care and airplanes, because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less-privileged compatriots burns so hot,” she told reporters. Harley Finkelstein, the president of one of Canada’s largest publicly traded companies, Shopify, spoke out about how the capital gains tax increase is a divisive political move... the tax hikes will cause businesspeople and entrepreneurs to suffer and will penalize their success. He wrote, “[Canada’s] policy failures are America’s gains” as the country is “facing critically low productivity and business investment” while “our political leaders are failing our country’s entrepreneurs.”... Angus Reid tweeted out a poll that debunks the government’s estimate that only 0.13 percent of Canadians will be impacted by the capital gains inclusion rate increase in any given year. In fact, the government may be off by about 20 percent. The poll found that about one in five Canadians expect to be affected by the hike, resulting in them footing a larger tax bill within the next five years. Additionally, contrary to the government’s claim, Canadians of all income levels anticipate being impacted by the increase, not just the country’s wealthiest, who make an average of $1.4 million a year. Moving into a more rural setting, the Grain Growers of Canada (CGC) launched a campaign against the hike, citing that the tax burden will decrease many farmers’ retirement savings. They say the tax would make it more difficult for young farmers to take over their family farms if some of the tax cost is passed on to the next generation... As bearish bets on Canadian currency reached an all-time high, the highest number of non-commercial short positions on Canadian currency futures since 1986 was reached. Adam Button, chief currency analyst at ForexLive, says that this display of uncertainty in the Canadian dollar indicates that “Global markets are sensing that high interest rates will lead to an economic slowdown, particularly in Canada due to high leverage and housing exposure.”"
Trudeau's Chinese collaboration has been in broad daylight all along - "In their testimony during the commission’s hearings earlier this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Democratic Institutions Minister Dominic Leblanc, National Defence Minister Bill Blair and a gaggle of senior Liberal officials came perilously close to committing perjury in their efforts to pretend they didn’t know what the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) had been warning them about for years, and in the attempt to hide what they knew about the role China’s proxies played in their party’s hair’s-breadth 2019 Don Valley North nomination of Beijing-friendly candidate Han Dong. Some good has already come of Justice Hogue’s inquiry, at least to the extent that the penny is starting to drop, that what is happening here is not so much about “foreign interference” as it is about unseemly mutually beneficial collusions and collaborations between hostile foreign actors and Canada’s politicians at all levels of government, in both “witting” and “unwitting” arrangements. This is where the tabloid headlines about “treason” come into it, leaving Canadians to rely only on the assurances of such questionably independent authorities in the matter of espionage and international intrigues as the Green Party’s Elizabeth May, who tells us we needn’t worry. Being a federal party leader, May availed herself of an unredacted copy of last week’s report of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), and on Tuesday, to the great delight of Trudeau and his ministers, May declared: “Having read the full, unredacted (NSICOP) report, for myself, I can say I have no worries about anyone in the House of Commons. There is no list of MPs who have shown disloyalty to Canada.”... A central pillar of Bill C-70, now being rushed with all-party support to the Senate, is the proposed Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act. In December 2022, at a Liberal-hosted “Palestine solidarity” event on Parliament Hill attended by MPs from all the parties that erupted in controversy owing to the creepy antisemites and Holocaust deniers on the guest list, May uttered this declaration: “I take my marching orders from the permanent representative of Palestine to Canada.” On the face of it, this would seem a perfectly straightforward “arrangement with a foreign principal” to be regulated by Bill C-70, which would mean May would have to enter her own name in the foreign influence registry. But that’s only if we can take May seriously. What has also raised questions about May’s judgment is that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh also asserted his prerogative to read the entire unexpurgated NSICOP report, and Singh claims the report contains the opposite of what May says about its contents... “In short, there are a number of MPs who have knowingly provided help to foreign governments, some to the detriment of Canada and Canadians. There are also politicians at all levels of government who have benefited from foreign interference.” As for Trudeau, “He may disagree with that intelligence,” Singh said. “But I believe … he has sent the message that he is willing to accept some level of foreign interference.” No kidding. This is a matter of public record in so many instances it’s barely even newsworthy, and only most recently and scandalously in the case of Han Dong. For nearly five years, Trudeau pretended in public that there was nothing untoward about the Liberal nomination in Don Valley North, and that it was racist to suggest that there was, and that there was nothing amiss about busloads of Chinese students showing up from a posh foreign-student academy in another riding to cast votes for Dong. All along, Trudeau knew that CSIS had assessed that the students were strong-armed by the Chinese consulate, that they were from another riding and therefore voting in contravention of the Liberal Party’s rules, that they used fraudulent party credentials and that they had intimidated local Liberal party members to get Beijing’s guy on the ticket. If the NSICOP report contained a “list” of politicians who have helped foreign governments and who have benefited from foreign principals and their proxies to the detriment of Canada and Canadians, any serious observer of China’s whole-of-government exertions in this country since 2015 would full expect to see the prime minister’s name at the very top of it. Justin Trudeau has been a one-man Chinese influence operation for years, and he hasn’t even tried to hide it. Nevermind his weird cash-for-access arrangements with multi-millionaire proxies of the Chinese government, the unaccountable serendipity of $67,080 in Mandarin-bloc donations replenishing the war chest of his own Papineau riding in Montreal in a single 48-hour period in July 2016, and other such indiscretions. Open collaboration with Xi Jinping’s torture state was Trudeau’s policy when he ran for the Liberal leadership, and he embarked upon it with verve and style from his first days in the Prime Minister’s Office. It would be a “win-win” affair. This is exactly why the prime minister is not, strictly speaking, a traitor. Treason by way of collaboration in foreign interference operations requires that the conduct be clandestine. With Trudeau, with only a few possible exceptions, it’s been in plain sight, brazen and in broad daylight."
I chaired the CHRT. It has no business policing 'hate speech' - "The Liberal government’s proposed Bill C-63, the online harms act, is terrible law that will unduly impose restrictions on Canadians’ sacred Charter right to freedom of expression. That is what the Liberals intend. By drafting a vague law creating a draconian regime to address online “harms,” they will win their wars without firing a bullet. The consequences for violating the law are so severe that it should be expected that hardly anyone would risk violating it. Even news media organizations and big tech companies should be expected to avoid the risk. In this moment when we need it the most, robust political discourse in Canada could disappear with a whimper... The terrible part of this proposed legislation is bringing hate speech back into the Canadian Human Rights Act. Hate speech was removed from the act more than a decade ago for a simple reason: It was a bad idea. It was unworkable and created far more problems than it solved. It is still a bad idea... Another dangerous change involves allowing complaints to be made anonymously. The current presumption is that all inquiries are conducted in public. The tribunal has the power to anonymize complaints under certain conditions, such as whether there is “a serious possibility that the life, liberty or security of a person will be endangered.” Fair enough. Bill C-63 expands those considerations for hate-speech cases, which may be anonymized if the complainant or a witness may be subjected to “threats, intimidation or discrimination.” It’s now a much lower threshold. Secrecy, not transparency, will be the new normal. Unrelated to discrimination, Section 60 of the Canadian Human Rights Act allows for summary conviction and a large monetary fine for other offences, such as obstruction of an investigation. We rarely see such a prosecution because it requires the consent of the attorney general. Under Bill C-63, consent from the attorney general is not required to go after anyone who breaches an order for anonymity in hate speech cases. All of this tinkering to create a big stick for enforcement, just for hate speech cases, makes it clear that the intention of the bill is to stifle free speech and needed political discourse. Lastly, the Tribunal needs experienced, skilful members who will be impartial, fair and neutral when deciding these hate speech cases. Although Bill C-63 allows for the maximum number of members to be increased from 18 to 20, there are currently only 11. The tribunal is gravely under-resourced as it is, and cannot keep up with its current caseload. How will its members manage with the massive influx of new hate speech cases, even if new members are appointed? And there will be many, many new hate speech complaints lodged. Why not? You might get $20,000, you might get a lawyer to take your case at no cost to you, and you might get to do it anonymously. It will cost you nothing. Meanwhile, your online enemies will pay a huge price. We used to say at the CHRT that the process itself is the punishment. It takes years to bring a case to conclusion. No one wants to be a respondent to a human rights complaint. Everyone knows that, and that’s likely the point. Criticism of government policies, like immigration policy for example, might suddenly become dangerous. Welcome to a new era of self-censorship. Free speech in Canada is about to be stifled. Don’t be fooled by the lipstick. This is terrible legislation."
