Politics
CAQ, Liberals compete to offer tax cuts on Day 2 of Quebec election campaign
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QUEBEC — The two top parties running for office in Quebec’s election campaign held competing news conferences in the provincial capital on Monday to promise income tax cuts if they are elected on Oct. 3.
Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault said if he’s elected premier again, his government would reduce by one per cent the first two income tax brackets, starting 2023. He also promised to cut income taxes by a total of 2.5 per cent over the next 10 years.
“Quebec, we know, has taxation levels that are very high,” Legault said, adding that Monday’s announcement was the first of four promises related to helping voters deal with the rising cost of living.
The tax cuts, he added, are “going to help Quebecers have more money in their wallets to face inflation.”
Quebecers making $80,000 a year would save $630 in taxes per year, he said, adding that he would pay for the cuts by reducing the amount of payments the government must make every year into a fund — called the Generations Fund — dedicated to reducing the province’s debt.
“We will use 39 per cent of the payments to the Generations Fund,” Legault said. “There may be political parties that will use 100 per cent of the payments; we think it’s irresponsible to do that,” Legault said.
Meanwhile, the Liberals, who had promised before the start of the election campaign to reduce by 1.5 per cent the first two income tax brackets, announced on Monday more measures to fight inflation.
The party is proposing to freeze Hydro-Québec rates and abolish the Quebec sales tax on the first $4,000 of a client’s electricity bill. The Liberals are also promising to abolish the Quebec sales tax on basic necessities and increase a tax credit for the most disadvantaged.
Liberal Leader Dominique Anglade estimated that the total savings would amount to $5,000 per family of four if her party wins the election. But she said that $5,000 in savings is also tied to measures that haven’t been announced yet.
One political scientist says the tax-cut promises are being driven by inflation and cost-of-living concerns, but also by a financial situation in the province that is better than expected. There is also an element of competition involving parties on the right side of the political spectrum, Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, said Monday.
The Conservative Party of Quebec, he added, has promised even deeper tax cuts than what was proposed by the two leading parties on Monday. The Quebec Tories, Béland added, are fighting with the CAQ for seats in the Quebec City area.
“It’s normally popular when you talk about tax cuts, but of course people don’t always think about the trade-off,” Béland said.
Legault’s party has said it wants to reduce the high tax burden that Quebecers face. The CAQ says Quebecers pay, on average, four to five per cent more tax than other Canadians.
Béland said with higher taxes, the province has been effective in fighting poverty and in instituting progressive family policies and affordable child care — waiting lists aside.
Quebecers, however, are clearly dissatisfied with the management of their health-care and long-term care systems, according to polls.
As well, the provinces, including Quebec, are asking for increased health-care spending from the federal government while looking to cut taxes, which is an odd position to take, Béland noted.
“Yes, parties are saying they will act to fix these problems, but people will have to understand that tax cuts might mean less money for other things like health care, long-term care, so forth,” Béland said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 29, 2022.
Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press
Politics
The Earthquake Shaking BC Politics – TheTyee.ca
Six months from now Kevin Falcon is going to be staggering toward a catastrophic defeat for the remnants of the BC Liberals.
But what that will mean for the province’s political future is still up in the air, with the uncertainty increased by two shocking polls that show the Conservatives far ahead of BC United and only a few percentage points behind the NDP.
BC United is already toast, done in by self-inflicted wounds and the arrival of John Rustad and the Conservative Party of BC.
Falcon’s party has stumbled since the decision to abandon the BC Liberal brand in favour of BC United. The change, promoted by Falcon and approved by party members, took place a year ago this week. It was an immediate disaster.
That was made much worse when Rustad relaunched the B.C. Conservatives after Falcon kicked him out of caucus for doubting the basic science of climate change.
Falcon’s party had fallen from 33 per cent support to 19 per cent, trailing the Conservatives at 25 per cent. (The NDP has 42 per cent support.) That’s despite his repeated assurances that voters would quickly become familiar with the BC United brand.
BC United is left with almost no safe seats in this election based on the current polling.
Take Abbotsford West, where Mike de Jong is quitting after 30 years in the legislature to seek a federal Conservative nomination. It’s been a BC Liberal/United stronghold. In 2020 de Jong captured 46 per cent of the votes to the New Democrats’ 37 per cent and the Conservatives’ nine per cent.
But that was when the Conservatives were at about eight per cent in the polls, not 25 per cent.
Double their vote in this October’s election at the expense of the Liberals — a cautious estimate — and the NDP wins.
United’s prospects are even worse in ridings that were close in the 2020 election, like Skeena. Ellis Ross took it for the BC Liberals in 2020 with 52 per cent of the vote to the NDP’s 45 per cent.
But there was no Conservative candidate. Rustad has committed to running a candidate in every riding and the NDP can count on an easy win in Skeena.
It’s the same story across the province. The Conservatives and BC United will split the centre-right vote, handing the NDP easy wins and a big majority. And BC United will be fighting to avoid being beaten by the Conservatives in the ridings that are in play.
United’s situation became even more dire last week. A Liaison Strategies poll found the NDP at 38 per cent support, Conservatives at 34 per cent, United at 16 per cent and Greens at 11 per cent. That’s similar to a March poll from Mainstreet Research.
If those polls are accurate, BC United could end up with no seats. Voters who don’t want an NDP government will consider strategic voting based on which party has a chance of winning in their ridings.
Based on the Liaison poll, that would be the Conservatives. That’s especially true outside Vancouver and Vancouver Island, where the poll shows the Conservatives at 39 per cent, the NDP at 30 per cent and United lagging at 19 per cent. (The caveat about the polls’ accuracy is important. Curtis Fric and Philippe J. Fournier offer a useful analysis of possible factors affecting the results on Substack.)
And contributors will also be making some hard choices about which party gets their money. Until now BC United was far ahead of the Conservatives, thanks to its strong fundraising structure and the perception that it was the front-runner on the right. That’s under threat.
The polls also mark a big change in the NDP’s situation. This election looked like a cakewalk, with a divided centre-right splitting the vote and a big majority almost guaranteed. Most polls this year gave the New Democrats at least a 17 per cent lead over the Conservatives.
If the two recent polls prove accurate and that gap is much smaller, the NDP faces a tougher campaign challenge than anyone expected a few weeks ago.
Next: What’s behind the B.C. Conservatives’ surge?
Politics
Political longevity of Sunak smoking ban likely to outlast PM – BBC.com
Unless the opinion polls shift and shift quite a bit, Rishi Sunak knows his time left as prime minister might be running out.
But he is the instigator of a smoking plan with substantial, cross-party political support, which looks set to herald a sizeable social change.
And that cross-party support suggests it’s an idea with greater political longevity than he might have, because Labour wouldn’t scrap it if they win the election.
In other words, whatever happens, it is what some in politics call a legacy.
As I wrote here when Mr Sunak first set out his plans last autumn – in what he described at the time as “the biggest public health intervention in a generation” – this is a government seeking to nudge, or elbow, a societal shift along: the near end of smoking.
On Tuesday, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said she hopes creating a smoke free generation will “spare thousands of young people from addiction and early death as well as saving billions of pounds for our NHS”.
What was once mainstream is already marginal. Now the attempt to near-eradicate it, over time.
This isn’t the end of this discussion: what we have seen so far are the early parliamentary stages. There is more to come before it becomes law.
So that is the big picture, potential social change stuff. What about the politics?
Nearly 60 Conservative MPs voted against Mr Sunak’s idea.
Yes, they had a free vote – they weren’t told how to vote – but they defied him nonetheless. The cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch among them.
Another 100-ish abstained. The cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt among them.
A source close to Ms Mordaunt told me that she abstained because “she was not a supporter of the bill. She has many objections to it. The practicality of it. The implementation and enforcement of it. But being a serving cabinet minister she thought voting against it would look more confrontational and posturing than abstaining would have been.”
Who could that possibly be a dig at? Ah, Kemi Badenoch.
And what do Ms Mordaunt and Ms Badenoch have in common? A splash of ambition.
They are both talked up by some as future Conservative leaders.
Read more about the smoking ban
When you look at the numbers, nearly half of Conservative MPs couldn’t bring themselves to endorse one of their leader’s flagship ideas of the last six months.
Which tells you something about the fractious nature of the Conservative parliamentary party, although not a lot that wasn’t pretty clear to the regular observer already.
Labour are already gleefully talking up that it is a good job they backed the idea or Mr Sunak would have lost.
And they are also publicly pondering what those opponents might do once the chance arises to change the ideas, to bolt on amendments.
But then again they would be defeated if those in favour keep backing the plan as it is.
When governments manage to latch on to a plan which goes with the grain of where a society is already heading, the might of the law can shove it along profoundly and, probably, permanently.
This idea – for now at least – looks like it might be one of those.
And, for all his political troubles, it is Mr Sunak who is its author.
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