Double-double trouble: N.S. Tories accused of vote-buying with Tim Hortons gift cards

Voters in Nova Scotia go to the polls on Nov. 26. At dissolution, the Progressive Conservatives held 34 seats in the 55-seat legislature, the Liberals held 14 seats, the NDP had six and there was one Independent.

Here’s a look at some of the promises announced by the three major parties on the campaign trail:

Progressive Conservatives:

— Cut the harmonized sales tax by one percentage point, to 14 per cent, by April 1. (Announced shortly before election call.)

— Increase the basic personal exemption on the Nova Scotia income tax to $11,744 from $8,744.

— Increase minimum wage in 2025 to $16.50 per hour from $15.20 per hour.

— Remove the tolls from the two Halifax harbour bridges at a cost to government coffers of $40 million.

— Open a Halifax-based medical clinic to treat the symptoms of menopause, which would cost $4 million to set up and $2.4 million a year to operate.

— Establish a 30-member provincial travel nurse team to help areas with nursing shortages, part of an estimated $5.3-million pilot program to begin at the end of 2024.

— Reduce the minimum required down payment for first-time buyers on a home costing up to $500,000 to two per cent from five per cent under a loan program administered by local credit unions.

— Launch a universal shingles vaccine program for people 65 and older.

— Make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres at a cost of $8 million.

— Impose a cap on electricity rate increases that will be based on the average of rate hikes across the country. (From platform)

— Reduce the small business tax rate to 1.5 per cent from 2.5 per cent; increase the small business tax threshold to $700,000 from $500,000. (From platform)

Liberals:

— Cut harmonized sales tax by two points, to 13 per cent. (Announced in February)

— Establish the position of ethics commissioner with order-making powers; give more resources to auditor general.

— Grant order-making powers to the privacy commissioner so that rulings related to access to information requests and other privacy matters can be enforced.

— Implement fine of $250,000 for any governing party that defies law on fixed election date.

— Remove the provincial portion of the harmonized sales tax on all food that isn’t already tax-free, such as snack foods, granola products, and rotisserie chickens, at a cost of $11 million annually.

— Provide about $10 million in subsidies for independent grocers and food retailers in the form of grants and low-interest loans to help them expand and compete with big retailers.

— Build 20 new collaborative care centres and expand services at 20 existing clinics to help tackle the province’s family doctor wait-list.

— Offer a one-time $15,000 bonus to professionals such as pharmacists and therapists who commit to five years of service in the new collaborative care centres; double the existing incentive for doctors to $10,000 a year from $5,000.

— Lower provincial income taxes by raising the basic personal exemption amount to $15,705.

— Establish a public inquiry into illegal fishing; introduce a minimum fine for people caught buying illegally harvested lobster; create a dedicated fisheries enforcement unit and separate commercial fisheries office.

— Build 80,000 new homes by 2032 to help alleviate housing shortage. (From platform)

— Replace the federal carbon price with an Atlantic region cap-and-trade model for large industrial greenhouse gas emitters. (From platform)

— Make public transit free across province. (Announced in September)

— Promote flexible work arrangements to reduce the number of vehicles on the road.

— Improve rent controls and close loopholes in the province’s regulations for fixed-term leases.

— Establish a provincial rent bank to provide zero-interest loans to renters who can’t pay their bills.

— Reduce immigration levels to align with provincial Labour Department targets.

— Create a minister of women’s health.

— Provide the public access to free menstrual products at all provincial buildings.

— Spend $300 million on local infrastructure and housing needs in Cape Breton.

NDP:

— Ban fixed-term rent leases and immediately slash the province’s rent cap in half to 2.5 per cent in order to prevent large annual rent increases.

— Establish rent control and provide a tax credit for renters from low and middle-income households.

— Prioritize the use of prefabricated housing to expand public housing stock. (Announced in May)

— Increase loans to help with down payments on homes, to 10 per cent of purchase price (up from five per cent), for a maximum of $50,000; extend the repayment period to 25 years from 10 years. (Announced in May)

— Reintroduce Coastal Protection Act to protect coastal areas, dunes and salt marshes, as well as to restrict development along parts of the 13,000-kilometre coastline at risk of heavy erosion.

— Offer an affordable homes rebate that would help households with incomes of less than $70,000 save an average of $900 per year on rent or mortgage payments.

— Create a compliance and enforcement unit for resolving tenant-landlord disputes.

— Open 45 doctor clinics across the province to provide primary care at a cost of $60 million in the first year of the plan.

— Remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all groceries, cellphone and internet bills and for the purchase and installation of heat pumps.

— Double the municipal finance grant to $30 million from $15 million in their first year of government.

— Establish a rent-to-own home program for Nova Scotians who earn less than $100,000 annually, with about 500 new homes built in the first year by using prefabricated construction.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.

OTTAWA – The federal government is opening a research centre that will study the dangers posed by artificial intelligence technology.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced the launch of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute in Montreal on Tuesday. He said the centre will be important for building public trust in artificial intelligence technology.

“If you want people to adopt it, they need to have trust,” he said. “If there’s no adoption, we will squander the incredible potential of many new technologies.”

The government says AI can be misused in election interference efforts, disinformation campaigns and cybersecurity breaches.

At a meeting in Soeul in May, world leaders agreed to build a network of publicly backed safety institutes to advance research and testing of the technology. Champagne said Canada was among the first countries to launch such an institute.

The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute will collaborate with similar organizations in other countries as part of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes, which is set to hold its first meeting in San Francisco next week.

Governments and global bodies have been working to design guardrails for AI amid expert warnings the technology, which is already changing everyday life, could pose an existential risk.

The centre will be based at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. It will receive $50 million over five years from Ottawa, part of $2.4 billion in AI-related funding announced in this year’s federal budget.

The institute will work on projects directed by the government focusing on priorities like cybersecurity and joint testing with other countries. The government will also fund research by Canadian and international experts through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Elissa Strome, executive director of Pan-Canadian AI strategy at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, said global collaboration is essential because AI technology doesn’t have borders.

Canada is a longtime leader in AI research, she said. “It’s the value-add that Canada brings to the global conversation, is this expertise and this leadership that we have in AI research.”

At the meeting in San Francisco, representatives from AI institutes around the world will look at emerging topics and opportunities for collaboration, she said.

“We hope to be able to come back from that meeting with some ideas on where we want to focus, at least to start with.”

Strome said there are already concerns and issues with how AI is being deployed, including misinformation, disinformation and synthetic content like deepfakes, but also opportunities to develop new technical approaches to identify or prevent false content.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

MONTREAL – A Quebec civil liberties group says it intends to push forward with legal action after the Supreme Court of Canada responded to its translation demand by simply removing thousands of unilingual English judgments from its website last week.

Droits collectifs Québec said the court’s decision to delete the rulings doesn’t resolve the issues it raised. “Our intention is to continue the proceedings which, in our eyes, are still relevant at this time, despite this somewhat desperate gesture made by the Supreme Court,” Étienne-Alexis Boucher, the group’s executive director, said in an interview.

The organization had gone to Federal Court alleging the high court’s registrar — the court’s administrative body — was not respecting the Official Languages Act. It was seeking a public apology, a judgment from the court, official translations of the English-only decisions within three years, and $1 million in exemplary damages to be shared with groups working to preserve the French language.

More than 6,000 decisions from before 1970, when rulings started to be systemically translated under the Official Languages Act, had been posted on the Supreme Court’s website in English only.

On Friday, the registrar announced it was removing all pre-1970 judgments from the Supreme Court website, directing people to other online databases if they wished to consult them. The court’s Chief Justice Richard Wagner said in June that the pre-1970 rulings were primarily of historical interest and the cost of translating them would be prohibitive.

The registrar said Friday that although the judgments were taken down, it would begin translating the “most historically or jurisprudentially significant” decisions from before 1970.

The Federal Court application involves decisions that were rendered between 1877 and the September 1969 entry into force of the Official Languages Act, which obliges federal institutions to publish content in English and in French. It came after the court failed to respond to a ruling from official languages commissioner Raymond Théberge declaring that decisions published on the court’s website must be available in both official languages.

Théberge agreed that the law doesn’t apply retroactively, but he said posting earlier decisions without translating them amounted to an offence under the act, and he gave the high court 18 months to correct the situation.

On Tuesday, Théberge said in a statement that he was aware of the Supreme Court’s “new approach on publishing judgments on their website” and said his office will continue to monitor developments in the matter.

François Larocque, a University of Ottawa professor who researches language rights, said that under 2023 reforms to the Official Languages Act, the commissioner has the power to propose a compliance agreement if institutions don’t follow his recommendations.

He said the removal of the unilingual decisions reflects short-term compliance.

“The spirit of the recommendation was something different … it was about making the entirety of the court’s jurisprudence available to both legal audiences in Canada: the French and English legal audience,” Larocque said.

“By removing all the decisions, essentially they’re levelling down, right? Instead of making all the decisions available in both languages, you’re just going to remove the offending ones and no one gets them on the Supreme Court website.”

Larocque said access to translated versions are important, as some of the cases are still cited regularly as jurisprudence.

He said he “vehemently” disagrees with the chief justice’s characterization that the rulings are just of historical interest. “Those decisions, even though they’re not necessarily cited every day, are still important. They are the law of the land until they are explicitly overruled by a subsequent decision,” Larocque said.

The decisions are also pedagogical tools for law professors and having them in French is important.

“I think that’s the right way to view all those decisions as being part of the fabric of our legal system,” Larocque said. “Everything the Supreme Court has ever done, I consider it to be important.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.

— With files from Pierre Saint-Arnaud in Montreal.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.