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OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet are in Vancouver Monday for the start of a three-day retreat as they prepare for a fall sitting of Parliament, a new Conservative leader, and the ongoing pressures of the COVID-19 recovery and inflation.
Trudeau has indicated affordability will be a key agenda item as Canadians struggle to pay their bills and inflation keeps going after bank accounts with a wrecking ball.
Last week Trudeau said Canada’s economy has recovered quickly from the COVID-19 shutdowns and unemployment is at a record low — 4.9 per cent in both June and July — but there is more help to come.
“Lots of people have jobs, but there (are) still real challenges and we’re going to continue to do what is necessary to support vulnerable Canadians as we move forward, taking into account inflation, but also being careful not to do things that will accelerate or exacerbate the inflation crisis we’re facing,” he said last Wednesday.
That low unemployment rate is indicative of one of the biggest challenges facing the Canadian economy right now: labour shortages.
Tim Barber, a principal at Bluesky Strategy Group, said the Liberals would do well to use this retreat to respond to the ongoing labour challenges, which are affecting everything from factory floors and restaurant kitchens, to school buses and emergency rooms.
“I would argue it is the source of so many of our pain points,” Barber said.
The Liberals have been reluctant to put more money on the table to aid affordability, fearing handouts would stimulate more consumer spending and demand, exacerbating price pressures.
Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland have until now pointed to increases in government benefits that were scheduled to happen with or without inflation. That includes planned increases to the Canada Child Benefit, GST rebates and seniors’ benefits.
Most other G7 nations moved in the spring to address soaring energy costs with direct price rebates or plans to hand out energy-related relief cheques. Some Canadian provinces followed suit — Alberta, Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador all cut gas taxes, while Saskatchewan is promising $500 to every adult this fall.
The federal government is not moving to lower gas taxes, which would contradict their climate plan that will see gas prices slowly increase as a way to incentivize greener energy choices.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pushed the government over the spring and summer to hike GST rebate and child tax benefit cheques to help those who need it the most.
Inflation has been one of the key talking points for Pierre Poilievre, the Ottawa-area MP who is widely expected to run away with the Conservative leadership this coming weekend.
Poilievre consistently blames Trudeau directly for the rising cost of basic needs from housing and home heating bills, to groceries and back-to-school supplies.
The cabinet meetings will surely include talk of how the government will respond to a Poilievre-led Conservative party.
It will also be a time to look at delivering on the agreement made with the NDP last year in exchange for that party’s support on confidence matters. To live up to the agreement, the Liberals must deliver the start of a national dental care plan and a boost to housing allowances before the end of this year.
Barber said the cabinet needs to just be better at managing its files, and must “demonstrate competence.”
This summer was the most normal since COVID-19 began, but emerging from two years of the pandemic brought a host of problems the Liberals did not fully anticipate. That included a debacle of passport renewals and painfully long lineups at airports as neither airlines nor government-run security and border services were staffed up for a spike in travel.
There is also a growing health-care crisis, largely created by the labour shortage but exacerbated by ongoing pressures and burnout from COVID-19.
The provinces want more federal money for health care, and Trudeau said repeatedly over the last two years he would negotiate a new health accord with the provinces once the pandemic was over. But he insists that any more money has to be met with specific deliverables, while the provinces want it without strings attached.
Trudeau insists there is no impasse and that the federal government will be there with money as soon as the provinces are ready to show results.
“Canadians need better access to family doctors, Canadians need lower wait times for surgeries, for mental health supports,” he said.
“We will be there with more investments in health care but we need to be able to demonstrate to Canadians that those results are going to be tangibly delivered for them.”
Ministers are also expected to have some heavy conversations about their own security amid an increase in both online and in-person threats and acts of intimidation targeting politicians.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 6, 2022.
Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press
The race for mayor and city council will not cross the finish line until October of next year but the first big step is now
Published Apr 25, 2024 • Last updated 50 minutes ago • 4 minute read
The man insists upon a point to be made.
“This is not a takeover by the UCP of municipal elections and it’s not a takeover by the NDP of municipal elections. It won’t be allowed to be. It will be an overt prohibition. Nobody is taking over anything.”
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The man quoted is Ric McIver.
In a previous life McIver was a long-serving fiscal hawk on Calgary city council, nicknamed Dr. No by this scribbler because he was no fan of big spending.
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McIver is now Premier Danielle Smith’s point man on cities and he’s delivering news that could pave the way for a real shakeup at Calgary city council where lefties rule the roost.
Read on.
The race for mayor and city council will not cross the finish line until October of next year but the first big step is now.
It is Thursday and later this day the UCP government led by Premier Smith will roll out its plan to allow local political parties to contest the next city election in Calgary and Edmonton “where political affiliations are most obvious.”
The move is already opposed by Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek who says she is not a fan.
The Smith government is pushing forward.
They intend to create rules city political parties will operate by.
With city political parties, a candidate’s political party will appear on the ballot.
Candidates can still run as independent candidates.
These city political parties will only be in Calgary and Edmonton, at least for now.
These parties will not have any formal affiliation with federal or provincial parties. There will be no city UCP or NDP or Liberal party.
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There will be no sharing of funds or voter lists between federal or provincial parties and these city parties.
The Smith government will discuss all the ins and outs with local governments in Alberta and regulations governing the parties will be on the books by the end of the year, or at least more than six months before the fall 2025 city election.
This will give the cities and the political players in those cities time to prepare for the vote.
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For years, city conservatives, especially in Calgary, have been champing at the bit for the chance to do battle as a local political party.
The belief is, and there is evidence to back it up, if city conservatives could get their act together and agree to one candidate for mayor and 14 candidates for the 14 council seats they’d have a good chance of being the city council majority.
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Why?
Because if Calgarians knew exactly who they were voting for and if it was crystal clear what each of the candidates stood for then you would see more conservatives win instead of the election being a game of who has the most name recognition.
There will be those who will attack the Smith government and say this is about partisanship at the local level, folks picking sides.
Get real.
“There’s a lot of partisan behaviour and people in municipal politics now,” says McIver.
“There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s actually part of free speech, part of the freedom of association, part of what we’re guaranteed in this country.
“Those who say partisanship doesn’t exist are wrong. My guess is people who say that probably haven’t sat through a lot of council meetings. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s a duck.”
And let us not forget in the last city election city unions bankrolled a campaign involving the endorsement of candidates, many of them winning council seats.
McIver says having city parties is an opportunity to hold politicians somewhat accountable.
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The cities boss says right now there are candidates at the doors with no party handle who can tell people they believe are conservative that they themselves are conservative and tell people they believe are liberal that they themselves are liberal.
With city parties, it will make it easier for those who want to vote one way or the other to find their candidate.
The candidate’s affiliation will be spelled out and if the candidate is elected and votes in a different way the voters can more easily call that politician out.
But people like Calgary Mayor Gondek don’t like the idea of city political parties.
What is McIver’s reaction?
“We heard that and we disagree. We think this is a positive thing,” says the man riding herd on the cities file for the UCP.
“It should increase accountability. It should increase the ability of voters to look at candidates and say this is my candidate, this is not my candidate.”
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OTTAWA – Conservative member of Parliament Colin Carrie, who represents Oshawa, Ont., says he will not run in the next election.
Carrie was first elected in 2004 and re-elected six times.
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In Israel, the far right is increasingly influential in politics, with a government reliant for its existence on a settler movement driving an ever-more extreme agenda.
Analysts point out that settler and ultra-right-wing voices have come to dominate the cabinet, providing legal and political cover for even more expansion into internationally recognised Palestinian territory, and underpinning much of the ferocity of Israel’s war on Gaza.
And yet, despite that, and irrespective of the international criticism of Israel that continues to grow, the United States continues to fund it.
US lawmakers in the Senate voted on Tuesday, by an overwhelming majority, to transfer $17bn in military aid to Israel.
Celebrating the passage of the bill, House House Majority leader Chuck Schumer told the Senate: “Tonight we tell our allies: ‘We stand with you.’
“We tell our adversaries: ‘Don’t mess with us.’ We tell the world: ‘The United States will do everything to safeguard democracy and our way of life.’”
But in Israel, “democracy” and the system that Schumer and other US politicians back involves the illegal settlement of occupied Palestinian land, displacing the native population, and creating a dual system of governance, with Jews ruled under Israeli civil law, and occupied Palestinians under military law.
These settlements now dot much of the occupied West Bank, either gathering in established clusters, or in outposts that even the Israeli state deems illegal, but does little about.
As their numbers and political support have grown, settlers have become more confident, attacking Palestinian villages in well-armed and coordinated raids, occasionally with military support, and evicting Palestinian villagers.
In tandem with the expansion of the settlements has been a wider rightward drift across Israeli society, which saw the country elect its most right-wing parliament or Knesset in its history in November 2022.
Among its members are extreme-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir – convicted of incitement in 2007 – who acts as national security minister, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose claims to Palestinian territory in the occupied West Bank run counter to international law.
“The settler and far-right movements have been growing rapidly within Israel for years, to the point where forming a government is impossible without participation from right-wing parties opposed to territorial compromise with Palestinians,” Omar H Rahman of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs said.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, members of the right-wing coalition cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speak to a growing constituency characterised as “messianic” in its approach to Palestinians and their land, according to analysts.
Settlers’ ideologies – which claim, among other things, a religious justification for their taking of Palestinian land – have been a growing political presence since the 1967 war, which resulted in Israel occupying the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
“The US has played a significant role in this rightward shift by ensuring Israel’s impunity for relentless illegal settlement building, thereby undercutting those within Israeli politics who warned of the consequences of unfettered expansionism,” Rahman said. “This demonstrated to the Israeli public there would be no penalty for supporting those in Israel who want all the land ‘between the river and the sea’.”
Israel has seemingly run a violent campaign in the occupied West Bank in parallel to its war on Gaza, which followed a Hamas-led attack into Israel in which 1,139 people were killed and some 200 taken into Gaza.
As of March of this year, 7,350 Palestinians had been arrested by Israeli forces across the West Bank, many without charge and with no hope of due process.
In the last few days, rights group Amnesty International has sharply criticised settler attacks on Palestinians and what it calls the established system of apartheid that reigns in the occupied West Bank.
In the days following the discovery of the body of 14-year-old Binyamin Ahimeir, himself from an illegal Israeli West Bank settlement, hundreds of settlers went on a deadly rampage between April 12 and 16, torching homes, fruit trees and vehicles.
By the end of their attack, four Palestinians lay dead, killed by either settlers or Israeli military forces, Amnesty said, including Omar Hamed, a 17-year-old boy from near Ramallah.
An estimated 487 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank in attacks by armed settlers, often supported by security forces according to witnesses, or by security forces in near-nightly raids on towns and refugee camps and in other incidents.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 34,262 people. The true figure is likely far higher.
While Netanyahu has officially rejected settler ambitions for Gaza, he does have two settler ministers in his cabinet and the movement is continuing to grow.
Expectations that prime minister Netanyahu might act as a check on settler ambitions have also proven ill founded. Since at least 2015, both he and his Likud party have been joining with the extreme elements of the right by running campaigns noted for their dog whistle racism, Eyal Lurie-Paredes of the Middle East Institute said.
“It’s not just about the present,” Lurie-Paredes added, “It’s about the future.
“Most political party, not just Likud, has ever really opposed the settlements. They’re a winning card. The main two sectors of the population of settlers – national orthodox and ultra-orthodox – have the highest birth-rate among Israeli Jews high birth-rates. Out of Jewish first graders, more than 40 percent belong to these groups.
Additionally, Israeli governments have created a more enhanced welfare state in the West Bank for Jews, offering them better infrastructure and cheaper housing – which or drive people to move there and increase their belonging to the settler movement” he added.
Referring to the years leading up to Israel’s founding in 1948, Tel Aviv-based analyst Dahlia Scheindlin said “Settler politics have always been there.”
“However,” she noted, “it had never really been especially religious. That element only really entered the political mainstream after the 1967 war. From that point, the idea developed that territorial expansion was part of messianic redemption took hold as a specific theology among certain religious Jews.
“In tandem to this was a state that was ready to facilitate settlements covertly. However, more recently, Likud’s own populist mandate has become indistinguishable from that of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and now we have a government openly embracing settlers, the extreme right and their politics.”
The US says it opposes the creation of settlements and has recently sanctioned bodies involved with the movement, some known to be close to Ben-Gvir and said to be actively fundraising for the settler movement within the US.
The US government has also said it is considering sanctions against the Netzah Yehuda battalion, which operates within the occupied West Bank and draws its recruits from Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, on repeated allegations of rights abuses.
Nevertheless, while the US may oppose settlements on paper, the Israeli government publicly embraced the settler mission of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in June of last year, overturning legislation that had stood for 27 years, and giving Smotrich effective control of the expanded and accelerated settlement-building process. Netanyahu himself has repeatedly rejected the idea of a Palestinian state, and has presented himself as a bulwark against Palestinian self-determination.
Other than a brief period under former President Donald Trump, when the United States supported the notion of settlements, Washington has regarded them as illegal since 1978. In 1983, the census showed that the settler population of the West Bank was 22,800. It is currently estimated at 490,493.
And now, that dominance of the settler ultranationalist trend in Israeli politics threatens Gaza.
At a “Settlement Brings Security” conference in Jerusalem in January, around a third of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, as well as up to 15 additional Knesset members, including members of his own nationalist Likud Party, walked past a large map of Gaza with a bold star of David emblazoned above it.
For Palestinians in Gaza, the threat of a new wave of displacement to make way for any such illegal settlement is real – championed by figures at the very top of Israeli politics.
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