Politics
Pandemic-Era Politics Are Ruining Public Education – The Atlantic
If you’re an American schoolchild, you’ve probably spent much of your recent life alone at home in the mesmerizing glow of a screen, twitching between Google Classroom and innumerable online distractions. Perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to spend most days in an actual classroom with two-thirds of your face wrapped up, trying to make yourself heard and hear others, taking 30 seconds to shove your lunch down. Your schedule is often unpredictable; some days there’s no one to teach you at all. During the pandemic, you’ve lost at least three months of instruction—or nearly twice that, if your family is poor—as well as the steady company of people your own age. The grown-ups around you fret incessantly about your “mental-health issues” and “social-emotional learning,” which only makes your anxiety and depression worse.
You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head. Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are. Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.
It isn’t clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year. The shortage is so dire that New Mexico has resorted to encouraging members of the National Guard to volunteer as substitute teachers.
Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled. Families are deserting the public system out of frustration with unending closures and quarantines, stubborn teachers’ unions, inadequate resources, and the low standards exposed by remote learning. It’s not just rich families, either, David Steiner, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, told me. “COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools.” In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return—the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before. “It’s an open question whether the public-school system will recover,” Steiner said. “That is a real concern for democratic education.”
The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination. The party that stands for strong government services in the name of egalitarian principles supported the closing of schools far longer than either the science or the welfare of children justified, and it has been woefully slow to acknowledge how much this damaged the life chances of some of America’s most disadvantaged students. The San Francisco school board became the caricature of this folly last year when it spent months debating name changes to Roosevelt Middle School, Abraham Lincoln High School, and other schools with supposedly offensive names, while their classrooms remained closed to the city’s children. Republicans have only just begun to exploit the fallout.
But I’m not interested in joining or refereeing this partisan scrum. Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues. Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America. Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country. It’s our core civic institution—not just because, ideally, it brings children of all backgrounds together in a classroom, but because it prepares them for the demands and privileges of democratic citizenship. Or at least, it needs to.
What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,” Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn’t get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think. In an authoritarian or rigidly meritocratic system, schools select the elites who grow up to make the decisions. A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.
If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime. In 1960, when Richard Nixon chose not to contest an extremely narrow loss to John F. Kennedy, and Nixon partisans didn’t storm the Capitol looking to hang the speaker of the House, 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees. By the time of last year’s insurrection, that proportion had surpassed one-third. Law degrees from Harvard and Yale didn’t keep Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley from trying to tear up the Constitution. Americans with college degrees are likelier to vote and otherwise participate in civic life than those without; they’re also likelier to spend hours throwing clever online darts. One study found that college-educated Democrats were more likely to hold false views about their political enemies than those without four-year degrees. More education generally makes people more Democratic, but not more democratic.
So the question isn’t just how much education, but what kind. Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves? Possibly, but I doubt it’s ever been more necessary. The COVID era, with Donald Trump out of office but still in power and with battles over mask mandates and critical race theory convulsing Twitter and school-board meetings, shows how badly Americans are able to think about our collective problems—let alone read, listen, empathize, debate, reconsider, and persuade in the search for solutions. If these habits have something to do with education—and every kindergarten teacher knows that children can be taught to compromise—then democratic citizenship can, at least in part, be learned. We owe our beleaguered children, the victims of our inadequacy, a chance to be better than we are.
We can start by giving them a way to survive the curriculum wars without being captured by one side or the other. The orthodoxies currently fighting for our children’s souls turn the teaching of U.S. history into a static and morally simple quest for some American essence. They proceed from celebration or indictment toward a final judgment—innocent or guilty—and bury either oppression or progress in a subordinate clause. The most depressing thing about this gloomy pedagogy of ideologies in service to fragile psyches is how much knowledge it takes away from students who already have so little. The history warriors build their metaphysics of national good or evil on a foundation of ignorance. In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like “Who did the United States fight in World War II?” and “We elect a President for how many years?” The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont.
A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars. In “The Propaganda of History,” the last chapter of his great study of Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context. The Stanford History Education Group, a research organization, has developed a curriculum called “Reading Like a Historian,” which assembles material from various chapters of American history and poses a thematic question for students to answer. For example, to answer the question of what John Brown was trying to do when he raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, they read several accounts, including one by Brown’s son, an excerpt from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and a speech and letter from Brown himself.
The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents. This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support. “We have a desperate shortage of teachers,” David Steiner of Johns Hopkins said, just as we’re making teaching more difficult by “politicizing education.” It’s easy and satisfying for adults to instruct children that America is an exceptional experiment in freedom, or a benighted system of oppressions. It’s harder, but infinitely more useful, to free them to think about history for themselves.
To do that, we’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans. If remote learning taught parents anything, it was that staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers. One day, and I hope soon, the masters of social media will stand before Congress with their hands raised in the manner of the Big Tobacco bosses, and try to deny what they’ve long known about the damage their products can inflict on human minds, especially young minds. After these hearings lead to belated regulation of web advertising and toxic algorithms, we’ll look back on the amount of time we let our children spend online with the same horror that we now feel about earlier generations of adults who hooked their kids on smoking.
Of course, students can’t quit cold turkey. “It’s not a choice between tech or no tech,” Bill Tally, a researcher with the Education Development Center, told me. “The question is what tech infrastructure best enables the things we care about,” such as deep engagement with instructional materials, teachers, and other students. But kids need help mastering what now masters them. Releasing them to do “research” in the vast ocean of the internet without maps and compasses, as often happens, guarantees that they will drown before they arrive anywhere. A nonprofit called the News Literacy Project helps teachers guide students in assessing the credibility of news articles and social-media posts. Like learning to read as historians, learning to sift through the tidal flood of memes for useful, reliable information can emancipate children who have been heedlessly hooked on screens by the adults in their lives.
Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms. The phrase English Language Arts already sounds at best indifferent to books. The ELA portion of high-stakes testing hacks up literature into what Steiner calls “bleeding chunks of texts”—isolated passages used to assess comprehension. This approach treats reading as just another skill, like long division or woodworking. When students do read whole books, they’re rarely part of the state assessments. “What’s the incentive for teaching The Bluest Eye deeply and seriously?” Steiner asked.
The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers. We sell them insultingly short in thinking that they won’t read unless the subject is themselves. Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it’s disturbing. The ability to enter a world that’s far away in time or place; to grapple with characters whose stories might initially seem to have nothing to do with your life; to gradually sense that their emotions, troubles, revelations are also yours—this connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom.
The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently predicted that the novels of the next 10 to 15 years “will be awful … Art has to be able to go to a place that’s messy, a place that’s uncomfortable,” she said. “Literature is the last thing that we can depend on to tell us the truth about who we are.” The connection between reading and democratic citizenship might not be direct, but it’s real.
The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it’s a crisis that we’ve just about wasted. The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps. American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.
This article appears in the April 2022 print edition with the headline “School Shouldn’t Be a Battlefield.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
When Shannon Waters first joined the press gallery at the B.C. legislature, the decision on whether or not to continue the Site C dam project was looming large. Shannon was there as a reporter for BC Today, a daily political newsletter, and she remembers being blown away by long-time Narwhal reporter Sarah Cox’s work.
“Her ability to look at these huge complex reports, which, at the time, I mostly just felt like I was drowning in, and cut through that to tell stories about what was really going on was impressive,” Shannon says. “That was my initial intro and I have been following The Narwhal ever since!”
Fast forward more than six years later, Shannon joins The Narwhal as our first-ever B.C. politics and environment reporter. And get this, Sarah will be her editor in the new gig.
“After years of admiring their work, I’m excited to work with Sarah and the whole Narwhal team,” Shannon says.
I sat down with Shannon to get to know her better and hear more about what brought her The Narwhal’s growing pod.
What’s your favourite animal?
That’s easy, it’s an octopus. I have one tattooed on my arm. I just think it’s really neat that we have a creature on this planet as intelligent as an octopus. It’s the closest thing to alien life that we’ve ever come across but it’s right here on the planet with us. And I think that’s very cool.
What is the thing about journalism that gets you excited to start your work day?
I get excited about working as a journalist because every day is a bit different. I like having the opportunity to learn new things on a regular basis, partly because I get bored really easily.
My favorite thing about being a reporter is you never really know exactly how your day is gonna go and you’re always getting to talk to interesting people. As a bonus, I also really like to write, and I always have.
Your first job was at a radio station in Prince George, B.C. How did this early experience shape you?
I think it really honed my sense of journalism being part of the community and a community service. We covered all kinds of things. I was on the school board beat when I first got there and then I was covering city hall a little later on. I did a weekend shift. I covered crime stories.
Sometimes you’d start out the day covering one story and then by the end of the day, you’d be doing something else. I was also in Prince George in 2017, for the wildfires, and the city became a hub for people who were displaced from all across B.C. That was a really intense, eye-opening experience about what communities can do for people when they are put to the test. So again, learning things, and that variety and getting to write about them for a living.
You’re a self-described political nerd. Where does that come from?
I’m fascinated by politics because it touches every aspect of our lives, and there’s not really any way to get away from it. I consider myself a bit cynical about our political systems but even if you don’t like them, or don’t believe in them, or don’t want anything to do with them, you can’t really get away from politics. I find it fascinating to look at what is going on in the political sphere, what kind of policies are popular at the moment? Which ones are being rejected? How is that conversation going? How did it get started? Where might it go? And politics is also about people.
I like being someone who can hopefully try and help people understand why politics matters, what they can do to try and affect the change that they might want to see and how the politics in their area or the policies being enacted by politicians affects them and the people around them. It’s not something that everybody finds fascinating. A lot of people’s eyes glaze over when you tell them you’re a political or a legislative reporter. But I really enjoy the work. And it’s one of those things that feels like, well, somebody should be doing it. And so for now, at least, that somebody can be me.
It’s an election year in B.C. What are you most excited about?
I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. We’re really in a very interesting space in B.C. right now. If you were talking to me a year ago about the election, I would probably have sounded a bit more bored, because it seemed like much more of a foregone conclusion — you know, the NDP were going to likely win a majority and we’d have sort of more of the same. But now you have this really interesting churn in the political landscape with the emergence of the B.C. Conservatives as a real contender of a party according to the polling that we’ve been seeing. Meanwhile B.C. United, which is the very well-established B.C. Liberal party renamed, has sort of had the wheels come off.
So, I’m really interested to see what happens on the campaign trail as you have these parties trying to court voters, what sort of ideas they’re going to put forward. I’m also really curious what it means for the Green Party. B.C. hasn’t had a lot of elections where we’ve had so many parties competing for seats in the legislature and I think that’s going to make for a very interesting and probably quite dramatic campaign.
What kind of stories do you hope to tell more of?
I am excited about getting more in depth. I’ve been doing daily news for about seven years now, including covering elections. I have really enjoyed doing that and I feel like when you’re a daily news reporter you also have all these thoughts about potential stories that need a closer look or more time to percolate. So I’m really looking forward to looking at the news landscape and seeing what’s missing. With the election, I’m also excited to look back and think: what was the government saying about this particular policy in the last election? What have they done on it during the interim? And what are they saying now?
I think one of the biggest things I learned as BC Today’s reporter and later Politics Today’s editor-in-chief is finding the stories in the minutia and the nuts and bolts of what goes on in the legislature. There’s a list that has been building in my head for a long time of all of these stories that I’ve wanted to take a closer look at over the years and I’m excited to get started.
What are three things people might not know about you?
I could eat peanut butter toast and drink coffee every day of my life and die happy. Growing up I wanted to be a marine biologist and study either sharks or cephalopods. I am the biggest word nerd, which can be a good thing for someone who writes for a living, but is sometimes a struggle. I am still striving to use the word “absquatulate” in a story someday!
Politics
Trudeau questions Poilievre's judgment, says the Conservative Leader 'will do anything to win' – The Globe and Mail
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is flanked by Minister of Housing Sean Fraser, right, and Treasury Board President Anita Anand, left, during a press conference in Oakville, Ont., on April 24.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau criticized Pierre Poilievre over his judgment, a day after the Conservative Leader visited a protest against carbon pricing that featured a “Make Canada Great Again” slogan and a symbol that appeared to be tied to a far-right, anti-government group.
Mr. Trudeau accused Mr. Poilievre of exacerbating divisions and welcoming the “support of conspiracy theorists and extremists.”
“Every politician has to make choices about what kind of leader they want to be,” the Prime Minister said at a press conference Wednesday in Oakville, Ont.
“He will do anything to win, anything to torque up negativity and fear and it only emphasizes that he has nothing to say to actually solve the problems that he’s busy amplifying.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Poilievre stopped at a protest against carbon pricing near the New Brunswick-Nova Scotia border while on his way from PEI to Nova Scotia. Video of the protest shows an expletive-laden flag directed at Mr. Trudeau that was a symbol of the anti-vaccine-mandate protests that gripped Ottawa two years ago, as well as an anti-carbon-tax sign and a van with the slogan “Make Canada Great Again” written on it.
“We saw you so I told the team to pull over and say ‘hello,’” Mr. Poilievre said to the protesters in one of the videos posted online. He thanked them for “all you’re doing.”
“We’re going to axe the tax and its going to be in part because you guys fought back,” Mr. Poilievre said in the videos. “Everyone hates the tax because everyone’s been screwed over. People believed his lies. Everything he said was bullshit, from top to bottom.”
When asked to take a picture in front of the flag with the expletive, Mr. Poilievre responded: “Let’s do it in front of something else.”
One of the vans at the protests has what appeared to be a symbol of the anti-government, far-right group called Diagolon. Mr. Trudeau tried on Wednesday to tie that to Mr. Poilievre. The Conservative Leader has previously disavowed the group.
In a statement Wednesday through his lawyer, the group’s leader, Jeremy MacKenzie, said he was Mr. Poilievre’s biggest detractor in Canada. He also criticized Mr. Trudeau, saying “both of these weak men are completely out of touch with reality and incapable of telling the truth.”
Mr. Poilievre’s office defended the Conservative Leader’s visit to the protest in a statement on Wednesday.
“As a vocal opponent of Justin Trudeau’s punishing carbon tax which has driven up the cost of groceries, gas and heating, he made a brief, impromptu stop,” spokesperson Sebastian Skamski said.
“If Justin Trudeau is concerned about extremism, he should look at parades on Canadian streets openly celebrating Hamas’ slaughter of Jews on October 7th.”
During his press conference, Mr. Trudeau also pointed out that Mr. Poilievre has done nothing to reject the endorsement of right-wing commentator Alex Jones earlier this month. Mr. Jones, on X, called Mr. Poilievre “the real deal” and said “Canada desperately needs a lot more leaders like him and so does the rest of the world.”
Mr. Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1-billion in damages to the families of the victims of the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which he portrayed as a hoax.
“This is the kind of man who’s saying Pierre Poilievre has the right ideas to bring the country toward the right, towards conspiracy theories, towards extremism, towards polarization,” Mr. Trudeau said.
In response to the Prime Minister’s remarks, Mr. Skamski said “we do not follow” Mr. Jones “or listen to what he has to say.”
“Common-sense Conservatives are listening to the priorities of the millions of Canadians that want to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime,” he added.
“It is the endorsement of hard-working, everyday Canadians that Conservatives are working to earn. Unlike Justin Trudeau, we’re not paying attention to what some American is saying.”
With a report from The Canadian Press.
Politics
Politics Briefing: Younger demographics not swayed by federal budget benefits targeted at them, poll indicates
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Hello,
The federal government’s efforts to connect with Gen Z adults and millennials through programs in last week’s federal budget has not yet worked, says a new poll.
The Angus Reid Institute says today that the opposition Conservatives are running at 43 per cent voter support compared to 23 per cent for the governing Liberals, while the NDP are at 19 per cent.
Polling by the institute also finds the Liberals are the third choice among Gen Z and millennial voters, falling behind the NDP and Conservatives.
According to the institute, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is viewed more positively among Gen Z adults than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with Poilievre at 29 per cent approval and Trudeau at 17 per cent. Poilievre also has a higher favorability than Trudeau’s approval among younger and older millennials.
Gen Z adults were born between 1997 and 2012, while the birth period of millennials was 1981 to 1996.
The poll conclusions are based on online polling conducted from April 19 – three days after the budget was released – to April 23, among a randomized sample of 3, 015 Canadians. Such research has a probability sample of plus or minus two percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Asked about the poll today, Trudeau said the budget is aimed at solving problems, helping young people and delivering homes and services such as child care.
“I am confident that as Canadians see these measures happening, they will be more optimistic about their future, the way we need them to be,” Trudeau told a news conference in Oakville, Ont.
He also said he expected Canadians to be thoughtful about the future when they vote. “I trust Canadians to be reasonable,” he said.
The Globe and Mail has previously reported that Trudeau’s government has set an internal goal of narrowing the Conservative Party’s double-digit lead by five points every six months. A federal election is expected next year.
This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Ian Bailey. It is available exclusively to our digital subscribers. If you’re reading this on the web, subscribers can sign up for the Politics newsletter and more than 20 others on our newsletter sign-up page. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
TODAY’S HEADLINES
Pierre Poilievre visits convoy camp, claims Trudeau is lying about ‘everything’: CBC reports that the Conservative Leader is facing questions after stopping to cheer on an anti-carbon tax convoy camp near the border between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, where he bluntly accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of lying about “everything.”
Smith defends appointment of task force led by doctor skeptical of COVID-19 measures: The Globe and Mail has published details of the little-known task force that was given a sweeping mandate by the government to assess data used to inform pandemic decision-making. Story here.
Canadians should expect politicians to support right to bail, Arif Virani’s office says: The office of Canada’s Justice Minister says, warning that “immediate” and “uninformed reactions” only worsens matters.
Parti Québécois is on its way back to the centre of Quebec politics: The province’s next general election isn’t until 2026, a political eternity away, and support for separating from Canada remains stagnant. But a resurgent Quebec nationalism, frustration with Ottawa, and the PQ’s youthful, upbeat leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon have put sovereignty back on the agenda.
Anaida Poilievre in B.C.: The wife of the federal Conservative Leader has been on a visit to Kelowna in recent days that was expected to conclude today, according to Castanet.net.
Ontario to do away with sick note requirement for short absences: The province will soon introduce legislation that, if passed, will no longer allow employers to require a sick note from a doctor for the provincially protected three days of sick leave workers are entitled to.
Australian reporter runs into visa trouble in India after reporting on slaying of Canadian Sikh separatist: In a statement, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Indian authorities should safeguard press freedom and stop using visa regulations to prevent foreign journalists covering sensitive subjects.
Canadian military to destroy 11,000 Second World War-era pistols: The Ottawa Citizen reports that the move comes as the Canadian Forces confirmed it has received the final deliveries of a new nine-millimetre pistol as part of a $19.4-million project.
B.C. opposition leader in politics-free oasis: The first hint that there may be more to Kevin Falcon, leader of the official opposition BC United party, than his political stereotype comes when you pull up to his North Vancouver home – a single-level country cottage rancher dwarfed on one side by large, angular, modern monstrosity. A NorthernBeat profile.
TODAY’S POLITICAL QUOTES.
“Having an argument with CRA about not wanting to pay your taxes is not a position I want anyone to be in. Good luck with that Premier Moe.” – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the Canada Revenue Agency weighing in on Saskatchewan’s government move to stop collecting and remitting the federal carbon levy.
“That’s not something that we’re hoping for. We’re not trying to plan for an election.“ – NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, at a news conference in Edmonton today, on the possibilities of an election now ahead of the vote expected in the fall of 2025.
THIS AND THAT
Commons, Senate: The House of Commons is on a break until April 29. The Senate sits again April 30.
Deputy Prime Minister’s day: In the Newfoundland and Labrador city of Mount Pearl, Chrystia Freeland held an event to talk about the federal budget.
Ministers on the road: Cabinet efforts to sell the budget continue, with announcements largely focused on housing. Citizens’ Services Minister Terry Beech and Small Business Minister Rechie Valdez are in Burnaby, B.C. Defence Minister Bill Blair is in Yellowknife. Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault is in Edmonton. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Natural Revenue Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau are in the Quebec city of Trois-Rivières.
Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu is in Lytton, B.C., with an additional event welcoming members of the Skwlāx te Secwepemcúl̓ecw band to four new subdivisions built after the 2023 Bush Creek East wildfire. International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen is in Sault Ste. Marie. Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is in Québec City. Diversity Minister Kamal Khera is in Kingston, Ontario. Immigration Minister Marc Miller and Tourism Minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada are in Whitehorse. Justice Minister Arif Virani and Families Minister Jenna Sudds are in North York, Ont. Veterans Affairs Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor is in Charlottetown.
Meanwhile, International Trade Minister Mary Ng is in South Korea leading a group of businesses and organizations through to tomorrow.
GG in Saskatchewan: Mary Simon and her partner, Whit Fraser, on the last day of their official visit to Saskatchewan, is in Saskatoon, with commitments that include visiting the Maternal Care Centre at the Jim Pattison Hospital and meeting with Indigenous leaders.
Ukraine needs more military aid, UCC says: The Ukrainian Canadian Congress says Canada should substantially increase military assistance to Ukraine. “As President Zelensky stated, “The key now is speed,’” said a statement today from the organization. The appeal coincides with U.S. President Joe Biden signing into law an aid package that provides over US$61-billion in aid for Ukraine. “We call on the Canadian government and all allies to follow suit and to immediately and substantially increase military assistance to Ukraine,” said the statement. An update issued on the occasion of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s February visit to Ukraine noted that, since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Canadian government has provided $13.3-billion to Ukraine.
New chief commissioner of the Canadian Grain Commission: David Hunt, most recently an assistant deputy minister in Manitoba’s environment department, has been named to the post for a four-year term by Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay.
PRIME MINISTER’S DAY
In Oakville, near Toronto, Justin Trudeau talked about federal-budget housing measures, and took media questions.
LEADERS
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet is in the Quebec city of Victoriaville, with commitments that include a meeting at the Centre for Social Innovation in Agriculture
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, in the Vancouver Island city of Nanaimo, attended the sentencing of deputy party leader Angela Davidson, also known as Rainbow Eyes, convicted of seven counts of criminal contempt for her participation in the Fairy Creek logging blockades on Vancouver Island.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, in Edmonton, held a media availability.
No schedule released for Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre.
THE DECIBEL
James Griffiths, The Globe’s Asia correspondent, is on the show t to discuss Article 23 – a new national security law in Hong Kong that includes seven new offences related to sedition, treason and state secrets that is expected to have a chilling effect on protest. The Decibel is here.
OPINION
The Liberals’ capital-gains tax hike punishes prosperity
“In her budget speech this month, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pointed to 1980s-era tax changes by the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney as a precedent for boosting the tax take on capital gains. … If one were to leave it at that, the Liberals come off quite well, having decided to boost the inclusion rate for capital gains – the amount subject to tax – to two-thirds, well below that of the latter years of the Mulroney government. But Ms. Freeland was only telling half the story.” – The Globe and Mail Editorial Board
The Liberals weight-loss goal shows they are running out of options
“The bad polls are weighing down the Liberals, so they have decided to shed some weight: They aim to cut the Conservatives’ lead by five percentage points by July. Like middle-aged dieters beginning a new regime, they’ve looked in the mirror and decided they have to do something. They’ve committed to it, too.” – Campbell Clark
Fear the politicization of pensions, no matter the politician
“Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland don’t have a lot in common. But they do share at least one view: that governments could play a bigger role directing pension investments to the benefit of domestic industries and economic priorities. Canadians, no matter who they vote for, should be worried that these two political heavyweights share any common ground in this regard.” – Kelly Cryderman
The failure of Canada’s health care system is a disgrace – and a deadly one
“What can be said about Canada’s health care system that hasn’t been said countless times over, as we watch more and more people suffer and die as they wait for baseline standards of care? Despite our delusions, we don’t have “world-class” health care, as our Prime Minister has said; we don’t even have universal health care. What we have is health care if you’re lucky, or well connected, or if you happen to have a heart attack on a day when your closest ER is merely overcapacity as usual, and not stuffed to the point of incapacitation.” – Robyn Urback
Investment Statistics (10 Investment Statistics Investors Need To Know) – Forbes
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