Manuel Merino, the head of Peru’s legislature, arrives at Congress to be sworn-in as the country’s new president, on Nov. 10, 2020.
Martin Mejia/The Associated Press
Peru swore in a new president Tuesday who is unknown to most and was recently accused of trying to secure the military’s support for a congressional effort to boot the nation’s last leader out over unproven corruption allegations.
Businessman and former head of Congress Manuel Merino placed his hand on a Bible and swore to carry out the remainder of the current presidential term, which is set to expire in July of next year.
He then donned the red and white presidential sash while wearing a face mask and stood as the nation’s anthem was played.
“This is a difficult moment for the country,” he said. “Today, the country does not look at the future with hope, but with worry.”
Merino’s swearing in was met with protests on the streets of Peru’s capital a day after Congress voted to oust popular President Martin Vizcarra, who had campaigned against corruption. Peruvians widely distrust legislators and decried Vizcarra’s removal as an overt power grab.
Analysts warn the country could be thrown into a new period of instability at the same time as it grapples with one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks.
“It’s a coup d’etat,” taxi driver Paul Mendoza said. “Now we’re going to have inflation, a recession, and we won’t be able to get ahead because of the pandemic.”
The new president is Peru’s third chief of state since 2016; both Vizcarra and his predecessor, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, were pushed out by the powerful Congress, where neither managed to secure a majority bloc.
Merino hails from the centre-right Popular Action party and is from the province of Tumbes along the country’s border with Ecuador. He served two terms in Congress, the first in 2001, before being elected again this year as part of a new slate of lawmakers voted into office after Vizcarra dismissed Congress in 2019.
In his first remarks, Merino vowed to move forward with the presidential election planned for April 2021, improve health care to ensure the country is better prepared for a second virus wave, boost the economy and crack down on crime.
“We can’t divide the country,” he said.
But outside Congress, Peru’s divide was readily apparent.
Riot police blocked hundreds of protesters against Merino who banged pots and pans as he was sworn into office. A September Ipsos poll found that 72 per cent of Peruvians in urban areas disapproved of the then-chief of Congress. By contrast, 79 per cent said they thought Vizcarra should continue in office.
Legislators first initiated impeachment proceedings against Vizcarra in September, accusing him of obstructing an investigation into possible favouritism in government contracts. Shortly before that vote, local media reported that Merino had reached out to high-level military leaders seeking their backing if Vizcarra was voted out.
The move backfired as many denounced Congress for acting out of line and the removal effort failed. Lawmakers said they didn’t want to destabilize the country during the pandemic upheaval. Merino later apologized to the military but said he had no ill motives.
“There was never any intention to go beyond rule of law,” he said.
Merino took a back seat in the latest effort to oust Vizcarra, this time on allegations that he’d taken more than $630,000 in bribes for construction contracts while serving as governor of a small southern province years ago. This time, Congress overwhelming approved Vizcarra’s ouster.
Though Vizcarra denied any wrongdoing, he quickly agreed to step down.
“History and the Peruvian people will judge the decisions made,” he said.
The speed of the ouster and lack of evidence led some political analysts to warn that Congress could be putting democracy in jeopardy. The removal also points to structural weaknesses within the nation’s political system. Legislators can override a presidential veto with a simple majority and can remove a president on the vaguely defined grounds of “permanent moral incapacity” with a two-thirds majority vote.
“That does make the Peruvian presidency quite weak,” said Abhijit Surya, Peru analyst for The Economist Intelligence Unit. “I don’t think a lot of his supporters were necessarily claiming that he was definitely innocent, but I think they wanted the investigations to play out.”
Several international rights groups expressed concern about the upheaval.
“I’m very worried for the rule of law in Peru,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch. He added that while there were reasons to investigate Vizcarra, “the impeachment happened in a very questionable way.”
Many lawmakers justified Vizcarra’s ouster not just on the alleged corruption but also on his handling of the pandemic. They pointed to Peru’s high virus numbers, deadly oxygen shortages and the misuse of rapid antibody tests to diagnose cases even though they can’t identify infection early during an illness. At least 34,879 people have died among 922,333 infected by the virus in Peru, a nation of 32 million people.
“This is something I can never forgive,” lawmaker Maria Cabrera said.
Vizcarra rose to the nation’s highest office in 2018 after Kuczynski resigned amid allegations that he had failed to disclose payments from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to his private consulting firm. He made defeating corruption his principal mission and is one of the nation’s most popular leaders in recent history.
But he was unable to make friends in Congress, dismissing lawmakers last year in a brash move cheered by citizens as a victory against dishonest politicians. He has also pushed through initiatives to curb corruption by changing how judges are chosen and to bar politicians with criminal records from running for office.
Numerous lawmakers themselves face criminal probes.
After Merino left Congress, protesters continued to gather in the city’s historic district under a gray sky. Police and demonstrators briefly clashed, with at least one man throwing what appeared to be a plastic bottle at an officer. Authorities sprayed tear gas but the crowd kept marching.
Jo-Marie Burt, a senior fellow with the Washington Office on Latin America, said the impeachment is “terribly destabilizing for Peru.”
“It generates a huge amount of uncertainty at a time when the economy is in a tailspin because of COVID and people are dying,” Burt said.
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The 2024 federal budget failed to spark a much-needed rebound in the polls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trailing Liberal party, according to new Ipsos polling released Tuesday.
Canadian reaction to the Liberal government’s latest spending plans shows an historic challenge ahead of the governing party as it tries to keep the reins of government out of the Conservative party’s hands in the next election, according to one pollster.
“If the purpose of the budget was to get a political reboot going, it didn’t seem to happen,” says Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs.
The 2024 federal budget tabled last week included billions of dollars in new spending aimed at improving “generational fairness” and rapidly filling in Canada’s housing supply gap.
Ipsos polling conducted exclusively for Global News shows voters’ reactions to the 2024 federal budget mostly ranged from lacklustre to largely negative.
After stripping out those who said they “don’t know” how they feel about the federal budget (28 per cent), only 17 per cent of Canadians surveyed about the spending plan in the two days after its release said they’d give it “two thumbs up.” Some 40 per cent, meanwhile, said they’d give it “two thumbs down” and the remainder (43 per cent) gave a symbolic “shrug” to Budget 2024.
“Thumbs down” reactions rose to 63 per cent among Alberta respondents and 55 per cent among those in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Some 10 per cent of respondents said the budget would personally help them, while 37 per cent said it would hurt, after again stripping out those who said they didn’t know what the impact would be.
Asked about how they’d vote if a federal election were held today, 43 per cent of respondents said they’d pick the Conservatives, while 24 per cent said they’d vote Liberal, followed by 19 per cent who’d lean NDP.
The Conservative lead is up one point from a month earlier, Bricker notes, suggesting that Budget 2024 failed to stem the bleeding for the incumbent Liberals.
Only eight per cent of respondents to the Ipsos poll said the budget made them more likely to vote Liberal in the upcoming election, while roughly a third (34 per cent) said it made them less likely.
“The initial impressions of Canadians are that it hasn’t made much of a difference,” Bricker says.
Sentiment towards the Liberals remains slightly higher among generation Z and millennial voters — the demographics who appeared to be the focus of Budget 2024 — but Bricker says opinions remain “overwhelmingly negative” across generational lines.
Heading into the 2024 budget, the Liberals were under pressure to improve affordability in Canada amid a rising cost of living and an inaccessible housing market, Ipsos polling conducted last month showed.
The spending plan included items to remove junk fees from banking services and concert tickets, as well as some items aimed at making it easier for first-time homebuyers to break into the housing market. It also included a proposed change to how some capital gains are taxed, which the Liberals have claimed would target the wealthiest Canadians.
Paul Kershaw, founder of Generation Squeeze, told Global News after the federal budget’s release that while he was encouraged by acknowledgements about the economic unfairness facing younger demographics, there is no quick fix for the affordability crisis in the housing market.
Trudeau, his cabinet ministers and Liberal MPs have hit the road both before and after the budget’s release to promote line items in the spending plan.
Bricker says this is the typical post-budget playbook, but so far it looks like there’s nothing that “really caught on with Canadians” in the early days after the release of the spending plans. The Liberals have a chance to make something happen on the road, he says, but it’s “not looking great.”
“Maybe over the course of the next year, they’ll be able to demonstrate that they’ve actually changed something,” he says.
Bricker notes, however, that public opinion has changed little in federal politics over the past year.
The next federal election is set for October 2025 at the latest, but could be called earlier if the Liberals fail a confidence vote or bring down the government themselves.
But a vote today would see the Liberals likely lose to a “very, very large majority from the Conservative party,” Bricker says.
“What we’re seeing is, if things continue on as they’ve been continuing for the space of the last year, that they will end up in a situation where, almost an historic low in terms of the number of seats,” he says.
The Conservatives are leading in every region in the country, except for Quebec, where the Bloc Quebecois holds the pole position, according to the Ipsos polling.
The Liberals are meanwhile facing “a solid wall of public disapproval,” Bricker says. Some 32 per cent of voters said they would never consider voting Liberal in the next election, higher than the 27 per cent who said the same about the Conservatives, according to Ipsos.
Typically, Bricker says an incumbent party can hold onto a lead in some demographic, age group or region and build out a strategy for re-election from there.
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But this Liberal party lacks any foothold in the electorate, making prospects look grim in the next federal election; it’s so bleak that he even invokes the Progressive Conservative party’s historic rout in the 1993 vote.
“The hill they have to climb is incredibly hard,” Bricker says.
“I haven’t seen a hill this high to climb in federal politics since Brian Mulroney was faced with a very similar situation back in 1991 and ’92. And we all know what happened with that.”
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between 17 and 18, April 2024, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18-plus was interviewed online. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18-plus been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
Opinion: Brad West been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization
Published Apr 22, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read
VICTORIA — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West fired off a letter to Premier David Eby last week about Allan Schoenborn, the child killer who changed his name in a bid for anonymity.
“It is completely beyond the pale that individuals like Schoenborn have the ability to legally change their name in an attempt to disassociate themselves from their horrific crimes and to evade the public,” wrote West.
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The Alberta government has legislated against dangerous, long-term and high risk offenders who seek to change their names to escape public scrutiny.
“I urge your government to pass similar legislation as a high priority to ensure the safety of British Columbians,” West wrote the premier.
The B.C. Review Board has granted Schoenborn overnight, unescorted leave for up to 28 days, and he spent some of that time in Port Coquitlam, according to West.
This despite the board being notified that “in the last two years there have been 15 reported incidents where Schoenborn demonstrated aggressive behaviour.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that an individual who has committed such heinous crimes, and continues to demonstrate this type of behaviour, is able to roam the community unescorted.”
Understandably, those details alarmed PoCo residents.
But the letter is also an example of the outspoken mayor’s penchant for to-the-point pronouncements on provincewide concerns.
He’s been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization.
His most recent blast followed the news that the New Democrats were appointing a task force to advise on ways to curb the use of illicit drugs and the spread of weapons in provincial hospitals.
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“Where the hell is the common sense here?” West told Mike Smyth on CKNW recently. “This has just gone way too far. And to have a task force to figure out what to do — it’s obvious what we need to do.
“In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”
He had a pithy comment on the government’s excessive reliance on outside consultants like MNP to process grants for clean energy and other programs.
“If ever there was a place to find savings that could be redirected to actually delivering core public services, it is government contracts to consultants like MNP,” wrote West.
He’s also broken with the Eby government on the carbon tax.
“The NDP once opposed the carbon tax because, by its very design, it is punishing to working people,” wrote West in a social media posting.
“The whole point of the tax is to make gas MORE expensive so people don’t use it. But instead of being honest about that, advocates rely on flimsy rebate BS. It is hard to find someone who thinks they are getting more dollars back in rebates than they are paying in carbon tax on gas, home heat, etc.”
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West has a history with the NDP. He was a political staffer and campaign worker with Mike Farnworth, the longtime NDP MLA for Port Coquitlam and now minister of public safety.
When West showed up at the legislature recently, Farnworth introduced him to the house as “the best mayor in Canada” and endorsed him as his successor: “I hope at some time he follows in my footsteps and takes over when I decide to retire — which is not just yet,” added Farnworth who is running this year for what would be his eighth term.
Other political players have their eye on West as a future prospect as well.
Several parties have invited him to run in the next federal election. He turned them all down.
Lately there has also been an effort to recruit him to lead a unified Opposition party against Premier David Eby in this year’s provincial election.
I gather the advocates have some opinion polling to back them up and a scenario that would see B.C. United and the Conservatives make way (!) for a party to be named later.
Such flights of fancy are commonplace in B.C. when the NDP is poised to win against a divided Opposition.
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By going after West, the advocates pay a compliment to his record as mayor (low property taxes and a fix-every-pothole work ethic) and his populist stands on public safety, carbon taxation and other provincial issues.
The outreach to a small city mayor who has never run provincially also says something about the perceived weaknesses of the alternatives to Eby.
“It is humbling,” West said Monday when I asked his reaction to the overtures.
But he is a young father with two boys, aged three and seven. The mayor was 10 when he lost his own dad and he believes that if he sought provincial political leadership now, “I would not be the type of dad I want to be.”
When West ran for re-election — unopposed — in 2022, he promised to serve out the full four years as mayor.
He is poised to keep his word, confident that if the overtures to run provincially are serious, they will still be there when his term is up.
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LIVE Q&A WITH B.C. PREMIER DAVID EBY: Join us April 23 at 3:30 p.m. when we will sit down with B.C. Premier David Eby for a special edition of Conversations Live. The premier will answer our questions — and yours — about a range of topics, including housing, drug decriminalization, transportation, the economy, crime and carbon taxes. Click HERE to get a link to the livestream emailed to your inbox.
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