Politics
Surprise Senate wins give Democrats once-in-a-decade power to shape U.S. politics – CBC.ca
Democrats now have their best opportunity in a decade to shape the American political agenda, having achieved the coveted trifecta of political power in Washington — first the House of Representatives, then the White House and now the U.S. Senate.
A surprise double victory in two Georgia run-off races on Tuesday has allowed them to claw their way to the narrowest possible Senate advantage.
While Raphael Warnock, a pastor at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, was declared the winner of his seat early Wednesday, the other race — won by fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff — wasn’t called until the late afternoon just as the nation’s attention was on the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol.
The chamber will soon be tied 50-50, which is an imperceptible margin but one that offers incalculable advantages to Joe Biden’s presidency.
WATCH | How the protests at the Capitol unfolded:
CBC News’ David Common breaks down what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and how U.S. President Donald Trump stoked discontent among his supporters before he lost the election. 3:44
‘A brand new day’
What it means, for starters, is that Kamala Harris, in her next job as vice-president, will frequently roll down Pennsylvania Avenue in motorcade trips to her former workplace, the U.S. Senate, to cast critical tie-breaking votes.
That gives Democrats more control than at any time since they lost congressional seats early in the Obama administration.
“A brand new day,” is how Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, described the effect in a celebratory statement Wednesday morning.
While the races were both close and the Republican candidates have not yet conceded, Schumer treated the result as a fait accompli and promised bold change.
Democrats won two Georgia seats they had lost by margins of 14 and eight per cent the last time they were up for grabs.
It is the first time Democrats have unseated a Republican Senate incumbent in Georgia in decades, helped by sky-high participation among African-American voters in Atlanta and more modest turnout in whiter, more conservative rural areas.
Winning the Senate launches Biden into the presidency on Jan. 20 with freer rein in various areas. Passing bills will be simpler — though considerably short of a slam dunk.
Appointing judges will be easier, as will naming cabinet members, top officials and diplomats, with little fear they’d be blocked.
Biden can also live without fear of hostile congressional committees. Republicans who had been investigating his son Hunter’s business dealings will no longer control investigative bodies on Capitol Hill, which will now be run by Democrats and presumably used to advance the party’s own goals.
WATCH | Raphael Warnock makes history in winning Georgia Senate seat:
Raphael Warnock won one of Georgia’s two Senate run-offs, becoming the first Black senator in his state’s history and putting the Senate majority within the party’s reach. Fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff claimed victory in the other race, which some news organizations say is too close to call. 7:43
Republican recriminations ahead?
Republicans, meanwhile, are spiralling into the early innings of what could be a protracted intra-partisan feud.
At the centre of that tussle lies President Donald Trump.
Before the results even emerged in those two tight Senate races, several Republicans — including one of Georgia’s top Republican election officials — blamed the president for the defeat.
Gabe Sterling said Trump depressed turnout by complaining incessantly about his fellow Republicans, by insisting the presidential vote was fraudulent and bemoaning their refusal to help him overturn it.
“President Donald J. Trump,” Sterling said Wednesday, when asked why Republicans lost.
“When you say, ‘Your vote doesn’t count,’ then you have [allies] who … say, ‘Don’t come and vote.’ Then you spark a civil war within the GOP that needed to be united to get through a tough fight like this.… It irritates me.”
More recriminations will likely follow.
Trump has fired back by blaming the party establishment. He suggests the races may have been lost because Senate Republicans refused to send people $2,000 stimulus cheques, as demanded by Trump and by Democrats.
“Your leadership has led you down the tubes,” Trump said in a grievance-filled speech Wednesday to a large crowd of supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest the election certification.
“I said, ‘Give [people] $2,000. … Give ’em a couple of bucks. Let ’em live.'”
Trump can fairly point out that he did attend two rallies to help the state’s Republican candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
Yet both events were overshadowed by Trump’s personal grievances. The most memorable moments of his Georgia rally speech this week included Trump demanding that his vice-president, Mike Pence, overturn the presidential result, and threatening to support a primary challenge in 2022 to unseat the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
Some Trump supporters made clear in interviews that, like the president, their minds were more focused on re-fighting the Nov. 3 election than the ones on Jan. 5.
What a majority can accomplish
While the vast majority of Republican voters did, in the end, turn out for Tuesday’s races, they did so in fewer numbers than Democrats.
Democrats benefited from huge participation from African-American voters, who helped elect Warnock and Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker and political staffer who at age 33 will become the youngest Democratic senator elected since Biden himself first won in 1972.
The result is that Democrats have a chance to implement their agenda. Or at least to try.
Biden’s party now has an ability it previously lacked — it can actually hold votes on its chosen issues, like pandemic stimulus cheques, expanded health coverage, green infrastructure, immigration, gun control and political reform.
One great power held by the Senate’s majority party is the ability to control the floor agenda and decide what gets voted on. That’s why some Democrats grudgingly referred to Republican Mitch McConnell as the gatekeeper blocking debates.
Now, the role of majority leader will belong to Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who, while often criticized by progressives, holds considerably more liberal views than McConnell. (Schumer is also a frequent critic of Canadian dairy.)
“Joe Biden has a reasonably good shot of getting changes he wants to see enacted,” said Charles Bullock, an expert on legislative politics at the University of Georgia, before the vote, of the implications of a Democratic sweep.
“[Many of their goals] depend on having a Democratic majority.”
A 1-seat majority has its limitations
Here comes the caveat. And it’s a significant one.
Passing bills won’t be easy. Most types of bills in the U.S. Senate require 60 votes for adoption.
Many Democrats want to water down that rule as part of a sweeping institution-modernization agenda — one that includes adding liberal judges to the Supreme Court and making Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico new U.S. states, with voting rights in Congress.
That type of institutional reform stands a slim chance of success. Some Democrats, like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, have already expressed clear opposition to these ideas, and given the wafer-thin margin in the Senate, losing even one vote would likely bury these measures.
Let me be clear: I will not vote to pack the courts & I will not vote to end the filibuster. The U.S. Senate is the most deliberative body in the world. It was made so that we work together in a bipartisan way. If you get rid of the filibuster, there’s no reason to have a Senate. <a href=”https://t.co/g0fasdzVmt”>pic.twitter.com/g0fasdzVmt</a>
—@Sen_JoeManchin
Yet Democrats now have other, narrower paths to passing bills. For starters, they can bring votes to the floor and hope to win a few Republican backers.
If that fails, there are budget bills.
It’s possible to pass certain spending legislation in the Senate with a one-vote majority. It involves a complicated process known as reconciliation — and has been applied dozens of times since 1980, including on key provisions of the so-called Obamacare health reform and Trump’s tax cuts.
“You can do a lot of things through reconciliation,” said Tony Madonna, a political scientist at the University of Georgia.
The tactic does have limitations. It can only be used once a year, and only on budget bills, and the measures usually expire after 10 years.
But a pair of surprising wins in Georgia at least give Biden’s party a chance to try it.
Politics
Politics Briefing: Saskatchewan residents to get carbon rebates despite province's opposition to pricing program – The Globe and Mail
Hello,
The federal government will continue to deliver the carbon rebate to residents of Saskatchewan despite the province’s move to stop collecting and remitting the levy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said today.
In January, Saskatchewan’s Crown natural gas and electric utilities removed the federal carbon price from home heating bills, a move that the government says will improve fairness for its residents in relation to the other provinces.
But Trudeau told a news conference in Saskatoon today that payments to residents won’t stop and that the Canada Revenue Agency has ways of ensuring money owed to them is eventually collected. He said he has faith in the “rigorous” quasi-judicial proceedings the agency uses.
In Ottawa, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault accused Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who is opposed to federal carbon pricing policy, of playing politics with climate change.
“The Prime Minister, and I think cabinet, felt that it wouldn’t be fair for the people of Saskatchewan to pay for the irresponsible attitude of the provincial government,” Guilbeault told a news conference.
The rebate is available to residents of provinces and territories where the federal carbon pricing system applies.
Trudeau was in Saskatoon to announce that the federal government is offering $5-billion in loan guarantees to support Indigenous communities seeking ownership stakes in natural resource and energy projects.
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 signup page. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
TODAY’S HEADLINES
Motion to allow keffiyehs in Ontario legislature fails again: A few Ontario government members blocked a move to permit keffiyehs in the legislature, prompting some people watching Question Period from the public galleries to put on the scarves.
B.C. puts social-media harms bill on hold: Premier David Eby issued a joint statement today with representatives from Meta, TikTok, Snap and X to say they have reached an agreement to work to help young people stay safe online through a new BC Online Safety Action Table.
Changes to capital-gains tax may prompt doctors to quit, CMA warns: Kathleen Ross, the president of Canadian Medical Association, said the tax measure “really is one more hit to an already beleaguered and low-morale profession.”
Thunder Bay Indigenous group wants province to dissolve the municipal police force: Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler, from the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, said that after years of turmoil, the Thunder Bay force has not earned the trust of the Indigenous people it serves.
Canada Post refusing to collect banned guns for Ottawa’s buyback program: CBC says the Crown corporation’s position is complicating Ottawa’s plans for a buyback program to remove 144,000 firearms from private hands, federal sources say.
Ottawa police investigating chant on Parliament Hill glorifying Hamas Oct. 7 attack: Police Chief Eric Stubbs acknowledged it can sometimes be difficult to discern what constitutes a hate crime as he confirmed his force is investigating a pro-Palestinian protest over the weekend on Parliament Hill.
TODAY’S POLITICAL QUOTES
“I don’t take any lessons from the Leader of the Opposition when it comes to how marginalized people feel. I’m an Italian Canadian, who, in the 1970s, was spit on.” – Ontario Government House Leader Paul Calandra in the legislature today.
“I’ve spoken with some of my peers from all around the world. All of us would be challenged to find an environment minister somewhere in the world that would tell you: Easy peasy fighting climate change.” – Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault at a news conference in Ottawa today as international talks in the city proceed to deal with plastics pollution,
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: Chrystia Freeland participated in a fireside chat on the budget, then took media questions.
Ministers on the road: With the Commons on a break, ministers continued to fan out across Canada to talk about the budget. Today, the emphasis was largely on the budget and Indigenous reconciliation. Citizens’ Services Minister Terry Beech, with Health Minister Mark Holland, made an Indigenous reconciliation announcement in the B.C. community of Sechelt. Defence Minister Bill Blair is on a three-day visit to the Northwest Territories. Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault is in Edmonton to make an announcement on Indigenous reconciliation. Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne was in the Quebec city of La Tuque. Public Services Minister Jean-Yves Duclos is in Quebec City, focusing on the budget and Indigenous reconciliation. Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu in Vancouver addressing Indigenous reconciliation. Families Minister Jenna Sudds is in Thunder Bay. King’s Privy Council President Harjit Sajjan and Justice Minister Arif Virani touted the budget in an event in Coquitlam, B.C.
Vidal out: Conservative MP Gary Vidal has announced he won’t run in the next election owing to dramatic changes in the Saskatchewan riding he has represented since 2019 that will mean he will no longer be living there. Also, he noted in a posting on social-media platform X that the Conservatives are not allowing an open nomination in the riding he will be living in. “Although this is not the expected outcome I anticipated, circumstances beyond the control of myself and my team have dictated that I move on after the next election,” he wrote.
GG in Saskatchewan: Mary Simon and her partner, Whit Fraser, continued their visit to the province, with stops in Regina that included a stop at the Regina Open Door Society, which provides settlement and integration services to refugees and immigrants. Later, she engaged in a round-table discussion with mental-health specialists on issues affecting Canada’s farming and ranching communities.
New CEO for Pearson Centre for Progressive Policy: George Young is the new chief executive officer of the think tank on progressive issues. The former national director of the federal Liberal party under Jean Chrétien served as a chief of staff to several Chrétien ministers, was a senior adviser to former Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson.
PRIME MINISTER’S DAY
Justin Trudeau was in Saskatoon for a news conference on budget measures.
LEADERS
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is in Ottawa to attend a session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on plastic pollution.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, in Edmonton, went door-knocking in the city with Edmonton Centre candidate Trisha Estabrooks.
No schedules released for Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
THE DECIBEL
On today’s podcast, Nathan VanderKlippe, The Globe’s international correspondent, discussed what has been happening on West Bank farmlands during the Israel-Hamas war. The Decibel is here.
PUBLIC OPINION
Liberals not an option: A third of Canadians surveyed by Ipsos Global Public Affairs say they would never vote Liberal in the next federal election.
No budget lift: Nanos Research says the federal Tories have a 19-point lead over the Liberals despite the release of a budget the government hoped would improve its political fortunes.
CAQ running third: Quebec’s governing Coalition Avenir Québec party has, in a new poll, fallen to third place in public support behind the Parti Québécois and the Liberals, The Gazette in Montreal reports.
OPINION
The Liberals promise billions for clean power. Don’t undermine it with politics
“In the summer of 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden’s ambition to deliver landmark climate legislation looked like it was dead – until the plan experienced a sudden political resurrection on Capitol Hill. The machinations in Washington have reverberated in Ottawa ever since.” – The Globe and Mail Editorial Board
The Liberals’ immigration policies have accomplished the opposite of what was intended
“In its well-meaning effort to encourage the migration of international students to Canada, the Trudeau government is turning swaths of our postsecondary education system into a grift. As a result, broad public support for immigration, the foundation stone of multicultural Canada, is eroding.” – John Ibbitson
Canada’s underwhelming disability benefit is a sign of a government out of ideas
“The Canada Disability Benefit had – and still has – the potential to be a generational game-changer. Done right, it could lift hundreds of thousands of Canadians out of poverty. But what the Liberal government has delivered so far is a colossal betrayal of the promise made to those living with physical, developmental and psychiatric disabilities: a program with a paltry payout and a limited scope, and bogged down in red tape.” – André Picard
Got a news tip that you’d like us to look into? E-mail us at tips@globeandmail.com. Need to share documents securely? Reach out via SecureDrop.
How Michael Cohen and Trump went from friends to foes
CNN’s Tom Foreman breaks down the evolution of the relationship between former President Donald Trump and his one-time fixer Michael Cohen, and how it fell apart.
Politics
Budget 2024 failed to spark ‘political reboot’ for Liberals, polling suggests – Global News
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.
A symbolic ‘shrug’ for Budget 2024
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.
Ipsos polling shows few Canadians give Budget 2024 “two thumbs up.”
Ipsos / Global News
“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.
A steep hill for Liberals to climb
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.
More on Politics
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.
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