Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plunged back into campaigning on Monday after unusually vocal protesters disrupted his election rallies and forced him to cancel an event.
Trudeau, whose ruling Liberals are tied in polls with their Conservative rivals ahead of the Sept. 20 vote, spoke to media in the Quebec town of Granby on Monday but did not refer to the weekend unrest.
In highly unusual scenes for Canada, demonstrators in the Ontario towns of Bolton on Friday and Cambridge on Sunday shouted death threats and screamed abuse at Trudeau, many referring to his push for COVID-19 vaccinations.
The crowd in Cambridge made his announcement on Sunday of climate change policies difficult to hear.
Trudeau’s team took the rare decision to cancel a rally planned near Bolton on Friday, saying the protests could endanger public safety. A senior Trudeau aide said the Liberal leader did not plan to make changes to avoid similar confrontations.
“I know Canadians … if you threaten them with violence and try to scare them away from what’s right, we double down,” Trudeau, who has been in power since 2015, said on Sunday after the protest.
Trudeau, 49, is the son of former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who in the early 1980s was extremely unpopular in western Canada.
“I’ve never seen this intensity of anger on the campaign trail or in Canada, not when I was a kid, even with my dad visiting out West, where we did see anger,” he said on Friday.
During the 1968 campaign, Trudeau’s father stood his ground when Quebec separatists threw rocks and bottles at him. “It defined the man,” said University of Toronto history professor emeritus Robert Bothwell.
Justin Trudeau’s push for inoculations has generated the same rancor among right-wing groups as in the United States. Some demonstrators demanded Trudeau be locked up, prompting a Liberal aide to tweet, “Team Trump is out in force,” referring to former U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Conservatives denounced the images and behavior although some people at the Bolton protest wore shirts identifying themselves as working for a Conservative legislator.
Conservative strategist Dan Robertson suggested the Liberals, who have a minority government, might be seeking to benefit from the protests by appearing to stand firm.
“It’s not terribly difficult to re-jig a tour to avoid demonstrators (and) confrontations — if you wanted to,” he tweeted.
(Reporting by David LjunggrenEditing by Paul Simao and Cynthia Osterman)
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the NDP is caving to political pressure from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre when it comes to their stance on the consumer carbon price.
Trudeau says he believes Jagmeet Singh and the NDP care about the environment, but it’s “increasingly obvious” that they have “no idea” what to do about climate change.
On Thursday, Singh said the NDP is working on a plan that wouldn’t put the burden of fighting climate change on the backs of workers, but wouldn’t say if that plan would include a consumer carbon price.
Singh’s noncommittal position comes as the NDP tries to frame itself as a credible alternative to the Conservatives in the next federal election.
Poilievre responded to that by releasing a video, pointing out that the NDP has voted time and again in favour of the Liberals’ carbon price.
British Columbia Premier David Eby also changed his tune on Thursday, promising that a re-elected NDP government would scrap the long-standing carbon tax and shift the burden to “big polluters,” if the federal government dropped its requirements.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Simon Jolin-Barrette, minister responsible for consumer protection, has tabled a bill to force merchants to calculate tips based on the price before tax.
That means on a restaurant bill of $100, suggested tips would be calculated based on $100, not on $114.98 after provincial and federal sales taxes are added.
The bill would also increase the rebate offered to consumers when the price of an item at the cash register is higher than the shelf price, to $15 from $10.
And it would force grocery stores offering a discounted price for several items to clearly list the unit price as well.
Businesses would also have to indicate whether taxes will be added to the price of food products.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
Quebec legislature member Youri Chassin has announced he’s leaving the Coalition Avenir Québec government to sit as an Independent.
He announced the decision shortly after writing an open letter criticizing Premier François Legault’s government for abandoning its principles of smaller government.
In the letter published in Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec, Chassin accused the party of falling back on what he called the old formula of throwing money at problems instead of looking to do things differently.
Chassin says public services are more fragile than ever, despite rising spending that pushed the province to a record $11-billion deficit projected in the last budget.
He is the second CAQ member to leave the party in a little more than one week, after economy and energy minister Pierre Fitzgibbon announced Sept. 4 he would leave because he lost motivation to do his job.
Chassin says he has no intention of joining another party and will instead sit as an Independent until the end of his term.
He has represented the Saint-Jérôme riding since the CAQ rose to power in 2018, but has not served in cabinet.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
