Daily Archives: July 12, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) Joe Biden stood in a Pennsylvania metal works shop, just miles from his boyhood home, and pledged to define his presidency by a sweeping economic agenda beyond anything Americans have seen since the Great Depression and the industrial mobilization for World War II.

The prospective Democratic presidential nominee promised the effort would not just answer a pandemic-induced recession, but address centuries of racism and systemic inequalities with a new American economy that finally and fully (lives) up to the words and the values enshrined in the founding documents of this nation that were all created equal.

It was a striking call coming from Biden, a 77-year-old establishment figure known more as a back-slapping deal-maker than visionary reformer. But it made plain his intention to test the reach of liberal populism as he tries to create a coalition that can defeat President Donald Trump in November.

Trump and his Republican allies argue that Bidens positioning, especially his ongoing work with progressives, proves hes captive to a radical left wing. Conversely, activists who backed Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary were encouraged, yet cautious, about Bidens ability to follow through while conceding that his plans on issues including climate action and criminal justice still fall short of their ideals.

Bidens inner circle insists his approach in 2020 is the same its been since he was elected to the Senate in 1972: Meet the moment.

Hes always evolved, said Ted Kaufman, Bidens longest-serving adviser. The thing thats been consistent for his entire career, almost 50 years, is he never promises things that he doesnt think he can do.

Kaufman, who succeeded Biden in the Senate when he ascended to the vice presidency, said Bidens core identity hasnt changed: progressive Democrat, friendly to labor and business, consistent supporter of civil rights, believer in government and the private sector. Whats different in 2020, he said, are the countrys circumstances a public health crisis, near-Depression level unemployment, a national reckoning on racism and the office Biden now seeks.

If you want to get something done, encourage it, Kaufman said. What he learned over history watching campaigns is that you put forth a program, and then you come into office, and everybody involved knows thats the program youre offering.

Bidens evolution has been on display from the start of his campaign as hes tacked left both in substance and style while trying to preserve his pragmatist brand.

At the start of the Democratic primary, Biden was positioned as offering a moderate alternative to Sanders call for a political revolution and Warrens push for big structural change.

The former vice president countered their proposed universal government-funded health insurance with a government insurance plan that would compete alongside private insurance. Progressives wanted tuition-free public higher education; Biden offered tuition subsidies for two-year schools. Biden called the climate crisis an existential threat and offered a clean energy plan with a trillion-dollar price tag, but resisted the full version of progressives Green New Deal. He promised hefty tax hikes for corporations and the investor class but opposed a wealth tax on individuals net worth.

Biden noted that his health care platform put him to the left of 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, who had jettisoned a public option from his 2010 health care law, angering liberal Democrats.

And on race, even before the recent national uprising against police violence, Biden spoke often of the nations systemic failure to live up to the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson didnt, he said often in early speeches, alluding to the fact that the Declarations author and the third U.S. president owned slaves.

Still, Biden isnt immune from the kind of internal party tensions that cost Clinton progressive support in 2016, and hes spent the last three months shoring up his left flank.

Biden and Sanders created policy groups to write recommendations for Democrats 2020 platform. Those committees unveiled 110 pages of policy plans Wednesday, ahead of Bidens speech in Pennsylvania. They left Biden short of endorsing single-payer health insurance and the most aggressive timelines to achieve a carbon-neutral economy, but ratified his claims of a more progressive slate than his predecessors.

Further, Biden already had moved toward Sanders tuition position, endorsing four years of full subsidies for most middle-class households. He adopted Warrens proposed bankruptcy law overhaul and her ideas for a government procurement campaign to benefit U.S. companies.

Progressives promise continued pressure.

I think our job is really to sometimes push him, Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal said. Jayapal, who helped lead the Biden-Sanders health care task force, said that means being alongside him, of course, and then sometimes be out in front.

Likewise, Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement, a leading environmental advocacy group, said her group wont abandon the Green New Deal. But she credited Biden for embracing a level of public investment that would remake the energy economy during the pandemic recession.

Biden has managed party unity that wasnt present four years ago.

I dont consider Bidens proposals a political hat tip to progressives as much as rising to the moment were living in, said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and a Warren ally.

The former vice president also has amassed an impressive slate of endorsements and built a stable of regular campaign surrogates, including all his major primary rivals. Many of them held events in the hours and days following his speech Thursday in a show of force that Trump, even with his intense online presence and fervent base, would be hard-pressed to match.

For his part, Trump accused Biden of plagiarizing his economic populism but also tarred Biden as a leftist who cant win.

Its a plan that is very radical left, but he said the right things because hes copying what Ive done, Trump said Friday before departing the White House for Florida.

Kaufman said Biden will continue campaigning as a nominee unconcerned about such labels. Whats allowed him to survive all these years, Kaufman said, is that hes not into any of those characterizations.

Go here to read the rest:

Biden forges brand of liberal populism to use against Trump - The Associated Press

In an office in a university campus, there is a young woman the student and an older man, the teacher.

Shes in his office because of a poor grade. In that first meeting, hes patronising but magnanimous. Maybe he can teach her privately? He puts an arm around her shoulder.

The next time we meet the pair, a complaint has been made to the tenure committee. The young woman has found a group feminists who have put words around what she experienced in the office, and the power relations between the two.

In this meeting you see the power shift, and the professors magnanimity and ease liquify into fear.

Almost 30 years ago, David Mamets play Oleanna explored what it means when a gatekeeper an ostensibly liberal one has his position challenged and threatened by someone less powerful.

Oleanna was written in the shadow of the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill sexual harassment case, and Mamets play very much sympathises with the older man.

His student shrill, young and wielding the borrowed intellect, talking points and nascent power of an organised group crushed the career and upward progression of a man who was just trying to help.

The plays lines could have been written now by someone recently cancelled: You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life?

But the fear at the heart of Oleanna a loss or transfer of power from establishment white men to young feminist women never came to pass.

The old order of centrist liberals have held out in places such as universities, the media and the arts. But for how long?

Our current moment also teems with anxiety around loss of power and, like in Oleanna, the threat comes from those lower down or outside the hierarchy.

Small l liberalism is being threatened like never before, as its failure to live up to its meritocratic ideals are being exposed. Foundations, supposedly built on fairness, are increasingly being damned for maintaining oppressive systems that, unwittingly or not, are racist.

Many people of colour who have gained entry to ostensibly liberal institutions have found that, once admitted, they face racism and dont rise beyond a certain level of power.

In late June at Australias SBS channel, staff sent a letter pleading with the board to appoint someone other than a white Anglo man as news director to reflect the stations multicultural charter (there has only been one exception since 1978).

Indigenous reporters posted Twitter threads about the racism they faced in the newsroom.

Things are, finally, moving fast. Its been the summer of rage in America (and then around the world) with the call to dismantle oppressive and racist systems, including the demands to defund the police in the US something that would have been unthinkable in the mainstream a year ago.

Amid calls for the systems to be dismantled, representations and symbols of the systems have been toppled: statues have been torn down, shows removed from Netflix, and some anxious liberals are trawling through their Facebook from years past to expunge any problematic costume party photos.

But does this shift mean that liberalism is on the way out? In the last few, fevered weeks, we have seen fretful claims about the death of liberalism at the hands of what some say is a new orthodoxy.

On Wednesday, an open letter in Harpers magazine was published, signed by more than 150 high-profile writers, public intellectuals, journalists and academics including JK Rowling, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, warning of an increasingly intolerant intellectual climate.

The letter stated: The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

(The letter was predictably divisive, with many on social media asking the signatories to check their privilege.)

The issues raised in the Harpers letter echo the views published in a much-read piece by journalist Matt Taibbi on how the left is destroying itself because people fear being called a racist.

He wrote: The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats and intimidation.

This new orthodoxy or woke culture can be defined broadly as being alert to injustice in society, especially racism.

Writer Wesley Yang has described it as the successor ideology to liberalism. Yang sees the promise and the purity of woke culture that we can move from the individual wish to the collective demand.

But he believes it is a flawed ideology the idea that we really can be equal still seems to me an impossible wish, and, like all impossible wishes, one that is charged with authoritarian potential.

This struggle is of a different complexion from the culture wars between left and right. Instead it pits the liberal left and centrists against the woke left.

Established cultural gatekeepers, many of whom for years have been on the left side of politics are finding, like the professor in Oleanna, that they need to defend their position and hard.

And like the professor in Oleanna, they have anxiety that their power could be taken away not by a committee but via cancellation, deplatforming or online shaming.

After a wrongdoing is exposed on the internet, the sheer weight of public condemnation can be highly traumatic for the person being cancelled (although for many serial offenders on the right, who are regularly cancelled for their racist views, the blowback has no material effects).

The fear of cancellation, or of not being seen performing the correct activism, or of saying the thing that doesnt conform to the current thinking, is a form of Stalinism, according to some liberals and privileges fear of giving offence over freedom of expression.

Robert Boyers, a literature professor at Skidmore College, is one such liberal. In his book The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies he charts what he sees as censorship on campus where people are too afraid to express ideas contrary to the new orthodoxy, lest they be hauled before a committee.

Boyers cites political theorist Stephen Holmes in defence of liberalism; That public disagreement is a creative force may have been the most novel and radical principle of liberal politics.

Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis have also complained about such groupthink (devoting entire chunks of his newish book White to the issue.) He writes, Everyone has to be the same And if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist.

Liberalism as he knew it in the past has hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement.

In Australia, novelist Richard Flanagan has defended the writers festivals hosting cancelled people such as Germaine Greer, Lionel Shriver and Junot Daz.

He wrote in the Guardian in 2018: The individual examples of Shriver, Daz, Carr and Greer all point to a larger, more disturbing trend. Writers festivals, like other aspects of the literary establishment such as prizes, have in recent years become less and less about books and more and more about using their considerable institutional power to enforce the new orthodoxies, to prosecute social and political agendas through reward and punishment.

Novelist Zadie Smith has often defended the need for freedom of expression and spoken about her need to be wrong, make mistakes, and to feel free in her writing.

I want to have my feeling, even if its wrong, even if its inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind, she said. I dont want to be bullied out of it.

(In a 2018 short story Smith wrote for the New Yorker, everyone is eventually cancelled and on the other side is freedom: Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things.)

Apart from these voices and until the Harpers letter liberals have been accused of being passive when it comes to defending their right for free inquiry, their right to offend and their right to get it wrong.

Perhaps ... the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up theyre afraid theyll be next, wrote Peter Franklin in Unherd. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.

Liberals are playing chess with pawns and keeping their important pieces in the back row, heavily defended. Speak out now and you may risk being put through the threshing machine of cancellation. Your colleagues might circulate a petition calling for your sacking. You can become an unperson in the moment it takes to send an ill-advised tweet.

The thrill and the danger of this present moment is in the apprehension that entrenched cultural power is shifting hands rapidly, and that once the pawns have been sacrificed, liberals could start playing a more aggressive game. One side will win and one will lose, because you cant integrate the two orthodoxies, such are the opposing characteristics that define each movement.

One (liberalism) is about the individual and their rights, the other comes from the position of the collective, alienated from liberal power structures and networks.

The latter demands the former reconsider and reconfigure language, gender, ownership, sexuality, representation, equity and notions of equality.

But for some liberal elders the freedom of the individual is paramount. The freedom they are talking about is their own to write, to debate, to think, to have unpopular opinions, or, as novelist Zadie Smith has claimed, to be wrong.

I believe in freedom of thought, says the professor in Oleanna. (To which the student replies; You believe not in freedom of thought but in an elitist, in, in a protected hierarchy which rewards you.)

Woke culture radically shifts the focus from the individual to the systems that the individual operates in. You may be able to have an unpopular opinion but thats because your privilege, position and your platform allow you to make mistakes and take risks, try out ideas, to be wrong. You are allowed to be free.

But while you are free, many, many more are voiceless, oppressed, unrepresented and and the system that oppresses them remains unchanged.

It is via the collective that woke culture defines and draws its power after all the individualism so central to the last 30 years of liberalism and so-called meritocracy has only advanced the careers and voices of the few. Problems of oppressive systems of deaths in custody, police brutality, sexual harassment and race and gender pay gaps still remain.

When the student threatens the power of the professor in Oleanna, she does so not as an individual but for the group; for those who suffer what I suffer.

Changing the systems that produce and sustain inequality can only occur via some sort of collective action. Liberalism has largely failed on this front.

For the liberal gatekeepers, were in an Oleanna moment.

Theres lip service to the struggle, but is there actually an exchange or relinquishing of power? Not yet. As we saw recently, two young white critics, Bec Kavanagh and Jack Callil, relinquished their platform as book reviewers for Australias Nine newspapers, in the hope that their positions could be filled by non-white critics.

But such actions are rare and even rarer at the top.

In Oleanna, the professor is about to lose tenure, his house, maybe his marriage. He defends his corner. You vicious little bitch. You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life? Here we see when the power is under real threat of being transferred, all talk of liberal ideals falls away.

The last scene of the play ends in a physical struggle. Shes on the ground, hes about to bludgeon her with a chair hes holding above his head.

The plays last words are hers: Thats right. In that context and the context we are now in those final words mean something. They mean of course of course you were going to defend your power by literally standing over me and threatening me with violence.

Woke culture sees this violence which explains in part, the vehemence of the fight.

Different but essentially the same social movements emerge every few years, its only the technology that changes, one friend told me recently on a walk, as we were speculating about that days fresh cancellations.

The sort of shift being demanded by the new orthodoxy is nothing short of radically transformative for society. For a start, it demands a move away from the liberal position of the individual to the collective position of the woke. The shift is from me to we.

Read more here:

Can liberalism and its gatekeepers survive the seismic changes in our society? - The Guardian

Associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

Overall, the liberal ideal is a diverse, pluralistic society of autonomous people guided by reason and tolerance. The dream is harmonious coexistence. But liberalism also happens to excel at generating dissensus, and some of the major sociopolitical controversies of the past few years should be understood as conflicts not between liberalism and something else but between parties placing emphasis on different liberal freedomschiefly freedom of speech, a popular favorite which needs no introduction, and freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values. Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

For instance, while public universities in America are generally bound by the First Amendment, controversial speakers have no broad right to speak at private institutions. Those institutions do, however, have a right to decide what ideas they are and arent interested in entertaining and what people they believe will or will not be useful to their communities of scholarsa right that limits the entry and participation not only of public figures with controversial views but the vast majority of people in our society. Senators like Tom Cotton have every right to have their views published in a newspaper. But they have no specific right to have those views published by any particular publication. Rather, publications have the rightboth constitutionally as institutions of the press, and by convention as collections of individuals engaged in lawful projectsto decide what and whom they would or would not like to publish, based on whatever standards happen to prevail within each outlet.

When a speaker is denied or when staffers at a publication argue that something should not have been published, the rights of the parties in question havent been violated in any way. But what we tend to hear in these and similar situations are criticisms that are at odds with the principle that groups in liberal society have the general right to commit themselves to values which many might disagree with and make decisions on that basis. Theres nothing unreasonable about criticizing the substance of such decisions and the values that produce them. But accusations of illiberalism in these cases carry the implication that nonstate institutions under liberalism have an obligation of some sort to be maximally permissive of opposing ideasor at least maximally permissive of the kinds of ideas critics of progressive identity politics consider important. In fact, they do not.

Associative freedom is no less vital to liberalism than the other freedoms, and is actually integral to their functioning. There isnt a right explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment that isnt implicitly dependent on or augmented by similarly minded individuals having the right to come together. Most people worship with others; an assembly or petition of one isnt worth much; the institutions of the press are, again, associations; and individual speech is functionally inert unless some group chooses to offer a venue or a platform. And political speech is, in the first place, generally aimed at stirring some group or constituency to contemplation or action.

Ultimately, associative freedom is critical because groups and associations are the very building blocks of society. Political parties and unions, nonprofits and civic organizations, whole religions and whole ideologiesindividuals cannot be meaningfully free unless they have the freedom to create, make themselves part of, and define these and other kinds of affiliations. Some of our affiliations, including the major identity categories, are involuntary, and this is among the complications that makes associative freedom as messy as it is important. Just as the principle of free speech forces us into debates over hate speech, obscenity, and misinformation, association is the root of identity-based discrimination and other ills. The Supreme Courts decision in Bostock v. Clayton County banning employment discrimination on the basis of LGBTQ identity last month was a huge step forward, but in practice, workers of all stripes often lack the means and opportunity to defend themselves from unjust firingsall the more reason for those preoccupied with cancel culture and social mediadriven dismissals to support just-cause provisions and an end to at-will employment.

What about the oft-repeated charge that progressives today intend to establish group rights over and above the rights of the individualthat, specifically, minorities and certain disadvantaged groups are to be given more rights than, and held as superior to, white people? If this were the case, the critics of left illiberalism would truly be onto something: Individual rights are, again, at the center of liberal thought.

But that divergence isnt anywhere to be found in any of the major controversies that have recently captured broad attention. A minority chef who says she wants to be paid as much as her white colleagues has not said that white people are inferior; an unarmed black man under the knee of a policeman and begging for his life is not asking to be conferred a special privilege. The goal is parity, not superiority. The heart of the protests and cultural agitation weve witnessed has clearly been a desire to see minorities treated equallysharing the rights to which all people are entitled but that have been denied to many by societys extant bigots and the residual effects of injustices past.

Ultimately, its the realities of our collective past that make the notion that progressives are dragging the country toward illiberalism especially ridiculous. Over the course of two and a half centuries in this country, millions of human beings held as property toiled for the comfort and profit of already wealthy people who tortured and raped them. Just over 150 years ago, the last generation of slaves was released into systems of subjugation from which its descendants have not recovered. August will mark just 100 years since women were granted the right to vote; Black Americans, nominally awarded that right during Reconstruction, couldnt take full advantage of it until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The litany of other inequities and crimes our country has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate against Native Americans, immigrants, religious and sexual minorities, political dissidents, and the poor is endless. All told, liberal society in the U.S. is, at best, just over half a century old: If it were a person, it would be too young to qualify for Medicare.

View post:

The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism - The New Republic

We is once again a touchy subject in Justin Trudeaus Liberal party.

While the hits just keep on coming about Trudeaus connections to the WE charity, the controversy has touched off grumbling in Liberal circles about the lowercase we as in, how exactly did we get into this mess, and who is we anyway in the decision-making circle around the prime minister?

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, the Liberal MP for the Toronto riding of Beaches-East York, says he was on the phone immediately after the news emerged about WE being chosen to hand out nearly $1 billion in pandemic relief to students. He placed a call last week to the office of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth Minister Bardish Chagger whos now gone silent with the media to get an explanation.

I was struggling to understand why it was being done this way, said Erskine-Smith, a rare MP willing to go on the record on Friday about his concerns with the entire WE affair.

He made the call before he knew all the details, which have been emerging daily, about how closely WE had been working with Trudeaus family, including nearly $300,000 in speaking fees paid out to Trudeaus mother and brother.

Had I known what I know now, I would have said this was too close to the prime minister, Erskine-Smith said.

Other MPs, preferring to talk off the record on Friday, said there has been a lot of chatter in the caucus over the past week about how this WE controversy has revived concerns about team culture or lack of it in Trudeaus government.

There arent a lot of relationships between the PM and caucus, one MP said. Now, he said, with most of caucus relations taking place remotely during the pandemic, there are even fewer opportunities for MPs to have contact with the PM and the tight team around him.

It is either ironic or fitting that WE has made the Liberal we annoyed and nervous.

One MP said he was surprised to learn from news reports first in the Star, as it happens that WE had been given a contract to do work that would normally be done by the public service.

This is a real head-scratcher for me and several of my colleagues, the MP said. I like to consider myself plugged in but the first time I heard of the WE contract was when I read the controversy in the papers. I know for a fact that I was not alone.

What baffled many MPs was why the government needed to do any contracting out at all, especially after months of proving that it was nimble and adaptable enough to get COVID-19 aid directly to citizens.

This was Erskine-Smiths main concern at first: the government has generous and effective programs in place already for students and summer jobs. MPs themselves, of all stripes, are often helpful in steering that help toward where its most needed in their ridings.

So, while Erskine-Smith didnt put it this pointedly, not only was the WE decision made without input from MPs, the plan itself which has now been reversed also kept MPs out of the loop.

Its just so frustrating, he said, citing all the good work the government has been doing to provide help to citizens in this crisis. Now this is taking up so much of the conversation. Erskine-Smiths own mother asked him on Friday why this was going on, though he says his office is not being inundated with complaints, at least not yet.

The exquisitely bad timing of this controversy has Liberals frustrated too. Not only is it happening during a pandemic, but also still in the shadow of the humbling the government received during last years election.

From all accounts, Trudeau had been making genuine efforts after the election, also after last years SNC-Lavalin saga, to forge some greater connections with the Liberal team. Just this week, Trudeau handed a major ambassadors appointment to former interim leader Bob Rae a decision seen as a symbolic olive branch to Liberals who had been kept at arms length from the PMO.

Make sense of what's happening across the country and around the world with the Star's This Week in Politics email newsletter.

But the WE controversy is viewed by some Liberals as being about how easy it is for Trudeau and his team to lapse back into old habits of keeping to themselves and giving access and benefits only to the small number of people they trust. Many MPs chose to speak off the record on Friday precisely because they were worried about reinforcing that outsider-insider culture.

None of the MPs or Liberals I reached were calling for Trudeau to resign, as his official opponents are. But there were suggestions that the PM had to surround himself with people who ask harder questions, who would have immediately spotted that WE would hurt the Liberal we.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Q:

How do you think Liberal MPs should address the WE scandal?

Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)

Sign In

Register

Original post:

Blindsided by the WE scandal, Liberal MPs wonder: How did Justin Trudeau get us into this mess? - Toronto Star

The federal balance sheet is a mathematical exercise that has real fiscal and economic implications. But outside of a debt crisis,the greatest value of a surplus or deficit estimate may be as a political idea.

In that respect, the most interesting thing about the $343 billion deficit that Finance Minister Bill Morneau projected on Wednesday is how it might frame the federal debate for years to come.

There is very little actualdebate to be had about the current deficit. Almost no one is arguing that the federal government should not have spent nearly $200 billion over the last few months to help Canadians get through a pandemic-induced economic shutdown. The need to continue providing some amount of support through the fall and into next spring seems obvious.

Where there are specific complaints, they tend to be that the government could have spent more and moved faster. As if in response to those critiques, Morneau's 168-page snapshot goes on at length about what the Liberal government has done and makes a point of showing how the federal response in Canada stacks up against relief efforts in other G7 countries.

All of which might explainwhythe Conservatives stopped short Wednesday of a fullassaulton the current deficit. Instead,the Conservatives renewed their attacks on the deficits the Trudeau government ran before the crisis. In 2015, the Liberals made an explicit decision to run a deficit and the federal government ran a cumulative shortfall of $54.7 billion between 2015 and 2019.

Watch: Andrew Scheer presses federal government for a pandemic recovery plan

The Conservatives like to argue that the budget was balanced when the Harper government left office five years ago. That's not entirely accurate. In November 2015 after that year's federal election, but before the Liberals had started to implement their agenda the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer released an updated fiscal projection that showed a surplus of $1.2 billion for 2015-2016.

But the federal balance sheet was benefiting from a one-time boost provided by the sale of the federal government's shares in General Motors. In the years following, the PBO projected that the budget would show a deficit of between $3 billion and $5 billion in subsequent years.

For the fiscal year of 2018-2019, the PBO estimated that the federal government's debt-to-GDP ratio a measure of accumulated debt in comparison to the national economy would be 27.9 per cent.

In fact, after the Liberal government implemented its spending plans, the debt-to-GDP ratio was 30.9 per cent in 2018-2019. That three per cent difference isn't nothing, but it is the box within which any argument about pre-2020 fiscal policy has to be fought.

Of course, a full evaluation of the Liberal approach before the pandemic hit would have to assess the value of that increased spending. But the 2015 to 2019 era is just the prelude to what'slikely to be a larger debate about the shape, size and activity of the federal government going forward.

The federal government is running a deficit of $343 billion but the sky has not fallen and that is an implicitchallenge to the Conservatives' arguments about the primary value of frugality.They also may notwantthe idea of such widespread federal support for individuals and businesses to be broadlyaccepted by Canadians.

So, on Wednesday, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer told the House of Commons that Morneau had presented a "dire" picture of federal finances. Pierre Poilievre, the shadow finance minister,stood and loudly decriedthe fact that total federal debt isnow expected to reach $1 trillion.Poilievrethen called on Morneau to reform the government's relief policies so that the free market could be unleashed to create the jobs and growth that are now needed.

The future direction of the Conservative Party still depends on who its next leader turns out to be, but Scheer and Poilievreprobably havelaid out the broad strokes of what Conservatives will argue in the months and years ahead that government borrowing isa significant source of concern, that there has been too much spending under the Liberals, and that the private sector must be left alone to create prosperity.

When Conservatives need to argue that Canada cannot "afford" something in the future, they'll no doubt insist that the Liberals have 'spent the cupboards bare'. (Granted, Poilievre and Scheer were making that argument before the current crisis. Maybethey needa new metaphor.)

Watch: The National:Bill Morneau on $343B deficit, post-pandemic recovery

One trillion is not a magic number;the federal debt almost inevitably would have reached that level at some point in the future. But it is a big number. And big numbers can be attention-grabbing.

No one should take thedeficitfor granted, but Morneau was prepared to argue thatCanada's current fiscal plight looks less alarming when it's placed incontext. Canada went into this crisis with the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7 and it still has the lowest level of net government debt among those countries. Due to low interest rates, the federal government also willpay a lower servicing charge on that debt this year than it did last year, even with the extra borrowing.

Federal debt-to-GDP is now expected to reach 49 per cent well below its peak of 66 per cent in the mid-1990s. As the economy continues to recover, that ratio should decline.

But even if no one is really contestingthe need to spend now, there will be a debate later about how to manage the deficit and the debt going forward. And the extent of the federal government's emergency spending coupled with the deficits of earlier years could leave Morneau and the Liberals vulnerable to claims that they are irresponsible or profligate.

There was some faint grumbling already when it seemed that the federal government might not be doing enough to ensure that payments from the Canadaemergency response benefit (CERB) weren't going to ineligible recipients. Any future spending scandals could be much more potent in light of the big numbers that were released on Wednesday.

And Morneau willsoon have to confrontall the other problemsthis pandemic has exposed, and all the outstanding requests that have piled up over the last four months. Major issues involving long-term care, precarious work, inequality, child care and climate change are going to be waiting for the finance minister once it's time to rebuild not to mention the need to be better prepared for the next pandemic. Each of those issues will come with demands for new funding.

On that note,theNDP'sJagmeetSingh isalreadycalling for a new tax on the richest Canadians. Of course, theNDPwas proposing a wealth tax before this pandemic but New Democrats will have evenmore reasons to argue for one now.

For the Liberals, doing everything and making the case that theycan do so responsibly is only going to get harder. And Liberals who worry about this government's legacy must know that if they leave the government on an unacceptable fiscal path, they'll give their successors a handy reason to significantly restructure whatever is left behind.

Watch: The At Issue panel discusses what's missing from the fiscal snapshot

View original post here:

Why the Conservatives are going after the Liberals' pre-pandemic spending now - CBC.ca

Robyn LeGrow is among the thousand-odd people rejected by the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador to vote for its next leader. (Peter Cowan/CBC)

Some people registered to vote in Newfoundland and Labrador's Liberal Party leadership race are being ousted from the process, and left questioning the party's reasoning why.

Among the rejected is Robyn LeGrow of St. John's,who two weeks ago posted on herpersonal Facebook account a critique of candidate Andrew Furey's campaign policies.

"I can only assume that that is why I have been disqualified. I had no idea when I put that post out on my personal page, to my personal friends, that it would get as much attention as it has," LeGrow told CBC News on Wednesday.

The party is informing the former voters via email.

"We want to thank you for your interest in the Liberal Party and this election. However, our records indicate that you do not support the aims and objectives of the Liberal Party of NL. As a result, you have been found ineligible to vote," reads an emailwritten byLewis Stoyles, chief returning officer of the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador leadership election.

The upcoming party vote will elect its nextleader and the province's next premier on Aug. 3 ahead of a provincialgeneral election which will be called within the next year.

LeGrow took to Twitter Wednesday morning with her concerns, with many people commenting that they, too, have received rejection notices.

Emails being sent to rejected voters include an opt-inreview process by the party.

"If our records are incorrect or you wish to have this decision reviewed, please respond to this email by9:00 PM (NST) on July 8, 2020," the email from Stoyles reads.

That leavesmany, includingLeGrow, with less than 12 hours before the deadline for appeal closes.

An appeals process will continue throughout the rest of the week, according to Judy Morrow, a member of the leadership election committee and past president of the Liberal Party in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The first part of the appeals involvesasking Stoylesto review thedecisionthat rendered the voterineligible. If the voter is not satisfied,then they have an opportunity to make an appeal to the party's appeals committee, which wasput in place in February.

The party plans to have a finalized list of voters by July 14, with voting starting onJuly 28.

LeGrowistaking the party up on its appeals offer, and says she has notified them she'll be pursuing it.

"My concern is that communications all along haven't been consistent," she said.

"It seems to me that they are creating the rules as they go, making decisions and then responding to them based on feedback from people who are on the other end of those decisions."

On Wednesday afternoon, the Liberal Party held a virtual news conference for anupdate on the election process.

Since voter registration closed on June 25, the election committee has been going through what its calling a "multi-faceted vetting process." Thatincludedcalls and email blasts to verify and authenticate registered voters, and waspartnered with a research company.

As of Wednesday roughly 33,500 voters have been designated eligible, according to Morrow, who took questions from reporters.

When asked if the vetting process included the research company combing through social media accounts of registered voters to find past comments which could find them in the ineligible category, Morrow said no.

"They were just given pure lists from our Liberal list database," she said.

Morrow saidanyone who signed up with the party to vote for itsleadership, and in a follow up robocallsaid they would vote for any other party, were automatically disqualified from voting.

Anyone who said they didn't support the aims of objectives of the Liberal Party were also disqualified. Those categories addedup to about 300 people.

There were about 1,000 ineligible voters total, Morrow said.

"They were for various reasons. That could be because their date of birth was missing, or they didn't have an email or telephone number, or they were no longer a resident of the province," she said.

"We found some individuals who had been deceased. There were different reasons for knockouts."

Read more articles from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

Read the original post:

Liberals rejected 1,000 voters in its leadership race. One of them is questioning why - CBC.ca

This is a revolutionary moment in American culture.

On one side, activists and employees are demanding fundamental change to overturn structural racism deeply embedded within institutions of journalism, education, and business. On the other, critics accuse the would-be revolutionaries of engaging in acts of illiberalism, including the silencing and firing of people who resist the proposed changes or even show insufficient zeal in enacting them.

So far, the fight between the two sides has generated far more heat than light. That's what makes Osita Nwanevu's essay in The New Republic, "The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism," such a welcome intervention.

In defending the activist side of the dispute, Nwanevu's tone is high-minded, his reasoning clear and thoughtful. While critics of the activists frequently call the latter a "mob" or describe it in explicitly religious terms, Nwanevu makes a careful, deliberate, complex argument designed to show that it's actually the critics who are acting and speaking impulsively, reacting to events without deep thinking, intentionally refusing to see the reality going on around them.

As one of those critics (unnamed in Nwanevu's essay), I disagree. But it's important to clarify exactly why to ensure that both sides keep the conversation going instead of merely talking past each other, with each side doing little more than bucking up allies and seeking to discredit opponents. In my view, Nwanevu is quite wrong to describe social justice activists as "expanding" the bounds of liberalism, since the aim of their reforms is a deliberate constriction of debate. It would therefore be more honest for him and his ideological allies to admit this and accept its illiberal implications.

I've been pointing to the illiberalism of the social-justice left since at least 2013. I backed off somewhat during the first couple years of the Trump administration, since it seemed a little peevish and an offense against proportionality to write frequently about the topic with the White House occupied by a man who regularly expresses contempt for civil liberties. But there have been events worth addressing over the past year or so. Roughly since the publication of the "1619 Project" in The New York Times last August, but especially since the newsroom rebellions began early last month, I've found myself led once again to call out the illiberalism of the activist left.

Yet as far as Nwanevu is concerned, those who hold my views are the ones guilty of illiberalism.

Part of the problem may be that Nwanevu is responding to weaker arguments made by some on my own side. He's right to note, for example, that the core issue has nothing much to do with "free speech" in constitutional terms, since no one is raising a threat of government censorship. But neither does it concern, as Nwanevu asserts, "freedom of association," including the freedom of a community civil society, a newspaper, a corporate workplace to establish its own standards, since no one is denying the legitimacy of that freedom.

As I've argued on other occasions, every community makes decisions about what ideas and attitudes to rule out of bounds to treat some ideas as worthy of debate and others as unacceptable and warranting cancellation. What's distinctive about the present moment is that groups of activists are demanding to be given the power to make this all-important decision within certain institutions and they are using this newfound power to shift (and often constrict) the lines of acceptable thought and discussion, ruling certain arguments (and the people who make them) out of bounds.

Why do I oppose this effort? It has nothing to do with public policy. I'm all for vigorous debate and personally support efforts to ensure that Black Americans and other minority groups receive equal treatment under the law and that police reforms address and rectify manifest injustices in law enforcement. But that's only a small (and peripheral) part of what Nwanevu discusses in his essay and what his activist allies are aiming for. What he and they are really concerned with is defending the view that American society is comprised of "intelligible, if often hidden, systems" of racial oppression, and rejecting the views of "reactionary liberal[s]" like myself, who see the country as "a jumble of bits and pieces a muddle that defies both systemic understanding and collective action."

That really is the nub of the issue, though I think this is a tendentious way to describe the difference between the two camps. My criticism of the "1619 Project," for example, was focused less on the details of the various contributions and more on the framing of the project as an effort to tell the definitive, "true" story of America, with the history of slavery and its legacy sitting at its very core, decisively shaping everything else.

This was an activist move an act of deliberate exaggeration, a flattening out of the complexity that Nwanevu dismisses as a "muddle" and a "jumble," a decision to focus monomaniacally on one (important) facet of the multifaceted American experience and warp everything else around it. It certainly wasn't an example of seeking to achieve what Nwanevu calls "parity" among various groups. It was an effort to make Black history the defining feature of the country.

The best one can say for the effort is that it's an act of intentional overcorrection: American history has for too long been told as a story focused on white people, so now we should tell it as a story focused on Black people. But that's not a way to achieve a more accurate understanding of the past. It's an act of replacing one form of distortion with another.

And this brings us back to the second-order issue to the question of whether the activists fighting for control of decisions in the workplace believe this kind of criticism is acceptable, and hence worth publishing, at all. From his essay, it's genuinely hard to tell where Nwanevu comes down on the question. During an especially perplexing passage, he mocks New York Times columnist David Brooks for "surreal condescension" in wondering, in the midst of an essay about Ta-Nehisi Coates's much-lauded memoir Between the World and Me, whether, as a white person, he had "standing to respond" critically to Coates' "experience."

When Brooks' column appeared, five years ago, it was possible to wave away such concerns. Today, after a series of forced resignations and firings at a series of media organizations, they cannot be. Yet Nwanevu dismisses them anyway before quickly pivoting to expressions of admiration for two more recent columns from Brooks in which the columnist shows that his reading in Black history has "worked" on him, leading to a "conversion" to support for reparations for slavery and an acknowledgement that "moderates" have "failed Black America."

Brooks has learned. He won't be canceled.

But what if his reading hadn't "worked"? What if Brooks stood by or deepened his respectful criticisms of Coates? What if he continued to argue, as he did in that five-year-old column, that "this country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame" and that although "violence is embedded in America it is not close to the totality of America"? What if instead of joining Coates in calling for reparations, he argued, as I have, that it's a proposal doomed to failure? Would he be allowed to make those arguments in The New York Times today? Or would he be risking his job in doing so not because he would be severely criticized, which is assumed and expected, but because he would provoke a rebellion on staff and calls for his dismissal for refusing to adequately listen, learn, and adjust his views?

I want a public world in which Ta-Nehisi Coates is free to make his arguments with as much potency as he possibly can. But I also want a public world in which his critics can do the same without fear of crossing lines newly drawn. One argument. Then the next. And so on, down through the years. That's how we truly learn and grow as a culture not by taking control of the boundaries of debate, narrowing them to verify our tidy certainties, protecting our sacred texts, and punishing those who dare to profane them.

I don't know if Osita Nwanevu shares this vision of a free, liberal society. I do know that many of the people on his side of the debate appear not to. And that he nonetheless believes that those who think the way I do are the ones guilty of illiberalism. Maybe one day, if the argument continues, I'll be able to persuade him otherwise.

Visit link:

Who are the real liberals today? - The Week

Many analysts argue that the liberal international order ended with the rise of China and the election of US President Donald Trump. But if Democratic challenger Joe Biden defeats Trump in Novembers election, should he try to revive it? Probably not, but he must replace it.

Critics correctly point out that the American order after 1945 was neither global nor always very liberal. It left out more than half the world in the Soviet bloc and China and included many authoritarian states. American hegemony was always exaggerated. Nonetheless, the most powerful country must lead in creating global public goods, or they will not be providedand Americans will suffer.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a case in point. A realistic goal for a Biden administration should be to establish rules-based international institutions with different membership for different issues.

Would China and Russia agree to participate? During the 1990s and 2000s, neither could balance American power, and the United States overrode sovereignty in pursuit of liberal values. The US bombed Serbia and invaded Iraq without approval by the United Nations Security Council. It also supported a UN General Assembly resolution in 2005 that established a responsibility to protect citizens brutalised by their own governmentsa doctrine it then used in 2011 to justify bombing Libya to protect the citizens of Benghazi.

Critics describe this record as post-Cold War American hubrisRussia and China felt deceived, for example, when the NATO-led intervention in Libya resulted in regime changewhereas defenders portray it as the natural evolution of international humanitarian law. In any case, the growth of Chinese and Russian power has set stricter limits to liberal interventionism.

Whats left? Russia and China stress the norm of sovereignty in the UN Charter, according to which states can go to war only for self-defence or with Security Council approval. Taking a neighbours territory by force has been rare since 1945 and has led to costly sanctions when it has happened (as with Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014). In addition, the Security Council has often authorised the deployment of peacekeeping forces in troubled countries, and political cooperation has limited the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. This dimension of a rules-based order remains crucial.

As for economic relations, the rules will require revision. Well before the pandemic, Chinas hybrid state capitalism underpinned an unfair mercantilist model that distorted the functioning of the World Trade Organization. The result will be a decoupling of global supply chains, particularly where national security is at stake.

Although China complains when the US prevents companies like Huawei from building 5G telecommunications networks, this position is consistent with sovereignty. After all, China prevents Google, Facebook, and Twitter from operating in China for security reasons. Negotiating new trade rules can help prevent the decoupling from escalating. At the same time, cooperation in the crucial financial domain remains strong, despite the current crisis.

By contrast, ecological interdependence poses an insurmountable obstacle to sovereignty, because the threats are transnational. Regardless of setbacks for economic globalisation, environmental globalisation will continue, because it obeys the laws of biology and physics, not the logic of contemporary geopolitics. Such issues threaten everyone, but no country can manage them alone. On issues like Covid-19 and climate change, power has a positive-sum dimension.

In this context, it is not enough to think of exercising power over others. We must also think in terms of exercising power with others. The Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization help us as well as others. Since Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong met in 1972, China and the US have cooperated despite ideological differences. The difficult question for Biden will be whether the US and China can cooperate in producing global public goods while competing in the traditional areas of great-power rivalry.

Cyberspace is an important new issuepartly transnational, but also subject to sovereign government controls. The internet is already partly fragmented. Norms regarding free speech and privacy on the internet can be developed among an inner circle of democracies but will not be observed by authoritarian states.

As suggested by the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, some rules barring tampering with the internets basic structure are also in authoritarians interests if they want connectivity. But when they use proxies for information warfare or to interfere in elections (which violates sovereignty), norms will have to be reinforced by rules such as those the US and the Soviet Union negotiated during the Cold War (despite ideological hostility) to limit the escalation of incidents at sea. The US and like-minded states will have to announce the norms they intend to uphold, and deterrence will be necessary.

Insistence on liberal values in cyberspace would not mean unilateral US disarmament. Rather, the US should distinguish between the permitted soft power of open persuasion and the hard power of covert information warfare, to which it would retaliate. Overt programs and broadcasts by Russia and China would be allowed, covert coordinated behaviour such as manipulation of social media would not. And the US would continue to criticise these countries human rights records.

Polls show that the US public wants to avoid military interventions, but not to withdraw from alliances or multilateral cooperation. And the public still cares about values.

If Biden is elected, the question he will face is not whether to restore the liberal international order. It is whether the US can work with an inner core of allies to promote democracy and human rights while cooperating with a broader set of states to manage the rules-based international institutions needed to face transnational threats such as climate change, pandemics, cyberattacks, terrorism and economic instability.

The rest is here:

After the liberal international order | The Strategist - The Strategist

People have been asking me what I think of the HarpersLetter on Justice and Open Debate, a short statement opposing the cancel culture and signed by 153 prominent liberal intellectuals and cultural figures. Here are my thoughts after reading the letter.

First and most important, in the current atmosphere, anyone defending free speech and viewpoint diversity deserves support. We are living through a time of persecution, in which it is common for individuals to be publicly disgraced and to lose their jobs because theyve said something not in step with the latest theory of what constitutes social justice, or because they wrote something foolish decades ago.

So I support the general message of the Harpers letter. Still, I have to say that this statement is pretty messed up.

The most obvious way its messed up is that too many of the signatories have spent years systematically trying to stifle reasonable public debate by delegitimizing conservative voices and creating a context in which its too costly to engage with them in a public way.

Im not talking about those signatories who have strongly disagreed with conservatives, nationalists, Christians, populists, and so on. Vigorous disagreement is all fine and good and welcome, of course. Im talking about those who have accused conservatives of being authoritarian and anti-democracy; who have compared our views to Nazism, fascism, or Stalinism; whove said were theocrats, racists, sexists, and Islamophobes; whove said that were enabling and collaborating.

This campaign to delegitimize conservative views has been going on for years. Its been effective, too: A generation ago, conservatives were a minority in the mainstream media, academia, and other cultural settings. But we were considered legitimate participants representing a legitimate point of view.

Today this has changed entirely. Conservatism has been driven out or underground in one institution after another. And far too many of the signatories to this letter kept quiet or have actively taken part in bringing this about. But now that itsliberals whose standing is in danger, suddenly theyve realized they care immensely about free speech and viewpoint diversity!

Okay, so thats human nature. People tend to defend their own in-group and interests. Its easier for a liberal to worry about whether wereall free to be liberals than to worry about whether were free to be conservatives. I get it.

But now liberals are being persecuted and deplatformed. Now liberals thinking over the mistakes theyve made in the past. And theystilldont get how messed up it is to collect 153 signaturesin support offree speech and viewpoint diversity but to exclude conservatives fromthat as well.

That brings us to the heart of whats wrong with the Harpers letter: Even after all thats happened, the liberals who cooked this up still dont understand the most basic thing about democracy, which is that you need to have twolegitimate political parties for democracy to workone liberal and one conservative.,

This means that to have a democracy liberals need to grant legitimacy to conservatives (even when they dont like them much) and conservatives need to grant legitimacy to liberals (even when they dont like them much). Nothing else is going to work.

Heres what isnotgoing to work: Liberals trying to exclude conservatives fromevery kind oflegitimate discourse (because conservatives arethe real threat), while granting ever more influence to the very neo-Marxists who are working to bring them down. Its not going to work because neo-Marxists arent like conservatives: They dont believe in democracy. They dont believe in compromise. And they dont share power.

Nevertheless, thats what this letter is about, isnt it? Its about excluding conservatives from even the most elementary declaration of civic principles in order to throw a bone to the left in the hope that theyll take it.

Now, I know that not all the signatories are on the same page on this. Jonathan Haidt, for example, has risked much over the last few years trying to persuade liberals that the effective ban of conservatives in many universities is wrong-headed and self-destructive. Other liberals have stood with him, of course.

But far too many of the Harpers letter signatories have been toeing the line with, for example, Yascha Mounk, who on July 2 announced a new organization whose purpose is to ramp up the delegitimization campaign against conservatives, whom he says are the real threat to democracy. In his own words: The most pressing threat to liberal democracy comes from the populist right. From Brasilia to Washington, authoritarian populists are muzzling dissent, stoking racism, and concentrating power in their own hands. Were facing the fight of a lifetime.

So according to Mounk, the fight of his lifetime isnt against the neo-Marxists who are poised to take over the principal liberal institutions in America, but against conservatives, who are the most pressing threat to liberal democracy. And he said thisfive daysbefore appearing as a signatory on the Harpers letter, in anannouncementthat showcased the names of a dozen other Harpers signatories.

No big surprise, then, that the Harpers letter on free speech and viewpoint diversity includes no fewer than three (!) side comments aimed at delegitimizing conservatives. The reason for these asinine anti-conservative swipes is that the liberals behind the Harpers letter still think theyre going to get an alliance with the very same neo-Marxists who are out to destroy them. And they truly believe the way theyre going to get there is by putting conservatives down.

That leads us to the final reason this Harpers letter is so messed up: Its signatories dont seem to have a clue what time it is. They dont understand that the terrain has shifted beneath their feet.

The left has just scored dozens of victories, from taking down Opinions Editor James Bennet at The New York Times to taking out Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. Theres blood in the water and no one on the left is stupid enough to go for these little liberal bribes now.

Liberals only have two choices: Either theyll submit to the neo-Marxists or theyll try to put together a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There arent any other choices.

To be clear, I dont mean an alliance with theNeverTrumpersthat liberal outfits keep on their platforms so they can pretend to be dialoguing withthe other.Most of them arent conservatives and they certainly dont bring the conservative public with them.

Im talking about rebuilding a stable public sphere constructed around two legitimate political parties, one liberal and one consisting of actual conservativesmeaning people that the broad conservative public would recognize as their own.

Maybe liberals just arent smart enough to see that this is what theyve got to do. Maybe theydont have the gutsto do it. Maybe most liberal intellectuals are just going to keep hoping for love from the neo-Marxists until its all over. Could be.

But for now, two cheers for the Harpers letter on free speech and viewpoint diversity.Anyone defending free speech and viewpoint diversity at this time deserves support. So I support the general point of the thing. Even if it is pretty messed up.

Yoram Hazony is chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and author of The Virtue of Nationalism. Follow him on Twitter @yhazony.

Read more here:

Liberals' Only Hope Against Neo-Marxists Is An Alliance With The Right - The Federalist

Adelaide Friday July 10, 2020

A standoff is looming for one of the SA Liberal Partys most senior roles, with country medico Max van Dissel today nominating to replace former premier John Olsen as state president.

The move will surprise many in the party who had anticipated an uncontested ballot, with high-profile lawyer and recent failed senate hopeful Morry Bailes believed to be preparing for a run for the presidency.

Bailes did not respond to inquiries today and has previously not commented on the issue, but senior sources had expected him to be a candidate and to be unopposed.

But that changed today when van Dissel nominated for the role, with sources from both the left and right of the party telling InDaily he was expected to garner support from both wings, and questioning whether Bailes would still run in a contested ballot.

Both men are currently Liberal vice-presidents, with van Dissel coming to the end of the maximum-allowed three terms.

Olsen, who was brought in as president ahead of the successful 2018 state election, is tipped to be elevated to the presidency of the federal party, although a formal decision on that succession has been delayed by the Coronavirus pandemic.

Van Dissel, a Kapunda specialist and GP who ran for the Save the RAH Party in the state seat of Frome in 2010, confirmed he had lodged a nomination for the presidency this morning when contacted by InDaily.

He said he had toyed with standing for the Legislative Council, whose ballot is being held next weekend, but I then thought, Im 61 Id be 63 when the next election is held, and Id be 71 after one term and that, I think, was inappropriate.

I thought, how else can I serve the party, he said.

Van Dissel as a Save the RAH candidate in 2010.

Asked whether his candidacy would be a fly in the ointment of Bailes prospective bid, van Dissel said: He hasnt discussed it with me.

No-one has discussed it with me Ive made up my own mind to run [and] well see who else gets flushed out, he said.

I feel Ive got the credentials, having been a vice-president for three years and served on state executive.

Get InDaily in your inbox. Daily. The best local news every workday at lunch time.

Thanks for signing up to the InDaily newsletter.

Van Dissel, whose nephew Michael ran against Bailes in this years senate race that saw then-Legislative Council president Andrew McLachlan elected, said he brought a lot of experience to the table.

A country doctor for 30 years, he said he was passionate about rural health issues an area he argues was neglected by Labor in their 16 years because theres no votes in it for them.

He has also championed issues at odds with the partys right wing, having pushed a pill-testing motion at state council last year.

InDaily revealed last month Bailes had stepped down as managing partner of leading general practice firm Tindall Gask Bentley.

At the time, he left the option open for another senate tilt, saying: Youd have seen from my previous nomination that I was interested in the senate I was interested in the federal parliament [and] public life is something Id never say no to so, watch and wait.

But some in the party have baulked at the prospect of the next state president harbouring political ambitions, with several backing van Dissel on those grounds.

I believe the Liberal Party does best when theres some cooperation between the two factions, van Dissel said today.

Send us anemail, making it clear which story youre commenting on and including your full name (required for publication) and phone number (only for verification purposes). Please put Reader views in the subject.

Well publish the best comments in a regular Reader Views post. Your comments can be brief, or we can accept up to 350 words, or thereabouts.

In times like these InDaily provides valuable, local independent journalism in South Australia. As a news organisation it offers an alternative to The Advertiser, a different voice and a closer look at what is happening in our city and state for free. Any contribution to help fund our work is appreciated. Please click below to donate to InDaily.

Powered by PressPatron

See original here:

Shock bid for Liberal presidency turns party tensions to the Max - InDaily