Daily Archives: July 15, 2020

You can be forgiven for not knowing theres a Liberal Democrat leadership contest going on. You can also, to a degree, be forgiven for not caring very much either. For the record, the candidates are the acting leader, Ed Davey, who is a green and a centrist, and the education spokeswoman, Layla Moran, who is more on the partys left. The result, due on 27 August, is likely to be met with almost total indifference outside the partys own ranks.

It isnt hard to see why. The Lib Dems have not recovered from the 2010-15 coalition. A decade ago they had 57 MPs. Today they have 11. Hopes of a revival in the 2019 election proved fanciful. Foolish enthusiasm for an early election, the failure of the partys Brexit revocation policy, Jo Swinsons heavy-footed leadership and some bad seat-targeting combined to roll that latest Lib Dem bandwagon back down to the bottom of the electoral hill.

Since the general election, things have got even tougher. The partys vote share has fallen to 8% in an average of recent UK polls (from 12% at the election). Keir Starmer has meanwhile begun rebuilding support for Labour that was lost, some of it to the Lib Dems, under Jeremy Corbyn. Crucially, much of the air has gone out of Brexit, on which the Lib Dems once sometimes seemed to speak for half of the British public.

Put all that together, and the Lib Dems seem almost a busted flush. Whether Davey wins or Moran, the next leader will be a marginal figure. And yet, in spite of that, the 2020 Lib Dem contest actually matters a lot more widely than this tale of unremitting Lib Dem party woe might suggest.

There are two principal reasons for saying this. The first is UK-specific, while the second is more global. Ironically, the first is the Lib Dems electoral influence. Eight per cent in the polls is dreadful. But it is an 8% that affects the rest of the inter-party battle. The Lib Dems stand in almost every UK seat. Three and a half million people voted for them last December. As long as that continues, the Lib Dems will be one factor alongside the Scottish National party in Scotland and Conservative inroads in England making a Labour victory under the winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post system much harder.

The second reason is not confined to Britain. Liberalism is fragmenting and in some respects retreating, here as elsewhere in the west. Many aspects of economic liberalism are under challenge, from recession and climate change, and especially from nationalism. Meanwhile, a raft of traditional moderate liberal values around conscience, tolerance and rights are also being confronted by forms of sometimes highly illiberal progressivism. The apparent post-cold war triumph of liberal capitalism is rapidly giving way to a variety of forms of post-liberalism in economics, politics and cultural life. In some of these, traditional liberalism is fighting for its life. There are multiple moments of reckoning.

One of these certainly affects the Lib Dems. But the same issues affect all other parties, and other institutions too, including universities, artistic life and most forms of the media. In Britain it is undoubtedly also true of the Labour party. The 2019 election result asked whether, in the wake of the Brexit divide and other stresses, a 21st-century Labour party can any longer achieve a winning coalition rooted both in liberal values and class politics. Starmer is trying to show that it can still be done by better leadership than preceded him. But in the face of the current fragmentation both of values and of class politics, as well as the revival of nationalism, it is an uphill task.

The political impact of all this on both Labour and the Lib Dems is existential. Both lay claim in different ways to being parties that can combine social justice goals and liberal values. So, it should also be added, do many important traditions within the Tory party, arguably including Boris Johnsons. But the balance between the two traditions that they all wish to appeal to is not stable.

A century ago, Labour was a working-class party with some middle-class supporters. Today it is increasingly the reverse. The tension between those who see Labour as a party of the poor and struggling, and those who see it as a party of liberal and progressive values, has a long history. But the coalition between them that worked in 1945, 1966 and 1997 came close to breaking apart in 2019 when significant numbers of English working-class former Labour voters turned to the Conservatives to deliver Brexit. It is hard to see it being reforged without significant compromises and moderation on both sides. Starmer gets this. Many in his party and beyond do not. In some parts of post-liberal politics, compromise and moderation are anathema and worse. This will not be easy.

It is made even more difficult by the electoral system. In potted histories of British politics since 1900, it is often said that Labour replaced the Liberals as the main rival of the Tories. So it did, in broad terms. But not in all ways. The Liberals never quite died, even after 1945. Their successor party is not dead today either. Since the 1970s, the Greens have become a third opposition option against the Conservatives.

Liberalism has many guises. Its crisis likewise takes multiple forms. The parties that draw on liberal traditions, or owe their existence to it, face a choice. They can either go on as before, each parading their own untarnishable virtue. Or they can try to fashion compromises within their own ranks and between one another. If they do the former, the Conservatives are well placed to go on defeating them, as they did to such effect in 2019. But if they choose cooperation and compromise, there may be a way back. The Lib Dem leadership contest may just help to decide which it will be.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Liberalism is fighting for its life. There is only one way to survive - The Guardian

Shyam Saran

Former Foreign Secretary and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research

The liberal spirit is suffering from terminal angst. Its political expression in liberal democracy is an endangered political species. What is the liberal spirit? It is a conception of society where the dignity of the individual is sacrosanct and rights are citizen based. A liberal society upholds the fundamental rights of each individual to life, liberty, expression and association, the only restraint being the rule of law, not the rule of state or a group or community. The liberal spirit not merely tolerates but celebrates dissent. It believes in the dictum that what is more dangerous is not when there are questions to which there are no answers but rather when there are answers which are not open to question. A liberal society creates equal opportunities for each individual to develop his innate genius and realise his potential. It is non-discriminatory among individuals irrespective of caste, creed or religion. But fraternity is equally fundamental because a sense of affinity with ones fellow citizens, the empathy for one another in recognition of a larger humanity, these are values without which a liberal society has no meaning.

To survive and to flourish, a liberal society needs a unique state structure, namely, the political dispensation of a liberal democracy. The state is as much bound by the rule of law as is the citizen and exercise of state authority is subject to challenge by even the most humble of its citizens. Another feature is the existence of independent and constitutionally empowered institutions which serve to restrain the arbitrary exercise of state power. An independent media and a robust civil society are its other essential ingredients. For a concrete and comprehensive articulation of the liberal spirit and the institution of liberal democracy, one need look no further than the Constitution of India. But while lip service is paid to the Constitution and constitutionally empowered institutions still remain in place, these are being systematically and relentlessly hollowed out. This is not just true in India but in other democracies as well. How has this happened?

I trace the origins of this slide to 1980 when Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK led the retreat of the state from the economy and elevated laissez-faire economic strategies as instruments of both economic prosperity and social welfare. The role of the state in wealth and income redistribution was progressively decimated and even made illegitimate. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s gave further momentum to this trend. The magic of the marketplace was now hitched together to the notion of liberal democracy. Free markets led to successful liberal democracies and liberal democracies became synonymous with free markets. Thus was born the touching faith in the inevitability of Chinas embrace of capitalism leading to its becoming like one of us. But the very moment of seeming victory of liberal democracy marked the beginning of its unravelling. It became obvious that there was nothing automatic about a free market leading to egalitarian society. The enshrinement of competition, above all else, in delivering prosperity paid no attention to those left behind.

The failure of liberalism lies precisely in its acquiescence in this new orthodoxy, its failure to question these answers. Globalisation delivered immense benefits across the board in terms of rising prosperity but states failed to ensure the egalitarian distribution of these benefits because the free market was assumed to achieve that automatically. Globalisation is not responsible for inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity. It is the failure of public policy which liberals failed to expose. When the free market went into free fall in 2007-08, so did the credibility of the liberal democratic ideal. India has not been immune to these forces. The orthodoxies of the past four decades are no longer tenable. How can one salvage the liberal ideal and liberal democracy?

The liberal idea must be preserved. It still has the power to help us deal with the challenges we confront today because it is the unbounded contention of ideas that will engender possible solutions. If globalisation is here to stay, as I am convinced it is, then we need societies that are capable of adapting to change, of being able to handle immense diversity and cultivate a new spirit of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Only liberal democracies with their respect for diversity and commitment to non-discrimination are best suited to navigate the new landscape. The pandemic raging in our midst is laying bare the bankruptcy of populist authoritarianism and crass mediocrity that pretends to represent the disempowered and deprived but is unable, unwilling and incapable of mobilising society to deal with current and looming challenges. Instead, there is a constant recourse to quick fixes, the bypassing of institutions and of constitutional norms, and worse, the overturning of the very notion of the rule of law. This is how in India, we have ended up with brazen encounter killings to applause from large sections of society which are unable to understand that once the rule of law is breached they will be its next victims.

How do we engage in a discourse that leads us back to a contemporary design of liberal democracy? What must be its key features? The renewed exploration of the Constitution is a good starting point. Even those paying lip service can hardly object.

If liberalism survives in India, its future in the rest of the world may be brighter.

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Reclaiming the liberal idea - The Tribune India

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court gather for a group portrait. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court gather for a group portrait.

The recently concluded Supreme Court term was remarkable for many reasons. But for SCOTUS geeks who love numbers, it's worth looking at how the conservatives often split among themselves, while the liberal justices, understanding that they are playing defense, stuck together far more often, refusing to dilute the outcome of their victories by disagreeing with one another.

In all, the four hard-line conservatives wrote way more separate opinions.

They wrote nearly two-thirds of the concurring opinions. These are the opinions in which individual justices do not agree with some or all of the reasoning in the majority opinion.

The conservative justices were also more likely to speak for themselves alone. Of the 45 solo opinions, the four most conservative justices wrote 31.

In addition, they wrote more pages than the liberal justices, writing 734 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions, out of 1,214 such pages total.

The most restrained conservative author was Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote just one concurring opinion and one dissent. But he was the deciding vote in a lot of cases and often wrote the majority opinion in the most important decisions.

The other four conservatives put pen to paper for themselves in especially ideologically charged cases, whereas the liberal justices stayed their hands in most of these.

On the liberal side of the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the most concurring opinions eight of them solo and one joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But in six of those cases, the decisions were either unanimous or 8-1.

While members of each bloc of justices banded together in most cases, the liberal justices more often stuck together overall. Of the 60 votes cast this term, the liberals voted as a unified group 80% of the time. The four most conservative justices voted together in 70% of cases.

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In Supreme Court Term, Liberals Stuck Together While Conservatives Appeared Fractured - NPR

It isnt really about Bari Weiss.

The mob inside The New York Times didnt target Weiss, an opinion editor and writer there since 2017, for cancellation to get her specifically though her smart writing and editing surely didnt endear her to some of the third-rate digital-media hacks and talentless millennials who enjoyed the pursuit of this journalistic star on the rise due to their loathsome envy.

As Weiss detailed in a widely read public resignation letter on Tuesday, she left her job after constant bullying by more left-wing colleagues (the vast majority) that included underhanded gossip, anti-Semitic innuendo and public attacks against her that would never have been tolerated had she been the one meting them out.

She also described an atmosphere of pervasive ideological intimidation and conformity that finally made commissioning diverse viewpoints and writing and thinking freely essential to opinion journalism all but impossible.

So Weiss left. But again, it wasnt ultimately about her. The mobs real targets are twofold.

First, the mob yearns to scare into submission everyone in a position of authority at the Times and any other liberal institution in America who might think it wise to hire someone like Bari Weiss someone who draws outside the ideological lines and brings a fresh perspective.

You can see how this works in the cowardice manifested by Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. As Weiss noted in her letter, Sulzberger praised her in private, even as he simultaneously failed to defend her in public from the threats and slanders of her own colleagues, both in internal communications and on Twitter. Such conduct marks the journalistic scion forevermore as less a man than a mouse.

Consider, too, that Weiss blistering resignation letter shows how Sulzberger and the Times leadership are likely guilty of several employment-related offenses, particularly in their refusal to intervene to end the hostile work environment in which she had found herself due at least in part to how she was being treated by colleagues as a member of a minority religion.

It should be said, right here, that Weiss, who is a friend of mine, is not a conservative. She calls herself a centrist, and as someone who has argued with her on matters of ideology, I can confirm this is an entirely fair description.

She is, however, versed in conservative thinking and argument and open to both. This is a thought-crime in woke circles.

Even more telling, she is a Zionist, a stout defender of Israel and someone willing to call out anti-Semitism on the left views that, in our garbage cultural and political movement, have become tragically unacceptable in many woke quarters.

She was targeted for holding these opinions and because she became well-known on TV and elsewhere for the eloquence with which she espouses them. Those who targeted her did so at her place of work and in public fora. And yet Sulzberger & Co. did not come to her defense or aid, even though their business was facing legal exposure, because it was safer for them to risk a Weiss lawsuit than to discipline those who had threatened her.

Why? Because they are more frightened of the mob. They are terrified of being subjected to the same treatment. Its that simple. Sulzberger let the wolves try to devour Weiss to save his own rich-boy hide. She refused to participate in her own sacrifice.

Which brings us to the mobs second object: The wokesters want to scare everyone who might emulate Bari Weiss in the future. And this, of course, is the real purpose of cancel culture. It is less about silencing the voice who is so annoying to the cancelers in the present and far more about silencing the perspective that voice represents in the future.

This goes far beyond The New York Times. It is an effort pervading every major cultural institution in America.

Against this generational menace, the milquetoast mandarins who run these places refuse to defend themselves, the principle of free expression or anything but the maintenance of their own jobs. Their surrender of all principle in pursuit of that lowly aim is a mark of just how morally, spiritually, politically, intellectually and practically decayed they and their organizations have become.

jpodhoretz@gmail.com

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Woke wolves and the cowardly leaders of liberal America - New York Post

Mark Meadows came to the West Wing with big plans, hoping his friendship with President Trump would help him avoid turbulence. Then reality and the coronavirus pandemic hit.

The $1.4 million in Facebook ads is likely just a fraction of the money behind the Courier project, which includes a newsroom of at least 25 people and eight separate websites with content often focused on local issues in presidential swing states. But this activity creating an unregulated advertising stream promoting Democratic officeholders, more akin to a PAC than a newsroom diverges from other partisan news outlets that are proliferating online as local newspapers struggle.

And in setting up the enterprise, Acronym a sprawling digital organization whose programs include millions of dollars in traditional political advertising and voter engagement efforts, with financing from some of the deepest pockets in progressive politics, such as liberal billionaires Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of The Atlantic has stirred outrage and provoked debate about the ethics of such political tactics and the future of the press.

Backers believe they are simply ahead of the curve. Courier, they say, is where news is heading in the Wild West of social media, where partisan stories often thrive and the old business model is failing. With public-facing editorial standards similar to other media organizations, Courier is an answer to the deluge of false partisan content consumers face, they argue. They also point to the long history of explicitly partisan news outlets in the U.S. and elsewhere.

More quality reporting with integrity even if it has a partisan bent and as long as that bent is disclosed anything to combat the spread of misinformation is important, said Nicco Mele, the former director Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, who is supportive of Courier.

But while some Democratic operatives concede the premise that their party needs to be more competitive online, they believe Courier and Acronyms tactics are unethical but also ineffective given the high cost.

Courier is not the first to experiment with versions of this model, but it is likely the most robust attempt so far. In 2014, the Republican Partys congressional campaign arm set up news sites that criticized Democrats and bought ads on Google to promote the pieces. At the time, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blasted the Republicans for deception. Asked if they approved of Couriers 2020 tactics boosting their members, the DCCC did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

We look forward to Democrats denouncing these dark money fake news groups meddling in our elections, said Bob Salera, a spokesperson for the National Republican Campaign Committee, who said the party no longer operates such sites. Since they represent everything Democrats claim to oppose in politics, this should be an easy call.

Couriers operations differ from the NRCC in that it is a for-profit newsroom, and election law doesnt regulate the press due to its First Amendment protections. As a result, Courier raises new digital-age questions about what is and is not a news organization questions that political ad regulators are unlikely to answer, according to election experts, leaving this murky space open for abuse, said Brendan Fischer, the federal reform director at the Campaign Legal Center.

I dont know how the FEC would treat Courier because the media exemption is the third rail of campaign finance, Fischer said. Neither the Democrats or Republicans want to be in the business of determining what is a media entity."

So far, Couriers web traffic has been light. Its signature site is ranked 76,004 in the United States, according to the Amazon-owned Alexa, and has under 6,000 likes on Facebook. The organization did not release any other traffic information. Its most-watched video on YouTube, with over 570,000 views, was a well-reported story showcasing Amazons ability to place laudatory stories about itself in local news broadcasts. But the next most-viewed video only had about 2,500 views, and the companys laudatory clips of their favorite congressional candidates have far less than that. Its YouTube channel has just 735 subscribers.

While campaign finance watchdogs worry about the trend of dark money influencing American politics and media experts say that Courier and similar endeavors only further undermine trust in news and shared facts, Courier and their supporters dismiss these concerns as liberal hand-wringing more concerned with being pure than with winning.

Coupling original, fact-based reporting with paid content distribution, Courier is reaching Americans in their newsfeeds and is providing a powerful counter to conservative misinformation which dominates platforms like Facebook, Courier Newsroom COO Rithesh Menon said in a statement through an Acronym spokesperson. Were so proud of what Courier has built in its first year, and hope others in the progressive space invest in this type of digital media ecosystem - because the Right has for years.

Courier and Acronym did not make anyone available for an on-the-record interview. After publication, Acronym's founder and CEO Tara McGowan wrote on Twitter that "Courier's reporters would also never publish drag pieces with anonymous critics that further weaken the standards of journalism just for cheap clicks to make their stakeholders richer [shrug emoji] but you know, here's to journalistic integrity!"

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Newsroom or PAC? Liberal group muddies online information wars - POLITICO

The world may be reaching a dangerous inflection point for liberalism. According to the latest reports from Freedom House, over the last 15 years the share of unfree countries in the world has risen while the share of free countries has dropped. Today, government deficits are spiking in response to the publics demand for intervention to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, and some warn that authoritarian leaders are seizing the opportunity to expand their control.

Still, this may be a time when liberalism starts to gain ground, not lose it. A new study by World Bank economists, drawing on data from 190 economies spanning the last 15 years, finds that fiscal crisesof the sort created by the pandemic in countries around the worldare likely to spur liberal reforms, particularly in the economic policy areas of property, investment, and trade.

How liberal advocates act on this glimmer of hope will be crucial. Post-Cold War efforts to spread liberal democracy have disappointed to date. Instead of ushering in the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama predicted in 1989, a know-it-all approach to proselytizing liberal institutions to other countries has engendered widespread resentment toward Western influences. And yet, its more complicated. The political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes recently argued that we should think of that resentment not as a rejection of liberalism, per se, but as an indignant reaction to its perceived imposition.

Whats the lesson here? Liberals must stop thinking of liberalism as theirs alone to give. Instead, they should recognize it as a universal ideal that has roots in many different traditions and cultures. It is on such foundations that enduring liberal institutions can be built in diverse places.

Extensive research on institutional change bears that out. There is a saying: People support what they help create. For liberal institutions to stick in new places, they must not be mere knockoffs of institutions that grew elsewhere. The Wests own liberal democratic institutions, including the division of powers, property rights, freedom of exchange, free speech, and public deliberation, are idiosyncratic versions of liberal ideals, but not the ideals themselves. They are successful, but theyre works in progress. They are worthy of thoughtful study, but theyre not suited for franchise-like plug and play.

This should prompt a tectonic shift in the foreign aid approach to development. A growing number of voices within development circles have been trying to do just that. They advocate a localization agenda, which means shrinking the role and influence of foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations and narrowing their focus to a few areas where they are better suited to help, such as information-sharing and providing operating support for local NGOs to increase their capacity to lead change for themselves.

With widespread belt-tightening across the development sector due to the coronavirus pandemic, including at major institutions such as Oxfam and the U.K. Department for International Development, such a radical change has become thinkable, perhaps even imminent, in a way we would not have imagined a year ago. This may provide a short window to permanently curb the undue influence of outsiders on local development questions.

Thats not to suggest a pure agnosticism about what to support abroad. Liberal reforms and liberal institutions should remain the priority. The same logic that commends federalism and its principles of subsidiarity applies equally to development work in other countries: Decentralization works. But if foreigners continue to hold the reins, even unwittingly, their efforts will continue to breed resentment and, more importantly, fail to serve local needs.

For maximum effect, we should look to private philanthropy for most grant-making to foreign NGOs. Voluntary nongovernmental philanthropy is less liable to special-interest distortions and political manipulation. Just as importantly, private philanthropy can be less rigid about predetermined compliance requirements.

Such flexibility is important. Through the grant-making our organization has administered to think tanks and other NGOs in recent years, we have learned to hold our tongues and listen. We invite our grantees to tell us whats possible, whats important, how they will do it, and, most importantly, how they will measure meaningfully their success for the projects they are proposing.

That model fits best with what we know about the diffusion of good ideas and practices. In their study on Regulatory Reforms after Covid-19, Simeon Djankov and other World Bank economists also found that countries that share borders or that trade heavily with each other are more likely to adopt for themselves the reforms of their neighbors and commercial partners. They see with their own eyes the successes and failures in neighboring countries and can, on their own initiative, decide for themselves what changes to pursue and how best to pursue them.

Decentralized liberalism is a prudent strategy for navigating this time of great uncertainty. In 2020, we have seen the limits of centralized models at work. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Internal Revenue Service to the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and, at the global level, the United Nations World Health Organization, big institutions have failed. Its a stark reminder that there are very real limits to the types of problems that distant authorities are able to solve, no matter how well-funded or well-trained they are.

Early in this crisis, the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates invested billions of dollars in seven different vaccine candidates simultaneously knowing that, at best, one or two might work. Gates knows what a big mistake it can be to place all your bets on one unproven solution. Not only does it raise the stakes considerably if you get it wrong, but it also severely limits any opportunities for learning, since there are no alternative results for comparison.

Liberal economies, with their presumption of decentralized decision-making, allow fast-acting, widespread, uncoordinated experimentation and learning. That model takes advantage of centralized knowledge and expertise, to be sure, but it also integrates the dispersed knowledge the rest of us possess about our individual circumstances. People close to the problems can find solutions that actually work, long before a large and distant bureaucracy ever could.

Our instinct when facing fear and uncertainty is to shift the tough decisions to the experts and to insist on one uniformand presumably bestsolution to our diverse problems. Experts play important roles in collating and disseminating knowledge, but they cannot know enough to successfully conjure up one great solution for us all. Its the lesson we have learned in our failed attempt to install liberal democracies throughout the world. In this moment of crisis, we now have a second chance to get it right. Lets keep making history.

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The Pandemic Could Be the Crisis Liberalism Needed - Foreign Policy

OTTAWA -- Federal opposition parties are continuing to demand answers from the federal government, and are calling for a quick solution to revive or rework the now-halted $900 million student summer grant program.

The program was initially awarded to WE Charity, prompting a series of headlines calling into question Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus ethics and the potential conflict of interest he and his finance minister may have put themselves in by not recusing themselves from the decision making table on the deal, given their close family connections to the organization.

On Monday both Trudeau and minister Bill Morneau apologized for their part in the controversy and vowed to recuse themselves from any WE Charity discussions in the future, though the federal ethics commissioner is still looking into the matter, and various House of Commons committees plan to continue to hear testimony and seek evidence that could further shed light on how this sole-sourced contract came about.

The government insists it was the public service that suggested WE Charity was the best, and only organization to administer the program, though now government departments and agencies are being looked at as alternatives to execute the program that was created to offer students grants for summer volunteer work related to COVID-19.

While the government has vowed to rework the program as quickly as possible, after WE Charity handed back over the program to the government along with the funding, thousands of students are left in limbo without summer jobs and, for now, no chance for volunteer grants to help cover costs like fall tuition.

This has prompted the Green Party to suggest shifting the funds to the Canada Summer Jobs program instead, a pre-existing program that connects young people to temporary job opportunities in their communities. That program was deemed oversubscribed this summer and the government has already put additional funding into it.

There are thousands of Canadian students who need jobs and thousands of Canadian charities and nonprofits which are dealing with a decline in revenue and an increase in demand in services that could benefit from students working with them. Organizations that applied through WE should be allowed to move their application to Canada Summer Jobs, Green Party parliamentary leader Elizabeth May said in a statement.

The grant to post-secondary students and recent graduates was designed to provide one-time payments of up to $5,000 for volunteering in pandemic-related programs, depending on the number of hours worked. For every 100 hours spent, a student would receive $1,000.

The whole premise of the Canada Student Service Grant was problematic, said Green Party MP and employment critic Paul Manly in the same statement, noting that the amount being offered for the volunteer work was less than the minimum wage in any province.

Students would not gain any EI eligible hours or have this de facto employment recognized next spring if there is another wave of the pandemic and a need for further financial relief programs, he said.

Diversity, Inclusion and Youth Minister Bardish Chagger said on CTV News Channel on Monday that the government will not be able to deliver the program to the same extent as was originally planned when WE Charity was involved.

"There was thousands of opportunities that were posted Right now we are looking to get the program out the door once again, looking at what needs to be done us to be able to deliver this program," she said.

Brandon Amyot was one of the students who was banking on volunteering through the program to help pay down their student debt. While the government says volunteer hours through to the end of October will count, by then many students will be back in class and preparing for the first round of midterms.

Amyot said WE Charitys involvement and the inference that students would only volunteer if paid was also a concern. It leaves me questioning how I am supposed to get through school, Amyot said. It weakens my trust in institutions in general when these sort of avoidable things happen.

Other students have opted to bypass the federal process altogether and set up their own volunteer positions, hoping that the federal government will still compensate them for those hours once the programs problems are sorted.

I dont even know if Ill still get compensated for my volunteering, said Jake Chabut, a student volunteer in Guelph, Ont.

Meanwhile, thousands of students like Kevin Caswell have not heard a word about their application.

I think its frustrating not knowing whats happening, the Carleton University student said. Were jut kept in the dark.

In a press conference on Parliament Hill on Tuesday, Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet doubled down on his call for Trudeau to temporarily step aside and let Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland take the reigns of Canadas COVID-19 response as the ethics probe into his potential conflict of interest is concluded.

I believe that now his attention is much more on his personal situation than about helping and taking care of Canadians and Quebecers. That by itself is a good reason for him to step aside, he said.

Though, given the ongoing health and economic crisis, Blanchet said now is not the time for an election so the Bloc Quebecois is not looking to bring down the minority Liberal government.

He wants to see Trudeau testify at the House of Commons Finance Committee, where one probe of the controversy is already underway. Speaking in French, however, he rejected the Conservative calls for an RCMP investigation, saying that its wrong for the Tories to think they can order a police investigation as if it was placing an order for a pizza.

With a report from CTV News Molly Thomas and CTVNews.ca Writer Ben Cousins

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Opposition demand answers and action for students following Liberal WE apologies - CTV News

When I started my first newspaper job with this paper 15 years ago, I saw conflicts of interest everywhere. I forget now what the exact issue was, but it was something with then-mayor Jim Davidson being involved in some enterprise that was on the council agenda.

I took it to the editor and his response was basically that in a town of 5,000 people, if being involved in things that eventually town council was going to have to vote on disqualified a person for office, we would not have a town council.

Of course, in these matters the problem is not that a potential conflict exists, but how the officeholder in question handles it.

As it turned out, Davidson did the right thing and recused himself.

So far, Ive tried to cut our prime minister a bit of slack, mainly because I shudder at the prospect of any of the alternatives to a Liberal government right now.

Merely by the celebrity of the Trudeau family, potential conflicts of interest are going to arise, as one did last week when the federal ethics commissioner opened yet another investigation over Justin Trudeaus role in awarding a $19.5 million sole-source contract to the WE charity to administer the $912 million Canada Student Service Grant program.

The WE organization hires all kinds of speakers, performers and leaders for events intended to inspire youth to take local action for global change. Two of those speakers over the past four years were Trudeaus mother Margaret and brother Alexandre (Sacha) who were paid $250,000 and $32,500 respectively.

His wife, Sophie Grgoire Trudeau is an ambassador for the organization.

On top of that, finance minister Bill Morneau is also drawing criticism because one of his daughters works with WE.

Im not convinced anything overtly nefarious happened here. There is a big difference between corruption and conflict of interest. The public service has said it was their recommendation to award the contract.

But good gracious, the cabinet still had to rubber-stamp it and at the very least two seasoned public figures should know, at the very least, to recuse themselves, especially after being sanctioned twice by the ethics commissioner.

What happened to transparency and doing politics differently?

I find it extremely discouraging that we cant get beyond these kinds of simple ethics issues. Weve had 153 years of political scandals from both of the seesawing governing parties. Can we ever expect something different? Is human nature really that intractable?

I have lots of friends who despise Trudeau. They believe he is only prime minister because of his celebrity. Theres some truth to that. There were better candidates in the Liberal leadership race, but its doubtful any of them could have won the election in 2015, or at least a majority government.

My Trudeau-despising friends think he is entitled, narcissistic, incompetent and insincere.

Its getting pretty hard to argue with that, not that I have ever whole-heartedly defended him, my only real defence being that the Liberals as a whole are the lesser of evils.

Of course, all the opposition calls for criminal investigations and for Trudeau to resign are political posturing. Ultimately, he will get his knuckles rapped for a third time and his fate will be in the hands of public opinion when the next federal election rolls around.

Unfortunately, at this point, I still dont see a viable alternative emerging.

Someone, please prove me wrong.

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Oh, for a viable alternative to the Liberals - Smithers Interior News

Beinart is the High Priest of the Jewish American left. He is also J Street's unofficial ideolog. His is a perplexing notion.

You can argue about the rights of the Kurds to have an independent state or the Catalans, but there is no precedent in these times, to rescind an already existing state.

We clashed Beinart and I in 2005 in London, in a public debate. He presented the positions of a liberal Zionist, so I chose not to remind him of the pogrom tweet. Afterall one can make a mistake. A liberal Zionist is a person who has criticism of the Israeli government but does not deny its right to exist. A liberal is respectful of the right for self-determination on both sides. Beinart is no Zionist and is certainly not a liberal.

Not all of Beinart's claims are invalid. The settler movement has been trying to bring about a one-state solution to the question of the West Bank and enjoy the support of part of the Israeli government.

They are promoting the notion that the settlement movement has succeeded in upending the chances for a two-state solution, but that is not the case.

Today the settlements occupy 1.5% of the West Bank and have municipal reserves that would include 7.9% of the territory. Most Israelis oppose even a partial annexation unless it is part of a peace deal.

Ma'ale Adumin settlement on the West Bank

(: AFP)

But Beinart is throwing the baby away with the bathwater. He negates the rights of Jews to an independent state because a minority of them oppose the rights of Palestinians to have the same. He supports the far-right policies of settlers from his position on the left. The French call it " Les extrmes se touchent," The opposite ends meet.

Beinart refuses to explain how what had failed in Yugoslavia, that broke apart into seven separate entities after decades of unity, would work for Israelis and Palestinians, and how what is failing in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and is barely hanging on in Belgium would thrive between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In what reality could two groups that have so much animosity, follow different religions, different languages, culture, and tradition succeed in existing in peace and harmony?

The situation we are living with now, which is in need of change, would seem like heaven on earth compared to the nightmarish prospect of a one-state solution.

Calls to exterminate Jews come not only from the Hamas terror group. They can be heard from members of the Palestinian Authority including its religious leader, who like his predecessor in the 1930s the pro-Nazi Amin al-Husseini, calls not only for the destruction of Israel but the extermination of Jews.

Beinart is mum in the face of those calls.

The Middle East is ripe with conflicts of national, ethnic, tribal, and religious groups waging war, slaughtering each other. But Beinart is mum in the face of that too.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, President Clinton and Yasser Arafat sign the Oslo Accords at the White House

(Photo: Reuters)

These words were soon followed by a massive wave of terror attacks. Beinart wrote nothing about that. Nor did he write about the Palestinian rejection of former prime minister Ehud Barak's offer of an independent Palestinian state in 2,000, or their rejection of the Clinton initiative to end the conflict - that same year, or the solution offered by Ehud Olmert when he was prime minister in 2008. They also rejected President Obama's proposal in 2014.

Why does Beinart only hold the Jews responsible for the ongoing Israeli control of the West Bank? Why has he never laid blame on the Palestinians? Relieving them from any responsibility is racist and condescending.

Jews have lived side by side with Moslems before. It had most often ended with persecution and expulsion. How can it now be expected to work? How can he and the far-right settlers believe that one big state would succeed where no other similar political entity had?

The Islamist movement Hamas is already gaining strength among Palestinians and according to the latest polling has 41% support. Is this terrorist group now expected to become part of a democratically governed entity?

A clear majority of Israelis and Palestinians reject the notion of a one-state solution that will end the conflict. But Beinart pays no attention to that fact because he believes his idea would invigorate the Palestinian cause. But to what end?

He is not motivated by a respect for the rights of both sides, he is fighting against the rights of one nation, out of all the nations in the world.

-A Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement's demonstration in New York

His words carry weight in some quarters in the West but there is nothing new in his message. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) campaign for the same thing and has been rejected as anti-Semitic by the European Union, the German parliament, the British Labour Party and elsewhere.

Denying the right of Jews to a national homeland is anti-Semitism.

Beinart is not Anti-Semitic. His intentions are different, but his position assists the anti-Semitic campaign.

A one-state solution works when it is made up of two nations that share the same roots, religion, language, and culture. Even the same family. Jordan's population that includes a Palestinian majority is a case in point. You would be hard-pressed to find the differences among Jordanians. Not that Beinart has considered that option.

He is not motivated by concern for the Palestinians or their rights. He is following the herd of anti-Zionists that has overtaken progressive thinking and is based on an industry of lies.

Beinart's column is another small win for the Israeli far-right and some Palestinians, who oppose to a two-state solution. He is not promoting peace and reconciliation.

The far-right deals in action as they work to achieve this nightmarish vision of one great state now supported by Beinart's words and ideas as part of their own propaganda.

Read the rest here:

Peter Beinart is neither a Zionist nor a liberal - Ynetnews

Editor:

The Shenandoah County School Board recently voted in favor of a resolution to retire the names of two local schools. The necessity of such an endeavor may be debated in accordance with varying viewpoints. Personally, I stand in opposition to the change along with all other liberal attempts to control society. Five of six School Board members made an arbitrary decision with next to no public commentary. Their method of operation would cause dictators, past and present, to swoon with admiration and envy.

Vote November 2021 to replace three School Board members. It is time to stand up to and stop this insidious liberal incursion that seeks to annihilate every aspect of all things conservative and decent, and I am not just talking about school names.

Michael Wakeman, Edinburg

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Letter to the Editor: Stop the liberal incursion | Nvdaily | nvdaily.com - Northern Virginia Daily