Daily Archives: September 18, 2020

Politics Insider for Sept. 17: Canada's former ambassador in Washington gets a wrist slap, COVID testing capacity is a nightmare in Ottawa and the feds are selling an electric guitar

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The federal ethics commissioner, Mario Dion, has ordered nine Liberal politicians, senior staffers and top public servants notto conduct any official dealings with David MacNaughton, Canadas former ambassador to the U.S. and a longtime Trudeau government insider, for one year. The order applies to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland andIndustry Minister Navdeep Bains, as well as two ministerial chiefs of staff andthree deputy ministers. Rick Theis, the PMs director of policy and cabinet affairs, is on the list. So is General Jonathan Vance, the outgoing chief of defence staff.

The commissioner found that in the pandemics early days, MacNaughton pitched thepro bono services of Palantir Technologies Canada, the software company he now heads up in Ottawa. Dion ruled that the former ambassador had broken the rule against taking improper advantage of a previous government gig, but also concluded that Palantir did not benefit from the meetings. Back in April,The Logic first reported on MacNaughtons claimsduring a private event that hed lined up meetings with top federal officials(Read the full report.)

Erin OToole and his family got tested yesterday for COVID-19. One of OTooles staffers had come back positive, so the Tory leader and his brood took no chances. It wasnt a banner day for testing capacity in the nations capital. Families eager to get tested faced hours-long outdoor lines.Macleans own Ottawa bureau chief, Shannon Proudfoot, endured a logistical testing nightmare. She gave up on a suburban testing centre when a security guard warned of a six-hour wait. After a wasted trip to a testing centre in Winchester, an hours drive away, she ended up lucking into an appointment at the citys drive-in centre tonight. These ordeals may, she writes, foreshadow a frightening fall. Either well all muddle along, missing work and school

or average, well-intentioned people with busy families and lives that need living are going to start fudging their answers to screening questions, sending kids off to school or daycare or themselves off to their workplaces even when they know symptoms have cropped up in their households, because they cant handle the hassle or outright impossibility of getting tested. After the nightmare I experienced today, I cant say I blame them.

What is Ontarios testing capacity?Every premier sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that outlined how theyd spend their share of the $19-billion federal-provincial Safe Restart Agreement. Premier Doug Fords letter boasted about Ontarios increased capacity, per capita testing rate and overall tests administeredall the highest in Canada. Ford also committed to future capacity well beyond the near-term goal of 50,000 tests a day, and surge testing capacity of up to 78,000 tests per day. Theyll use $1.28 billion in federal payola to make it happen in the coming months. Meanwhile, in the real world, lines grow longer.

The Canadian Press scored an interview with Peter MacKay, the Tory leadership runner-up whos contemplating his next move back home in Nova Scotia. MacKay identified his campaigns fatal flaw:The plan was in retrospect too much focused on the next steps and not enough on winning the party. As he tried to win over soft Liberals and lapsed Tories, his rivals were shoring up their core voteand chipping away at MacKays lead.

Did the WE scandal make charitable Canadians think twice about donating? Yes, says a new Angus Reid Institute poll. Charitable giving was already trending down before the scandal, says the pollster: 37 per cent of respondents have donated less in the past six months (49 per cent remain unchanged and only 9 per cent have increased donations). Fifty-five per cent of Canadians say the scandal is seriousand a similar majority say its raised questions about the whole sector. While most Canadians say WEs troubles havent had an impact on their donations, a solid 38 per cent still say theyre rethinking their giving.

Parks Canada has declared a caribou herd in Jasper National Park locally extinct. On Sept. 3, the agency snuck an update on the population of the maligne herd onto its website. That declining herd was last observed in 2018 and is considered extirpated. Two other herds, the tonquin and brazeau, do not have enough female caribouto be able to grow the herds. That update marked a stark change to the same webpage earlier this year. The Rocky Mountain Outlook quotedthe Alberta Wilderness Association saying the extirpation was a tragic, predictable result of decades-long habitat and wildlife errors.

Need an electric guitar? The federal government would be happy to sell one to you. The federal surplus website is auctioning off a used Dean Hollywood axethe closing date is today at 2 pm ETthats replete with scratches, and comes with no strings, no power cable and a damaged case. Full functionality, reads a description, is unknown. That hasnt stopped bidders, whove ratcheted up the price from $75 to, at this writing, a cool $89.70. Theres still time.

More here:

The ethics czar rules on another Liberal conflict of interest of interest - Maclean's

In the real world, where successful businesses are operated somewhere in the broad range between break-even and absolute-maximum profitability, there was and is always leeway for being a bit unnecessarily fair and responsible to accept slightly smaller profit margins to fulfill implicit obligations to employees, customers, communities, society at large, decency itself. But while economists still argue over Friedmans theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists the Friedman doctrine turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in Its a Wonderful Life, the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that theyd been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

As for government regulation, Friedmans doctrine included a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose Catch-22. Any virtuous act by businesses beyond what the law requires is simpering folly, he insists, yet according to him too almost any government attempt to regulate business is the beginning of the end of freedom and democracy. Friedmans was a reductio ad absurdum purification of what had become a well-tempered, successful, increasingly fair free-market system. His vision was to revert to a fundamentalist capitalism from which a century of systemic interventions and buffers by democratic government and norms would be removed.

Friedman was horrified by the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to capitalism, profits, the soulless corporation and so on. Indeed, a survey-research firm that had been asking people every year if they thought business tries to strike a fair balance between profits and the interests of the public found the number who agreed had dropped to 33 percent in 1970 from 70 percent in 1968. (By the late 70s it had bottomed out at 15 percent.) The very same month that The New Yorker filled a whole issue with excerpts from a liberal professors hurrah-for-revolution best seller, The Greening of America, Friedman delivered his counterrevolutionary economic manifesto to 1.5 million Times subscribers. Yet its self-righteous, hyperbolic, screw-the-Establishment confrontationalism is also a product of that 1970 moment: While Friedman was reacting against the surging support for social justice, he did so in the spirit of the late 1960s. Two ascendant countercultures, the hippies and the economic libertarians, in 1970 one large and one still tiny, shared a new ultraindividualism as a prime directive: If it feels good, do it; follow your bliss; find your own truth; and do your own thing were just nice utopian flip sides of every man for himself. For businessmen who felt demonized by public opinion and besieged by tougher government regulation for the last few years, the militancy of the Friedman doctrine in The New York freaking Times a year after Woodstock was thrilling. And then, as now, to get what they were mainly after politically superlow taxes, minimized regulation they exploited the voter backlash against street protests by aggrieved, angry younger Americans.

Just as America reached Peak Left, the Friedman doctrine and, a year later, a battle plan commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, drafted by the corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, quoting Friedman, just before he joined the Supreme Court became founding scripture for an economic crusade to discredit the New Deal consensus and rewrite the social contract. Democratic and liberal leaders, alas, didnt put up much of a fight. At the end of the 1970s, for instance, PBS commissioned a 10-episode series, Free to Choose, starring Friedman and funded by General Motors, General Mills and PepsiCo. A spokesperson for the show promised it would explain to viewers like you how weve become puppets of big government. And indeed, in that four-TV-channel era, Friedman used his noncommercial government-subsidized PBS platform to argue that the Food and Drug Administration, public schools, labor unions and federal taxes, among other btes noires, were bad for America. The series premiered in January 1980, just before the first Republican primaries, in which Ronald Reagan was a candidate. Of course, Reagan won the nomination and the presidency, after which Friedman patted himself on the back for his work with Goldwater and the epochal move away from New Deal ideas. As Friedman put it in 1982, you need ideas that are lying around his ideas as ready alternatives to existing policies, and then at a ripe moment the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Throughout big business and finance and much of conventional wisdom, the Friedman doctrine came to mean that the pursuit of absolutely maximum profit for your company and yourself trumped every other value or motive, greed-is-good definitively replacing concern for the common good. A result was an American economy and culture driven by selfishness, callousness and recklessness. Before long, a big Hollywood movies most memorable scene was a kind of dramatization of the Friedman doctrine, Libertarian Economics for Dummies. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, sexy Gordon Gekko told his ecstatic fellow stockholders, that greed for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works. And greed, he promised, would make America great again.

In 1976, Friedman became the first Chicago school economist to win a Nobel Prize. That same year, two members of the University of Rochester business-school faculty published a 55-page paper conceived as an operational elaboration of the Friedman doctrine. Theory of the Firm made righteous greed seem scientific, with equations and language of the managers indifference curve is tangent to a line with slope equal to u kind. Its big point was that if corporate executives are mere salarymen rather than owners of company stock, theyll overspend on charitable contributions, get lax on employee discipline, concern themselves too much about personal relations (love, respect, etc.) with employees and the attractiveness of the secretarial staff. It is one of the most-cited economics papers ever. The professors also wrote a shorter, more accessible follow-up that ditched the math and the pretense of scholarly neutrality: big business has been cast in the role of villain by consumer advocates, environmentalists and the like, who want to spread the clich that corporations have too much power.

The modern understanding of how corporate managers should run companies, an article in The Harvard Business Review declared in 2012, has been defined to a large extent by that original Friedman-doctrine-inspired paper from 1976. It went beyond doctrinal Friedmania that companies must absolutely maximize profit, now positing as a kind of mathematical fact that stock price, a much less objective measure, was the only meaningful corporate metric. Soon a Reagan-administration S.E.C. rule change effectively gave free rein to public companies, for the first time since the New Deal, to buy up shares of their own stock on the open market in order to jack up the price. U.S. executive pay, meanwhile, shifted from consisting mainly of salary and bonus to mainly stock and stock options. Astonishingly, stock buybacks eventually consumed most of the earnings of S&P 500 companies, as they still do. So here we are with a re-engineered system in which just the richest 10th of us have 84 percent of all stock shares owned by Americans, and a ravaged economy in which the stock market is close to an all-time high.

Read the rest here:

How Liberals Opened the Door to Libertarian Economics - The New York Times

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) on Friday responded to a tweet about a segment on gender reveal parties from Trevor NoahTrevor NoahTed Cruz: 'Many liberal males never grow balls' Overnight Defense: House chair announces contempt proceeding against Pompeo | Top general says military has no role in election disputes | Appeal court rejects due process rights for Gitmo detainees Top general: Military will play no role in resolving any electoral dispute MOREs The Daily Show, saying many liberal males never grow balls.

Cruz wrote his comment in a retweet of an article from conservative news website The Daily Wire, which critiqued Noah for railing against gender reveal parties.

A fair point. Many liberal males never grow balls.... https://t.co/FhHmIPFUpJ

In Tuesdays episode of the Comedy Central show, Noah referenced the fact that one of the three major wildfires currently burning in California was sparked by a gender reveal party.Noah said he believed the practice of celebrating a babys gender was outdated.

"Celebrating a babys genitalia is starting to feel very outdated," Noah said. "Like, given everything were learning about gender, gender reveal parties should only happen when the child is old enough to know their actual gender."

The Daily Wire article criticizes Noah for separating biological sex from gender, arguing instead that the two are inextricably connected. Gender identity has become increasingly accepted by many in recent years to include the gender characteristics one uses to identify themselves, which may differ from their biological sex at birth.

Cruz has previously used gender identity as a means to criticize Democrats, with a March tweet from the senatorjoking that Bernie identifies as every gender, simultaneously.

Mark, thats not fair. Bernie identifies as every gender, simultaneously. https://t.co/EQsCCld7Mu

In the past, Cruz has been particularly vocal about his conservative views on gender, including through his support for laws that do not allow gender-neutral bathrooms. The senator also tweeted in 2019 that parents allowing young children to undergo a gender transition is child abuse.

Originally posted here:

Ted Cruz: 'Many liberal males never grow balls' | TheHill - thehill.com

Students from Galloway Residence pose with Niedfeldt Residences old homecoming banner before trading it for their flag. Courtesy | Seth Ramm

It is my intention to prove once and for all that Hillsdales male dormitory raid culture is necessary for a liberal arts education. I would like to begin by saying (keep your shirts on Simpsonites), that inter-dormitory rivalries are at the heart of student culture and campus will be worse off if raids and the events leading up to them are done away with for good.

Hillsdale College boasts one of the most unique academic experiences in America, and it is fitting that the student culture is just as unique. Though to some, the time-honored traditions of flag stealing, petty pranks, and meeting on the quad to beat each other senseless with foam-insulated PVC may seem childish and unnecessary, I would argue that behind this apparent childishness is hiding a complex and positive culture that fosters community and improves the spirit of campus.

There are many things more harrowing than your first few nights on campus (asking someone on a dining hall date, for instance), but being alone in a strange place filled with strangers is a difficult adjustment. This was the beginning of my freshman year, 2019. Like most others in my dormitory, I went to Welcome Party. I spent about an hour making small talk and participating in something that vaguely resembled dancing. It was not until I returned to the dormitory that the night got interesting.

I was informed that some nefarious actors had crept their way into Galloway Residence, my dormitory, and absconded with all our pillows. Every. Single. One. Left in their place was a cryptic notean apparent riddle that would reveal the location of our wayward pillows. Within five minutes, there were 20 to 30 people crammed wall to wall in the first-floor lobby of Galloway, all desperate to decipher the note and retrieve our pillows. I dont remember how long we spent racking our brains, consulting with upperclassmen, and trying to apply what little knowledge of Hillsdale we had to solving the problem.

We eventually did find our pillowssoaked in perfume and stuffed in contractor bags on the carpeted floor of the Olds Residence lobbybut most importantly, we found friends. That night, a simple prank brought the freshman residents together for a unique and unforgettable night.

It wasnt long after the pillow theft that I was introduced to raid culture. Simpson had of course engaged in their customary saber rattling the first week back on campus. Everyone knew that something was going to happen, but exactly when and what was a mystery.

That all changed on a dreary Friday night.

When word broke that a legion of Simpsonites was expected to march on Galloway, the night was transformed. Galloway men went to general quarters. Guys armed themselves with raid weapons stashed in various storage closets and rooms. The situation room was filled to the brim with Resident Assistants and upperclassmen analyzing intelligence and creating a defensive strategy. Someone was blaring John Williams Duel of the Fates from a speaker. The mood was electric.

Having no weapons of my own, I volunteered to join then-junior Philip Andrews on a reconnaissance mission to Simpson. Feeling like two spies sent on a death-defying, top secret mission, we stealthily approached Simpson, concealing ourselves in the bushes by the Searle Center. Though the headlights of passing cars illuminated our pasty faces, we somehow observed Simpson unseen. Even as the rain began to fall, we remained at our post, looking for anything that could confirm that Simpson was in fact preparing an attack. Though I believe that night did not end in a climactic battle (my memory could be wrong), just the threat of a Simpson raid created an unforgettable night.

It is fitting to conclude this defense of raid culture with a discussion of what happens when foam swords clash, when flags are stolen, when glory is earned, and when legends are made. The world of raiding is a curious one, filled with traditions, pageantry, and unwritten rules (which may not always be followed, but thats a subject for a whole other article). At least one opinion article has been written deriding such momentous displays of gallantry and courage as The Battle of Kappa Lawn and Land Battle. I was among those who valiantly took part in Land Battle last year. I was one of those whose behavior was considered by some to be childish, outrageous, uncouth, and (most heart wrenchingly) unbecoming of a potential future life partner. Allow me to condemn these slanders as untrue, unfounded, uninformed, unsubstantiated, unaccommodating, unadulterated, and above all false.

Yes, in the simplest, most elementary terms, Land Battle is simply a bunch of college men meeting to pummel one another with baby-proofed plumbing. But it is simultaneously so much more. There is a nearly universal thread that ties men together. It is a desire for competition, for glory earned. Its a desire to overcome overwhelming odds and achieve greatness.

To steal a term from the class Great Books I, men want kleosthe ancient Greek word meaning your renown or glory. Even in a simulated, controlled, low-stakes scenario like Land Battle, there exists kleos. There is a reason why movies such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones resonate almost universally with boys. Boys innately crave adventure. Boys want to be Indiana Jones; they want to be Luke Skywalker.

In a political climate where boys are told from kindergarten that they should behave more like the girls, to be quiet and studious, and to sit down and dont fidget, Hillsdale is a refreshing alternative. It is a place where boys are ablefor at least one nightto participate in an exercise of the masculinity that society is trying desperately to extinguish.

I can guarantee that I have never felt more alive than I did when I returned to my dormitory after Land Battle. It was already well past midnight and I had a calculus quiz in the morning, but I didnt care. I stayed up for hours after the event, reveling in what had happened.

The memory of that night will forever be in my consciousness. It is an experience unlike any other, and I believe it would be a disservice to the current and future freshmen of Hillsdale if they are never able to experience it.

Nick Treglia is a sophomore studying applied mathematics.

Read more:

Liberal arts in action: Release the raids - Hillsdale Collegian

On Monday, U.S. News & World Report released its annual ranking of the best colleges in the country, from large research universities to small liberal arts schools.

U.S. News calculates its ranking based on six categories which are each weighted differently: student outcomes (40%), faculty resources (20%), expert opinion (20%), financial resources (10%), student excellence (7%) and alumni giving (3%).

For the first time, U.S. News considered student debt in their ranking. The student outcomes category now takes into account the average amount of accumulated federal loan debt among full-time undergraduate borrowers at graduation and the percentage of full-time undergraduates in a graduating class who borrowed federal loans.

This year's top liberal arts colleges all boast small classroom sizes, including top-ranking Williams College, where 75% of classes have fewer than 20 students and just 3% of classes have 50 or more students.

Getting into one of these schools isn't easy. Admitted students boast strong high school records and high standardized test scores. However, many of these prestigious liberal arts schools have higher acceptance rates than similarly top-ranking universities.

For instance, while the top-ranked national university, Princeton, accepts just 6% of students, Williams accepts closer to 13% of applicants. Wellesley College, which tied for fourth place on U.S. News' ranking of liberal arts schools, has an acceptance rate of 22%.

The top-ranking liberal arts colleges also tended to score better than the top-ranked national universities on comparative measures of social mobility, that are designed to represent a school's likelihood of helping students improve their circumstances by considering the graduation rates and post-graduation performances of students who qualify for federal Pell Grants.

Here are the top 5 liberal arts colleges of 2021, according to U.S. News and what it takes to get in.

Williams College

Denis Tangney Jr | Getty Images

Average SAT score: 1410-1550

Share of first-year students in the top 10% of their high school class: 85%

Acceptance rate: 13%

Amherst College

Source: Amherst College

Average SAT score: 1410-1550

Share of first-year students in the top 10% of their high school class: 88%

Acceptance rate: 11%

Swarthmore College

aimintang | Getty Images

Average SAT score: 1380-1540

Share of first-year students in the top 10% of their high school class: 87%

Acceptance rate: 9%

Pomona College

Ted Soqui | Corbis | Getty Images

Average SAT score: 1390-1540

Share of first-year students in the top 10% of their high school class: 93%

Acceptance rate: 7%

Wellesley College

David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Average SAT score: 1360-1530

Share of first-year students in the top 10% of their high school class: 79%

Acceptance rate: 22%

Don't miss:

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The top 5 liberal arts colleges of 2021, according to U.S. Newsand what it takes to get in - CNBC

The bill designed to keep the financial wheels of the provincial government churning is not yet a done deal, but the Opposition partiesand two Independent MHAshavescored a partial victory in the process, one that seeminglyquietsany chatter about an imminent provincial election.

Debate continues this week in the House of Assemblyon the Liberals'interim supply bill,which allows government money to keep flowing, ahead of a formal budget being passed.

For example, the billwould include funds to ensure workers are paid and the province to meet other financial obligations.

Late Tuesday night, the PCs, NDP andtwo Independent MHAsscored a political victory by passing an amendment making the interim supply bill for two months, instead of the three months the Liberals wanted.

"I think we simply demonstrated to the government that they can't do any old thing they want to do and we kept them to a sense of fiscal discipline," PC Leader Ches Crosbie said Wednesday afternoon.

Finance MinisterSiobhan Coadysaid "she didn't understandthe logic" of endorsing a 60-day bill. She said it took 57 days to pass a budget in 2018.

"I'd rather have more than less [time]," Coady added.

The PCs and NDPhad originally balked at the three-month proposal.

"We've been accommodating within reason but to be asking for threemonths right now is overreaching,"Crosbie said earlier this week. "Three months is a large blank cheque."

That measuredoesn't mean the entire interim supply bill has passed because other parts of the legislation must be voted on individually.

But the Tuesday night voteon the amendment underscores that the Liberal minority government needs votes from across the aislesin order to get bills passed.

Coady has said a budget will be presented on Sept. 30. The interim supply bill must be approved before that.

Budgets are usually announced in the spring, but the pandemic disrupted that financial schedule, and in March the Opposition parties supported a six-month $4.6-billion interim supply bill.

The NDPhad expressed concerns thata three-month supply bill would give the Liberals an opportunity to call a general election this fall.

On Wednesday, Crosbiepointedly said his party is not looking to potentially help bring down the government on a confidence vote related to the budget.

"They have plenty of time, the budget will pass[Coady]tells us in the House that there's going to be nothing in it that we canobject to, I'll take her on face value on that." he said.

"There won't be an issue passing the budget. There will not be an election, they will have plenty of money to pay the bills."

On Tuesday, before the vote on the bill's amendment, bothCoady and PC MHAand finance critic Tony Wakehamsaid neither party wants an election right now.

The supply bill was debated for a few hours on Wednesday morning and will continue this week.

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

See the rest here:

Opposition parties, Independents shave month off Liberals' spending bill - CBC.ca

TORONTO -- While on the campaign trail a year ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that a re-elected Liberal government would plant two billion trees over the next 10 years. But so far, none of those trees have gone in the ground.

Some federally-funded trees have been planted in 2020, according to Natural Resources Minister Seamus ORegans office, but the two billion promise referred to brand-new trees, on top of the usual replanting efforts.

Ian Cameron, press secretary for ORegan, says that COVID-19 is the cause for the delay.

Our government provided $30 million to businesses in the forest sector to ensure that they could safely continue their planting activities during COVID-19, he said in a statement to CTV News. We are also planting hundreds of thousands of trees through the Infrastructure Disaster Mitigation Adaptation Fund. These have been our priority in the past several months, and we were successful in those efforts.

Building off these efforts, we remain fully committed to planting two billion trees, and we look forward to sharing more on that soon.

Trudeau first made the promise in September 2019, after he met with Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, and before he participated in a climate march in Montreal.

The two billion trees were pitched as an important part of the Liberals plan to fight climate change and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The partys platform specified that it would create 3,500 seasonal tree planting jobs, and that it was all part of a $3-billion commitment to better conserve and restore forests, grasslands, agricultural lands, wetlands, and coastal areas.

Nature isn't just part of our identity as Canadians, it's also a part of the solution to climate change and it's a solution we can start using today," Trudeau told reporters in September 2019.

"Trees are remarkable. They pull carbon out of the atmosphere. They are renewable and they're sustainable and, eventually, they even recycle themselves. All we have to do is plant the first one."

When the plan was announced, officials specified that this would be in addition to the roughly 600 million trees that are already planted across Canada each year.

In order to have two billion trees planted by 2030, the government shouldve been planting 200 million trees a year starting in 2020, which breaks down to 547,945 trees planted every single day.

If they start planting in 2021, itll take 608,828 trees planted every day to make the goal.

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Trudeau government hasn't started planting 2 billion trees promised in 2019 campaign - CTV News

The Southern Chiefs' Organization is calling the Manitoba government dishonourable in the way it treats vulnerable children in the province.

Southern Chiefs' OrganizationGrand Chief Jerry Danielssays Brian Pallister's Progressive Conservative government isattempting to present legislation that would prevent the government from being liable for taking hundreds of millions of dollarsintended for children in care.

Through the Children's Special Allowance, the federal government gives roughly $455 to $530 for each child in careto government child and family services agencies each month.

Beginning in 2010, Manitoba'sNDPgovernment began forcing the agencies to remit the money given, saying the province was paying for the maintenance of children in care and the money was therefore owed to them.

Thatmoney was put into general revenue. If agencies refused to remit it, the government withheld 20 per cent of the operating funds it gave the agency.

Daniels, who spoke at a press conference Wednesday alongsideManitoba Liberal Leader Dougald Lamontin the city's West End,says that between1999 and 2016, the NDP government diverted approximately $250 million. Since 2016, the PCs have diverted more than$100 million, Daniels and Lamont claimed.

The clawback prompted sixIndigenous child and family services agencies to suethe Manitoba government in 2018, but the SCO and Manitoba Liberals say the government has includedtwo provisions in its budget bill that would effectively end the lawsuit.

One clauseseeks to shield the province from being held responsible for clawing back the money earmarked for kids in care.

"Our children's resources are being stolen and Pallister is wanting to legislate himself out of being accountable for it,"Daniels said, calling the provisions in the budget bill"get-out-of-jail-free" clauses designed to shield the Tories.

"If the Pallister government believes they're right in taking the children's money, why does he not want the courts to decide?"

Unlike other bills, budget bills don't go before committees for public hearings, Lamont said, adding he is raising the issue now because the legislature is going back into session on Oct. 7.

"The Pallister PCs are using a budget bill to do an end-run around the courts," he added.

"The law is there to hold people to their word, and these measures set a terrible precedent."

Daniels and Lamont spoke on Wednesdayinfront of an Adele Avenue building, which was operated by the SouthernFirst Nations Network of Careas afacility for children in care until2019, when residents were evicted three months before the province introduceda bill in an effort to break its lease on the building.

The 20-year deal was signed in 2007under the NDP government to providean alternative to hotel placements of kids in care.

The province on Wednesday said it stepped in to help theSouthernFirst Nations Network of Care with the lease "at their request."

"They had signed an untendered, 20-year deal at a cost of $9.4 million and then determined the property would not meet their needs,"said a statement from Families Minister Heather Stefanson.

"The lease did not allow for an early termination, which meant a large portion of SFNNC's budget intended to support children and families was consumed by lease payments," the statement said, adding the government tried, unsuccessfully, to renegotiate the least.

"If the lease is not terminated, it will cost the province another $6.5 million over the next 10 years, plus maintenance costs," she said.

"We believe that is a complete waste of taxpayer money, which is why we are taking steps to end the lease."

The SCO and Liberals said the provincial government ordered the eviction of the home in February of 2019, and that children at the home were forced out in the middle of the night.

Stefanson's statement called that "a shameful falsehood." Plans werein place for the transition of every child at the Adele home, and notice was provided ahead of time, Stefanson said.

As for requiring agencies remit the Children's Special Allowance back to the province, that is ahistorical practice of the previous NDP government, Stefanson said, noting the proposed legislation will change that.

Since April 2019, agencies have beenretaining the allowance, as well as receivingsingle-envelope funding from the province, which will provide more than$400 million to the authorities and their agencies in 2020-21 a $15-million increase compared to what they received before, Stefansonsaid.

View original post here:

Southern chiefs, Liberals accuse Manitoba government of withholding millions intended for kids in care - CBC.ca

Paul Wells: Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didn't cancel gravity, and that 'building back better' will, in fact, be hard work

Im grateful to the excellent Toronto Star columnist Heather Scoffield for noticing some fascinating comments Gerald Butts made on Monday.

Butts, of course, resigned in 2019 as Justin Trudeaus principal secretary and has been working since then as a consultant, climate-policy opinion leader and Twitter scold. He was a member of the Task Force for a Resilient Recovery, which spent the summer pushing hard on the build back better rhetoric that imagined the coronavirus pandemic as the dawn of a bold new green-energy future.

To say the least, excitement about a pandemic is counterintuitive. I started writing about the contradictions in June, when nameless Liberals were telling reporters, Itll be a good time to be a progressive government There are a lot of us who are dreaming big. I came back to the theme in August, when the PMO was setting Bill Morneau up as some kind of obstacle to their plans to build back better. And I wrote last week about the unsettling spectacle of Trudeau greeting Morneaus departure as, essentially, the end of history: We can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking. As much as this pandemic is an unexpected challenge, it is also an unprecedented opportunity.

It was already clear last week that some of these considerations were starting to weigh, perhaps belatedly, on the Prime Minister and his advisors. Theres a sensitivity to being perceived to hijack the moment for a green recovery, a senior Liberal source told the CBCs David Cochrane. Boy, I sure hope there is.

Along comes Butts, who on Monday was addressing something called the Recovery Summit, an ambitious online virtual conference organized by some of the usual suspects, including the (Trudeauist) Canada2020 think tank in Ottawa and the (Clintonist) Center for American Progress in Washington.

Butts kicked off the proceedings by pouring industrial quantities of cold water on everyone.

Its important tounderstand and appreciate the level of anxiety that people are going through right now, he said. Conferences like this one were made by and for members of the progressive movement, he said. But in a clear warning to people who consider themselves members of that movement, he added, We depend on the support of the broad middle class and regular people. When we keep that support we form governments. And when we dont, we lose governments.

In an even clearer warning against the weird self-celebratory tone of some of the rhetoric from the government over the summer, he added:Its really important to emphasize what were doing and whom were doing it forrather than celebrate the fact that we are doing it.

I havent spoken to Butts since a few months before the SNC-Lavalin controversy wrecked his career in government, and I doubt he minds at all. So it was odd to hear him sounding warnings that resembled things Ive been writing for months. Its pure coincidence. It simply reflects the fact that to anyone with any distance from the government echo chamber, the Trudeau circles weirdly giddy triumphalism of recent months has got to sound jarring.

To put it diplomatically, I think that in any crisis situation, people will repurpose their pet projects as urgent and necessary responses to the crisis at hand, Butts said. And its vitally important that, when people are feeling as anxious as theyre feeling right now, we start the solutions from where they are and build up from there. And not arrive in the middle of their anxiety with a pre-existing solution that was developed and determined before the crisis thats arisen.

I know theres a widespread assumption that Butts never really left the Trudeau circle, that he remains the PMs puppeteer. I think thats farcical. Butts probably has an easier time getting Ben Chin to return a call than some of my colleagues do, but for the most part hes basically a sympathetic outsider whos watching the work of friends from a distance. His remarks amplify and consolidate things Dave Cochrane was already hearing from senior Liberals last week. Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didnt cancel gravity or smite the foes of progress, as they define progress, from the earth. When Parliament returns next week, it will still be a venue of measurable personal risk for its occupants, like any large room for the foreseeable future. It will still contain more MPs who arent Liberals than MPs who are. It will be watched by a population that is worried, defensive, and incapable of ignoring risk for the sake of a resounding slogan. It speaks well of the Liberals that they have spent the summer working some goofy rhetoric out of their systems before returning to the real world.

This doesnt mean the government shouldnt pursue reductions in carbon emissions. They ran on promises to do so. They set ambitious targets, having spectacularly missed easier targets in the past. They faced concerted opposition and won. Working to reduce carbon emissions is necessary work with broad public support.

But it will be work. The clear implication of the dreaming big and unprecedented opportunity talk was that Liberals, including the Prime Minister, were talking themselves into believing school was out. That a global calamity would somehow transform hard work into a party, disarm the political opposition and, once againthis is a particularly sturdy fantasy of life in Trudeau-land, as Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau could tell youdelegitimize internal dissent.

It isnt so. Meeting the Liberals own climate goals will be hard work that will feel like hard work, if they care to take it up. The necessary changes will impose costs that will feel like costs before they provide benefits that feel like benefits. The very nature of this crisis will make building back better anything but a cakewalk.

First, because 2020 hasnt wiped out the former world. Building back better became a slogan a decade ago after earthquakes in New Zealand erased a lot of existing infrastructure. COVID-19 has been more like a neutron bomb, interrupting livelihoods but leaving neighbourhoods intact. If I had to build a new rail link from scratch between Toronto and Montreal, I might build something fancy. But the old one is still there. That makes a difference.

Second, because theres little likelihood of a sustained, long-term recovery like the one that characterized Canadas economy for 30 years after World War II, a comparison that was briefly fashionablea few months ago with the build-back-better set. The recoverys likely to be pretty quick, to pick up steam only after a vaccine or effective treatment becomes widespread, and to last only about as long as it takes to return to the status quo ante. Its fantasy to imagine miracle growth lasting the rest of everyones lifetime will take away costs and tradeoffs.

So the Trudeau governments duty to meet its climate targets remains, and so does just about all the difficulty of meeting them. Which means a central question about this Prime Ministerdoes he rise to challenges, ever? also remains.

The rest is here:

Farewell to the Liberals easy green revolution - Maclean's

news, act-politics, canberra liberals, light rail, act election 2020

The Canberra Liberals want nothing more than to frame October's vote around cost-of-living pressures. But they could be risking a repeat of the last election by keeping light rail in play this campaign. In 2016, Labor won what was dubbed a referendum on light rail. The party was particularly successful in the Gungahlin-based seat of Yerrabi, where eight of Labor's top 10 booths were located. No surprises there - it was the primary beneficiary of Labor's blue ribbon election promise in light rail stage one. Chief Minister Andrew Barr would be more than happy to run another light rail election. For many, this fact makes the Liberals' refusal to back the city-to-Woden line particularly perplexing. They want to make the election about the cost of living, but by not committing to continuing the work on stage two of light rail, they could risk de-railing their message. The Liberals say they want to extend the network, but would decide what the next route should be after conducting an independent study. Transport spokeswoman Candice Burch says the party hears a lot of feedback that Belconnen to Airport should be the next leg. It means all the work done on the city-to-Woden line so far could be thrown down the drain, and construction timelines delayed significantly. Woden - and the seat of Murrumbidgee - will be a central battleground in the October election. The Liberals must pick up an extra member in that seat to have a chance of forming government. The Liberals' decision not to neutralise the light rail issue suggests they believe Woden residents will not vote based on the tram. It is true Woden cannot be seen through the same lens as Gungahlin. Unlike Gungahlin, it is a relatively strong area for the Liberals. It also has not had the same congestion issues crying out to be fixed as Gungahlin had in 2016. There are also real questions to be asked about the speed of light rail in Woden, with a journey predicted to take up to 30 minutes compared to 15 minutes on some express buses. The Liberals may have misjudged the public's support for light rail in 2016 when they pledged to ditch the project before. But at least voters knew what their party's policy was. There are very genuine questions about whether Woden would be the best next stage. A Belconnen line would be far less costly and complicated. And they have a genuine point when they say the government has lacked transparency. The problem for voters going into this election is they don't really know whether a Liberal government would extend the system at all. There have been no dollar announcements, and no real vision for their version of light rail. Just a commitment to do an independent analysis. And we all know "independent reports" from government are not always as independent as the name suggests.

https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc70nttdp4pl0lmt6cjgw.jpg/r3_265_5182_3191_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

ANALYSIS

September 17 2020 - 4:30AM

The Canberra Liberals want nothing more than to frame October's vote around cost-of-living pressures. But they could be risking a repeat of the last election by keeping light rail in play this campaign.

In 2016, Labor won what was dubbed a referendum on light rail. The party was particularly successful in the Gungahlin-based seat of Yerrabi, where eight of Labor's top 10 booths were located.

No surprises there - it was the primary beneficiary of Labor's blue ribbon election promise in light rail stage one. Chief Minister Andrew Barr would be more than happy to run another light rail election.

For many, this fact makes the Liberals' refusal to back the city-to-Woden line particularly perplexing.

They want to make the election about the cost of living, but by not committing to continuing the work on stage two of light rail, they could risk de-railing their message.

The Liberals say they want to extend the network, but would decide what the next route should be after conducting an independent study.

Transport spokeswoman Candice Burch says the party hears a lot of feedback that Belconnen to Airport should be the next leg. It means all the work done on the city-to-Woden line so far could be thrown down the drain, and construction timelines delayed significantly.

Woden - and the seat of Murrumbidgee - will be a central battleground in the October election. The Liberals must pick up an extra member in that seat to have a chance of forming government.

The Liberals' decision not to neutralise the light rail issue suggests they believe Woden residents will not vote based on the tram.

It is true Woden cannot be seen through the same lens as Gungahlin. Unlike Gungahlin, it is a relatively strong area for the Liberals. It also has not had the same congestion issues crying out to be fixed as Gungahlin had in 2016.

There are also real questions to be asked about the speed of light rail in Woden, with a journey predicted to take up to 30 minutes compared to 15 minutes on some express buses.

The Liberals may have misjudged the public's support for light rail in 2016 when they pledged to ditch the project before. But at least voters knew what their party's policy was.

There are very genuine questions about whether Woden would be the best next stage. A Belconnen line would be far less costly and complicated. And they have a genuine point when they say the government has lacked transparency.

The problem for voters going into this election is they don't really know whether a Liberal government would extend the system at all.

There have been no dollar announcements, and no real vision for their version of light rail.

Just a commitment to do an independent analysis. And we all know "independent reports" from government are not always as independent as the name suggests.

Read more from the original source:

The Liberals won't commit to Woden light rail, so will the 2016 election come back to haunt them? - The Canberra Times