Category Archives: Liberal

Labour Minister Seamus ORegan, seen here in a April 28, 2022 file photo, said the Liberals plan on introducing several measures to beef up the legislation in committee.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus Liberals have thrown their support behind a Senate bill requiring government and businesses to annually report on steps they have taken to identify forced labour in their supply chains.

This means Bill S-211 stands a good chance of becoming law once it finishes moving through the House of Commons. The legislation, which has already passed the Senate, also passed second reading in the Commons by a vote of 327-0 on Wednesday. It now heads to committee for further study.

Labour Minister Seamus ORegan said the Liberals plan on introducing several measures to beef up the legislation in committee.

We need to substantively tackle forced labour in our supply chains. Bill S-211 is an important first step, he said via Twitter.

We voted to send this bill to committee. There, well look at amendments to strengthen it, the minister said. He did not elaborate on what improvements the Liberals had in mind.

Ultimately, we want to pass legislation that will be effective against forced labour.

Canada has repeatedly been faulted for failing to do anything to stop imports of goods made with forced labour despite a commitment it made in the renegotiated NAFTA deal to do so.

As The Globe reported last week, Canada has yet to stop a single such import since mid-2020 when Ottawa amended the Customs Tariff Act to prohibit forced-labour imports in keeping with a pledge made under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade deal that replaced the North American free-trade agreement.

The single shipment of goods impounded by Canadian authorities since then was later released after the importer successfully challenged the seizure.

By comparison, in the fiscal 2021 year alone, the United States intercepted more than 1,400 shipments of goods made with forced labour from a variety of countries, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The difference in the Canadian and U.S. records on this, critics say, cannot be accounted for solely by the far larger volume of imports into the United States.

The Global Slavery Index, produced by an Australian philanthropic foundation, estimated in a 2018 report that more than $18.5-billion worth of goods imported into Canada are at risk of being made with forced labour at some point in their supply chains, including computers, smartphones, clothing as well as gold, seafood and sugarcane.

Bill S-211, Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act, would require government institutions and businesses to submit annual reports to Ottawa outlining any steps taken during the previous fiscal year to prevent and reduce the risk that forced labour or child labour are being used at any step in their supply chains.

Critics say the bill falls short because it does not oblige government or businesses to take steps to rid their supply chains of coerced labour but only report on it.

There is no requirement to take any steps. There is no certification scheme, nor attestation that the supply chains are free of forced labour. There is only a requirement to report annually on if you took any steps, and your assessment of how effective they are. There is actually no requirement to report if you identify forced labour, said Emily Dwyer, policy director at the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability.

She said Canada should strive for legislation that goes further and includes an obligation to prevent forced labour from taking place. She pointed to a private members bill by NDP MP Peter Julian that would require companies to identify, prevent and mitigate human-rights abuses and provides for liability when companies cause harm in their global operations.

S-211 was sponsored in the Red Chamber by Senator Julie Miville-Dechne and is being sponsored in the House by Liberal MP John McKay.

Mr. McKay defended the legislation despite its shortcomings, saying companies could end up being embarrassed into taking action because the reporting will end up naming and shaming businesses or government departments taking no measures.

I wouldnt want to be the CEO filing a return that just answers nil to each question, he said.

He said Canada lags behind peer countries in the requirements placed on business and government to report whether they have taken action to weed out slave labour from their supply chains.

Lawyer John Boscariol, head of McCarthy Ttraults trade and investment group, said in his opinion the legislation is still an important and positive step despite the fact companies wont be required to scrutinize their supply chains.

There is an indirect impact here that will encourage companies to actually have due diligence measures in place and that overall should discourage the use of forced labour and child labour in supply chains.

The legislation would take effect as early as January, 2023, if it receives royal assent this year.

Mr. McKay said any amendments would mean S-211 would have to go back to the Senate to be ratified.

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Liberal government throws support behind bill aimed at tackling forced labour in supply chains - The Globe and Mail

NDP Critic for Women and Gender Equality Leah Gazan made the following statement:

It has been three years since the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) released its report.

The Inquiry involved impacted families and individuals sharing compelling stories brought forward by survivors of violence and the brave family members who are looking for loved ones, and from those who have lost a loved one due to this ongoing genocide. The grief and trauma that comes along with this sharing these stories can not be overlooked. They are our sisters, daughters, aunties and mothers who vanished from our lives. The people who loved them told the Inquiry that they were left with no answers, no closure and no justice.

Their stories and testimonies formed the bases for the 231 Calls for Justice designed to address systemic racism and legacy of colonial genocide that perpetuates disproportionate rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people. The Calls to Justice were steps for the government to take to stop the violence and harm that was being perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls. It is three years later and the crisis has not gotten better. It has, in fact, gotten worse while this Liberal government has failed to implement the Calls for Justice and save lives.

In Winnipeg, five Indigenous women have been murdered or lost their life as a result of the system failing them in the month of May alone. And sadly, that number is very likely to rise throughout the summer.

I have been urging this government to deliver funding for more low-barrier, 24/7 safe spaces so that women, girls, 2SLGBTQQIA+ people have a place to go when they need it. Even though the Former Minister of Crown Indigenous Relations called Winnipeg ground zero for MMIWG2S they continue not to act.

It shouldnt be up to Indigenous leaders and communities to plead for the lives of their people. We should not have to convince this Liberal government of our humanity or our right to safety.

Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people have value even if this government fails to recognize it and do whats needed to keep people alive.

We have heard the Prime Minister say that there is more work that needs to be done. When his government has implemented zero recommendations out of 231, it is very safe to say the Prime Minister is correct. Even more concerning is that there was no money allocated in the 2022 budget to address this ongoing genocide.

To the survivors of violence, the families and communities who have lost a loved oneon behalf of all New Democrats, I am wishing you peace and healing today. And I can promise you that we will never stop fighting for justice. We will not rest until this government ensures that all the Calls for Justice are implemented and Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people can live in safety and dignity.

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The Liberal government continues to fail to act three years after the MMIWG Inquiry - New Democratic Party

An NDP majority government would run Ontario for the next four years, under Premier Andrea Howarth, if students decided the outcome of Thursdays election.

The unofficial Student Vote Ontario resultswould also have returned Mike Schreiner to represent Guelph, joined by three other Greens at Queens Park.

"It feels great to have the youth support," he said following his victory address on Thursday, having re-claimed the local riding seat. "We're a party that's about protecting their future and ensuring we address the climate emergency in particular.

"It's good to know young voters recognize the policies we put forward and the vision we have for the Ontario they want."

Guelph students cast 2,174 votes during the mock election in favour of Schreiner (46.9 per cent), followed by NDPs James Parr with 652 votes (14.07 per cent). Liberal candidate Raechelle Devereaux received 598 votes (12.9 per cent) and 409 votes went to PC candidate Peter McSherry (8.82 per cent).

Rounding out the student vote were Juanita Burnett of the Communist Party with 373 votes (8.05 per cent); New Blues Will Lomker with 281 votes (6.06 per cent); and Paul Taylor of the None of the Above Direct Democracy Party with 148 votes (3.19 per cent).

There were 31 participating elementary and secondary schools in the riding, which saw 4,635 votes cast. Centennial Collegiate & Vocational Institute students cast the most ballots, with 1,600.

Wellington-Halton Hills students cast 1,166 mock ballots for Arnott (31.45 per cent), followed by Green candidate Ryan Kahro at 880 (23.73 per cent), Diane Ballantyne of the NDP with 780 votes (21.04 per cent) and Tom Takacs with 488 votes (13.16 per cent).

New Blue candidate Stephen Kitras took 8.2 per cent of the student vote (304 ballots), with Consensus candidate Ron Patava last with 2.43 per cent (90 ballots).

The mock vote involved more than 250,000 students from 1,672 schools from all 124 provincial electoral districts, with ballots cast throughout this week.

We are excited to share the results of Student Vote Ontario, which marks the culmination of weeks of democratic engagement of young Ontarians, says Taylor Gunn, president and CEO of CIVIX, the group behind Student Vote initiatives. We are grateful for all the educators who dedicated time and energy to cultivating future voters this spring.

If the student vote generated official results, the NDP would have won a majority with 75 seats and 28.6 per cent of the popular vote. The Liberals would form the Official Opposition, taking 28 seats with 22 per cent of the popular vote.

With 17 seats, the PC party came in third. It captured 18.7 per cent of the popular vote.

The Greens received 16 per cent of the popular vote, claiming four seats, including the Guelph riding.

Student ballots would have seen each of the four major party leaders win in their respective ridings.

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NDP majority with Liberal opposition if students had their way - GuelphToday

By and large, liberal politicians in the United Statesand the vast majority of Democratssupport the legalization of cannabis. Many have come to see the War on Drugs, especially cannabis, as a civil rights issue that has had devastating effects for African Americans. But the Democratic Governor of Delaware, John Carney, is not one of those. His veto of a cannabis-related criminal justice bill was a throwback to an earlier time.

During the current legislative session, the Delaware House and Senate voted on HB371. Unlike some of the legislation passed by liberal Democratic state legislatures in the past two years, this bill simply removed any penalty for individuals, aged 21 and older, found possessing or consuming one ounce of less of cannabis. The legislation allows the penalization, via a fine, for individuals possessing one ounce or less if those individuals are under the age of 21. The law also eliminates penalties on adults aged 21 and older who transfer or gift one ounce of cannabis or less.

The law does not set up the type of commercial cannabis operations seen in more than a dozen states that have legalized cannabis for adult-use. Nor does the law facilitate the possession or use of cannabis by minors. Instead, it restricts the ability of the state to make money off of adults who possess small amounts of cannabis for personal use or want to transfer small amounts of cannabis for adults who seek to do the same.

In his veto message, however, Governor Carney trots out the tried and true tropes of the drug war that are either based on a lazy misunderstanding of the legislation or that protects the interests of the precise apparatus that has used drug laws to enrich themselves and hobble communities of color. First, Gov. Carney notes, I do not believe that promoting or expanding the use of recreational marijuana is in the best interests of the state of Delaware, especially our young people. This legislation does nothing to promote or expand the use of recreational cannabis in that state. That argument could be used as a concern against a commercialized system with advertising that would promote use. This legislation deals only with criminal justice issues.

Whats more, Gov. Carney throws in the especially young people line that politicians who oppose cannabis reform vacantly use to justify their outdated position. This legislation specifically included an exception to the removal of penalties: minors. Minors still face fines for possession and use, and this legislation does not promote or expand use among that subpopulation.

Instead of framing his position with a lets save the children canard, Gov. Carney should be more honest with Delaware residents about what his position does promote. It promotes the police state. It promotes the power of police to penalize adults engaging in conduct that is perfectly legal in more than a third of American states. It promotes the continued racially biased drug war that have kept communities of color down for generations. This position does not save children; it promotes racism.

A later passage in Gov. Carneys veto statement clarifies this. He notes that serious law enforcement concerns remain unresolved. On that point, he is right. Law enforcement uses simple possession of cannabis as grounds for further searches and seizures. It also uses drug laws to bring in fines and court fees and to target communities of color. Law enforcement officials in many states oppose weakening cannabis laws because it cuts into their ability to use the power of the state to harm specific communities in specific ways.

While law enforcement concerns remain unresolved, Americans concerns about cannabis have broadly dissolved. The vast majority of Americans support cannabis legalization. And the vast majority of Delaware legislators supported HB371. The House passed the legislation 26-14; the Senate passed the legislation 13-7; each chamber had one member absent for the vote. But, rather than supporting the public will, the Governor of Delaware opted instead, to support the racially discriminatory War on Drugs. The failure to understand the consequences of those actions for a population that is nearly 40% Latino and/or non-white shows that many elected officials hold on to aged belief systems despite significant data and analysis to the contrary.

The governors veto comes on the heels of a racially-motivated incident involving a Delaware womens lacrosse team in Georgia in April. The team bus from Delaware State Universityan HBCUwas pulled over on a Georgia highway and police officers searched the entire bus, with one officer noting, theres probably some weed. The officers referenced marijuana multiple times during the stop.

Governor Carney responded to this incident angrily. He stated, Moments like these should be relegated to part of our countrys complicated history, but they continue to occur with sad regularity in communities across our country. Its especially hard when it impacts our own community. That day, Gov. Carney sided with the rights of individualsespecially Black individualsnot to be harassed by police using the foundation of our nations drug laws. Today, he sided with law enforcement and their ability to target people of color in precisely the same way the Delaware State womens lacrosse team was. The veto statement for HB371 speaks volumes louder than his defense of his own states college students.

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Delaware shows the War on Drugs lives on in liberal enclaves - Brookings Institution

Pandoras Box, 2021. Marcel Dzama. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Art: Marcel Dzama

On Wednesday, the Washington Posts Taylor Lorenz reported on the disastrous rollout of the Department of Homeland Securitys Disinformation Governance Board. Announced on April 27 with a hazy remit to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, the initiative generated immediate fierce backlash from conservative pundits and politicians who compared it to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwells 1984. The expert tapped to lead the board, Nina Jankowicz, faced a wave of ferocious, viral, and often personal attacks online as well as scrutiny over her past statements seeming to betray her partisan sympathies. Now, just three weeks later, the Disinformation Governance Board is no more, and Jankowicz has resigned.

According to Lorenz and her sources (other disinformation researchers, as well as staffers in DHS and on the Hill), Jankowicz was taken down by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating and was undermined by a flat-footed, timid response from the Biden White House. The campaign against Jankowicz and the board, Lorenz writes, was a prime example of how the right-wing internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. In other words, the Disinformation Governance Board was undone by a textbook disinformation campaign.

This version of the story is richly ironic and tragic. As one Hill staffer told Lorenz, Ninas role was to come up with strategies for the department to counter this type of campaign, and now theyve just succumbed to it themselves. But from another perspective, the rights campaign against the Disinformation Board resembled any other successful advocacy effort to halt a government initiative. As with most activist endeavors, some of the facts were fudged, innocuous statements were deprived of context and tendentiously interpreted, those in charge were depicted as cartoonish villains, and a more complex story was reduced to a fairy-tale struggle between the forces of good and evil not great, but when it comes to political messaging in our polarized age, par for the course. (I can recall quite a bit of Manichaean simplification happening during the Trump years.)

Obviously, I sympathize with Jankowicz. No doubt she faced an astronomical volume of right-wing nastiness, dishonest attacks on her reputation, and genuinely disturbing threats. Im sure the administration could have done more to insulate her from the backlash. But other than that, I dont see how a fully operational Disinformation Governance Board could have prevented this outcome except via the very means conservatives (mistakenly?) feared it would possess. If, as Lorenz is careful to note, neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech, then how would it have prevented right-wingers from tweeting terrible, dishonest things about Jankowicz? Lorenzs reporting seems to arrive at a Catch-22: The rights campaign to depict Jankowicz as a government censor amounts to disinformation only if she and the DHS were indeed helpless to stop it.

I know, Im being slightly glib. The truth is, I think its important for smart people to analyze the ways in which the architecture of social media facilitates and incentivizes witch hunts and the dissemination of hateful, dishonest content. And the government likely has a role to play in coercing tech platforms to prioritize the public interest over the profit motive in crafting their algorithms. But I dont think it requires any great leap of conspiratorial thinking to find fault with a disinformation board under the aegis of the DHS. Government officials whoever resides in the White House are professional liars. They lie haughtily in the interest of national security, sheepishly in the interest of saving face, and passionately when their jobs are on the line. Would Jankowiczs office have been empowered to counter disinformation coming from her own department? Or only from those criticizing it? And what would its remit have been under the next Republican presidency? As one conservative writer put it, Its not clear to me that Democrats have fully reckoned with the non-negligible possibility that Donald Trump is in charge of the new Disinformation Governance Board in 2 years.

But the other pernicious problem with liberals fixation on disinformation is that it allows them to lie to themselves.

Trumps ascendance in 2016 posed a painful psychic challenge to liberal elites. It suggested the possibility that many millions of Americans were motivated by deep, venomous dissatisfactions with the world they had helped create, that our cultural disagreements were profound, not superficial, and that our perspectives were practically irreconcilable inversions of each other. Political reality seemed to tilt on its axis. How could a man who appeared to them so transparently abhorrent and clownish be welcomed by others as a savior or at least as a tolerable alternative to the status quo?

Disinformation was the liberal Establishments traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection. It wasnt that the country was riven by profound antinomies and resentments born of material realities that would need to be navigated by new kinds of politics. No, the problem was that large swaths of the country had been duped, brainwashed by nefarious forces both foreign and domestic. And if only the best minds, the most credentialed experts, could be given new authority to regulate the flow of fake news, the scales would fall from the eyes of the people and they would re-embrace the old order they had been tricked into despising. This fantasy turned a political problem into a scientific one. The rise of Trump called not for new politics but new technocrats.

Like other pathological reactions to trauma, the disinformation neurosis tended to re-create the conditions that produced the affliction in the first place. (Freud called this repetition compulsion.) By doubling down on elite technocracy and condescension toward the uneducated rubes suffering from false consciousness liberals have tended to exacerbate the sources of populist hostility. As Joe Bernstein documented in Harpers last year, the antidisinformation industry has attracted massive investment from wealthy Democratic donors, the tech industry, and cash-rich foundations. Hundreds of millions of disinfo dollars are sloshing around the nonprofit world, funding institutes at universities and extravagant conventions across the world. Last months Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference was headlined by Barack Obama and featured Anne Applebaum, David Axelrod, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a lengthy list of other academic, journalistic, and political luminaries. Im sure very interesting ideas were discussed there. But gathering the leading lights of liberalism to an auditorium at the University of Chicago so that they together can decide which information is true and safe to be consumed by the rabble outside strikes me as a hollow exercise in self-soothing, more likely to aggravate the symptoms of our legitimacy crisis (distrust and cynicism) than resolve any of its impasses.

Dont get me wrong: There are obviously hard problems to be worked out regarding technology, speech, and democracy, and I have great respect for scholars working in that nettlesome nexus. But as Bernstein put it, the new class of disinformation experts, however well intentioned, dont have special access to the fabric of reality. If faith in our institutions is to be restored, I dont think it will be accomplished by stigmatizing doubt or obstructing the dissemination of falsehood. After all, faith is not a matter of fact and fiction.

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The Liberal Obsession With 'Disinformation' Is Not Helping - New York Magazine

Jeff Jacoby decries the medias liberal bias and predicts that the left will lament a Republican takeover of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections (Whos afraid of liberal media bias? Ideas, May 15). To my mind, the liberal media is fact-based and promotes inclusion, democracy, a free press, science, economic justice, a womans right to choose, and the US Constitution. Todays conservative media, like the GOP, promotes misinformation, white supremacy, insurrection, censorship, fossil fuels, oligarchy, religious extremism, and authoritarianism.

Those who favor conservative media have picked their side, and history will not look kindly upon them.

Stephane Acel-Green

Watertown

In Whos afraid of liberal media bias?, Jeff Jacoby writes, Our society would be healthier if Americans shared more common ground, or if journalists operating in the right- and left-wing echo chambers had more respect for those with a different worldview.

No, our society would be healthier if our media shared more common truth.

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Right-wing media have embraced the Big Lie and continue to amplify and spread it, along with all sorts of other bizarre conspiracy theories and outrageous fabrications of alternative facts. Theirs is not a worldview that deserves respect. Their irresponsible disregard for truth endangers our democracy and the nations national security.

Diana Kerry

Newburyport

Im still looking for a concrete example of the liberal media bias that right-wingers keep talking about.

Conservatives have been pretty successful at convincing the base that truth is, in reality, bias, so that anything they disagree with immediately becomes tainted by ideology, or liberal media bias in other words, untrue.

But Jeff Jacoby is correct that liberal media bias has no real impact these days, because the gullible and suggestible have been convinced, as Donald Trump says, that they can no longer trust what they see or hear or read.

Indeed, thats how Trump was elected in 2016, and its the only way that the current crop of GOP minions will get elected. Thats not liberal media bias thats the truth.

Rick Bevilacqua

Whitinsville

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It's not 'bias' liberal media are telling the truth, pointedly - The Boston Globe

That they no longer feel at home there demonstrates the extent to which populism has successfully laid siege to the old political philosophies.

Liberal voters who desire articulate, forward-thinking policies have been taken for granted by leaders who disregard their concerns as vacant middle-class musings leaders seemingly taking advice from commentators who, with absolutely no evidence, claim a mythical new base of the Liberal Party that rejects any type of climate action exists in the outer suburbs of our capital cities. These are commentators who assert themselves as the arbiters of ideological purity, yet whose understanding of the political philosophies they guard is so incoherent one would need a translator to make sense of it.

It is a de facto assumption in too many conservative circles that net zero is bad, coal is good, LGBTIQ is bad, religiously acceptable relationships are good. You support proactive climate policy and promote the individual freedoms of marginalised groups? You obviously arent a real Liberal.

Real Liberals supposedly dont support such policies as they are the remit of starry eyed eco-luvvies.

What rubbish. It is time real Liberals stopped listening to those bastardising their partys philosophy to shroud Luddite attitudes towards progress and veil naked bigotry towards people who make them uncomfortable.

Real Liberals as friends of the free market know that there is no movement more amenable to conservation and climate action than liberalism. They know we should be supporting the private sectors desire to speed up the exit of coal from the grid, rather than forcing energy companies to keep open loss-making, coal-fired power stations (a perfect example of government overreach if there ever was one).

They know that there is enormous economic opportunity in diversifying regional industry away from mining. They know that it is lunacy to allow good environmental policy to be the partisan property of the Greens. That, as Liberals, they resonate with Burkes view of society as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead and that the greatest thing they can do is to pass on a world to their children that is sustainable and unravaged by climate change.

Real Liberals as protectors of individual liberty know that governments must fearlessly support marginalised communities so they can live free from discrimination. They know that the unhinged views on the LGBTIQ community held by reactionary darlings (particularly in relation to how LGBTIQ school students should be treated) are far-left ideas with far-right sensibilities: deeply censorious, overtly invasive of individual privacy and monocultural.

Lessons must be learnt from this loss. Dave Sharma, Trent Zimmerman, Jason Falinski, Tim Wilson and Josh Frydenberg were the future of the party. They are genuine liberals who would have been huge assets to the 47th parliament and to the country. If the Liberal Party is serious about winning back these seats, it must come to the table with a policy platform consistent with the partys philosophy.

If it doesnt, the momentum towards independents will only increase as voters lose sight of what their leaders stand for.

David Cross is CEO of the Blueprint Institute.

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Abandoning classical liberalism turns the heartland teal - The Australian Financial Review

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What will happen to the Liberal Party when that nostalgic generation isnt voting anymore?

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Despite stereotypes that old age turns progressives into ornery conservatives, the exact opposite seems true in Canada. Justin Trudeau won his 2015 majority thanks in large part to young people who voted for him, but those voters soon became disillusioned. Since then, many polls suggest baby boomers are Trudeaus most reliable demographic, whose loyalty might be based on his surname, not his policies. For many of the same people who still attend Elvis impersonator concerts, the first Trudeaumania never died.

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Trudeau Jr. had a coalition of age brackets behind him in 2015, but an EKOS poll last week showed a plurality of Canadians under 50 currently favour the Conservatives, while those 50 and older, especially those 65 and older, stubbornly prefer the Liberals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the senior citizen preference for the Liberals is the strongest in the Laurentian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Less than one in five Canadians aged 18-34 in the poll would vote Liberal in the next election. Considering most of those aged 50 and up grew up in a transformative era of Liberal political dominance, their disposition is somewhat understandable.

In C2C Journal last year, writer John Wesseinberger detailed how Liberal Prime Ministers Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau spearheaded the demise of British Canada in the 1960s, ushering in the modern, multicultural country that exists today. It was a partisan transition. The Progressive Conservatives opposed Pearsons replacement of the Red Ensign as Canadas flag. It was also Pearson who officially adopted O Canada as the national anthem over God Save the Queen.

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On the economic side, Pearson and Trudeau Sr. gleefully laid the foundations of the Liberal preference for a massive federal government. It conditioned a whole generation to reflexively equate budget deficits with virtuous governance. As that generation came to love the charismatic Trudeau Sr. in the 70s, some discovered and learned to love the internet in the 2000s, where today, they spread their obsolete political gospel. They are Canadas equivalent of conservative Americans of similar ages, who vote for any Republican that invokes the name Ronald Reagan.

A strange obsession of Trudeau supporters is the alleged Tory plot to privatize the health care system, legislated into existence by Pearson. During the near-decade of Stephen Harpers Conservative government, health care was never privatized, but the canard endured.

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The healthcare system they defend is among the worst performing in the civilized world. Family doctors are rare, and wait-times are nightmarish. If it continues to deteriorate, people wont want to keep it in 20 years. Much of this can ironically be blamed on Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who doubled-down on the Mulroney governments cuts to medical school enrolments in the 1990s. No other party did more to shrink Trudeau Sr.s vision of Canada than his own Liberals, who in the same decade, enacted the biggest budget cuts in Canadian history.

Nonetheless, many boomers remain devoted to the Liberal Party of their youth, though it one wonders whether it is driven more by cultish nostalgia than policy. Trudeau Jr. proudly admitted his candidacy was all about his father during his 2013 Liberal leadership campaign, a clear wink to those who remember his father fondly. Considering the narrow Liberal victories in the 2019 and 2021 elections, Trudeau Jr. might have lost both without the House of Trudeaus greying faithful.

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Those qualities remain a mystery to most people. Canada is not a better place than it was seven years ago. Health care is worse, housing is far worse, inflation is high, and many immigrants are considering leaving the country within a few years due to the increased difficulty of living here.

What will happen to the Liberal Party when that nostalgic generation isnt voting anymore? What will happen when someone named Trudeau doesnt lead it? It took 100 years for British Canada to be replaced by Liberal Canada in the 1960s. The country is due for a cultural and political shift. Some Trudeau boomers may just live long enough to discover that the version of Canada they cling to was not to last forever.

Geoff Russ is a Haida journalist and writer based in British Columbia.

National Post

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Geoff Russ: The Liberal Canada loved by the boomers keeping Trudeau in power won't last - National Post

Senior Labor ministers say Peter Dutton becoming Opposition Leader would show the Coalition has not listened to the message sent by voters at the election.

Former home affairs minister Karen Andrews saidPeter Dutton wouldbe the next leader of the Liberal Party, confirming speculation he would run unopposed for the position.

Ms Andrews said Mr Dutton had widespread support in the party and it was a "very fair and very accurate assessment" that he would become the next leader.

"He will be standing, unopposed, to take on the leadership and that means there's no-one else putting their hand up," she said.

"So it will be Peter.

"His deputy is almost certain to be Sussan Ley. Together, they will bring a team to appoint people into the shadow ministry and to reshape the party for the future."

Catch up on all the news about the 2022 Australian federal election from May 25 in our blog

Ms Ley who is not aligned with the conservative or moderate factions is canvassing support among her colleagues, but she is seen by some as being tainted by the Morrison era.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Mr Dutton becoming leader "would show [the Coalition] have learned absolutely nothing from the drubbing they got on Saturday".

"Peter Dutton has all of the same characteristics that people didn't like, that they saw in Scott Morrison," he said.

"I think we're up for a very divided period when it comes to the Liberals and the Nationals."

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher said she did not think Mr Dutton would pose a threat to Labor getting re-elected in three years' time.

"It's sort of a last-man-standing situation isn't it?" she said.

"But also, if Peter Dutton is the answer, then it's not entirely clear that they heard the questions that were raised during this election campaign."

Ms Andrews said, given Mr Dutton was from Queensland, it was important the deputy be from another state,which had effectively ended any ambition she had to put her hand up to be deputy leader.Ms Ley is from New South Wales.

"While that is personally disappointing for me, the reality is that it was untenable to have a leader and a deputy leader from Queensland," she said.

"I understand that we need to rebuild across the country. Queensland took a hit, some of the other states took a significant hit and we need to go back to our values and look closely at this."

Before the election it was believed Josh Frydenberg or Mr Dutton would replace Scott Morrison in the event the Coalition lost, butwith Mr Frydenberg losing his seat to an independent, it left Mr Dutton as the frontrunner.

Ms Andrews said the new leadership team, as well as the rest of the party, needed to understand the election result and why the Coalition lost the votes of women.

"I don't think the answer is whether we tack right or tack left," she said.

"The reality is, that the people [voters] we lost in droves were predominantly women, educated women.

"They were women who were financially secure. They were unhappy with the Liberal Party and they chose to take their vote elsewhere."

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Posted8h ago8 hours agoTue 24 May 2022 at 11:35pm, updated1h ago1 hours agoWed 25 May 2022 at 6:53am

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Labor says Peter Dutton taking reins of Liberal Party shows Coalition 'learned absolutely nothing' from federal election - ABC News

Throughout a decade of leadership challenges and changes during his time in parliament, Frydenberg always backed the sitting leader, voting for Tony Abbott against Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 and Turnbull against Peter Dutton in 2018. He is loyal to a fault with leaders, a senior party figure said.

At the start of the election campaign, Liberal MPs in teal-targeted seats desperately tried to separate themselves from the unpopular triumvirate of Morrison, Barnaby Joyce and the Queensland LNP. Frydenbergs final pitch to the Kooyong electorate was Keep Josh but his campaign discussed printing polling days flyers with the message, Vote Ryan, Get Dutton. The flyers did not eventuate.

Monique Ryan celebrates her election win against Josh Frydenberg.Credit:Joe Armao

Internal party polling provided to The Age and Herald show the collapse of the Liberal vote in seats that turned teal was precipitated by four key events in the final months of the Morrison government; the return of Barnaby Joyce as Nationals leader, the Glasgow climate conference, the Christmas holiday chaos caused by the Omicron outbreak and the decision to push ahead with religious discrimination legislation.

Several MPs also said the governments handling of Brittany Higgins rape allegations and the broader response to the treatment of women in Parliament House damaged the Coalitions credibility.

Sussan Ley is a strong contender to replace Josh Frydenberg as deputy leader.Credit:AFR

Senior Liberals concede the party made a fatal mistake by not calling an election at the end of last year, rather than running full term. A 2021 poll would have starved the teal movement of time to build their community-based campaigns.

As vote counting continued on Tuesday, more Liberal MPs confirmed that Dutton was all but certain to lead the party, though a ballot will not be held until the count has concluded.

NSW Liberal MP Sussan Ley was firming for the deputys job. Victorian moderate senator Jane Hume and South Australian senator Anne Ruston were also being discussed. But Queensland MP Karen Andrews ruled herself out of the contest for the job late on Tuesday.

Angus Taylor and Stuart Robert are both likely to put their hand up for the shadow treasury portfolio.

The Liberal Partys internal track for Kooyong, a series of polls and qualitative research conducted by Crosby Textor, show that by September 2021, three months after Joyce returned to the leadership, Morrisons personal brand had turned toxic in the traditional Liberal seat with a net approval rating of -18.

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The same polling showed that Frydenberg still had a safe hold on his seat, with a 57-43 lead over Labor, a 59-41 lead over the Greens and a positive approval rating of 15. This challenges the notion that Frydenbergs interventions against the second-wave lockdown in Victoria were a decisive factor in the Kooyong result.

Monique Ryan, the pediatric neurologist who won the seat on Saturday, had not yet been announced as the teal candidate. At the time, Frydenberg was approached by fellow moderate MPs about challenging Morrison, he had no indication that his own political career was under threat.

That changed between November and December last year when, in quick succession, Morrison went to Glasgow with a tepid climate change commitment, the Omicron outbreak wreaked havoc on Australias re-opening and summer holiday plans and Ryan emerged as a serious, well-supported local challenger in Kooyong.

The Crosby Textor track shows that by March 2022, on the eve of the federal budget, Frydenberg was in serious trouble, along with other Liberals in progressive, inner-city seats. His primary vote had crashed to 41, Ryans had surged to 37 and the likely flow of preferences would tip Frydenberg out of parliament.

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The final poll taken at the start of the campaign showed the budget did nothing to stop the flight of Liberal voters to teal candidates.

It accurately predicted Saturdays result: a drubbing at the hands of Ryan.

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Link:

Liberals discussed dumping Morrison in Coalitions final months - Sydney Morning Herald