Category Archives: Liberal

Defence Minister Anita Anand, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly look on as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks following a cabinet retreat, in Ottawa, on Jan. 26.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

The federal Liberals head into a new budget season talking about pursuing bold, new strategies to shape Canadas economic future. But listening to Chrystia Freeland discuss it this week, it all sounds a bit old and tired.

As we look to the years ahead, our focus must be on jobs and economic growth priorities that will form the foundation of the budget, the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister told a Monday news conference, marking the launch of public consultations for a budget she framed as forming a blueprint for the countrys long-term economic prosperity.

Jobs and growth are the motherhood and apple pie of economic objectives. Find me the last government that didnt say these were its priorities. Its more platitude than policy. Might test well with the focus groups, but its not a meaningful starting point for a serious rethink of long-term economic policy.

More than six years into this governments time in office, its time for something more ambitious. If the Liberals have a vision for the countrys economic future and its not clear they do theyre running out of time to act on it.

Freeland lists housing affordability, green transition and jobs as 2022 budget priorities

Federal government posts $1.4-billion deficit for November, 2021, down from $15.4-billion in November 2020

Yet even when discussing the countrys most immediate and pressing economic worries, the Liberals display an unsettling lack of ideas. The recovery strategy for the COVID-19 pandemic is stuck in get vaccinated.

That was Ms. Freelands response when reporters asked her Monday about the trucker protest, and the economic issues raised by it. She offered nothing about policies to address supply chain bottlenecks. Nothing about addressing inflation. Nothing about working with the United States and other trading partners to minimize cross-border slowdowns.

Vaccination has, unquestionably, been a huge part of the economic solution over the past year. But this was our best idea a year ago. Since then, nearly 90 per cent of the eligible population has gotten at least partially vaccinated and in the process, serious new economic problems have emerged. Its great that the government is keeping its focus on the vaccination effort. But its not nearly enough.

Casting her gaze toward the long-term economic picture, Ms. Freeland certainly recognizes where the challenge lies: I think we all really, really need to be focused on measures to increase Canadas economic potential, she said.

Few economists and public-policy experts would disagree. We live in a country with relatively low population growth (and, by extension, a slow-growing labour force) and chronically tepid productivity growth. Without policies to address those issues, we face a sluggish long-term economic outlook that threatens to compromise our living standards and strain our public finances.

This need to grow long-term potential is not new indeed, the Liberals recognized it when they came to power in 2015. They have taken some important steps to address the problem: the national affordable child-care plan, the higher immigration targets and the increased commitment to infrastructure spending. But the governments overall record on tackling long-term economic priorities is, to be generous, spotty.

It has yet to establish a coherent strategy on innovation. It has fiddled around the edges of the countrys ancient, convoluted and inefficient tax code, which desperately needs a complete overhaul. It has made discouragingly little progress in removing interprovincial trade barriers.

The governments efforts to increase public infrastructure investment have proven over-ambitious, with billions in budgeted spending failing to get out the door. It hasnt developed a serious plan to accelerate the countrys chronically listless private-sector capital investment.

Its biggest wins in international trade have been a North American pact that achieved little more than safeguarding market access that Canada already had, and pacts in Europe and the Pacific Rim that closed deals that had already been largely negotiated by the previous Conservative government.

In short, there is much, much work still to be done. Its debatable whether this governments inability to make serious progress in many of these areas is the result of a lack of will or a lack of execution; its probably a bit of both.

What should be clear to the Liberals is that they dont have a lot of time left to get going. This is very likely Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus final mandate before he makes way for a new Liberal leader, and history tells us that minority governments have pretty short life expectancies. The Liberals may only have two budgets before they are wrapping up the Trudeau era and preparing to go to the polls with a new leadership team.

Yet despite Ms. Freelands naturally enthusiastic personality, you have to wonder whether the pandemic has worn down this government. When it discusses the economic task ahead, it talks an awful lot about the policies it has already put in place. It seems more comfortable leaning on past successes than proffering fresh ideas.

Ms. Freeland invited think tanks and business groups to give me some great recommendations that we can put in place. But were not suffering from a lack of ideas (see above). What we need is a government that still has the imagination to lead the discussion, and the energy to get things done.

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Opinion: The clock ticks on a Liberal plan for economic growth - The Globe and Mail

From a Washington Postop-ed today by Prof. Lakier (who is at the University of Chicago Law School):

[R]eturning to the pre-Sullivanstandard would create problems of its own. Most important, it would leave journalists and other public speakers vulnerable to the kind of politically motivated litigation that the Times faced in 1964, when, after the newspaper published an advertisement containing minor factual inaccuracies about civil rights movement in Alabama, a phalanx of segregationist forces tried to use libel suits to run the paper out of businessand almost succeeded. No one who cares about an independent press in the United States should view the return of this state of affairs as a positive development.

But theSullivanrule is not the only mechanism one could devise to protect press freedom against vexatious litigation. There are many other changes to the law that could be made to make defamation lawsuits less expensive and ensure that public figures and officials could more easily defend their reputation when defamed.

Most obvious among these are damage caps, which could be used instead of the actual malice rule to limit the possibility that libel lawsuits could drive media organizations out of business. Stronger statutory protection against politically motivated litigation, at both the state and the federal, could also help reconcile protection for reputation with press freedom in the Internet age. Changes to court procedure could limit discovery and otherwise shorten the length and expense of libel trials so that media organizations don't have to dedicate as much time, energy and money to defending them. And venue rules could help ensure that media organizations do not get hauled into court before hostile out-of-state juries.

Rather than talking seriously about these kind of reforms, though, debates about the future of libel law overwhelmingly focus on theSullivanstandard, divorced from the rules and facts surrounding it. Perhaps that's not surprising: The rule is an icon of American constitutional law and unique in the common law world. It's an emblem of American free speech exceptionalism and a source of pride. But it's also, to some extent, an accident of history. We need not letSullivanlimit our imagination of how First Amendment law could better serve the public interest in a vastly different media environment from the one in which the decisionwas originally handed down.

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Also on New York Times v. Sullivan, from Leading Liberal Law Prof. Genevieve Lakier - Reason

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The government said Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez would 'propose a revised framework as soon as possible'

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The Liberal government says it heard the criticism that its proposed online harms bill would infringe privacy and charter rights, and will work with experts to revise the legislation.

In a consultation the government held last year, respondents raised concerns around the complexity of this issue and warned about unintended consequences if a thoughtful approach is not taken, Canadian Heritage said in a press release Thursday morning.

Experts and academics, Google , civil liberties groups and even research librarians took that draft legislation to task, warning the government the plan would result in the blocking of legitimate content and lead to censorship, violating Canadians constitutional and privacy rights.

University of Ottawas CIPPIC, for instance, told the government that anything else than setting the fundamentally flawed proposal aside would jeopardize Canadas claim to being a leader in advancing free expression, a free and open internet, and the human rights upon which our democratic society has been built.

The bill aimed to target online posts in five categories terrorist content, content that incites violence, hate speech, intimate images shared non-consensually, and child sexual exploitation content. Platforms would have been required to proactively monitor posts and take down illegal content within 24 hours of it being flagged, with a new regulator called the Digital Safety Commissioner of Canada in charge of enforcement.

The release said that in the coming weeks, the department would engage a group of experts whose mandate will be to collaborate with stakeholders and Canadians, in order to provide the Government with advice on how to adjust the proposal.

The announcement Thursday means the Liberals wont table the legislation within the first 100 days of Parliaments return, as promised in last years federal election. The government said Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez would propose a revised framework as soon as possible.

The release said the Liberal government is committed to getting this right and to doing so as quickly as possible.

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Liberals to work with experts on revision of 'fundamentally flawed' online harms bill after criticism - National Post

Once upon a time Liberals believed an Economic Accelerator was a policy to cut tax and red tape.

Leaving aside the issue of an Australian prime minister promising to fuse together things, his plans, priorities, strategies, programmes, programs, trailblazers and accelerators smack of a bureaucratic and technocratic mindset the Coalition appears to be in thrall to.

Its a language and a way of speaking straight out of the Kevin Rudd School of Management. On some issues the Liberals and Labor might differ, but their method of governing is identical. Eventually, the way something is done turns into what is done, which is a point lost on the Coalition and is the great insight of the old saying about hammers and nails and problems.

Morrison talked of plans more than a dozen times. Albanese, no less than 20 times.

In his Press Club speech, Morrison talked of his plans more than a dozen times. In his speech, Albanese of his plans no less than 20 times. Presumably the parties focus group testing is telling them voters want not just one plan, but many.

Few Liberal MPs would have heard of Friedrich Hayek, and even fewer would know what he said about planning The more the state plans the more difficult planning becomes for the individual. When the people want plans and politicians agree its no mystery why the trajectory of public policy in Australia is towards more planning and bigger government.

Towards the end of his Press Club speech Morrison lamented the fact that only 40 per cent of Australias researchers work in private industry, well below the OECD average. Surely part of the reason for this is that when the government showers the countrys public universities with plans and promises, theres little incentive for a bright young researcher to swap the largesse of the taxpayer for the uncertainty of the private sector and the free market.

Its worth putting into context the Prime Ministers speech this week. Its the product of 8 years of Coalition government. More than one Liberal Party supporter (and more than one Liberal MP) might ask whats changed in that time. To many it seems as if the big things havent changed much and neither have the little things.

At the end of last year the Australia Council awarded $80,000 to a cabaret artist whose performance includes writing abusive messages about the Prime Minister on particular parts of her body. This is in the wake of COVID-19, when the performing arts around the country are devastated and an organisation such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is on the verge of going broke.

Gifts of $80,000 from the government to cabaret singers makes the claim Were all in this together somewhat hollow.

As small business owners struggle through the effects of shadow lockdowns and plan how to make the following weeks payroll they can contemplate how different their life would have been had they become a taxpayer-funded cabaret singer or a public servant or a politician.

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How the Liberals have found their inner Kevin - The Australian Financial Review

Mr Marks later conceded the event was a mistake after it was criticised by journalists at Nines three metropolitan newspapers - The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian Financial Review - who complained it compromised the papers reputation for independent journalism.

Nine, which acquired the newspapers after a 2018 merger with Fairfax Media, donated $62,906 to the Liberals in the 2019-20 financial year, of which $35,406 related to the fundraiser. In the same year, Nine donated $27,500 to Labor.

Mike Sneesby replaced Mr Marks as Nines chief executive in April 2021.

Kerry Stokes-controlled Seven West Media also made political donations in the 2020-21 financial year, handing a combined $11,950 to the Liberal Partys Tasmanian and NSW divisions, $3000 to the National Party, and $11,000 to the Labor Party.

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Nine Entertainment Co donated $27,500 to the Liberal Party in 2020 - Sydney Morning Herald

Within the world of racial politics, Adolph Reed is the great modern denouncer. His day job, for forty years, was as a political scientist. (He is now emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.) But by night he has maintained a long-term position, too, as a left-wing lambaster of figures he believes are selling some vision of race for political expediency or profit. In Harpers, the Village Voice, Jacobin, and smaller factional outlets, not all of them still operating, Reed has called out Barack Obama as a vacuous opportunist, and the scholars bell hooks and Michael Eric Dyson as little more than hustlers, blending bombast, cliches, psychobabble, and lame guilt tripping in service to the pay me principle. For Reed, class is what divides people, and far too many political actors treat race as an all-explaining category.

Like his friend and ally Barbara Fields, a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Racecraft, Reed tends to look skeptically on diversity programs or campaigns for reparations, which he believes redirect political energies for change into symbolic efforts that help just a few powerful Black people; these stances have put him in opposition to activist anti-racist thinkers, like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and to mainstream liberal figures, such as Isabel Wilkerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I taught Obamas cohortthe Yale version, Reed told me. And I was struck by how many of them were so convinced that the whole purpose of the civil-rights movement was that people like them could go to Ivy League colleges and go to Wall Street afterward, how many of them were dispositively convinced that rich people are smarter than the rest of us. It was the same perspective, Reed went on, that suggested that more Oscars for Ava DuVernay is like a victory for the civil-rights movement, and not just for Ava DuVernay and her agent.

Cornel West, at times one of Reeds targets (Reed once denounced him as a freelance race relations consultant and Moral Voice for whites) and lately an ally, told me, Brother Adolph has three deep hatreds. He hates the ugly consequences of predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the neoliberal rationalization for those predatory capitalist processes. And he hates the use of race as a construct that promotes the neoliberal rationalization of predatory capitalist processes. A trinity of hatredsyou could almost put that as the epitaph on his grave. Among the left-of-center, this puts Reed at odds with just about everyone, which means that there are few more interesting developments in intellectual politics than the news that Adolph Reed is on the warpath.

In the summer of 2020, Reed began a new campaign, which had both a technical element and a polemical one. The technical observation was that public-health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic had overemphasized racial disparities. With Merlin Chowkwanyun, a professor in public health at Columbia, Reed published an essay in The New England Journal of Medicine that was drained of his usual combative glee. It urged medical practitioners to collect socioeconomic data, to be leery of suggesting that a persons race made him more likely to catch a disease, to remember that emphasizing racial disparities can perpetuate harmful myths and misunderstandings that actually undermine the goal of eliminating health inequities. With his close friend and collaborator Walter Benn Michaels, Reed wrote the polemical version, which argued that, shortly after the death of George Floyd, an anti-racist fervor was clouding the political judgment of progressives. That thing got rejected in more ways by the Times than you could possibly imagine, Michaels told me. (In fact, he later clarified, it was rejected twice by the Opinion editors.) Eventually they published it under the title The Trouble With Disparity in two smaller and more ideologically aligned outlets: Common Dreams and Nonsite. The problem (thought to be so ingrained in American life that its sometimes called Americas original sin) is racism; the solution is antiracism, Reed and Michaels wrote. That point of view, they went on, is mistaken.

On the basis of his article with Chowkwanyun, Reed was invited to give a talk, on Zoom, to the New York City and Philadelphia chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America. On the morning of the event, the D.S.A.s Afrosocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus formally demanded that the New York City chapter unendorse and remove all promotion for the event or that it be turned into a debate over Reeds class reductionism. The events organizers tried to reassure Reed that they could use Zoom to manage the discussion. But Reed, who had been accused of class essentialism, on and off, for decades, decided against it. Eventually there would be debates, in the Times and on podcasts and in private conversation, about whether Reed had been cancelled, and whether the episode suggested that even the socialist left was uninterested in an analysis that didnt center on race. To Reeds allies there was irony in this. Michaels told me, The Times was outraged that Adolph was cancelled by the D.S.A., but the Times had zero interest in publishing the views for which he was cancelled. (A spokesperson for the Times said, The suggestion that this reporting expressed outrage, and that Opinion editors rejected Reed and Walter Benn Michaelss essay because of it, is completely false.) But to Reed himself the situation was simpler: This is a handful of jerkoffs who had their Cheerios that fucking morning.

Next month, Reed will publish a book that is, in the context of his polemical writing, unusual. Called The South, it is an account of growing up in segregated Arkansas and New Orleans, and of navigating, as a young man, Jim Crows immediate aftermath. The book read to me as a memoir, a term he adamantly rejects. He told me my interest in the book made him regret writing it; he did not want to receive mainstream attention for his reminiscences. But the argument in the book is both pointed and characteristic of Reed. By assembling the quotidian details of his early life, Reed suggests that the everyday experience of Jim Crow was defined by the formal racial-apartheid regime, but that class and simple contingency played large roles, too. There is an unacknowledged offensive action here. In returning to the material of his childhood, Reed also engages a central history for many anti-racist writers, Jim Crow. He is in his own childhood, but on their turf.

Reed has a very specific story to tell. He was born into the Black middle classhis father was a political scientist who taught at Black collegesand raised largely in Creole New Orleans, one of the most urban settings in the South and one where racial categories tended to be more fluid. In his recollection, a phenomenon like racial passing was not so much an expression of internalized subjugation as an instrumental reaction to itan impulse evident in his own family when they sent their lightest-skinned member, his grandmother, to a notoriously racist bakery to buy beignets. In his neighborhood, he writes, there was a duplex in which both units were occupied by branches of the same family, bearing the same surname, one of which lived as Black and the other as white. He remembers Black and white men on one anothers front yards kibbitzing over radio broadcasts of baseball games. Reed recalls that, in ninth grade, he was caught shoplifting a bag of chips by the white couple who ran a corner store. The proprietors sat him down on the stoop, and to his great relief, he writes, talked to him more like concerned parents or relatives than as intimidating or hostile storekeepers. They told Reed that he seemed like a good kid, that they wouldnt call his parents or the police, but that if he tried this again he might find that other storekeepers were not so understanding.

Neighborliness did not necessarily extend to real acceptance. Many of those white people who were cordial in the neighborhoods everyday confines would snub or feign to not recognize their black neighbors when encountering them elsewhere, Reed writes. And the harshest aspects of the Jim Crow regime often could not be mediated at all. He writes, of an adolescent friend who was caught joyriding, sent to the notorious Angola prison, and was dead within a year, No intercession by his parents could save him. Even the gestures of neighborliness were always contingent, subject to changes in the political climate that served to extend white supremacys radar range. In his own neighborhood, an early post-Brown desegregation attempt at a local school brought police barricades and riot control dogs and left behind a blockbusting frenzy. As a teen-ager, Reed noticed the presence of Black social clubs, fraternities, and sororities, which, he writes, existed in part to distinguish their members from lower-class Blacks. We were all unequal, Reed writes, but some were more unequal and unprotected than others.

In the two decades that form the core of Reeds memoir, his experience of race changes. Reed grew up in the years before the Voting Rights Act; by his late twenties he was living in an Atlanta presided over by its first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Reed describes this period, the late nineteen-sixties and seventies, as one of uncertainty in racial mannersof flux in the order and the order in flux. In 1965, shortly after bus segregation ended, Reed, on a bus in Arkansas, saw a white driver try to move some Black college students to the back to make space for an elderly white couple; the students resisted, and Reed feared violence. About seven years later, Reed was driving with his family when a white police officer pulled them over on the side of a dark South Carolina road. They grew nervous, but the officer had just been confused by a political bumper sticker on the car calling for a boycott of Gulf Oil, and Reed, now a doctoral student at Atlanta University, wound up giving an impromptu lecture on post-colonial politics and resource extraction in Angola. When he writes of white supremacy in The South, he puts it in the past tense: White supremacy was as much a cover storyfor, as he later puts it, a specific order of political and economic poweras a concrete program.

In this slim book, one line in particular read to me like a manifesto: A danger, Reed writes, is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like allegory, its nuances and contingencies can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed. I asked Reed what he had in mind. He said, This wont come as a surprise but one thing that was on my mind was the 1619 Project. I mean that nothing has changed line is one I have found bemusing and exasperating. That project, he went on, wiped away any historical specificity, so that racism operated as an unchanging force. And so you get to say that the murder of Trayvon Martin or of George Floyd is the same as Emmett Till or of the slave patrols. Reed told me, I dont like the frame of the declining significance of race narrativeI didnt like it in the nineteen-seventies and I dont like it now, right? But racism is less and less capable of explaining manifest inequalities between Blacks and whites. Liberals, he said, wanted it both ways. Its a common refrain: I know race is a social construction, but Reed said. Well, theres no but. Its either a unicorn or its not a fucking unicorn.

Since roughly 2015, every part of politics has been pressured by the possibility of authoritarian developments on the right. When I reached Reed on Zoom in Philadelphia, he confessed that hed been feeling those pressures, too. For his Zoom background hed chosen a diagram of a mounting tsunami, which he said represented his fears of an imminent surge of authoritarianism and the retreat of American democracy. Ive basically been haunted by that image of drawback for a couple of months now, Reed told me. In the fall, he said, hed begun to doubt that the democracy would survive the 2022 midterm elections. That so many voices among the governing class and the corporate media had since expressed a similar alarm made him a little less panicked, without making him doubt that the situation is existential: Either the Biden Administration and congressional Dems begin to deliver material benefits to the American people, to the working-class majority, or the right, which seems pretty uniformly bent on imposing authoritarian rule, will succeed in expunging nominal democracy. He later e-mailed me that one possibility he foresaw was something like Biden running with the Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney on a national-unity ticket, which wouldnt resolve the contradictionsthe problems of mounting inequality and economic insecuritybut, in kicking the can down the road, could help buy time for the real working-class organizing that I think is the only way to turn the tide. (Later, he said, of Vice-President Kamala Harris, To be clear, Im not part of the tendency that sees Harris as a liability to Biden. He also seemed to have reconsidered the idea, saying, that it might cater to a supposed Republican constituency Im not even sure exists.)

Some of the things Reed said struck me as surprisingly bleak, coming so soon after the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaigns. I had imagined that Reed might take some comfort from the swelling young membership of the D.S.A., but instead he dismissed it, comparing it to the late-period Students for a Democratic Society, full of political nafs, and noting that Socialism was a somewhat vaporous concept at this point, anyway. It may sound odd, but where the hopefulness lies is in recognizing that, as the real left, we cant have any impact on anything significant in American politics, Reed told me. So we dont have to constrain our political thinking. To illustrate how far the left is from power, he said something Id heard him say before: The most significant left force in the Biden Administration on domestic policy is the asset managers of BlackRock, and on foreign policy its John Mearsheimer and the foreign-affairs crowd. Reed did not mention that these developmentsthat his ideological enemies in the Administration were pushing large amounts of social spending in the domestic sphere and retreat from forever wars overseasmight count, from another perspective, as a left-wing victory.

Reed seemed confident that American politics are turning away from him; this seemed less clear to me. It is possibly, but not definitely, true that authoritarianism is a nearing possibility, and possibly, but not definitely, true that a spending program that delivered material benefits to the working class, in Reeds term, would stave it off. Maybe most relevantly, it is possibly, but not definitely, true that anti-racism has become the essential progressive creed, even though conservative and contrarian media outlets insist that it has; in the past few months its presence in politics has faded, as Democrats have focussed on the lingering emergency of COVID and the economic projects of infrastructure and inflation.

What does seem more obviously true is that, at a moment of very high political stakes, it isnt clear what the Democratic Party will organize itself around. The Sanders campaigns shook liberalism without transforming it, Bidentacking always toward the center of his partyhas not exactly been a figure of change or a figure of retrenchment, and the Democrats have not been able to replicate the electoral success of Obamas high liberalism without Obama himself. In such a period, very basic questions come to the fore: how fixed or fluid racial categories are, and whether history has moved or is stuck in an unimprovable loop. In such a period, a Marxist factionalist might see both danger and opportunity, and write a gentle first-person book, speak to the mainstream press, and try to persuade people whom he might not ordinarily reach to see politics as he does.

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The Marxist Who Antagonizes Liberals and the Left - The New Yorker

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. New Yorks Democrat-controlled Legislature released the first look Sunday night at what the states proposed congressional district lines could look like for the next 10 years.

Staten Islands district, which it shares with part of Brooklyn, would shift from more conservative areas, like Dyker Heights and Bath Beach, to more liberal areas like Park Slope and Sunset Park, according to the map from the New York Legislative State Task Force on Demographic Research and Apportionment.

The district covering Staten Island, New Yorks 11th Congressional, has been one of the nations most closely watched. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/South Brooklyn) took over the seat last year after defeating former Rep. Max Rose in 2020 with 53.1% of the vote.

For most of the last decade, the seat was reliably Republican, but in 2018, Rose defeated former Republican Rep. Dan Donovan.

Rose, who grew up in Park Slope, has declared his candidacy for the 2022 election, and is expected to face off against fellow Democrats, Brittany Ramos-DeBarros and Dr. Komi Agoda-Koussema, in the June primary.

Map shows what New York's 11th Congressional District has look like since 2012. (Courtesy: LATFOR)

At the national level, the new statewide map could lead to Democratic gains in New Yorks House of Representatives delegation that would help offset their expected losses in states like Texas and Florida.

Locally and at the state level, Republican Party officials fired back at the map proposal calling it an effort to silence conservative voices in whats become an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

Anthony Reinhart, chairman of the Staten Island Republican Party, likened the map to cancel culture, due to Staten Island conservatives continuous lack of conformity with their liberal counterparts around the city.

We see this for precisely what it is - an attempt by those who brought us rising crime and high taxes to subvert the voices of Staten Islanders by tying our borough to [former Mayor Bill de Blasios] Park Slope. he said.

Clearly political shenanigans are at play to silence our voices. We will not be silenced. We will not be canceled. We will come out stronger than ever to re-elect Congresswoman Malliotakis.

New York Republican Party Chairman Nick Langworthy said the party is reviewing possible legal challenges to what he described as an effort to gerrymander the state. Gerrymandering is a political strategy in which district lines are drawn to benefit a particular group.

These maps are the most brazen and outrageous attempt at rigging the election to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker, he said.

Voters spoke loud and clear in rejecting their partisan power grab last year and in 2014, but Democrats are circumventing the will of the people. They cant win on the merits so theyre trying to win the election in a smoke-filled room rather than the ballot box.

A representative for the Staten Island Democratic Party did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication, and the state party has yet to issue a statement on the proposed lines that could be voted on as soon as this week.

State Senator Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), who chairs the legislative redistricting task force, told the New York Times that they did the best they could with a flawed system.

This is a very Democratic state, lets start there. Its not surprising that a fairly drawn map might lead to more Democrats getting elected, he said.

The task force will also redraw district lines for the State Assembly and Senate, but has yet to release those proposals on its website. City Council districts are drawn during a separate local process.

In 2014, New Yorkers passed a ballot proposal that created the New York Independent Redistricting Commission (NYIRC) in an effort to limit the politics involved with the process that takes place after every decennial U.S. Census.

However, the 10-member commission broke down on partisan lines, and failed to find a compromise on how district lines should be drawn. The group never even submitted a unified set of maps after a series of public testimony hearings around the state.

The process shifted to the Legislature earlier this month after lawmakers chose not to adopt any of the NYIRC-proposed maps, and for the first time in decades a single party, Democrats, have complete control over both of New Yorks legislative chambers and its governors mansion.

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Proposed NYC congressional map would shift S.I. district into more liberal parts of Brooklyn - SILive.com

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The federal government will also reintroduce its controversial Broadcasting Act update, known as Bill C-10, 'very soon.' They haven't said if any changes will be made

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The Liberal government is preparing to reboot its controversial broadcasting bill, the online streaming act, which it unsuccessfully attempted to pass last Parliament as Bill C-10, even as it plans within days totable legislation to force big social media platforms like Facebook and Google to share revenue with news publishers.

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Liberal government House Leader Mark Holland told reporters Monday that a bill for the streaming act, which would subject internet companies to government regulation much as broadcasters are, will be presented very soon. When asked about the news-compensation legislation, Holland said that you should expect to see this bill in the coming days.

The mandate letter for Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, released in December, directs him to introduce legislation to require digital platforms that generate revenues from the publication of news content to share a portion of their revenues with Canadian news outlets.

The letter said the legislation should follow the Australian approach, which imposes bargaining rules for publishers and online platforms. The bills biggest targets are Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and Google. Both companies strongly opposed the Australian law when it was introduced.

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The Broadcasting Act update, which sets up the CRTC to begin regulating online companies like Netflix, drew strong opposition in the last Parliament when the government removed an exemption for user-generated content. Critics charged that was a violation of free expression rights, and though the Liberals then limited the CRTCs power over social media content, that wasnt enough to alleviate free speech concerns.

While the government managed to pass the bill through the House of Commons at the last minute, with the support of the Bloc and NDP, C-10 hit a wall in the Senate when senators refused to fast-track it.

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The Conservatives have already signalled their opposition to its re-introduction. In a Jan. 19 letter to Rodriguez, Conservative heritage critic John Nater asked the government not to bring the legislation back. Bill C-10 is so deeply flawed and controversial that it would not be in the interests of Canadians to reintroduce it, Nater wrote.

Holland declined to say whether the re-introduced bill will include any changes to address free speech concerns. The minister will be speaking to that when it is presented in terms of any changes that might be present in the bill, he said.

The news compensation bill and the legislation previously known as C-10 were two parts of a trio of online regulation bills the Liberals promised to introduce within 100 days, following last falls federal election.

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The third piece of that is the online harms bill, aimed at terrorist content, content that incites violence, hate speech, intimate images shared non-consensually and child sexual exploitation. But the draft legislation was lambasted in a consultation by experts, Google and even research librarians, who warned the government in written submissions the plan would result in the blocking of legitimate content and lead to censorship.

The mandate letter for Rodriguez then told him to continue working on developing that legislation, noting it should be reflective of the feedback received during the recent consultations.

When he was asked whether that legislation will also be introduced shortly, Holland said Monday there will be more information regarding online harms very soon.

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Liberals to reboot controversial C-10, along with bill forcing digital giants to pay for news - National Post

The minister is even more scathing, describing you as a fraud and a complete psycho. Does this exchange surprise you? And what do you think that it tells us?

Mr Morrison responded cautiously to the surprise question.

Well, I dont know who youre referring to or the basis of what youve put to me. But I obviously dont agree with it, and I dont think that is my record, Mr Morrison responded.

Journalist Peter van Onselen during Prime Minister Scott Morrisons address to the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

After the alleged exchange was revealed, Ms Berejiklian said she did not remember the messages.

I understand there has been some commentary today concerning myself and the PM. I have no recollection of such messages, she said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

Let me reiterate my very strong support for Prime Minister Morrison and all he is doing for our nation during these very challenging times. I also strongly believe he is the best person to lead our nation for years to come.

Van Onselen said Scott Morrison will be looking at his cabinet ministers, wondering which one of them the former NSW premier spoke to, suggesting the unnamed Liberal could be one of Mr Morrisons close federal colleagues.

The NSW Liberal party has been embroiled in a series of factional disputes, with the state executive last week rejecting a motion that would have used special powers to endorse sitting MPs and protect government members from preselection challenges.

Its not the first time the allegedly frosty relationship between the Liberal leaders has been exposed. Last year The Sydney Morning Herald reported Ms Berejiklian went as far as to tell a colleague Mr Morrisons behaviour was evil after the Prime Ministers office phoned political reporters in a background effort to discredit her over the vaccine rollout last year.

But Ms Berejiklian said, dont believe what you read and said she was on good terms with Mr Morrison.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison during his address to the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on Tuesday.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Late last year, the Prime Minister led an appeal for the former state premier to run for the federal seat of Warringah, telling reporters in Sydney at the time shed be a great candidate for the independent-held seat. Ms Berejiklian ruled out the idea days later.

Ms Berejiklian stepped down from her role as premier after the states corruption watchdog announced she was to be the subject of an inquiry.

A survey of voters published last week indicates the Coalition could be in trouble ahead of the upcoming federal election. Primary vote support for the Coalition has fallen from 39 to 34 per cent from November to January. The federal election is expected to be held in May, the announcement of which is expected in March.

The primary vote results in the exclusive Resolve Political Monitor showed an increase in Labors core support from 32 to 35 per cent, putting Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese in a strong position ahead of the election.

Another poll conducted for The Australian showed Mr Morrisons approval rating has fallen to its lowest level since March 2020, when he faced attacks over his handling of the bushfire crisis.

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A complete psycho: Claim that Gladys Berejiklian and Liberal slammed PM in texts - Sydney Morning Herald

The Liberal Democrats are targeting Tory MPs representing the Blue Wall in the Southern shires demanding they submit a letter of no confidence in Boris Johnson or face being sacked by the public.

Senior Conservatives including former Prime Minister Theresa May, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove and the Justice Secretary Dominic Raab are among 54 MPs singled out by the campaign.

The seats have been selected because Savanta ComRes polling conducted by the Lib Dems shows that a third (32 per cent) of those who voted Conservative at the last election are now less likely to support a Conservative candidate if they back Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister.

It comes after the Tories lost to the Lib Dems in Chesham and Amersham over its planning reforms, and the ultra safe seat of North Shropshire following the sleaze scandal.

The campaign will see letters sent to each of the 54 Tory MPs, telling them: The power is in your hands. Either you sack Boris or the public sack you.

Digital ads will also be targeted at the MPs, with a mocked up letter of no confidence waiting to be signed and sent to 1922 Committee chair Sir Graham Brady.

The letter from Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper reads: As an MP representing a constituency in the heart of the Blue Wall, I know just how much anger there is at Boris Johnsons antics.

You are currently supporting a Prime Minister who shows utter contempt for the office he holds. You are dragging the British public along in this soap opera and causing pain for all those who lost loved ones in the pandemic.

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Liberal Democrats target Blue Wall Tory MPs calling on them to sack Boris, or be sacked by public - iNews