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OTTAWA -- MPs on the House of Commons finance committee have heard a plea from the country's farmers that the government's plans to rewrite tax laws shouldn't make it difficult, again, to pass the family farm from parents to children.

Farmers and small business owners have for years asked the government to address an inequity in federal law that saw hundreds of thousands in extra taxes heaped on families that wanted to sell their company to another generation of owners.

A Conservative private member's bill passed last month rewrote part of the Income Tax Act so business owners could pass on companies to their children or relatives at the same tax rate as if they were selling to a stranger.

The Liberals now say they plan to rewrite parts of the new rules to deal with potential loopholes that could lead to tax evasion.

Speaking to a House of Commons committee Tuesday, Mary Robinson, a P.E.I. farmer and president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, urged MPs to make sure the Liberals' promised amendments wouldn't reintroduce the tax inequities that the bill, known as C-208, addressed.

"We believe the targets for future amendments can be addressed while maintaining this access for Canadian farm families. However, we believe this can only be assured through dialogue with farmers and farm advisers," Robinson said.

"The potential for unintended barriers is significant unless informed by those with direct experiencing managing farm succession and financial planning."

First announced last month, the government's plan to do its own rewrite of the tax laws created a heap of confusion, drew the ire of Conservative MPs, and ultimately led to Tuesday's rare summer meeting of the finance committee.

One day after the bill got parliamentary approval, the Finance Department announced the government would introduce amendments and apply the rules on family business sales starting Jan. 1, 2022.

Business groups expressed concern that the department was delaying implementing the new rules that left owners and families caught up in a legislative limbo.

Parliamentary law clerk Philippe Dufresne told the finance committee that the bill officially became law when it received royal assent in late June even though it didn't contain a specific coming-into-force date.

He said the government's announcement of a possible delay was surprising and unseen in modern history. He noted it is more common to see the government apply proposed tax rules before they become law on the assumption that they'll gain parliamentary approval.

Liberals and Finance officials told MPs that there was nothing out of the ordinary in what the government announced, although it might have just been misunderstood.

They pointed to a statement Monday evening from Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland that said C-208 was the law of the land.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture voiced their pleasure that government had cleared up confusion and would help with succession planning.

Freeland's statement, hours before the committee meeting, also signalled the government's plan to introduce amendments to close loopholes that could help people avoid paying taxes.

She cited the possibility of converting dividends to capital gains to take advantage of the lower tax rate without any actual transfer of the business between family members.

Any changes would apply no earlier than Nov. 1.

"As finance minister, it's my job to be sure everyone in Canada pays their fair share, and to close loopholes which permit tax evasion," Freeland told reporters in Longueuil, Que.

"What we will do is consult widely with stakeholders, publish some draft legislation, some draft amendments to C-208 designed to close those loopholes."

Opposition parties noted during the committee hearing that the government could have proposed amendments to C-208 while it was being debated, and argued Freeland's stance now was spurred by a parliamentary hearing on the matter.

The committee also decided to invite Freeland to testify before the committee on the issue within the next two weeks.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 20, 2021.

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Liberals, MPs urged not to unwind easing of tax rules on sale of family businesses - CTV News

Roger Melanson (via Zoom)

The provincial Liberals say New Brunswicks health care system is on life support and the Higgs government needs to resuscitate it now.

In a virtual news conference on Tuesday via Zoom, the official opposition says the shortage of health care professionals is worsening at an alarming rate.

Interim Liberal leader Roger Melanson says existing health care professionals need to be retained and more need to be recruited.

Whats happening now is because conditions are so challenging and theres such a lack of resources that people are burning out. And its putting even more pressure on the people who are working in the system.

Melanson says the province needs to put more into the health care system.

The provincial government needs to invest some money. We need to have competitive salaries. We need to have better working conditions. And we need to have these people go to work every day and enjoy what they do.

Melanson says health care staff are burning out amid challenging working conditions and a lack of resources.

In February 2020, the Higgs government tried to implement a plan to close emergency rooms overnight at several rural hospitals. Thanks to public outcry and the Liberal Partys threats to bring down their minority government, they cancelled this decision, added Melanson.

Now after a year and a half of inaction by the Higgs government, we are seeing hospitals at maximum capacity, with some forced to reduce their emergency room hours, and ambulance offload delay times increasing rapidly. This is beyond unacceptable.

The Department of Health issued a statement in response on Tuesday afternoon through communications director Bruce Macfarlane.

New Brunswicks health care system has been facing significant challenges for many years. The Department of Health is working to address those challenges, with help from the regional health authorities, industry stakeholders, and communities across the province.

In recent months, the Department of Health has organized a series of public consultations, which offered New Brunswickers the opportunity to share their ideas and vision for a more responsive and effective health-care system.

Despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department has been successful at addressing some of those health care challenges. It has cut the number of patients waiting longer than a year for hip or knee replacement surgery by 50 per cent, with continued efforts underway to ensure no one will wait longer than a year by the end of March 2022.

Meaningful change is also coming to how the province delivers mental health services. As part of its five-year plan to overhaul the existing system, work is being done to improve the quality and accessibility of services.

Last fall, the province launched rapid access addiction and mental health services, offering walk-in and rapid appointment services, on a trial basis in Campbellton. More than 300 individuals have already benefited from these services, cutting the average wait time for care from four to five months down to a week or less. There are plans to expand this programming to other communities this fall.

In addition, since June, the department has launched three new nurse practitioner clinics in Saint John, Moncton and Fredericton. The 18 nurse practitioners working in these clinics have already taken on more than 5,000 patients waiting for a primary care provider from the Patient Connect New Brunswick list.

Efforts continue to recruit more nurses and physicians, though the department understands that jurisdictions everywhere are struggling with staffing shortages. Last week, tentative agreements were reached with two of the three nurses collective bargaining units, and contract talks are still underway with other health care units.

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N.B. Liberals Say Health Care Is On Life Support - 91.9 The Bend

Aftershocks from The Bulwark's recent publication of a 12,000-word hit job on a right-wing think tank "What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?" continue to rock the conservative intellectual world. The latest tremor has been felt at Powerline, where Reagan biographer Steven Hayward provocatively asks, "What the Hell Happened to Bill Kristol?" Kristol, you see, is a founder and leading force behind The Bulwark (where I participate in a weekly podcast). If he was willing to publish an extended polemic against a leading institution of the intellectual right, can Kristol even be considered a conservative anymore?

To which I would reply: What if Bill Kristol has been a liberal all along?

How could it be that the man who served as Dan Quayle's chief of staff, who founded and edited for two decades one of the leading conservative magazines in the country, who was a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and who was the public face for neoconservative ideology from the mid-1990s on how could this man have always been a liberal? Answering the questionrequires a brief detour into history.

Bill Kristol's father, Irving Kristol, became one of the original neocons during the 1970s. Until that point, he and his ideological compatriots had considered and called themselves Cold War liberals. But by the time of George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972, they'd become convinced that the Democrats were heading left on foreign policy, crime, and cultural questions. That led them to begin allying with Republicans. By the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the partisan shift was complete.

This new alliance with conservatives persisted even after the Democrats had tracked back to the center during the mid-1990s. Why? Inertia, mostly. The neocons had grown used to working with and reaching compromises with conservatives in order to advance the things that mattered most to them. And for Irving's son Bill, what mattered most was developing a "neo-Reaganite foreign policy" for the post-Cold War world. This would be a foreign policy in which the U.S. used its unmatched military might and geopolitical preeminence to challenge tyrants and spread liberal democracy around the globe.

During the administration of George W. Bush, that sounded conservative. But since Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the Republican Party? Not so much. With the GOP expressing open hostility to democracy promotion abroad (and even at home), Kristol has now undertaken his father's rightward migration in reverse.

But does that signal a fundamental change? Or merely a pragmatic response to altered circumstances? I'd say the latter. Bill Kristol has always been a hawkish, idealistic liberal. What's changed is which party is best suited to serve as that disposition's natural home.

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Were the neocons liberals all along? - The Week Magazine

DALLAS, TX If being "woke" is such a good thing, why do people hate it so much?

As loosely defined, woke refers to a state of conscious awareness about injustice, particularly of the racial variety.

Revolving around that, though, is a constellation of ideas about how to conduct oneself in public discourse and signifiers to let those nearby know that you've reached a state of enlightenment.

For example, say the woke, the term "slaves" is considered antiquated when referring to those people deprived of their freedom before Juneteenth. "Enslaved people" is now the operative term.

When someone pointed out that former First Lady Michelle Obama has recently used the term "slaves," woke people will tell you that such things are permissible if you're the part of the minority who such a word might "trigger."

People who don't conform to heterosexual norms may therefore describe themselves as "queer." But calling someone queer, or "a queer" is absolutely triggering.

The only way for a person to know even if they're trying to stay abreast of current jargon is to apologize immediately if you've triggered someone, and hope that you can always remember that non-binary people prefer the pronouns "them" and "they," even though historically those words were only used in the plural.

And that's as it should be. Everyone deserves the right to be referred to in terms that they believe afford them basic dignity. But everyday language hasn't seen such upheaval since African-Americans let it be known at the end of the '60s that they'd rather be known as Black than those terms in use before the civil rights movement got underway.

In Texas today, Gov. Greg Abbott seeks to punish social media for censoring completely unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories online while at the same time making sure no traces of Critical Race Theory (which, although never actually taught, only highlights verifiable historical events) creep into the school curriculum. Both are targets in his current special session agenda.

And here's the real problem: Policing people's speech does not change their beliefs, and we've been through this before when the Berkeley Free Speech Movement sprang up in the wake of the communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

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In that moment, liberals decided that silencing opposing viewpoints was antithetical to rigorous debate, and after multiple protests and arrests pressing for free speech, the faculty at Berkeley voted overwhelmingly to support their students.

The working theory was that it was anyone's right as an American to say whatever they wanted, and someone else could challenge those opinions while receiving the same amount of respect and time to do so.

Now, with QAnon and hives of conspiracy theorists breeding in online isolation, there's freedom to claim that Democrats are pedophiles and a secret cabal of liberals are conspiring to take over the country. But, because membership in these online groups is tightly controlled, there's no public square to challenge such absurdities before they take hold, and these sites become hothouses that allow malignant extremism to flourish unchecked by facts.

Woke liberals have come to believe that if you shame people for using the wrong terminology, that will somehow change a bigot's thought patterns. They don't. They simply drive people underground into the company of those who welcome such nonsense, and their hothouse gets just that much hotter.

During the Free Speech era, you could be a rabid segregationist like Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a militant Muslim minister like Malcolm X, a radical Yippie like Abbie Hoffman or an American Nazi like George Lincoln Rockwell, and you got a chance to run your mouth in public without being muzzled or told you'd "triggered" someone.

Ideas could stood or fell on their own merits. Now, thanks to the internet, we only talk to people we already agree with, or people who hide what they think in fear of being called out for their biases. And as the saying goes, "If two people are in a room, and they share the same ideas, one of them is unnecessary."

The great blues guitarist Buddy Guy put it very well when he talked about having moved from Mississippi to Chicago in search of fame and fortune at the dawn of the civil rights era. In describing how urban racism differed from the rural variety he grew up with, Guy said, "I look at it like rattlesnakes."

He explained, "there's poisonous snakes everywhere, but a rattlesnake will make a noise to let you know to get the hell out of the way. Other poisonous snakes show up in other places where you don't expect to find them, and they don't warn you. They show you."

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Liberals Began The 60s Pushing Free Speech. Now Theyre Woke - Patch.com

In an election-style campaign stop in B.C., Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said Ottawa is going to triple the number of parents and grandparents Canadians can sponsor to Canada in 2021 to 30,000.

Flanked by two Liberal colleagues in Surrey, where South Asians make up almost 60 per cent of the population, the Ontario MP made an in-person appearance at a community centre to praise the importance of family reunification, a big issue for newcomer communities.

Mendicino was quick to remind the audience how the Liberals have raised the annual quota of the parents and grandparents program which allows Canadians and permanent residents to sponsor their parents to the country since it took over from the Conservative government in 2015, when the intake was capped at 5,000 a year.

We are going to welcome under it to a record level of 30,000. Lets not gloss over that fact, in 2015, when we took reigns over from the last Conservative government, they were at just 5,000. We are now at six times that rate under this program, he said.

And worse, they put a two-year pause on the parent and grandparent program when there wasnt even a pandemic.

So my message to the community is: continue to see the parent and grandparent program as an opportunity to reunite with your loved ones, to reunite with your families. This is a government that believes in you, believes in family reunification, and we will deliver on these commitments.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government scaled back its 2020 intake under the program to 10,000, half the level in the previous year. Now, with speculation that an election call is coming, the Liberals are promising to reverse that.

Every immigrant that I go to, this is what Im hearing, Parents and grandparents play a major role in the success of new immigrants, said Sukh Dhaliwal, MP for SurreyNewton, citing other immigrant-friendly policies his party has rolled out since coming into power.

Through a random draw, the immigration department will select 30,000 applicants from a pool of potential sponsors who have already submitted an expression of interest to sponsor their parents and grandparents from abroad to be permanent residents in Canada.

Selected individuals will be invited to submit the full applications over two weeks, starting the week of Sept. 20, through a new digital platform created to speed up and simplify the process.

Citing the financial challenges faced by Canadians during the pandemic, Mendicino said sponsors income requirement for the 2020 tax year will be reduced. For instance, to bring in two people, a sponsor only needed to make $32,270 last year, down from $41,007 in 2019.

Incomes from regular employment insurance benefits and temporary COVID-19 benefits such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit will be counted toward their 2020 income.

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Liberals promise to boost number of parents and grandparents sponsored to Canada - StCatharinesStandard.ca