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1. NDP expects Liberals to honour spending pledges in budget, Tories call for restraint  Coast Reporter
2. Liberals set to unveil 2022 federal budget that promises billions in new spending - constructconnect.com  Daily Commercial News
3. John Ivison: For these big-spending Liberals, this is what a prudent budget looks like  National Post
4. Budget 2022: Feds eye growth with $31B in net new spending | Globalnews.ca  Global News
5. Canada's Liberals to Unveil Budget as Inflation Fears Mount  U.S. News & World Report
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NDP expects Liberals to honour spending pledges in budget, Tories call for restraint - Coast Reporter

In homage to my friend Todd Gitlin, who died on February 5, Ive been rereading his wise and prescient book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. I read the book not long after it came out in 1987 and had not looked at it again since. It is even more powerful than I remember it, and profoundly relevant today.

I know of no other book that displays such insight about the fraught era that began my own political lifetime and contoured the decades that followed, especially the awkward relationship between liberals and radicals who resent each other and need each other. Only occasionally do radicals and liberals make their uneasy coalition work, as in the great labor gains of the 1930s and the epic civil rights achievements of the 1960s. We desperately need such an alliance now, if Joe Biden and the Democrats are to keep fascism at bay and restore the promise of American democracy.

This magazine has always stood at the intersection of liberal and radicalthe left edge of the possible, in Michael Harringtons splendid phrase. At the beginning of his administration, liberals did not have great hopes for Joe Biden, and radicals were openly contemptuous. But Biden has turned out to be the most progressive president since FDR, both in his aspirations and in his appointees, rejecting the fatal delusions of neoliberalism that so undermined Clinton and Obama, and sapped the faith of working people in Democrats. Its even more remarkable given Bidens lack of a reliable working majority in Congress.

More from Robert Kuttner

The Prospects role in the Biden era has been to put forth ideas for progressive policies, many of which can be achieved by executive action; to investigate the corporate undertow that continues to stunt the promise of the political moment; to issue warnings when the Biden administration seems at risk of being captured; and to dispense praise when it is earned.

Some in the further-left press can manage only attacks on Biden, as if he could somehow conjure 51 or 60 votes in the Senate if only he were more boldly radical. This stance seems less than helpful, and it brings me back to the wisdom of Todd Gitlin.

Todd was a couple of years ahead of me in college. He went off to Harvard in 1959, and I began Oberlin in 1961. That was the dawn of an era when long-deferred reforms seemed possible, and that faith kindled the idealism of a whole generation. The early part of the 60s were Gitlins Years of Hope.

Our generation saw in the civil rights movement and its uneasy alliance with Lyndon Johnson the redemption of a promise deferred since Lincoln. We saw in the Great Society the completion of the New Deal. Todd Gitlin, at age 20, was elected the second president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963.

Looking back a quarter-century later, he writes as both a participant and a critic, but as a compassionate critic. Early SDS, inspired by the promise of the moment, was more left-liberal than radical. Read the SDS founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, today, and it sounds almost Jeffersonian.

At Harvard in February 1962, Todd helped organize a Washington protest to call for a nuclear test ban treaty. Such was the faith in the promise of the Kennedy administration and the power of reason that the young protesters asked for and got meetings with senior administration officials. Todd recalls: President Kennedy, with his fine eye for public relations, dispatched a liveried White House butler with a huge urn of hot coffee to the demonstrators picketing in the snowwho proceeded to debate whether drinking the Presidents coffee amounted to selling out.

This was the era of hope. The civil rights movement of the Freedom Rides and lunch counter sit-ins were doing nothing more than holding America to its ideals, and the Kennedy administration to its campaign promises. Gitlin writes:

At its luminous best, what the movement did was stamped with imagination. The sit-in, for example, was a powerful tactic because the act itself was unexceptionable. What were the Greensboro students doing, after all, but sitting at a lunch counter, trying to order a hamburger or a cup of coffee? They did not petition the authorities, who, in any case, would have paid no heed; in strict Gandhian fashion, they asserted that they had a right to sit at the counter by sitting at it, and threw the burden of disruption onto the upholders of white supremacy. Instead of saying that segregation ought to stop, they acted as if segregation no longer existed.

I quote that passage at length both because it displays Todds gift for insight and language, and because it captures the eras sense of hope. In the early 1960s, the movement could make a bargain with the Johnson administration to shift from confrontational direct action to the most apple-pie activity of all, registering to vote. In return, the administration promised to defend that right. But it took more violence on the part of the sheriffs, and more deaths and beatings, before Johnson threatened to send in troops and finally persuaded Congress to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But by then, as Gitlin painfully recounts, the years of hope were past, wrecked by Vietnam and by Johnsons efforts not to alienate the white South. The radicals came into the fateful Democratic Convention of 1964 in Atlantic City thinking they could still work with the liberals. The ingenious SDS slogan was Part of the Way with LBJ, meaning that they were with LBJ on the Great Society but not on Vietnam; and that even the Great Society would only take us part of the way. (I still have the button. I was there with the Young Democrats, smuggling floor passes to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.)

It all fell apart with the conventions refusal to seat the MFDP, and the radicals of that era never quite trusted the liberals again. The deepening Vietnam catastrophe only deepened the mistrust. The hope of working within the system seemed briefly to be restored when anti-war activists forced Johnson to abdicate, portending the nomination of Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy. But that aspiration died with Kennedys murder.

The movement itself fragmented, into Black nationalists and integrationists; peaceful protesters and makers of Molotov cocktails and bombs. Some of the more extreme fragments of the left not only blew themselves up; they blew up the movement. In the election of 1968, most people I knew could not bring themselves to vote for Hubert Humphrey. I voted for Eldridge Cleaver. There followed Richard Nixon and half a century of neoliberalism and then Trumpism. Every New Left veteran I ask now wishes they had voted for Humphrey.

The promise of the political moment was destroyed, mostly by the mulish stupidity of the Cold War corporate liberals, but also by the miscalculation and grandiosity of some on the left. Gitlin writes, One of the core narratives of the Sixties is the story of the love-hate relations of radicals and liberals. To oversimplify: Radicals needed liberals, presupposed them, borrowed rising expectations from them, were disappointed by themradically disappointed then concluded that liberalssuspicious, possessive, and quellers of troublewere the enemy.

Today, half a century later, the stakes are even higher and there is no margin for error. Thirty years ago, in the preface to a new 1992 edition of The Sixties, Todd Gitlin was again way ahead of his time. He warnedand this may be painful to read:

Movements that seek to represent underrepresented people too often harden into self-seeking. The result is balkanization fueled by a narcissism of small differences, each group claiming the high ground of principle, squandering moral energy in behalf of what has come to be called identity politicsin which the principal purpose of organizing is to express a distinct social identity rather than achieve the collective good. In this radical extension of the politics of the late Sixties, difference and victimization are prized, ranked against the victimization of other groups. We crown our good with victimhood. Ouch. Todd wrote that, not as some kind of cultural neoconservative, but as the best kind of thoughtful and fearless radical.

Comparing the condescending white supremacist inquisition of Ketanji Brown Jackson with the civil rights hopes of the early and mid-1960s, when most of America, including more than half the Republicans in the Senate, favored voting rights, is to feel that we have gone backwards. Whats at stake is not just the extension of full democracy to Black Americans but democracy at all. We simply do not have the luxury of fragmentation and mistrust. To save democracy and return to a path of possible progressive reform, we need the broadest coalition possible.

There will be a public memorial to Todd Gitlin this coming Saturday at Columbia University.

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The Dance of Liberals and Radicals - The American Prospect

The misplaced shock that Putin would act as so many past leaders acted, that he would try to take what he wants just because he can, reflects liberalisms long work remaking not just what we believe to be moral but what we believe to be normal. At its best and sometimes at its worst, liberalism makes the past into a truly foreign land, and that can turn those who still inhabit it into anachronisms in their own time. But liberals deceive themselves when they believe that that happens only to liberalisms enemies. It also happens to liberalisms would-be friends.

You can see this clearly in Ukraine in Histories and Stories, a collection edited by Volodymyr Yermolenko. Theres a particular poignancy in reading this book now, as it was released in 2019, in the interregnum between Russias annexation of Crimea and its current invasion of Ukraine. This is the recent past, but it, too, feels foreign.

In this collection of essays, written by Ukrainian intellectuals, Ukraine is not a darling of the West; it is a country that aspires to be part of the West and struggles against the indifference and even contempt of those it admires. Throughout the book, the Wests ignorance of Ukraine is a theme, with author after author recalling futile efforts to try to interest Europeans in their experience and history and possibilities. We, Ukrainians, are in love with Europe, Europe is in love with Russia, while Russia hates both us and Europe, the novelist Yuri Andrukhovych writes.

The authors see Ukraine as a nation trapped painfully in a state of becoming, neither truly modern nor confidently traditionalist. Andrij Bondar, a Ukrainian essayist, offers a tragicomic list of what Ukraine lacks, including trust in institutions, the culture of comic books, the Protestant work ethic and Calvados or any other apple spirits. But there is also much it has, including a generally highly tolerant society, the ability to consolidate and unite efforts to attain acommon goal, elements of democracy and a talent for enduring hardship. Today it is clear that these were the things that mattered.

The authors also see that Europe is not all that it claimed to be. For us, citizens of Ukraine, Europe still looks like the Europe of the late 20th century, while it has become absolutely different today, writes Vakhtang Kebuladze, a Ukrainian philosopher. Iunderstand this, of course, and it hurts when Isee the actions of Putins European right-wing and left-wing friends. Icertainly do not like this Europe.

Prophetically, Kebuladze saw that Western renewal might lie in attending to the experience of those struggling toward liberalism, not those comfortably ensconced in it. Europeans could look at themselves through the eyes of those citizens of Ukraine who came to Maidan for the sake of the European future of their country, those who are dying in the east of our country while protecting it from Russian invasion and those who are slowly dying in Russian prisons sent there on trumped-up charges, he writes. Will you then perhaps like yourselves? Or will you see away to overcome something that you do not like?

The anti-liberals Rose profiles all believed that liberalism prescribed a life without sacrifice, an age when individual contentment reigned supreme and collective struggle disappeared. This was not true then, and it is not true now. What they missed is what liberalism actually believes: that there is a collective identity to be found in collective betterment, that making the future more just than the past is a mission as grand as any offered by antiquity.

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Opinion | The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means - The New York Times

David Kilgour, former Liberal cabinet minister, speaks to reporters during a news conference on Parliament Hill on July 6, 2006.DAVE CHAN/The Canadian Press

David Kilgours trips abroad as Canadas secretary of state for Africa and Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s were a chance to advance human rights abroad and, occasionally, reconnect with old friends.

On one such visit to Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, he stopped in at the official residence of Canadas ambassador, John Schram, with whom he had studied at the University of Torontos law school in the 1960s. Everything was going fine until Mr. Kilgour noticed the collection of photos Mr. Schram had displayed in the residence, including those of him presenting his credentials to officials representing the states to which he was accredited.

Because Mr. Schram was also Canadas ambassador to Sudan, these photos included one of Mr. Schram and Sudans then-president Omar al-Bashir. Mr. Bashir has since been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes related to Sudans military campaign in the countrys Darfur region. Even at the time of Mr. Kilgours visit, around 2000, Mr. Bashirs government had been accused of human rights abuses, including in a civil war that pitted Khartoum against the rebel Sudan Peoples Liberation Army in the south of the country.

Mr. Kilgour knew all about these allegations. Mr. Schram says Mr. Kilgour had wanted to visit Sudan during that trip but couldnt which may be why his eyes lingered on the photo of Canadas ambassador and Sudans dictator.

He was really upset that I had a picture of me presenting my credentials to such a a tyrant is what I think he called him, Mr. Schram recalls.

David Kilgour was a crown prosecutor in Northern Alberta in the 1970s.Courtesy of the Family

Mr. Schram was not really surprised. Mr. Kilgour, he says, was just as outspoken in law school, where he was guided by his principles rather than a desire to curry favour. Very internationally famous professors complained about David in public because he would put them straight if they interpreted laws differently and to the disadvantage of people, he says.

Its an approach Mr. Kilgour, who died on April 5 of a rare pulmonary fibrosis in his Ottawa home at the age of 81, carried into politics as well. He was a member of Parliament for nearly 27 years, representing the same Edmonton riding (subject to constituency boundary changes) first as a Progressive Conservative, then as a Liberal, before retiring as an Independent in 2006.

He was kicked out of the Conservative caucus in 1990 because of his opposition to the goods and services tax. He quit the Liberals in 2005. According to a CBC story at the time, Mr. Kilgour said his decision to break with the Liberals under then-Prime minister Paul Martin was a cumulative thing. I have about 10 issues I disagree fundamentally with the party on.

These included what Mr. Kilgour described then as inaction to address the crisis in Darfur. He also opposed the Liberals same-sex marriage legislation (Mr. Kilgour believed same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual ones but did not think such unions should be called marriages), and he was embarrassed by revelations about the sponsorship scandal, which he famously said made Canada look like a northern banana republic.

According to Irwin Cotler, minister of justice under Mr. Martin and Mr. Kilgours Liberal caucus colleague, partisanship didnt exist for Mr. Kilgour.

I rarely met a more principled parliamentarian who was involved for the sake of the common good, never with regard to any personal interest always doing that which was right, always doing that which was good, always being there for everybody else and being involved in all the great and good causes.

He was a role model, not only of what a parliamentarian can and should be and was, but also really a role model for the way he lived by his principles in all respects modest, unassuming, but a person of real moral courage and moral clarity. Something we sorely miss in these days.

David William Kilgour was born in Winnipeg on Feb. 18, 1941. His parents, Mary Sophia (ne Russell) Kilgour and David Eckford Kilgour, were wealthy and raised him and his siblings, Donald and Geills, in comfort.

Among the summer jobs Mr. Kilgour had while studying economics at the University of Manitoba was one with Frontier College, working with Portuguese migrants on a railway steel gang in northern Ontario and teaching them English in the evenings.

I guess I felt like I had to give a lot back, because Ive sure been given a lot, he said in an interview for this obituary, two days before his death.

Mr. Kilgours parents gave him a trip to Europe as a graduation present in 1962. He travelled with his friend Monte Black (George Montegu Black III, older brother of newspaper tycoon Conrad Black), and on their way the two stopped in Montreal where they had dinner with Mr. Kilgours sister, Geills, and her date, John Turner, then campaigning for election as a Liberal MP. Mr. Turner wasnt surprised to learn Mr. Black was a staunch Conservative, Mr. Kilgour remembered, but he was disappointed to discover his dates brother was. (The two got married anyway.)

Now, why was I Conservative? I guess it had a lot to do with John Diefenbaker, Mr. Kilgour said. I was a kid on the Prairies who was very blown away by John Diefenbaker.

Mr. Kilgours first tried to get elected in 1968. He ran in the riding of Vancouver Centre and lost. His first success came in 1979 when he ran in Edmonton in the election that saw Conservative leader Joe Clark become prime minister.

David William Kilgour was born in Winnipeg on Feb. 18, 1941.DAVE CHAN/The Canadian Press

Mr. Kilgour, along with his wife, Laura Scott Kilgour, and their growing family moved into Skyridge, a tiny community in Gatineau Park, across the Ottawa River from Parliament. Rick Higgins, a neighbour from that time, describes a close-knit group of neighbours who went Christmas carolling together and held an annual Skyridge Soapbox Derby race that involved contestants pushing each other across a finish line in wheelbarrows.

The neighbourhood was a bit of an oasis from politics, but when Mr. Higginss elderly mother came to visit from Australia, Mr. Kilgour promised to show her around the Parliament Buildings. Mr. Kilgour told her that because it was the lunch hour the prime minister was unlikely to be in his office, so he could show her that, too. The pair were wandering through Joe Clarks office when he returned to find them there nonplussed, according to Mr. Higgins.

Mr. Kilgour was elected three more times as a Progressive Conservative. Mr. Cotler, then a McGill University law professor, says he got to know Mr. Kilgour at this time because the MP founded and chaired a parliamentary committee for Soviet Jewry and did crucial if underappreciated work.

If you look at the galaxy of those involved in the struggle of Soviet Jewry, you might not see his name with the prominence and impact that he had, but he was there, always in the trenches, Mr. Cotler says.

Mr. Kilgours move to the Liberal Party allowed him to pursue further his work on international human rights. After working as secretary of state for Africa and Latin America, in 2002 he was made secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific. He was generous by nature not by political calculation to help people and causes, remembers Elliot Tepper, a political scientist at Carleton University who worked with Mr. Kilgour on files related to Asia.

Shortly after Mr. Kilgour joined the Liberals, the family moved to Rockcliffe Park, an affluent neighbourhood east of Ottawas downtown core, where they became neighbours of Elizabeth May, the future leader of the Green Party. The Kilgours daughters would occasionally babysit Elizabeth Mays daughter. Ms. May once received a last-minute invitation when her daughter was three or four. Bring her over, Ms. May recalls Mr. Kilgour saying. The girls will be home soon. They werent, and Mr. Kilgour probably knew they wouldnt be. He looked after Ms. Mays daughter himself for several hours.

Mr. Kilgour didnt run in the 2006 federal election, but his departure from party politics wasnt much of a break from public life.

With Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas, he published a report accusing China of harvesting organs from members of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in that country. China denied the allegations. He campaigned on behalf of Chinese Uyghurs, a persecuted ethnic and religious minority. A strong Christian, he promoted interfaith fellowship. He championed the causes of refugees, political prisoners and vulnerable dissidents the world over, co-operating in recent years with both Ms. May and Mr. Cotler. Ms. May describes him as a crusader. Mr. Cotler says he was at the forefront of combatting the resurgence of global authoritarianism.

Mr. Kilgour leaves his wife, Ms. Kilgour; his children, Margot Kilgour, Eileen Kilgour, Dave Kilgour, Hilary Kilgour and Tierra Baker; and six grandchildren.

In recent weeks, even as his health worsened, he continued to write, advocate and engage with those who sought his assistance. Eventually, Ms. Kilgour was forced to intervene on his behalf, explaining that Mr. Kilgour was too sick to respond himself. Asked shortly before he died of what in his life he was most proud, Mr. Kilgour said it was trying to help people.

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Principled MP David Kilgour split from the Conservatives then from the Liberals - The Globe and Mail

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The budget contains no details except to say that more is to come this fall, but tax experts say this is a very interesting move by the Liberals to address inequalities in the tax system

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OTTAWA Over one quarter of Canadians who made over $400,000 in 2019 paid less than the 15 per cent in federal tax in 2019, a surprising number that has the Liberal government rethinking how it taxes Canadas highest-income earners.

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Some high-income Canadians still pay relatively little in personal income tax (PIT) as a share of their income 28 per cent of filers with gross income above $400,000 pay an average federal PIT rate of 15 per cent or less, which is less than some middle class Canadians pay, reads the 2022 federal budget published Thursday.

In the document, Finance Canada reveals new data based on 2019 tax data that shows that nearly 18 per cent of Canadians who earned $400,000 in gross income that year or the 0.5 per cent paid less than 10 per cent (and sometimes even 0 per cent) in federal tax.

Another 10 per cent of wealthy Canadians paid up to 15 per cent, which is essentially the first income tax bracket for the federal government. The remaining 72 per cent of the countrys top 0.5 per cent earners in 2019 paid over 15 per cent in federal tax.

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There are still thousands of wealthy Canadians who pay little to no personal income tax each year. That is unfair, and the federal government is committed to changing it, reads the budget.

Though many within that 28 per cent paid less tax entirely legally, the government is concerned that many more have found ways to make far more deductions to their income than they should be able to.

These Canadians make significant use of deductions and tax credits, and typically find ways to have large amounts of their income taxed at lower rates, the budget reads.

But thats where Canadas little-known Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) provision should kick in. The Royal Bank of Canada defines the AMT as an secondary means of calculating income tax that should prevent high income earners and trusts from paying little or no tax as a result of certain tax incentives, including claiming certain tax deductions and earning Canadian dividends and capital gains.

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But the federal government admits that the AMT, which hasnt been substantively updated since 1986, isnt working.

So now its looking for a new minimum tax regime which it wants to go further in ensuring that wealthy Canadians pay their fair share of tax.

The budget contains no details except to say that more is to come this fall, but tax experts say this is a very interesting move by the Liberals to address inequalities in the tax system.

Jamie Golombek, Managing Director, Tax and Estate Planning at CIBC, said he was very surprised to see that 28 per cent of wealthy Canadians paid so little in federal tax in 2019.

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That number seems crazy to me, Golombek said. We have an AMT, it affects very few people, literally, at the end of the day and its obviously not capturing enough people in their opinion.

This is very interesting, he added.

Greg Bell, a tax expert with KPMG, says Finance Canada should dive deeper into how so many wealthy Canadians managed to reduce their gross income so much on their tax filings.

The first question that comes to my mind is, if they have more than$ 400,000 of income, how are they getting their tax rates so low?, he said.

But a review of the AMT is only one of many tax measures in the latest federal budget meant to address what experts call loopholes that have allowed some corporations or wealthy individuals to pay less taxes than they should in the eyes of the government.

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The Liberals also promised to invest $1.2 billion over the next five years into the Canada Revenue Agencys fight against tax crime, focusing particularly on increasing audits of wealthy companies and individuals as well as countering foreigners use of Canada as a money laundering haven (also known as snow-washing).

For the most parts, experts agree that most of the measures amount to housekeeping, or simply patching known issues or grey zones in federal laws.

They have this laundry list of things that they dont like, and when (an issue) becomes serious enough, they go after it, Golombek said.

The most impactful change for government coffers announced in this budget is one that would ban private Canadian companies from using foreign corporations, such as shell companies based abroad or moving their headquarters to a tax haven despite still being fully Canadians owned and controlled, to avoid paying Canadas tax rates.

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The government estimates the proposal will rake in $4.2 billion over five years starting in 2022-23.

The budget also expects to recoup roughly $135 million per year going forward by closing the double-deduction loophole that allows companies to claim deductions on dividend-paying stocks that they both bet on and against.

Another $150 million per year is expected to return to government coffers by beefing up anti-avoidance rules to ensure that Canadians pay their fair share of taxes when they use a so-called interest coupon stripping arrangement.

Due to differences between Canadas various tax treaties, the interest received from Canadian residents is often subject to different tax rates depending on where the recipient resides. Interest coupon stripping arrangements exploit these differences and allow some to pay less in taxes, reads the budget.

Finally, the budget promises to review and strengthen federal rules aimed at preventing abusive tax avoidance transactions, though no further details are provided.

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Liberals to 'go further' targeting high-income earners with budget's new minimum income tax - National Post