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OTTAWA Today, media has reported that nearly two-thirds of Canadians have seen the rising rate of inflation outpace their wage gains over the pandemic. This creates the same effect as a pay cut for millions of workers. The new interest rate hike announced by the Bank of Canada this morning will also put more pressure on the household budgets of Canadians.

"Canadians are now paying more interest on their debt to the big banks. To make matters worse, big companies are raising their prices and its putting an unreasonable amount of pressure on household budgets, said NDP Finance Critic Daniel Blaikie (ElmwoodTranscona). Canadians with stagnant wages shouldn't be expected to pay more to increase the giant profits of banks and big corporations. In last week's budget there was some progress to make the ultra-rich pay their fair share, but more needs to be done. These measures should be expanded to include the grocery and big box stores making record profits."

In last weeks federal budget, New Democrats used their power to make big banks and other financial institutions pay a little bit more of their fair share after making record profits. New Democrats are calling for these measures to be extended to big box stores and big oil companies making record profits so that the money can be reinvested in solutions that make life more affordable for you and your family.

When the cost of food, housing and gas for your cars goes up faster than workers wages, its like getting a hefty pay cut its not fair, said Blaikie. Rich CEOs are lining their pockets on the backs of struggling Canadians. It doesnt have to be this way. Instead of maintaining a rigged system that benefits the wealthiest, we need to fix it by making sure those at the top pay their fair share. By doing so, we can invest more in healthcare, build affordable homes, and create good jobs that help fight the climate crisis for Canadians.

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The Liberals must stop giving a free pass to the ultra-rich and make them pay their fair share: NDP - New Democratic Party

OTTAWA Today, NDP Critic for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Jenny Kwan called out the Liberal government for requiring Afghan interpreters to complete even more bureaucratic red tape before they can bring their families to safety in Canada. Only days after the interpreters held a protest and hunger strike to highlight the already frustrating and lengthy process in March, the government requested even more documentation from their family members seeking asylum.

Afghan interpreters and their families have gone through enough, said Kwan. Just days after their protest, the government decided to complicate the process even more for these Afghan interpreters and their family members threatened by the Taliban. While the families flee for their lives in Afghanistan, the government is burying their loved ones with more onerous paperwork. For some, this may as well be a death sentence.

In an email to Afghan interpreters, the government says they have 30 days to submit additional documents, or their families applications may be refused. The families have already submitted abundant documentation to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) when they first applied. Now, eight months later, the government is putting up more hurdles for the families. Justin Trudeaus Liberals need to make good on their promise to bring the families of Afghan interpreters to safety in Canada.

Former Afghan interpreters are part of the Canadian military family they deserve recognition, said Kwan. They have already gone through layers and layers of vetting and security checks when they served with Canadian troops. The Canadian military has vouched for them with certifications. At the Special Afghanistan Committee, all the former interpreters said that they will vouch for their family members. If the government doesnt stop with this bureaucratic red tape, more lives will be lost.

The NDP is calling once again on the Liberals to waive the documentation requirements, issue single travel journey documents to the family members to reach a third country and, from there, organize evacuation flights to reunite them with their loved ones in Canada. The NDP is also calling on the government to waive the refugee determination requirements and allow Afghans to apply for the special immigration measures from within Afghanistan.

Reactions from former Afghan interpreters:

I do not know how to reply or submit these when I have no contact with my family. They are hiding from the Taliban. They are barely surviving. They do not have the luxury of accessing computers. One of my brothers has gone missing and I fear that he may have been captured by the Taliban. As the government delays the process, the risks for our family members increases. Eventually their luck will run out and they will lose their lives. Safiullah Mohammad Zahed

Previous to this, we have received numerous requests from IRCC and different government departments asking for many of the same documentations. The families have submitted what documentations we could get our hands on already. For some, they have had to burn them fearing that the Taliban will find them. How can we produce documents that have already been burned? This was all explained to the government. Now they are asking for them again but this time with a 30-day deadline. We have supported Canadaat the risk of our lives and the lives of our familiesand now it seems as though the government is getting back at us for speaking out. I cant help but to think that they are just trying to get rid of us by coming up with a reason to refuse our applications. Ghulam Faizi

All we are asking for is that our families be treated the same as Ukrainian nationals. We understand what they are going through and we support them wholeheartedly. They are trying to escape the violence and death inflicted by the Russians. We have been there. Now, our family members are trying to escape the Taliban. Are our lives not worth the same as Ukrainian nationals? Ahmad Sayed

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Liberals must remove red tape to bring families of Afghan interpreters and collaborators to Canada - New Democratic Party

Western Australia has long been a fortress for the Liberal Party in federal elections.

The last time Labor won more WA federal seats than the Liberals was in 1990, when Bob Hawke won his fourth election with heavy hitters in his cabinet like Kim Beazley, John Dawkins and Peter Walsh.

If federal Labor is to topple this decades-long dominance and potentially influence a tight election, it needs to pick up three seats the most likely being the Perth metropolitan electorates of Hasluck, Pearce and Swan.

Labor, which holdsfive out of the 15 WA seats, has also been helped by the abolition of the Liberal-held seat of Stirling in the redistribution last year.

Its chances are best in Pearce, with a margin of 5.2 per cent, and Swan, with a 3.2 per cent margin, which also have both of their sitting members retiring.

The boundaries of Pearce, held by former Attorney General Christian Porter, were dramatically redrawn in the electoral redistribution and now largely overlap with the City of Wanneroo.

So it's probably no surprise that the two main candidates are connected with thecouncil;its mayor Tracey Roberts is contesting the seat for Labor against fellow councillor Linda Aitken.

Notre Dame University political analyst Martin Drum believes threekey factors the recent controversies surrounding Mr Porter, the changed composition of the electorate and Ms Roberts' high profile in the area play more in Labor's favour.

"It would give them an added chance, certainly beyond what they would normally have in that seat," he said.

Swan is the Liberals' most marginal seat, where the two candidates,chemical engineer Zaneta Mascarenhas for Labor and media commentator Kristy McSweeney for the Liberals,are both trying to win their first election.

Dr Drum also thinks the retirement of long-time Swan MP Steve Irons benefits Labor in this seat, because his popularity boosted the Liberals' margin by around 2 per cent.

Removing this margin makes Swan a more even contest.

"That's a 50-50 line ball before you consider any swing Labor might get against the Liberals," he said.

Winning Hasluck is a tougher job, with its sitting member, Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt,defending it against Labor challenger and former Woodside manager Tania Lawrence.

"If Labor gets a decent swing, they should get the other two seats," Dr Drum said.

"But if they do really well, they'll win a third, so this would be the cherry on top, I guess, for Labor if they were to win this seat."

But Labor will also have to defend its most marginal seat of Cowan, held by Anne Aly on a slim margin of0.9 per cent.

It has also changed with the electoral redistribution, absorbing a chunk of the abolished seat of Stirling.

So Dr Aly's challenger,Stirling MP Vince Connolly,already has some local recognition in the north metropolitan seat.

Another fascinating seat aside from the traditional Labor-Liberal tussle will be Curtin, where high-profile independent candidate and corporate manager Kate Chaney is challenging Liberal member Celia Hammond.

Ms Chaney is being backed by the Climate 200 campaign, which is supporting some high-profile, pro-climate and pro-gender equality candidates across Australia, including Allegra Spender in Wentworth and Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo.

Dr Drum says the geographically bigger seats in Perth, compared to more densely populated inner-city electorates in other cities, could make it harder for independents to get traction.

"Your work is cut out trying to raise your visibility across the electorate," he said.

"So it doesn't mean she can't win, it just means her challenge is certainly tougher than some of the comparable seats in Sydney and Melbourne."

While there's much speculation about the impact of WA Premier Mark McGowan's sky-high popularity on the federal Labor vote, Dr Drumbelieves there's plenty of evidence to show that Western Australians vote differently in state and federal elections.

For example, Mr McGowan seized power after the landslide election of 2017, yet Labor failed to win any new seats in the 2019 federal poll.

But the electoral drubbing of the WA Liberals at last year's state election is really hurting their federal campaigning, from their fundraising ability to the nuts-and-bolts issue of staffing an election campaign.

Theyhave also lost or are losing some of their highest-profile local representatives, including former Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Mr Porter.

Another new potential factor in the campaign is the 86,000 young Western Australians who will be able to vote in a federal election for the first time this year and who have come-of-age during the past nine years of a federal Liberal government.

Australian National University political researcher Intifar Chowdhury saidthe main issues that would influence the vote of these and other young voters includepolitical inaction on climate change, housing affordability and the treatment of women in the workforce.

Ms Chowdhury says her research shows that young voters, aged between 18 and 27, were just as engaged with traditional electoral processes, like political parties and elections, as older generations.

But the key influence on their voting behaviour were the issues which were front of mind on election day, a reason why she thinks the one-off cost-of-living payment announced in the recent federal budget will play well for the Liberals.

Australian Electoral Commission data from December show that one in five voters in Pearce and Swan is aged between 18 and 29, with 18 per cent of Cowan and Hasluck electors in this demographic.

Their vote is an untested variable in an election where WA, the last state to close the polls on election day, could determine who gets their hands on the key to the Lodge.

Continued here:
Federal election 2022: Why the Liberal Party could lose its dominance in WA - ABC News

For example, a writer who seemed overly hopeful about the liberal-revival scenario in the first days of the war, Francis Fukuyama, has now written a searching essay for Foreign Affairs on why liberalism needs the nation arguing that the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians should teach liberals a lesson about the virtues of national identity.

With their bravery, he writes, the Ukrainians have made clear that citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only when those ideals are embedded in a country they can call their own. The war has thus been a partial rebuke to the fantasy of a pure cosmopolitanism, of a liberalism that transcends borders, languages and specific histories. And its offered a case study in how the nation-state, its loves and loyalties, can unite a disparate population around a common cause in a way that no supranational institution has ever been able to achieve.

The challenge, though, is that the sense of national purpose Fukuyama is praising in Ukraine conspicuously depends on an external enemy, a wolf at the door, and you cannot simply will such an enemy into being. (Nor should you wish to!) Whereas most of the peacetime sources of national solidarity he cites, from food and sports to literary traditions, are somewhat thinner things. And one of the potentially thicker forces, a sense of religious unity within a liberal order, Fukuyama rules out: In a pluralist society, the idea of restoring a shared moral tradition defined by religious belief is a nonstarter, leading only to sectarianism and violence if applied.

But that might be too simplistic. Certainly you cannot impose strict religious uniformity upon a pluralist democracy. But the liberal order in America, at least, long relied for solidarity and purpose on a softer religious consensus, a flexible religious center, based on Protestant Christianity and then expanding to a more ecumenical but still biblically rooted vision. From the 19th century through the civil rights era, this shared worldview supplied not just a generic unity but a constant moral touchstone for would-be reformers, a metaphysical horizon for the entire American project.

Here Fukuyamas essay might be usefully supplemented by my colleague Ezra Kleins recent meditation on how Western liberalism appears when seen through the eyes of its enemies meaning not just Putinism, with its spurious Christian justifications for aggressive war, but certain radical-right philosophers who have rejected liberalism and Christianity together, seeing the latter as the original source of liberalisms egalitarianism, its attention to the poor and marginalized, and its restless quest for universal dignity (all of which they reject and despise).

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Opinion | Why Liberalism Needs Nationalism and Religion - The New York Times

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The government could be forced to put the country on red alert if the global economy continues to deteriorate and it presses ahead with its plans to decimate the energy industry

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In a 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise finds Scotty from the original series suspended in a transporter buffer and brings him back to life after 75 years. While interacting with the crew, the ships chief engineer, Geordi La Forge, informs Scotty that he told the captain his current task would take an hour and that it was an accurate estimate. You didnt tell him how long it would really take, did ya? asks Scotty. Oh, laddie, youve got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

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In many ways, this is the approach the Liberals have taken to budgeting throughout the pandemic: predict a high deficit in the fall and then bill themselves as miracle workers when it comes in slightly lower. The 2020 fall economic statement, for example, estimated the deficit would hit $381.6 billion, but it turned out to be only $327.7 billion. Likewise, the 2021 fiscal update pegged the 2021-22 deficit at $144.5 billion, but last Thursdays budget had it coming in at $113.8 billion.

The big question this time around is whether the Liberals science fiction-like predictions will continue to work out in their favour. Though the budget forecasts that the deficit and debt-to-GDP ratio will steadily decline over the next four years, an alternate scenario detailed in the document admits that the economic outlook is clouded by a number of key uncertainties.

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Should we see a long, drawn-out war in Ukraine which is looking increasingly likely by the day we could see higher-than-expected commodity prices, inflation and interest rates, coupled with reduced consumption and economic output. This would significantly throw off future budgets, causing the deficit to be over 150 per cent higher than expected by 2026-27.

But in the coming year, the countrys fiscal situation would actually improve, with the deficit falling to $39.5 billion, instead of an expected $52.8 billion, and the debt-to-GDP ratio dropping 2.5 percentage points below what was initially forecast.

This would come about thanks to higher-than-expected commodity prices that would provide the federal government with additional revenues. Such an eventuality would allow Trudeau to play the miracle worker card one more time, but the gains would be short lived. Eventually, global energy prices will stabilize, and Canada will find itself in a situation in which energy-related investment and exports remain relatively muted, due to uncertainty about longer-term demand for fossil fuels.

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This will surely be exacerbated by the fact that the Trudeau government has made punishing the energy sector a top priority. Budget 2022 reiterates the governments recently laid out plans to put a cap on oil and gas emissions and force the industry to reduce its CO2 output by a whopping 42 per cent below 2019 levels.

The budget does include a new carbon capture and storage (CCS) tax credit, which is expected to cost the feds $35 million this year, increasing to $1.5 billion by 2026. But it will not be available to companies looking to use carbon to extract otherwise unrecoverable oil from existing wells, in a process known as enhanced oil recovery, which could help reduce emissions while encouraging economic growth.

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The money made available for CCS will also be dwarfed by the $8.2 billion the government expects to bring in from its pollution pricing framework, which includes the gas tax and taxes from jurisdictions where the federal government collects carbon tax revenues. That doesnt include all the carbon taxes the industry will pay to provincial governments, most of which now have their own carbon tax, cap-and-trade scheme or output-based pricing system that allows them to bypass the federal backstop.

To further turn the screws on the industry, the Liberals will be phasing out minimally taxed flow-through shares, which are used to help finance exploration. Its a measure that is only expected to bring in $9 million over the next five years but will have a significant impact on smaller players. It is yet another example of the federal government imposing additional costs on the industry simply because it doesnt like fossil fuels.

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Instead, the Liberals are betting big on the green transition fuelling the economy of tomorrow. Measures include the Canada Growth Fund, which the government hopes will attract $3 of private capital for every $1 of public money put into it. The Canada Infrastructure Bank will also be tasked with finding private investment in clean energy and other emission-reduction technologies, despite having little success in its previous efforts to entice investors. And, of course, there will be significant new spending on energy-efficient home retrofits, green-energy infrastructure, natural decarbonization measures and electric vehicle chargers.

The environmentalist left has long tried to sell us on the idea that transitioning to a less carbon-intensive future will boost economic output. As weve seen over the past two decades, however, most green technologies are not economically viable and are only feasible through massive government subsidies and tax increases designed to make once-cheap fossil fuels more expensive. Far from providing jobs and driving growth, the green transition will continue to be a net drain on society and will ensure the economic vitality of the country will be intimately tied to the governments continued largesse.

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Despite huge government investments in green technologies throughout the western world, its clear that sustainable energy will not provide the power needed to fully displace fossil fuels any time soon not unless we can secure a supply of dilithium crystals and perfect matter-antimatter reactors, that is. Instead of ensuring the resource industry can continue to drive the economy and provide much-needed government revenue during these turbulent economic times, the Liberals will make Canadas investment climate even less hospitable, driving energy companies away at warp speed.

National Postjkline@postmedia.comTwitter.com/accessd

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Jesse Kline: Liberals' sci-fi budgeting buttressed by the energy industry they have pledged to destroy - National Post