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Interim Liberal leader Roger Melanson delivers his response to the throne speech on Nov. 19, 2020. (Image: New Brunswick Legislature video capture)

New Brunswicks Official Opposition has delivered its response to the throne speech released Tuesday.

Liberal leader Roger Melanson touched on several topics during his hour-long address in the legislature Thursday morning.

But much of his speech focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the province and New Brunswickers.

Melanson said this years throne speech is critically important because the governments action will have an impact not only on the coming months but also on years ahead.

The clock is ticking and never has the burden of responsibility been so heavy, said Melanson. There is no time for hesitation and no time for errors. More than ever action is needed, and more than ever government will be held accountable.

Melanson said the Higgs government needs to do more to help businesses get through COVID-19.

He noted that New Brunswick is ranked last in the country in its financial response to the pandemic.

The current government takes a short-term accounting approach and seems to be betting that businesses will overcome this crisis on their own, said Melanson.

Lets be realistic. At this rate, several of them will go out of business or have already gone out of business. CFIB is projecting that it could be up to 15 per cent.

Melanson said we will need appropriate levels of revenue to operate our hospitals, nursing homes, long-term care homes and schools after the pandemic.

But we will not have that, he said, without a strong economy and profitable businesses.

Its easier to support an existing business than supporting a starting business, said Melanson. Government must step up before its too late.

Melanson said we also need action not promises to address affordable housing issues in the province.

He urged the Higgs government to make investments in partnership with the federal and municipal governments.

Melanson also reiterated his partys promise to bring forward rent control legislation in the coming weeks.

We hope that all members of this house will unanimously support this bill, he said to applause from members of his party. This is not about party politics. This is about New Brunswickers. This is about people in need.

Melanson applauded the government for extending Ottawas early learning and child care agreement for another year.

He encouraged the government to stay the course beyond the next 12 months.

The Liberals also accused the Higgs government, once again, of having a secret agenda when it comes to health reform.

Melanson said community consultations the Progressive Conservatives have promised are fake.

Following the last provincial election, the premier was not given a mandate to initiate turbulence, he said. The current crisis must not be used as a pretext for the disengagement of government.

Melanson said it is great that the Higgs government plans to establish nurse practitioner clinics, but noted it has been mentioned in throne speeches since 2018.

He said the Tories have also been promising to reduce wait times for knee and hip replacements since 2018.

On the topic of Clinic 554, Melanson said his party strongly believes the government should repeal legislation which prevents payment for abortion services outside of hospitals.

The Liberal leader also addressed calls for an inquiry into systemic racism in the province. He said when most of the population is calling for an inquiry, the premier has a duty to listen.

What matters here, Mr. Speaker, is not the premiers personal opinion, said Melanson. What matters are the demands of First Nation leaders.

Green Party leader David Coon is expected to deliver his reply to the throne speech Friday.

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Liberals Respond To Throne Speech - country94.ca

In an attempt to better understand both sides of the argument, I am reaching out to prominent figures on both sides of the party to talk about how they see not just the 2020 election but also the future for Democrats. Today is the first of those conversations; I talked with Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs of Third Way, a moderate think tank.

Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.

Bennett: Democrats only can win nationally and build legislative majorities on the backs of moderates. In the presidential race, Joe Biden, an avowed moderate, soundly beat an incumbent president for the first time since another moderate (Bill Clinton) did it 28 years ago. That followed a presidential primary in which moderate candidates (Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg) won 57% of the primary votes before the race effectively ended with Bernie Sanders dropping out and a huge Biden victory.

In the House, mainstream/moderate Democrats flipped 33 seats from red to blue in 2018 and three more in 2020. Far-left candidates backed by Our Revolution and Justice Democrats flipped ZERO. While there have been some high-profile evictions of moderate incumbents in primaries, those wins only served to turn blue districts bluer; they did not create or expand the Democratic House majority by a single seat.

In the Senate, the only way we can hope to win seats in the red and purple states that dominate the Senate map is with moderates running on a party brand that resonates with those voters.

Cillizza: How much did things like the Green New Deal and "defund the police" hurt Democrats in the 2020 election?

The shame about the Green New Deal is that centrists and mainstream progressives were (and are) inches apart on climate. But the Green New Deal included enough pieces that had nothing to do with climate and felt threatening to people's jobs and way of life. It was ripe for the usual preposterous distortions by the right. And it worked -- people believed that those Democrats were too far left.

The data are clear. Nationally, Joe Biden, running as a moderate with his own well-defined brand, is outperforming House Democratic candidates by 2.5 million votes. Voters knew Biden wasn't too far left, but some clearly worried about congressional Democrats. Take Nebraska's 2nd, a swing district in which Kara Eastman, running on those kinds of ideas, lost a winnable race in 2018. She ran again in 2020, and Biden won her district by 7 points. Eastman lost it again by 6.

Cillizza: What do you say to liberals like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez etc. who insist the energy (and money) of the party is on the liberal left?

Bennett: These notions were exposed as a myth by the 2020 elections. They are legends born of the political classes conflating things like noise on Twitter and (pre-Covid) rally crowd sizes with real-world impact and actual support. When it comes to the popularity of ideas, voter turnout, and results, the energy is with the moderates.

For example, in the primaries, turnout in the early states was highest in places where Buttigieg and Klobuchar won. Biden stoked huge turnout on Super Tuesday. The Sanders turnout in the primaries never materialized.

In the general, Joe Biden, running as a moderate, obliterated fundraising records. Other moderates, running for the Senate and the House, likewise brought in a sea of money. No Democrats, regardless of their place on the ideological spectrum, had trouble with fundraising or lost for lack of money. And this election saw record turnout in states and districts that Biden won. There was "energy" and money aplenty for moderates.

Cillizza: How much (or little) should Biden choose liberal favorites for Cabinet spots as a way to try to unify the party?

Bennett: The President-elect has made clear that he is going to have the most diverse Cabinet in history, and that will include ideological diversity. But he won't be pushed around by anyone, including those in his own political coalition. He will choose the people he needs to repair the damage done by Donald Trump and move the country forward.

We think he has this exactly right. No one in our party should be trying to impose litmus tests of any kind on his nominees, as the left has done. No one should be preemptively disparaging potential nominees, as the left has done (including public attacks on at least one African American woman). We think Biden should have the latitude and support of Democrats to pick the team that he wants and needs.

Cillizza: Finish this sentence: "The best way for Democrats to deal with the likes of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is ___________." Now, explain.

Bennett: This question has it backward. The real question is how they will deal with the rest of the Democratic Party. Will they work smoothly with our new leader, Joe Biden? Will they acknowledge that moderates flipped the seats that gave Democrats their majority in the House? Will they recognize and accept these political realities? If not, they will fairly be viewed as obstructionists.

One thing to note is that Sen. Warren is in a somewhat different place than the others you name. She has enthusiastically campaigned with Democratic moderates, and she's made clear that they belong in the Party and are essential to building majorities.

Elections, the useful clich goes, have consequences. Biden decisively beat Sen. Sanders and won the nomination running as a moderate. He did the same against Trump in the general election. He ran on an ambitious, modern and moderate agenda from start to finish. So while those folks certainly have earned their seats at the table, they must recognize that Joe Biden is sitting at the head.

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Did 2020 prove that liberals can't win? - CNN

When it comes to assessing scientific evidence, conservatives place more value on personal anecdotes, while liberals put more stock into what the experts are saying. Those are among the recent findings by Eureka College's Alexander Swan and his colleagues.

Tim Shelley spoke with him about these studies, and what they could mean as the country battles the COVID-19 pandemic.

TS: Recently, you did a bit of research on the differences between how liberals and conservatives perceive or assess evidence. If you could just talk a little bit about how that worked.

AS: Yes. So over the past two or three years, my collaborator Randy Stein and Michelle Sarraf asked two groups of people to identify their political leanings. And then we asked them to determine the credibility in a scenario.

So for example, we asked participants to read a blurb about the existence of the "hot hand" in gambling or other games of chance. And they read a [fake] excerpt from a researcher saying that the existence of "hot hands" is is disputed, and it doesn't exist.

And that was immediately followed up by a person, in Study One, with relevant experience. So in this case, maybe a casino manager who's directly refuted the researcher's claim. And so we had four scenarios like that.

And then in Study Two, it wasn't a person that had direct relevance of experience to that claim. It was just some commentator or commenter that we said was a previous respondent in the study.

So in Study One, it was a person with relevant experience. And in Study Two, it was just a random person that didn't have any relevant experience. And we asked participants to rate the credibility of each of the statements.

And what we found was that, among liberals and conservatives, liberals tended to put more credibility and more weight into what the researcher had to say about these four scenarios. And conservatives tended to allow the experiential evidence from this other commenter, or this relevant professional. They gave that more credibility and more weight.

And you can see that across both studies, the effect is stronger among conservatives in Study One with the relevant professional, because I assume it has to do with their taking in the relevant professional experience of this other person. And less so in Study Two, because it's just seems like a random person from their perspective. But in both cases, conservatives tended to give more latitude to the non-scientific perspective.

TS: Let's talk about the reasons behind that. Why would somebody who maybe leans more left place more trust in that researcher, while the conservative might place more trust in the other perspective, the anecdotal perspective?

AS: Right, yeah, that's a very good question. So the idea that we we worked with in this paper and in the piece in the conversation was that this effect seems to be somewhat mediated by conservatives' desire to give more weight to intuition, so intuition as their personal truth.

So if somebody expresses an experiential conclusion, they tend to give more weight to that because it's aligning with their trust and faith in their own intuitions -- and intuitions could be antithetical to what the scientists in any given science topic are saying. We don't we don't really see that trust, massive reliance on intuition in the liberal part of the sample, the people who lean more left in the sample.

TS: If we want to take another example, this I know was in the piece in The Conversation, you mentioned how this same dynamic might be playing out in how the perception of COVID-19 if you could just talk a little bit about that.

AS: Since the beginning of the pandemic, I think it's been pretty clear that there have been two competing narratives going on: one from the scientific community, which is 'this is a pretty terrible pandemic. And it's killing a lot of people. And we should take it seriously.'

And then on the other side, the other narrative, it is, you know, 'COVID, not a big deal. It's just like the flu. You know, we shouldn't shut down the economy or do any of these kinds of things.'

And at the very heart of it was President Trump, getting COVID, stating that, and getting the best health care that this country has to offer, and then coming out and stating that it wasn't that big of a deal, it wasn't a big problem.

And I think that feeds into the narrative of the latter side that I mentioned, where people are going to trust his detailing of it because he's the leader. And they're also going to then use that to fuel their own intuitions about their own fears and their own anxieties, and essentially, shove them away while the scientific community is saying, 'No, no, no, no, you need to wear your masks. You need to remain socially distant with among each other, and not have big gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know how much that sucks.'

And you have these two competing narratives. And I think that feeds into which narrative you play into. And it's just tragic, that from my personal perspective, it's tragic that we have a situation where we need to trust the science now. And we need to trust what the scientists are saying, not personal experiences or anecdotes.

TS: To lead off of that, my question would be, if I am a scientist or researcher, is there a way I can tailor my message perhaps to appeal more to people who might who might trust these anecdotal messages, moreso than something straight from a scientist's mouth?

That's a good question. I don't know if I have a really good answer for that one. Because the point is not to say that your science is always right. The point is to say that if there is consensus, and we've agreed upon facts that anecdotes and personal experiences do not constitute the enormous amount of data that's being collected in any given topic.

So with the coronavirus pandemic, there's a ton of data, and personal experiences and anecdotes shouldn't be held on equal footing to that massive amounts of data. So I don't know if I have a message to convey to people other than, "Please trust the data on this."

But scientists are biased just like any other human are, which is the main facet of my research, is humans are inherently biased. And it's very difficult to break some of those biases in persuasion. And so I think my thing here is, let's just trust the scientists in this particular one, because time is of the essence. And lives are of the essence.

TS: You've been conducting this research with your colleagues for the last couple years. What other avenues of research does this open up? Where can you branch off from here to explore this?

AS: My collaborator, Randy Stein, and I are going to be talking about follow-ups . One of the things that we're exploring is following this "feelings are truth scale" that we introduce into literature with this paper.

Following that up, finding more avenues where that actually is the case -- that people tend to rely on their intuitions and replace scientific truth with anecdotal or experiential truth, intuitive truth.

And a few colleagues have raised really important questions, which not every single papers going to get at, especially ours. We can't explore every single facet.

One of the interesting questions that I just came across was a scientific literacy plan So our our sample was from across the United States -- and it was only Americans that were allowed to participate here. And we did not asktheir level of scientific knowledge or their level of scientific engagement, and I think that is an important mediator as well, that we might include in future studies.

TS: Alex, was there anything else you wanted to add or that you would like people to know or take away from your work?

AS: Yeah, I we're not trying to we're not trying to vilify conservatives and in any way with this data.

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Study: Conservatives And Liberals Assess Scientific Evidence Differently. Here's Why That Matters - Peoria Public Radio

Did you hear the one about the Chabad rabbi, the settler leader and the Arab sheikh who walked into a kosher steakhouse in Dubai?

Its not the opening of a bizarre joke, but reality in the Persian Gulf today. A delegation of settlers spent the week in the United Arab Emirates, meeting with local businesspeople to explore the possibility of joint ventures. As for Chabad, the most reactionary Jewish sect, its been there for a while, taking control of the local synagogues and kashrut certification.

Haaretz podcast: Trump-loving Israelis brace for a Biden bombshellHaaretz

If anyone had predicted a few months ago that settlers and Trump-supporting Chabadniks would be the vanguard of Israeli peacemaking in the Middle East, you would have said that was too far even for the year of madness that is 2020. But now it all makes a kind of warped sense.

Israel is establishing diplomatic ties with the UAE and Bahrain, and its a right-wing enterprise. Those of us who dreamed of a time when Israelis could freely roam distant corners of the Arab world are bitter about it, because now that the dream is coming true its been tainted for us by the two men who made it happen: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and soon-to-be-former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Thats why weve been so busy poking holes in the Abraham Accords. Its easy, since, as Ehud Barak once said about a different peace agreement, its as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.

For a start, how can you can call something a peace agreement if Israel and the Gulf states were never at war to begin with? And anyway, this isnt really a peace deal, its an arms deal, in which the Emiratis get to buy billions of dollars worth of advanced U.S. military hardware.

Of course, this isnt real peace with nations, just with the elite dictators of oil-rich kleptocracies. (To make this claim, you need of course to ignore the fact that all of Israels peace deals, with Egypt, Jordan and the PLO, were hardly signed with model democracies.)

And Israels real challenge is making peace with the millions of Palestinians it occupies, by allowing them to build their state. The agreements with the UAE and Bahrain push the Palestinians to the furthest margins.

So theres plenty for those who hoped for a Mideast peace predicted on the resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians to be bitter about. And at the same time, its no coincidence that settlers are welcome in Dubai.

This is a peace after their own hearts. For decades, the left told Israelis they would get to fly off to Arab capitals, do business and vacation there only if they first ended the occupation and signed up to the two-state solution. The bitterest medicine to swallow is reality. And dont expect the UAE to suddenly shut the gates just because Trump lost.

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Can the Israel-UAE, Israel-Bahrain and whatever other normalizations follow be detoxified and should they?

There are three answers to this. The first is that Israel is and always will be part of the Middle East, and not every engagement between Israel and Arab countries should be hostage to changing political parameters and the conflict with the Palestinians.

The second is that while the Emiratis, in the short term at least, obviously have little interest in the Palestinians and whether they reach an agreement with Israel, improved relations between Israel and other Arab states will increase Israels stake in creating a different environment in the Middle East.

The Palestinians could be part of this or they could be cast aside, relegated indefinitely to the bottom of the regional agenda. It depends on who will be building these intra-Mideast relationships.

The third answer is less comfortable for liberals, but unavoidable.

This part of the Middle East was headed in this direction anyway, even without the encouragement of the Trump team. Israels not-so-secret alliance with the Gulf states has been in the making for at least two decades. If anything, President Barack Obamas decision to engage with the Iranian leadership and sign the nuclear agreement with them helped bring together Irans enemies in the region.

Those who supported a Palestinians-first diplomacy will find little comfort in the morality and expedience of this approach, and no reassurance in current reality. The transition to a Biden presidency in Washington isnt going to change the strategic decisions made by the rulers of the UAE or of Bahrain. But with Trump and his henchmen soon gone, there will be a vacuum to be filled, and not only by professional diplomats.

There are currently two types of parties involved in Israels burgeoning ties with the Gulf: those aligned with the right wing in Israel and the United States, and businesspeople who are in it for the money. What will this key relationship look like once Team Trump, backed by its Israeli cheerleaders,is no longer in power?

That depends on whether there are other players prepared to move in, from other parts of the political and cultural spectrum.

The same question applies to the broader issue of relations between Israel and Americas Jewish community, the largest in the world, now that people like Jared Kushner and the Adelsons are no longer the most influential Jews in America.

Do liberal American Jews have the energy and the passion to rebuild that connection? After four years of selfish men and their political bases narrowing the bridge between the largest groups in the Jewish people, can it be done?

The past four years were not simply an aberration. The inauguration of President Joe Biden will not be enough in itself to turn back the clock. The landscape has changed, and not just in the Gulf.

According to polls, two-thirds of Israelis wanted Trump to win the election and not because they all support Netanyahu, or are even right-wingers themselves. Even centrist and left-leaning Israelis preferred an administration that seemed to be on their side, and they didnt care that for the overwhelming majority of American Jews four more years of Trump was the darkest of nightmares.

Trumps defeat doesnt mean Israelis are going to suddenly acknowledge the fears and relief of liberal U.S. Jews, and they wont take kindly to even gentle criticism from them.

Normalization with the UAE and Bahrain wasnt just Trumps parting gesture to Netanyahu, the last in a long series of gifts, it was a challenge to the liberal diplomatic paradigm that in the past had transcended the terms of presidents and administrations.

It was the latest piece of proof that perhaps Israelis no longer need their kind American cousins, their philanthropy, lobbying and certainly not their advice. It meant that however American Jews choose to engage with Israel now, in the post-Trump era, it will have to be radically different from anything that went before.

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Get over your liberal guilt about Israels peace with the Gulf - Haaretz.com

Good morning. Im Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020. Before we take a look back at the week in Opinion, lets talk about ...

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Oh, to hell with the pithy introduction President Trump appears likely to have lost! Thats a big deal! Arguably the most authoritarian American leader ever ran for reelection, and enough voters seem to have told him no. We passed an important stress test that other liberal societies failed when they acquiesced to a strongmans wish to stay in power. That the president wants to overturn the election only exposes the lethality of the bullet our democracy looks like it just dodged.

This isnt to say were in the clear. As op-ed columnist Nicholas Goldberg explained, given everything we know about Trump his mismanagement of the pandemic, his refusal to accept the emotional burden of the deaths of 236,000 people, his dehumanization of immigrants, his persistent maladaptiveness the fact that he was able to draw tens of millions of votes is just mind-boggling and does not bode well for the months and years ahead. The Times Editorial Board expressed similar discomfort with Trumps less-than-demoralizing defeat and contemplated the implications of his enduring support.

Look, I wanted to see Trump and his sycophantic enablers buried in a landslide as much as the next guy, but after the Obama years we have to learn to accept something less satisfying than a 2008-type realigning election. Globally, authoritarian leaders in seemingly healthy democracies have managed to retain power in free and fair elections, only to go on to make the next election a little less free and a little less fair. For all its faults, the United States appears to have bucked this trend and selected as its next leader someone whose defining characteristics were empathy and competence. This is a wonderful development.

Why arent Democrats dancing in the streets? My thinking aligns more with that of op-ed columnist Virginia Heffernan, who urges liberals to mute their inner self-critics and celebrate the achievement of their biggest goal: the likely election of Biden and Kamala Harris. The problem, according to Heffernan, is that liberals are natural movement joiners, eternally focused on lofty principles but blind to the realities on the ground. She repeats the advice of journalist Windsor Mann, a Republican who voted for Biden: Spike the football. Gloat. L.A. Times

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There is no Latino voting bloc. Get used to it. About of quarter of voters who identify as Latino supported Trump, according to exit polls, leading to howls of dismay among liberals over ... what exactly? That the presidents inhumane border policies should have pushed every Latino voter into the arms of Joe Biden? That assumption isnt just offensively reductive; its not a winning strategy, says Mariel Garza. She writes: Really, we have to go through this again, explaining that Latinos are a racially, culturally, socioeconomically diverse group of people with a wide range of hopes and dreams and political leanings and not a uniform voting bloc? L.A. Times

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On that note, we have a new newsletter dedicated to the complexity of the Latinx experience. Its called the Latinx Files, its free, its weekly, and I encourage you to sign up for it. Nearly half of Los Angeles County and a fifth of all Americans identify as Latino, and the experiences of this diverse group will play an important role in Californias future. The newsletters author is L.A. Times audience engagement editor Fidel Martinez, who each week will send to your inbox his original reporting combined with the best of the papers coverage of Latinx culture, politics, art and much more. L.A. Times

This was the worst week ever for COVID-19 in the United States, and its only getting worse. While you were compulsively refreshing your Twitter feeds for ballot updates, new coronavirus infections set a daily record on Wednesday, then a new one on Thursday, then a new one on Friday. With a president who refuses to take meaningful action and much of the country momentarily distracted by the nontrivial task of rescuing American democracy, the pandemic is bound to get worse in the U.S., writes Mariel Garza: Sorry to be the bearer of bad news at the end of a difficult week, but its good not to lose sight of the fact that theres something more dangerous than partisan politics lurking out there. L.A. Times

If I told you that anticompetitive businesses successfully bought a law, where would you think this happened? In a post-Soviet oligarchy? It actually happened here in California, where voters probably just thought they were helping out their favorite Uber drivers by passing Proposition 22. What they were really doing was allowing money-losing, billionaire-backed companies rewrite a state employment law they didnt like and permanently etching it into the books by making it amendable only by a seven-eighths legislative majority. As the New York Times Shira Ovide charitably put it, Uber and Lyft Go Legit. New York Times

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Opinion: Trump's losing, and liberals are upset? - Los Angeles Times