Archive for the ‘Liberals’ Category

Ontario Liberals signal willingness to overhaul for-profit long-term care – iPolitics.ca

The Ontario Liberal party is warming up to the idea of removing private companies from the provinces long-term care and home care sectors.

The shift came as two sweeping reports into COVID-19 and long-term care shook the Progressive Conservative government last week. Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca, speaking to reporters on Friday, left the door open for his party to overhaul for-profit elder care, if elected next year.

Based on everything Ive seen and heard, and all the discussions and the tragic circumstances of the last 12 or 13 months, Im at a point where I do not believe mixing profit with care in this space at all is compatible anymore, Del Duca told iPolitics on Friday.

I cant see any compatibility, he added.

The Liberals are in the midst of developing their 2022 election campaign platform, meaning Del Duca couldnt commit to an official position, but his comments last week were the strongest yet on the issue.

If the Liberals choose to embrace a fully publicly funded elder care system, they will join Ontarios NDP, which unveiled a plan to remove private companies from the long-term care and home care sectors in October.

The NDPs plan would spend $6 billion over eight years in one-time capital investments to expand the sectors capacity, plus $3 billion in annual operating costs. If implemented, Ontario would spend 50 per cent more a year on long-term care than it does now.

On Friday, Ontarios commission reviewing COVID-19 in long-term care released its final report after an almost eight-month investigation. One of the reports recommendations urged the government to reassess the long-term care sectors business model.

READ MORE: Early instructions failed to contain COVID in Ontario nursing homes: AG

It is difficult to see how one can build a culture of excellence in care when care is only a means to profit on the infrastructure and hoteling of seniors, the report read.

COVID-19 has seriously undermined the reputation of for-profit homes. The commission has repeatedly heard about the distrust of the private sector when it comes to providing care. A new model is needed to reset the balance, it continued.

Del Duca acknowledged that Ontario couldnt flick a switch and remove profit incentives from long-term care, but he said the status quo isnt acceptable to the people of Ontario.

He also took aim at long-term care company executives.

Three of the largest for-profit chains paid out tens of millions of dollars in dividends to their shareholders during this crisis when they were receiving at least $90 million in pandemic support from you and I, Del Duca said. That just goes right to the heart of that incompatibility.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath told iPolitics on Friday the Liberals have no credibility when it comes to long-term care.

The Liberals had 15 years to deal with long-term care and they didnt, Horwath said. We all saw where long-term care was when COVID hit.

Del Duca said he will have more to say about his partys elder care policies in the coming weeks, as the Liberals platform comes together.

READ MORE: Ontario NDP pitches eight-year plan to overhaul long-term care

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Ontario Liberals signal willingness to overhaul for-profit long-term care - iPolitics.ca

Liberal plan to fast-track journalist refugees is running out of time – The Globe and Mail

Marco Mendicino, right, poses with Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after being sworn-in as Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship during the presentation of Trudeau's cabinet in Ottawa, Ontario, on November 20, 2019.

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A federal government promise to ensure that foreign journalists and human-rights campaigners are welcomed into Canada as refugees has not been put into action, and observers worry that the looming possibility of an election means the Liberals may not live up to their commitment to have a system in place by the end of the year.

In late 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed MP Marco Mendicino as Immigration Minister and directed him in a mandate letter to introduce a dedicated refugee stream to provide a safe haven for human-rights advocates, journalists and humanitarian workers at risk.

A year and a half later, the initiative to bring 250 such asylum seekers into Canada each year has failed to materialize. The federal government says it is still talking to stakeholder groups to iron out details, in hopes that officials can finalize the program by later this year.

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Consistent with his mandate letter, Minister Mendicino included 250 spaces in his annual immigration levels plan, with the first applications expected this year, said Peter Liang, a spokesman for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. He continues to engage with foreign and domestic partners as we move to fully implement this commitment in the coming months.

Yet some of the stakeholder groups with whom the government has been consulting argue time is running out.

Frankly I think they have their work cut out to meet the target for 2021, as there are still a lot of issues to be worked through before they can roll it out, says Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.

Peter Showler, who chairs PEN Canadas writers-in-peril committee, has also been talking to government officials. He worries that a potential fall election could derail the initiative. If there is an election call, and the program hasnt been implemented, well, then, those mandate provisions essentially fall by the wayside.

Canada has long admitted journalists and human-rights workers among the thousands of asylum seekers it accepts into the country each year. But the governments hope behind the program announced in 2019 is to create a special category for claimants who might be falling through the cracks.

Mr. Showler gives as a potential example the prospect of Canada welcoming Turkish journalists who are in limbo after fleeing President Recep Erdogans crackdown on civil society.

There are about 250 journalists who are now in prison in Turkey said Mr. Showler. Well, there are many of those people who tried to get out and werent able to get out. Some are languishing in places ... where theyre living without status and have been for two or three or four years.

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Mr. Showler, who is also a former chair of Canadas Immigration and Refugee Board, said that under the new program, groups like PEN Canada could help vouch for people who were displaced or under threat specifically because their writing or rights work placed them on a collision course with repressive regimes.

Several groups would be poised to help the federal government make such determinations.

Amnesty International Canada welcomes Canadas commitment to a new refugee stream, said Jackie Hansen, a gender-rights campaigner with that group.

Unlike standard immigration processes, the federal refugee determination system does not typically consider professional classes when it assesses who should be admitted to Canada.

For this reason, some stakeholders are wary about the government going down this road. As the government acknowledges, human-rights defenders are already resettled to Canada [they are just not separately categorized so cant be counted], said Ms. Dench at the refugee council.

She said she appreciates additional spaces opening up for refugees but we are concerned that the new category appears to create tiers within the resettlement program, with people processed under this category benefitting from [apparently] faster processing and additional support after arrival in Canada.

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Liberal plan to fast-track journalist refugees is running out of time - The Globe and Mail

Liberals’ goal to boost bio-manufacturing in Canada inhibited by their own policies, industry says – National Post

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'You can't do both. You can't take 70, 80, 90 per cent off the bottom line of businesses and expect them to be really happy about investing in the country'

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OTTAWA The federal Liberals spent big in last weeks budget in a bid to get more domestic bio-manufacturing for products like vaccines, but industry experts said it will take more than money to reestablish Canada as a major industry player.

Canadas vaccine roll-out has suffered from the countrys inability to produce vaccines domestically, with all of the shots going into arms currently being made somewhere else. This has left the country susceptible to export restrictions in Europe or America-first style policies or even complete bans as is happening in India where the country is dealing with a horrific new COVID wave.

Industry Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne said he is confident industry and government can work together to reestablish Canada as a leader in bio-manufacturing.

We are in a journey with a common purpose to make Canada a more significant player when it comes to the life sciences industry of the world, he said.

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That journey came with a $2.2 billion price tag that among other things includes $500 million over four years to the Canada Foundation for Innovation to help universities with capital projects related to research. It also provides $250 million to the governments research councils for bio-medical projects and $92 million to adMare, an arms length firm that helps small companies scale up.

There is also $1 billion in the governments strategic innovation fund set aside over the next seven years for bio-manufacturing projects. That money could be used for major deals like the governments decision last month to spend $415 million on a new vaccine plant in Toronto with drug giant Sanofi Pasteur.

Champagne said the pandemic has forced every country in the world to consider its limitations when it comes to pharmaceutical manufacturing and Canada needs to be prepared to step up to the plate.

The government has to be part of the equation, because obviously were competing with many jurisdictions in the world, he said.

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Pamela Fralick, president of Innovative Medicines Canada, said the funding in the budget is offering a lot for the sector and she is pleased the Trudeau government is finally engaging with the industry.

She cautioned, however, that the governments move to further regulate and lower drug prices runs right up against the goal of setting up a flourishing and vibrant industry.

You cant do both. You cant take 70, 80, 90 per cent off the bottom line of businesses and expect them to be really happy about investing in the country, she said.

She said the government should also look at regulatory issues to clear red tape so companies that have developed new treatments can get them to market quickly.

She said the governments goal of getting vaccines made in Canada is more complex than it might seem. Fralick said she is encouraging the government to think about supporting the whole industry from small start-ups to major players.

The Pfizer vaccine is a good example, she argues, because its supply chain is so complex that no one country could ever hope to produce it completely onshore.

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Its 280 components, 86 suppliers in 19 countries. Thats what it takes to get this vaccine from bits and pieces if you will, into the arms of those of us here in Canada and around the world, she said.

Andrew Casey, president and CEO of BIOTECanada, another industry group, said he was also impressed with the budget and said now it is about determining how best to address some of the other challenges.

There is really significant investment into the sector, and now trying to figure out where all these pieces are going.

He echoed Fralick in saying the government has to think not just about lowering prices.

That relationship has to morph a little bit going forward, away from the pure pricing discussion and towards something thats more holistic and benefits Canada in a broader way, he said.

Casey said predicting the next pandemic or what type of vaccine will be needed is impossible to know, but if Canada has a diverse field of bio-medical companies, there is a better chance the technology will be there to fight it.

What you need to do is start to look at a broader landscape, invest in certain areas, and then grow expertise, knowing that parts of that will be really critical to what the next solution is going to be.

Champagne said the government is looking both short and long-term when it comes to growing the industry, with short-term investments now, but with an eye to building a bigger industry over the long term.

He said Canada isnt alone in trying to push pharmaceutical prices down, but he is open to more conversations with industry about some of the broader issues.

There are some long term policy issues that warrant discussions, particularly following the largest, or the most significant, health and economic crisis we had in a century.

Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com | Twitter: ryantumilty

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Liberals' goal to boost bio-manufacturing in Canada inhibited by their own policies, industry says - National Post

John Ivison: Federal budget criticism that will be hard for the Liberals to brush off – National Post

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The parliamentary budget officer, two former Bank of Canada governors and aformer senior Liberal adviser have all criticized the big-spending budget

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The reception that greeted last weeks federal budget from fiscal conservatives was predictable. If you agree with American tax reduction advocate Grover Norquist that government should be shrunk down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub, youprobably didnt appreciate a budget that will send federal net debt levels to $1.4 trillion within five years.

The Trudeau government can brush off such criticism as ideological and partisan. It will find it harder to discount the reaction from an officer of Parliament and from respected economists who have been allies and colleagues in the past.

The critique coming fromthe Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux; fromtwo former Bank of Canada governors David Dodge and MarkCarney,and fromformer senior Liberal adviser, Robert Asselin,isthat a budget that claims to build prosperity for the future overstates the amount of growth it is likely togenerate.

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Giroux told thefinance committee on Tuesdaythat a chunk of the $101 billion the governmenttouted as economic stimulus was in reality a continuation of existing COVID-19 support measures.

Dodge told the Globe and Mail this week that a budgetwhichpositioned itself as being pro-growth doesnot invest much in growing Canadas economic capacity at all. My policy criticism of the budget is that it really does not focus on growth, he said. To me it wouldnt accord with something thatwas a reasonably prudent fiscal plan, let me put it that way.

He said that of the $100 billion billed as being a catalyst for growth, he estimates that only $25 billionadds to public or private investment, with the rest increasing consumption.

Those will be painful words forChrystiaFreelandto hear, given Dodge has been something of an intellectual godfatherfor the Trudeau Liberals. His endorsement of the use of temporary deficits to finance productivity-enhancing infrastructure investments were emblazoned on the Liberal policy platform in 2015.

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The finance minister might have expected a more ringing endorsementfrom Carney, the godfather to one of her children and someone who appeared at the recent Liberal convention saying he would do what he could to help the party.The former Bank of England governor appearedon the Herle Burly podcast this week,withformer PaulMartinadviser David Herle,and damned the budget with faint praise.

He talked about how COVID has accelerated the digital and sustainable revolutions and how the budget did some things to push the economy in that direction. But its going to take more than one budget.I dont think the government would pretend otherwise that this is job done, he said. In myjudgment, this was a hybrid budget, in that it had to conquer COVID by doing important things on the social sideandtostart growth. What we are seeing in some other jurisdictions is that the focus is more squarely on the growth. And when the focus is more squarely on growth, more and morespending isdirect government investment or the type of taxes and other measures that encourage private investmentto(create) the growth in jobs and income that we need down the road.

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Even with Carneys fancy footwork,its plainhe would have preferred more investment and less spending.

Asselin, a former budget and policy adviser to Trudeaus first finance minister, Bill Morneau, ismorebluntin his assessment. He labelled the short-term stimulus as a political solution in search of an economic problem in an article in The Hub, a new online commentary website.

He pointed out that the budget assumes economic growth of 5.8 per cent this year, four per cent next year, before moderating to two per cent for the rest of the forecast horizon. He criticized the lack of a coherent growth plan, with the bulk of innovation funding going into a Strategic Innovation Fund that has beenneither strategic nor innovative. Does it drive business investment and make our firms more competitive? Nobody has ever tried to answer this question seriously in Ottawa, he said.

Asselin spoke from experience when he said the most likely outcome of the stimulus spending is long queues of ministers and their senior officials in line at Treasury Board meetings with their budget submissions.

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The budget has added layers of duplication and bureaucratic complexity to a system that was not known for its nimbleness and agility, he said.

In addition to the prospect of disappointing growth numbers, all four economists acknowledgedthe inherent risk of soaring debt loads.

Giroux pointed out that, even with a new fiscal anchor thataims to reduce debt to GDP levels from a high of 51.2 per cent, there is no intention toreduce that ratioto pre-pandemic levels in the low-30s. He said the government has decided to effectively stabilizethe federal net debt ratio atahigherlevel through to 2055, with all the implications thatfollow for future fiscal room.

Dodge said that, while the rising debt burden is a concern, it is not yet a problem and wont become one as long as interest rates remain lower than growth.

On the rising debtlevel,Carney said just because something is possible, doesnt mean it is optimal.He pointedout if the growthstrategy is successful, it will force interest rates to rise, which will have a knock-on impacton debt servicing costs. The PBO has estimated that a one per cent rise in interest rates would cost $4.5 billion more in the first year and an increase of$12.8 billionby year five.

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But while most economists agree the debt is manageable, there is a sense of missed opportunity in the budget.Asselin accused the government of contriving a false economic premise to justify spending on unfocused and unimaginative structural spending.

All wouldclearlylike to see more public capital investment, more incentives for private investment or, ideally, both.

Instead, we have a federal government that isfailing tocreate the conditions neededto make Canada the best place in the world to do business.

Just three days after the budget, Canadian chip makerAlphawave decided to move its headquarters to the U.K., and issue shares on the London Stock Exchange to fund a new researchcentre in Cambridge, England.

Thats not Ottawas fault necessarily but it isnt helping.

An additional $12 billion to bolster Old Age Security in the budget isgoodnews for seniors but it does very little tocatalyze long-term growth.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

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John Ivison: Federal budget criticism that will be hard for the Liberals to brush off - National Post

How Liberal White America Turned Its Back on James Baldwin in the 1960s – Yahoo News

Author James Baldwin

Novelist and essayist James Baldwin. Credit - Ted ThaiThe LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In discussions about race relations today, the works of James Baldwin continue to speak to the present, even decades after they were written. So it is worth remembering that, at the very height of his influence, Baldwin experienced the same frustration that some Black activists, particularly on campus, feel about white liberals today: their refusal to acknowledge their complicity in the regime of white supremacy. In Baldwins case, the liberal backlash was widespread, and effectively marginalized him for a time.

The very first piece on the front page of the very first issue of The New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963, was a review of Baldwins The Fire Next Time by F. W. Dupee of the Columbia English department. Dupee (a former Communist Party organizer) took exception to Baldwins apocalyptic tone. Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? Baldwin had written. The answer, Dupee wrote, is that [s]ince you have no other, yes; and the better-disposed firemen will welcome your assistance.

Baldwin had abandoned criticism for prophecy and prescription for provocation, Dupee said. He was goading white racists, who were in a better position to cause trouble than Black people were, and it is unclear to me how The Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, can do nothing except inflame the former and confuse the latter. The point was repeated by Kenneth Rexroth in the San Francisco Examiner. The Fire Next Time, he wrote, is designed to make white liberals feel terribly guilty and to scare white reactionaries into running and barking fits.

At the end of the year, Baldwin participated in a Commentary symposium, Liberalism and the Negro. Baldwins fellow symposiasts were Gunnar Myrdal, Nathan Glazer and Sidney Hook, the epitome of liberal integrationist opinion. It became a war almost from the start, and Baldwins most persistent antagonist was Glazer. This was not surprising. Unlike the others, Glazer had worked in the American government. He served in the Housing and Home Finance Agency, precursor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), when Kennedy was president, and he had just published, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot. Glazer had written most of the book, which was based on research into the conditions of ethnic groups in New York City. He must have felt entitled to believe that he had a better grasp of government programs and of the facts on the ground than Baldwin did.

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The argument of Beyond the Melting Pot is that many Americans retain their ethnic identities regardless of the degree of their assimilation in other respects, and from this it followed that Black Americans should do the samethat is, they should become like other ethnic groups. The trouble, Glazer said, is that the Negro insists that the white world deal with his problems because, since he is so much the product of America, they are not his problems, but everyones. But once he becomes willing to accept that he is a member of a group, he will be able to take responsibility for himself and other members of his community.

Baldwin knew what he was in for, and he set the stakes early on. [T]o my mind, you see, he said, before one can really talk about the Negro problem in this country, one has got to talk about the white peoples problem . . . There is a sense, he went on, in which one can say that the history of this country was built on my back. To the suggestion that he become a member of one of the ethnic groups competing for their share of the pie, his answer was: What pie are you talking about? From my own point of view, my personal point of view, there is much in that American pie that isnt worth eating.

Glazer responded that its not prejudice that slows racial progress as much as ignorance, incompetence, and bureaucratic inefficiency. [T]he problems are a product of the kind of unwieldy institutions we have, he told Baldwin, the kind of feudal country we have, the kind of recalcitrant special interests that have developedamong them Negro interests. And so we all fight it out.

To this kind of argument Baldwins response was if you dont know what Ray Charles is singing about, then it is entirely possible that you cant help me. It is a good bet that none of the white men sitting around the table had ever willingly listened to Ray Charles. But they all wanted to help Black people, and they were being told that this was the reason they probably couldnt.

White liberals who identified with the Kennedy Administration resented being told they were not getting it. But even white liberals who may have considered themselves politically purer of heart expressed impatience. With Baldwin, Susan Sontag wrote in The New York Review of Books, passion seemed to transmute itself too readily into stately language, into an inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory.

The Commentary symposium was published in March, 1964. In August, Esquire ran a profile of Baldwin that had been commissioned by the magazines editor, Harold Hayes, who thought that Baldwins war on white liberals was absurd. The writer, Marvin Elkoff, dutifully portrayed Baldwin as mercurial and high-strung, and quoted him calling the white liberal blinder, more innocent and ignorant than the segregationist, and saying things like: If you dont realize that the same people who killed Kennedy also killed Medgar Evers, then you dont understand what is going on in the world. In the end, Elkoff concluded, everybody was playing his [Baldwins] game, and of course not nearly as well . . . At bottom he is disaffiliated, a medium of emotion.

At Christmastime, Baldwin published a deluxe boxed coffee table book of photographs with his high school friend Richard Avedon, now a successful fashion photographer. Baldwins essay is a cri de coeur on the banality of American life. It begins with despairing reflections on the artificiality of actors in television commercials and descends into musings like: When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents.

There is a way in which this boutique item, which does not present itself as a book about race, brings the precariousness of Baldwins position into focus. When he said things like the history of this country was built on my back or, in a widely publicized debate with William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union, I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone elses whip, he was using an established conceit of group autobiography (as Malcolm X did in his autobiography, published in 1965.) The understanding is that if these things did not happen to the author, they happened to somebody like the author. The I stands for the group.

White people dont write group autobiographies, however. It was not that people did not believe that when Baldwin lived in the United States, he had encountered racism and discrimination. It was that professionally, he had suffered no more, and arguably less, from efforts to censor him than, for instance, Norman Mailer or Henry Miller had. From the very beginning, he had been supported and promoted by powerful writers and editors, Black and white. He had written bestsellers: the only book that sold more copies than Another Country in 1963 was William Goldings Lord of the Flies. He wrote for Partisan Review and The New Yorker. He had been on the cover of TIME. He hung around with celebrities; he was rich; he had an entourage. And on top of all that, he had been living in Paris for eight years, and when the Montgomery bus boycott turned out to be a success, he turned up on the scene, in 1957, and started telling everyone what it was like to be Black in America.

The New York Review of Books was ready for Nothing Personal. The headline was Everybody Knows My Name, and the reviewer was Robert Brustein, who was soon to become dean of the Yale School of Drama: Now comes Richard Avedon, high-fashion photographer for Harpers Bazaar, to join these other outrage exploiters, giving the suburban clubwoman a titillating peek into the obscene and ugly faces of the mad, the dispossessed, and the great and neargreat [sic]with James Baldwin interrupting from time to time, like a punchy and pugnacious drunk awakening from a boozy doze during a stag movie, to introduce his garrulous, irrelevant, and by now predictable comments on how to live, how to love, and how to build Jerusalem.

[L]ending himself to such an enterprise, Brustein concluded, Baldwin reveals that he is now part and parcel of the very things he is criticizing. Baldwin was one of a handful of Black writers who had a white audience in 1963, and he lost it. He had set the bar higher than many white liberals were willing to jump.

This essay is adapted from Menands new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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How Liberal White America Turned Its Back on James Baldwin in the 1960s - Yahoo News