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OTTAWA - With the help of the NDP, Justin Trudeau's minority Liberal government has survived the last of three confidence votes on its massive budget.

The House of Commons approved Monday the government's general budgetary policy by a vote of 178-157.

Liberals were joined by New Democrat MPs in voting for the budget, in accordance with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh's vow not to trigger an election in the midst of a deadly third wave of COVID-19.

Conservative, Bloc Quebecois and Green MPs voted against the budget.

Votes on the budget are considered confidence matters; had all opposition parties voted against it, the government would have fallen, plunging the country into an election.

The government survived two other confidence votes on the budget last week, on Conservative and Bloc Quebecois amendments to the budget motion.

The budget, introduced last week, commits just over $100 billion in new spending to stimulate the economic recovery, on top of an unprecedented, pandemic-induced deficit of $354 billion in the 2020-21 fiscal year.

The government must eventually introduce a budget implementation bill, which will also be a matter of confidence.

Prime Minister Trudeau last week insisted the big-spending budget is not a launching pad for an election. He would not rule out an election this year, noting that he leads a minority government and saying it will be up to Parliament to decide when the election is.

While that sounded like Trudeau doesn't intend to pull the plug himself on his government, it didn't preclude the possibility that the Liberals could try to orchestrate their defeat at the hands of opposition parties. Nor did it preclude the possibility that Trudeau could at some point claim that a dysfunctional minority Parliament requires him to seek a majority mandate.

Some Liberal insiders believe Trudeau may pull the plug this summer, provided that the pandemic is relatively under control and vaccines are rolling out smoothly.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 26, 2021.

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No election yet as Liberal minority government survives third budget confidence vote - CP24 Toronto's Breaking News

OTTAWA -- Justin Trudeau's minority Liberal government has survived the second of three confidence votes on the massive federal budget.

A Conservative amendment was defeated by a vote of 213-120, with Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, New Democrat and Green MPs all voting against it.

The amendment called for the budget to be revised because, the Conservatives claimed, it will add "over half a trillion dollars in new debt that can only be paid through higher job-killing taxes," including more than $100 billion in new spending that the Conservatives dubbed "a re-election fund."

On Wednesday, a Bloc Quebecois sub-amendment was also easily defeated.

The government had informed opposition parties that it would consider both votes to be matters of confidence, meaning the government would fall if either of them passed.

A third opportunity to pass judgment on the budget comes Monday, when the House of Commons will vote on the main motion to approve the government's general budgetary policy.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has promised that his party will prop up the minority government on all budget votes to avoid triggering an election in the midst of a deadly third wave of COVID-19.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 22, 2021.

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Minority Liberal government survives second of three confidence votes on budget - CTV News

Tasmanian Liberal Premier Peter Gutwein is gambling on an early election to cash in on his governments popularity due to its management of the COVID pandemic. It is a reasonable strategy, given how voters in Queensland and Western Australia have rewarded their governments in recent months.

Gutwein announced the May 1 election on March 26 a year earlier than it is due. This was possible because, while Tasmania has a four-year maximum term, it does not have a fixed term, unlike all other states and territories.

In 2018 the Liberals, under then-Premier Will Hodgman, were returned to government with a bare majority of 13 of the 25 members of the lower house. Gutwein took over the premiership following Hodgmans resignation in January 2020.

Over the past three years, the majority government has at times looked shaky. This was typified by maverick Liberal Clark MP Sue Hickey winning the speakership ballot with the support of Labor and the Greens against her partys candidate. She has since voted against government legislation and policy on a number of policy and social reform issues.

Five days before calling the election Gutwein informed Hickey she would not get Liberal re-endorsement for the next election. She resigned from the party, putting the government into minority.

Having engineered a minority government and, despite written assurances from Hickey and ex-Labor, independent MP Madeleine Ogilvie on confidence and supply, Gutwein then called the election to secure stable majority government. His reasoning was that this would keep Tasmania in safe hands for ongoing management of COVID.

Read more: Morrison's ratings take a hit in Newspoll as Coalition notionally loses a seat in redistribution

A few days later, Ogilvie was endorsed as a Liberal candidate for Clark. This underlined the artificiality of the minority government argument.

Under Tasmanias Hare-Clark proportional electoral system, five members are elected to each of five multi-member seats. These are Bass in the north, Braddon in the north west, Clark and Franklin in the greater Hobart and southern region, and the sprawling Lyons across the middle of the state.

Going into this election, the Liberals had 12 seats, Labor nine, Tasmanian Greens two and there were two independents.

In March 2020, before the pandemic, Labor leader Rebecca White was matching first Hodgman and then Gutwein as preferred premier.

However, that changed after Gutwein declared a state of emergency and the toughest border restrictions in Australia.

Like his counterparts in Queensland and WA, the hard-line stance was widely interpreted as keeping the state safe. Gutwein polled as high as 70% as preferred premier in opinion polls throughout 2020.

The election announcement caught Labor unprepared. The start of its campaign was sidetracked by factional battles over preselection of high-profile Kingborough Mayor Dean Winter for the seat of Franklin. It also had to deal with the resignation of state ALP president Ben McGregor from the campaign over crude text messages he sent to a female colleague some years ago.

The Liberals also have had their share of problems. Franklin candidate Dean Ewington was forced to resign when it was revealed he had attended anti-lockdown rallies against Gutweins policy. Ex-minister and now Braddon candidate Adam Brooks also faces police charges over alleged contraventions of gun storage law.

Tasmania has has three minority governments in the modern era. These are the 1989 Labor-Green Accord government, the 1996 Liberal minority government and the 2010 Labor-Green quasi-coalition government. In each case voters punished the major governing party at the following election.

Consequently, the prospect of a hung parliament is always a central election issue in this state. Both Labor and the Liberals have pledged to govern in majority or not at all. However, in their one campaign debate to date, both Gutwein and White indicated they would resign the leadership rather than lead a minority government. This seems to leave open the door for their replacements to take up negotiations to form government.

Federal issues and federal political leaders have had a minimal impact on the Tasmanian election. So far, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not visited the state during the campaign, even for the Liberal campaign launch. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has visited twice, including for Labors launch.

While Tasmanias economy has held up surprisingly well during the pandemic due in no small part to Commonwealth JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments the end of those payments is likely to have a negative impact on the states economy. Some have pointed to this as an underlying reason for going to an election early.

Concerns about delays to the roll-out of COVID vaccinations and the possible distraction from the key state Liberal campaign theme of management of the pandemic may be another reason for keeping federal ministers away.

Read more: WA election could be historical Labor landslide, but party with less than 1% vote may win upper house seat

For its part, Labor has campaigned on state Liberal failure to reduce hospital and housing waiting lists and the lack of action on a range of key infrastructure development promises made at the 2018 election. The opposition has also raised concerns about future budget spending cuts to fund high-cost COVID economic stimulus measures, TAFE privatisation and delays in replacing the Spirit of Tasmania ferries, which are vital for interstate transport, tourism and freight.

The Greens and key high-profile independent candidates such as Hickey and popular Glenorchy Mayor Kristie Johnston in Clark have raised concerns about government secrecy, ministerial accountability and the states weak laws on political donations and, associated with that, poker machine licensing reforms.

There have been no public political opinion polls so far during this campaign. However, successive surveys by Tasmanian pollsters EMRS throughout 2020 placed the Liberals as likely to win more than 52% of the vote state-wide.

Since, historically, a party winning anything over 48% is likely to secure majority government in Tasmania, if those polls are reflected in the election outcome on May 1, another majority Liberal government seems likely.

Continued here:
As Tasmanians head to the polls, Liberal Premier Peter Gutwein hopes to cash in on COVID management - The Conversation AU

Starting Wednesday, March 31, Port, who is widely known for his conservative views on North Dakota and national politics, will be hosting weekly shows on InForum that will feature rotating guest hosts with more liberal takes on the issues. The Plain Talk segments will be live every Wednesday at 2 p.m. and include a live blog where readers and listeners can "join the conversation" by submitting questions and comments in real time.

"My goal is to leave the audience feeling like the issues covered are better illuminated for them, however they might feel about the views I or my guests express," Port said. "Maybe they'll feel persuaded. Maybe they'll feel more committed to what they already believed. Either way, that's a win in my book."

Port's first rotating guest host will be Jonah Lantos, a Minot-based talk show host with the podcast "The Good Talk Network." The idea is to provide a platform on InForum where civil dialogue can happen between two people with opposing views on some of the most hotly debated topics, all while allowing InForum readers to join the conversation.

"I don't want it to be another political cage match," Port said. "We have so much of that these days. Cable news might as well be professional wrestling. I want thoughtful, passionate conversations about news, culture and policy among people who can smile at each other at the end and agree to disagree.

Port, who was a guest on a livestreamed event with OneFargo activist Wess Philome to talk about race, said these kinds of conversations require a willingness to acknowledge that nobody is going to "win."

"In nearly two decades of covering politics, the most concrete thing I've learned is that nobody ever really 'wins' a debate," said Port. "One side may be ascendant for a while, but there are no permanent victories in politics. Time marches on. Attitudes evolve. There's always another election looming. All we can really do is listen and try to understand."

Parts of these livestream shows will be available on Plain Talk with Rob Port, which can be found on InForum or on a variety of podcasting services.

In addition to the Wednesday livestream shows, Port will also begin adding "newsmaker" video interviews with some of his columns, where he'll speak with state leaders and various newsmakers throughout North Dakota. His first is being published this Friday, April 2, with Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford as they talk about the potential sale of the Coal Creek Station.

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Conservative opinion columnist Rob Port to begin new livestream show with liberals - Grand Forks Herald

For a brief, shining moment after Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol on January 6, it seemed that the forces of rising authoritarianism in America might be curtailed, shamed by the violence thathad been unleashed by their lies and bitterness over losing the election. But nope, Republicans have quickly reverted back. After all, the fundamental problem facing the Republican party and the larger American right hasn't been resolved. They still know full well that their ideology is unpopular, their arguments are indefensible, and that the only way they can hold onto power is by gutting the ability of the voters to throw them out.And so, as the past month has shown, conservatives are not only becoming more fascistic in the aftermath of the riot but more shameless about their intentions.

The GOP war on voting has become the number one priority, with a bevy of conservative groups reorienting their organizing around keeping Americans away from ballots.Republicans are leaning into the racist signaling around the voter suppression efforts, and when confronted with it, they barely bother to defend themselves, mainly because there is no moral defense possible. There's lip-smacking from the right about "voter fraud" which they continue to fail to show is a problem, much less one that voter suppression efforts will fix but these excuses are pro forma, and you can tell their hearts aren't in it.

Instead of trying to sell their behavior as good and righteous, instead, conservatives are coalescing around a different excuse: The liberals are making them do it! They don't want to be fascists, you see, but gosh darn it,they have no choice!

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

This excuse was most clearly articulated for a large audience on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show last week. His guest, Jesse Kelly, ranted that he is "worried" and by "worried", he means he's threatening that the "right is going to pick a fascist" because "if we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa/Black Lives Matter guys go free andHunter Bidengoes free, then the right's going to take drastic measures."

Carlson, far from pushing back on this "don't make us hit you" threat, performed his idiotic mouth-open fake serious face, as if this was an intellectual discussion about something happening beyond his control. Inreality,his show is a nightly blast of encouragement at his fans to embrace their more fascistic yearnings.

The more "intellectual" version of this argument was rolled out by Glenn Ellmers at the American Mind blog of the Claremont Institute, a fairly prestigious conservative think tank that is oriented around the task of putting an intellectualized gloss on the reactionary impulses of the right. In the piece, Ellmers argues openly that "most people living in the United States today" by which he clearly and explicitly means Democratic voters "are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."

Defining most Americans as non-American, of course, is about justifying an all-out assault on their rights and freedoms. As progressive writer John Ganz wrote in his lengthy rebuttal to Ellmers,this is a "radically anti-democratic conceit of delegitimizing the citizenship of the majority of the country."But Ellmers, like Kelly, pretends to say this more in sorrow than anger, claiming that the left has forced this turn towards fascism (though he pretends it isn't fascism) because the liberal majoritydoes "not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people."

In this argument, of course, only the right gets to decide what counts as a legitimate American value. It's closed-loop logic: You are technically free, but only if you live your life in a way prescribed by the religious right.You're allowed to vote, but only if you vote for Republicans.But can freedom really be freedom if it's stripped away from you the second you actually use your freedom? Of course not.This kind of illogic allows authoritarians to claim to be "pro-freedom" while refusing people real freedom.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

On his recent call to Laura Ingraham's Fox News show, Trump understandably made headlines with lies about the Capitol insurrectionists, who he falsely claimed were "zero threat", even though they killed on Capitol police officer, traumatized two to the point of suicide, and left 140 injured. But equally disturbing was the way Trump justified the violence, even as he pretended not to see it.

"When I look at antifa and what they did to Washington," he whined, "and what they did to other locations, and the destruction, and frankly the killing and the beating up of people, and nothing happens to them whatsoever? Why aren't they going after antifa?"

Of course, this is more lies. Research shows that 98% of the Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful, and that police were often the instigators of the violence. But Trump's lie serves a purpose. Like Kelly and Ellmers, Trump is setting up the claim that violence and fascism are not something that conservatives are choosing willingly, but something they've been forced to embrace. You know, because "antifa" and the "beating up of people," most of whichresidesin the fevered conservative's imagination rather than reality.

As Adam Serwer at the Atlantic recently noted, from the very beginning of Trump's presidency, conservatives perceived him as "a punishment" and would "respond to any perceived liberal excess witha simple phrase: 'This is why Trump won.'" They knew that it was wrong to vote for Trump, that it made them bad people to do it, but insisted that they were forced into this immoral position by alleged liberal excesses, most of which were silly, made up entirely or wildly exaggerated. (Literally, conservatives justified the immoral choice to vote for Trump by citing the existence of veggie burgers, gay rights demonstrators twerking, and Disneyland removing a "humorous" display about selling women into prostitution.)Now that logic has exploded all over the right, being used to justify all their own grotesque, fascistic, or anti-democratic behavior.

In a sense, nothing is new about this.

Despite all the chest-thumping authoritarians do, they're all cowards at heart, prone to whining and playing the victim, no matter how silly the pretense. Nazis had their own version of this, with their false "stabbed in the back" narrative they used to justify their genocidal desires. From the very beginning of Trump's presidency, groups like the Proud Boys would openly trawl through liberal cities, trying to provoke a fight, so they could claim victimhood and use that as justification for violence. They can never just admit that they want to be fascists. Instead, they whine and blame someone else for their own immoral desires.

What's scary about this particular moment is that kind of illogic is starting to spread even more rapidly through conservative media. Trump's two-and-a-half-month-long coup effort may have failed to secure him a second term, but it did instill a widespread sense on the right that they were entitled to win the election. Since other voters "stole" the election by voting for Joe Biden, conservatives increasingly claim justification for ending democracy. If you reject people's right to prefer one candidate over another, however, you never believed in democracy in the first place.

Originally posted here:
Republicans have become more fascist since Jan. 6 and they blame liberals for it - Salon