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The Liberal government released its fall fiscal update Wednesday, making the bold pre-election claim that the land is strong even if it may not feel that way if youre trying to sell a house or work in the oilpatch.

In fairness things are going pretty well, on the back of surging demand from the U.S. But there appears to be a supreme confidence that it will ever be thus. Scant provision is being made for the recession rumbling towards us inexorably, like a winter storm.

The government gave itself a clean bill of health, pointing out GDP growth is forecast at 2 per cent for the next two years, before slowing to a still respectable 1.6 per cent.

Unemployment is forecast to be below 6 per cent over the next two years, while the federal debt-to-GDP ratio is predicted to continue to tick downward.

The government concluded its reelection pitch by claiming it has fulfilled a third of its mandate promises, with progress made on the other two-thirds.

For a government heading back to the polls next year, it is, at first blush, a solid base from which to launch a campaign for another mandate.

Finance minister Bill Morneau said Wednesday that a middle-class family of four is now $2,000 better off, thanks mainly to the Canada Child Benefit.

When it comes to specific measures the fall update, given the title Investing in Middle-class Jobs, is a modest document, with much to be modest about.

But it did introduce a number of measures aimed at addressing U.S. President Donald Trumps corporate tax cuts, including tax incentives to encourage businesses to invest in new assets like machinery and equipment.

The new plan will give Canadians the help they need to succeed, making smart investments to grow our economy for the long-term, while we bring the books back towards balance, Morneau said the first time anyone can remember a Liberal finance minister talking about balanced budgets since the days of Paul Martin, the deficit-slayer.

On the basis of the spin, were an election held tomorrow there would be line-ups at the polling booths to laud the Liberals for their incredible feats of economic alchemy.

Needless to say, while the fiscal update tells the truth it doesnt tell the whole truth.

On the basis of the spin, were an election held tomorrow there would be line-ups at the polling booths to laud the Liberals for their incredible feats of economic alchemy

Tax revenues for the first six months of the fiscal year were up 10 per cent, or a whopping $13 billion, but growth is patchy. The housing market for so long a driver of economic growth has recorded three quarters of contraction.

The oilpatch appears to be going through something of an existential crisis, as jobs and investment continue to bleed south of the border. In the Financial Post this week, former Encana CEO Gwyn Morgan noted with alarm how his former company has exported itself to the U.S. He blamed Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government for a litany of bad policy decisions from the oil tanker ban, to killing the Northern Gateway pipeline; from the introduction of upstream emissions in pipeline regulatory hearings to bill C-69, the impact assessment act that have all but killed Canadas most economically important industry.

The fall update offers little in the way of comfort for producers, or for Albertas provincial government, faced as they are with a price differential that is reaching record highs.

What it does contain is a range of tax changes to encourage business investment in Canada. Arguably, the measures should have been included in the spring budget, flush from the windfall of 3-per-cent growth in 2017.

But since business investment and exports will be relied on to make a greater contribution to economic growth, it is timely that the Liberals have finally acknowledged that the golden goose wont keep laying without some encouragement. This has not been a government overly concerned about wealth generation during its first three years in office.

Business groups had called for Morneau to reduce the corporate income tax rate across the board but the finance minister deemed his room for manoeuvre was limited, given the need to keep the fiscal anchor, the debt-to-GDP rate, ticking down. The new measures will cost $14 billion over the next five years, so this is not chump change. But the money appears to be targeted, since it allows Canada to market itself as the lowest marginal effective tax rate (METR) in the G7.

For many international companies, it is the METR, the cumulative rate of taxes that affect businesses, that is a key determinant of where they will invest.

It is a creative solution that will help businesses write-off assets in a range of industries at a faster rate including intangibles like computer software even if it doesnt address the specific problems facing the oil industry.

Needless to say, while the fiscal update tells the truth it doesnt tell the whole truth.

At the very least, it is investment that may have a productive outcome unlike many of the tax dollars that have been tossed hither and thither in the last three years. You only get it if you invest.

The real problem is that, for all the confidence in Canadas economic future the document expressed, a downturn is coming as surely as winter follows fall.

When it does, the debt-to-GDP ratio will not keep falling, because GDP will shrink. That is when a reckoning will take place.

The measures announced in the fall update will add to a deficit that is set to remain in double figures as far out as the Department of Finance projects.

The much-vaunted $2,000-a-year bonanza for the family of four is paid for with borrowed money. It is not just Conservatives who see that as a raid on future generations.

For all the billions being added to the national debt, the benefits are not being felt by everyone.

These are the good times but for many people, they dont feel that good. The government boasts about rising wages but for the past three years, real wages averaged gains of just 0.3 per cent, versus 1 per cent for the previous decade.

Rising interest rates are also making life tougher.

But there is none of this nuance in the sunny days document tabled by the government. In a self-assessment of their own brilliance, the Liberals judged their commitment to balance the budget by 2019-20 as a measure where action has been taken and progress made, even if, sadly, it is facing challenges.

That blatant nose-stretcher comes just 25 pages after the summary statement of transactions that says the deficit in 2019-20 will be $19.6 billion. Some progress, some challenge.

The entire document should come with a warning sticker: Caution stormy objects in your mirror are closer than they appear.

Email: jivison@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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John Ivison: Liberals' fiscal update an exercise in self ...

What does it mean to say that a person is a liberal, or to say that a thing may be described with this word? The answer, as is so often the case with the English language, is it depends.

'Liberal' shares a root with 'liberty' and can mean anything from "generous" to "loose" to "broad-minded." Politically, it means "a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change."

Liberal can be traced back to the Latin word liber (meaning free), which is also the root of liberty ("the quality or state of being free") and libertine ("one leading a dissolute life"). However, we did not simply take the word liber and make it into liberal; our modern term for the inhabitants of the leftish side of the political spectrum comes more recently from the Latin liberalis, which means of or constituting liberal arts, of freedom, of a freedman.

We still see a strong connection between our use of the word liberal and liber in the origins of liberal arts. In Latin, liber functioned as an adjective, to describe a person who was free, independent, and contrasted with the word servus (slavish, servile). The Romans had artes liberales (liberal arts) and artes serviles (servile arts); the former were geared toward freemen (consisting of such subjects as grammar, logic, and rhetoric), while the latter were more concerned with occupational skills.

We borrowed liberal arts from French in the 14th century, and sometime after this liberal began to be used in conjunction with other words (such as education, profession, and pastime). When paired with these other words liberal was serving to indicate that the things described were fitting for a person of high social status. However, at the same time that the term liberal arts was beginning to make 14th century college-tuition-paying-parents a bit nervous about their childrens future job prospects, liberal was also being used as an adjective to indicate generosity and bounteousness. By the 15th century, people were using liberal to mean bestowed in a generous and openhanded way, as in poured a liberal glass of wine.

The word's meaning kept shifting. By the 18th century, people were using liberal to indicate that something was not strict or rigorous. The political antonyms of liberal and conservative began to take shape in the 19th century, as the British Whigs and Tories began to adopt these as titles for their respective parties.

Liberal is commonly used as a label for political parties in a number of other countries, although the positions these parties take do not always correspond to the sense of liberal that people in the United States commonly give it. In the US, the word has been associated with both the Republican and Democratic parties (now it is more commonly attached to the latter), although generally it has been in a descriptive, rather than a titular, sense.

The word hasfor some people, at leasttaken on some negative connotations when used in a political sense in the United States. It is still embraced with pride by others. We can see these associations with the word traced back to the early and mid-20th century in its combination with other words, such as pinko:

Thanks to The Dove, pinko-liberal journal of campus opinion at the University of Kansas, a small part of the world last week learned some inner workings of a Japanese college boy. Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 7 Jun., 1926

"To the well-to-do," writes Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of the pinko-liberal Nation, "contented and privileged, Older is an anathema. Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 9 Sept., 1929

Pinko liberalsthe kind who have been so sympathetic with communistic ideals down through the yearswill howl to high heaven. The Mason City Globe-Gazette (Mason City, IA), 12 Jun., 1940

The term limousine liberal, meaning "a wealthy political liberal," is older than many people realize; although the phrase was long believed to have originated in the 1960s, recent evidence shows that we have been sneering at limousine liberals almost as long as we have had limousines:

Limousine liberals is another phrase that has been attached to these comfortable nibblers at anarchy. But it seems to us too bourgeois. It may do as a subdivision of our higher priced Bolsheviki. New York Tribune, 5 May, 1919

Even with a highly polysemous word such as liberal we can usually figure out contextually which of its many possible senses is meant. However, when the word takes on multiple and closely-related meanings that are all related to politics, it can be rather difficult to tell one from another. These senses can be further muddied by the fact that we now have two distinct groups who each feel rather differently about some of the meanings of liberal.

One of these definitions we provide for liberal is a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change; it is up to you to choose whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. In other words, We define, you decide.

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What Exactly Is a 'Liberal'? | Merriam-Webster

After Trump announced that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, an op-ed in The New York Times termed it "a radical break ... a major provocation," one that would cause "irreparable harm" to his plans for Middle East peace. But the issue has largely disappeared, even as the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem approaches. Trump's denunciation of NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem led columnist Al Hunt and others to brand him a race-baiter, but now the most famous black male musician of this moment, Kanye West, calls him "my brother." He has faced derision from some quarters, but he doesn't appear to buy the liberal line on Trump and race.

You might sympathize with liberal politicians and journalists, not to mention conservative Never Trumpers, who can't understand how this so-called farce-presidency can go on. They don't realize something about themselves though: They are a crucial factor in the Trump ascendancy.

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Trump's in his glory, and it's driving liberals nuts ...

The question sounds abstract and clich at first: do we have free will? If you look at the academic side of the question, what you will see is a long bibliography that seems only relevant to nerdy interests. However, the question has permeated public debates and leftist campaigns.

Feminists sometimes speak as if women have no agency. Women are all victims because muh patriarchy is choosing for them. Porn actresses, according to at least a bunch of harpies, do not choose: even though they sign their contracts and do everything by themselves, they are used by the porn industry.

Likewise, muh minorities would perform badly because they would have internalized some floating racism that stifles their abilitiesdoesnt matter that this far-fetched theory was never proven or that blacks have been constantly found to be more self-confident than whites, not less.

Outside of leftist abuse and whitemaleophobic baiting, the question of whether we have a free will faculty or if we are the end result of smaller, impersonal mind processes where our personality dissolves has tremendous implications on what we do. Studies found that not believing in free will tended to stimulate cheating and numb patience.

The ancient Greeks believed we had an internal sovereign calledegemonikon. To free it, we would have to meditate on our passions, beliefs, desires and so on as to free the internal sovereign from them: knowing what determines us and of options allows to be less determined.

No stupid fears like the fear of being rejected, no delusions like equality, no laziness considered too natural for us to work well. Instead, an enhanced and cleansed self, able to become what he is. This is the Greeks gnothi seauthon (know thyself) in a nutshell.

Conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell famously argued that liberals were unconstrained minds, with less predetermined beliefs, than conservatives. Liberals would believe more in change, conservatives more in immutability. This has been true to a certain extent, and liberals rushed to use it: change or hope means that leftism wins, both in fashion and reality, over a timid, hesitating, fearful and most importantly uncool conservatism.

However, since Sowells time of glory, things have considerably evolved. Today liberals and their RINO cuck allies are the most constrained and constraining camp ever. They are the ones who want to lock everyone up into their mad world of gender, white genocide, balkanized West, mandatory worship of a hallucinated progress, trigger warning, land whale supremacy and every monstrous stuff that makes up the liberal pantheon.

Liberal qualities have turned on their heads, and what liberals believe about themselves is either false or liable to so many exceptions it becomes window dressing.

The same libs who proudly claim they believe in equality love to think how their mean IQ is higher than the conservative voters. They believe they are more creative and more intellectual, that is, more prone to bookishness and theorization. They will routinely talk of love, justice, universality, we, humanity. They claim to be open-minded, progressive, tolerant, and fancy themselves as fairer and less authorian. Is that true?

Not one bit.

This may be the most dishonest statement the leftists ever made up.Every individual of normal constitution is capable of both love and hatred. Couples of passions are a standard part of human nature. But somehow liberals managed to confuse the apparently positive aspect of love with being right, then managed to present themselves as the side of universal love. But by doing so they didnt even care about stigmatizing the other political side as representing universal hatred.

Liberals do not love more than others. White liberals who feel guilt because theyre white and male, and virtue-signal as to compensate, suffer from a psychological issue. White guilt is a pathology, a mental virus that corrupts self-esteem and destroys the memories of all the good things the West gave to the world. Liberals do not love minoritiesthey need them to clean their shit for a smaller wage than white proles. Liberals are not free of hatredthey hate the patriarchy, they despise conservatives, they hate us.

The only thing a liberal truly loves is his (or her) ego, comfort, and own pleasures. Which is why liberals tend to be hedonistic and coward. The love they claim is just a mask for self-complacency.

Obey me. For love. Or youre a Nazi!

This is what many of them said when they ushered Obama in power. They said so even when they despised the browbeaten, blue pills fed, loser men. Boomers who voted Obama said so while chastising millennials as losers. As we learned the hard way, when they win, we lose.

And many of those on the liberal train end up losing as well, for example when youre black and youre forced into an identity of perpetual aggrieved victim dependent on the State instead of being taught to manage your own goddamn life, or when youre an upper middle class feminist and you end up raped and killed by the dark-skinned masses you always supported.

The we want a world without losers crowd always vote themselves in power, vote their own advantages, and do so at the expense of untold people. Just like using an ECA stack while lobbying for the prohibition of smart drugs. Doublethink at its finest.

Leftism has always been a particular group identity. From the eighteenth century philosophers to the younger upper middle class feminist of now, leftism has its codes, references, events and even saints. In truth, humanity only exists in a biological sense: one is human because one is a homo sapiens. Beyond that, the Earth has always been covered with different identities. The Left pretends to be different, but leftists have always been parts of societies or of the world. Which makes them as non-universal as any other identity.

Bourgeois bohemians love to talk about culture as their particular thing. They love to gloat about openness from the comfort of their flats or houses in a so-called glamour neighbourhood. Even when leftism was more akin to communism, said movement worked because it gave a purpose and a sense to the life of its members. That is, a particular purpose. No purpose is interesting or worthy when it ceases to be particular, identitarian, and thus different from the rest of humanity.

Leftism is an identitarianism. A cancer that developed from the West while chastising it. No wonder why the feminists fish and bicycle motto is intrinsically antisocial: leftisms universality is a joke. And it is intolerant at our identitarianism.

Any group has common beliefs. Any group has prejudices. This is normaland this is what leftists love to say they went beyond erroneously. Ive often seen pompous students going at great lengths on their 50 shades of leftism or gender whereas talking of the far right as if people outside of the left were an homogeneous block. Those who speak like this know nothing of our side: even the Alt-Right is rather a big tent than an edifice.

Likewise, when the libs r smarter rule, which may be true if and only if certain conditions apply, becomes heralded as obvious, it is a prejudicean excessive generalization that denies exceptions.

If you compare the mean IQ of a group of academics and the mean IQ of a group of plant workers, chances are, the former have a higher mean IQ. But does that mean that the academics are better human beings? That they are necessarily right? Does that mean that other high IQs who agree with plant workers should be ruled out as irrelevant?

The smarter Left myth is only true to the extent that the Left has taken over the institutions, only allowed its own inside, then used the institutions authority to claim smartness. Yes, thats the very same people who pretend that race IQ measurements, which do not differ from class IQ measurements, are racists and invalid.

Leftists who have a high IQ use it to craft theories, narratives, and other misleading impressions to force and manipulate. Their pseudo-creativity is a smokescreen to mask the giant prison where they want to force societyand their own inability to get out of the matrix.

As everyone who ventured outside of cultural Marxism knows, no one on Earth is as bossy and domineering as the tolerant Left. Forced equality and communism were not tolerant projects. Forcing anal marriage, gender madness, mass immigration, white guilt, land whale/HR supremacy, banning words and reshaping whole identities through mass indoctrination is definitely not tolerant. No one else pretends to love the Other while being so intolerant at the political Other. At bottom, a leftist is a political xenophobic.

However, the Left has been crafty (or dishonest) enough to say that its intolerance would end intolerance, just like the communist genocidal mania would end all genocides, the freemason-propelled WW1 would end all wars, etc. Now it can safely be said that all these hopes were illusions, as Leftism always needs new targets to protest and harass. The only true hope for anything better lies in the death of cultural Marxism.

Antiracist fraudster Franz Boas was wrong. Sigmund Freuds theory of Oedipus was wrong and likely build to hide a Jewish propensity for incest by blaming it on the children. Minority identities did not even exist before they were wholly constructed (organized) by Alinskyite figures who took all their inspiration in Marxism. Now these groups are like cancerous tumors, having no function yet stealing from a society they did not built. Margaret Mead was a fraud. Feminist founders had deep issues. And so on.

Leftism is all about manipulating the human psyche while making you indignant (or ashamed, depending on which role the narrative-crafters attribute to you) about being oppressed. Many of us were fed blue pills since our youngest infancy.

More often than not, we were taught everything would be possible, to be thrown into a world where everything is blocked, taught to be respectful when this made us cowards, taught to be cultivated when this is just made us more conditioned, taught to believe in equality because this is what the cultivated, successful individual do, and so on.

Cultural Marxism is not based on knowledge. It is based on sophisticated make-believe. Know the difference.

Read Next: If Leftist Ideology Is Correct, Why Are Liberals Using Dirty And Violent Tactics?

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Liberals Do Not Know Themselves Return Of Kings

Wednesdays parliamentary outrage du jour was an online summer job posting from Dogwood, a B.C. environmental group. The successful applicant will help (Dogwoods) organizing network stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker project, and she will make $15 an hour thanks to the generosity of the Canadian taxpayer. The Canada Summer Jobs Program distributes funds to all manner of not-for-profits and small businesses, with local MPs two New Democrats and one Liberal, in this case deciding which applicants are most deserving.

It careered into the public spotlight only recently when the Liberals found that MPs, including one of their own, had been signing off on funding for anti-abortion groups, including at least one known for displaying grisly photos of aborted fetuses. A womans absolute right to manage her own pregnancy is central to Liberal policy. It made perfect sense that they would want to close the tap. And for the same reason, it would have made sense for the Liberals to cut off an organization like Dogwood. Trudeau and his deputies swear blind that Kinder Morgan must and shall be completed, but it faces many significant obstacles not least activists like those in Dogwoods employ. Why would the government pay them?

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was in high dudgeon about it on Wednesday. If the Prime Minister claims to be trying to build public support for this pipeline, perhaps he can explain to the House why his government gave a grant to an environmental lobby group that specifically used those funds to hire an activist to protest against the Trans Mountain pipeline, he said in Question Period. Does the Prime Minister not realize that paying groups to protest against these projects is exactly part of the problem?

Trudeau had two comebacks. One, that Dogwood got funding under the Conservative government as well. A fair point, certainly: tactically, if anything, it was weirder for the Conservatives not to object than for the Liberals, who can (or could) reasonably hope some Dogwood supporters might vote for them. And two, that unlike apparently the leader of the official opposition, we believe in free speech.

I dont even know what to call that. I would call it chutzpah, but even after weeks upon weeks of controversy, Im not convinced the Liberals and their most ardent supporters actually understand why people object so strenuously to the way they have handled the anti-abortion carve-out to the Summer Jobs Program.

The most logical way to ensure that government money isnt spent advocating for or against a government policy is to stipulate that it not be so spent. Tick this box to affirm that your summer employee will not participate in any anti-abortion/anti-pipeline/anti-whatever activities. Easy peasy. Instead bureaucrats somehow came up with this: an applicant organization has to attest that both the job and my organizations core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights.

This unambiguously shifts the focus from behaviour (protesting a pipeline, parading around photos of aborted fetuses) to belief. A government is on much shakier ground when it discriminates based on belief; indeed, if anything is a value underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, freedom of religion certainly is. Yet Liberals seemed utterly baffled as more and more religious organizations, notably Bible camps, refused to tick the box not because they had anything to do with anti-abortion advocacy but because their core mandates are to reflect their religious beliefs in all that they do, and their religious beliefs include the sanctity of human life in utero.

If Team Trudeau really cant wrap its mind around the nature of devout religious faith, despite an obvious imperative to do so, then perhaps this Dogwood episode can ram it through their skulls. You dont need to be religious to understand. Just flip it around. Imagine the Conservative government had decided to nix summer jobs funding for anti-pipeline advocacy (not much of a stretch), or to throw a rare bone to its social-conservative wing and refuse to fund pro-choice advocacy. It would have been well within their rights, but people would have howled.

Now imagine they had asked every progressive-minded summer camp to attest, say, that its important to get Albertas natural resources to tidewater, or that there is no Charter right to abortion. The howling would have rather increased, no?

Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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