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Minister of Finance Bill Morneau attends a news conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, on March 11, 2020.

BLAIR GABLE/Reuters

That was a big oops. The Liberal governments explanation for putting a 21-month blank cheque into emergency legislation was essentially that officials and aides wanted to give Finance Minister Bill Morneau flexibility in a crisis, and got carried away. Nobody caught the grab for additional powers. An accident. Oops!

So Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to start out his daily press conference pledging that he will stick with the whole democracy thing even in a time of crisis. Mr. Trudeau has for days been explaining he didnt need to invoke the Emergencies Act for more powers, but by Tuesday, his government had so overreached that he had to profess his unwavering commitment to democracy.

The original version of the legislation, before the opposition cried foul, allowed for Mr. Morneau to tax, borrow or spend without any parliamentary approval, until the end of 2021. It dispensed with even the basic safeguard in the Emergencies Act, including limited parliamentary oversight and shorter time limits, such as 90 days, on emergency powers. It was so offside, the government withdrew the most offending part at the 11th hour around 11 p.m. Monday night and on Tuesday entered negotiations with the opposition about other sections.

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The uncomfortable thing is that this grasping move betrays a panicky uncertainty among the people making economic policy in Ottawa.

They are so unsure about what is needed to stabilize the economy that they tried to obtain the power to borrow, tax, and spend as they see fit, at the stroke of a pen, for nearly two years.

The desire to be able to move quickly is understandable. Every week seems to bring the coronavirus crisis and its economic impact to a new scale. Yet this move is a byproduct of the way the Liberal government has handled the economic package that is supposed to reassure Canadians.

The first tranche announced last week was big, for normal times $27-billion in spending and $55-billion in temporary tax deferrals but not so big that it got ahead of the rising wave of fears and really reassured the public. The U.S. Congress is working on a US$2-trillion bill, and though the two packages and economies are not exactly comparable, the scale isnt, either.

It seems likely that finance officials wanted all those extra powers because theyre not only worried about the unpredictability of the future, theyre uncertain about the adequacy of what they have already done. The economic package in the legislation going before Parliament doesnt put Canada firmly ahead of the curve.

The 10-per-cent wage subsidy is so small, it seems like the government didnt believe in the idea. And perhaps wage subsidies are not the right choice but small ones will probably not keep a lot of people on payrolls. The emergency benefit of $900 every two weeks is not enough for those who dont get some other sum, like the enhanced Canada Child Benefit. The feds might add sums later, but it is important to reassure quickly.

Some things, like industrial bailouts, might take a little more time. But for big things, its not impossible to recall Parliament, as they did Tuesday. In the meantime, the Finance Minister needs a little flexibility. But not a Constitution made of Play-Doh.

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The Liberals note they sent a draft of the bill to the opposition in advance, and the offending provisions will be fixed. No harm, no foul. And lets accept mistakes will be made in a rush job. But this one betrayed a reckless disregard for parliamentary checks and balances. It was a big mistake.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer took the sensible position that his party was willing to pass the package of economic supports, but not the most egregious overreaches for new powers without oversight. He was not wrong. Conservative backbencher Scott Reid defied his own party by showing up at the House of Commons when only a small rump of MPs from each party was supposed to attend, because he objected to the process, and that the bill wont even have after-the-fact monitoring by a parliamentary committee. He was not wrong, either. Instead of mustering multiparty co-operation in a crisis, the Liberals triggered tense negotiations.

The partisan bickering wasnt reassuring. Neither was the panicky grab for spending powers. Mr. Trudeaus Liberals had worked to reassure the public, and then we saw them sweat.

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The panicky legislative power grab at Liberal crisis central isnt reassuring - The Globe and Mail

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Last week, The Washington Times had an inspirational moment. On Thursday, it wrapped this venerable newspaper in a red-inked wrapper and presented readers with an evocative question. In the top half of the wrapper the editors asked boldly:

Tired of being

Lectured,

Mocked,

Lied to?

Now whom do you think The Times we call it the Good Times was alluding to? I think we all know. The question was directed at attendees at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC. Thousands of conservatives were pouring into the area, and the Good Times wanted to greet them in style.

We have all had the same experience every time we step out of the door of our residences. It can be from an Uber driver, from an impudent high school snot who just discovered global warming, from a card carrying left-wing mesmerizer. All such know-it-alls have all the answers to any problem one might present to them. Doubtless, they already have the answer to the coronavirus crisis. His name is Donald Trump.

The left-wingers regularly lecture us, mock us and, of course, lie to us. Their behavior, however, rarely ever stings, because long ago we saw through their hysteria.

Another reason is that they never listen to us anyway. This has been true for many years, ever since liberalism died and the progressives replaced them. There was a day when leading liberals and leading conservatives got together to exchange views. Back in the 1960s Bill Buckley, the leading conservative polemicist of his day and the editor in chief of National Review, would regularly sit down with such figures as The New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal to discuss the drift of things in America. It is impossible to convene such social gatherings today.

I know. I tried to convene similar dinners in Washington. It was back in the 1980s. I succeeded for a couple of years on a couple of occasions. Then the liberals simply failed to show up. We went on with our dinners they are called The Saturday Evening Club and I continued to invite liberals. The last Saturday Evening Club attended by a liberal was in 1994 and the liberal was Sen. Pat Moynihan. I had known him for years and often learned from him. After his death it was hopeless.

Frankly, I think that the problem was generational. Pat and I, though a generation apart, shared the same broad values: Tolerance, trust, respect, curiosity and similar goals. Not always the same goals but at least similar goals. Pat admired the mixed economy. I was for free markets. Either way the country would survive. There are no such shared values extant between the likes of me and the socialist Bernie Sanders, who claims he is introducing a revolution to our shores. He does not want America to survive but to be replaced, and he is the frontrunner in the Democratic field.

Last Thursday, I shared my copy of The Washington Times with an attendee from the CPAC meeting, the distinguished political historian Professor Paul Kengor from Grove City College. He immediately grasped the meaning of the newspapers red wrapper. He followed up with a story of an experience that he had just endured at lunch. He was eating sushi at a public restaurant. The seating was rather tight. The table next to him had two women, one from a diversity-training program, the other from a corporation that had hired the first womans services. Paul said, they could not have been more than a foot or two from him. He could hear every word they uttered but they did not care.

It presented no problem for them or for what they wanted to discuss. They gabbled on about white males, about pushing white males aside for minority hiring programs, about women replacing men in the workplace. Paul who is white and a male not transgendered but the real thing said nothing.

America has broken down into two different countries. One lectures us, mocks us and lies to us. It is about to experience four more years of us.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is the author most recently of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc.

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Liberals persist in lecturing, mocking and lying to conservatives - Washington Times

that awareness of a ubiquitous, arbitrary deathwhich descends like a medieval plague on the just and the unjust alike, without warning or reasonis, I think, central to our experience of the 20th century.

A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from human habitationa book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Kafka, quoted in The Savage God

The institutionalizing of knowledge.makes people dependent on having their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of the moral and political imagination.

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

A Cafe customer and friend, Brian, handed me out of the box he was carrying copies of the August 18 issue of the New York Times magazine and the Times supplement that announce the launching of the 1619 Project. He had bought 50 of them in order to pass them on to anyone who might be interested. Somehow, I had missed the news of this worthy Project, aimed ambitiously and admirably at reframing American history to make explicit that slavery is the foundation upon which this country is built- a cause I wholeheartedly support.

Inwardly, and in the face of Brians (he is white) perpetual enthusiasm for the topic of race, I am tired. I could imagine myself reading the material, consoling myself and warming my soul with truthy facts from peoples history. An oasis right at the tip of my fingers wherefrom I can drink until satiated. But, instead of accepting the materials gracefully, I protested to Brian: The problem is, knowing the facts doesnt change people. I gave him my example of all the customers we lose when their children arrive at school age, and the parents promptly move to the white suburbs with their higher performing schools. I emphasized, These people are not racists; they are pro-social justice, good people. But their behavior will reflect their context, not what they are taught in a pro-social program at school. They will behave according to their fears, not their ideals.

As I spoke, I had the familiar sensation of the microphone being clicked off. I am talking to myself.

The same day, I received from a friend via email a video that was apparently making the rounds among liberal intellectuals like herself, called The Day Democracy Died. In it, we are treated to delightfully inventive animated portraits of the Founding Fathers, singing to the tune of The Day the Music Died, smart lyrics about Trump and how people must not vote for him. I watched as George Washington, John Adams, and then James Madison sang their verses. Im not sure I will watch the rest. All I can think of, watching it, is, yes, these are the smart clever guys, the educated liberals, who can put together such a satisfying few moments of wellliberal satisfaction. I could not think what I had said that made my friend think this was something I would enjoy.

These days, I wonder if I can muster my energy anymore to make the response my soul wants to make to all this good liberal-splaining. The difficulty for me, as the ongoing catastrophe climate inequality war discardability of human beings keeps advancing, of being continually bathed in a wash of liberal enthusiasms is to keep track of whats missing, what keeps me from sharing their enthusiasm. Whatever it is, I have to summons it myself; the liberal thoughtworld that turns off the mic on me is singularly bent on forgetting its inner disquiet (or limiting it to if we can just get rid of Trump!).

Its nothing personal, this microphone-switching. Its what you do when someone is clearly coming from some foreign place whose thought patterns you cannot grasp because you do not know the culture, this otherness confronting you. Amongst my liberal friends, it is a general phenomenon, not a unique one; the liberal class believes it exists in a homogenous society marred by racism and poverty, when in fact the society is wholly segregated and stratified; they do not acknowledge otherness (other than in the approved categories, thus Kim cannot be an other; microphone clicks off). They do not become others themselves, unless something terrible befalls them and they fall out of the liberal class, and even that may not do it. What liberals need in order to stop collectively being an obstruction to change, besides turning off MSNBC news, is soul facts to stand against the knowledge that has been produced for them, dependence upon which is making them stupid. In Kafkas sense, they should read a book but not another comfortable read by Naomi Klein or Ta-Nehisi Coates. It must be a confrontation with the knowledge that will chop the frozen sea within, the kind of soul meeting that society generally leaves to its artists.

The special character of art or creativity, its independence from facts due to the relationship of artists to the Muse (i.e., to their inwardness and imagination), allows the artist to function as societys conduit for necessary compensatory spiritual knowledge. Compensatory because it comes from the Unconscious, the realm of the deep Feminine, that cannot be contacted via ordinary consciousness, this knowledge includes the stuff most of us dont like to think about (i.e, death, decay, loss, failure and poverty); it both fascinates and repels. Consequently theres a mystique about the artist; those who die at an early age (Keats) or by suicide (Plath) are romanticized or fetishized. In post- WW II, atomic-age America, the burden of the modern awareness of ubiquitous, arbitrary death was expressed in the bleakness and despair, alcoholism and suicide we associate with the artists of that era. Fast forward to our time: neoliberalisms triumphal embrace of progress, its offer of salvation by technology, 24-7 media saturation etc., has resulted, catastrophically, in near-complete suppression of the compensatory knowledge; even art has come to serve neoliberalisms benign totalitarianism, sacrificing imagination for the good of the bourgeois whole. In effect, neoliberalism has turned off the microphone for the spiritual voices of its poets, prophets, and mystics while keeping it on for the droning banality of MSNBC and NPR.

In The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1970) author and literary critic A. Alvarez wrote of the artist in totalitarian society: When the artist is valued only to the extent to which he serves the policies of the state, then his art is reduced to propaganda. The artist who refuses that role refuses everything; he becomes superfluous. In these circumstances the price of art in the traditional sense is suicide or silence, which amounts to the same thing.

Though I wasnt sure if Alvarez referred to Soviet Russia or our own smiley-faced totalitarianism, we know the silence he is talking about. I am tempted to say of Alvarez that, having perceived the artists predicament as the choice between either artistic suicide or silence (i.e, professional suicide), he chose the former, as has much (not all!) of the art world since. As literary critic, he championed the confessional poets, many of them self-destructive. His doing so helped his career, and it helped to keep the art world in the popular media. As part of the media spectacle, artists no longer could serve as conduit for deep spiritual knowledge with its power to enliven us and make us feel our worth as human beings. With the art world largely having chosen artistic (spiritual), rather than professional suicide, and liberal societys microphone off, a different way must be found for spiritual knowledge to be integrated if we are to be capable of imagining, much less retaining, the necessary conditions for our own humanity,

Fortunately for the human cause, other artists, both known and unknown, responded differently to the great evil of late-stage capitalism than those who succumbed to its darkness. They have consciously taken up the artists function as integrators of compensatory knowledge. I am particularly aware, from my own study, of contemporary writers and thinkers who were influenced by the poet Robert Bly. He, in turn, was influenced by Spanish surrealist poets, by Eastern spirituality and Sufism, by C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, Marie-Louise von Franz, etc., and also by people who, like Bly, were part of the spiritual recovery movements of the 1980s. The result was a new age movement (derided and demeaned in mainstream liberal media) among these explorers of the Unconscious. By a process of descending into their darkness and despair they learned that integration of darker knowledge could be achieved by means of the myth-informed imagination existing in the soul. Most importantly, those who descend into the indigenous layers of their own psyche, i.e., making the heros journey in the manner of the artist, can go beyond the stage of healing that just makes people functional enough to keep capitalism going. Men and women who enter and get lost in the forest remote from human habitation a test of courage as perilous as any 19th century explorer of the Nile can discover the great treasure of eternal things awaiting them there, the basis for their own subjective authority, i.e., for their individuality and their art.

Accustomed as I am to speaking with the microphone turned off, I prefer this death to the alternative, for without individual truth learned in soul facts, vision is limited to liberal consensus. Without a basis in eternal things, counter-cultural idealism that is, the unelectable, funky and unfashionable idealism of peace, reconciliation, justice, between all living beings and with the earth cant exist. Only with the capacity to be grounded in ones own subjectivity precisely as if it mattered! can a spirit for living humanly and nobly be found that does not shrink back, even in the face of the modern horrors. Built up over millennia of an ever-threatened human existence, the souls memory provides a basis for adhering to the center, rather than flying outward in the falcons ever-widening gyre (Yeats). Even the advancing threats of the 20th-21st centuries that fall on the just and unjust alike cannot vanquish its completely subjective, soul-based idealism.

I write about these ideas not to propagate a new dogma. (On the contrary, decision-making based in soul facts rather than in a science-based regime of official facts, makes this new heroism intrinsically de-centralized and non-authoritarian, anarchist without Anarchism.) I write purely in the interest of maintaining human aliveness, chiefly my own, so constantly threatened and demoralized in the neoliberal reality. I am willing to be dead in this world, as long as I can be livened by the subjective, creative reality within. Therefore, I decline to speak from or for the world based in institutionalized fact thats designed to dominate over the fragile soul fact, and leaves all the others on the planet to grapple with feelings of smallness, or shame, or being dumb, failed, discardable, unwanted. The contrast provided by those who depend on soul facts, rather than on the knowledge thats been produced for them, allows one to feel the difference between being a subjectively alive human being (i.e., dead, microphone off) and subjectively shit (i.e., functional).

The liberal class in America is now highly disturbed and disoriented by the instability of facts, the two sides to every argument and fake news of neoliberalisms brave new world. So much so, they will act as if all the error is on the other side, with those who will not listen to science, or reason. Really, though, this betrayal by fact-based, media-propagated truth is something we had coming. If liberal society had, after outgrowing religion, kept ears and eyes open to the artists and poets, mystics and prophets, and turned off the microphone on the MSNBC babblers and game players, we would have been better equipped for defending humanity against the increasingly violent forces of dehumanization. As it is now, humanity depends upon each person to be a hero in its defense; and this has to be our cause, over mere survival.

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Liberals Explain Things to Me ... My Soul Rebels - CounterPunch

Making sense of Russia has become more urgent since the Russian leadership threw down a gauntlet to the Western powers. Vladimir Putin, coming to the presidency at the start of this millennium, at first played in harmony with the United States. But unhinged by the so-called color revolutions that rocked Georgia and Ukraine in the early 2000s, he suspected U.S. meddling and resolved to challenge Washington in global affairs.

Relations between Moscow and Washington cooled under U.S. President George W. Bush and, despite a slight thaw when Putins protege Dmitry Medvedev was Russian president, went into a deep freeze in 2012 after Putin returned to the highest Kremlin office. He despised U.S. President Barack Obama almost as much as he hated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Moscows propaganda outlets denounced the U.S. government as the fount of geostrategic evils and called for a multipolar world in which American power would be curtailed. Meanwhile Russian foreign policy sought conciliation with U.S. rivals, notably the Peoples Republic of China, while challenging the United States and its allies at every turn.

Putins pugnacious rhetoric imprinted itself on policy. He accelerated nuclear arms modernization and annexed Crimea in 2014. Russian forces have continued to bathe eastern Ukraine in blood, Russian digital operatives and intelligence agents interfered maliciously in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and Russian money was used as a tool to undermine the European Union.

Having castigated Americas endorsement of the Arab Spring, the Kremlin leadership from 2015 deployed Russian airpower to rescue Bashar al-Assads embattled regime in the Syrian civil war. Although Putin apparently enjoys a friendly relationship with current U.S. President Donald Trump, official Russias anti-American polemics have been maintained.

Like most journalists who have lived in Russia while reporting on it, Joshua Yaffa focuses on the domestic situation in his new book, Between Two Fires. But he does not ignore foreign policy, because Russian internal affairs help to condition the options favored by the Kremlin in international relations. And it is difficult not to discern a parallel between the Kremlins belligerence abroad and its illiberal activities on the home front.

Indeed, the Putin administration savagely represses Russians who speak or act against it. The electoral system has been further enfeebled since Boris Yeltsin stepped down from the presidency at the end of 1999. Opposition politicians and investigative reporters have been persecuted, sometimes even assassinated. Parties gain the legal registration to contest national elections only if they represent no serious threat to the ruling elite. The main TV stations dutifully repeat the news as dictated by the Kremlin.

The Russian people, as Yaffa points out, have grown habituated to this contemporary reality. When Russians think about the 1990s, they spend little time pondering whether a different outcome for Russias transition from communism was a realistic possibility. Although Yeltsin pursued a foreign policy of collaboration with the United States, his management of elections and parliaments was characterized by persistent fraud, and it is misleading to picture Putins arrival in power as the first bridge on the road to illiberalism.

Yaffa, however, deliberately directs his focus away from the Kremlin. Instead, his highly original and riveting account describes how a growing number of more or less liberal-minded figures across the whole range of Russian professional life have decided to make their peace with the ruling establishment. They have come to the judgement that political liberals are unlikely to win a national election in the near future. They conclude that if they are to make an influential contribution to the life of the nation, they have pick up a long spoon and sup with the devil.

Putin for his part knows that he would lose more than he could gain by excluding them entirely from public affairs. Their services make his Russia operate more effectively and increase the impression that he rules by consent. The country is no longer a totalitarian dictatorship, and the Putin administration is flexible enough to allow breathing space for those who do not like its policies but agree to forswear open criticism of them. It is a tacit compromise that suits both sides in current circumstances.

Heda Saratova, for instance, is a human rights activist who worked for years to rescue victims of persecution and torture in Chechnya. She built her career as an official of Memorial, which is the organization that fights to tell the truth about atrocities from the Stalinist 1930s to the present day. In the course of her enquiries she witnessed the drastic narrowing of opportunities as the Chechen president and Putin loyalist Ramzan Kadyrov dealt as brutally with incoming investigators as he did with his critics among fellow Chechens. Her lifes choice has been to abandon overt criticism of Kadyrov so as to gain otherwise unlikely opportunities to save the lives of those whom he was abusing. In her view, it was not a perfect solution but better than doing nothing.

Elizaveta Glinka, a medical doctor, faced a similar dilemma in her work among the dead and wounded in eastern Ukraine. As the price of being able to continue her activities saving sick and injured children, she was drawn into cooperating with the state authorities in Moscow. The Kremlin showered her with honors, which enabled it to burnish its own reputation for philanthropy while continuing the war. Glinka was aware of how she was being used but saw it as the only available way that she could alleviate the appalling distress. Her last exploit would have been to perform the same services in Syria, attended by television crews. Tragically, her flight to the war zone crashed on takeoff from a Russian military airport near the southern city of Sochi.

Not all of Yaffas portraits of those cooperating with the establishment have involved individuals who needed to curb the murmurs of a liberal conscience. Konstantin Ernst is a renowned TV producer who put his creativity as the disposal of the Russian authorities. He has a chameleons ability to change color as circumstances shift. He climbed to the apex of his career when he was assigned the task of directing the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014. The five rings of the Olympic symbol shone up to the heavens above the stadium in the form of five gigantic snowflakes (one of which didnt work, but nobody minded), and the audience was treated to a balletic tableau of Russian history from tsarism to the present day. Peace and love after much suffering was the unifying theme.

Ernsts masterpiece of soft power would have had a more lasting effect worldwide if Putin had not decided to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea later that month. There were no liberals in Putins inner circle involved in the fateful discussion, and he did not bother even to seek advice from either his prime minister, Medvedev, or his foreign affairs minister, Sergei Lavrov. The core of his thinking was that Russia should and could do whatever was necessary for recognition as a global colossus.

Indeed, nothing annoyed him more than when, in March 2014, Obama scornfully referred to the Russian Federation as a mere regional power. The Putin administration was determined to prove that Obama had seriously underestimated it and that economic sanctions against Russia would never deflect it from its desired objective.

Yaffa notes the national popularity and political supremacy that accrued to Putin as the result of the Crimean land grab, when his poll ratings rose to 89 percentan extraordinary achievement by someone who had held one or other of the two supreme offices of state for so long. And Putin has predictably earned additional plaudits at home as Russian arms and diplomacy filled the vacuum left by Obama and Trump in the wars across the Middle East.

Russias renewed assertiveness welled up from deep and wide feelings among Russians in general that the country had to stand tall again after the humiliations of the 1990s. It derived just as much from the leaderships calculation that such a stance would distract the electorate from the defects of their leaders.

This raises a question about the prospects for continued political and social stability, the same stability thatas Yaffa painstakingly describesinduced so many Russians to think it useless to engage in direct opposition to an obviously greedy, corrupt, and authoritarian administration. When in 2011 Putin announced his intention to stand for a third presidential term, there was an upsurge of rallies and demonstrations against him. In response, his campaign slogans noticeably increased the number of promises about welfare benefits. Evidently, he and his advisors sensed that there might be serious trouble for him unless he offered to relieve the material hardships endured by average Russian households.

An acute threat to the Putin administration arose in summer 2014, when the price of oil plummeted on world markets. As the finance ministry tightened its purse strings, sharp new cutbacks on welfare payments were imposed. By mid-2018, the administration was pushed into extending the obligatory working years before retirement. This time it was retirees rather than the usual political activists who protested, by occupying buses and trains and blocking highways. Putin was shocked into agreeing to restrict the scope of pension reform.

Other countries, of course, have witnessed much more tumultuous groundswells of anti-government protest. Russia in the last 30 years has seen nothing like the Arab Spring of 2011, when long-ensconced ruling cliques were overturned by the fury of street demonstrations. Nothing quite as serious as even the gilets jaunes who brought Paris and other French cities to a standstill in the winter of 2018 to 2019 has yet transpired.

The likelihood at present is that the uppermost elite in Russia has the guile and ruthlessness to see off any disturbances. But Putin cannot rule forever, and he has repeatedly shown that he is capable of making mistakes by overplaying his hand. Embracing the Chinese while annoying most Americans may soon come to be seen as a poorer strategy than playing them off against each other.

For the moment, though, he can count on many ambitious Russians concluding that their careers require them to compromise with the Kremlin. Good and not-so-good men and women are forced to make difficult choicesand Joshua Yaffas remarkable book is a guide to the pain and pleasure of their lives in the public arena.

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In Russia, Liberals Are Selling Their Souls to the Kremlin - Foreign Policy

The federal budget is usually delivered before the start of the new fiscal year on April 1.

This year might be an exception. No date has been announced and the uncertainty created by the coronavirus means it might be a good idea if Bill Morneau saves his breath to cool his porridge.

Former finance minister John Manley said on CTV Power Play that he would be inclined to delay the budget until we have a better sense of how severe the impact of the virus is going to be.

When it comes, it may bear little resemblance to the spending plan Morneau thought he was going to deliver. The first emergency rate cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve since the financial crisis is a stark reminder of the risks the virus poses to economic activity.

But unless Morneau needs to act to avert a meltdown, the expectation is that the budget will be more transitional than transformative.

The finance minister does not have much fiscal room, given the deficit is already forecast to come in at $26.6 billion this year.

Veteran Liberal MP Wayne Easter said that the budget recommendations made by members of the finance committee he chairs were conscious of Morneaus spending constraints. Everybody well, most tried to avoid big ticket items, he said.

The finance committees pre-budget report, tabled last week, is generally a good barometer of government thinking, even in a minority parliament.

It was telling that the first piece of advice the committee gave to the finance minister was that he adopt the recommendations of the expert panel on sustainable finance, which delivered a report that landed on cats paws last summer and has scarcely been mentioned since.

However, it sounds as if the report has been lifted off the dusty shelves in the Department of Finance and will form the narrative backbone for a budget that talks about the co-operation between government and financial institutions to fight climate change.

The Liberals asked former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, Royal Bank director, Andy Chisholm, Caisse de dpot et placement du Qubec executive vice-president, Kim Thomassin, and Ontario Teachers Pension Plan chief risk and strategy officer, Barbara Zvan, to make suggestions on policies that might encourage the financing of innovation, clean electricity, building retro-fits and climate-resistant infrastructure.

Many recommendations were perfect for Morneau green initiatives that sound modern and transitional but dont have major spending implications

It will be a major surprise if Morneau does not follow up on a number of their suggestions.

The thrust of the report is that the climate change debate should be presented as an opportunity, rather than a burden.

The government should provide more clarity about the capital investments that are needed to meet Canadas 2030 emissions targets and the role it sees for the private sector, the authors said. The report cited the U.K.s offshore wind market as an example of a government articulating a long-term policy framework and working with industry to achieve its goals. The British government identified a market and targeted barriers to offshore development, established institutions to foster the technology and designed a capacity auction for the power generated. The result is that the U.K. now hosts 40 per cent of globally installed capacity.

Another report recommendation urged government to create financial incentives to encourage Canadians to invest in climate conscious financial products through registered savings plans and defined contribution pension plans.

There were a suite of technical recommendations, such as the call to clarify the scope of fiduciary duty in terms of climate change governments and corporations have been sued for having taken insufficient action to mitigate or adapt to climate incidents.

Many of the recommendations were perfect for Morneau green initiatives that sound modern and transitional but dont have major spending implications.

But the report was less inspiring when it came to suggestions to transform the oil and gas sector into a low-emissions industry.

Its footprint puts high-intensity segments at heightened risk of market displacement in sustainability-conscious markets, the authors said.

That has become apparent, as the drive towards sustainable finance that the reports authors are cheerleading has seen some of the worlds largest financial institutions pull out of oil production in Alberta.

As the panel pointed out, the trend toward capital flight has been exacerbated by perceptions of regulatory uncertainty, high compliance costs and long lead times, with the result capital spending in the oilsands in 2018 was only one third the investment level of 2014.

The report might perhaps have made some recommendations to address the political factors at play but instead it focused on variations of clean technology solutions that are already being attempted such as the Clean Resources Innovation Network, a group of resource industry professionals and academics trying to accelerate commercialization of low-carbon technology.

It all sounds like so much lip-service.

Not that Morneau will be worried unduly. This government wants to be seen to be supporting the oil and natural gas sector but were market-displacement to take place, then no great mischief.

For the government of a country that may be on the brink of recession to shrug its shoulders at the demise of its largest export industry more than twice the value of auto shipments and three times that of base metals does not suggest stellar leadership, particularly when the integrity of the country itself may be at stake.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter:

Originally posted here:
John Ivison: With Canada facing possible recession, Liberals can't afford to shrug off the oilsands - National Post