Archive for the ‘Liberals’ Category

Budget 2017: Liberals try to ease anxiety and get Canada ready for the future – BarrieToday

OTTAWA The future is coming at you, fast, and the Liberal government says it knows you're getting anxious and potentially angry.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau delivered a federal budget Wednesday that aims to get Canadians ready for a changing world and potentially shield the Liberals from the forces that brought U.S. President Donald Trump to power.

"Everyday folks who work hard to provide for their families are worried about the future," Morneau said in his speech to the House of Commons as he tabled the 2017 federal budget, the second since the Liberals formed a majority government in 2015.

"They're worried that rapid technological change, the seemingly never-ending need for new skills and growing demands on our time will mean that their kids won't have the same opportunities that they had. And who can blame them?" Morneau said.

After setting up the doom and the gloom, Morneau spoke of the good news: Canadians have always been able to adapt to changing circumstances.

The budget, which projects a deficit of $28.5 billion this coming fiscal year, including a contingency reserve, is designed to help them get there.

It includes about $5.2 billion for skills development as the government plans to help Canadians adapt their education and employment training to a diversifying economy at a time when the lower price of oil has meant the natural resource sector can no longer be counted on to provide jobs or sustain federal revenues.

Measures include letting out-of-work Canadians go back to school or receive new job training without having to give up their employment insurance benefits, a pilot project to test ways to make it easier for adults who have already been in the workforce to access student loans and grants and doing more to promote careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to young people.

The Liberals do not just want to help Canadians find jobs in the future. They also want to try and bring that future about.

The budget commits nearly $3 billion to support innovation over the next five years and promises to develop an innovation and skills plan that will target six sectors the Liberal government see as good bets for spurring economic growth and creating well-paying jobs: advanced manufacturing, clean technology, the agri-food sector, digital industries, clean resources and health and bio-sciences.

As the Liberals work to ensure everyone can find a job in the new economy, they are also giving a boost to many who were left behind by the traditional one, such as women and those from indigenous communities.

The budget commits $7 billion over the next decade to help increase access to affordable child care, will allow women to begin maternity leave earlier and provides more financial support for those caring for an ill or aging relative all seen as ways to help increase the participation of women in the workforce.

The budget document, for the first time in Canadian history, also includes a section on how many of its measures impact men and women in different ways, with a promise to do a deeper gender-based analysis for the 2018 budget.

While this budget is relatively thin on net new spending, all these new promises still come with a cost, especially since the federal government is still footing the bill for the gigantic, ongoing commitments from last year.

Canadians can expect a five-cent increase in EI premiums in fiscal 2018-19, up to $1.68 per $100 of insurable earnings, with some of that additional cost coming from the measures that will give more people access to benefits.

The government is also looking for savings in other ways that will hit the pocketbooks of many Canadians, by eliminating the public transit tax credit, raising the tax on alcohol by two per cent beginning Thursday and changing the rules so that ride-sharing businesses, such as Uber, are subject to the same sales taxes as traditional taxis.

The deficit still remains nearly three times the $10-billion limit the Liberals promised in their campaign platform and while the budget's projections show it shrinking over time as the government expects economic growth to pick up steam, there is still no official word on when they expect to get back to balance.

This budget also removes a pledge to reduce the ratio of federal debt to GDP over the course of their mandate, which, after busting past their promise to eliminate the deficit by 2019, was the only fiscal target they had left.

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Joanna Smith, The Canadian Press

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Budget 2017: Liberals try to ease anxiety and get Canada ready for the future - BarrieToday

Philip Cross: The Liberals have become prisoners of their own, unwise budgeting – Financial Post


Financial Post
Philip Cross: The Liberals have become prisoners of their own, unwise budgeting
Financial Post
There are two major problems with the latest federal budget, starting with the Liberals' first budget in 2016. By immediately adopting that budget's full array of middle-class tax cuts and more spending on everything from the Canada Child Benefit to ...

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Philip Cross: The Liberals have become prisoners of their own, unwise budgeting - Financial Post

Liberals pour billions in to child care in political bid to win over families – Calgary Herald

OTTAWA - The federal government plans to spend $7 billion over the next decade to help ease the burden of child care costs, part of a slew of new long-term spending targeting families.

The details outlined in Wednesday's federal budget estimated that child care spending could create 40,000 new, subsidized daycare spaces countrywide over the next three years, representing a bump of less than 10 per cent in the overall number of spaces, although it's unclear how the Liberals came to that figure.

The budget said the money could also help thousands of parents more easily enter the labour force, particularly women, much as it did in Quebec after that province introduced a subsidized daycare system.

The potential new spaces and reduced child care fees would come just in time for 2019, when the Trudeau Liberals face re-election, and build on the extra money the Liberals gave to families last year through a new child benefit. At a cost of about $23 billion a year, the income-tested child benefit eats up under 10 per cent of the federal budget.

The Liberals would also have a carrot to dangle in front of families during the election as the child care funding would hover around $550 million a year for the next five years and then jump to approximately $800 million annually between 2022 and 2028. That's about one third of what the Paul Martin Liberals promised provinces the last time the federal government made a significant foray into the child care system.

"It has been a long time since we've seen federal leadership in this area but we are disappointed the budget is not more ambitious in its spending especially at the start of the 10-year period," said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada.

Andrea Mrozek, director of the faith-based think-tank Cardus Family said the money acts as a form of "soft coercion" for families to send their children to daycare and mothers to get back to work faster than they may wish.

"Rather than expanding options that increase the good for particular families, the government paints families into a corner by favouring one particular option," she said.

Exactly how the money will be spent will be subject to negotiations between federal, provincial and territorial governments and on how much the federal government wants to push the provinces on the issue of affordability, said David Macdonald, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives who studies child care costs.

Federal officials said the money could be spent on building child care centres, fee subsidies for parents, or wage subsidies for providers among other options to address the cost of child care that in some cities costs more than $20,000 a year. It's also unclear if the money will go to for-profit or home-based day cares.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said the budget doesn't promise new child care spaces, only the possibility of 40,000 even though there's a need for hundreds of thousands of spaces nationwide.

The child care spending is one of several measures the Liberals are enacting as part of a push to get more women into the workforce, and politically win over families who may have lingering financial concerns about how to pay the bills.

The budget extended parental leave to 18 months by spreading 12 months worth of payments over that time. And it lets expectant mothers begin claiming maternity benefits up to 12 weeks before their due date, an increase from the current eight weeks but short of the 15 weeks envisioned in a bill from Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen, which heads to committee for review starting Thursday.

The budget doesn't include dedicated leave for the second parent, something the Liberals had openly mused about doing. Nor does it increase parental leave benefits to make it easier for low-income earners to be able to afford to take leave.

The parental leave measures will cost the government about $30 million a year over the next five years. Moving up the start date on the maternity benefit will cost about $8.6 million more per year over the same period.

Those measures, among others, will require an increase in employment insurance premiums paid by workers and employers, starting next year.

The Liberals' second budget also expands eligibility for student loans and grants, so part-time students who support families can more easily access funding to help them enter or re-enter the workforce, at a cost of about $167 million over four years.

Both measures will be in place for the 2018-2019 academic year.

The budget also includes $287.2 million over three years starting next year for a pilot project to test changes to student loan and grant rules to help more adults return to school.

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Liberals pour billions in to child care in political bid to win over families - Calgary Herald

Les Leyne: BC Liberals’ cash woes there’s too much – Times Colonist

The B.C. Liberals have managed something that not many political outfits can do. Most parties have perennial financial problems, but the Liberals money issue is different. Theyve got too much of it.

Perceptions have been driving the continued controversy about fundraising in B.C., and the appearance of businesses that do business with the government sending millions the Liberals way is the main one that rankles. But the other perception is the yawning gap between the governing party and the others.

If the Liberals and the NDP were even in the same general ballpark in terms of fundraising, there would be a lot less concern about the issue. But the Liberals rake in three or four times as much as the NDP, and 25 times as much as the Greens. Its such an overwhelming, sustained advantage, it gives people pause.

Part of it is simply because the Liberals have been in government through four terms. Incumbency gives a big edge because business donors are generally more interested in politicians with power, than without. Even the prospect of being a winner makes raising money a lot easier.

New Democrats got a vivid lesson in 2013 when they were overwhelming favourites to win the election. They collected $2 million from corporations, 10 times the amount they got from that sector in the previous election. Many of the business leaders who routinely give to the Liberals hedged their bets and gave to the NDP.

The party avidly courted those donors with the same expensive receptions that both major parties are still holding today.

They still managed to lose, but it wasnt for lack of money.

Part of the Liberals funding edge stems from the standard mistrust business has for the NDP. Thats part of the comeback the Liberals have to the complaints about big money in politics.

Its a free country and everyones playing by the same (lack of) rules. If the NDP wanted to even the balance, all theyd have to do is come up with more popular policies.

Or come up with better fundraisers. At the Liberal convention in 2014, Vancouverite Bob Rennie was introduced as the new fundraising chairman, and you could tell right away the party was going to take its fundraising effort to another level. Hes a hugely successful real-estate agent, art investor and philanthropist with a Midas touch.

Rennie stepped away from that post at the end of last year and the results showed. The Liberals pulled in more than $12 million in 2016 and paid off all debt.

They also confounded people who suspect big money dictates Liberal policy to some extent. The real-estate industry, riding a spectacularly lucrative price spiral, was a big donor to the party, but the Liberals did that industry no favours by clamping down on real-estate agents and trying to suppress prices. Its a measure of how acute the housing affordability problem became that the Liberals would bite the hand that feeds them.

The money edge isnt as apparent during the campaign period, since parties all have the same spending limits. Where it shows up is in day-to-day operations in off-years outside the campaign. In the last reporting period, the Liberals ran a $7.4-million operation; the NDPs budget was $3.5 million. The Liberals also have a much bigger payroll.

With no limits whatsoever, B.C. is the freest of all jurisdictions, but that might be about to change. Although the Liberals gave up on their plan to change the disclosure system and let the bill die last week, Premier Christy Clark did promise also to refer campaign financing to an independent panel.

That promise still stands, and is matched by the NDP. Clarks proposal has two catches: The panel cant recommend taxpayer financing, and any reform ideas would need unanimous support to take effect.

Those could create a deadlock where nothing much would come of any panel report.

But any panel, no matter which government appoints it, would only have to glance at the national landscape and conclude that B.C. has fallen way behind the times on campaign financing. Theres a chance the Wild West of campaign financing will some day be domesticated.

lleyne@timescolonist.com

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Les Leyne: BC Liberals' cash woes there's too much - Times Colonist

Opinion: The nationalist wave in the US and Europe that liberals still don’t get – MarketWatch

Geert Wilders, the nationalist candidate for prime minister of the Netherlands, lost that countrys election last week. This has brought comfort to those who opposed him and his views on immigration and immigrants. It is odd that they should be comforted.

A decade ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that someone of Wilderss views would have won any seats in parliament. The fact that his party is now the second-largest in the Netherlands, rather than an irrelevancy, should be a mark of how greatly both the Netherlands and Euro-American civilization have changed and an indication that this change is not temporary.

Indeed, the second-place showing of the nationalists in the Netherlands is accompanied by an interesting phenomenon. The center-right has shifted a number of its positions toward the nationalists. As we approach the French and German elections, a similar process is under way. While the right may lose elections, its positions are being adopted, at least in part, by centrist parties.

Wilders views are coarser than most, to be sure. He called Moroccans pigs and advocated closing mosques in the Netherlands. But more alarming is the inability of his enemies to grasp why Wilders has risen, and their tendency to dismiss his followers as simply racists. This comforts his critics. They feel morally superior. But paradoxically they are strengthening both Wilders and his allies in Europe and the United States.

I have written before onthe intimate connection between the right to national self-determination and liberal democracy. The right to nationalself-determinationis meaningless without the existence of a nation. And a nation is impossible to imagine without an identity. There is something that makes the Dutch different from Poles, and both different from Egyptians. Nationalism assumes distinctions.

Barron's senior editor Jack Hough and WSJ's Shelby Holliday discuss the latest issue of Barron's. Topics include finding alternatives to a border tax. Also, how to invest in water. Plus, why Canada's MBA programs are getting a Trump Bump.

For Europe, Nazi Germany and the wars of the 20th century were seen as manifestations of nationalism. Without nationalism or more precisely the obsession with national identity these things would not have happened. One result from this was the European Union, which tried bafflingly to acknowledge the persistence and importance of the nation-state while also trying to reduce the nation-states power and significance. The European Union has never abolished the differences between nations and their interests, because it couldnt.

Adolf Hitler taught us an important lesson. The balance between loving ones own and despising the stranger is less obvious than we would like to think. Nationalism can become monstrous. But so can internationalism, as Josef Stalin, Hitlers Russian soul mate, demonstrated. All things must be taken in moderation, but the need for moderation doesnt abolish the need to be someone in a vast world filled with others.

Nationalism was the centerpiece of the rise of liberal democraciesbecause liberal democracy was built around the liberation of nations. Liberals in Europe and America did not deny that, but they simply could not grasp that a nation cannot exist unless its people feel a common bond that makes them distinct. The claim was that it was legitimate to have a nation, but not legitimate to love it inordinately, to love it more than other nations, to value the things that made it different, and above all, to insist that the differences be preserved, not diluted.

Nationalism is not based on minor idiosyncrasies of food and holidays. It is the deep structure of the human soul, something acquired from mothers, families, religious leaders, teachers. It is the thing that you are before you even understand that there are others. It tells you about the nature of the world, the meaning of justice, the deities we bow to and the obligations we have to each other. Nationalism is not all we are, but it is the root of what we are.

If I say that I am an American, then I have said something of enormous importance. I am American and not Japanese or Dutch. I can admire these nationalities and have friends among them, but I am not one of them, and they are not one of us. I owe obligations to America and Americans that I do not owe to others, and others owe the same to their nations. It is easy to declare yourself a citizen of the world. It is much harder to be one. Citizenship requires a land, a community, and the distinctions that are so precious in human life.

The problems associated with immigration must always be borne in mind. The United States was built from immigrants, beginning with the English at Jamestown. America celebrated immigrants, but three things were demanded from them, two laid down by Thomas Jefferson. First, they were expected to learn English, the common tongue. Second, they were expected to understand the civic order and be loyal to it. The third element was not Jeffersons. It was that immigrants had to find economic opportunity. Immigration only works when this opportunity exists. Without that, the immigrants remain the huddled masses. Immigrants dont want to go where no economic opportunities exist, and welcoming immigrants heedless of the economic consequences leaves both immigrants and the class they will compete with desperate and bitter.

In some countries, such as the United States,immigration and nationalism are intimately connected. Since economic opportunity requires speaking English, immigrants must learn English and their children learn loyalty to the regime. It is an old story in the U.S. But when there is no opportunity as in many European countries currently assimilation is impossible. And when the immigrant chooses not to integrate, something else happens. The immigrant is here not to share the values of the country but as a matter of convenience. He requires toleration as a human, but he does not reciprocate because he has chosen to be a guest and not a citizen in the full sense of the term.

For the well-to-do, this is a drama acted out of sight. The affluent do not live with poor immigrants, and if they know them at all, it is as servants. The well-off can afford a generous immigration system because they do not pay the price. The poor, who live in neighborhoods where immigrants live, experience economic, linguistic, and political dislocation associated with immigration, because it is the national values they were brought up with that are being battled over. It is not simply jobs at stakes. It is also their own identities as Dutchmen, Americans, or Poles that are at stake. They are who they are, and they battle to resist loss or weakening of this identity.

For the well-to-do, those who resist the immigrants are dismissed in two ways. First, they are the poorer citizens, and therefore lack the sophistication of the wealthy. Second, because they are poor, they are racists, and nationalism is simply a cover for racism.

Thus, nationalism turns into a class struggle. The wealthy are indifferent to it because their identity derives from their wealth, their mobility, and a network of friends that go beyond borders. The poor live where they were born, and their network of friends and beliefs are those that they were born into. In many cases, they have lost their jobs. If they also lose their identity, they have lost everything.

This class struggle is emerging in Euro-American society. It is between the well-to-do, who retain internationalist principles, reinforced by a life lived in the wider world, and the poor. For this latter group, internationalism has brought economic pain and has made pride in who they are and a desire to remain that way a variety of pathology.

The elite, well-to-do, internationalists, technocrats call them what youd like demonize poorer members of society as ignorant and parochial. The poor see the elite as contemptuous of them and abandoning the principles to which they were born, in favor of wealth and the world that the poor cannot access.

This is about far more than money. Money is simply the thing that shields you from the effect of the loss of identity. The affluent have other ways to think of themselves. But the real issue goes back to the founding principles of liberal democracy the right to national self-determination and, therefore, the right to a nation. And that nation is not understood in the EUs anemic notion of the nation, but as a full-blooded assertion of the right to preserve the cultural foundations of nationhood in the fullest sense.

In other words, the nationalism issue has become a football in a growing class struggle between those who praise tolerance but do not face the pain of being tolerant, and those who see tolerance as the abandonment of all they learned as a child. I began by talking about Hitler, whom no reasonable and decent person wants to emulate. Yet, what made Hitler strong was that the elite held his followers in contempt. They had nowhere else to go, and nothing to lose. Having lost much in World War I and the Depression, they had nothing left but pride in being German. And the scorn in which they were held turned nationalism into a monstrosity.

Scorn and contempt are even more powerful a force than poverty. Liberals are sensitive to the scorn directed at immigrants, but rarely to those who must deal with immigration not as a means of moral self-satisfaction, but in daily life. This is not about immigration or free trade. It is about the nation, first loves, and the foundations of liberalism.

George Friedman is the founder and chairman ofGeopolitical Futures LLC, an online publication that explains and forecasts the course of global events. Republished with permission.

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Opinion: The nationalist wave in the US and Europe that liberals still don't get - MarketWatch