No Canadian federal budget in my conscient lifetime, going back to finance minister Walter Harris in the St. Laurent government, has been as noisily hyped or widely anticipated as the Carney-Champagne budget of this past Tuesday, and none has been such a stultifying anti-climax. What was promised was a cornucopia of “generational investments” that would ”define our next century” by making a series of “difficult choices (and) sacrifices.” The same prime minister who is in a photo finish with his British analogue Keir Starmer for who can be more obsequious to President Donald Trump, but who promised to keep his ”elbows up,” promised also to “swing for the fences” in the budget with intermittent hints of ”austerity.”
We all know that on Election Day, New York City began a death spiral so steep that it will terminate in a smoking hole in Dante’s Ninth Circle. Things were not looking much rosier in Minneapolis, where Omar Fateh made his own mayoral run. Fateh, an American and Minnesota state senator, with Somali parents and a socialist (of course), was running on a platform of standing up to Trump, protecting illegal immigrants, a $20/hour minimum wage, replacing some police visits with mental health crisis responders, and environmental justice,