NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Monday his party still hasn’t decided whether it will vote in favour of the federal budget introduced last week.
The New Democrats have an agreement in place to back the governing Liberal Party on confidence and budgetary votes in exchange for movement on key policy priorities.
The agreement is set to last until June of next year, but Singh has been coy on whether he supports the Liberals’ most recent budget.
At a conference hosted by Canadian tech giant Shopify in 2018 , Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a moment to marvel at the unlikely success of two men who started out as snowboarders.
Trudeau, the former snowboarding instructor, was sharing the stage with Shopify founder Tobias Lütke, whose multi-billion dollar company had its beginnings as an online snowboard shop.
As they chuckled at their humble beginnings, the two snowboarders agreed that Canada had all the raw materials for a vibrant, entrepreneurial economy if it could only just get out of its own way and, Trudeau said, show “ a little more swagger .”
It’s been among the most volatile and untouchable third rails in Canadian politics: The adoption, at any level, of a private health-care system.
In the last federal election, a Conservative statement about “public-private synergies” was all it took for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to brand it as a right-wing assault on the “public, universal health-care system.”
But a new Ipsos report shows that “two tier health care” is not the threat it once was.
Asylum claims by international students have risen more than 1,500 per cent in the past five years, figures obtained by The Globe and Mail show, as experts warn that the study-permit system is being exploited as a way to enter and remain in Canada.
The sharp increase is particularly acute at colleges, where claims at some schools have climbed in excess of 4,000 per cent since 2018. Students at major universities, however, tend to lodge fewer claims than at colleges, the figures show.
It’s an abuse of Canadians by the Liberal government.
In 2006, at the University of Toronto, my late friend and the brilliant writer and orator Christopher Hitchens gave a speech whose eloquence I could never pretend to emulate, defending the argument that the freedom of speech includes the freedom to hate. At the time, he was castigating the Canadian Government for its legislation regarding hate speech.
Alas, once again the Government has introduced legislation to curb free speech in the name of safety, but this time in even more insidious ways. Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, purports to keep Canadians safe online, but does so by regulating speech that “foments hatred” via civil penalties within a human rights framework that invites abuse.
You’d assume the reaction to Scotland’s new hate crime laws would make other authoritarian governments hesitate before introducing similar legislation. Humza Yousaf has become a laughing stock and his approval ratings have fallen by fifteen points. But apparently not. The new Irish Taoiseach, Simon Harris, is determined to railroad through the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offenses) Bill, Donald Tusk’s government in Poland wants to introduce a new law that would make it a criminal offense to “defame” a member of the LGBT community and Justin Trudeau is pressing ahead with an Online Harms Bill that makes our Britain’s Online Safety Act seem like the First Amendment. It’s as if all these “liberal” leaders are saying: “You think Humza Yousaf is the West’s foremost opponent of free speech? Hold my beer.”
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says she thinks unhappy premiers will come around on measures in the federal budget that touch on provincial legislation, even as they push back.
At an event in Toronto on Sunday, Freeland — who presented the federal budget on Tuesday — said the national government needs to push ahead on such issues as housing and that she was “extremely optimistic” premiers would choose to co-operate.
“Housing is a national challenge, and the federal government needs to be leading the charge,” she said.
The Trudeau government released its 2024 budget with a promise to bring “fairness for every generation” by pledging billions on housing and introducing a new capital gains tax on the wealthy, as part of its strategy to win back younger voters.
But former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley doubts the major spending geared at a millennial and Gen Z audience will be enough to keep Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in power once election time rolls around.
A 35% reduction in the number of permits granted to foreign students, imposition of an entry visa for Mexican travelers, questioning of the “massive” regularization of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants… Under pressure from a public increasingly wary of migratory flows, the Canadian government has, since the beginning of the year, stepped up measures designed to show that it does not intend to be “overwhelmed.” These measures are at odds with the image of a country traditionally open to immigration (mainly economic, i.e. selective) and to a welcoming policy that Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau considers necessary “to ensure the country’s long-term growth.” Some 985,000 new permanent immigrants are expected by 2025.
Sociologist and professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, Christian Bergeron, works on models for integrating minorities into society and has observed changes in public opinion regarding migration. Here, he explains how the nature of the immigration debate has changed in Canada, to the point of challenging one of the country’s founding principles: multiculturalism.
The debate about Multiculturalism is over. It is settled, it sucks.
“Everything that is created, built, served and sold in this country is increasingly being created, built, served and sold by Millennials and Gen Z,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he announced what he called a budget focused on a quest for “generational fairness.”
“Their success is Canada’s success in the future, sure, but also right now. But the economy isn’t rewarding them the way it used to reward their parents and grandparents.
“That’s not right. That’s not fair.”
More diversity. I wonder if Justsingh are laying low so as not to trigger Modi?
h/t MW – note – open link in incognito.
While the goal of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate change plan costing Canadian taxpayers more than $200 billion is to lower industrial greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, the latest federal government projection says they went up for the second year in a row.
A B.C.-based climate activist scheduled to be deported over the weekend has had his removal stayed after a federal minister intervened in his case.
Zain Haq, 23, was scheduled to be deported to his native Pakistan on April 22, while being nearly a year into a spousal sponsorship application with his B.C.-born wife. Haq, who co-founded the group Save Old Growth, caught the attention of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) in 2022 while protesting and speaking to the press about Canada’s climate policy.
h/t Mauser
The federal government’s decision to bring in fewer newcomers in the next few years due to the housing crunch could create labour shortages and inflationary pressures on some areas of the economy if the right balance isn’t maintained, says an analysis by Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
I’ll take Zero Migrants for 500 Alex.
The fancy stats used by economists and business analysts are discouraging enough.
Since the Liberals came to office in 2015, business investment per worker is down, productivity is down, per capita Gross Domestic Product has fallen for six consecutive quarters, living standards have fallen (especially relative to those in the U.S.) and Tuesday’s Liberal budget unleashed a capital gains tax grab that will scare away as much as $20 billion more in investment and new jobs.
