Date of publication: 11 Apr 2022 • 2 hours ago • 4 minutes reading • 132 comments NDP leader Jagmeet Singh speaks in reaction to the release of the federal budget on April 7, 2022. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS / Sean Kilpatrick
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TOP STORY
The federal NDP has been in an awkward position lately. On the one hand, they have just signed an agreement that guarantees the NDP support for Prime Minister Justin Trinto at least until 2025. On the other hand, the party’s messages are largely based on its criticism of the liberal government. Instead of offsetting these two mutually exclusive morals, the party is simply doing both. According to Anja Karadeglija of the National Post, the 2022 budget included about $ 15 billion in additional spending to ease the terms of the Supply and Trust Agreement, the formal agreement under which the NDP agreed not to challenge the leadership of the various. That’s why columnist Carson Jerema was not the only voice to name him “Jagmeet Singh Budget” after the NDP leader. But while the NDP has announced that it will vote in favor of the budget, they still plan to publicly destroy all its parts outside the NDP. “We still have criticism,” Singh told a news conference on Friday. On the eve of Budget Day, Singh even tweeted condemning Trudeau’s environmental policy. “In 7 years, Justin Trinto was not the leader of the climate. Real leaders do not subsidize big oil. “Real leaders do not buy pipelines,” he wrote.
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For 7 years, Justin Trudeau has not been a climate leader.
Real leaders do not subsidize big oil.
Real leaders do not buy pipelines.
Real leaders have bold solutions for protecting the environment.https: //t.co/G8w4Lq9njc
– Jagmeet Singh (@theJagmeetSingh) April 6, 2022
This is not really the case in the rest of the democratic world, where parliaments are traditionally more fragmented because of proportional representation voting systems. In most countries, if Singh wanted to have a say in the federal budget, he would have to join a formal governing coalition. This is the case with the German NDP’s German counterpart, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, which currently governs the country thanks to the support of the Greens and the Free Democrats. And the issue with coalitions is that they can not stand so much when one of the partners is constantly scolding the other. A 2018 study in countries with a tradition of coalition governance found that it has the effect of forcing politicians not to unpredictably applaud their political opponents.
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Queen Elizabeth II appears last week on a video link during a virtual audience to receive the Libyan Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The queen canceled her usual attendance at an Easter church service, the latest in a recent series of lost public engagements by the monarch. According to reports, the Queen’s difficulty in walking combined with her refusal to see with a walker has added an extra level of complexity to her appearance at events. Photo by Photo by Yui Mok / POOL / AFP
CIVIL WARS
Quebec lawmakers are not commonly known as freedom of speech. This is the province with language police after all. However, a new Quebec bill proposes to protect the utterance of “any word” spoken in a university classroom, which would protect teachers from professional sanctions for using language that administrators or pressure groups might find offensive. “Censorship has no place in our ranks,” said Danielle McCann, the county’s minister of higher education. The panel was a University of Ottawa professor, Lieutenant-Duval Veruska, who was suspended because he contextually uttered a racial slander in the classroom (namely, racial slander beginning with an “n”). This week, author Jamie Sarkonak wrote for the National Post about how it has become routine for Canadian universities to explicitly exclude white men from job applications, even when such work is paid for through state funding. Speaking to the Journal de Montreal, two Quebec Liberal MPs said they believed the measure was going “too far”. This included Joël Lightbound, who recently received national attention for his public criticism of federal policy on COVID. Speaking specifically about recruitment policies at Laval University, Lightbound said it was important to promote integration, but “value must be given priority”.
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Canada gets its first direct fiber optic connection to Asia and Google is paying for it. The Topaz submarine, which will connect Japan to the West Coast city of Port Alberni, is expected to be operational by next year. Photo by Google
BUDGET
The 2022 budget seemed to be so serious about the affordability of housing that it placed all housing measures in the first chapter. But the good people at Better Dwelling pointed out that the budget is still full of demand-side measures that will result in more money being channeled into the real estate market, exacerbating the problem. These include grants for first-time home buyers and tax-free home savings accounts to save on down payment. “Essentially, taxpayers will subsidize advances,” they write. It is really difficult to overestimate the amount that the 2022 budget has spent on military spending. Just last month, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg directly criticized Canada for calling on its defense budget. Shortly afterwards, Defense Secretary Anita Anand promised “aggressive” measures to bolster the Canadian military in response to a more dangerous world. And yet, the budget only provided an additional $ 8 billion for five years. “In the end, all this ambitious telegram was in vain,” defense analyst Jeffrey F. Collins wrote in a column for Global News.
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One of the most neglected parts of the 2022 Budget was a provision to extend Canadian copyright terms for another 20 years. Previously, the works became public domain in Canada 50 years after the death of a writer. It is now 70 years old. The Americans forced us to do this as a provision of the renegotiated NAFTA agreement, but a change in copyright law really has nothing to do with government spending, so it is strange that it is a budget forecast. It was only seven years ago that the Liberals harshly criticized this very behavior in the Harper administration, when “multiple” budget accounts were used systematically to evade any number of irrelevant measures. One of the toughest grocery games in Canada of recent memory has just come to an end. After Loblaw’s (Superstore and No Frills managers, among others) refused to pay higher prices for Pepsi-Co foods, such as Lay’s chips, the snack food giant went so far as to completely withdraw its products from the retailer. This week, Loblaw’s announced a peaceful resolution to the dispute, ending several awkward weeks with selected snack aisles filled almost exclusively with Cheezies. Photo by (Photo by Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg Receive all this information and more in your inbox every day at 6 p.m. ET, subscribe to the First Reading newsletter here.
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