Roundup: Proposing a premium holiday

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Given that the government’s EI tax credit actually has the perverse incentive to fire employees or reduce wages instead of hiring new staff as was intended, Justin Trudeau offered up a different solution yesterday, which is to offer employers a two-year holiday on paying the EI premiums of new staff. One wonders why he just doesn’t suggest setting the rate at the break-even rate in the actuarial report, which is a mere 0.02 percent above what the government’s “tax credit” effectively reduces it to, but would be across the board, but hey, he’s putting ideas on the table, right?

Stephen Harper kicked off the session with a fairly pedestrian speech at the nearby Convention Centre, which offered almost nothing new other than it was delivered in one of the more campaign styled events of him wandering in a defined area rather than at a lectern. The speech was a bit heavier on foreign affairs, given that Harper is trying to position himself as the one with substance on that file, and as a world statesman, but I’m not sure there was a lot of substance with “Yay Israel” and “There is no root cause for ISIS because it’s evil!” as the central planks. The only controversial aspect, however, was that he came in and left to the tune of “Taking Care of Business” – for which Randy Bachman was not impressed.

Rona Ambrose says that she wants to make palliative care a priority, which is something we’re going to no doubt hear more about with the Supreme Court cases on assisted suicide coming up, and the fact that this seems to be what people keep defaulting to as doctors are “struggling” with the issue of assisted suicide or euthanasia. Note that Ambrose has yet to propose any kind of national strategy around palliative care, or funding, or anything like that. And then there’s this:

The government tabled their Action Plan™ on missing and murdered Aboriginal women, using the $25 million over five years of funding that was announced in the February budget. The opposition is deriding it as smoke and mirrors as they demand a national inquiry.

The Commissioner of Elections officially moves office from Elections Canada to the Director of Public Prosecutions on October 1st.

The tale of the RCAF sourcing spare parts from the Air Force Museum is renewing concerns about the budget for search and rescue operations in this country, as well as the concerns about the procurement process for replacing our search and rescue aircraft.

A study commissioned by the government shows that even recent immigrants to the country are sceptical about the planned “Express Entry” expression-of-interest immigration system which does away with the point system and wait lists in favour of pools of skilled workers that companies can draw from.

The government is denying accusations that Dr. Arthur Porter is making in his book that they covered up the capture, torture and execution of “rogue” Canadian spies while he was the chair of SIRC. It does raise more questions about Porter’s motives that he would be making such allegations.

The Senate is spending $150,000 on an outside consultant to help improve its communications infrastructure, given that it has had problems coping with the increased demands on it after all of the media attention during the spending scandals.

Here’s a Q&A with new Liberal MP Arnold Chan.

Suspended Senator Patrick Brazeau has a court date of June 1, 2015 set. In the meantime, he’s apparently going back to school.

And over in Alberta, Jim Prentice has been sworn in as Premier – but he doesn’t have a seat yet. He also appointed two cabinet ministers who also don’t have seats yet. There are currently two vacant seats, neither of which Prentice has said that he wants. That means that there will need to be at least one more resignation from his caucus and three by-elections before the legislature resumes sitting. It’s not unheard of to appoint cabinet ministers who aren’t sitting members at the time, but this does have all the hallmarks of a very interesting and strange move.