Roundup: Fundraising fears

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It’s been a curious thing the last few days, watching in QP as the Conservatives are tearing their hair out over this Bill Morneau fundraiser in Halifax and raising the spectre of the wealthy contributing to politics, and calling Bill Morneau a millionaire like it’s a bad thing. As though suddenly the Conservative Party of Canada has become overrun by socialists or something. Really, it’s just their cheap populism run amok, trying to cast themselves as champions of ordinary Canadians (never mind that their policies disproportionately aided wealthier Canadians during their decade in power), and if they really were the champions of the working class, you would think the rest of their policies to date would be different (such as around labour unions or the Canada Pension Plan, or anything like that), but no. And if you think this is really a question about ethics or conflicts of interest, well, no, the Ethics Commissioner herself has stated that this fundraiser was above board, but hey, if they wanted to tighten the rules around fundraising, she’s been asking them to do that for years and after a decade in power, they wouldn’t do that either. So here we are, with a desperate attempt to frame perfectly above-board fundraising as “cash for access” and somehow comparable to the situation in Ontario, which it’s not. Meanwhile, Howard Anglin had a perfectly apropos tweet storm on this, so I’ll let him finish off here.

Good reads:

  • The finance minister’s economic advisory council made their report, which included a goal of boosting the median household income by $15,000 by 2030.
  • The prime minister of Wallonia says the ball is now in Canada’s court when it comes to their signing off on CETA, but won’t say how exactly.
  • Catherine McKenna says more climate measures are being rolled out this fall.
  • John McCallum reminds us that the rise in citizen revocations was because the previous government instituted more fraud investigations.
  • Stéphane Dion is at the UN trying to get the General Assembly engaged in the Syrian conflict after the Security Council has been unable to.
  • The government has appointed 24 new judges – a third of the vacancies – and has moved to undo the Conservatives’ Judicial Appointment Committee changes.
  • Economist Frances Wooley crunches the numbers on bilingualism with regard to Supreme Court justices, and notes the elitism of said requirement.
  • The electoral reform committee wants Maryam Monsef to table her ministerial consultation report, but the Liberals on the committee are squirelly about it.
  • The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ assures us that yes, claims that health transfers are being cut are indeed full of baloney.
  • The rumour is that Michelle Rempel is still mulling a leadership bid.
  • Senator Vern White says that security on the Hill is where it should be, two years after the shooting.
  • A former TransCanada executive blasts the Conservatives for their opposition to carbon pricing (and still thinks the government is doing their wrong).

Odds and ends:

It seems that sexist assumptions around primary caregivers are CRA’s policies, some of which were reinforced under the Conservatives.

One thought on “Roundup: Fundraising fears”

  1. That only 40% of respondents correctly identify FPTP as our electoral system is quite simply not believable. To give credence to this proportion, we would also have to believe that almost two-thirds of those who voted in the last election (40% of the 68% of those eligible who voted) did not realize that the candidate with the most votes in each riding would win. Really? Or that nearly 1 in 7 (12% vs. the same 68%) thought that they had filled out a ranked ballot (when of course no one did). IVR polls are the bastard child of research and should be assessed very carefully. I would not base a hypothesis of a crisis of civic literacy on them.

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