Roundup: Commercial rent relief on the way

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For his Friday presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau at long last unveiled the details of the commercial rent relief programme, now that they have ironed out the details with the provinces (considering that it’s their jurisdiction), which is essentially that commercial landlords (for properties where the rent is below a certain threshold) need to offer 75 percent discounts on their rent from April to June, and the federal government would provide non-repayable loans of up to fifty percent of said rents. From there, he mentioned that they were deploying Canadian Armed Forces personnel to certain long-term care facilities in Ontario and Quebec, and that they were working to beef up the salaries of existing long-term care workers. He also said that they were working with provinces and territories to establish guidelines for when they re-open their economies, but that people need to pay attention to the local rules and not those in other jurisdictions, because the outbreaks are different in each region. (During the First Ministers’ weekly teleconference later in the day, there was some agreement to this, and apparently each province and territory will be submitting their plans to the federal government).

Of course, with the news that there was an agreement on commercial rents, we got some fairly usual voices caterwauling that all rents needed to be dealt with, not just commercial ones. The response to that, of course, is to talk to one’s premier, because that’s where the responsibility lies – Trudeau can’t just swoop in because landlord and tenant legislation is strictly provincial, and the mechanisms they employed for the commercial rent relief are not necessarily suited for residential properties. And there was word today that Doug Ford wants the federal government to step in on residential rents – after he has been spectacularly unwilling to do anything and tells people to work it out with their landlords – so if there is more uptake with his fellow premiers in the next few days, they may try to design something, though I’m not sure exactly what, because I worry that there may be a bigger domino effect throughout the banking sector, but there are no quick fixes. And no, the national housing strategy does not give federal jurisdiction over rents, nor does the Canada Health Act provide a template for rent either, because there are no funding agreements with the provinces, nor would the federal government simply be transferring a pot of money to the provinces for residential rents. It’s complex, there are big jurisdictional issues, and Trudeau can’t and shouldn’t do everything. The provinces have a role to play and they should play it.

Good reads:

  • While Justin Trudeau has been talking about new gun control measures, his government still hasn’t implemented the measures they passed last year.
  • The government’s CERB application numbers show 7.1 million unique applications, meaning job gains since the 1980s have been (temporarily) wiped out.
  • Anita Anand says it’s not surprising that some of the PPE acquired doesn’t meet standards, given the demand. Some masks that fail could find non-medical uses.
  • The federal government has announced that employers who violate quarantine rules for temporary foreign workers face $1 million fines, and public shaming.
  • Here’s the transcript of the RCMP’s press conference laying out what they’ve learned about the mass shooting in Nova Scotia last weekend.
  • The US has cleared its domestic hurdles, and the New NAFTA can be fully implemented on July 1st.
  • Some Conservatives are starting to grumble about getting on with the leadership race so that they can get Scheer out for realsies. No word when that will happen.
  • Jason Kenney has appointed former Conservative MP James Rajotte as the province’s “representative” at the embassy in Washington DC.
  • Stephanie Carvin and Jessica Davis argue that it makes no sense to use sparse resources to duplicate intelligence gathering on pandemics.
  • Kevin Carmichael explains the Bank of Canada’s entry into quantitative easing, how it differs from “printing money,” and that the bigger danger right now is deflation.
  • Heather Scoffield takes stock of the “unthinkable” things this government has undertaken in the last month as a result of the global pandemic.
  • Chris Selley decries how the warnings over long term care facilities have been ignored for the past seventeen years, and these deaths are not “unexpected.”
  • My weekend column stresses that when we look at how other Westminster parliaments are handling the pandemic, we don’t overlook capacity issues.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Commercial rent relief on the way”

  1. Trudeau’s perpetual critics cry “dictator!” in bad faith until they want him to be a dictator. So they can pass the buck onto the feds and then complain about overreach. Sound familiar? It’s the same old, same old, rinse and repeat of the American populist rallying cries on left and right: Obama (Trudeau) was weak, Obama (Trudeau) didn’t respect state’s (provinces’) rights, Obama (Trudeau) is a big-government micromanaging authoritarian with a scattershot strategy that reduces the federal government to a mere ceremonial figurehead. They should learn civics, pick a lane, and get some new material or get out of the way. But where would that allow for cheap low-info partisan outrage, click-bait headlines, and easily digestible soundbites? I guess if jurisdictional gaslighting wasn’t their beat, they’d just go back to yelling about doughnuts, beards, and socks.

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