Roundup: Not the provinces’ cash cow

Posted on by

Everything got off to an earlier start yesterday, beginning with the ministerial presser, during which Marc Miller announced another $650 million being allocated to Indigenous communities for healthcare, which would also include added income supports for those living on-reserve, as well as some $85 million to build new shelters for women on reserves. Marc Garneau also announced that the ban on cruise ship docking in Canadian waters was going to be extended to October 31st, which will impact the economies of these communities, but also limits potential vectors for the pandemic. When pressed about the issue of airline ticket refunds, Garneau reiterated the warning that the sector could fail if they were forced to refund all of the tickets, though later on, prime minister Justin Trudeau indicated that there were talks ongoing.

For his presser, Trudeau started off by talking about his teleconference with the premiers and spoke about sick leave being one of the items on the agenda, and it was later in the Q&A that he said that he was offering for the federal government to assume most of the responsibility for the costs, rather than putting it on business owners, but it sounds like some premiers remain rather cool to the idea. After reiterating the earlier Miller/Garneau announcement, Trudeau took questions, which included mention that he was trying to get premiers to agree to some modified orders at the Canada-US border that would allow family reunification, such as cases like the Canadian woman who was trying to get the American father of her unborn child into the country before she gave birth – but again, there are premiers who are not keen. After the questions, Trudeau then gave an unprompted statement on anti-Black racism as a result of what’s going on in the US – that there is a need to stand up as a society, that there needs to be more respect, and that we have work to do as well in Canada. He called on all Canadians to stand together in solidarity, as they know how deeply people are being affected by what we are seeing on the news.

Something else raised in Trudeau’s Q&A was a letter sent to him by five of his Toronto-area backbenchers, calling on him to lead the country in national standards on long-term care, and to press Ontario for a full public inquiry into what happened with the breakdown in care (which I maintain won’t tell us anything we don’t already know). Trudeau praised them for their efforts, and talked about the ongoing talks with provinces, but two of those MPs were on Power & Politics later in the day, and something that I was also glad to hear was Judy Sgro saying that while they wanted federal leadership, they both were respecting that this is provincial jurisdiction and they also didn’t want the provinces treating the federal government like a “cash cow” when you have premiers like Ford demanding more federal funds to fix their own long-term care mess. My own patience for provinces crying out for federal funds to fix the problems in their own jurisdiction is wearing mighty thin, particularly as most of those provinces have broad taxation powers at their disposal (though some of those provinces have less tax room available to them – Ontario, however, is not one of them). Premiers don’t want to have anything on their books and would rather it come from Ottawa’s, so that they don’t have to look like the bad guy when it comes to paying for their own programmes – never mind that there’s really only one taxpayer in the end.

Good reads:

  • The Canadian Forces members working in long-term care facilities are eligible for the pay and benefits for those deployed overseas, and will likely get hazard pay.
  • Marc Garneau says that Iran still hasn’t turned over the black boxes from flight PS752 (though some of the delays were likely pandemic-related).
  • An RBC Economics report warns that the pandemic is going to have a major effect on the country’s immigration-fuelled growth plans.
  • It looks like the Keystone XL pipeline lost a court challenge in the US, which could further delay the project.
  • The Senate’s suspension has been extended by a couple more weeks after there was no agreement to resume sittings next week.
  • Maclean’s has a lengthy profile of foreign minister François-Philippe Champagne.
  • Susan Delacourt touches base with Mélanie Joly, whose portfolio has moved from mostly dealing with rural and remote regions to distressed urban centres.
  • Kevin Carmichael has a retrospective and exit interview with outgoing Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz.
  • Andrew Potter lambastes the Liberals for their contempt for Parliament, and the NDP for selling it out for pretty much free.
  • Colby Cosh makes a few interesting observations about the regulatory regime around long-term care, and where the breakdowns happened.
  • My weekend column looks to how provincial legislatures with hung legislatures have been dealing with pandemic, and how that reflects on Parliament.

Odds and ends:

CBC’s Julie Van Dusen is moving on from the Hill, and no scrum will be the same without her – both her infectious laughter, and her tenaciousness in the scrums.

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.

One thought on “Roundup: Not the provinces’ cash cow”

  1. The Provincial Premiers despite this pandemic and the health emergency it has generated only think of how to stay in power and who to blame. We really chose poorly in terms of political leadership.

Comments are closed.