Tag Archives: Basic Income

Roundup: The WE Imbroglio worsens

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Because the Liberals’ capacity for self-harm wasn’t apparent enough already, it seems that they decided to find yet another rake to step on as the WE Imbroglio continues to unfold, and we learned that two of Bill Morneau’s children have done work for WE – one of them as a salaried employee, and no, Morneau also did not recuse himself from any Cabinet discussions or decisions when it came to awarding WE the student service grant contract. Because of course he didn’t.

Within the Liberal ranks, so far only Nathaniel Erskine-Smith – already considered a “maverick” – has come out to say that he’s not keen on what has transpired, which makes me wonder how many other Liberal MPs feel similarly but just aren’t saying out of a sense of loyalty or because they would rather close ranks at a time like this. Of course, if we had a properly functioning Westminster democracy in this country, the caucus could get together and say “You know what – the leader keeps hurting the party with these self-inflicted wounds, so maybe it’s time we find a new leader,” and within a few days, they could have voted out Trudeau and voted on a replacement from within the caucus ranks, and then it would be off to Rideau Hall to swear in a new prime minister, who hopefully wouldn’t be a prone to stepping on those rakes. But we don’t have a properly functioning system because the Liberals and the pundit class back in 1919 decided it was somehow “more democratic” to give the party membership the ability to decide on the leadership, and suddenly the accountability of that leader to his or her caucus was annihilated. Now we have leaders who have centralized all power and authority and who are accountable to no one, so that when they cause trouble for their parties, the caucus is now stuck. (It would also help in keeping the party from becoming a personality cult of the current leader because that leader is easily replaced, but again, that’s no where we’re at in this country, and we are paying the price for it.

As for the Conservatives, they decided that they needed to up the stakes and send a letter to the RCMP to demand a criminal investigation of this contract, under the flimsiest of pretences. It’s ludicrous, of course, but what it allows them to do is to insinuate that the RMCP are investigating when they likely aren’t because they’re not public about what they are and are not investigating, and they can spend the summer asking Trudeau “have the RCMP contacted you yet?” and posting those clips all over their social media channels. We’ve seen this particular play before, and it wasn’t great the first time, and this iteration won’t have improved either. I suspect there is also an element of “lock her up!” as part of their calculation for this, because they know that there is an element of their base that will respond to this bit of red meat, and they can’t help themselves, no matter how corrosive this is to our political discourse, or the long-term the damage that it causes.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt hears from Erskine-Smith and other unnamed Liberals who are balking at how closed-off to caucus Trudeau has been, and how that breeds these kinds of problems. Chris Selley marvels at Trudeau’s trilogy of scandals, and the ways in which they are continually minimized.

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Roundup: Trudeau steps on yet another rake

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The prime minister’s problems with the now-cancelled WE Charity contract blew up yesterday, as it was revealed that Justin Trudeau’s mother and brother have been paid by WE to speak at events, that his wife had once been paid by them in 2012, all of which contradicts their previous statements that they don’t pay speakers. (Trudeau maintains that he has never been paid). Suddenly this makes the fact that Trudeau didn’t recuse himself from any decisions around that contract at the Cabinet table look very bad, because his family does benefit from the organization, and they’re not just donating their time and profile as had been previously stated. And for WE’s part, they have done themselves no favours by saying that it was their social enterprise arm, ME to WE, which paid them, except for the times when there was a billing error and WE Charity paid them instead. This as more parliamentary committees are (finally) doing their jobs in calling ministers and bureaucrats before them to explain their decisions. And to cap it off, Yves-François Blanchet is now demanding that Trudeau step aside and let Chrystia Freeland run things until everything is cleared up. So that’s something.

It’s hard not to see that the Liberals’ capacity for self-harm knows no bounds, between these self-inflicted wounds and their inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag/manage an issue, means that they inevitably make it worse for themselves – which they did yet again today by essentially saying that the only thing that matters is that Trudeau was really concerned about the youth. Seriously? It is not only obvious that Trudeau seems to lack any sense of self-awareness, in part because he has grown up as a kind of celebrity, but it’s also combined by the fact that there clearly isn’t anyone in his office who will stand up to him and say that no, this maybe isn’t a good idea, and no, it’s going to come across well no matter how well-meaning it all is. I mean, the first couple of years in office, Trudeau dismantled any way for the party mechanism to push back against the leader and his office, and that was a fair bit more autonomous than what goes on in PMO. This being said, I will add that our ethics and conflict of interest regime in this country is ludicrous, and subject to the whims of successive Ethics Commissioners, who either read their mandates so narrowly that nothing was ever her problem, except when she took it upon herself to decide who is and is not a family friend of the Aga Khan (that being Mary Dawson), or her replacement, who has invented new statutory interpretation out of whole cloth on numerous occasions to baffling results. None of this excuses Trudeau’s constantly stepping on rakes – he should absolutely know better, but seems incapable of figuring that out.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt remarks on how repetitive Trudeau’s ethical lapses are getting, and how every time he promises that he’s learned his lesson – until he does makes yet another blunder. Matt Gurney is baffled at PMO’s tone-deafness on this whole affair. Chris Selley, while boggled at Trudeau’s constant blunders, is even more incredulous at how Andrew Scheer keeps being so bad at responding while creating his own distractions.

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Roundup: Pearl-clutching about the deficit

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For the first time this week, prime minister Justin Trudeau held a presser, wherein he praised the agreement with the First Nations on moving ahead with transferring control over child welfare, mentioned the virtual Cabinet retreat that was held over the previous two days, and mentioned that new pandemic modelling was on the way, noting that there are still hot-spots around the country. And then it was the takeaway message of the day – a mere couple of hours away from the fiscal “snapshot” being delivered, Trudeau made the case that they chose to support Canadians rather than leaving them to fend for themselves, and that the cost of doing nothing would have been far greater on both healthcare and the economy. He reiterated that this was not the time for austerity, but that they have been building a “bridges” to a stronger, more resilient Canada, and drove home the point that the federal government took on debt so that ordinary Canadians wouldn’t have to. He pointed to the low debt-to-GDP ratio, and that historically low interest rates mean manageable borrowing costs. And with one final word on Bob Rae being appointed to the UN, he took questions, one of the first of which determined that he didn’t recuse himself when the WE Charity sole-source contract came before Cabinet, which is something the Ethics Commissioner is looking at. He spoke about the necessity of childcare, that Bill Blair has been engaged on the subject or the RCMP and police brutality as part of the broader Cabinet workplan on combatting systemic racism, that they were following the recommendations of the Auditor General on CBSA, and then reiterated again that with historically low debt-servicing costs, it was easier for the federal government to take it on in order to prevent Canadian households from having to do so. When asked about the relationship with Donald Trump, Trudeau once again reiterated that they have concerns about the possibility of new tariffs, and that it will only hurt American industry because they need Canadian aluminium as they can’t produce enough of their own.

And then the fiscal “snapshot.” While Bill Morneau’s pabulum-heavy speech was pretty much all self-congratulation and a recap of measures they’ve taken, the accompanying documents did show a $343 billion deficit projected for this year (though it has been speculated that this was an outer bound limit designed for them to come under), and that the total debt by the end of this fiscal year could be $1.2 trillion – numbers everyone clutched their pearls about while ignoring that the debt-servicing costs continue to decrease even though the size of the debt has increased. There was mention that the wage subsidy is going to be extended, but with modifications on the way “sooner than later,” but there wasn’t much indication about the broader recovery plan thus far.

Of course, the obsessions among all of the media coverage was the deficit and debt figures, because our reporting narratives remain firmly affixed in the mid-1990s, and no one can break free of them – not to mention the hyperbolic mentions about how this was the biggest deficit since the Second World War (never mind that this is a virtually unprecedented global pandemic we’re facing with a demand-side shock that people can’t seem to wrap their heads around). And because the framing devices remain in the 1990s, headlines obsessed that there wasn’t a plan to curb spending – because of course we know how the epidemiology of this pandemic is going to play out until we get a vaccine at some point in the future. But perspective? You need to turn to the economists on Twitter for that.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1280933038394875905

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280946657106878464

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280948115911045120

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280935717359644672

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280992891343527936

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Roundup: Hot and Bothered for Basic Income

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The idea of a Basic Income has been a hobby-horse of parliamentarians for a while, and yesterday the Parliamentary Budget Officer came out with a report that purported to cost one out in a couple of different scenarios. But it’s a bit of a horror show of a report because what it’s actually describing is a cash transfer and not an actual Basic Income scheme, and more than that, some of the things it purports to strip in order to pay for its high price tag are a number of disability supports. Remember that while a Basic Income may sound like a left-wing idea, there is plenty of right-wing support for it if it dismantles the welfare state, where replacing tailored disability programmes with a one-size-fits-all cash transfer is a feature and not a bug. (More from economist Mike Moffatt here).

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280537746881212422

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1280630991661535238

Suffice to say, this report got some senators all hot and bothered, including Senator Yuen Pau Woo, who put out a press release on the topic, calling for a pilot project, so here’s Lindsay Tedds, who worked on BC’s Basic Income project for the last two years, and who knows a thing or two about Basic Income.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280562781142388736

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280643403349291008

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280623432766353408

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280623434410496003

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280624155994361856

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280628328622219265

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