Tag Archives: Budget 2015

Roundup: Crossing the line with a golf shirt

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The official date of the new child benefit cheques going out saw the Conservative government at its most ham-handed yesterday, starting with a “leaked” letter to caucus about just how historic this event was as the “single biggest one-time direct payment in Canadian history.” Funny, it seems to me that an actual conservative government would rather just lower taxes across the board rather than bribe people with their own money, but oh, wait – this is a right-flavoured populist government and not a real Conservative one. As ministers and MPs went around the country to tout the benefit, and social media sites were bombarded with blaring ads, some of which were branded as “Christmas in July,” Pierre Poilievre was the most egregious of all, hosting a press event in Halifax that was arranged by his department, and yet featured him wearing a Conservative-branded golf shirt, as though this were a partisan event, or that it was somehow the Conservatives doling out this largesse rather than the Government of Canada. It was utterly crass, and yet the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner decreed that no, it wasn’t actually in contravention of the rules, though one cannot deny that it was in poor taste and poor judgement. Mind you, this bit of vote-buying is going to blow a big hole in the government’s budget, given that growth projections are down and we are pretty much certainly back into a deficit position (not that the budget was actually balanced – simply papered over by raiding the contingency reserve and the EI fund). But then again, the NDP have declared that the child benefit would remain under their plan on top of their plans to have this universal childcare programme (well, years down the road at a great cost to the provinces) and the Liberals planning to revamp the whole system that will also cost at least an extra couple of billion more than this programme does. Watching this play out in the election while each touts fiscal responsibility will be an interesting exercise.

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Roundup: Totally not buying votes

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With those new child benefit cheques starting to flow, a couple of bits of analysis were done over the past few days. One was to use census data to look at the demographics of ridings where people stood to gain the most from the new cheques, and wouldn’t you know it, of the 338 ridings, most were either Conservative or had a good chance of leaning that way in the next election. The other piece did some detective work into Pierre Poilievre’s big hunt for families who had not signed up for the benefit, and how he was able to derive numbers of how many families in certain regions had not done so. Why target regions? Why, electioneering, of course. There were also some pretty artificial deadlines being floated for getting people to sign up to the programme, so that cheques would handily flow just as the election is kicking off. Because that’s not trying to buy votes with people’s own money either, apparently. Among the places Poilievre visited on his “ finding families” tour were, you guessed it, Conservative ridings, while First Nations communities, who were less likely to be signed up, didn’t merit visits at all as they were unlikely to vote Conservative. So in case you really did think that these child benefit cheques were really about helping families and not about trying to buy votes, well, the analysis doesn’t support that kind of altruistic viewpoint.

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Roundup: A contraction and a rate cut

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While he didn’t use the word itself, Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz essentially said that Canada is in a recession, and he cut the interest rate by another quarter of a percent, leaving prime at 0.5 percent. Poloz said that we are in a contraction, but there should be growth in non-energy sectors in the second half of the year. Nevertheless, shrinking the growth outlook for the year by a full percentage point of GDP blows billions of dollars out of the projections that were built into the government’s budget, which almost certainly will push it into real deficit territory (as opposed to the paper surplus that it was sitting in after raiding the contingency reserve and EI fund in order to pay for those family tax breaks and still make it look like there’s a surplus). Where the real kicker could come in is the fact that the Bank of Canada is trying to use monetary policy to stimulate the economy to help it grow, while the government is cutting in order to achieve its balanced budget rather than stimulating at a time of contraction to prime the pump, as it were, and there was talk about how it meant the government was basically undoing the work the Bank was trying to do. So there’s that. Also not helpful is the government then coming out to attack Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair as a means of trying to distract from their economic record, so that they can make the pitch to be allowed to stay in office after the election. Maclean’s assembled an expert panel to discuss the rate cut, while Andrew Coyne fears the damage that all of the election promises will end up causing the economy by the time the vote is over.

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Roundup: Spinning deficit financing

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It should be no surprise that a government that likes to re-announce the same funds over and over again are now re-spinning old funds with a new purpose. As previously discussed, they’re going full-speed ahead on rebranding their childcare benefits as economic stimulus – because apparently only families with children should be stimulating the economy. (Singletons, we’re being shafted – again). As well, Scott Brison noted that these cheques are essentially being deficit financed, after the budget raided both the contingency reserve and the EI fund to pay for them while still claiming balance (not to mention their projections for oil prices). And hey, you know what would be a good thing during a recession? A full contingency reserve and an EI fund that’s ready to help any layoffs and job losses that result from said recession. But things were going to be rosy, and there was nothing to worry about – except now there is, but Harper insists it’s all external factors (never mind that he still takes credit when things go well even though it had nothing to do with his government). What great economic leadership…

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Roundup: Cheques doing double duty

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While former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page says that if we go into a technically recession, it should be contained as there is still growth in other sectors beyond oil and gas, Pierre Poilievre has been out spinning yet another tale over the weekend. Not content to show that the universal childcare benefit cheques due in the mail this month are nakedly partisan attempts at vote buying (and those of us of a certain age will remember when Ralph Klein would send out cheques to help Albertans pay for the cost of natural gas conveniently as elections were around the corner), Poilievre has ensured that the cheques get a second political purpose – they are now to also count as economic stimulus. Which of course they would be – but not very much, according to Don Drummond. As well, the government keeps saying they’re making all of these infrastructure investments, but the vast majority of them are still years down the road, and their Canada 150 infrastructure programme is going to be very small-time, and is also unlikely to have much in the way of lasting economic benefit. So we can expect these kinds of talking points to be repeated ad nauseum for the next few weeks as the campaign heats up, and until we get the numbers from StatsCan on September 1st as to whether we’re in a recession or not.

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Roundup: Abusing the Senate for partisan ends

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The parade of people looking aghast at that Senate committee interim report continued yesterday, much of it with the usual cartoonish depictions of the Senate as a whole, never mind that this was a small group of Conservatives that made the recommendations in an interim report, and the Liberals on the committee explicitly dissented from it. Yes, the proposal is problematic and no doubt there are many in the Muslim community who are sceptical because it’s not a monolithic religion. Even those who are supportive in theory, because of the problem of foreign-trained imams that are more likely to come from radicalised schools, are wary of the current government and its mechanisms for dealing with it, though it has also been noted that the government already issues work permits for these imams, so perhaps that is a tool they could better use now. The report did mention what happens in Europe, but the language is vague, and what does happen in many European countries is providing funding for imam-training schools, with the intention of helping them learn about the language and culture of the country they’re heading to. Could this be what they mean? Maybe, but it’s still an interim report, so we won’t know until maybe December, assuming that the next parliament is actually constituted by then. So what to make of it? John Ivison posits that the report reads like a Conservative election platform, and I don’t think he’s wrong. This government has not been above abusing the Senate for its own ends before, and it looks like they’re doing it again. And yes, you’re going to look aghast at the suggestion that the Senate is partisan, never mind that it is and always has been – it’s usually just less partisan because Senators don’t need to campaign for re-election. It’s also in a difficult period right now because the majority of the Conservatives in the Senate were appointed in a manner that stressed the Chamber’s ability to absorb them, and that in turn led the Conservative leadership therein to further abuse the chamber by going heavy on the whip. It is a problem that may not be solved until Harper is no longer the party leader and this group no longer feels beholden to him. Until then, we should be critical, but let’s keep said criticism in perspective. The institution itself is not to be faulted because it currently has some problematic appointments and a Prime Minister that is keen to abuse it.

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Roundup: A curious recommendation

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The Senate’s national security and defence committee released an interim report yesterday on countering the terrorist threat in Canada. The report made some 23 recommendations, many of them critical of what the government has and has not yet done, such as making it a criminal offence to be part of a terrorist organization, or having a “no-visit” list to keep known ideological radicals out of the country. The one that got the most attention on Power & Politics and subsequently the Twitter Machine was recommendation 9, which suggests the government “work with the provinces and the Muslim communities to investigate the options that are available for the training and certification of Imams in Canada.” And then they were off about how this was criminalizing speech and thought, and how it was likely to be a Charter issue, but actually reading the report itself, the preceding section noted the problems of amateur prison proselytizers, and that members of the Muslim community were concerned about foreign-trained imams spreading extremist ideology, and noted that certification is already the case in Europe. Not much further down in the report is a reputable Calgary imam talking about how extremist ideology is being protected on campuses under the guise of “academic freedom.” In this context, the recommendation doesn’t seem nearly as extreme as it was presented, but hey, it’s not like that context made it into some of the articles (not that surprising, unfortunately). This having been said, there remain problems with the report, which is why the Liberal senators dissented from the report, looking for more counselling, early intervention, study of the roots of radicalization, and more importantly resources for RCMP that the government seems reluctant to do. Is it perfect work? No. Is it better than we’d get from the Commons? Yes. It’s also still an interim report, and more work will be done on it in the next parliament, so perhaps things will improve with it before the final version is issued. In the meantime, it’s not a bad thing that senators are actually talking about this issue without relying solely on slogans.

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Roundup: Making the AFN pitch

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The Assembly of First Nations has been holding their General Assembly in Montreal, and both of the two main opposition leaders addressed them yesterday. As First Nations leaders try to convince their people to start flexing their political muscles, with some 51 ridings they say that they can influence, both Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau made their pitches to the assembled chiefs. For Mulcair, it was largely a recapping of pledges he had made previously, while Trudeau unveiled a much more comprehensive policy plank for the party’s election platform. The fact that the parties are making this kind of a pitch – probably the most high-profile of such pitches in recent electoral memory – is a sign to the seriousness to which Canadians are taking these issues now, where they would have been considered far more niche in elections past.

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Roundup: Tweet storms over Greece

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On an otherwise hot and sleepy Monday in the Nation’s Capital, an otherwise innocuous-sounding tweet turned into a bit of a flap, which of course feeds the broader narrative of the coming election.

Suffice to say, both positions were both pretty ridiculous. Ashton (who later made it clear this was a personal position and not a party one) being ridiculous of course in trying to infer that there is some kind of oppositional dynamic between democracy and austerity (would a “yes” vote have been anti-democratic? Really?), while Poilievre ridiculous in trying to make any kind of economic comparison between Canada and Greece, even if Canada were to have an NDP government. It would take decades of structural and even cultural factors for us to even approach a Greece-like situation, but that doesn’t fit well into a tweet. Poilievre kept on, tweaking the opposition parties about their previous support for joining a Greek bailout, which would mean that Canada would now be on the list of countries owed billions, had we opted to do so. And then both the NDP and the Liberals chipped back with both Harper’s mediocre economic record and the ridiculous comparisons to Greece. So, I guess it gave us all something to talk about, but it’s still kind of lame – and did I mention ridiculous?

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Roundup: The R-word

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With all of this bad economic news coming out lately, the R-word has been bandied about – recession, or technical recession, in the event that we get two quarters of negative growth. After all, we had negative growth in the first quarter, and we’ve already had one US bank say that we’re headed for recession and a 77-cent dollar (note: This was misreported as a 70-cent dollar the day before yesterday). Oh, but don’t worry, Joe Oliver says – we won’t go into recession. His forecasters still show growth, and Harper insists that the oil patch is going to bounce back, while they send out MPs saying that certain sectors of the economy are going to do better with a lower dollar – except no, the manufacturing sector isn’t ramping up on a lower dollar this time because that burned them before, and they had already retooled a lot of their operations to service oil and gas demand rather than export demand. So there’s that. One also can’t help but be reminded of the 2008 election, when Harper insisted that if a recession was going to happen, it would have happened already, and hey, look at all of these great buying opportunities. And then the “Great Recession” happened (a ridiculous name considering that the recession in the early 80s was actually worse), and the government drove us into deficit with a badly planned stimulus programme. Now that the campaign has begun, all of the leaders are plugging their messages – Harper insisting that things are going to bounce back and hey, look over there – terrorists!; Mulcair talking about manufacturing jobs without saying how he’ll encourage them (that miniscule innovation tax credit isn’t going to cut it) while also falsely decrying that “all of our eggs” were in the resource basket (not even remotely true); while Trudeau is making points about the current way the government is treating the economy and environment in an oppositional framework when it needn’t be, and talking about ramping up infrastructure spending but also trying to be clever about how to do it without more deficit spending. We’ll know by September 1st if we’re really in a recession or not, but it could make for a long two months of campaigning on the economy in the meantime.

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