The COVID 19 pandemic has been disastrous for many countries and Canada has not been spared. Thousands of Canadians are dead who would probably not have died this year without the virus and the Canadian economy took a major hit. Recent economic data has shown that the economy could be on the road to recovery but it is a fragile recovery at this time and it cannot be taken for granted.
Despite that all things come to an end and this pandemic will end at some point. At that point the true recovery will begin and there will be a great opportunity to shape that recovery in such a way as to handle a whole host of issues, including climate change, poverty and income inequality, just to name a few.
It would seem that the Trudeau government is planning on doing just that. Lost in all of the hubbub around WE was an announcement a few weeks ago about converting the CERB into a Employment Insurance Program for the 21st Century. Then a few days ago, buried in the news, was an announcement that further programs to address a whole host of issues would be included in an economic update scheduled for the Fall, although I would guess that it will be pretty close to a full blown budget as we still have not had one yet. Part of that announcement was some of the programs and policies that will be included in the update will be announced in August 2020, which is this month.
Further, the Trudeau government announced that they were hiring Mark Carney as an advisor for planning the economic recovery post-pandemic.
So, while the Opposition and the media have been playing political games the Government is planning the recovery and they are planning on using the opportunity presented by it to address all sorts of issues they would not have been able to address in normal times. And they would not be floating this idea if they did not believe Canadians are ready for that kind of bold thinking. One thing that the government reaction to the pandemic has demonstrated is Canadians seem to be OK with government spending and they might even be getting used to it in sufficient numbers as to accept the costs of the programs that will be proposed.
This is probably not lost on the Opposition Parties. One of the key people to plan this recovery is the Finance Minister, which is why they are so horny to have him resign or be fired. If he were to leave their plans would be greatly disrupted, which is why I would be very surprised to see him leave.
As well, Mr. Blanchette announced today that he would move a non-confidence motion at the first opportunity in the Fall, again unless Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Morneau (and Ms. Telford for some reason) resigned, to bring down the government and trigger an election. The reason is simple. If the government announces all sorts of new programs, in a Fall budget, that will address many issues important to Canadians it would be very hard just to prevent the Liberals from winning a majority government let alone beating the Liberals. In 2000, Paul Martin brought in a budget that included $100 billion in tax cuts. After that budget was passed Jean Chretien called an election, ran on that budget, and went from a 4 seat majority government to a 20 seat majority government.
The Opposition would like to prevent that. Certainly, if they do the Liberals will just have an election platform with all of the measures they would include in the Fall budget but it would not have the weight of a government bill behind it. It would just be an election platform.
So, in October we will either see an election or the Government will introduce, pass and begin to implement a budget that could put the country on a very different economic and financial path than before the pandemic. I do not envy the position of the Opposition Parties. If they trigger an election before a budget but during a pandemic voters might not be too pleased with them. However, if they let the budget drop, and it is well received, then triggering an election by voting it down, during a pandemic, might not please voters either. I imagine they will continue to fling their own feces at the government over the coming weeks because it would appear that none of them have actually given much thought on how to manage the economic recovery after the pandemic.
Regardless of the machinations of the Opposition Parties and their media cheerleaders it is interesting that the government is looking at the current situation as an opportunity create some good out of it. I also am pleased that they actually seem to be thinking about and planning for a post pandemic world. This government has been the most progressive government that I can remember and I am looking forward to what they have to offer for the recovery of the Canadian economy after the pandemic.
1 comment:
If there is an election in the fall, it won't be Trudeau calling one. Even when the Liberals were polling astronomically and the media was all agog with speculation that he would call a fall election, he reiterated several times that he wouldn't, because the pandemic would put voters' health at risk. So if the opposition forces one right as the second wave is kicking in, it'll backfire, with the likeliest outcome being a Liberal majority. For that reason alone I hope he baits them into it and/or some Liberals stay home whenever the opposition decides to play chicken.
The NDP have no money, but their "brain trust" is so monumentally stupid, inflamed with "revolutionary" fever, and consumed with the same irrational hatred of Trudeau (and his whole family, apparently) that has infected the Cons and Bloc, that I wouldn't put it past them to shoot themselves in the foot. As for the Bloc, the reason Blanchet's threats keep escalating (and he keeps adding more names to his resignation wishlist) is because he has his own very real scandal he is trying to distract from. He wants Trudeau replaced with Freeland so that the Bloc can get more seats by not having to run against a Quebecer. But I'm sure he'll find some reason to call for Freeland's resignation too, once the heat really turns up on him. Foresight isn't his forte, but misogyny is. He may not want to face another Quebecer but it's obvious that he doesn't want to face a woman.
None of these parties are serious about governing for Canadians, and they've proven it. They don't really even have policies, let alone bad ones. They've devolved into vessels of knee-jerk populism, perverse conspiracy theories, Republican tactics of opening perpetual investigations into their opponents in the absence of credible policy alternatives, and mainlining the drug of Trudeau/Liberal derangement syndrome. Now they've resorted to fomenting nonsense about Mark Carney. At the end of all this, however, the only ones with an actual platform of substantive, expert-driven solutions will be the Liberals. But the common denominator is that none of the opposition parties nor the media wants to see a Trudeau get credit for transforming Canada for the better after a once-in-a-century natural disaster.
So because they get no traction from their nonexistent or untenable platforms, they manufacture scandals instead. One can only hope their breathless, absurd desperation and petty jealousy ends up consuming them all in the end. As you've written before, though, Justin Trudeau appears content to ignore the media noise and the poll fluctuations that finally seem to be abating, which seems to indicate that the Liberals feel pretty confident that it will.
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