FIRST READING: The NDP plan to support Trudeau while still hating him

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OUTSTANDING STORY

The federal NDP is in a bit of an awkward position lately. On the one hand, they have just signed an agreement guaranteeing NDP support for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau until at least 2025. On the other hand, the party’s message It depends largely in his criticism of the liberal government. Instead of squaring these two mutually exclusive ethos, the party is simply doing both at the same time.

According to Anja Karadeglija of the National Post, The 2022 budget included approximately $15 billion in additional spending to appease the terms of the Reliance and Supply Agreement, the official deal under which the NDP agreed not to challenge the Liberal leadership in exchange for various . That’s why columnist Carson Jerema wasn’t the only voice to call it the “Jagmeet Singh Budget,” after the NDP leader.

But although the NDP has announced that it will vote for the budget, they still plan to publicly criticize all non-NDP parties. “We still have critics and critics”, Singh he said at a news conference on Friday. On the eve of Budget Day, Singh even put out a cheep criticizing Trudeau’s environmental policy. “In 7 years, Justin Trudeau has not been a climate leader. Real leaders don’t subsidize Big Oil. Real leaders don’t buy pipelines,” he wrote.

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This is not really the case in the rest of the democratic world, where parliaments are traditionally more fractured due to voting systems based on proportional representation. In most countries, if Singh wanted a say in the federal budget, he would have to join a formal governing coalition.. That is the case with the German equivalent of the NDP, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, which currently lead the country thanks to the support of the Greens and Free Democrats. And the thing about coalitions is that they don’t last as long when one of the partners is constantly criticizing the other. One study 2018 of countries with a tradition of coalition government found that it has the effect of forcing politicians not to deliberately criticize their political opponents.

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CULTURE WARS

Quebec legislators are not often known as free speech libertines. This is the province with language police, after all. But a new Quebec bill proposes to protect the expression of “any word” spoken in a university classroom, which would protect professors from professional sanctions for using language that administrators or lobbyists might find offensive. “Censorship has no place in our classrooms”, Danielle McCann said, the Minister of Higher Education of the province. The context was a University of Ottawa professor, Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, who was suspended for contextually uttering a racial slur in class (specifically, the racial slur beginning with an “n”).

This week, writer Jamie Sarkonak wrote for the National Post about how it has become routine for Canadian universities to explicitly exclude white men from job applications, even when such work is paid for with government funds. Speaking to the Montreal Journal, two Liberal MPs from Quebec said they thought the move went “too far.” This included Joël Lightbound, who recently received national attention for his public criticism of federal COVID policy. Speaking specifically of the hiring policies at Université Laval, Lightbound saying it is important to promote inclusion, but “merit must be prioritized”.

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BUDGET

The 2022 budget professed to be so serious about housing affordability that it placed all of its housing measures in chapter one. But the good folks at Better Dwelling he pointed that the budget still manages to be packed with demand-side measures that will have the effect of pumping more money into the housing market, making the problem worse. These include first-time homebuyer grants and tax-free home savings accounts to save for a down payment. “Essentially, taxpayers will be subsidizing down payments,” they write.

It is very difficult to exaggerate how much Budget 2022 spent on military spending. It was only last month that NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg directly criticized Canada for calling in its defense budget. Shortly after, Defense Minister Anita Anand promised “aggressive” steps to bolster Canada’s military in response to a more dangerous world. And yet the budget only provided for an additional $8 billion over five years. “In the end, all those ambitious telegrams were in vain,” defense analyst Jeffrey F. Collins wrote in an article. global news column.

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One of the most overlooked sections of Budget 2022 was a provision to extend the terms of Canadian copyright for another 20 years.. Previously, works became public domain in Canada 50 years after the author’s death. Now, it’s 70 years. The Americans forced us to do this as a provision of the renegotiated NAFTA agreement, but a change in copyright law actually has nothing to do with government spending, so it’s strange that it’s a budget provision. It was only seven years ago that Liberals were fiercely critical of this exact behavior in the Harper administration, when “generalBudget bills were routinely used to bypass any number of unrelated measures.

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