Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals keep taking punches at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, but new polling suggests they aren’t hitting home.
In fact, since the beginning of Parliament’s spring sitting, the Liberals have found themselves facing all-time lows when it comes to support. Abacus Data polling shows a 19-point lead for the Conservatives, who hold 43 per cent support among those polled, compared to 24 per cent for the Liberals.
By the numbers, the federal government’s ArriveCAN app is a disaster. Designed during the pandemic to pre-screen travellers to Canada, its cost ballooned from $80,000 to $59.5 million — and possibly more.
Over $12 million worth of invoices for work done on the project was potentially unrelated to it. Over 10,000 people were told by the app to quarantine when they didn’t have to, and only 10 per cent of travellers have continued to use ArriveCAN since it was made optional.
Housing minister denies he ignored warning about immigration levels and housing supply
OTTAWA – Housing Minister Sean Fraser said he didn’t ignore warnings as immigration minister about the number of new Canadians the country was accepting exceeding the number of houses the country was building.
The Liberals immigration targets set to plateau next year at 500,000 permanent residents are twice what the targets were when they came to office in 2015.
Fraser appeared at the House of Commons finance committee, where Conservative MP Jasraj Singh Hallan demanded to know why he had failed to act on that warning in his last cabinet post as immigration minister.
There is no “labour shortage” – Canada’s much-touted labour shortage is mostly a mirage
… Despite that apparent shortage, wages are not rising in response. That could be explained in part by a lack of pricing power by some employers. They may not be able to increase their own prices enough to absorb the cost of higher wages.
The heart of the answer, however, is the rise in the number of temporary foreign workers who are willing to work for cut-rate wages and are not as able to shift jobs nearly as easily as Canadian residents. The number of such workers has exploded since the pandemic, jumping to 120,000 at the end of 2022 from 73,360 at the end of 2019.
Our Captains of Industry loved indentured servants.
The federal government paid to have a “high-speed” ship on stand-by to evacuate Canadians in Lebanon, then later canceled the $440,000-a-week contract after five weeks, deciding it wasn’t needed after all, officials say.
Joining with one or more other countries to put the ship on retainer — and later scrapping the deal — underscores the tricky logistical and political challenges Ottawa faces around the conflict on Israel’s border with Lebanon.
Last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly announced that Canada was sanctioning 11 Hamas leaders for their participation in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel – a redundant and pointless gesture, since Hamas is considered a terrorist entity by the Canadian government. The ministry’s own news release acknowledged the superfluous nature of the announcement, noting that members of terrorist organizations are inadmissible to Canada and that their property is subject to forfeiture.
It was a little bit of security theatre by the Canadian government, part of its continuing effort to demonstrate that it cares deeply about Israelis/Gazans/Jews/Muslims/whoever’s turn it is next, even if it was announced four months after the Hamas attack. Indeed, one would think that the time for such wholly symbolic gestures was on Oct. 8, not months later.
It’s been 22 years since a former auditor general blasted the Chrétien government after it “broke just about every rule in the book” in handing out private sector contracts in the sponsorship scandal(opens in a new tab).
The book has been broken anew.
In a rule-shredding repeat orbiting the dreaded ArriveCan(opens in a new tab) app, Auditor-General Karen Hogan(opens in a new tab) drew a paint by hefty numbers portrait of bureaucratic incompetence, dodged accountability and contractors treating Liberal government officials to fine whisky tastings.
Canada’s electric vehicle manufacturing subsidies are not “investment” – they are economic illusions. There has been over $40-billion worth of Canadian federal and provincial handout announcements, including up to $15-billion for Stellantis and LG, up to $16.3-billion for Volkswagen, $7.3-billion for Northvolt, and a continuing race to give billions to Honda and others. As Dutch, South Korean, German, Swedish, and Japanese companies build their value chains using Canadian taxpayers’ dollars, what’s in it for Canada?
Tent encampments prove ‘exactly how broken’ Canada’s system is, federal housing advocate says
A new report on tent encampments across Canada calls for urgent action from all levels of government to end what the federal housing advocate describes as a “life and death crisis.”
Marie-Josée Houle said her report released Tuesday is the first of its kind in Canada. The report — titled Upholding dignity and human rights — outlines six calls to action to address ongoing homeless encampments across Canada.
“It is a physical manifestation of exactly how broken our housing and homelessness system is from coast to coast to coast in Canada. It needs urgent measures,” Houle told CBC News.
Failing to properly vet newcomers will hinder social cohesion
I came to Canada as a political refugee. In my home country of Iran, I was arrested, tortured and later received a prison sentence for my student-organizing activities. I had a month to surrender to prison. Instead, I decided to leave the country with the help of a smuggler. I escaped through the mountains, partly on horseback, to Turkey, where I applied for asylum through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
There’s no sign that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sharper attacks against the Conservatives have shifted public sentiment in his favour a month into 2024, and things are getting worse for the Liberals on some metrics, according to new polling.
The Nanos Research data, released Monday and conducted for The Globe and Mail, shows Mr. Trudeau isn’t faring well among voters’ perceptions. He doesn’t enjoy the typical advantage of a sitting Prime Minister in managing U.S. relations. Closer to home, views on his performance as Liberal leader have slipped, and only a tiny fraction of Canadians believe the best thing for the party would be for him to stay on.
Remember that time the federal government tried to become an app developer?
On Monday, Auditor General Karen Hogan issued a scathing report on the federal government’s ArriveCAN app, which highlights the folly of a country that devalues entrepreneurship and relies instead on top-down government initiatives — and of a governing party whose only real skill is spending taxpayer dollars with reckless abandon.
The government agencies behind ArriveCAN “repeatedly failed” to follow best practices in the development of the now controversial application, Canada’s auditor general says.
Auditor General Karen Hogan released a long-awaited report Monday that blasted the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), and Public Services and Procurement Canada, the departments responsible for ArriveCAN.
Having grown up in the 1960s, the attraction of the Liberal Party of Canada was that it was a big tent party. They were the party that eliminated racism in our immigration policies, the party that championed equality, fairness in the rule of law, free speech, and tolerance (as well as their leader stating, “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”—a very popular message in the decade of sexual liberation). They were the party that accepted everyone. That’s what attracted so many young people to the Liberals. In the 1960s and ’70s, if you were young, you were a Liberal.
Health Minister Mark Holland says he has “every confidence” his government can deliver pharmacare legislation by the promised March 1 deadline, and that the Liberals are “not pulling the fire alarm” on their confidence-and-supply deal with the NDP over the issue.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said this week there will be “repercussions” if the Liberals don’t table a sufficient piece of pharmacare framework legislation by next month, and signalled he’ll consider a missed deadline to mean they’ve “walked away” from their confidence-and-supply agreement.
The Trudeau government wants you to know it’s mad as hell and it’s not going to take it anymore.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he’s, to put the term politely, “PO’d” with Bell Media for its “garbage decision” to lay off journalists.
