Tag Archives: liberals

#CdnPoli | The 44th Session of the Canadian Parliament Begins Today

#CdnPoli | Canadian Politics, Canada, Politics, , ,

The ‘new’ House of Commons is located in what used to be the outdoor courtyard of the West Block on Parliament Hill, while the decade-long renovation of the Centre Block Commons building  takes place

The 44th session of Canada’s Parliament officially commences today, followed by a Speech from the Throne on Tuesday at 9 a.m. PST, to be read by Governor General Mary Simon, who will lay out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s key priorities for his minority Liberal government.

From the last, pre-election, Parliament to this, the Liberals gained 5 seats, the Conservatives lost 2 seats, the Greens lost 1 seat, there’s now one independent, and the Bloc Québécois stand pat at 32 seats

The clock is ticking on the Liberal promise to introduce a host of bills — including the introduction or reintroduction of at least eight bills — within the first 100 days of their new mandate, and the year-end session of Parliament.

The government will sit for only 24 days to get things done in the Commons before the clock runs out on Feb. 3 — with the first two days essentially lost since they’ll be devoted to electing a Speaker, and delivering a throne speech..

The Commons is scheduled to sit for four weeks before breaking for the holiday season on December 17th. MPs won’t return to Ottawa until January 31st.

If the Liberals intend to keep their promises for the first 100 days — and they insist they do — that spells a crammed legislative agenda for the few weeks the House of Commons will be sitting before the new year.

“We have a very aggressive agenda to get to in the coming weeks and that’s what we’re focused on,” government House leader Mark Holland said last week following the Liberals’ first post-election caucus meeting.

Here’s what’s on the government agenda in the next 24 sitting days …

    • Implement last month’s announcement on more targeted emergency aid benefits for individuals & sectors hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic;
    • Pass a bill to impose criminal sanctions on anyone who blocks access to vaccine clinics, hospitals, testing centres and abortion clinics, or anyone who seeks to intimidate or harass health care workers, keeping a promise made by Trudeau as anti-vaccination protests ramped up during the recent, late summer election campaign;
    • An important bill, with NDP support, would provide 10 days of paid sick leave for federally regulated workers, a measure triggered by the pandemic;

    • A bill will be re-introduced  to ban the traumatizing practice of forcing a person to undergo “conversion therapy” aimed at altering their sexual orientation or gender identity. Although Conservatives spun out debate on the ban last time and more than half of the Tory caucus voting against the initiative, banning conversion therapy is strongly supported by all other parties;
    • Combat online hate, including hate speech, terrorist content, incitement to violence, child sexual abuse and non-consensual distribution of intimate images. New legislation will make social media platforms accountable for the content they host;
    • Reform the criminal justice system to address the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Indigenous people: the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for less serious crimes and greater use of conditional sentences, such as house arrest, counselling or treatment, for people who do not pose a threat to public safety;
    • Safeguard Canada’s critical infrastructure, including 5G networks, to preserve the integrity and security of national telecommunications systems.

    The platform also commits the government to a host of other non-legislative tasks within 100 days, including appointing a new federal housing advocate, holding a summit on restarting cultural industries, and working with provinces and territories to create a national paid sick leave plan.

    And, of course, completing the task of bringing all provinces and territories on board for the government’s much needed, and long overdue economic, feminist and family equity issue — $10-a-day national child care.

    More tomorrow on the 44th session of the Canadian Parliament.

Decision 2021 | Canada | Post Mortem, Part 1 | It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

Decision Canada 2021, Politics, , , , ,



On Monday evening, Canadians returned a stable and responsible Liberal minority government, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,  to the halls of power in Ottawa and to Parliament, in an election that would appear on the surface not to change much. Only time will tell, of course, if the 2nd, 3rd and 4th parties will find themselves able to work with the Liberals in the interest of all Canadians, or whether they’ll return to their destructive and unproductive orientation of morbid  partisan politics that defined their conduct prior to the calling of the August 15th election.

For VanRamblings, here are a few takeaways from the election …

1. Shachi Kurl cost Canadians and the Liberal Party a majority government. Going into the English Leaders’ debate, the Bloc Québécois had lost their footing, with all polls showing them unable to retain more than 10 seats in Parliament, for a loss of 22 seats. The support of Québeckers had moved to Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party — which looked to pick up most of the lost Bloc seats, propelling them to a majority government. Then Ms. Kurl asked a damnedly poorly phrased question concerning Québec Bill 21 — banning Québec citizens from wearing religious symbols, and mandating that one’s face be uncovered to give or receive specific public services — the contentious nature of her question propelling the Bloc into a stratospherically high, and unforgiving, seat count;

2. The NDP. In an entirely wrong-headed collusionary campaign with Erin O’Toole’s Conservative campaign team — that, it should be noted, won the NDP only one additional seat in Parliament — the NDP relentlessly joined the Conservatives in attacking the Prime Minister, yet never saying an unkind word about one another. Had it not been for Jason Kenney’s announcement of a vaccine passport for Albertans last week — which all but destroyed Erin O’Toole’s chance at winning government —  the Tories would have won government, and thanks to the NDP, Canadians would not have realized the Liberal national child care plan, the continued ban on assault weapons, and the re-introduction of a bill banning  conversion therapy, among a myriad of other progressive Liberal policies.

Annamie Paul is finished as the Green Party leader, and should have resigned on Monday night — but didn’t. Ms. Paul came in a distant fourth place in her home riding of Toronto Centre, securing only 9% of the vote for herself and the Green Party.

In Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole’s re-tread of former Tory leader Andrew Scheer’s 2019 concession speech, Mr. O’Toole talked about working together with his Tory colleagues to win the next election. Sad for Mr. O’Toole, most members of his party are far to the right of the leader, and want him gone. The knives are already out for Mr.  O’Toole — who is hanging onto his leadership with a hare’s breadth. Mr. O’Toole will resign his leadership within months of his status quo loss.

In happier Election Night stories: federal New Democratic Party candidate Bonita Zarrillo (above) — in the riding of Port Moody-Coquitlam — decisively won her second go-round at the polls, defeating near invisible Conservative Party parachute candidate Nelly Chin by a healthy 1,607 vote count.


Vancouver Granville NDP candidate Anjali Appadurai awaiting count of all polls, and mail-in ballots

At this writing, Vancouver Granville NDP candidate Anjali Appadurai finds herself in a near dead heat with Liberal Taleeb Noormohamed — behind by 230 votes — with 1 poll and the mail-in ballots yet to be counted.

In Richmond Centre Liberal Wilson Miao handily defeated Conservative imcumbent Alice Wong, while in Steveston-Richmond East Liberal candidate Parm Bains absolutely thrashed the Conservative incumbent, Kenny Chiu.

In Burnaby North-Seymour Liberal Terry Beech handily won a third term in office, with VanRamblings favourite, Fleetwood Port Kells Liberal incumbent, Ken Hardie, performing the same feat. Liberals’ Joyce Murray in Vancouver Quadra and Hedy Fry in Vancouver Centre were also gratefully victorious on election night.


Defeated candidates, the NDP’s Ruth Ellen Brosseau & recent Liberal Cabinet Minister, Maryam Monsef

In sad news: in Québec, Berthier—Maskinongé’s Ruth Ellen Brosseau lost her bid to return to Parliament, as did Ontario’s recent Liberal Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Minister of Rural Economic Development, Maryam Monsef.

One final note: in perhaps the best news of the evening, now former Cloverdale-Langley City incumbent Tory MP, renowned climate change denier, and rampant homophobe and transphobe, not to mention activist anti-choice campaigner, Tamara Jansen, was unceremoniously unelected … yippee !!!

Post Election columns from The Globe and Mail (click on the links directly below)

Tory Leader Erin O’Toole’s ideology shift not enough to surpass Liberals

Jagmeet Singh still holds balance of power but NDP doesn’t make major seat gains

After failing to secure majority, Trudeau will face questions within his caucus

Plus these reflections on Election Night 2021 (click on the links directly below)

CBC | Canadians have re-elected a Liberal minority government

Maclean’s |  A win’s a win | Paul Wells

Vancouver Sun | Liberals hold onto battleground Metro Vancouver ridings

New York Times | Trudeau Projected to Remain PM, Falls Short of a Majority

Washington Post | Liberals win re-election, will lead minority government again

Decision 2021 | Day 30 | The State of the Race | Progressivism Reigns

Decision Canada 2021, Politics, , , ,

With only one week to go, Canadians — who just 11 days ago seemed almost completely unaware there was a federal election going on —  have come out of their slumber, and in vast numbers have set about to change the complexion of the current election.

Here’s what the polls were looking like on September 2nd …

On Thursday, September 2nd, Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives seemed to have the election in the bag, their policy-driven campaign a wild success, while at the same time Jagmeet Singh’s federal NDP campaign had caught fire, and catapulted the usual also-ran social democrats into second place, and ready to assume the mantle of Opposition party in the next session of Parliament.

So, what happened in 11 days to turn the Liberal campaign around?

1. Voters took a closer look at a Conservative Party platform that would annul a national child care programme signed onto by eight provinces and territories; nullify a Canada Child Care benefit programme that has provided much needed aid to young families, while cutting child poverty in Canada by 40% since 2015; rescind the ban on tanker traffic along British Columbia’s pristine coast; and reverse the current ban on assault weapons that have murdered so many of our fellow citizens; among dozens of other provocations;

2. Canadians took a closer look at the fiasco that is pandemic policy in the four provinces where the Conservative party is in power, and what that might mean for Tory pandemic policy federally. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan —  both of which refuse to consider a vaccine card to help keep their citizens safe —  have the highest per capita COVID-19 infection rates in Canada, and a citizen vaccination rate lower than anywhere else in the country, where the Premiers of these provinces say, “Everything is back to normal. We had lockdowns, quarantined our citizens, did contract tracing, and spent far too much taxpayer money on fighting a war against an invisible foe.” Recently resigned Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister and Ontario Premier in hiding, Doug Ford, have done little better in protecting their citizens and fighting the scourge that is COVID-19.

https://twitter.com/EDenhoff/status/1436810714677604352?s=20

Canadian voters aren’t stupid: they know what an Erin O’Toole government would mean for the health of their families.

3. If Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party have risen 5.8 points in the polls in the past 11 days, and Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives have lost 8.7 points in Canada-wide polling, the party that has experienced the steepest decline in support is Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, who in falling from a September 2nd high of 28.4% to a mere 17.1% standing today — for an incredible (if not unexpected) drop of 11.3 percentage points — simply have to be reeling.

Although, the NDP will pick up three seats if the Mainstreet Research / iPolitics poll above is correct.

Election Day 2021 is but one short week away from today.

By late in the evening of Monday, September 20th, Canadians will know whether we’ve elected an Erin O’Toole government — certainly not out of the realm of possibility, given the volatility of the current election cycle — or returned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Ottawa, for what will likely be his final term in office, allowing him to complete his work on creating a national child care programme, and seeing us through this pandemic that has so disrupted the lives of all Canadians.