I don’t think the Conservatives want an election either. I think they’d lose seats and they know it.
PP had Andrew Scheer and Scott Reid (two senior caucus members with the most experience in Parliamentary procedure) sit out the vote. This action would’ve guaranteed the passing of the budget.
It was only after two members of the NDP had registered their official abstentions that Scheer and Reid were freed of their obligations and returned to cast their “nay” votes under their claims of a “technical glitch” with their remote voting devices. It was a funny sight indeed.
Andrew Scheer was literally hiding behind a curtain and waiting while everyone was voting (I think the doors close when voting begins, so he needed to be in the chambers to have time to blame his device).
The video shown on tv was brutally painful to watch.
Notice Scheer’s arm in the background. They had to sit and wait for almost 99% of MP’s before returning to their seats to blame their devices. lol.
One Conservative MP was on “sick leave”. His/her vote was designated as “Abstain”. Do MPs on such a leave lose their rights to vote? I would think that unless (s)he was in a coma, (s)he could have reached out to a computer screen and selected “Yes” or “No”.
Interesting article on 29 ways Trump has changed Canada. Obviously this impacts heavily on Carney. (Limited gift link and normal link to same article in Globe, respectively.)
Thing is, the Conservatives didn’t want to sink the budget vote, hence the shenanigans with Scheer and Reid. If the guy on sick leave makes the effort to cast a ‘no’ ballot remotely, that just means you need to get a third MP in the house to look an idiot, so I’m betting he was instructed not to vote.
Good unemployment numbers came out today. Of course, the PM cannot take all credit for this, but let’s face it; if the numbers were terrible, he’d definitely be taking the blame for it from the usual suspects.
Canada’s unemployment rate dropped to 6.5 per cent in November, Statistics Canada said on Friday, bringing the rate to a 16-month low.
“This solid jobs report follows a series of better-than-expected results on the Canadian economy in recent weeks, including the upside surprise on Q3 GDP and the earlier robust job gains,”
The article says, “A reduction in the total labor force as immigration curbs instituted by the government sent fewer people into the job market also helped.” Helped by how much?
An economy is healthy when it adds full-time, high income private sectors jobs. Part-time, quasi-public low wage jobs are not so indicative of an improving economy. If we are dumping good manufacturing or resource jobs for temp support roles its problematic.
Youth unemployment fell 1.3 per cent It has been troublingly high recently, so this is good news.
The private sector added 52,000 jobs in November, while the public sector saw little change. I think more private sector jobs is a good thing.
This is the third consecutive month of job gains; September, October and November saw a total of 181,000 jobs added. It’s always good when there is a positive trend line.
Canada seems to be weathering the Trump factor better than expected. Let’s hope this continues, and the doom-sayers continue to be incorrect.
Which doomsayers? The ones saying the economy is pooched with people lined up in unprecedented numbers at food banks and we’re, as a country, spending money like drunken sailors on shore leave? Or the ones saying that the world is ending due to climate change so we should shutdown all industry, give the country back to the indigenous, and prepare for Trump invading Canada to subjugate us all?
It probably helps that NAFTA ended up providing a lot of cover against the tariffs. There was some recent editorials or commentary that Trump would end NAFTA next year. While the threat of doing so is pretty obvious, I think actually doing it is unlikely given he maintained its status through the tariff blitz and, you know, delivering a massive economic shock before the mid-terms is a terrible idea politically.
The graphs on US wine imports and Canadian travel to the US are especially striking. Non-US international travel by Canadians is up significantly while travel to the US has dropped precipitously. US wine imports are practically down to zero. No great loss for me – there were some California wines I quite liked but by the time they make it to Canada they’re rather overpriced. There are great wines available at reasonable prices from Europe, Australia, and South America, not to mention the stellar quality of many Canadian wines after decades of steady improvement.
Carney said government will add $500 million to the softwood lumber guarantee program of loans and financing being administered by the Business Development Bank of Canada, devote $500 million from the loan facility Ottawa set up to help big businesses with liquidity and set up a single window, or “one-stop shop,” for all applications for federal support.
Lumber producers will also be included, along with steel producers, in rail freight subsidies to CN and CPKC railways that cover half the cost to ship their products interprovincially and in an expansion of the work-sharing program launched earlier this year to increase income-replacement ratios to 70 per cent from 55 per cent.
In Victoria, B.C. Forest Minister Ravi Parmar welcomed Carney’s commitment to create a forest sector transformation task force, among the measures.
Of course, the main problem is softwood lumber tariffs from the United States - an ongoing problem for the past several decades. Tell me, how, exactly, would YOU solve this ongoing problem?
I asked you what YOU would do to solve the softwood lumber problems, which has been ongoing since 1982.
Not a complaint that Carney is not doing enough in the past few months to solve a problem that has been bad for BC forestry for the past 40+ years. By not negotiating with a toddler down south who does not even understand who pays for tariffs.
Complaining is easy. What specific solution do you (or the Conservatives) offer?
