Monthly Archives: January 2020

A new report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer says the federal government's tax cut will cost about $1.2-billion more per year than estimated during the election campaign.

The Canadian Press

The federal governments tax cut will cost about $1.2-billion more per year than estimated during the election campaign, according to a new report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The Liberal Party platform said the tax cut would reduce federal revenue by $5.66-billion a year once fully implemented in 2023-24. However, in a new report released Tuesday, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux said the estimated cost for that fiscal year is now $6.85-billion.

The government is planning to introduce legislation that would make the tax cut effective as of Jan. 1, 2020. The change would raise the basic personal amount a non-refundable tax credit that essentially sets the income threshold before owing tax from the current $12,298 for 2020 to $13,229, then gradually increase it to $15,000 for 2023.

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The latest PBO report appears to contradict the offices own costing, given that the Liberal Party platform relied on an independent estimate provided by the PBO. Last year, for the first time, political parties had the option of getting cost estimates from the PBO for specific campaign promises.

However, PBO officials say there are two main reasons Tuesdays estimate is higher. The first is that the Liberal Party asked the PBO to exclude the spousal and dependant benefits from the campaign estimate, but the government has included those in the proposed tax cut presented to Parliament. The second is that Tuesdays report is based on current data for economic growth and tax revenue.

Tuesdays report also provides new details about the distributional impact of the tax cut in 2023.

Couples with children will receive the largest benefit, $573, while a single-person family will receive $189.

Individuals with incomes between $103,018 and $159,694 will be $347 better off. Those with incomes between $51,510 and $103,017 will receive $337. People earning $159,695 to $227,504 are next in line, with a $257 tax cut. Those with incomes between $15,001 and $51,509 will receive $211, and individuals with incomes below $15,000 will save one dollar, on average.

The benefit of the tax cut starts to be phased out for individuals in the second-highest tax bracket and is fully phased out when individuals reach the highest tax bracket, which is estimated to start at $227,504 by 2023. As a result, the PBO said Canadians in the highest tax bracket will end up owing $11, on average.

The NDP has called on Finance Minister Bill Morneau to restrict the scope of the tax cut so that it no longer applies to individuals earning more than $90,000. The NDP said this would help pay for new social spending in areas such as dental care.

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Liberal tax cut will cost $1.2-billion more annually than promised: PBO - The Globe and Mail

Liberal-Academic-Methodist-Midwestern-Public School Proud-Steel Mill Salary Educated-Lesbian Mom-Tell Me Again About My Bubble. This was my sign at the 2017 Womens March in Chicago.

I grew upMethodistin a southern Illinois steel mill town, the kind where my wife and I still dont really feel comfortable holding hands. Nonetheless, I was amazed to discover that following the United Methodist Churchs 2019 vote to affirm a proposed Traditional Plan, one which kept in place and strengthened bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage, the vast majority of young and middle-aged parishioners abandoned my childhood church in protest. Perhaps less surprisingly, simultaneous to that small-town exodus, the social justicedriven, queer-inclusive Chicago churches Ive called home ones I chose for their rainbow flags and pink triangles railed against the UMC machinein the face of an institutional decision they saw as antithetical to their very beings.

Where are these stories? Buried somewhere beneath headlines about Kanyes performance alongside anti-LGBTQ speakers and Trumps promise for big action in promoting prayer in schools (the same schools where his administration rolled back protections for LGBTQ students), are untold stories of queer and queer-friendly liberal Christians. Sure, the 24-hour news cycle briefly latched onto the January 3 announcement ofthe UMC's proposed split, a separation that would leave the more progressive and queer-friendly faction of the denomination at the center, with the regressive traditionalists as aseparated side-denomination.But this kind of pro-queer action within the Christian community is not new. News outlets that clamor for the most regressive talking heads just make it seem so.

Where are the faces of queer and liberal Christianity? When I came out in the 1990s, Mel Whites Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America gave me peace. But hes not the full story (and had he not been a former ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell, there may have been no story). Sure, the mainstream news found Mayor Pete, but to them hes an unavoidable and attractive unicorn: a queer Christian Midwestern veteran. Where are the queer and queer-friendly talking heads?As a queer media scholar and liberal Christian, Ive been watching headlinesclosely, wondering yet again why an image of Christianity driven by hate and exclusion continuously controls the frame.

We liberal Christians are out there fighting for LGBTQ+ rights,immigrant rights,reproductive rights, and everything painted by the right as blasphemous and hedonistic. Yet progressive Christianstill doesnt exactlytrip off the tongue (let alone queer Christian).

Althoughreligioncommonly makes its way into the political beat, whether through George Conways anti-Trump Lincoln Project releasing ascathing videojuxtaposing evangelicals praise of the president with the commander in chiefs most egregious anti-Christian statements or the president launching his Evangelicals for Trump reelection coalition or trottingBilly Grahams granddaughter Cissieonstage during a Miami campaign rally to rebukeChristianity Todays call for his ouster, seldom dothe protests or progress of liberal Christians make the cut. For this reason, the UMC story has been an extraordinary wrinkle in the dominant conservative Christian narrative.

For decades, the hyperpresence of a vocal Christian right has driven liberals (including LGBTQ parishioners) away from the church. At a time when American churches are seeing declining numbers in general and surveys asking about religion note a rise in nones, queer congregants areneeded. And just as the UMC needed its queer parishioners and their queer-friendly allies to drag church doctrine into the 21stcentury, American politics and the impending election cycle need to hear from progressive Christiansand those who support LBGTQ rights.

According to the most recentPew Research Center surveylinking political ideology and religious affiliation, in the categories of both Mainline Protestant and Historically Black Protestant, the combined classifications of moderate and liberal far outweighed those of conservative. Nevertheless, its the conservative talking heads who cork off during the 24-hour news cycle, and its conservative politicians who wave the banner of Christianity while painting Christians with broad regressive strokes. They dont speak for all of us.

The story of the UMC is much more reflective of the current American religious landscape than are the talking points spewing forth on cable news, talk radio, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Evangelical legacy Franklin Graham (who gives Vladimir Putin props for protecting his nations children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda) and megachurch preachers like Joel Homosexuality Is a Sin, But Repentance Leads to Heaven Osteen, cramming50,000 worshippers into the old Houston Rockets stadium and reaching another 10 million weekly via TV, may have the cash, flash, Pepsodent smiles, and coiffures to sell the show. But they only speak for a subset of contemporary Christianity, one that unfortunately carries disproportional weight when it comes to headlines.

We are notKim Davisrefusing marriage licenses to Kentucky same-sex couples, religiousColorado bakersrefusing to bake queer wedding cakes, orHobby Lobbys Green familydenying Plan B or IUDs to their employees. As long as we allow them, the Grahams, the Osteens, and President TrumpsProsperity Gospel darlingand faith whisperer, multimillionaire Paula White, to be the face of American Christianity, we not only lose the public relations battle, but allow religion to be used as a weapon by the political right not just against us but all progressive Christians.

Only a visible and vocal presence of the Christian left can help combat this cultural fallacy.

By no means would I suggest that queer liberal or any liberal Christian voices form a monolithic Christian base. Surely demographic overlap exists between Christians and those who seek to withhold birth control, ban abortion, prevent same-sex couples from adopting, and bar transgender Americans from usingtheir chosen bathroom, but settling in on this view of Christian America is counterproductive. In fact, data pulled from a 2018Cooperative Congressional Election Studyshows that the religious left, although obscured by the media, is the mostpolitically activereligious group in the United States. And queer Christians are driving the fight for social change.

Queer Christians and their allies need to come out of yet another closet and make their voices heard. It shouldnt take tragedy or Jim J. Bullock and Tammy Faye Bakker teaming up for queer and religion to find their way into the same sentence. For decades we have fought to make ourselves and the LGBTQ community visible and valued; heres one more step to take. Make your voices heard not just in your churches but in the media, in local politics, and while canvassing for your candidates. Take away the taboo union of progressive politics, queerness, and Christianity.

We need to publicly prove that we too are part of the force driving positive and inclusive social, cultural, and political movements in this country. Dont let the pundits and politicians defineChristian. WWJD? Drive the story.

Kelly Kessler, a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project, teaches media and cinema studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Her teaching and scholarship often focus on the intersection of mainstream media, queer audiences, and queer images. All the while, shes doing her best to make her twins into good humans.

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Where Are the Faces of Queer and Liberal Christianity? - Advocate.com

Commission fonctionnaires may be urbane, talented, and hard-working, but they are not a civil service. They can launch dawn police raids. They can impose vast fines on their own authority. They have quasi-judicial powers and the prerogative of legislative initiative.

They are more like the Roman Curia. Nothing like this has existed in British political life since the Reformation. How do voters hold this Caesaropapist structure to account? They cannot do so. That is what Brexit is about.

There are great numbers of us in Britain, France, Holland, the Nordics, or the Czech Republic, who think the precious liberal nation state inspired by the redemptive values of the English Bill of Rights and the Dclaration des droits de l'homme has been a resounding success.

We think it is the only forum of authentic democracy, the agent of the greatest moral progress the world has ever seen. We think the systematic attempt to discredit the nation state by blaming it for two world wars is an historical sleight of hand, a lie fed to two generations of European school children though the co-ordinated Franco-German curriculum in a systematic brain-washing exercise.

We see it as the guarantor of social solidarity and a bulwark against religious agitation, fracture, and the unforgiving clash of communitarian identities. We think it should not be discarded lightly.

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Leaving the EU is horrible, but it is the only way to preserve our democratic liberal nation state - Telegraph.co.uk

TheGunBlog.ca Peter MacKay, a top candidate to lead the Conservative Party of Canada, promised to undo the governing Liberal Partys gun confiscations against hunters, farmers and sport shooters if he is elected prime minister.

Whatever they do, we will undo, Mackay said on Twitter today, sharing an article from The Post Millennial about Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rushing to order mass seizures from federally licensed firearm owners. The safety of Canadians will be enhanced by putting criminals behind bars, not harassing law-abiding citizens.

Liberal Mass Confiscation

Trudeau promised one of the biggest confiscations against honest citizens of any democracy in history.

Hes preparing to order licensed firearm owners to surrender a quarter-million of their rifles, and potentially all of their handguns.

He said he would offer to pay victims of the rifle confiscations, but not the handgun confiscations.

MacKay, OToole

MacKay is one of the most-popular candidates seeking to lead the Conservatives and beat the Liberals in the next election.

Erin OToole, another contender who respects Canadas 2.2 million men and women with a firearm Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL), officially entered the race today. The military veteran pledged to scrap the deeply flawed Firearms Act when he ran for the leadership in 2017.

Members Vote, But Will PAL Holders?

Anyone who wants to vote for the next Conservative chief must have a valid party membership.

Although many firearm users vote Conservative in federal elections, almost no PAL holders voted in the 2017 Conservative election that propelled Andrew Scheer past Maxime Bernier.

The Post Millennial article summarized a report in Blacklocks Reporter yesterday on the planned Liberal confiscations.

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Peter MacKay on Liberal Gun Bans: 'Whatever They Do, We Will Undo' - TheGunBlog.ca

QUEBEC CITY -- Tensions between the two camps squaring off in the leadership race of the Quebec Liberal Party rose a notch Monday, with the party's ethics at the heart of the budding conflict.

Members of the Liberal caucus are starting to worry that tangible animosity between the camps of candidates Dominque Anglade and Alexandre Cusson will leave a mark, to the point that it could undermine the party's unity the day after it chooses its next leader on May 31.

Anglade's team has asked MNA Marwah Rizqy, the right-hand woman of Cusson, to put an end to personal attacks against Anglade, a fellow MNA from Montreal.

On Sunday, during the launch of Cusson's campaign, Rizqy hinted that Anglade was practicing 'denial' by avoiding tackling head-on the issue of ethics at the Quebec Liberal Party.

On Monday, in the wings of the Liberal caucus being held in preparation for the next parliamentary session, the two co-chairs of the Anglade campaign, MNAs Carlos Leitao and Marie Montpetit, as well as Anglade herself, publicly called Rizqy to order.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

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Quebec Liberal Party leadership: Growing tensions between the two opposing camps - CTV News