Monthly Archives: February 2022

VICTORIA A member of the B.C. Liberal party has filed a petition asking a judge to delay the results of Saturday's leadership vote for 15 days. The petition filed in B.C.

VICTORIA A member of the B.C. Liberal party has filed a petition asking a judge to delay the results of Saturday's leadership vote for 15 days.

The petition filed in B.C. Supreme Court by Vikram Bajwa outlines concerns about the completeness of the party's recent audit of new members who were signed up during the leadership contest.

A hearing is scheduled for Friday in Vancouver.

Bajwa's petition asks the court to delay announcing the winner of the leadership vote for 15 days in order for the party to provide more details about the audit results and process.

Seven candidates are vying to replace former Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson, who resigned shortly after the October 2020 election when the New Democrats won a majority government. The candidates are legislature members Michael Lee, Ellis Ross and Renee Merrifield; business leaders Gavin Dew, Val Litwin and Stan Sipos; and Kevin Falcon, a former cabinet minister.

Bajwa's petition seeks several orders by the court on top of the delay, including a declaration that the party's membership audit is incomplete and to order the party to reveal its conclusions on whether any co-ordinated voter fraud took place in the leadership race.

Liberal spokesman David Wasyluk said the party will be in court Friday to respond to the petition.

"The party believes that the Leadership Election Organizing Committee, the party, and the chief returning officer have taken reasonable steps to determine voter eligibility by reviewing and auditing party memberships," he said in a statement.

"The party is confident in that review process."

He said last week the process of confirming the membership information of 1,423 members was still underway, while 1,140 membership applications were found not to be in compliance with party membership rules and procedures.

Colin Hansen, co-chairman of the leadership election committee, said last month the party gained more than 20,000 new members during the leadership campaign, increasing its membership total to about 43,000 members.

Concerns about new party memberships were raised by several leadership candidates during the campaign.

Candidate Val Litwin said he sent a letter to the party last December outlining concerns after his campaign reviewed data that included people giving an address on their membership applications in areas where there are no homes.

Representatives of the leadership campaigns for candidates Lee and Dew confirmed they sent a joint letter about membership concerns to the party last month.

The letter said a preliminary analysis "suggests a significant portion of the membership should be flagged for audit in the range of 33 per cent to 50 per cent."

Dew said if elected leader, he would introduce legislation to have Elections BC, the independent office that runs provincial elections, administer leadership contests for all political parties.

Voting for the new Liberal leader runs Thursday until Saturday, online and by telephone. Wasyluk said the petition does not affect the voting process.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2022.

Dirk Meissner, The Canadian Press

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B.C. Liberal asks court to delay leadership result over membership concern - Coast Reporter

And that idea and self-image have remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grass-roots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing Yankee Doodle.

Against this complicated backdrop, Trumps stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual rights skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist rights small-d democratic self-image. In Trumps toxic dreampolitik theres actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy werent so good at cheating.

So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trumps deceptions isnt just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the rights more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival cant defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already one that would hold up, no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.

But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally. Because however much the rights populists get wrong about their claim to represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.

To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called undemocratic liberalism is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to Who votes? is different from its answer to Who decides? In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.

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Opinion | Who Believes in Democracy? - The New York Times

Defence Minister Anita Anand, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly look on as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks following a cabinet retreat, in Ottawa, on Jan. 26.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

The federal Liberals head into a new budget season talking about pursuing bold, new strategies to shape Canadas economic future. But listening to Chrystia Freeland discuss it this week, it all sounds a bit old and tired.

As we look to the years ahead, our focus must be on jobs and economic growth priorities that will form the foundation of the budget, the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister told a Monday news conference, marking the launch of public consultations for a budget she framed as forming a blueprint for the countrys long-term economic prosperity.

Jobs and growth are the motherhood and apple pie of economic objectives. Find me the last government that didnt say these were its priorities. Its more platitude than policy. Might test well with the focus groups, but its not a meaningful starting point for a serious rethink of long-term economic policy.

More than six years into this governments time in office, its time for something more ambitious. If the Liberals have a vision for the countrys economic future and its not clear they do theyre running out of time to act on it.

Freeland lists housing affordability, green transition and jobs as 2022 budget priorities

Federal government posts $1.4-billion deficit for November, 2021, down from $15.4-billion in November 2020

Yet even when discussing the countrys most immediate and pressing economic worries, the Liberals display an unsettling lack of ideas. The recovery strategy for the COVID-19 pandemic is stuck in get vaccinated.

That was Ms. Freelands response when reporters asked her Monday about the trucker protest, and the economic issues raised by it. She offered nothing about policies to address supply chain bottlenecks. Nothing about addressing inflation. Nothing about working with the United States and other trading partners to minimize cross-border slowdowns.

Vaccination has, unquestionably, been a huge part of the economic solution over the past year. But this was our best idea a year ago. Since then, nearly 90 per cent of the eligible population has gotten at least partially vaccinated and in the process, serious new economic problems have emerged. Its great that the government is keeping its focus on the vaccination effort. But its not nearly enough.

Casting her gaze toward the long-term economic picture, Ms. Freeland certainly recognizes where the challenge lies: I think we all really, really need to be focused on measures to increase Canadas economic potential, she said.

Few economists and public-policy experts would disagree. We live in a country with relatively low population growth (and, by extension, a slow-growing labour force) and chronically tepid productivity growth. Without policies to address those issues, we face a sluggish long-term economic outlook that threatens to compromise our living standards and strain our public finances.

This need to grow long-term potential is not new indeed, the Liberals recognized it when they came to power in 2015. They have taken some important steps to address the problem: the national affordable child-care plan, the higher immigration targets and the increased commitment to infrastructure spending. But the governments overall record on tackling long-term economic priorities is, to be generous, spotty.

It has yet to establish a coherent strategy on innovation. It has fiddled around the edges of the countrys ancient, convoluted and inefficient tax code, which desperately needs a complete overhaul. It has made discouragingly little progress in removing interprovincial trade barriers.

The governments efforts to increase public infrastructure investment have proven over-ambitious, with billions in budgeted spending failing to get out the door. It hasnt developed a serious plan to accelerate the countrys chronically listless private-sector capital investment.

Its biggest wins in international trade have been a North American pact that achieved little more than safeguarding market access that Canada already had, and pacts in Europe and the Pacific Rim that closed deals that had already been largely negotiated by the previous Conservative government.

In short, there is much, much work still to be done. Its debatable whether this governments inability to make serious progress in many of these areas is the result of a lack of will or a lack of execution; its probably a bit of both.

What should be clear to the Liberals is that they dont have a lot of time left to get going. This is very likely Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus final mandate before he makes way for a new Liberal leader, and history tells us that minority governments have pretty short life expectancies. The Liberals may only have two budgets before they are wrapping up the Trudeau era and preparing to go to the polls with a new leadership team.

Yet despite Ms. Freelands naturally enthusiastic personality, you have to wonder whether the pandemic has worn down this government. When it discusses the economic task ahead, it talks an awful lot about the policies it has already put in place. It seems more comfortable leaning on past successes than proffering fresh ideas.

Ms. Freeland invited think tanks and business groups to give me some great recommendations that we can put in place. But were not suffering from a lack of ideas (see above). What we need is a government that still has the imagination to lead the discussion, and the energy to get things done.

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Opinion: The clock ticks on a Liberal plan for economic growth - The Globe and Mail

From a Washington Postop-ed today by Prof. Lakier (who is at the University of Chicago Law School):

[R]eturning to the pre-Sullivanstandard would create problems of its own. Most important, it would leave journalists and other public speakers vulnerable to the kind of politically motivated litigation that the Times faced in 1964, when, after the newspaper published an advertisement containing minor factual inaccuracies about civil rights movement in Alabama, a phalanx of segregationist forces tried to use libel suits to run the paper out of businessand almost succeeded. No one who cares about an independent press in the United States should view the return of this state of affairs as a positive development.

But theSullivanrule is not the only mechanism one could devise to protect press freedom against vexatious litigation. There are many other changes to the law that could be made to make defamation lawsuits less expensive and ensure that public figures and officials could more easily defend their reputation when defamed.

Most obvious among these are damage caps, which could be used instead of the actual malice rule to limit the possibility that libel lawsuits could drive media organizations out of business. Stronger statutory protection against politically motivated litigation, at both the state and the federal, could also help reconcile protection for reputation with press freedom in the Internet age. Changes to court procedure could limit discovery and otherwise shorten the length and expense of libel trials so that media organizations don't have to dedicate as much time, energy and money to defending them. And venue rules could help ensure that media organizations do not get hauled into court before hostile out-of-state juries.

Rather than talking seriously about these kind of reforms, though, debates about the future of libel law overwhelmingly focus on theSullivanstandard, divorced from the rules and facts surrounding it. Perhaps that's not surprising: The rule is an icon of American constitutional law and unique in the common law world. It's an emblem of American free speech exceptionalism and a source of pride. But it's also, to some extent, an accident of history. We need not letSullivanlimit our imagination of how First Amendment law could better serve the public interest in a vastly different media environment from the one in which the decisionwas originally handed down.

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Also on New York Times v. Sullivan, from Leading Liberal Law Prof. Genevieve Lakier - Reason

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The government said Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez would 'propose a revised framework as soon as possible'

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The Liberal government says it heard the criticism that its proposed online harms bill would infringe privacy and charter rights, and will work with experts to revise the legislation.

In a consultation the government held last year, respondents raised concerns around the complexity of this issue and warned about unintended consequences if a thoughtful approach is not taken, Canadian Heritage said in a press release Thursday morning.

Experts and academics, Google , civil liberties groups and even research librarians took that draft legislation to task, warning the government the plan would result in the blocking of legitimate content and lead to censorship, violating Canadians constitutional and privacy rights.

University of Ottawas CIPPIC, for instance, told the government that anything else than setting the fundamentally flawed proposal aside would jeopardize Canadas claim to being a leader in advancing free expression, a free and open internet, and the human rights upon which our democratic society has been built.

The bill aimed to target online posts in five categories terrorist content, content that incites violence, hate speech, intimate images shared non-consensually, and child sexual exploitation content. Platforms would have been required to proactively monitor posts and take down illegal content within 24 hours of it being flagged, with a new regulator called the Digital Safety Commissioner of Canada in charge of enforcement.

The release said that in the coming weeks, the department would engage a group of experts whose mandate will be to collaborate with stakeholders and Canadians, in order to provide the Government with advice on how to adjust the proposal.

The announcement Thursday means the Liberals wont table the legislation within the first 100 days of Parliaments return, as promised in last years federal election. The government said Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez would propose a revised framework as soon as possible.

The release said the Liberal government is committed to getting this right and to doing so as quickly as possible.

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Liberals to work with experts on revision of 'fundamentally flawed' online harms bill after criticism - National Post

Once upon a time Liberals believed an Economic Accelerator was a policy to cut tax and red tape.

Leaving aside the issue of an Australian prime minister promising to fuse together things, his plans, priorities, strategies, programmes, programs, trailblazers and accelerators smack of a bureaucratic and technocratic mindset the Coalition appears to be in thrall to.

Its a language and a way of speaking straight out of the Kevin Rudd School of Management. On some issues the Liberals and Labor might differ, but their method of governing is identical. Eventually, the way something is done turns into what is done, which is a point lost on the Coalition and is the great insight of the old saying about hammers and nails and problems.

Morrison talked of plans more than a dozen times. Albanese, no less than 20 times.

In his Press Club speech, Morrison talked of his plans more than a dozen times. In his speech, Albanese of his plans no less than 20 times. Presumably the parties focus group testing is telling them voters want not just one plan, but many.

Few Liberal MPs would have heard of Friedrich Hayek, and even fewer would know what he said about planning The more the state plans the more difficult planning becomes for the individual. When the people want plans and politicians agree its no mystery why the trajectory of public policy in Australia is towards more planning and bigger government.

Towards the end of his Press Club speech Morrison lamented the fact that only 40 per cent of Australias researchers work in private industry, well below the OECD average. Surely part of the reason for this is that when the government showers the countrys public universities with plans and promises, theres little incentive for a bright young researcher to swap the largesse of the taxpayer for the uncertainty of the private sector and the free market.

Its worth putting into context the Prime Ministers speech this week. Its the product of 8 years of Coalition government. More than one Liberal Party supporter (and more than one Liberal MP) might ask whats changed in that time. To many it seems as if the big things havent changed much and neither have the little things.

At the end of last year the Australia Council awarded $80,000 to a cabaret artist whose performance includes writing abusive messages about the Prime Minister on particular parts of her body. This is in the wake of COVID-19, when the performing arts around the country are devastated and an organisation such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is on the verge of going broke.

Gifts of $80,000 from the government to cabaret singers makes the claim Were all in this together somewhat hollow.

As small business owners struggle through the effects of shadow lockdowns and plan how to make the following weeks payroll they can contemplate how different their life would have been had they become a taxpayer-funded cabaret singer or a public servant or a politician.

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How the Liberals have found their inner Kevin - The Australian Financial Review