[Canada] Canadian Politics Redux

[Barrister]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-ford-announce-honda-ev-deal-1.7184495

So Honda announces a $15 billion dollar investment in electric vehicles and battery manufacturing.  This is being funded by a total of $5 billion in "incentives" from both Ontario and the Feds.  This will in turn create over 1,000 "well-paying manufacturing jobs".

Uh, guys - that's about $5 million per job.  They'd damn well better be well-paying.

[crazy canuck]

A Globe editorial about how childish our Federal political leaders have become

To accuse your political opponent of being a liar is so serious a charge that the word is banned in legislatures. And so when federal Health Minister Mark Holland last week told a reporter that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was lying about pharmacare, he levelled a grave accusation.

But was that accusation of lying itself true?

Mr. Poilievre had said he would not support the government's new pharmacare legislation because, he claimed, it would require people who had prescription plans through their workplace to move over to the government's plan.

Except the legislation as it currently exists does not do that. It offers contraceptive and diabetic medication through a government plan to those who have no plan of their own. But no one is required to abandon their existing arrangement. Mr. Holland said the Conservative Leader was "spreading what are out-and-out lies."

For some political observers, Mr. Poilievre's remarks were symptomatic of a dangerous new trend that is being spread by right-wing populists and personified by former U.S. president Donald Trump: peddling conspiratorial untruths to rally uninformed voters to their side. Like everything in politics, however, the reality is more complicated.

Mr. Holland left out a key fact, a bit of mendacity-by-omission. While the existing pharmacare legislation does not compel universal public access today, it aspires to that eventual end. Bill C-64 states that it seeks to improve "the accessibility and affordability of prescription drugs ... with the aim of continuing to work toward the implementation of national universal pharmacare."

So while covered workers will not lose their private plan tomorrow, they may lose it some day. Mr. Poilievre could and should have made that distinction. But his words were not the bald-faced lie that Mr. Holland said they were. They belonged, instead, to the everyday prevarication, obfuscation and distortion that is the stuff of political discourse.

Such as when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, last October, announced that home heating oil would be exempt from the carbon price. The move disproportionately benefited Atlantic Canada, which is far more dependent than other parts of the country on heating oil.

Mr. Trudeau denied the carve-out was aimed at saving the Liberals' political bacon in the Atlantic provinces. Suspending the tax, he said, was intended to help everyone who heats their homes with oil make the switch to cleaner alternatives.

But the truth is that the tax was deeply unpopular in Atlantic Canada, and MPs from the region had been lobbying hard for the exemption. As he made the announcement, a gaggle of them stood behind Mr. Trudeau, nodding happily.

Lest there be any doubt about the politics of the decision, Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings offered a solution for those in the West who complained that natural gas had not also been exempted: "Atlantic caucus was vocal with what they've heard from their constituents, and perhaps they need to elect more Liberals in the Prairies so that we can have that conversation as well," she told CTV.

Nothing that Mr. Trudeau said about the home heating oil exemption could be described as a lie. And yet the political calculations behind the announcement clearly contradict the Prime Minister's own words.

Whether or not a statement is an outright lie, claims that play fast and loose with the truth degrade politics. Mr. Poilievre could have said that he would not support a pharmacare plan that could one day bring an end to private plans. Mr. Holland could have said those existing plans are safe for the foreseeable future. Those two statements would have laid the foundation for a proper political debate. Instead, each of them distorted and misled.

Mr. Poilievre took political rhetoric far past the breaking point recently when he visited anti-carbon tax protesters camped out beside a highway near the New Brunswick-Nova Scotia boundary. "People believed his lies," he told them, referring to Mr. Trudeau. Mr. Poilievre disagrees with his opponent and thinks his policies are wrong-headed and damaging; he should simply say that. Childish insults are, or should be, beneath his office.

There's a reason Parliament bans words such as "lie" and "liar": They coarsen and corrode discourse, and turn political debate into trash talk. That's true inside a legislature, and beyond its confines.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/519974dc5e28f762a87fb14c1570523f4fb873adfcfcb945043907ccc3c41650/76AEJW2KI5BW5OTCW3ESZEL4GY/