Liberals Have Transparency and Credibility Problems on Numerous Issues

The Trudeau Liberal announcement on their climate change plan could not even muster much credibility with former provincial Quebec Environment Minister David Heurtel on the Power and Politics political panel today. Heurtel noted that we have no idea of what the legislation imposed legally imposed five year greenhouse gas emission targets will look like or even whether there will be penalties for not achieving those targets. He said that there is a major credibility problem for a government that has no chance of meeting its 2020 targets and is well on the road to missing its 2030 targets after four years in power saying it is now setting even higher 2030 targets and then promising to get net zero emissions by 2050 even if it had a detailed plan, which it does not. To me it sounds like part of the Liberal strategy to put out quarter-baked plans on different topics every day to get the media off talking about the brown/blackface scandal. 

Heurtel also noted that the Harper greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that Trudeau adopted after the 2015 election involved much smaller reductions than the Liberal Chretien and Martin governments adopted but never met and yet he could not even meet those. His comment was "Not a very high number to begin with (Trudeau's cuts). Not a very ambitious plan". 

Heurtel said he was also surprised that "star environmental" Quebec Liberal candidate Steven Guilbeault would so hurt his own credibility by trying to defend the new strong emission reduction proposals without any details when the federal Liberals have failed to come close to achieve their previous plans and the lack of announced penalties for failing to meet legislated targets. This surprised Heurtel because in 'environmentalist'  Guilbeault had repeatedly criticized the Liberals on their 2015-2019 record, including as late as March when he said "Justin Trudeau is in bed with Kinder Morgan" over the Liberals purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline. With Liberals like Heurtel criticizing the proposal like this, who needs to hear from the opposition on how good the plan is?

Francoise Boivin, who has been a Liberal and NDP MP in the past said "There are two key words - serious and credible. It's incredible. I'm flabbergasted" at the Liberals putting forward such a meaningless plan when they already have a major credibility problem over their buying and building the Trans Mountain pipeline in terms of meeting any of their greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. 

The Liberal proposal to have a panel of experts, who have not been chosen let alone named, to advise them on how this will be done sounds like a make-it-up-as-you-go-along strategy of distraction.  

The Trudeau Liberals have acted quickly to deal with the Waseem Ramli as it threatens to throw another monkey wrench into their election campaign plans. Macleans raised questions about how Canada could accept Ramli as a Syria's honorary consul general who deals with Syrians needing documents certified by the Syrian government when many Syrian refugees and immigrants feel threatened by such an avid supporter of the dictator and war criminal Bashir Assad.

The picture below shows him posing with Trudeau and he has attended a Liberal fundraiser in Montreal. Besides raising the question of why Ramli is attending a Liberal fundraising, it also recalls the picture of Trudeau with a Sikh terrorist on his India trip and how, as in the SNC Lavalin case, the Liberals always try to blame any problems on civil servants, the police, CSIS, anyone but themselves or admit to it only when the photos appear, more than a decade later, as in the case of Trudeau's brown/blackface pictures. 

Syrian Canadians are wondering how a man who has a large picture of Assad  and a Syrian flag on his van, strongly supports Assad online, claims Assad has never used chemical weapons and argues that the Syrian White Helmets, who document war crimes and rescue those injured during the war, are actually Al Quaeda members, can receive such a position in Canada. They are also afraid that Ramli records those Syrians who speak out against Assad and spies on them. 

Yesterday, Chrystia Freeland claimed that she had no knowledge of how this came about and that it was a failure of the Global Affairs bureaucrats. Sounds similar to claims in that civil servants created all the problems in the SNC Lavalin affair. This morning Freeland revoked Ramli's appointment that was scheduled to take effect on October 1st in order to end the embarassment. 

A photo of Waseem and Trudeau posted to Waseem’s Facebook page. (wramli/Facebook)

A photo of Waseem’s vehicle, posted to his Facebook page. (wramli/Facebook)

Waseem Ramli is a well-to-do Montreal businessman who harbours an infamously unapologetic loyalty to the blood-soaked Baathist regime in Damascus. He’s often seen driving the streets of the city in his bright red Humvee, with its 1SYRIA custom licence plates, and its rear window emblazoned with the flag of the Syrian Arab Republic and the country’s Hawk of Quraish coat of arms. A side window is obscured with a portrait of Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad.

Among the thousands of Syrian refugees who have settled in Montreal since 2015, the Kuwaiti-born Ramli is a notorious character. To many, his Humvee is an unsettling, menacing sight. Even so, Ramli, the director of his own management consultancy and proprietor of the popular Cocktail Hawaii restaurant on Rue Maisonneuve, has held little sway over Montreal’s Syrian community.

Until now. On October 1, with Ottawa’s blessing, Ramli will become perhaps the most powerful Baathist regime official in North America. As Montreal’s “honorary consul,” Ramli will control the consular affairs of tens of thousands of people in the Syrian diaspora in Eastern Canada and much of the United States. The only other Syrian honorary consul in North America operates out of an office in Vancouver.

All this came to pass in a manner that you could call sketchy in the extreme. And it all happened quickly and quietly. On June 17, Ramli was among a small group of Assad supporters who showed up at a Liberal Party fundraiser at the Hôtel William Gray on Rue Saint Vincent. It was an “armchair discussion” with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Liberal MP Marc Miller, the incumbent candidate in Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Sœur. Trudeau and Miller posed separately for photographs with Ramli.

Within days, Ramli had secured the Assad regime’s endorsement as Syria’s honorary consul in Montreal. Last month, Global Affairs quietly signed off on Ramli’s appointment. ...

In North America, honorary Syrian consuls have been intermittently active, and only in Vancouver and Montreal, ever since May, 2012. Following an atrocity carried out by Assad’s forces in Houla, which included the slaughter of 30 children under the age of 10, Canada joined the United States, Australia and several European countries in a mass expulsion of Syrian diplomats. Syrian consulates in Toronto, Washington, D. C., Los Angeles, New York, Los Angeles and Houston were permanently shuttered.

https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-did-the-trudeau-government-appro...

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has revoked the status of Syria’s honorary consul in Montreal following outrage over the diplomatic envoy’s support for Syrian President Bashar Assad and controversial social-media posts. ...

he approval was granted despite Ramli’s outspoken support for Assad, whose government has used chemical weapons and other tactics to crush dissent during what has been a bloody eight-year civil war in Syria, as well as social media posts criticizing Western sanctions against the country. Ramli, who was set to take up his new post on Oct. 1, also described the White Helmets humanitarian organization in Syria as terrorists.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/newsalert-freeland-revoking-appoint...

Here's more on the impacts of the failure of governments, including the current Canadian one, to deal effectively with global warming on their watch from the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere (the ice covered areas of the Earth) in a Changing Climate that was released today. Clearly, the Liberal and Conservative climate change plans are completely inadequate in their vagueness and failure to address specific global warming problems in the past makes it seem unlikely to see them even living up to what they promised. In fact, many of these impacts of climate change are occurring now and the key question is to what extent we can keep it from getting extremely worse

The report found:

• Seas are now rising at 3.66 millimeters a year, which is 2.5 times faster than the rate from 1900 to 1990.
• The world’s oceans have already lost 1 to 3 per cent of the oxygen in their upper levels since 1970 and will lose more as warming continues.
• From 2006 to 2015 the ice melting from Greenland, Antarctica and the world’s mountain glaciers has accelerated and is now losing 653 billion metric tons of ice a year.
• Arctic June snow cover has shrunk more than half since 1967, down nearly 2.5 million square kilometres.
• Arctic sea ice in September, the annual minimum, is down almost 13 per cent per decade since 1979. This year’s low, reported Monday, tied for the second lowest on record. If carbon pollution continues unabated, by the end of the century there will be a 10 to 35 per cent chance each year that sea ice will disappear in the Arctic in September.
• Marine animals are likely to decrease 15%, and catches by fisheries in general are expected to decline 21 to 24 per cent by the end of century because of climate change.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5948225/un-climate-report/

Both the Liberal March 2017 budget promise to spend $7.5 billion during the 2017-2026 ten year period on child care, beginning with $500 million in the first year and reaching $870 million in 2026 to fund spaces in provinces and territories, and their 2019 election childcare election promise are far too little to create a meaningful national child care problem. They are also full of inaccuracies and half truths. 

In 2017 the Trudeau Liberal budget continued its never-ending promise to implement a national child care program that began with the 1993 Chretien government and has continued to be promised in every election since. However, the 2017 budget was nowhere near enough for a national childcare program. 

For advocates who have waited years for the federal government to kick in cash to help expand and subsidize child-care services, the money is seen as a start, but far from enough to cover the whole country.

The annual funding is below what the Paul Martin Liberals offered provinces in 2005 and below what federal officials told the minister in charge of the file in November 2015 would be needed to make a measurable effect on the number of child-care spaces countrywide.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government’s pledge would have a “huge” impact on low- and modest-income families, calling it a “historic investment.”

“These are the kinds of things that we need to do to ensure that every family has the opportunity to make the choices that are right for them,” Trudeau said at a Winnipeg daycare. ...

The money could potentially create 40,000 subsidized spaces for low and modest-income families over the next three years, about 13,000 spaces a year or about 2.4 per cent of the roughly 543,000 regulated child care spaces in Canada for children five and under. ...

NDP families critic Brigitte Sansoucy said the promised future spending on child care is totally inadequate to meet the needs of parents and below what her party had proposed in a plan the Liberals attacked for being too slow.

“The Liberals should be supporting child-care programs, such as the one in Quebec,” she said. “This budget fails to do that.”

Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu said in Quebec, home to the largest subsidized system in the country, and other parts of the country there are long wait lists for spaces, suggesting the need is enormous. The Liberal plan, she said, only amounts to about 40 new child care spaces per riding, per year.

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/jeremy-broadhurst-gerry-butts-tr...

The 2019 Trudeau Liberal national child care promise continues the Liberal election record of promising a national child care program that has been part of every Liberal election campaign in one form or another since 1993 under the Chretien Liberals. Somehow it never gets done. 

It also stands in sharp contrast to the NDP child care campaign promise. 

 An NDP government would spend $10 billion over the next four years to create 500,000 new child-care spaces in Canada, leader Jagmeet Singh said Monday, with the goal of offering free services for some parents. Singh said prices would be capped at $10 a day and build on a similar program in Quebec as well as a pilot project that started last year in British Columbia. ...

"Our goal is to get to universality, which is no cost for families that can't afford it and low cost, like a $10-a-day cost, for those who can to make it affordable and make it accessible by 2030," he said at a Vancouver day-care centre that offers $10-a-day care. We know this is bold and ambitious but it has to be done," Singh said, adding the program would be enshrined in law so child care is available across the country, in urban, remote and rural areas. ...

That legislation would include provisions for training new child-care workers and ensuring they are paid "a decent and quality salary to recognize the importance of the work they're doing," he said.

Morna Ballantyne, executive director of the national advocacy group Child Care Now, said the federal government has a crucial role to play in the provision of child care regardless of where families live.

"It's well understood that if you have a good child-care program in place that's actually affordable then parents can stay in the workforce and pay taxes and that helps to grow the economy," Ballantyne said.

She said Quebec has two child-care programs — one that is publicly funded and costs between $7 and $20 a day, depending on household income, and another that charges market rates and allows parents to claim tax credits.

However, Ballantyne said most parents opt for the second choice only because enough publicly funded spaces are not available.

Compared with the other federal parties' child-care proposals, Ballantyne said only the New Democrats' plan includes training of early child-care workers whose low wages and poor benefits often force them to leave their jobs, creating a "crisis" in the system.

Singh repeatedly attacked the record of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who he said "walked away" from families in need of child-care support.

The Liberals made a promise to help Canadians access affordable child-care 26 years ago but haven't delivered, he said.

https://www.nsnews.com/ndp-commits-10-billion-for-500-000-new-child-care...

 The Liberals have delayed to three days before the last possible day to appeal, which is October 7th, as part of their ongoing delay strategy in dealing this issue. In the appeal they are also demanding that Cindy Blackstock pay all the legal costs of the appeal.  Since the 2016 human rights ruling, 102 of the apprehended First Nations children have died while in this underfunded system of government custody.

In trying to avoid having this become a election campaign issue, the Liberals have made it a major campaign issue in the last half of the election. 

The tribunal emphasized that the Trudeau government has failed to changing the Liberals discrepancies in First Nations funding for children in this situation. 

The tribunal ruled the federal government had been “wilful and reckless” in discriminating against First Nations children living on reserves by chronically and knowingly underfunding child-welfare services.

It ordered the federal government to pay $40,000 for every First Nations child who was inappropriately taken away from his or her parents after 2006. The same amount is to be paid to each of their parents. Children who were abused in foster care and those who had basic services, like medical care, denied to them are also each entitled to $40,000. That’s the maximum the tribunal can award.

The Assembly of First Nations estimates about 54,000 children and their parents could be eligible for the money, meaning the total bill will likely exceed $2 billion. ...

In its 93-page order, the tribunal panel said the maximum compensation award is reserved for the worst cases of discrimination.

“No amount of compensation can ever recover what you have lost, the scars that are left on your souls or the suffering that you have gone through as a result of racism, colonial practices and discrimination,” the panel wrote.

When Blackstock first brought the case in 2007, Indigenous Affairs was a single department. In 2017 the Liberals divided it into two: the departments of Crown-Indigenous Relations and of Indigenous Services. ...

Since its ruling in 2016, the tribunal has said 10 times that Ottawa failed to comply with orders to fix the funding discrepancies. In 2018, the Liberals finally committed to funding prevention services at the needed levels. Blackstock said while that has mostly happened, Ottawa refused to fund supports for those services, such as for buildings to house programs.

https://tworowtimes.com/news/national/first-nations-given-max-compensati...

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

I am surprised the Liberals are doing this during an election. Shows their true colours when it comes to human rights and Indigenous rights.

They had no choice if they wanted to appeal. They delayed an appeal as long as possible so it would not become an issue earlier. However, the final appeal date is Monday October 7th. I think the appeal being launced on the last possible Friday was not an accident, because Friday is the traditional day for governments to release bad news, since the public and media tend to pay less attention to what is happening on the weekend and they hope the issue will be 'old news' by Monday.

While the Liberals say that they want to compensate these First Nations children, that is not what the court documents say. They are appealing for a dismissal of the human rights tribunal's ruling, not an extension beyond the December deadline the tribunal in order to implement the decision,. They are playing hardball, saying one of the problems is that the children should be in court telling the judge how they have been harmed by their apprehension. Many of the children are under six years of age. The court documents also reveal that they want Cindy Blackstock, who initiated the case in 2007 and which has now dragged on for thirteen years, and other involved indigenous organizations to pay the leagal costs, which are a pittance to the deep pockets of the government, but catastrophic to these groups. 

Choosing October 4th to appeal also means the next court date is October 23rd, two days after the election. This is NO ACCIDENT. 

For more than 100 years, the federal government has underfunded the needs of indigenous people on reserves compared to the provincial funding available to everyone living off reserve, partly to encourage First Nations people to move off-reserve. The underfunding has had drastic consequences for the health, housing, education, job opportunities, and self-confidence of these children and their families.

There are now more children in government custody than at the height of the residential school crisis. Of the more than 50,000 children in custody since the start of this case in 2007, 102 have died, more than half in just the three years the Liberals have been battling the ten human rights tribunals' orders to adequately fund indigenous programs for children. The tribunal was so frustrated by the Trudeau Liberal government fail to comply ten times that it issued the maximum amount that it could assess, $40,000 for each child, after the tenth refusal to comply.

The 40% support that the Liberals received in the 2015 election had fallen to 21% in an Environics poll conducted for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) was conducted between Sept. 4 and 12,one month before the Liberal government appeal was launched (https://election.ctvnews.ca/support-for-liberals-plummets-among-indigeno...). This will almost certainly further decrease Liberal party support among First Nations.

The Liberals lack of transparency in discussing this issue and their lack of credibility in their claims to be ready to deal fairly with First Nations on this issue could also erode Liberal support outside First Nations. 

The growing lack of credibility of the Liberals on indigenous issues has led the NDP to target Trudeau and the Liberals on their indigenous record. On Friday, Trudeau claimed the Liberals are not challenging the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's ruling that compensation should be given to apprehended children and their families, but the Liberal government judicial appeal of the decision says exactly the opposite. 

When a reporter asked Singh this week if his promise to fully fund fixing indigenous water systems, a reporter asked him if he would be giving First Nations a blank cheque for this. Singh answered that if there was a problem with the water supply in Canada's cities, the reporter would never ask such a question. 

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh attacked the Liberals' record on Indigenous issues, saying the government's decision to appeal the latest ruling on compensation for Indigenous children demonstrates the kind of inaction that can be expected if they're re-elected. 

This week the Liberal government announced it would challenge a landmark human rights ruling to compensate apprehended First Nations children harmed by the on-reserve child welfare system and under-funded child and family services.

Singh reacted to the news on Saturday while he was campaigning in Grassy Narrows, an Indigenous community in northern Ontario that has been dealing with mercury poisoning in its water supply for years, and has been under a water advisory since 2013.

He used the community as an example of the "the inaction of Conservative and Liberal governments," saying compounding examples — Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau saying "thank you for your donation" to a protester asking questions about Grassy Narrows at a fundraising event, the remaining 56 listed boil water advisories on reserves and now the appeal of the ruling — prove the Liberals won't fight for Indigenous communities. ...

Trudeau said he is not challenging the tribunal's conclusion that compensation should be awarded.  "We need to compensate those who've been harmed, but the question is how to do that," Trudeau said. "Those are conversations that we cannot have during a writ period."

But that's not what his government's application says. It calls for an order setting aside the tribunal's decision and dismissing the claim for monetary compensation. In the absence of such an order, the federal government is asking to have the decision put aside and refer the matter back to the tribunal for review in accordance with directions set by the Federal Court. ...

"Why do we have to keep living this way?" Chrissy Isaacs said. "It feels like forever." 

Isaacs, 39, said she was born with mercury in her body and experienced severe mental health problems as a child because of it. As an adult, her legs are starting to go numb, and she's unable to swallow easily. Her children are also showing similar symptoms of mercury poisoning. 

She said there's a double standard between cities and Indigenous communities in Canada.  "How come in the cities they have clean water?" she said.  ...

Singh said the NDP would commit to providing Grassy Narrows with the full amount they asked for. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/singh-liberals-indigenous-grassy-narrow...

While grandiosely promising that "Every Canadian, no matter where they live, who they are or what they do, should receive the care they need to stay healthy,", Trudeau's actual health care campaign promises are grossly underfunded and therefore will be only a bandaid that will hardly do anything to accomplish their stated goals. In addition, there is deliberately no detailed breakdown on how they would accomplish this goal because in reality it was meant to be another promise, like those of the Liberals in all elections over the last 22 years, meant to attract voters rather than significantly improve health care. Their promises to give everyone a family doctor, pharmacare and greatly improved mental health care are lies.

On Monday, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau unveiled his plan to close the "gaps" in Canada's health care system, promising an "additional down payment" of $6 billion to strengthen medicare and the public health system. 

The party reported the amounts — $750 million in 2020-21, rising to $1.75 billion in 2023-24 — but said a detailed breakdown of how the money would be spent will have to wait until later in the campaign.

Still, that didn't stop Trudeau from raising expectations about what he might accomplish in a second term, vowing that Canadians in every province and territory would have access to a family physician, mental health services as needed and prescription medications via a universal "pharmacare" program. ...

The Liberals came to power in 2015 promising to negotiate a new "collaborative" health accord with the provinces and territories. But when the 10-year deal was finally struck in 2017, it wasn't nearly as generous as the premiers had hoped: it capped increases to the Canada Health Transfer at three per cent per year, down from six per cent under the old agreement. ...

Michael Law, an associate professor of public health at the University of British Columbia and the Canada research chair in access to medicines, said it's hard to reconcile the Liberals' ambitions with the $6 billion sum and the multiple objectives on offer.

"It might go toward some of the groundwork to get things started," he said. "But what they are currently proposing to spend is nowhere near what they would have to spend to set up a national pharmacare program." ...

Last year, the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) produced a report that looked at spending on mental health versus physical health in Canada. Right now, only 7.2 per cent of the federal health care budget is dedicated to mental well-being. And the 2017 pot-sweetener that dedicated $5 billion more over 10 years barely moved the needle, increasing slightly the share of federal health spending going to mental health from 7 per cent.

Fardous Hosseiny, the CMHA's interim chief executive, said getting to nine per cent would take an additional $3.1 billion a year — which would still be well below the spending level his organization wants to see. ...

Then there's that Liberal pledge to provide everyone with access to a family doctor. ...

Statistics Canada estimates that there are now 4.7 million people who don't (by circumstance or choice) have a primary health care provider. Offering them the same level of access as other Canadians would mean adding at least 11,000 more doctors — which, at current payment rates, adds up to an additional $3.76 billion a year in health costs.

And keep in mind that the country already is having difficulty finding enough residency spots for the record number of students graduating from medical schools.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-health-care-fact-check-1.5295449

When Canadians think of drug costs they typically compare our prices to the United States where prices are 51% higher on average. However, Canadian drug prices are themselves 45% higher the the OECD average and third highest in the world, only behind the US and Switzerland, the HQs of many global pharmaceutical companies that have successfully lobbied these governments to maintain their high prices. 

Once again the Liberals pharmacare plan sounds better as a name than its details actually provide in terms of help to those suffering from the burden of high drug costs. Trudeau's pharmacare program offers to set NEW patent pharmaceuticals at the average of international patent drug prices for a particular drug. However, in order for this to have a major effect on overall pharmaceutical prices it will take a decade, since these prices only apply to new pharmaceuticals, and all previously existing pharmaceuticals will be at whatever price the pharmaceutical companies can get away with. Furthermore, this will take three electoral mandates to see a significant shift in overall prices. Lots can happen in between, including the election of a right-wing government to stult a reduction in prices by this Rube Goldberg system that does nothing for those who cannot afford the cost of the pharmaceuticals that they need today. 

But the Liberals pharmacare plan did accomplish its goal of having an attractive name for attractive purposes even though it did little to solve today's high drug costs. 

The NDP, on the other hand, plans to intruduce a universal pharmacare program that provides free prescription pharmaceuticals to everyone while keeping costs low by negotiating prices at the national level in order to save over $4 billion a year in costs. If this seems too good to be true, keep in mind that every country that has a universal medicare program in the world, except Canada, includes universal pharmacare within their universal medicare program and much lower pharmaceutical costs as a result of this. So, why more than 50 years after the creation of Canadian medicare has no Liberal or Conservative government done the same? Is the answer that they are too beholden to the pharmaceutical industry giants?

Though American per capita drug spending in 2016 was 51 per cent higher than Canada, Canadian per person spending is 45 per cent higher than the OECD average – including 63 per cent higher than the United Kingdom, 92 per cent higher than the Netherlands and 132 per cent higher than Denmark. Canadian drugs prices are a bargain next to our southern neighbour. Set against the rest of the world, they’re anything but.

Canada in 2019 has two distinct drug-affordability problems. Both deserve to be election issues.

The first problem is that too many Canadians – between one-in-20 and one-in-five, depending on who is counting – have insufficient or no drug insurance.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-a-liberal-cur...