Hello,
There’s still no budget for the 2020-21 fiscal year, but Justin Trudeau today promised to provide a “snapshot” of the books in a few weeks.
The Liberal government scrapped its planned March budget when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Since then, the Prime Minister has said that events are too unpredictable to provide an economic forecast that would be worth anything.
After weeks of increasing opposition criticism on that front, though, Mr. Trudeau made a small step toward more financial transparency this morning by announcing that the government would provide an economic “snapshot” on July 8. He said it would not provide long-term forecasts and would stop short of being the kind of “fiscal update” that the government usually tables in the fall.
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TODAY’S HEADLINES
Voting is under way for the rotating seats on the United Nations Security Council. Canada is competing against Norway and Ireland for the seat (two of the three will win). Today is just the first round of voting, and it may take more days for the winners to be declared. Winning this seat has been a foreign-policy goal of the Trudeau government since they were first elected in 2015.
The Bank of Canada will be “turning [its] focus more to monetary policy” as the COVID-19 crisis continues, governor Tiff Macklem said in his first public remarks in the new job.
China says it has found pests in Canadian logs, raising the possibility that the country is preparing new economic retaliation against Canada for a recent court decision against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. China restricted imports of Canadian agricultural after Ms. Meng’s initial arrest in 2018.
The Conservative leadership contenders debate in French tonight, and English tomorrow.
And camping will be allowed in some national parks as early as Monday.
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on Canada’s quest for a UN Security Council seat: “The lesson from Canada’s Security Council campaign is that its foreign policy has been lost in complacency. Let’s hope that is learned, win or lose.”
Andrew Coyne (The Globe and Mail) on the Liberal government’s lack of transparency: “So, there is a refreshing honesty in the Prime Minister’s evident willingness to dispense with Parliament altogether – or at least a refreshingly obvious dishonesty in the substitution of a toothless temporary committee in its place. If in fact MPs have no role but to rubber-stamp decisions made elsewhere – if they are in essence human voting machines, the useless residue of elections that are really contests between party leaders – would we not do better to acknowledge this openly, and save ourselves the trouble and expense of electing them?”
Don Drummond (The Globe and Mail) on the need for the federal government to provide a fiscal update: “Canadians understand that fiscal forecasts are not a precise science. They are acutely aware of the uncertainties now and would not be expecting a fiscal update to be exact. But valuable insight could be conveyed through the presentation of scenarios.”
Noha Aboueldahab (The Globe and Mail) on the arms industry rolling along during the pandemic: “It is hard to take governments seriously in their efforts to devote vast resources to prioritizing security when they are simultaneously making multibillion-dollar arms deals, especially since such militarization actively undermines the ability of states to effectively eradicate COVID-19.”
John Ivison (National Post) on Conservative leadership contender Leslyn Lewis: “It is Lewis’s social media posts in the last week or so, as the Black Lives Matter debate has raged, that have made Conservatives sit up and take note. All of a sudden, the idea has blossomed that a Black woman from Toronto who expresses conservative ideas articulately and thoughtfully could be a leader of the Conservative party.”
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