The Liberals prepare to table their first federal budget in two years and in the middle of a global pandemic. These 'could be game-time decisions for a lot of these measures,’ says Sahir Khan, who spent three years immersed in federal budget discussions in the PCO.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is expected to release her first budget at some point in the coming months. She will have to square her promise of ambitious stimulus spending and social programming with the uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic and Canada's economic performance over the next year, say current and former Liberals and public servants. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade
Expect a buttoned-down spring budget, say politicos and former government insiders, as the pandemic and vaccine rollout continue to challenge the Liberals and talk of a pending general election has faded.
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Liberal MP Adam Vaughan wants the Doug Ford government to publicly release the allocation criteria used for the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in different regions of Ontario.
The government must keep workers on the job, say business lobby groups. The longshoremen's union says the Liberals should publicly rule out the use of back-to-work legislation.
Nearly 2,700 people in Canada died from an opioid-related overdose between April 2020 and September 2020, according to the Special Advisory Committee on the Epidemic of Opioid Overdoses.
Barring residents who haven’t been vaccinated from travelling to another province may be the unlikeliest of scenarios, but Prof. Krishnamurthy says he sees certificates being used to confer benefits to pass holders.
The political instinct is to ‘accept no risk’ when solving a problem, but that’s not how the ‘real world of medicine’ works, says former emergency-room doctor and Liberal MP Marcus Powlowski.
Last July, a landmark Federal Court ruling declared the 17-year-old refugee pact violated the Charter. Today, the appeal court disagreed, and so the treaty will remain in effect.