Canadian News

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected requests for new trials for two men convicted on human smuggling charges in the deaths of four members of a family from India who froze to death while trying to cross the Canadian border into Minnesota during a blizzard in 2022.

Canadian border officials say there has been a steady rise in the number of people seeking asylum at a border crossing south of Montreal.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith claimed yesterday a new “patient-focused funding model” planned for Alberta hospitals “will increase transparency, lower wait times and attract more surgeons – helping deliver better health care for all Albertans, when and where they need it.”

But what will really happen when the United Conservative Party (UCP) puts Smith’s new acute-care funding model into effect at Alberta hospitals?

Back in 2013, Jonathon Ross, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Toledo in Ohio, warned Canadians what to expect if they were talked into adopting case-based activity fees instead of global funding to operate hospitals. 

This is, of course, exactly what Premier Smith touted yesterday at a news conference to announce, in the words of the government’s press release, “a new acute care funding model, increasing the accountability, efficiency and volume of high-quality surgical delivery.”

“I would advise extreme caution and careful assessment of the implications for cost, quality, access, equity and efficiency before adopting this hospital funding model,” wrote Dr. Ross, terming it “activity based funding” or ABF, in a piece for the Canadian Healthcare Network. 

“Depending where you live, this method of funding may be called patient-focused funding, payment by results, volume-based funding, service-base funding, case-mix funding, or prospective payment system,” he explained. “But no matter what you call it, ABF has serious side effects.”

It should be noted that “patient-focused funding” is a tendentious euphemism, intended to leave the impression it will make things better for patients, which it will not. 

“One of the dangers is that ABF can be used to ‘game the system,’” Dr. Ross said. “When you pay hospitals according to diagnosis, the incentive is to increase or otherwise modify your diagnosis so your hospital will make more money. And that’s exactly what happened when the United States implemented ABF for U.S. Medicare patients.”

“Here in the States, we have a small army of nurses reviewing every case in hospital to remind us to use special words just the right way so we can get more money for each case,” he observed. “The incentive is to list all of the diagnoses you can possibly list for every patient, as some of these will increase the payment even if it does not change your management one bit.”

In addition, he warned, there will also be pressure to discharge patients too soon. 

“If the hospitals game the codes upward, then you need another army of regulators to catch them and code them back down,” he said. “There is now a large hospital bureaucracy whose job it is to up-code the severity of illness of Medicare patients and another large Medicare bureaucracy trying to figure out how to stop the hospitals from gaming the system.”

Nothing has changed since then. Indeed, as Nobel Prize-winning American economist Paul Krugman pointed out in January, this is one of the reasons the U.S. health care system costs Americans so much. “Medicare is supposed to provide older Americans with the health care they need,” Dr. Krugman wrote on his Substack. “Yet instead of focusing solely on how best to achieve that goal, we have an arms race between insurance companies trying to game to system to charge more and deliver less and government officials trying to rein them in.”

Smith was accompanied to her news conference by Health Minister Adriana LaGrange and Chris Eagle, the interim CEO of Acute Care Alberta, the administrative agency set up specifically to introduce this funding scheme as part of the Smith Government’s effort to destroy Alberta Health Services and make its remnants easier to privatize. 

They burned up some time that could have been used more profitably for questions about how this will really work with a slick hard-sell video of the premier pushing the funding model.

Alas, when it was time for reporters’ questions, with one honourable exception, every single journalist who showed up or tuned into the tightly scheduled newser, used their time to ask questions about the federal election campaign, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s gentle joke about Ms. Smith, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war on Canada.

Only the Toronto Star’s Graham Thomson asked a relevant question: Wouldn’t incentives for surgeons to do more surgeries in private facilities drain resources from public hospitals, making them less efficient? Would the government, he wondered, let surgeons from private clinics use public operating rooms? 

The premier responded ambiguously, nodding affirmatively and mumbling, “Mmm-hmm.” (Whether this would be permitted under the Canada Health Act was unanswered.)

Later, she added, “I would hope our public hospitals would look at this as a way of getting more revenue.” More surgeons will come here, she also claimed, because they will be able to make more money. 

“The Premier is blowing things up even further with a plan to use public money to accelerate health care privatization,” Friends of Medicare director Chris Gallaway said bluntly in a news release later yesterday. 

The announcement, he said, “continues to claim that privatizing surgeries will save money, expand surgical capacity and shorten wait times for Albertans.” Yet a series of reports show otherwise. “If the Premier was serious about shortening wait times for Albertans, she would invest in expanding use of operating rooms in our public hospitals,” Gallaway said.

What this government is serious about, of course, is privatizing as much of our public health care system as quickly as possible. 

As Dr. Ross put it a dozen years ago: “Beware of American consultants bearing gifts such as case-based payments for hospitals as a cost-saving idea. Count your blessings, Canadians, and get to work improving the effective system that you have!”

Stephen Harper demonstrates he shouldn’t be running AIMCo

Back on November 20, I wrote that the appointment of Stephen Harper as chair of the governing board of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. meant that we could forget about the notion the provincial pension management Crown corporation has an arm’s length relationship with the political level of government in Alberta.

“Mr. Harper remains an active political figure and far-right ideological advocate in his roles as éminence grise of the Conservative Party of Canada and leader of the Munich-based neoliberal internationale, formally and tendentiously known as International Democrat Union,” I said. 

Last night, Harper introduced federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre at a large pre-election pep rally here in Edmonton. That’s fine. Harper can appear anywhere he likes, just as long as we all understand that this clearly demonstrates his complete unsuitability as a leader of a supposedly neutral manager of thousands of Albertans’ pensions. 

The post Danielle Smith’s ‘patient-focused’ funding scheme means hospitals will need to game the system appeared first on rabble.ca.

If vetting federal political candidates was as strict in 2004 as it needs to be today, would Pierre Poilievre have made the cut as a candidate? I wonder. 

Since candidate vetting by national political parties is as rigorous as it is in this age of social media, where any injudicious thing we say is likely to live online forever, is the quality of the candidates we’re getting better or worse?

I’m not confident I know the answer to either question, but they’re both worth asking. 

I do know that if you’ve ever expressed a controversial opinion on social media or, God help you, in a TikTok video or equivalent, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about running for Parliament. The parties won’t want you, with good reason, even if they happen to quietly agree with you. This is because your opinion is bound to show up in The National Post or some other news organization with a political agenda – which nowadays is just about all of them. 

This is especially good advice, by the way, if you’ve already got a job that you won’t necessarily get back if you quit to run for office, as Rod Loyola discovered to his dismay last week after he’d resigned his seat as the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Ellerslie to run for the Liberals in the new Edmonton Gateway federal riding. 

That was before Loyola was outed by the Post for having said nice things about Hezbollah and Hamas 16 years ago when he was performing as a rapper at a “Say NO to NATO” rally. 

The Post must be losing its touch. They didn’t wait until it was too late for the Liberals to get Loyola’s name off the ballot before they leaked the news, which up until his resignation from the provincial Assembly someone had presumably been keeping in reserve for the next Alberta election. 

Thanks to the Post, then, the NDP has probably dodged that bullet, although as the past few days have shown, such revelations from history preserved on social media is a problem that can bedevil any political party. 

“I did not think that an intro at a hip-hop segment 16 years later would get me ‘cancelled’ after close to a decade of serving as an elected representative at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, but here we are,” Loyola told the CBC. 

He now says he will run as an independent, but in any federal election, let alone one like this, that is a plan that will end in tears for the candidate, and maybe for a majority of voters too. He’d be wiser just to pack it in and look for a new gig. 

As the past few days show, federal parties are skidding candidates with surprising frequency and then bragging about the rigour of their vetting – which is fair enough under the circumstances, as when Poilievre boasted about some of his Conservative Party’s cashiered candidates, even if that was about all he could say in the circumstances.

If I haven’t missed anybody – it’s starting to get hard to keep up – the Conservatives are down four since Monday: 

• Mark McKenzie, Con candidate in Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore, out for endorsing public hangings. (I admit it’s something of a relief to know Poilievre isn’t touting the view we should Hang the Gang!)
• Stefan Marquis, CPC candidate in Laurier-Sainte-Marie, no reason given, but by the sound of it failing to hew to the national consensus on Ukraine.
• Lourence Singh in New Westminster-Burnaby-Maillardville, no explanation at all for that one.
• Don Patel, the CPC candidate in Etobicoke-North, for endorsing a social media comment suggesting Canadians critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi should be shipped to India.

Next on the list? Who knows? Maybe Andrew Lawton, the party’s candidate in Elgin-St. Thomas-London South, who Press Progress reported Friday “was a member of a secret group chat used by Freedom Convoy leaders and their lawyers to coordinate messages on social media with right-wing alternative media personalities and far-right social media influencers.”

Apparently it won’t be Aaron Gunn, though, the Conservative candidate for North Island-Powell River on the West Coast. Yesterday, Poilievre drew the line at dumping a candidate for making statements on social media denying that Canada’s historic treatment of Indigenous peoples amounts to genocide despite an open letter from 26 municipal and Indigenous leaders condemning Gunn’s statement. 

Meanwhile, the Liberals are down two, including Loyola, both in Alberta. 

First to go was Thomas Keeper, the party’s candidate in Calgary Confederation, who the CBC reported had failed to tell the party about a 20-year-old domestic assault charge that was stayed six weeks after it was laid.

So, if I’ve got this right – and the story could be changing as I write this – the Conservatives are beating the Liberals 4 to 2 in fired candidates, even if they’re not ahead in the polls. 

It would be tied 4-4 if you counted Edmonton Centre Liberal and former Trudeau Government cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault, and Markham-Unionville MP Paul Chiang, both of whom Prime Minister Mark Carney allowed to walk the plank as candidates without an obvious shove – Boissonnault for his controversial claims about Indigenous ancestry and troubling allegations about his business activities and Chiang for his opinion that an opponent should be turned over to Chinese authorities for the bounty.

The NDP hasn’t lost anyone yet – except maybe Loyola, sort of. 

The parties only have until tomorrow to find replacements.

As for the second question – is the quality of the candidates we’re getting better or worse? – the answer is probably better, but not necessarily more interesting or inspiring. 

Young careerists found in all political parties will already have figured out that they’d better zip their lips and not share their annoying opinions in their undergraduate political science classes, because someone’s sure to have a phone discreetly recording them for future reference. 

But Canada has certainly had excellent Parliamentarians who would never be allowed to run for Parliament today. 

Consider Frank Howard, CCF member of the British Columbia Legislature and NDP MP for the old Skeena riding, who served two years in the pen for armed robbery before becoming a union leader and then embarking on a long political career. 

As an MP, he played a major role in winning the right for First Nations citizens to vote in Canadian elections. He fought for prison and divorce law reform, earning a reputation “as compassionate and caring,” reporter Jennifer Lang wrote in the Cloverdale Reporter after Howard’s death in 2011. 

“I came to this conclusion many years ago,” Lang quoted him saying in a 2004 interview, “don’t blame anybody else for your difficulties. I got to the point where I hated the police. I hated the social workers. I hated foster homes. I suppose I hated myself, too. But I still had to come to the conclusion that it was my doing.”

When someone tried to blackmail MP Howard with a threat to reveal his criminal record, he set up an interview at the local TV station in Terrace and told all on the air. First elected as an MLA by 13 votes in 1953, the northwest B.C. voters came to love him, returning him to office 10 times over 27 years, 17 of them spent as an MP in Ottawa. 

Is there anyone like that in Ottawa now? I doubt it. Could there be? Not a chance. 

The post Candidates dropped for remarks that somehow made it past vetting appeared first on rabble.ca.

Four people from Gatineau are facing charges after what police described as an armed assault and attempted robbery on the Ruisseau-de-la-Brasserie Trail, near Morin Street in the Hull sector on April 6. Read More

In the fast-paced world of municipal politics, time rarely slows down. But with the increasingly negative impacts of a Trump presidency revealing themselves day by day, this is one of those moments. Read More

One in four managers at the Bank of Canada fail to meet the institution’s bilingualism requirements, including senior deputy governor Carolyn Rogers who is nearing the mid-way point of a seven-year mandate, according to information obtained by Radio-Canada.

Perhaps in hopes of kindling some support in Quebec, the NDP announced former parliamentarian Ruth Ellen Brosseau — dubbed “Vegas Girl” when first elected as a 27-year-old in 2011 — as its candidate for the riding of Berthier—Maskinongé.

In a post to social media channels Sunday, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said the two-time MP “couldn’t just stand by” as Canadians are struggling with fewer services, increased living costs and the threat to farming and industry presented by U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policies.

I’m so proud to share this with you: Ruth Ellen Brosseau is back — as the NDP candidate in Berthier–Maskinongé.

With everything people are going through — skyrocketing prices, cuts to services, and Donald Trump threatening our farmers and industries — Ruth Ellen knew she… pic.twitter.com/xN9YxmWVX4

— Jagmeet Singh (@theJagmeetSingh) April 6, 2025

“Because when things get tough, she steps up,” he wrote.

But who is the two-time legislator who was once accidentally elbowed in the chest by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons?

• Comeback attempt by former NDP star Ruth-Ellen Brosseau runs into the Bloc
• Canada's unlikeliest MP: Ruth Ellen Brosseau went from 'Vegas Girl' to NDP success story

Why do they call her Vegas girl?

In 2011, Brosseau was a 26-year-old single mother working at Oliver’s Pub on the Carleton University campus in Ottawa when she was approached about being a paper candidate — someone on the ballot in name only to represent the NDP and give electors a choice.

The NDP were parachuting her in to replace the nominated candidate, Julie Demers, who party brass had moved to Bourassa, where she would eventually lose to Liberal Denis Coderre.

Brosseau, a native of Kingston, Ont., agreed, only to leave Canada during the campaign for a pre-booked trip to Las Vegas to celebrate her 27th birthday.

At the time, the media highlighted that Brosseau wasn’t fluent in French, had never set foot in the riding north of the Saint Lawrence between Montreal and Trois-Rivières, opted not to campaign and was not giving interviews.

“We had journalists camp out at my place for a while. My son found it really difficult. He was about 10 years old at the time. He was scared to go outside,” she told the Ottawa Citizen in 2014.

It mattered little to voters in Quebec who elected her and 58 other NDP candidates in a surge of support under Jack Layton’s popular leadership. Brosseau, without spending any money on her campaign, took the seat with nearly 40 per cent of the popular vote, ousting three-time Bloc Québécois incumbent Guy André in the predominantly Francophone riding.

“The people in my riding could have stayed home, or they could have spoiled their ballots. I think they were voting for something,” she said in a 2015 Chatelaine story . “So I never doubted my obligation to represent them. I wanted their votes to matter, and I wanted to do them justice.”

How long was she in Parliament?

Brosseau quickly found her footing in both her riding and the House of Commons.

Having grown up speaking French at home, her fluency quickly improved with regular lessons from Layton’s former tutor.

Meanwhile, when not on Parliament Hill under the tutelage of mentor and veteran MP Jean Crowder, Brosseau was in her riding learning about it and its constituents.

By the time she turned 30, she had risen with the party ranks to become NDP caucus vice-chair and its deputy critic on agriculture and agrifood.

Brosseau was re-elected in 2015, eclipsing the Bloc Québécois candidate Yves Perron by a wider margin than in her 2011 victory. Former leader Thomas Mulcair promoted her to the party’s official agriculture and agrifood critic and Jagmeet Singh made her NDP house leader when he took over in 2018. (Brosseau had endorsed Guy Caron in the leadership contest.)

Perron and the Bloc flipped the seat in 2019, winning by 1,500 votes, and Brosseau lost by less than 1,000 votes in the 2021 mid-pandemic election.

What happened with her and Justin Trudeau in “Elbowgate”?

Brosseau found herself back in headlines in 2016 when she was inadvertently elbowed in the chest by Trudeau during a somewhat heated moment on the House floor.

Footage from the Commons television feed shows the Liberal leader trying to pull Conservative Party of Canada House leader Gord Brown through a group of NDP MPs who were trying to delay a vote on a bill related to doctor-assisted death.

In the process, Trudeau’s elbow struck Brosseau, who reacted visibly as she was forced up against a desk.

“The prime minister intentionally walked over, swore at us, reached between a few members of Parliament to grab the (Conservative) whip … how did he think he wasn’t going to hit anybody else?” she said in a 2016 interview with The Canadian Press.

Trudeau quickly offered Brosseau apologies in the moment and did so repeatedly in the aftermath, all of which she accepted.

“In my haste, I did not pay attention to my surroundings and as a result I made physical contact with the member from Berthier—Maskinongé, something I regret profoundly, for which I regret unreservedly,” the prime minister said in the House the next day

A parliamentary committee tasked with looking into the incident cleared him of any wrongdoing , bringing an end to what became known on social media as “Elbowgate.”

What has she been doing since leaving office?

Before her 2021 bid to reclaim the seat, Brosseau told reporters she’d spent the previous two years working on her partner Nicolas Guathier’s farm in Yamachiche, Que.

Bon dimanche ❄️ pic.twitter.com/fFBiMHgoqh

— Ruth Ellen Brosseau (@RE_Brosseau) November 24, 2019

Her LinkedIn account lists her profession as agricultrice (farmer) and includes her time in the House, but is otherwise inactive. Official Twitter and Facebook accounts have been dormant since she lost in the last election.

In 2023, her story of being thrust into politics inspired a French drama-comedy series called La candidate on Radio-Canada owned Tou.tv .

Lead character Alix is a single mom and nail technician with no experience or interest in politics who, against all odds, defeats the heavily favoured incumbent and embarks on a political career.

As for why she’s running again, in a statement issued to the Montreal Gazette, Brosseau echoed Singh’s, saying crises facing the people of her riding need attention.

“I couldn’t sit on my hands and do nothing. I know what the region’s producers and businesses are going through, and it’s important for me to do everything I can to defend them and improve their quality of life.”

National Post has contacted the NDP for more information about Brosseau and her campaign.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Previously known as Ottawa—Vanier, the new riding of Ottawa—Vanier—Gloucester has absorbed Blackburn Hamlet, which was part of the old Orléans riding. Read More

Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has revealed she suffered from a condition called postpartum preeclampsia following the birth of one of her children.

She shared this information during the inaugural episode of her new podcast,  Confessions of a Female Founder .

Postpartum preeclampsia is a rare but serious condition related to high blood pressure and occurs up to six weeks after giving birth. It can cause a stroke, brain damage, organ damage, seizures — and sometimes death — if not treated, according to the Cleveland Clinic .

Markle described the experience as “so rare and so scary. ” She highlighted the immense pressure of trying to “show up for people,” especially her children and attend to her public responsibilities while dealing with a significant medical scare.

She noted that she had to manage these issues privately, as the world remained unaware of her condition.

However, Markle did not specify whether this occurred after the birth of her son, Prince Archie, 5, or her daughter, Princess Lilibet, 3.

It is important to note that postpartum preeclampsia is distinct from preeclampsia , which occurs during pregnancy. Markle’s disclosure sheds light on the struggles many women face with postpartum health issues, particularly those under public scrutiny.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble, revealed her own experience with postpartum preeclampsia during her conversation with Markle on the Confessions of a Female Founder podcast. While specific details about how Wolfe Herd managed the condition were not disclosed, she emphasized the severity of postpartum preeclampsia , describing it as “life or death.”

Wolfe Herd reflected on the challenges of coping with this rare and potentially fatal condition while navigating new motherhood and career responsibilities.

She shared her admiration for Markle’s ability to publicly present her newborn son, Archie, shortly after delivery, contrasting it with her own struggles. Wolfe Herd recounted being unable to handle small tasks, such as answering the door for a food delivery.

Lemonada Media announced on March 13 that Confessions of a Female Founder would focus on Markle’s entrepreneurial journey launching the “As ever” lifestyle brand and feature conversations with other female founders over the course of eight episodes.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

It’s our birthday month, and like many of us do on our birthdays, we’re making wishes for the year ahead. 

Our wish this year? To build up our community of progressive journalists and increase our coverage of the news and views you’ve come to rely on us for. 

For the past 24 years, we’ve been committed to providing news for the people, offering a progressive perspective on the issues that matter most. From witnessing the rise of neo-conservatism during the Harper Years to our ongoing coverage of the 2025 Federal Election, rabble has been at the forefront of Canadian news for nearly a quarter of a century.

Since our founding in 2001, independent media that speaks truth to power has only grown more essential. In a time when corporate-controlled outlets often prioritize profit over people, reliable, unbiased journalism has never been more critical. This is why we must continue to evolve and expand, ensuring that our coverage remains bold, relevant, and sustainable.

To do that, we are raising funds to support our growth and amplify our impact. 

Our dedicated team has identified a range of important stories and issues we plan to cover, but to do so effectively, we need the resources to support this work. Your support is the key to making these goals a reality and to ensuring that rabble continues to serve as an essential, independent voice in Canadian journalism. 

With your help, we can continue to provide the vital, community-driven reporting that speaks truth to power.

Every dollar we receive empowers us to report on the issues you care about – including the Federal Election, the path to reconciliation, climate change, reproductive justice, and the impacts Trump’s tariffs are having on labour in Canada. 

With your support, we can increase this coverage and grow a larger team of progressive journalists. Over the next year, we’re aiming to: 

• hire two national politics reporters and editors; 
• hire an Indigenous affairs reporter;  
• grow our podcasts production team; 
• and improve our social media vision and strategy. 

Times are unpredictable, and independent journalism in Canada is under threat. For those able to contribute, there’s no better investment than supporting free, accessible, and non-corporate media.

If you are not already a monthly donor and are in the position to become one, we welcome contributions at any level. We are also delighted to receive one-time donations. As our team sees it, each dollar donated by a rabble-rousing reader is an investment in the future of Canada’s democracy. 

After all, knowledge is the basis of empowered activism.     

Yours in solidarity,

Sarah Sahagian (she/her)
Executive director / publisher

The post Our birthday wish? Growing our team and expanding our progressive coverage! appeared first on rabble.ca.

A couple weeks ago, there was a rather unusual flurry of articles on a subject that has become somewhat of a taboo in the mainstream media these last few years: COVID-19 (aside from an ongoing trickle of minimizing and misleading opinion pieces on the harms and prevalence of the virus). The occasion for these articles was the fifth anniversary of the start of the pandemic.

Or so it seemed. These articles/retrospectives (in Canada and numerous other countries), whether it was a photo essay of pandemic relics (like social distance signage) or recollections from health care workers and others, looking back on the trauma of those early days, more than anything else, functioned to bookend the pandemic—placing it firmly in the past. 

Such articles might strike some as innocuous or even an important act of remembering, when in fact what the mass of articles are most invested in is helping you to forget that Covid is still with us. But while certainty at lower rates than a few years ago, the virus, circulating through all seasons, with multiple waves per year, is still killing off medically vulnerable people significantly more than the flu. And perhaps more significantly Long Covid continues to disable millions of people around the globe. These stats are undoubtedly undercounts as so few people, when ill, given the media narrative that COVID-19 is ostensibly no big deal, bother to test. 

And let’s be factually clear, the pandemic is not over. At least, according to the World Health Organization which, in being international, does not share the political agenda of any individual country (or at least to a much lesser extent). But you wouldn’t know this from media coverage that consistently commits journalistic malpractice by referring to the pandemic in the past tense with phrases like “during the pandemic” and “post-pandemic” (examples of this are so ubiquitous that I won’t offer links, but a Google search will provide plenty).

I am not claiming this is a conspiratorial collusion among mainstream media outlets, but they have, collectively, manufactured consent for the pandemic’s end nevertheless. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman sought to explain in the seminal Manufacturing Consent, mainstream media journalists serve the interests of the ruling class because of “(their) reliance… on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.”

In this case, what serves the interest of capital/the ruling class, in declaring Covid a thing of the past, is the tacit permission, from the populace, to return to the socio-economic status quo. “Back to normal” has accelerated Capitalist State abandonment of chronically ill and disabled people. And “back to normal,” with little resistance, has allowed nations to quietly and quickly dismantle the quasi-welfare state of 2020 through 2021 due to the crisis of the pandemic. Ironically, we briefly had a social-democratic state of the kind the institutional left in North America has been fighting for—for decades. 

The bookending of the pandemic in mainstream media articles share some common features: upholding the myth of pandemic’s end, thanks largely to vaccination, while also throwing a bone to the very organized and ascending anti-Covid-mitigation Right (that clearly scares the crap out the liberal establishment media). And a crumb or two to sick and disabled people, by acknowledging—while simultaneously downplaying—the scale and severity of Long-Covid.

Some good examples of such articles can be found in The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

In these aforementioned articles and many others, the manufactured end of the pandemic, necessarily, requires a story of how it started so that they can claim it ended. The mainstream media’s misleading story is, more or less, as follows: Public Health responded as best they could, given they were dealing with a novel virus. In hindsight, there was some government overreach, with consequences, particularly that “lockdowns” irreparably led to loss of learning among children. And an unfortunate few suffer from Long-Covid—research is necessary, but somehow, prevention is not.

As an important aside, learning loss, possibly, in part, as a result of a lengthy period of online education, is a legitimate concern, but that’s just one part of the story. Left out, is that  

Covid has been shown to cause neurological damage. Ignoring such a significant variable can only be explained either by ideologically driven bad faith or just sloppy, lazy journalism that has defined Covid reporting and opinion pieces in the last few years. 

Perhaps more importantly, granting “lockdowns” interfered with children’s learning development to some degree, they also clearly reduced the amount of deaths from the virus significantly and according to one study could have saved tens of thousands of lives if implemented, in England, sooner. Yet we have a not uncommon genre of “just asking questions” articles, pontificating that while lives were saved, maybe it wasn’t worth the downsides. If you scratch the surface of this question, the implication is that child’s development might outweigh the lives of immunocompromised, elderly folks, and other at-risk groups. This attitude normalizes eugenic-thinking for audiences—and parents in particular. In addition, there are countless articles from the financial press and right-leaning think tanks, weighing the economic costs of Covid mitigation against human lives.

Back to the main neoliberal narrative: the pandemic ended in 2022 (in the West) thanks to mass-vaccination. In truth vaccination could not keep up with variant mutation: with the arrival of the “mild” Omicron variant, mortality and deaths were nearly as high as at any other point in the pandemic (though this was, in part, due to the sheer volume of the particularly infectious variant). In other words, the “vaccine only” strategy failed. 

I also wish to jog people’s memory that our politicians and Public Health officers did not drop all Covid mitigations because they claimed the pandemic was over, but because it was time “to live with Covid.” Within a few months this morphed into a nebulous consensus that since there were no mitigations, the pandemic must be over. Living with Covid would actually entail, alongside vaccination (and developing better vaccines), universal masking in most places and an investment in cleaning the air inside our buildings, particularly in hospitals, schools and on university campuses. But why spend money on such infrastructure if you can persuade people the pandemic’s over, right? 

The biggest problem of this intellectually dishonest and/or ignorant neoliberal narrative is that in not acknowledging (or understanding) that the vaccine only strategy failed, mainstream media helped create a huge vacuum for the right-wing’s even more historically revisionist narratives to go virtually unchallenged. In short, the Right will tell you that Covid was never serious except maybe to very medical vulnerable people (who essentially don’t count as people from their eugenic perspective), lockdowns were an unlawful assault on civil liberties, vaccines were/are harmful, masks don’t work, and Public Health—and this is where disabled-leftists and the right agree, but for completely different reasons—has lost all credibility. 

The Right’s explanations for the state of affairs range from boiler plate libertarianism to what ought to be crank-conspiracies—attributing various nefarious motives to the government and Public Health response to Covid—have festered, largely unchecked, because the fact-checkers stopped paying attention in 2022. The right got to say what the facts were because no one cared anymore. Except, now we do, again: anti-vaccine conspiracy crank Robert F. Kennedy jr. oversees America’s public health agencies, which are themselves all directed by less notorious and outlandish figures, but who share similar dangerous beliefs—that will have fatal outcomes. Such eugenicist libertarians are not isolated to America; they just don’t have the power they currently enjoy in the United States—yet.

The only point of disagreement these days between liberals, fuelled by mainstream media, and the right, fuelled by an exploding reactionary podcast-sphere, is whether we should do virtually nothing or completely nothing when the next pandemic hits. 

And that next pandemic may well, as some experts are warning, be bird flu (H5N1)—a virus with a potentially 50 per cent fatality rate in humans. That seems like something we, as a society, would be incapable of learning to live with and then forgetting about: but, given the last few years, I wouldn’t put it past us.

The post The Great Bookending: Commemorating the COVID-19 pandemic to manufacture its end appeared first on rabble.ca.

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On March 14, on his first day in office, Prime Minister Mark Carney ended the consumer carbon tax and, with it, the Canada Carbon Rebate payment.

“We will be eliminating the Canada fuel charge, the consumer fuel charge, immediately,” he said. “This will make a difference to hard-pressed Canadians, but it is part of a much bigger set of measures that this government is taking to ensure that we fight against climate change, that our companies are competitive and the country moves forward.”

However, the government has also promised one last payment of the Canada Carbon Rebate (CCR), which a Queens University professor points out is one too many.

Here’s what to know about the end of the tax.

When did the consumer carbon tax end?

Despite Carney’s use of the term “immediately,” the order-in-council that he signed in front of cabinet ministers and the press actually stipulated that “the fuel charge be removed as of April 1, 2025.” And it was.

What was the effect?

The most dramatic change was in the price of gas, which had been taxed at 17.6 cents per litre , and home heating fuels , which had a consumer levy of $85 per tonne, based on greenhouse gas emissions. Almost immediately prices began falling. The CAA reported that the average price for a litre of gas in Canada on April 8 was $1.32. A week before that (and before the tax ended) it was $1.51. The highest price in the last year was $1.72 in April 2024.

Is the final rebate fair?

It’s more than fair, according to Robin Boadway , Emeritus Professor at Queens University. He points that the “rebate” is on taxes consumers haven’t even paid yet, and now never will.

“The issue is pretty straightforward,” he told the National Post. “The carbon tax rebate was paid in advance of carbon tax revenues being collected. When the carbon tax was terminated, no more revenues were coming in, so there was no longer a basis for continuing the rebate.”

The government website agrees. “The rebate is tax-free and paid four times a year in advance, before households face increased costs from carbon pricing,” it says.

Boadway continued: “In effect, the upcoming rebate will be for carbon taxes that will not be collected, so the revenues to finance it will have to come from federal government general revenues. So, those persons who are eligible for the rebate will be getting a transfer that is not really a rebate for carbon tax revenues.”

Boadway says the government did not explain why it was giving out one final payment, but he estimated this “once-over thing” could cost between $2.7 billion and $3 billion.

When does the final rebate go out?

The final CCR payments will roll out beginning April 22 to Canadians in eight provinces: Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan. (British Columbia and Quebec are excluded because they have their own carbon-pricing systems, as do the territories.)

“There will be no further quarterly CCR payments after the April payment,” the Canada Revenue Agency says on its website.

Who is eligible?

Canadians are eligible if they were a resident of Canada in the month before the payment, and a resident of an applicable CCR province on the first day of the payment month. They also must be 19 or older, or be married or living with a child.

How can Canadians receive the rebate?

Eligible Canadians who have filed their 2024 income taxes (up until April 2) will receive the final payment just as they did the earlier ones, either by mail or direct deposit.

“If you file after that, you will receive your final payment once your 2024 return is assessed,” the government website says.

• Here's what Canada's federal carbon tax accomplished (not much)
• Poilievre promises to 'name and shame' corporate tax cheats

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