Yes, Canadian politics can be ridiculous, too: Opposition Conservatives trying to force election over a non-scandal that nobody cares about but them

Le sigh...

As reported by Oak Bay News:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has blasted opposition parties for continuing their effort to dig into the WE Charity issue, and says his government is instead focused on helping Canadians through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The comments follow Conservative calls for a new anticorruption committee in the House of Commons to take over several parliamentary probes into a multimillion-dollar federal program for students that the government chose WE Charity to manage in the spring.

New Democrats have also proposed a special committee that would dive into the government’s various responses to COVID-19, including the now-defunct Canada Student Services Grant.

Both parties’ calls come as opposition parties have indicated they plan to resurrect the earlier probes at the Commons’ finance and ethics committees, among others, which were suspended for months when Trudeau prorogued Parliament in August.

Yes, in the middle of a second COVID-19 wave, the Conservatives' new leader seems intent on forcing Canadian to the polls, rather than let the WE Charity matter drop... in spite of the fact that non-Conservative Canadians seem to be focused on surviving the pandemic, much as the Liberals are.

Maybe that's why CBC News' poll tracker shows that the Liberals are 92% likely to win an election if one were called today, and 49% likely to win a majority; the Conservatives, on the other hand, are only 8% likely to win a minority, with no chance of winning a majority.

BTW, the Liberals' current polling results? They're actually up from last week, when the Conservatives still had a 9% chance of forming a minority, which would seem to indicate that this latest strategy is not so much a matter of principle for the Conservatives, as a matter of desperation: with WE out of the headlines, and the Liberals' pandemic response actually attempting to meet the current needs of locked-down Canadians, the trend is clear and it doesn't favour the opposition.

So, the Conservatives are apparently determined to commit political suicide, and Justin Trudeau, who can apparently also read a graph of these same polling results, is literally playing chicken with them, daring them to go to the polls in a political climate where the Liberals are almost certain to crush all opposition. And yes, Erin O'Toole appears to be Trumpian enough to believe that his alternative facts will prevail, and force an election, anyway.

I almost hope they do. If we have to go to the polls this winter, I'll tell you for nothing that I'll be voting Liberal... along with 36.5% of my fellow Canadians. 

Yes, you read that right: 36.5% popular support = a 92% chance of electoral victory in Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system, and I'll just bet that the NDP are kicking themselves for turning down Trudeau's offer to institute a Single Transferable Vote system instead, a few years back.

A sign of our changing times: IMF says "Yes" to taxing the rich, "No" to austerity

To describe the International Monetary Fund as a profoundly conservative (and, possibly, Conservative) institution would be an impressive feat of underachievement. 

Formed in 1944, ostensibly to "foster global monetary cooperation," among other corporate-leaning things, the IMF have spent decades forcing nations around to world to adopt austerity policies in the face of economic downturns, with the predictable result that effects of those downturns were much, much, worse, and longer-lasting. The IMF is a large part of why the economies of Italy and Greece are almost entirely dependent on tourism, unlike the economies of France, Germany, the UK, and the USA.

Care to guess who normally gets to determine which policies are favoured by the IMF?

But this week, the IMF, an organization founded by rich nations to ensure that they stayed rich, while other nations stayed less rich than them, abandoned decades of cheerleading for austerity and embraced the deficit. Yes, really.

As reported by Politico.eu:

Countries should consider raising taxes on the wealthy to reduce national debts after recovering from the economic fallout of the pandemic, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

The IMF made that and other policy suggestions in its latest World Economic Outlook, which revised its global forecast upward for this year after advanced economies recovered well in the second and third quarters from lockdown.

[...]

Governments should keep spending on initiatives that promote long-term growth, such as “high-return infrastructure” that cuts down on fossil fuels, the fund added. Public money should also flow into health care and education.

And here's the best part:

Finding the balance between public spending and mounting debt will prove challenging, the IMF said, suggesting states find new revenue streams through taxes.

“Governments may need to consider raising progressive taxes on more affluent individuals,” the report said, also suggesting hikes on higher income brackets, high-end property, capital gains and wealth.

Huzzah! After decades of inflicting economic pain on the already-struggling, the IMF have finally seen the value in helping the struggling, with an eye to creating a rise tide that can lift everybody up. And all it took was a global pandemic-caused economic crisis that affected the wealthy nations, too.

Of course, for this to actually happen, the USA will need to get on board. Here's hoping Biden actually wins the election in a few weeks...