Quebec

Thursday October 13, 2016

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator Ð Thursday October 13, 2016 Federal Liberals signal desire for Ômeaningful investmentÕ in Bombardier The federal government investing in aerospace giant Bombardier is not a matter of if but how, Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains said Tuesday. ÒWe want to be a partner,Ó Bains said after announcing up to $54 million in funds for a Bombardier-led aerospace-research consortium. ÒWe want to find a solution and we want to continue to make meaningful investments. We want to be a partner, we are at the table, we want to find a solution. ItÕs not a matter of if but how we want to make the investment.Ó His comments are the clearest the Liberals have been to date regarding whether theyÕll accept the Montreal-based companyÕs request for $1 billion in federal funding. In early September, Bombardier (TSX:BBD.B) received the second of two instalments of US$500 million from the Quebec government. Quebec now owns 49.5 per cent of a new limited partnership of the CSeries aircraft program, including larger versions of the plane beyond the CS100 and CS300 should they be developed. Bains wouldnÕt give details as to exactly how much Ottawa will invest or where the money will be targeted. He did reiterate the conditions his government will place on any future funding. Ottawa wants Bombardier to keep its head office and the jobs connected to its research and development activities in the country, he said. (Source: Financial Post) http://business.financialpost.com/news/transportation/federal-liberals-signal-desire-to-invest-in-bombardier-but-dont-indicate-dollar-amount Canada, Ottawa, Parliament, Bombardier, aerospace, subsidy, corporate, welfare, Quebec, pipeline, Justin Trudeau, Navdeep Bains, philippe couillard

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 13, 2016

Federal Liberals signal desire for ‘meaningful investment’ in Bombardier

The federal government investing in aerospace giant Bombardier is not a matter of if but how, Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains said Tuesday.

“We want to be a partner,” Bains said after announcing up to $54 million in funds for a Bombardier-led aerospace-research consortium.

“We want to find a solution and we want to continue to make meaningful investments. We want to be a partner, we are at the table, we want to find a solution. It’s not a matter of if but how we want to make the investment.”

His comments are the clearest the Liberals have been to date regarding whether they’ll accept the Montreal-based company’s request for $1 billion in federal funding.

In early September, Bombardier (TSX:BBD.B) received the second of two instalments of US$500 million from the Quebec government.

Quebec now owns 49.5 per cent of a new limited partnership of the CSeries aircraft program, including larger versions of the plane beyond the CS100 and CS300 should they be developed.

Bains wouldn’t give details as to exactly how much Ottawa will invest or where the money will be targeted.

He did reiterate the conditions his government will place on any future funding.

Ottawa wants Bombardier to keep its head office and the jobs connected to its research and development activities in the country, he said. (Source: Financial Post)

Published in the Leader-Post (Regina, Sask)

Published in the Leader-Post (Regina, Sask)

Saturday August 8, 2015

Saturday August 8, 2015By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday August 8, 2015

Thomas Mulcair’s Clarity problem

Wednesday, April 9, 2014At about the midpoint of last night’s debate, during an otherwise necessary chat about the state of democratic institutions, things veered into a constitutional abstraction of the sort that has obsessed this country’s political class for a half century. It lasted about five minutes and was prompted by Justin Trudeau, who looks younger than his 43 years but, at that moment at least, could have passed for pater Pierre Elliott circa 1968, shaking his fists at the evil Quebec separatists in our midst.

Friday, February 1, 2013“One of the things that really frustrates a lot of people is when they see politicians pander, when they say one thing in one part of the country and a different thing in another part of the country. One of the things that unfortunately Mr. Mulcair has been doing quite regularly is talking in French about his desire to repeal the Clarity Act, to make it easier for those who want to break up this country to actually do so. And in doing so, he is actually disagreeing with the Supreme Court judgment that said one vote is not enough to break up the country.”

Thursday, March 13, 2014The Clarity Act was wrought by Jean Chrétien’s government in 2000 to try and address the question born in 1995’s Quebec referendum, which the No side won by all of 54,288 votes: would it have been enough to separate the country had the Yes side won by as many (or fewer) votes? The Supreme Court’s answer was no: a province would need a “clear majority.” Except no one defined what, exactly, constituted this clear majority. The resulting lack of clarity has obsessed Canada’s political class and legions of its journalists ever since.

Friday, March 1, 2013Three things usually happen whenever this issue is brought up in a federal campaign. First, chest puffed, each leader will say what good Canadians they are. Then the others will say how irrelevant it is to talk about separatism, because Quebec’s sovereignty movement is stuck somewhere between cryogenic sleep and outright death. Finally, they do exactly that—talk about an apparently irrelevant issue. For over 50 years, it’s been our political quicksand: impossible to avoid, and even harder to escape. (Continued: MacLean’s)

RIP Jacques Parizeau

Jacques Parizeau, the Quebec nationalist former Premier has died at the age of 84. He served for many years in the cabinet of René Lévesque before eventually becoming leader of the Parti Québécois. In 1995, he led the Oui force of the sovereignty referendum and narrowly lost by a razor thin majority.

For any cartoonist he was an absolute joy to caricature. For me personally, Parizeau was at his prominence while I was honing my skills as an aspiring editorial cartoonist. Several caricatures I drew of him are seen below which were all drawn in the mid 1990’s. The final cartoon is from 2013.

Wednesday April 15, 2015

Wednesday April 15, 2015Editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 15, 2015

Like a carbon tax, but much worse

If you want to put a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, there’s an easy way to do it. You implement a carbon tax, like British Columbia did, and add it to the price of gasoline and other fossil fuels. The higher the emissions, the more tax people pay. Anyone can understand how it works.

Then there’s a second way, which is much more complicated and expensive. It requires a big bureaucracy to administer and is highly vulnerable to special interests. Lots can go wrong. In Europe, where they’ve been trying to get it right for a decade, it’s been an abject failure. This system is called cap and trade, and nobody but the experts can understand how it works.

Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario has chosen the second way. The fact that cap-and-trade schemes are incredibly opaque is considered a feature, not a bug. The government can swear it’s not a tax, even though the taxpayers will wind up paying for it anyway as industry passes on the extra cost.

Tuesday April 14, 2015Cap-and-trade schemes are supposed to encourage companies to find cleaner forms of energy. A cap is set on the amount of pollution each industry is allowed to emit. Individual businesses are then granted (or sold) permits to pollute. They can then buy or sell these permits on the open market. If they want to emit more pollution, they have to buy more permits, and vice versa. Finance people love carbon markets because there’s good money in it for them. (Source: Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail)

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Tuesday, September 2, 2014Illustrations by Graeme MacKay (all 4 originally drawn in 1995) – Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Parizeau used Bouchard in 1995, Chantal Hébert’s new book shows

They don’t make sovereignist leaders like they used to. It’s hard to imagine any candidate for the Parti Québécois leadership matching the combination of Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard in the 1995 sovereignty referendum.

Jacques ParizeauThat referendum wouldn’t have been held without Parizeau’s single-minded pursuit of sovereignty. And the sovereignists wouldn’t have come within fewer than 55,000 votes of winning if it hadn’t been for Bouchard’s ability to gain voters’ trust.

Yet, as a forthcoming book shows, Bouchard did not trust Parizeau — and with reason.

Not only did Parizeau, who was premier, unscrupulously use Bouchard to deceive voters about his intentions, he intended to shove Bouchard aside after a Yes vote so he could make a unilateral declaration of independence.

The book is The Morning After, written by widely respected Ottawa journalist Chantal Hébert. It’s to be published early next month.

It’s based on recent interviews by Hébert and commentator Jean Lapierre (my fellow CTV Montreal political panellist) with political leaders of the day about what they would have done after a Yes vote in 1995.

Lucian Bouchard as NapoleonIt describes a “power struggle” among the three party leaders on the Yes side before the vote, with Mario Dumont of the now-defunct Action démocratique du Québec siding with Bouchard of the Bloc Québécois against the PQ’s Parizeau.

Bouchard and Dumont had forced Parizeau to promise that after a Yes vote, he would offer the rest of Canada a new partnership, political as well as economic, with a sovereign Quebec.

And in the mid-campaign turning point for the Yes side, Parizeau handed its de-facto leadership to the more popular Bouchard by naming him Quebec’s chief negotiator after a Yes vote.

Bouchard told Hébert and Lapierre he might have settled for something less than outright sovereignty and wanted a second referendum to ratify the results of negotiations — admissions likely to confirm some sovereignists’ lingering distrust of him.

Parizeau, however, would accept nothing less than sovereignty. (Continued: Montreal Gazette)

1995 Referendum Fleur de Lys