Francois Legault

Friday March 3, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday March 3, 2023

Bused out of Quebec, francophone asylum seekers struggle to get medical services

Over the phone, the woman’s voice is regretful but hurried — she says she’s sorry, but if the French-speaking migrant on the other end of the line cannot find someone to translate English, the doctor won’t see him for the medical exam he needs in order to claim asylum in Canada.

March 24, 2022

CBC News obtained a recording of the phone conversation the man says took place Wednesday in Niagara Falls, Ont. 

“It’s not possible to speak with the doctor if you can’t speak English,” the woman tells him in French. “You have to find someone at your hotel to help you.” 

“I don’t know anyone here,” Guirlin — whose last name CBC News has agreed to withhold because of his precarious immigration status — replies.

Guirlin and his family are among the more than 5,500 asylum seekers who have been bused by Canada’s government from Quebec’s border with the U.S. to cities in Ontario, including Windsor, Cornwall and Niagara Falls. 

They are also among a number of those — mostly francophones from Haiti or countries in Africa — for whom the transfer happened against their wishes since they could not afford to find a place to stay immediately. Their plan all along was to live in Quebec.

February 17, 2023

Guirlin, his wife, who is six months pregnant, and their four-year-old son ended up in Niagara Falls on Feb. 14. Originally from Haiti, the family had been struggling to make ends meet in Brazil, when they decided to travel north through a dozen countries to make their way to Canada. 

When they arrived on Feb. 11 via Roxham Road, the popular irregular border crossing south of Montreal, they were asked by immigration officers where they planned to live in Canada.

“I said we want to stay in Montreal because I don’t speak English and my wife doesn’t either, and she needs to have medical appointments for the pregnancy,” Guirlin said in a phone interview Thursday. 

He says they were told in the following days there was no space for them in Montreal, and that they were being sent to Ontario. They boarded a bus with roughly 40 other asylum seekers from a number of other countries last Tuesday. For now, the government has put them up in a hotel. (CBC) 

 

Tuesday February 7, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday February 7, 2023

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are stuck in the mud and hoping a health care deal helps pull them out

December 21, 2016

Justin Trudeau told us he was roaring into 2023 to “meet the moment” but lately his Liberals have been regrouping, retreating and running around in circles.

In a speech to his caucus prior to the resumption of Parliament, he said the Liberals would put forward a “positive vision for the future,” including good jobs, safe communities with clean air, and “an economy that works for everyone.”

At the top of the list was a fix for health care, which he promised would mean not only more federal money but better health care outcomes. Mr. Trudeau had just announced that he was convening a meeting with premiers for Feb. 7, a sign that a federal-provincial deal on health care is close. That was supposed to be the first big item on the Liberal agenda in 2023.

So this week Mr. Trudeau has an opportunity to take back the initiative.

A prime minister’s meeting with premiers never goes by without disagreement, but it is a place where the PM’s voice carries the loudest. And if the meetings do end with a level of federal-provincial agreement, sealed by a major, multiyear injection of federal cash, then Mr. Trudeau will tout progress on an issue at the top of Canadians’ concerns.

November 24, 2015

At this point, the Liberals are getting a little desperate for that kind of agenda-setting. Anything where the news is something the Liberals are doing, rather than something they are undoing, or something they wish they could do over. So this is a big week for Mr. Trudeau.

His Liberals would like to carry a health care deal into a spring of initiatives and a budget that is expected to centre on clean-tech incentives and industrial strategy.

But that’s just a hope right now. Mr. Trudeau’s government has had setbacks and scandals and made blunders before, but the Liberals have eventually regained the ability to set the political agenda with a flurry of activity. That is one of the home-field advantages of being in power: Government actions have consequences, so their agenda is consequential. Yet lately, Mr. Trudeau’s team seems less able to control it.

Mr. Trudeau’s government is encountering problems of a third-term government that has been through a lot.

One is that things come undone or are shown to have been done badly. (Continued: Globe & Mail) 

 

Wednesday October 5, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday October 5, 2022

Legault’s tense relationship with Ottawa likely to now continue

Francois Legault’s re-election in Quebec Monday night means an already frosty relationship between his government and Ottawa will likely continue, experts say.

August 5, 2022

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Legault after the Quebec premier’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) was projected to form a second majority government, vowing to work together moving forward. But court challenges and a looming fight over immigration are bound to test that promise.

“I don’t think that these tensions will ease as long as the Liberals remain in power in Ottawa and Legault and the CAQ remain in power in Quebec City,” said Daniel Beland, a political science professor at McGill University.

“There are simply fundamental differences between them in the way they see the federation.”

Legault’s first term saw his nationalist agenda clash with Trudeau’s Liberal government a number of times — most notably when the prime minister and members of his cabinet openly criticized Quebec’s secularism law, known as Bill 21, and Bill 96, which bolsters protections for the French language.

July 12, 2019

Both bills are currently before the courts in Quebec, and Ottawa has promised to join a legal challenge to Bill 21 if it reaches the Supreme Court of Canada.

Legault has also been one of the most vocal premiers calling on Trudeau to increase federal funding for health care, which has been met with resistance by the Liberals. Legault has gone further by insisting that any health transfer top-up must also respect Quebec’s ability to govern its own health-care system without federal interference.

Now that Legault is set to be premier through the rest of Trudeau’s current mandate, more fights are expected in the years ahead.

September 14, 2013

Most crucially, Legault has caught attention with his push for further immigration powers over family reunification — a responsibility currently shared between the provincial and federal governments — in order to limit non-French-speaking migration into Quebec.

Last spring, when Legault promised to make the dispute a campaign issue, Trudeau said he had no intention of relinquishing any of those powers.

“It’s clear that a country must have a say in its immigration,” he told reporters then, assuring the protection of French and francophone immigration was “very important” to his government.

According to Daniel Beland, a political science professor at McGill University, Legault could also cause headaches for the federal Liberals by continuing to align with other right-leaning premiers across the country like Ontario Premier Doug Ford on not just immigration, but also health-care funding and economic issues.

March 23, 2022

Ford was quick to congratulate “my friend” Legault on his election win Monday night on Twitter. Fellow right-leaning premiers Scott Moe of Saskatchewan and Heather Stefanson of Manitoba also celebrated Legault’s victory.

Although Trudeau and his government have pushed back on some of Legault’s more nationalistic moves, Beland adds the Liberals have to be careful about not starting an intergovernmental war with the strongly-supported premier of a vote-rich province.

“So long as Legault remains popular, there will be a strong incentive for Trudeau and the Liberals to … meet in the middle and remain diplomatic on some issues,” he said. (Global News) 

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …

 

Saturday September 18, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday September 18, 2021

This was no ordinary election campaign, but perhaps not ‘important’

If the polls are to be believed, we have all just wasted five weeks of our lives. An election that, in law, should never have been called, the reason for which has never been adequately explained, limped through a listless campaign on track to producing a Parliament remarkably like the one it was supposed to replace. The “most important election since 1945,” according to Justin Trudeau, might as well never have happened.

September 1, 2021

Compare the most recent polls (at time of writing) to those taken at the same stage of the previous campaign. The similarity is striking: The Liberals and Conservatives are again in the low 30s, with the NDP at around 19 and the Bloc at a little over six. The seat projections, likewise, look eerily familiar: The Liberals are projected to win about 150 seats, the Conservatives about 120, the NDP and the Bloc about 30 each. Only on the margins has there been much change: the Greens have lost half of their support, while the People’s Party of Canada have tripled theirs.

But. Well, there are lots of buts. National polls mean little: to really get an idea of what’s going on, you have to drill down into the regional figures. Polls are snapshots, not predictions: Much could change in the last days of the campaign. And the polls are often wrong. Turnout is an especially difficult thing to model: Are Conservative voters more motivated than Liberal? Will NDP voters show up? Are PPC supporters so angry they will crawl over the proverbial broken glass to vote, or so alienated that they will not bother?

July 9, 2021

So much for where we are – how did we get here? At the start of the campaign, each of the party leaders faced their own personal and strategic challenges. For Mr. Trudeau, the personal challenge was his faded popular appeal: Once the Liberal Party’s most significant asset, he had become its most significant liability, under the accumulated weight of broken promises, ethical lapses and sundry other controversies. The party led all polls going into the election, some by double digits. But the leader trailed the party.

The strategic challenge, as for any Liberal leader, was to win the “progressive primary.” A substantial majority of Canadians might be described as left of centre. But their vote is divided among several parties, with no enduring loyalty to any of them. In 2015, many of those voters were drawn to the Liberal side by a youthful, charismatic leader and a positive vision of change; in 2021, they would have to be frightened into it, as the party best placed to avert the dread prospect of a Conservative government.

August 25, 2020

For Erin O’Toole, personal unpopularity also presented a challenge: His precampaign approval numbers were even worse than Mr. Trudeau’s. A year into the job as Conservative Party Leader, people still did not know much about him, but what they did know they didn’t much like.

His strategic challenge: Conservative support has a high floor and a low ceiling. Where Liberal support can range anywhere from 20 per cent to 50 per cent, the Conservatives can reliably count on winning at least 30 per cent of the vote, but have difficulty getting beyond 37 per cent or 38 per cent. Only once in the past eight elections, in 2011, have they managed it.

January 22, 2021

To remedy that, Mr. O’Toole needed to shift the Conservatives from an angry, grievance-based party, more concerned with turning out its existing supporters than reaching out to new ones, into one that could attract centrist voters. The aim was not just to expand the Conservative vote, but to distribute it more efficiently: fewer votes wasted racking up huge majorities in the West, more going to win those tight races in suburban Ontario and Quebec.

That meant presenting the Conservatives as a safe, inoffensive choice, largely indistinguishable from the Liberals ideologically, but with a less polarizing leader. (In Quebec, where votes divide on different lines, it meant pitching the Tories as a more pragmatic version of the Bloc: nearly as nationalistic, but with more ability to “deliver the goods.”)

October 18, 2019

The catch: people might believe that about Mr. O’Toole. But would they believe it about his party? For Mr. O’Toole, in short, the problem was his base; for Mr. Trudeau, it was him. (Continued: Andrew Coyne, The Globe & Mail)

Drawing the Federal Leaders



 

Thursday October 8, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 8, 2020

Ontario’s conflicting public health messages are dangerous

May 29, 2020

If Premier Doug Ford’s objective is to sow confusion and uncertainty about Thanksgiving and this pandemic, this week he is succeeding spectacularly.

On Tuesday, Ford spoke at a COVID-19 news briefing, and sounded positively muddled. 

“Please, this is very simple,” he said. “There’s rules and there’s guidelines. The rules are very clear. Ten indoors, 25 outdoors. I would really, really discourage people from having 25 people, even if it’s outdoors. Stick within 10 people. And folks, we went through so much together. And we can get through this.”

Clear as mud? Now add to the mix that public health authorities, including Ontario’s Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe and Toronto Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa are urging people to celebrate Thanksgiving only with members of their immediate household.

Here’s de Villa: “Please do not hold a big Thanksgiving dinner. Please limit your Thanksgiving dinner to the people you live with. I would far rather that we change Thanksgiving one time for safety sake then look back at Thanksgiving 2020 with enormous regret.”

September 26, 2020

Now back to Ford: “Thanksgiving is going to make or break it. Just please hang in there. You know, I have a big family and I told Karla (Ford’s wife), and she knows this, we can have no more than 10. Simple as that.”

These conflicting messages are a lot of things, but simple they are not.

For the record, the official advice at this point is to mark Thanksgiving only with people in your immediate household. Anyone outside that should connect virtually, not in person. Ford has now revised his position and agrees with that.

Aside from anything else, these duelling positions point out an alarming and widening gulf between what public health experts think should be happening and what the government is willing to do. Toronto’s de Villa wants indoor dining and bars in that city shut down for 28 days, but Ford says the data doesn’t warrant doing that. 

July 17, 2020

The Ontario Hospital Association is warning that the health system could quickly become overwhelmed by the second wave. Anthony Dale, the association’s CEO says: “There is enormous growing risk. To keep hospitals functioning like they are now, rolling on all cylinders, we need to stop the community spread of COVID-19. Much more effective public health measures are needed.”

It is fair to note that the government needs to worry about the entire picture, not just the public health aspect. The economic and social impact of even localized lockdowns, like what de Villa is proposing for Toronto and others are suggesting for all hot spots, would be huge. Many businesses, especially in the hospitality sector, have said they cannot survive another lockdown.

But consider this: Ford also said this week that Ontario is flattening the curve. Numerous health experts disagree. University of Toronto epidemiologist Dr. David Fisman says: “There is no indication we are flattening the curve, and indeed hospitalizations are up sharply over the past two weeks, as the premier should know.”

If the government is acting on advice that suggests we are flattening the curve, but more and more health experts say that is not the case, there is a real danger that Ford’s reluctance to do more could be contrary to the public interest. The results of that disconnect could be tragic. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)