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If Trump loses this election, he could run again in 2024, former communication advisor says
With only six electoral votes left to win the race, it increasingly looks like Democratic nominee Joe Biden is on track to win what has been a rollercoaster of a U.S. presidential election this year. And despite several lawsuits against the vote counts, it appears the incumbent Republican president may be soon be heading out the doors of the White House.
But, if Trump were to lose, this wouldn’t necessarily be his final ride out of Washington, Bryan Lanza, a former communication director, suggested in an interview with BBC’s Radio 4 programme . In fact, the loss of a “very tight election” could strengthen Trump’s case to run for re-election in 2024.
“And the Republicans would let that happen.”
‘Biden will have the opportunity to guide this country out of Covid, and we’ll see what his successes and failures are. And there’s nobody in the Republican party that can challenge President Trump in the primaries,”Lanza said.
Running for re-election four years after a first term would be unusual — mostly because it’s rare for an incumbent president to lose a consecutive re-election in the first place. However, while the Constitution doesn’t allow a president to serve for more than two terms, there’s no language that specifies how far apart the two terms can be.
If Trump were to run again in four years, he would be 78-years-old, the same age as Biden is now in his current bid for presidency. “So age isn’t the issue,” Lanza said.
Lanza also defended the president’s attempts to sow doubt over the counting of votes. “I don’t think it’s different from what the Democrats did when they told Americans that Russians were involved in Donald Trump’s election four years ago.”
Lanza and Trump share a long working relationship, through the 2016 election cycle and into the inauguration and transition periods into the White House. He served as deputy communications director of the Trump-Pence campaign, overseeing campaign messaging and media relations. After the 2016 election win, he joined the transition team, vetting, interviewing and recommending individuals for top cabinet and staff positions in Trump’s administration.
By February 2017, he left the White House to take a role as managing director with Mercury, a public relations firm.
Categories: Canadian News
RCMP cancel nearly $20,000 contract after watchdog warns it was awarded to employee with insider information
OTTAWA – The RCMP cancelled a nearly $20,000 contract after the federal procurement ombudsman warned that it had been awarded to one of the force’s own employees who likely had insider information.
On October 23, 2019, Canada’s federal police force signed an $18,600 (plus GST) contract with Meaghan Potter for janitorial services at its detachment in Deloraine, Man., according to the Office of the Procurement Ombudsman’s (OPO) latest annual report.
The report does not name Potter, but the federal government’s public contract database shows only one RCMP “building cleaning” contract worth $18,600 signed on Oct. 23, 2019, and it was awarded to Meaghan Potter. Without naming the recipient, the OPO confirmed Thursday that it was the contract in question.
The problem is that the RCMP did not realize that Potter was a Deloraine RCMP employee. Furthermore, her job involved processing payments to the former janitorial service provider, reads the procurement watchdog’s report.
In other words, she likely knew exactly how much the former janitor was paid, and so was likely able to use that information to underbid and win the contract with her own employer.
It was only when the losing incumbent service provider complained to the OPO — who then brought the complaint to the RCMP — that the police force realized what had happened.
“The complainant claimed this gave the employee an unfair advantage and allowed the employee to underbid the complainant,” reads the report by Procurement Ombudsman Alexander Jeglic.
According to his report, the RCMP ordered Potter to stop working on the contract two months after the complaint. One month later, the contract was cancelled altogether.
“After we launched the review, the RCMP responded advising the circumstances of the procurement process were as stated by the complainant and, as such, the possibility of the employee having had an unfair advantage could not be ruled out,” Jeglic says in his report.
Unfortunately for the ombudsman, because the contract was cancelled, he was legally bound to put an end to his investigation. But that did not stop Jeglic from writing the RCMP to recommend that they compensate the losing incumbent bidder who had filed the complaint.
The RCMP did not respond to questions by deadline about the contract, notably how it did not detect that it was awarded to an employee or if internal procurement rules even allow employees to double as contractors for the force.
But this procurement issue is far from the only one plaguing the federal government, Jeglic warns in his report.
The ombudsman’s office refused an interview to discuss its latest annual report, preferring instead to answer written questions.
One of the biggest issues he notes is “unnecessarily complex nature” of federal procurement, which has become a “constant source of frustration, creating overly burdensome barriers to contracting with the federal government.”
That issue has only been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced government to scramble to find personal protective equipment (PPE), transportation and logistics services, extra cleaning services for its buildings, and everything in between.
“At a time when buyers and suppliers are working together to address a pressing matter of public health, it is especially clear they should not be hindered unnecessarily,” Jeglic notes.
“Including unnecessary criteria in solicitations only because they have been included in the past and adopting a zero-risk tolerance approach to procurement is not the way forward.”
In order to diversify its portfolio of potential suppliers in the hopes of getting more and cheaper bids, the ombudsman thinks the government should increase its tolerance for risk in procurement, make its processes more flexible and eliminate “unnecessary” requirements.
Some of the solutions he proposes are as simple as creating standardized bidding documents and processes across governments.
“If each department uses unique solicitation documents and processes, it significantly increases the burden on suppliers, particularly those who supply the same good or service across multiple departments,” Jeglic warns.
“Using standardized documents and processes decreases the cost to bid for suppliers and potentially lowers bid prices for departments.”
When it comes to pandemic procurement, the OPO argues that the government should increase both delegated spending authorities for bureaucrats as well as the maximum thresholds for a department to solicit non-competitive bids (currently set at $25,000 for contracts for goods, and $40,000 for service contracts).
In a statement, Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand said that “improving, modernizing and simplifying” procurement in Canada was a key priority.
To that effect, she lauded her government’s upcoming e-procurement system, which it hopes will streamline and simplify purchasing for the federal government all the while removing most of the physical paperwork.
“Our e-procurement system will create increased efficiencies, enhancing the accessibility of federal procurement opportunities. Importantly, e-procurement will also allow PSPC to gather disaggregated data to better track the participation of underrepresented groups in the procurement process,” the minister promised.
• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter: ChrisGNardi
Categories: Canadian News
Senate winners, losers and assorted other facts on the 2020 U.S. election
SENATE WINNERS:
Democrats picked up seats in Colorado and Arizona, and Republicans picked one up in Alabama in the battle for control of the U.S. Senate. Republicans held off Democratic challengers in just five of the 14 most competitive races, but final results may not be clear for some time. Here are some notable outcomes:
MAINE
Republican Senator Susan Collins, a New England moderate long known for her independence, won her fifth term after Maine House of Representatives Speaker Sara Gideon called her on Wednesday afternoon to concede one of the hardest-fought Senate races of 2020.
SOUTH CAROLINA
Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, held off a surprisingly strong challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, who raised $100 million for his run. “I’ve never been challenged like this,” Graham said, and later added about Harrison: “You wasted a lot of money. This is the worst return on investment in the history of American politics.” A stoic Harrison said, “We did something incredible … we proved that public office is not a lifetime job and that people are willing to hold our leaders accountable.”
GEORGIA
Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock head to a Jan. 5 runoff election after neither secured a majority in a multi-candidate non-partisan special election. The unusual race was prompted by the retirement of Republican Senator Johnny Isakson. Loeffler was appointed last year to fill his seat. The contest featured 21 candidates.
ALABAMA
Republican Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach, defeated incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones. Jones had been considered the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate. He won the seat in an upset in 2017 after Republican Jeff Sessions vacated it to become Trump’s attorney general. Tuberville defeated Sessions’ attempted comeback earlier this year.
IOWA
Republican Senator Joni Ernst defeated Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield. Ernst used her role in U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to appeal to conservative-leaning voters. Greenfield, an urban planner and real estate developer, accused Ernst of being a rubber stamp for President Donald Trump and not taking the pandemic seriously enough.
WYOMING
Republican Cynthia Lummis, 66, is heading back to Washington. She has spent decades in politics, as a former state treasurer and state legislator. She served as Wyoming’s lone congresswoman from 2009-2017 and was a founding member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. She will be the state’s first female senator.
SENATE LOSSES:
Democrats, who had been favoured to win the Senate majority heading into Tuesday’s election, had a net gain of only one seat to show by Wednesday afternoon. Here are some notable losses in the Senate races.
TEXAS
The state became a surprise battleground in this year’s presidential race. A challenge from Democrat M.J. Hegar could not take down veteran Republican Senator John Cornyn despite his vulnerability. Texas, once a Republican stronghold, has grown increasingly competitive as the population has grown more diverse and Trump’s polarizing presidency has alienated suburban women.
ARIZONA
Republican Senator Martha McSally failed to hold off Democratic former astronaut Mark Kelly. McSally, a former U.S. representative and U.S. Air Force combat pilot, was appointed to the seat once held by John McCain after losing her 2018 Senate bid to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.
COLORADO
Incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner could not hold off Democratic challenger John Hickenlooper. Gardner, a former U.S. representative who entered the Senate for the first time in 2015, was a vulnerable Senate Republican partly because of his allegiance to Trump in a state that has gone Democratic in the past three presidential elections. Hickenlooper, a former two-term governor and 2020 presidential hopeful, said record voter turnout showed voters were fed up with the bitter polarization in Washington.
MONTANA
Two-term Governor Steve Bullock, a former presidential candidate who branded himself as an independent-minded Democrat, could not hold off Republican Senator Steve Daines. Daines, a former congressman and software executive, is known as a reliable conservative and has touted his ties to Trump.
GENERAL NUGGETS:
POPULAR VOTE
In the nationwide popular vote , Biden on Wednesday was comfortably ahead of Trump, with about 3 million more votes . With ballots still being counted, Biden has garnered almost 70.5 million votes for president, beating a record previously held by his former boss, President Barack Obama. Obama collected 69.5 million votes in 2008. So far, Trump has received 67.8 million votes. He lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes even as he beat Hillary Clinton in electoral votes.
NORTH DAKOTA
David Andahl died of COVID-19 in October, but the North Dakota rancher nonetheless won his race for the state House of Representatives. His district has two House seats, and Andahl teamed up with another candidate, Dave Nehring, to earn endorsements. Nehring won the most votes on Tuesday, with Andahl coming in next at 35.53 per cent. The next two candidates tallied 12 per cent and 10 per cent. The local Republican Party will fill Andahl’s vacant seat until a special election.
BIDEN FIGHT FUND
Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have established a Biden Fight Fund as Trump’s campaign has asked for a recount in Wisconsin and filed a lawsuit in Michigan. Biden’s campaign manager told supporters that the campaign aims to put in place “the biggest and most comprehensive legal effort ever assembled.”
ELECTORAL COLLEGE
The candidate who wins each state’s popular vote typically earns that state’s electors. This year, those electors meet on Dec. 14 to cast votes, one ballot for president, one for vice-president. Both chambers of Congress will meet on Jan. 6 to count the votes and name the winner. But — in the case of two different election results submitted by the governor and the legislature, under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, each chamber of Congress separately decides which slate to accept. The electoral count is conducted by the new Congress, which is sworn in on Jan. 3. If the two chambers disagree, the act says the electors approved by each state’s “executive” should prevail. Many scholars interpret that as a state’s governor, others don’t. One law professor called the ECA’s wording “virtually impenetrable” in this context. The law has never been tested or interpreted by the courts.
CONTINGENT ELECTION
A determination that neither candidate had secured a majority of electoral votes would trigger a “contingent election” under the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. That means the House of Representatives would choose the next president, while the Senate would select the vice-president. Each state delegation in the House gets a single vote.
WHAT IF THERE’S A TIE?
A contingent election would have taken place in the event of a 269-269 tie. Any election dispute in Congress would play out ahead of Jan. 20, when the Constitution mandates that the term of the current president ends. If Congress still has not declared a presidential or vice-presidential winner by then, the Speaker of the House — currently Nancy Pelosi — would serve as acting president.
THOSE LATE COUNTS
Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center said that Republican state legislators in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin blocked requests from local election officials to begin counting ballots as they came in or at least in advance of Tuesday to speed the reporting of the massive influx of early and mailed ballots. They apparently did this to try to prevent the count from starting, claim that voting had to be cut off or that Trump was “winning” and then try to delegitimize votes tabulated after Tuesday.
Categories: Canadian News
One certainty of the U.S. election is that ethnic groups are not uniform voting blocs
Even with a winner undeclared the morning after the polls closed, one early conclusion of the U.S. election was that Latino voters were a key part of the stronger than expected showing for incumbent President Donald Trump.
As a voting demographic, Hispanic Americans seem to have been an especially important contributor to Trump taking the 29 Electoral College votes in Florida, thanks in part to major gains in the Miami area, where Democrat challenger Joe Biden had an unexpectedly poor tally compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Texas was also regarded by Democrats as a possible state to flip blue, but Biden similarly underperformed Clinton and Texas stayed in the Republican column.
This prompts the tough insight, for Democrats especially, that ethnic groups are not uniform voting blocs. Hispanics are not a safe Democrat constituency, and treating them as such can encourage the complacency that turns voters away.
Trump improved on his results among Hispanic Americans since 2016, according to CNN exit polls, which also showed the Democrat Latino vote strong in Arizona, but weaker in Georgia and Ohio.
This stood in contrast to pre-election polling, some of which suggested Hispanic voters were 74 per cent for Biden. In some areas that held true, but nationally Trump increased his support among Latino men to more than one in three, and among Latina women to 28 per cent, in both cases higher than in 2016, according to an Edison Exit Poll.
Curiously, that same poll showed Trump doing better with all major demographic ethnic and gender categories except for white men, among whom he dropped to 57 per cent in 2020 from 62 per cent in 2016.
African American voting patterns were much less of a shock, seeming to stay closer to the projected split of being nearly 90 per cent for Biden, and with men more likely than women to support Trump.
Trump’s success with the Hispanic demographic is also Joe Biden’s failure, as some of his fellow Democrats concede.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic U.S. Representative from New York, for example, said on Twitter she would not comment on general results “as they are evolving and ongoing, but I will say we’ve been sounding the alarm about Dem(ocrat) vulnerabilities w/ Latinos for a long, long time. There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn’t been put in.”
Partly this Republican shift of the Latino vote reflects a natural ideological alliance with white evangelical Christians, such that the Evangelicals for Trump event in Florida became Latinos for Trump.
Partly it is a general cultural conservatism, even apart from religion, such that the Trump campaign’s emphasis on law and order was an appealing message.
Many Latino voters also have experience of life under Latin American socialist dictatorships, which was a key part of the anti-Biden messaging, claiming he was in the pocket of a radical left wing socialist conspiracy and likely to support socialist strongmen like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
“The Cuban community in Miami has been through a communist regime,” said Marti Mees, a Cuban immigrant and Republican activist, in an interview with Daily Telegraph reporter Rozina Sabur about why those voters came out in force behind Trump. “We believe in law and order, we believe in family values and we believe in freedom. That’s what President Trump offers.”
NBC News exit polls had Trump taking 55 per cent of Florida’s Cuban American vote.
There is also a demographic shift at play. Pew Research projected this was the first election in which Hispanic voters are the largest ethnic minority group, narrowly overtaking Black Americans in the range of 12 to 13 per cent.
All of this is against the backdrop of Trump’s frequent comments about Mexican rapists, drug dealers, gangsters and criminals, and his Mexican border wall. His administration also pursued a policy of discouraging Latin American refugees and separating children from their parents when apprehended at the border.
But Biden had no good reply. Like any ethnic group, Hispanic Americans have internal diversity despite the broad patters. There are Puerto Ricans in New York and Mexicans in California, who are more likely to vote Democrat than Cubans or Venezuelans in Florida. There are others whose ancestry is in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, other Central and South American countries.
The concern for the Democrats is that the old way of approaching this constituency is too broad. The fear is that Democrats might have been fooling themselves by relying on polls that show, as Pew Research did in October, an increase in Hispanic voter confidence in Biden’s ability to manage important issues like the pandemic, compared to an unchanged negative view of Trump.
Categories: Canadian News
Surging COVID-19 cases were expected to hurt Trump's chances in key states, but the results have been mixed
As of Wednesday afternoon the U.S. election was still too close to call, with many battleground states still counting ballots. Joe Biden’s prospects are still strong, given the remaining votes are likely to favour him, but the election has not been the landslide for him that many had predicted.
A big reason for that prediction was the coronavirus surging in many of the states Donald Trump needs to win; it was thought voters would likely punish Trump for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the results have been more complicated than that.
Here’s a closer look at the some of the key states, and whether Trump defied expectations despite the virus.
Florida – 29 electoral college votes
Trump badly needed to win this state to keep his re-election chances alive. As it turned out, he won it fairly easily Tuesday night by three percentage points thanks to Biden underperforming in the Miama area.
Florida’s COVID-19 situation is still precarious, as it reported 4,637 new cases and 56 new deaths on Tuesday. However, those numbers are not nearly as high as they were in July, when Florida was reporting more than 10,000 new cases daily.
The state lifted most of its health restrictions in September, including on crowd sizes for restaurants and sports events. Still, Trump hit the message during the campaign that the threat from the virus was exaggerated and Democrats would lock them back down.
“You turn on MSNBC, you turn on this network, it’s COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID,” Trump said at a Florida rally last week. “They want to scare you to try to make you vote for Biden.”
Arizona – 11 electoral college votes
Trump won this state by a four-point margin in 2016, but both Fox News and the Associated Press project Biden will flip the state blue — a key step on his potential path to victory. Trump’s campaign is insisting they still have a shot at winning this state.
Arizona reported 1,548 new cases on Tuesday and 40 new deaths, and all the metrics have been rising over the past month. But these numbers are also far below where they were in summer, when Arizona was reporting 4,000 cases daily.
The state has reopened its businesses during the fall, lifting restrictions on bars, gyms, movie theatres and other establishments on Oct. 1.
Ohio – 18 electoral college votes
Trump would have been doomed if he’d lost this midwest state, which had been seen as a toss-up entering the election. But on Tuesday night he cruised to a comfortable eight-point lead and is projected to win it.
That’s despite the fact Ohio is facing its worst surge of COVID-19 cases of the entire pandemic so far, reporting a record 4,229 new cases and 33 new deaths on Tuesday. In the spring and summer its cases had never passed 2,000 in a day.
Businesses are largely open in Ohio, operating with some restrictions on capacity. As new cases spike, Republican Governor Mike DeWine has so far resisted calls to shut down parts of the economy again, saying he doesn’t want to see Ohio turn into a “totalitarian” state.
Pennsylvania – 20 electoral college votes
Pennsylvania had a chance of being the swing state that could decide the whole election, though that appeared less likely late in the day as both Michigan and Wisconsin were called for Biden.
The state is currently in its highest COVID-19 surge of the pandemic, with a record 2,868 new cases and 33 deaths reported on Tuesday. Its Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, has been in a fight with the courts over his powers to shut down businesses, but as of November the state was largely reopen with crowd size restrictions being eased.
It may take all week before all the votes are counted in Pennsylvania due to the mail-in ballots. Trump held a sizeable lead on Wednesday afternoon, but the remaining ballots are expected to lean heavily Biden, and both candidates still have a very realistic shot at winning.
Categories: Canadian News
'A very mixed performance': Why pollsters calling for a blue wave for Democrats got it wrong
OTTAWA – Pollsters had projected a big blue wave would sweep Republicans out of office across the United States, but it appears to have hit the shore with nowhere near the expected force.
As of Wednesday afternoon, former vice-president Joe Biden still looked like he could garner a win, but rather than the landslide victory many pollsters had predicted he was set to pull out a close victory over President Donald Trump.
Pollsters also predicted the Democrats would take control of the U.S. Senate and keep control of the U.S. House to give them complete control over the legislative process, but most of those Senate wins were failing to materialize.
W. Joseph Campbell, a professor in the School of Communication Studies at American University in Washington D.C., said the polls raised Democratic hopes and there are going to be a lot of questions for pollsters.
“The broad expectation was, and this is a poll driven expectation, that the Democrats would have something approaching a blue wave,” he said. “It’s at best a very mixed performance for polls.”
Among the polling misses were Florida, where pollsters gave Biden as much as a five point lead in recent weeks. North Carolina also consistently showed a Biden lead, but could end up in the Trump column when the counting is complete.
In Wisconsin, where Biden is forecast to win by about half a percentage point, polls had indicated he was as many as 17 points ahead of Trump. Biden was also predicted to win easily in Pennsylvania, but that race was proving to be a nail-biter with Trump ahead for most of the day.
Republican Senator Susan Collins, from Maine, had no major polls showing she had a chance to hold onto her seat, but she still managed to beat her challenger on election day.
Campbell said the polling misses are all across the country.
“There are all kinds of examples you can find in polls that really miscalled the race and in particular states, especially,” he said.
In 2016, pollsters were generally thought to have missed pockets of Trump supporters and underrepresented the view of non-college educated white voters in particular. Campbell said he believes it is too early to determine what went wrong this time, but he suspects it is something new.
“When polls go bad, it’s for reasons that are not shared from polling failure to polling failure,” he said.
Quito Maggi, president of Mainstreet Research, a Canadian polling firm, said he believes some Trump supporters were shy about admitting their support.
“They’re not the ones going to the rallies. They’re not waving the flags. They’re not wearing the MAGA hats, but in their heads they know they’re going to vote for Trump.”
Maggi said American polling firms are expected to deliver deep dives into the results to give results broken down across a wide group of demographics.
“Every poll that is published people expect to see not just age and gender, like what you might see here in Canada, but by income bracket, by education, by race,” he said.
Polling companies reach out to hundreds or even thousands of people, but will often get a disproportionate responses from certain demographics and have to weight their sample accordingly. For example, if a pollster reached out to 100 people and got responses from 25 women and 75 men, it would have to give more weight to the women’s response to reflect the population, because in the broader population men and women are in equal numbers.
Maggi said adding that kind of weighting to account for race, income, education as polling companies do in the U.S., increases the chance of a major error.
“When you start applying, race, income, education, all of those other factors. It’s the possibility for errors that grows exponentially.”
Maggi said pollsters in the U.S. also have to consider whether voters will actually get to the polls, because of issues around voting registration and long lines.
He said he is hopeful they will be able to figure out what they have been doing wrong and address it for future elections.
“They’ve had two elections in a row now. They’re going to have good data to model it. So hopefully, by the next election, maybe the midterms, they’ll make the necessary adjustments.”
• Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com | Twitter: ryantumilty
Categories: Canadian News
PBO says gender-based pay equity scheme to cost $621M, as Liberals withhold spending plans
OTTAWA — A new report offers the first-ever cost estimate for a Liberal policy that aims to ensure men and women receive equal pay, after Ottawa declined to provide details on the legislation in 2018.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that the Liberal government’s equal pay policy will cost taxpayers $621 million per year, covering about 390,000 public servants in Canada. That estimate does not include the additional 900,000 workers who fall under federally-regulated industries like airlines, telecoms, banking, and broadcasting, among other things.
Crown corporations including Canada Post, Bank of Canada and the newly-formed Trans Mountain Corporation will also fall under the new equal pay provisions. The $621-million hike amounts to a roughly one per cent increase on the $45 billion Ottawa spends every year on wages and pensions for public employees.
Yves Giroux, the PBO, said his office pulled together the estimates without the help of Treasury Board officials, who declined to provide any internal data for the program, citing Cabinet confidence.
He said he was unsure of the merit of those claims, but warned that the Liberal government should avoid using cabinet confidence as a catch-all to withhold information that would useful to the public.
“If the data exists, and it’s been used internally or in other formats, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should remain a secret just because it was discussed at cabinet,” Giroux said in an interview.
A spokesperson for Treasury minister Jean-Yves Duclos said Ottawa will eventually release cost estimates for the program, but said negotiations with agencies and federally regulated industries are still ongoing. The person said that making cost projections public now would “compromise future negotiations with bargaining agents.”
“It’s probably bureaucrats being overly risk averse,” Giroux said. “But there’s no way for me to be sure of that, because we haven’t seen the data.”
His comments come as the PBO on Wednesday issued a second report that lamented a broader lack of transparency by the federal government on its immense COVID-19 emergency spending measures.
It pointed out that the government has yet to lay out detailed accounts of the spending measures thus far for COVID-19, unlike past federal stimulus spending efforts, and with little excuse for the secrecy. The government’s latest spending request to Parliament, for $79 billion, has likewise been “lacking” in detail, the budget officer said.
“This lack of data is not a result of it not being available,” the PBO report said. “The Department of Finance had been providing biweekly updates to the standing committee on finance, but stopped when Parliament was prorogued in August.”
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has repeatedly called for better transparency in government spending during the pandemic, as policymakers in Ottawa rush hundreds of billions out the door in an effort to provide a lifeline to Canadian businesses and workers hit by economic lockdowns.
A lack of detail around the gender parity program is the latest example of these shortcomings, the budget watchdog said Wednesday.
The Pay Equity Act was ultimately tucked inside the Liberal government’s 2018 omnibus budget bill, which passed the House of Commons on a 163-113 vote in late December, with most opposition parties voting against. It received royal assent without associated costs ever being supplied by government.
The changes under the act seek to achieve pay equity by “redressing the systemic gender-based discrimination” faced by women, the legislation says. Employers under the new regime must “calculate the compensation, expressed in dollars per hour, associated with each job class,” and pay employees a set amount according to the value ascribed to those classes.
The new legislation also calls for the appointment of a “pay equity commissioner” to audit public sector pay, resolve pay disputes, and impose financial penalties on agencies and corporations that fail to meet the new guidelines.
Various studies have claimed that women tend to receive only a portion of the wages of men occupying the same roles, prompting calls from advocacy groups for regulations that would enforce gender parity.
Of the $621 million in higher pay associated with the changes, the PBO estimates that by 2023-24, $477 million more would go toward wages while the remaining $144 million would go toward public pensions.
Ongoing costs for regulatory oversight of the program is expected to be $5 million per year. Administrative costs will be $9 million annually, according to the PBO report.
Categories: Canadian News
While youth voters turned out in record numbers — mostly for Biden — a seniors surge didn't happen
The youth vote in the 2020 US presidential election swung heavily in favour of 77-year-old Joe Biden over Donald Trump, age 74, a trend that, as the votes continued to be counted on Wednesday, may have made a difference in some key battlegrounds.
The voter turnout in 2020 was unprecedented across the entire United States, according to the United States Election Project, which tracks information about the electoral system. Estimates come from exit polls — official data on turnout won’t be available until the census bureau releases it in a few months’ time. According to the Project’s data, only five states — Hawaii, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia saw less than 60 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, while Minnesota and New Hampshire had voter turnout in excess of 80 per cent.
In every single state for which there is data, analyzed by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), a youth-focused research centre at Tufts University, young voters — defined as those between 18 and 29 years old — took up a double-digit share of the total ballots cast. CIRCLE uses AP VoteCast data from The Associated Press,
“Nearly half of all eligible young people cast ballots in the most critical election races in the country,” says CIRCLE’s analysis.
Young voters preferred Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate over Trump, the Republican candidate and current president, in 34 of 38 states for which CIRCLE had vote data.
Overall, 62 per cent of those voters cast their ballot for Biden compared to 33 per cent for Trump. These are, CIRCLE notes, figures that outpace even the votes received from younger voters by Hillary Clinton in 2016 (although the data, because of sources and year, aren’t entirely comparable.)
Peter Loewen, a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, said there’s little doubt Biden benefitted from a high share of the youth vote and higher youth turnout. But that doesn’t mean they “delivered” the election for him or the Democrats, he said.
“It’s always hard to figure out how much differences in political behaviour due to age are because of something generational … or whether it is something that is really a life cycle thing,” said Loewen.
In Virginia, youth voters cast 21 per cent of all ballots; in Georgia, it was 20 per cent. Georgia remained a battleground state, as of Wednesday morning, while Virginia had been called for Biden, according to Reuters.
Youth were the lowest proportion in Kentucky (10 per cent) and Louisiana (12 per cent.) Both states were projected by Reuters to be Republican victories.
William Frey, a researcher with the Brookings Institution, said there are some states where the youth vote turnout helped Biden, but it’s still too early to make those determinations for certain.
“It’s clearly the case that … the younger population is more likely to vote for Biden than they were for Clinton vis-à-vis Trump,” Frey said.
“Certainly going forward in the U.S., it’s the younger generation … is going to be the main driver for Democratic support, probably everywhere.”
Further breaking down the data, every single ethnic group in CIRCLE’s youth cohort voted in a majority for Biden: 88 per cent of Black youth voted Biden; 83 per cent of Asian youth; 75 per cent of Latino youth; and 53 per cent of white youth.
Support for Trump, meanwhile, clustered in older voters. The highest proportion of voters who cast ballots for Trump landed in the 30-to-44 age cluster, with 57 per cent of voters voting Republican. From age 45 and up, 51 per cent of voters voted for Trump.
Frey said far more seniors were expected to abandon Trump for Biden, according to polling data leading to the election. That didn’t materialize.
“I don’t think the senior surge was as big as some of the polls said,” Frey said.
However it all turns out, Loewen said, it’s a testament to how serious the competition is in the United States and the effort parties put forward to winning votes.
“It’s just an amazingly dynamic and competitive system,” he said.
• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson
Categories: Canadian News
U.S. election 2020 recap: Biden on brink of victory on Day 2, but Trump hasn't given up
American voters went to the polls on Tuesday to choose between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden and cast votes in U.S. House and Senate races and state and local elections. As of Wednesday Nov. 4 at 4:30 p.m., there was no declared winner as of yet because of millions of uncounted ballots that were cast in early voting.
After Biden won Wisconsin, he had a total of 248 electoral votes to Trump’s 214, leaving both shy of the 270 needed to secure immediate victories. While Biden delivered a speech saying he is “confident” of a win, Trump wasn’t ready to give up. His campaign said it would demand a recount of the state since the margin was less than 1 percentage point.
- Get the latest news on the election result at nationalpost.com
Trump’s campaign also said it is suing in Pennsylvania and Michigan to halt vote counts that have been trending toward Biden. In both states, the Trump campaign claims it hasn’t been given meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the process for opening and tabulating ballots as guaranteed under state law. Neither filing could be immediately confirmed.
Trump holds a lead in Pennsylvania but hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots remain to be counted which are expected to push the race to Biden’s advantage. The president’s lead in Michigan evaporated earlier on Wednesday to give Biden a narrow edge. It will be almost impossible for Trump to win the election if he does not win Pennsylvania.
Trump needs at least four of the following states to pass 270 electoral votes: Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He won them all in 2016. If Biden wins any two of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, he’ll win.
This liveblog has now ended, but you can relive how election night — and much of Day 2 — unfolded below. If it isn’t displaying, click this link to access it on the National Post website.
— National Post, with files from Bloomberg, Reuters and The Canadian Press
You might also be interested in …- What happens if the U.S. election is contested and Donald Trump won’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power?
- What is the U.S. electoral college and how does it work?
- U.S. election exit polls: Just two in 10 national voters say COVID-19 was their biggest issue
Categories: Canadian News
Watch: 'Trump may go, but his ideology will remain'
National Post columnists John Ivison and Kevin Carmichael discuss the divide U.S. electorate with Larysa Harapyn, and its long-lasting impacts on the Canadian economy. Watch the video below.
Categories: Canadian News
'Outrageous': Biden campaign slams Trump's claims to premature victory as election results remain unclear
Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s campaign has dismissed President Donald Trump’s remarks as “outrageous” and “incorrect,” after the U.S. president claimed a premature victory to the 2020 election, despite millions of votes still left uncounted.
In a middle of the night speech from the White House, Trump falsely claimed that he won the U.S. election and threatened to ask the Supreme Court to intervene to stop what he called the disenfranchisement of Republican voters, without offering evidence that any wrongdoing had occurred.
“Frankly, we did win this election,” he said, noting that he held a lead in a number of states whose results were still uncertain. “So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump meant, as states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and others are counting legally cast votes. It is also routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day.
The unusually large number of absentee ballots cast due to the coronavirus pandemic meant counting wasn’t complete. The unresolved outcome risks stoking tensions further in the U.S., beset by an economic downturn and the raging virus.
As of 6 a.m. New York time Wednesday, Biden holds a narrow lead with 224 electoral votes while Trump had 213, leaving both shy of the 270 needed to secure immediate victories.
Trump’s comments immediately drew criticism from Biden’s campaign and at least one of the president’s allies. Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement that Trump’s remarks were “outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect” and “a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.”
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a close Trump ally, told ABC News he disagreed with Trump’s remarks about the election results and said, “There’s just no basis to make that argument tonight. There just isn’t.”
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, speaking at 12:30 in the morning Eastern Time on Wednesday, said it was going to take time to figure out the winner of the presidential race, but that the Democrats are feeling good about Tuesday night’s results.
“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won the election, that’s the decision of the American people,” he said.
The former vice-president, coming out to cheers and honking car horns, made his remarks as the race for president remained tight, with multiple networks and newswires holding off on declaring several key battleground states for either candidate.
In the lead-up to election day, there was much speculation that Trump would prematurely declare victory. The president remained quiet online for much of Tuesday, until coming to life just after Biden spoke, saying he, too, would soon speak.
Trump tweeted, without providing any evidence, that, “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter subsequently curtailed the spread of his tweet, telling readers that it contained disputed information.
We placed a warning on a Tweet from @realDonaldTrump for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy. More here: https://t.co/k6OkjNXEAm
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 4, 2020The road to victory for Biden, as of early Wednesday, remained unclear. Ditto for Trump, although there were very few surprises when compared to results from 2016. No states, as of the time Biden took to the mic, had switched hands from 2016.
Both men still have paths to victory, though it appears that Biden has more options than Trump does. Trump needs at least four of the following states to pass 270 electoral votes: Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He won them all in 2016.
If Biden wins any two of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, he’ll win.
There were few surprises among states where the AP announced winners, with Republican and Democratic states generally falling in line, despite expectations for several upsets. The only other Electoral College vote to flip so far, besides in Arizona, came from a congressional district in Nebraska that backed Biden after favoring Trump in 2016.
Trump won Florida, a crucial prize in the race to the White House that closed off Biden’s hopes for an early knockout in the election. The president also won Texas, which Democrats had hoped might turn blue and entirely reshape the electoral map.
Trump significantly outperformed in one of Florida’s most populous counties, Miami-Dade. After losing the county four years ago by 29 points, he lost by less than 8 to Biden.
The county is diverse, with large Cuban and Venezuelan populations Trump has courted by raising diplomatic and economic pressure on the socialist regimes in those countries. He accused Biden of sharing the regimes’ politics.
Trump won Ohio and Biden won Minnesota, states that each candidate had sought to take from the other but wound up politically unchanged from 2016.
Ohio was the first of several battleground states decided in the race.
Biden carried Minnesota even though Trump held multiple campaign rallies in a state he narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Biden’s strength in the urban parts of the state kept it in the Democratic column.
Trump holds small leads in North Carolina and Georgia, though there are votes outstanding in each. Trump won both states in 2016.
In addition, Biden won Nebraska’s second congressional district, Minnesota, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Delaware, District of Columbia and New Hampshire, according to the AP.
Trump won Nebraska’s other four Electoral College votes, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Missouri.
Nebraska is one of only two states, with Maine, that award an Electoral College vote to the winner of each congressional district. Trump won two districts and Biden won one. Trump won the state overall, giving him Nebraska’s two remaining Electoral College votes.
Maine’s second congressional district remained too close to call.
Even if Democrats yet claim the White House, a “blue wave” they hoped would also give them control of both chambers of Congress may fall short.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, was re-elected, the AP said. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, was re-elected despite a Democratic challenger who badly out-raised him, and Senator Doug Jones, an Alabama Democrat, was defeated by Republican Tommy Tuberville.
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, defeated Senator Cory Gardner, giving his party one pickup. Other contested Senate seats remain undecided.
Biden is winning over Latino and African-American voters in numbers similar to Clinton four years ago, and is narrowing Trump’s margin among White voters, early exit polls from the AP show.
Trump had a 12-point lead among White voters in Tuesday’s election. Network exit polls four years ago showed him with a 20-point advantage among those voters. Biden led among Latino voters 30 points, Black voters by 82 points, and women by 12 points.
In several key states, waits to process mail-in ballots — which are expected to lean Democrat — will mean delays in knowing the true winners, and could perhaps see victories materialize for Democrats in unexpected states.
“It ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted,” Biden told supporters in Delaware. “Keep the faith guys, we’re gonna win this.”
Categories: Canadian News
Could Trump and Biden still tie in the Electoral College? Unlikely. Here's why
Election Day has come and gone, putting an end to what has been one of the most divisive U.S. presidential election campaigns in the nation’s history. The messy part however, isn’t over yet — it’ll be a few days before poll clerks around the country will finish counting out the remaining votes that could make or break an election for either candidate.
In order to decisively win the election, a candidate would need to secure 270 electoral college votes. However, Joe Biden and Donald Trump continue to run neck-and-neck for majority of votes in several states, prompting many to question the likelihood of an election tie.
A tie is rare, but theoretically not impossible. The total number of electoral college votes is 538, which means each candidate could hypothetically receive 269 votes.
It has also happened before. In the 1800 presidential election — the third in U.S. history — Democratic candidate Thomas Jefferson and Republican candidate Aaron Burr each received 73 votes. Incumbent John Adams was booted off the presidential ticket after only accumulating 35 votes.
Subsequently, in keeping with a provision within the Constitution mandating that the House of Representatives shall vote for the final winner, each candidate presented themselves to the House and after 36 consecutive votes — almost causing a second civil war — Jefferson was picked as the third president.
More than 200 years later, the same provision would apply to Biden and Trump, if a tie were to happen. Each state delegation would be allotted one vote and a majority of 26 states would be needed to win the presidency. Senators would, in turn, elect the vice-president, with a majority of 51 votes required to win the vice-presidency.
Experts debating the possibility of a tie last night believed the situation might favour Trump. “If that were to happen, I think the conventional wisdom is that Republicans would probably be favored,” Alexander Burns, a veteran political correspondent for the New York Times, said during The Daily podcast.
Burns said a tie would be highly unlikely and “literally the messiest scenario possible.”
However, as of Wednesday morning, voters will no longer have to worry about an election tie after Biden secured an electoral vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, making a 269-269 outcome mathematically impossible.
No matter the results, the outcome of the election will still be messy. Biden and Trump have already prepared a legal team in the event that either candidate demands a recount, or the election results are taken to the Supreme Court. Trump has intimated several times that he would contest an election loss and has a long history of making falsely claims that the voting system is rigged.
Categories: Canadian News
With U.S. election 2020 still up in the air, Canadian politicians (mostly) stay out of the fight
OTTAWA – With the U.S. election result still very much up in the air Canadian politicians were staying out of the fight Wednesday morning.
Despite a false claim of victory by U.S. president Donald Trump early Wednesday morning, the race was still too close to call, with many key swing states still unable to report results.
The race was tightening in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania and more ballots remained to be counted.
Former vice-president spoke briefly to his supporters as well early Wednesday. He didn’t declare victory, but told his supporters to “keep the faith, we’re going to win.”
Television network TVA caught Prime Minister Justin Trudeau headed into parliament this morning and he said only that they were watching closely.
“As everyone knows there is an electoral process underway in the United States. We are of course following it carefully as the day and the days unfold,“ he said.
Conservative leader Erin O’Toole was headed into his caucus meeting this morning and admitted it was a long night watching the results. He said we will simply have to wait for results.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has been the only leader to weigh in on the U.S. campaign. On Tuesday, he said he hopes Trump is defeated.
“It is a moral imperative that we have to speak out and say that what he has done in his presidency is wrong,” he said. “I think it would be better for the world if Trump loses and I hope he loses.”
Twitter: RyanTumilty
Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com
Categories: Canadian News
No clear winner yet, but Trump has a path to victory and a second term
A momentous U.S. presidential election headed to a nail-biting conclusion Wednesday, as President Donald Trump once again defied opinion polls and put up a fierce fight to keep the White House.
Well after midnight, it was unclear who would win the race, the outcome likely to be decided by one or two states, or even a single congressional district.
It was one of the most bitterly contested U.S. political campaigns in the post-war era and ultimately came down to a relatively few key votes — after record turnout by Americans in the middle of a pandemic.
Any possibility of a landslide for either side evaporated as the night wore on, the votes were slowly counted and the numbers lined up in surprising ways.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden seemed on the way to stealing Arizona and its 11 Electoral College votes, but Trump captured the key prize of Florida and was leading in the three former “blue wall” northern states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. If he won those states and others where he led, the election would be his.
But as Tuesday turned to Wednesday, large chunks of the vote in those states, including in heavily Democratic areas, remained to be counted, offering a sliver of hope for Biden.
The former vice president made an early morning appearance to claim that, despite trailing in key areas, he would eventually prevail.
“I believe we’re on track to win the election,” he told supporters shortly before 1 a.m. “It ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted. But we’re feeling good about where we are.”
Trump Tweeted at about the same time, insisting that he would triumph.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election,” he posted, without explaining how or by whom the election was being stolen. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
U.S. TV networks reporting on the returns had to contend with a whole new pattern in how the vote came in, making races harder to read. The vast numbers of ballots cast in advance — believed to favour the Democrats — were counted first in some places, later in others.
But just before 12:30 p.m., Biden led the Electoral College vote by 205-139, the score representing expected results for each candidate in safe states. A total of at least 270 votes captures the White House.
Returns streamed in as a deeply divided nation waited on tenterhooks for the extraordinary election’s outcome.
But the final result could take days to come after a remarkable surge of advance voting, likely delays in counting ballots and a legal campaign by Trump and his allies against various pandemic-related voting protocols.
As results arrived surprisingly quickly from Florida, the lead bounced back and forth between Trump and Biden, typical of the kind of tight race for which the state is famous. Then the Republican steadily pulled ahead.
For Trump it was considered a must-win, its 29 Electoral College votes considered essential to his returning for another four years as president.
In other swing states, Trump won Ohio, and clung to a lead in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin. He also had a solid advantage in Georgia, which Biden had hoped to snatch away.
With the prospect of the two all but tying, it was possible the race could come down to one segment of a lightly populated state. Unlike almost all other states, Maine allots its Electoral College votes by congressional district, meaning a split favouring one or other candidate could seal a tight race.
More than 100 million Americans had cast their ballots before polling places opened on the actual election day Tuesday, with citizens voting by mail in unprecedented numbers or in person at advanced polls.
More streamed to the polls Tuesday amid fears of unrest and violence that did not seem to come to fruition, but will continue to be a spectre hanging over the election’s aftermath.
Some experts predicted 160 million overall could exercise their franchise, about 67 per cent of the U.S. electorate and the highest in a century.
But the integrity of America’s democratic system came under question as never before, with court rulings on the process even on Tuesday. For months, Trump has insisted there would be fraud because of the widespread use of mail-in ballots and counting that could continue for days after Nov. 3.
The size of turnout on election day was itself being closely watched as an indicator of where the vote could head, with Republicans traditionally less likely to vote in advance.
Opinion surveys suggested a comfortable lead nationally for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and a tighter advantage in several of the battleground states. Those are key to winning 270 or more Electoral College votes, the majority that decides who enters the White House under the American system.
Polls put Biden an average of about eight percentage points ahead.
But while Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections, they lost the White House in two of those contests — 2016 and 2000. And Trump captured narrow victories in a number of swing states last election, defying polls that suggested Hillary Clinton was ahead in those races.
The campaign pitted two starkly opposing visions for the United States and how to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, which became a central theme of the election.
Trump presided over a first term that was marked by chaos and conflict, his inflammatory style blamed for fanning the flames of white supremacy, threatening longstanding international alliances and encouraging an angry, polarized political conversation.
He was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives — but found not guilty by the Republican-led U.S. Senate — after pressuring Ukraine’s president to help him dig up dirt on alleged corruption by Biden’s son Hunter.
Trump touted his success in fuelling a robust economy before the pandemic hit earlier this year, cutting taxes and putting America first in foreign relations. In blunt and often insulting terms, he warned that a vote for Biden would usher in socialist policies and an administration content to let violent, leftist protesters run rampant.
Biden hit hard and often at Trump’s allegedly cavalier approach to the pandemic. The president failed to encourage lockdowns and mask-wearing that have helped curb COVID-19’s spread in countries like Canada, while actively denigrating scientific experts and their advice, the former vice president stressed repeatedly.
Biden painted the election as not only a referendum on Trump’s tumultuous first term, but a fight for which values define the United States.
He claimed he would strive to unite the country, standing up for both blue and red states if he took over the White House.
The candidates — Trump, 74, and Biden, 77 — also marked a historically elderly choice for American voters. Their running mates, Vice President Mike Pence, 61, and Kamala Harris, 56, brought the tickets’ average age down somewhat.
Meanwhile, polls suggested that the number of states whose Electoral College votes were up for grabs had expanded.
They included the one-time “blue-wall” northern states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that Trump flipped from the Democrats last time and Florida, a perpetual toss-up in recent history. But Georgia, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and even Texas were also considered competitive this time.
The remainder of states are typically sure things for each camp, meaning the toss-ups determine who is president.
• Email: tblackwell@postmedia.com | Twitter: tomblackwellNP
Categories: Canadian News
John Ivison: Trudeau makes sudden course correction on freedom of speech
Justin Trudeau was asked by a reporter on Tuesday whether he condemns the publication of cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad.
“No,” he said, definitively in French. “I think it is important to continue to defend freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Our artists help us to reflect and challenge our views, and they contribute to our society.”
Lest there was any room for confusion about the prime minister’s free speech credentials, he reinforced the point in English. “Our journalists, our artists have an important challenge function in our society and we need to leave them free to do their work. I have always believed that and I’ve always said it.”
At least he had the decency to look sheepish.
Because, of course, that’s not what he has always said.
Those with prodigious memories will recall it was last Friday that the prime minister said something quite different.
When he was asked at last week’s press conference whether we should be able to laugh at religion or make fun of the Muslim prophet, Trudeau defended freedom of expression but said there are limits on those freedoms. “We do not have the right to shout ‘fire!’ in a movie theatre crowded with people,” he said. In a pluralistic, diverse society, people have to be aware of the impact of their words and actions, particularly on groups that experience discrimination, he added.
In the aftermath of the beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty for showing his class some Charlie Hebdo cartoons that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, it was a response that discounted the barbarity of the assault on Western values such as freedom of thought.
It smacked of Trudeau’s rather academic reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing seven years ago, when, after the new Liberal leader had mused about the “root causes” behind the attack, prime minister, Stephen Harper, accused him of “committing sociology.”
On Monday, Quebec Premier Francois Legault made it known he “totally disagreed” with Trudeau’s equivocation on freedom of expression, despite his own government’s stance on the wearing of religious symbols by teachers and civil servants in its own secularism law.
Instead, Legault backed French President Emmanuel Macron, who has vocally supported the right to make fun of religion.
On his Facebook page on Tuesday, the Quebec premier revealed that he received a call from Macron, thanking him for his support in defending freedom of expression, a posting all the more delicious because it is clear that Trudeau did not get one.
It appears the prime minister’s sociological musings did not resonate with Canadian voters either, given the course correction on Tuesday.
No wonder. A cornerstone of liberal democracies for the past 160 years has been the English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” – that individual freedom should only be infringed to prevent harm to others.
In the struggle between liberty and authority, Mill said that if the state is to err, it should do so on the side of liberty.
Some Muslims might find the Charlie Hebdo cartoons distasteful, even outrageous, but the cartoonists should not be silenced, far less killed, simply for causing offence.
More recently, it has been pointed out that demagogues and conspiracy theorists have used language as a vehicle for emotion, rather than meaning.
Critics of Mill on the left think those trying to sow fear or promote prejudice should somehow be muzzled.
But Mill argued that silencing an opinion is wrong, even if the opinion is wrong, because a marketplace of ideas will see truth triumph over falsehood.
A real-life test of that theory, involving 239 million American voters as arbiters, is currently underway.
In another chapter of his book On Liberty, Mill was concerned about the tyranny of the majority, forcing its will on the minority.
Quebec’s Bill 21 arguably violates the harm principle by making Muslims and Sikhs target for bigotry.
But religious adherents across Canada are free to worship and are at liberty to protest anything they consider an abomination.
They have the right to be offended but not the right to impose their religious feelings on others.
Trudeau got it wrong. Imagine if Canada had been attacked and the French president had tempered his sympathies for the atrocity with musings on possible justifications or root causes.
It seems the prime minister is a belated convert to the harm principle. But in this case the main principle is that nothing should be done that harms his prospects of re-election.
• Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ
Categories: Canadian News
'It ain’t over,' Biden tells supporters as Trump launches early-morning Twitter tirade
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, speaking at 12:30 in the morning Eastern Time on Wednesday, said it was going to take time to figure out the winner of the presidential race, but that the Democrats are feeling good about Tuesday night’s results.
“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won the election, that’s the decision of the American people,” he said.
The former vice-president, coming out to cheers and honking car horns, made his remarks as the race for president remained tight, with multiple networks and newswires holding off on declaring several key battleground states for either candidate.
In the lead-up to election day, there was much speculation that Trump would prematurely declare victory. The president remained quiet online for much of Tuesday, until coming to life just after Biden spoke, saying he, too, would soon speak.
Trump tweeted, without providing any evidence, that, “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter subsequently curtailed the spread of his tweet, telling readers that it contained disputed information.
We placed a warning on a Tweet from @realDonaldTrump for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy. More here: https://t.co/k6OkjNXEAm
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 4, 2020Then early Wednesday, Trump falsely claimed that he had won the U.S. election — with millions of votes still uncounted.
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said. “This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump meant, as states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and others are counting legally cast votes. It is routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day.
The road to victory for Biden, as of early Wednesday, remained unclear. Ditto for Trump, although there were very few surprises when compared to results from 2016. No states, as of the time Biden took to the mic, had switched hands from 2016.
Biden, as Tuesday became Wednesday, held some 205 electoral college votes to Trump’s 136, though Texas and Florida — both heavily leaning towards Trump — and Pennsylvania — a toss-up — have a combined 87 electoral votes up for grabs. A candidate needs 270 of the 538 electoral college votes to take the presidency.
In several key states, waits to process mail-in ballots — which are expected to lean Democrat — will mean delays in knowing the true winners, and could perhaps see victories materialize for Democrats in unexpected states.
“It ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted,” Biden told supporters in Delaware. “Keep the faith guys, we’re gonna win this.”
Categories: Canadian News
Who will be the next U.S. president? A divided America braces for violence as it waits for election results
As Tuesday’s presidential election day dawned in Washington, D.C., a new “non-scalable” fence had been erected around the perimeter of the White House during the night, in anticipation of civil unrest before the day was done.
In parts of the U.S. capital, storefronts were boarded over and federal buildings, such as the Treasury Department, were fenced in. D.C. Police rallied officers and equipment and acknowledged unrest is expected, “regardless of who wins,” said the chief. George Washington University warned students to stock up on a week’s worth of food and medicine, as if a hurricane is heading to town.
Perhaps there is.
Plenty of scenes have been playing out in the United States to stoke fears of the improbability of a peaceful post-election America, no matter who wins the presidential vote.
If Trump loses, will he refuse to accept the result and try to remain in office? Will he rally zealous supporters, some of whom are better armed than many nations, to protect him?
If Trump wins, will his zealous detractors take to the streets in protests that inevitably will bring violence and destruction?
Or will all the angst and fear of unrest, or outright insurrection, turn out to be this year’s pre-result fantasy, akin to 2016’s certainty of Hillary Clinton’s victory?
Is America really a nation of well-armed sore losers?
Things — alarming things — are being thought and said out loud about the prospect for a smooth acceptance of the election results, things that sound as if the scene is a fragile, war-torn country rather than the world’s oldest continuous democracy.
“We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half,” says an article penned by five academics, led by Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a conservative policy think tank, drawing from research tracking public opinion trends.
“Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election — especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process — could generate violence and bloodshed,” Diamond and colleagues wrote in Politico.
“We do not pull this alarm lightly.”
The International Crisis Group, an independent organization that monitors global violence, often focusing on failing states, issued a report on the United States in the campaign’s closing days.
“The ingredients for unrest are present,” the report warns.
The United States faces risks that have doomed other countries: stark political polarization bound to issues of race and identity; the rise of armed groups built around political agendas; and the unusually high chance of a contested election outcome.
“And most importantly,” the report says, “President Donald Trump, whose toxic rhetoric and willingness to court conflict to advance his personal interests have no precedent in modern U.S. history.”
It is an odd place for the United States to be. The Crisis Group understands the apparent cognitive dissonance.
“The country faces an unfamiliar danger. While Americans have grown used to a certain level of rancour in these quadrennial campaigns, they have not in living memory faced the realistic prospect that the incumbent may reject the outcome or that armed violence may result.”
In its final pre-election poll, Gallup found a record high 64 per cent of voters afraid of what will happen if their candidate loses, almost equally by supporters of both Trump and Joe Biden; 77 per cent said stakes are higher in 2020 than in previous elections.
Pew Research Center, in its end-of-campaign polling, found that only half of Trump supporters thought the election would be properly run.
Previous Pew studies found the level of animosity in the United States between Republicans and Democrats was deeper and more personal. It was described as mutual “loathing”; 55 per cent of Republicans said Democrats are “more immoral” than other Americans and 47 per cent of Democrats said the same about Republicans.
These results suggest that even if this election passes without the nightmare scenarios being conjured, governing the country will be more difficult, jaded and partisan.
Political and social unrest this year was pushed along by a deadly and ruinous pandemic, racial injustice and broad public protests amplified by rallying cries on social media. These events exacerbate the dangerous divide, yet none of them will just evaporate after the election results are tabulated.
“Civil war is here, right now,” declared the leader of a far right-wing militia group after a Trump supporter was killed in Portland, Oregon, calling others to rally to his side.
An antifa activist tweeted Tuesday: “The best way to stop a racist with a gun is an anti-racist with a gun. Because they’re not gonna stop having guns.”
The unnerving possibilities were laid bare last month when members of a Michigan militia group were arrested and accused of a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, overthrow the state government and start a civil war.
Is this really all so new?
There was a similar vibe in America during the 1968 Presidential election, when Republican candidate Richard Nixon beat incumbent Democratic vice president Hubert Humphrey. There was a third candidate in the race, Alabama governor George Wallace, who championed racial segregation, a measure of the temperature of America at the time.
Civil unrest, protests, riots, polarization and outrageous violence preceded that vote. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that April, sparking protests and riots; U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated that June, while he was a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, large-scale street fighting broke out between anti-Vietnam War protesters and police and the National Guard. Some of the visuals from it look like low-resolution pictures from 2020.
In the wake of that election, a domestic terrorist group formed in Michigan. The Weather Underground started attacking government buildings to protest imperialism and racism. The first thing they blew up was a statue.
It all sounds too familiar.
America survived. It has survived 44 peaceful transitions from one president to the next through 58 presidential elections.
Has America become significantly more fractured?
Has the last four years changed the country that much?
• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys
Categories: Canadian News
U.S. election exit polls: Trump showing new strength with Latinos, losing some older voters
Nov 3 (Reuters) — As voting sites closed throughout the United States on Tuesday, exit polls conducted by Edison Research provided some insight on major issues driving the presidential vote and an early read on voter support.
Here are some highlights from the poll, which is based on in-person interviews with voters on Tuesday, in-person interviews at early voting centers before Election Day and telephone interviews with people who voted by mail.
NEW STRENGTH WITH LATINOS
In an emerging story on election night, Republican President Donald Trump was showing some surprising strength with Latino voters in key states such as Florida and Texas.
In Florida, according to exit polls, Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden were splitting the Latino vote. In 2016, Trump only won four out of 10 Latino voters in his race against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Overall, he was winning three of 10 nonwhite voters versus winning just two of 10 four years ago.
Trump maintained his advantage among white voters. According to Edison Research exit polls, six in 10 white voters said they cast ballots for Trump, unchanged from 2016.
The Trump campaign made winning over Cuban-American voters in populous South Florida a top priority by emphasizing the administration’s hardline policy toward Cuba and Venezuela.
In Texas, four in 10 Hispanics voted for Trump, up from three in 10 in 2016, according to exit polls in that state.
Edison’s national exit poll showed that while Biden led Trump among nonwhite voters, Trump had received a slightly higher proportion of the nonwhite vote than he did in 2016. The poll showed that about 11% of African Americans, 31% of Hispanics and 30% of Asian Americans voted for Trump, up 3 percentage points from 2016 among all three groups.
OLD TRUMP BASE ERODING
Trump may need his improved performance with nonwhite voters to offset losses within his traditional political base. He appears to have lost support among white men and older people in Georgia and Virginia, key parts of the Republican’s voter base, according to Edison polls.
While Trump is still winning the majority of those voters, some of them switched to supporting Biden, the exit polls showed.
Edison’s polls showed Trump winning seven in 10 white men in Georgia, down from an eight-in-10 advantage over Clinton in 2016. While Trump is winning six in 10 voters who are at least 65 years old in Georgia, that is down from seven in 10 four years ago.
Final election results from both states have yet to be tallied, but Biden has been projected to win Virginia. Clinton also won the state in 2016.
In Virginia, Trump was winning six in 10 whites without college degrees, down from seven in 10 in 2016. Trump was also winning six in 10 white men in Virginia, down from seven in 10 in 2016.
In more encouraging news for the president, Trump was winning six in 10 voters in Virginia who have an income of $100,000 or more.
COVID CONCERNS
The national Edison Research poll results revealed deep concern about the coronavirus pandemic that has infected more than 9.4 million people in the United States this year and killed more than 230,000.
While only two of 10 voters nationally said COVID-19 was the issue that mattered most in their choice for president, half of U.S. voters believe it is more important to contain the coronavirus even if it hurts the economy.
Trump has made the full opening of the U.S. economy a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, even as infections continue to rise. Biden has claimed Trump is undeserving of a second term because of his handling of the pandemic.
In the national exit poll, four out of 10 voters said they thought the effort to contain the virus was going “very badly.” In the battleground states of Florida and North Carolina, five of 10 voters said the national response to the pandemic was going “somewhat or very badly.”
Six of 10 said the pandemic had created at least a moderate financial hardship. Seven in 10 said wearing a face mask in public was a “public health responsibility” versus three in 10 who saw it as a personal choice.
The poll found that nine out of 10 voters had already decided whom to vote for before October, and nine out of 10 voters said they were confident that their state would accurately count votes.
Other issues that were top of mind for voters included the economy, racial inequality, crime and safety, and healthcare policy.
Edison compiles exit polls and live election results for the National Election Pool media consortium.
(Reporting by Chris Kahn and James Oliphant; Additional reporting by Dan Burns and Tiffany Wu; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Lincoln Feast and Peter Cooney)
Reuters, 11/03/20 22:48
Categories: Canadian News
A divided America braces for violence as it waits for presidential election results
As Tuesday’s presidential election day dawned in Washington, D.C., a new “non-scalable” fence had been erected around the perimeter of the White House during the night, in anticipation of civil unrest before the day was done.
In parts of the U.S. capital, storefronts were boarded over and federal buildings, such as the Treasury Department, were fenced in. D.C. Police rallied officers and equipment and acknowledged unrest is expected, “regardless of who wins,” said the chief. George Washington University warned students to stock up on a week’s worth of food and medicine, as if a hurricane is heading to town.
Perhaps there is.
Plenty of scenes have been playing out in the United States to stoke fears of the improbability of a peaceful post-election America, no matter who wins the presidential vote.
If Trump loses, will he refuse to accept the result and try to remain in office? Will he rally zealous supporters, some of whom are better armed than many nations, to protect him?
If Trump wins, will his zealous detractors take to the streets in protests that inevitably will bring violence and destruction?
Or will all the angst and fear of unrest, or outright insurrection, turn out to be this year’s pre-result fantasy, akin to 2016’s certainty of Hillary Clinton’s victory?
Is America really a nation of well-armed sore losers?
Things — alarming things — are being thought and said out loud about the prospect for a smooth acceptance of the election results, things that sound as if the scene is a fragile, war-torn country rather than the world’s oldest continuous democracy.
“We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half,” says an article penned by five academics, led by Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a conservative policy think tank, drawing from research tracking public opinion trends.
“Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election — especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process — could generate violence and bloodshed,” Diamond and colleagues wrote in Politico.
“We do not pull this alarm lightly.”
The International Crisis Group, an independent organization that monitors global violence, often focusing on failing states, issued a report on the United States in the campaign’s closing days.
“The ingredients for unrest are present,” the report warns.
The United States faces risks that have doomed other countries: stark political polarization bound to issues of race and identity; the rise of armed groups built around political agendas; and the unusually high chance of a contested election outcome.
“And most importantly,” the report says, “President Donald Trump, whose toxic rhetoric and willingness to court conflict to advance his personal interests have no precedent in modern U.S. history.”
It is an odd place for the United States to be. The Crisis Group understands the apparent cognitive dissonance.
“The country faces an unfamiliar danger. While Americans have grown used to a certain level of rancour in these quadrennial campaigns, they have not in living memory faced the realistic prospect that the incumbent may reject the outcome or that armed violence may result.”
In its final pre-election poll, Gallup found a record high 64 per cent of voters afraid of what will happen if their candidate loses, almost equally by supporters of both Trump and Joe Biden; 77 per cent said stakes are higher in 2020 than in previous elections.
Pew Research Center, in its end-of-campaign polling, found that only half of Trump supporters thought the election would be properly run.
Previous Pew studies found the level of animosity in the United States between Republicans and Democrats was deeper and more personal. It was described as mutual “loathing”; 55 per cent of Republicans said Democrats are “more immoral” than other Americans and 47 per cent of Democrats said the same about Republicans.
These results suggest that even if this election passes without the nightmare scenarios being conjured, governing the country will be more difficult, jaded and partisan.
Political and social unrest this year was pushed along by a deadly and ruinous pandemic, racial injustice and broad public protests amplified by rallying cries on social media. These events exacerbate the dangerous divide, yet none of them will just evaporate after the election results are tabulated.
“Civil war is here, right now,” declared the leader of a far right-wing militia group after a Trump supporter was killed in Portland, Oregon, calling others to rally to his side.
An antifa activist tweeted Tuesday: “The best way to stop a racist with a gun is an anti-racist with a gun. Because they’re not gonna stop having guns.”
The unnerving possibilities were laid bare last month when members of a Michigan militia group were arrested and accused of a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, overthrow the state government and start a civil war.
Is this really all so new?
There was a similar vibe in America during the 1968 Presidential election, when Republican candidate Richard Nixon beat incumbent Democratic vice president Hubert Humphrey. There was a third candidate in the race, Alabama governor George Wallace, who championed racial segregation, a measure of the temperature of America at the time.
Civil unrest, protests, riots, polarization and outrageous violence preceded that vote. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that April, sparking protests and riots; U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated that June, while he was a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, large-scale street fighting broke out between anti-Vietnam War protesters and police and the National Guard. Some of the visuals from it look like low-resolution pictures from 2020.
In the wake of that election, a domestic terrorist group formed in Michigan. The Weather Underground started attacking government buildings to protest imperialism and racism. The first thing they blew up was a statue.
It all sounds too familiar.
America survived. It has survived 44 peaceful transitions from one president to the next through 58 presidential elections.
Has America become significantly more fractured?
Has the last four years changed the country that much?
• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys
Categories: Canadian News
Trump gains commanding advantage in the key prize of Florida with most votes counted
Largely counted out by opinion polls, President Donald Trump put up a fierce fight Tuesday to keep the White House, closing in on the key prize of Florida and mounting a stiff defence in other battleground states.
One of the most bitterly contested, momentous elections in U.S. history wound toward a suspenseful finish as votes cast in a variety of different ways were slowly but steadily counted.
Any possibility of a landslide for either side seemed more and more unlikely as the night wore on, and the numbers lined up in surprising ways.
Biden seemed on the way to stealing Arizona and its 11 Electoral College votes by 10:30 p.m., but Trump was leading in the three former “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Those are considered crucial to deciding the race, and opinion polls had showed the Democrats ahead in each.
U.S. TV networks reporting on the returns had to contend with a whole new pattern in how the vote came in, making races harder to read. The vast numbers of ballots cast in advance — believed to favour the Democrats — were counted first in some places, later in others.
The former vice president had a slim advantage in the Electoral College vote by 10:30 of 98-95, the score representing expected results for each candidate in safe states. A total of at least 270 votes captures the White House.
Returns streamed in as a deeply divided nation waited on tenterhooks for the extraordinary election’s outcome.
But the final result could take days to come after a remarkable surge of advance voting, likely delays in counting ballots and a legal campaign by Trump and his allies against various pandemic-related voting protocols.
As results streamed in surprisingly quickly from Florida, the lead bounced back and forth between Trump and Biden, typical of the kind of tight race for which the state is famous. Then the Republican steadily pulled ahead.
For Trump it was considered a must-win, its 29 Electoral College votes considered essential to his returning for another four years as president.
In other swing states by mid-evening, Trump was on top in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Virginia, the latter two considered likely wins for the Democrats.
Trump also had a solid advantage in Georgia, which Biden had hoped to snatch away.
More than 100 million Americans had cast their ballots before polling places opened on the actual election day Tuesday, with citizens voting by mail in unprecedented numbers or in person at advanced polls.
More streamed to the polls Tuesday amid fears of unrest and violence that did not seem to come to fruition, but will continue to be a spectre hanging over the election’s aftermath.
Some experts predicted 160 million overall could exercise their franchise, about 67 per cent of the U.S. electorate and the highest in a century.
But the integrity of America’s democratic system came under question as never before, with court rulings on the process even on Tuesday. For months, Trump has insisted there would be fraud because of the widespread use of mail-in ballots and counting that could continue for days after Nov. 3.
The size of turnout on election day was itself being closely watched as an indicator of where the vote could head, with Republicans traditionally less likely to vote in advance.
Opinion surveys suggested a comfortable lead nationally for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and a tighter advantage in several of the battleground states. Those are key to winning 270 or more Electoral College votes, the majority that decides who enters the White House under the American system.
Polls put Biden an average of about eight percentage points ahead.
But while Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections, they lost the White House in two of those contests — 2016 and 2000. And Trump captured narrow victories in a number of swing states last election, defying polls that suggested Hillary Clinton was ahead in those races.
The campaign pitted two starkly opposing visions for the United States and how to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, which became a central theme of the election.
President Trump presided over a first term that was marked by chaos and conflict, his inflammatory style blamed for fanning the flames of white supremacy, threatening longstanding international alliances and encouraging an angry, polarized political conversation.
He was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives — but found not guilty by the Republican-led U.S. Senate — after pressuring Ukraine’s president to help him dig up dirt on alleged corruption by Biden’s son Hunter.
Trump touted his success in fuelling a robust economy before the pandemic hit earlier this year, cutting taxes and putting America first in foreign relations. In blunt and often insulting terms, he warned that a vote for Biden would usher in socialist policies and an administration content to let violent, leftist protesters run rampant.
Biden hit hard and often at Trump’s allegedly cavalier approach to the pandemic. The president failed to encourage lockdowns and mask-wearing that have helped curb COVID-19’s spread in countries like Canada, while actively denigrating scientific experts and their advice, the former vice president stressed repeatedly.
Biden painted the election as not only a referendum on Trump’s tumultuous first term, but a fight for which values define the United States.
He claimed he would strive to unite the country, standing up for both blue and red states if he took over the White House.
The candidates — Trump, 74, and Biden, 77 — also marked a historically elderly choice for American voters. Their running mates, Vice President Mike Pence, 61, and Kamala Harris, 56, brought the tickets’ average age down somewhat.
Meanwhile, polls suggested that the number of states whose Electoral College votes were up for grabs had expanded.
They included the one-time “blue-wall” northern states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that Trump flipped from the Democrats last time and Florida, a perpetual toss-up in recent history. But Georgia, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and even Texas were also considered competitive this time.
The remainder of states are typically sure things for each camp, meaning the toss-ups determine who is president.
• Email: tblackwell@postmedia.com | Twitter: tomblackwellNP
Categories: Canadian News
