US lawmakers voted Friday to elevate President Joe Biden’s giant social welfare bill to the Senate, in a major step forward for his vision to create a more equitable society — the centerpiece of his domestic agenda.

Build Back Better — Biden’s potentially legacy-defining package of education, health care, childcare and climate reforms — was green-lit by the House of Representatives four days after he signed into law the first part of his economic blueprint, a sweeping upgrade of the country’s crumbling infrastructure.

The $1.8 trillion measure faces a bumpier ride in the upper chamber Senate, with the Democrats’ deficit hawks jittery over spiraling inflation, before it gets a final rubber stamp in the House, likely in January.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi had hoped for a vote late Thursday but Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy scuppered that plan by breaking her record for the longest House floor speech, clocking in at more than eight-and-a-half hours.

The breakthrough vote in the House came as Biden was set to transfer power to Vice President Kamala Harris while he underwent a colonoscopy under anesthesia as part of a regular health check.

The White House released a statement from the president as he was out of action, describing the vote as “another giant step forward in carrying out my economic plan to create jobs, reduce costs, make our country more competitive and give working people and the middle class a fighting chance.”

Dealbreaker

The legislation would provide millions of jobs, according to the White House, although Republicans have characterized it as an example of wildly out-of-control Democratic spending.

It will likely be trimmed further in any case in the upper chamber, where Democrats have the narrowest of majorities and moderates are voicing concerns over Biden’s spending plans.

Annual inflation jumped to 6.2 percent last month, giving Republicans another cudgel to bash Biden with as they bid to retake both chambers of Congress in next year’s midterm elections. 

House Democrats would have lost the party-line vote had there been more than three defectors.

In the end only one Democrat — from a competitive district in Maine — joined the Republicans in rejecting the bill, boosting the majority party’s hopes that members in both chambers can overcome months of infighting to get the package signed into law.

Republicans seized on an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office saying the bill would boost the deficit by $367 billion over 10 years.

But White House officials had already been warning for days that the estimate would not take into account savings that could be made through tougher taxation enforcement.

‘Craptacular mess’

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Friday that Build Back Better was “more than fully paid for,” and would help reduce the deficit in the long run “by asking large corporations and the country’s top earners to pay their fair share.”

The bill is likely to be taken up by the upper chamber in late December or possibly January, with more urgent priorities such as avoiding a debt default and a government shutdown expected to take up much of the holiday period.

Pelosi downplayed the potential for senators making major changes, telling reporters after the vote that 90 percent of the text had been agreed among Democrats in both chambers of Congress and the White House.

“There were some differences at the end, and we’ll deal with that as we go forward,” she said.

The Senate has been locked in a 50-50 split for one of the longest periods in its history, and, with no votes to spare, every Democrat effectively has a veto on any bill as long as Republicans stick together.

Senate progressives are pushing for a national paid family leave program and a bigger expansion of health care benefits, but the latest inflation data could torpedo those efforts.

“We will act as quickly as possible to get this bill to President Biden’s desk and deliver help for middle-class families,” the upper chamber’s leader Chuck Schumer said.

But Nebraska’s Ben Sasse led a chorus of opprobrium from Senate Republicans over the legislation, labeling it a “craptacular mess” that will lead to “a million more annual IRS (tax) audits.”

Source: AFP

President Joe Biden will meet at the White House next week with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, his office said Wednesday, as the US administration seeks to shore up alliances that came under strain under Donald Trump.

At the November 18 meeting, Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will discuss efforts to fight the pandemic, as well as climate change and immigration, the White House said.

Biden is relaunching a gathering known as the North American Leaders’ Summit, the last of which was held in 2016 before being abandoned by Trump.

“During the summit, the United States, Mexico, and Canada will reaffirm their strong ties and integration while also charting a new path for collaboration,” the statement said.

It said the talks will also address “a regional vision for migration,” a touchy issue for the US and Mexico, which regularly sees thousands of mainly Central American migrants arrive at its southern border hoping to reach the United States as they flee poverty and violence at home.

“With respect for each other’s sovereignty and in a true spirit of partnership, we affirm our unwavering vision that North America is the most competitive and dynamic region in the world,” the White House said.

In addition to the three-way talks, Biden will also participate in bilateral meetings with Trudeau and Lopez Obrador.

The US statement noted that Biden held his first foreign bilateral meetings as president with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

“Since day one of the Biden-Harris administration, the United States has reaffirmed the importance of our regional partnerships to realize a more equal, prosperous, greener, democratic future for all our hemisphere’s citizens,” said Biden’s senior director for western hemisphere affairs, Juan Gonzalez.

The change of tone from the Trump era is stark.

Trump renegotiated a major North American trade deal with the two US neighbors but he also triggered conflicts with them.

His project to build a wall along the southern US border weighed on ties with Mexico.

He also had tense relations with Trudeau, calling him “dishonest” and “weak” at the height of a spat over US tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, the European Union and Mexico.

Source: AFP

President Joe Biden returned from Europe Wednesday with a wake-up call for feuding Democrats holding up his sweeping domestic reforms in Congress — after a humiliating state election defeat that many blamed on inertia and infighting among the party’s lawmakers.

“I do know that people want us to get things done,” he told reporters asking for his takeaway on longtime favourite Terry McAuliffe’s loss to a Republican newcomer in Tuesday’s Virginia governor’s election.

“And that’s why I’m continuing to push very hard for the Democratic Party to move along and pass my infrastructure bill and my Build Back Better bill.”

Amid nosediving approval ratings and frustration over his stalled economic agenda, Biden came home to a Republican red wave that swept over the eastern United States Tuesday, from Virginia Beach to Long Island and beyond.

Republicans pulled off a decisive upset in the gubernatorial election in otherwise blue-trending Virginia, with untested multimillionaire Glenn Youngkin beating McAuliffe, while the Democratic governor of New Jersey won re-election but only barely.

There were also Republican gains across New York City and a conservative backlash to a liberal proposal in Minneapolis — the city where George Floyd was murdered by police — to dismantle the local force.

Hours before the polls closed, Biden had voiced confidence about the votes in Virginia and New Jersey, rejecting suggestions in any case that they were a verdict on his presidency.

Asked several times on Wednesday if he took responsibility for the bloodletting in local elections, he avoided giving a direct answer.

But he told reporters at the White House: “People are upset and uncertain about a lot of things — from Covid to school, to jobs to a whole range of things and the cost of a gallon of gasoline.

“And so if I’m able to sign into law my Build Back Better initiative, I’m in a position where you’re going to see a lot of those things ameliorated quickly and swiftly. So that has to be done.”  

‘Clear message’

Biden, who campaigned as a centrist but has governed to the left, is facing a thorny path to the November 2022 midterm elections as he plays peacemaker between the increasingly polarised Democratic factions he has failed to bring together.

The president offered bold action on the climate in Glasgow at the weekend, but the lack of tangible progress in Washington on his environmental goals reverberated through the COP26 summit, underscoring the damage being inflicted on his agenda by months of infighting.

Amid record-shattering turnout, Youngkin squashed McAuliffe’s comeback by leveraging parents’ fears over a public school curriculum they consider too liberal and growing frustration with Biden, who swept the state by 10 points only a year ago.

Democrats have privately been warning for weeks that a McAuliffe loss could spook moderates already skittish about the expansive scale of Biden’s two-pronged, $3 trillion plan to transform infrastructure and enlarge the social safety net.

While Biden’s news conference may spur rank-and-file lawmakers to deal more urgently with considering his priorities, it is far from clear they are united on the lessons they should be taking from Tuesday’s setbacks.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist holdout on much of Biden’s agenda, led calls Wednesday for a handbrake on spending negotiations so that lawmakers can “take time and do it right.”

But progressives reached the opposite conclusion, arguing that Virginia had been lost by middle-of-the-road Democrats blocking provisions for child care, prescription drug reform and paid family leave from Biden’s Build Back Better social welfare package.

“Terry McAuliffe has been saying for weeks that his fate was tied to the progress of negotiations here on Capitol Hill,” Senate majority whip Dick Durbin told reporters, echoing Biden.

“And there ought to be a clear message to my party and all those who support it to get the job done.”

In reality, Congress had nothing to do with perhaps the most damaging gaffe of McAuliffe’s campaign, when he said at a September 29 debate with Youngkin: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

The remark became a rallying cry for conservatives bitter over mask mandates in schools and misled by the false Republican notion that “critical race theory” was being taught to their children.

Peter Loge, a public affairs professor at George Washington University, offered a crumb of consolation to those fearing the death of the party, pointing out that the Virginia governor’s election almost always serves as voters’ first opportunity to cudgel the party of the new president.

“What I do think the White House has to do now is go to Democrats in Congress and other Democrats around the country and say, look, here are the details of the votes,” Loge said.

“Here’s what voters were telling us… Let’s focus on what matters — and that’s families, that’s schools, that’s jobs, that’s inflation.”

Source: AFP

President Joe Biden promised to show the world that democracies can work to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As he prepares to push that message at a pair of global summits, his case could hinge on what’s happening in Washington, where he was struggling to finalize a major domestic legislative package.

After a fitful day of talks over the fate of twin infrastructure and social spending bills that he cast as a choice between “leading the world, or letting the world pass us by,” Biden landed in Rome aboard Air Force One in the dark early Friday with the answer still undetermined.

Headed first to a Group of 20 summit in Rome and then to Glasgow, Scotland, for a UN climate summit, Biden will be pressed to deliver concrete ideas for stopping a global pandemic, boosting economic growth and halting the acceleration of climate change. Those stakes might seem a bit high for a pair of two-day gatherings attended by the global elite and their entourages. But it’s written right into the slogan for the meeting in Rome: “People, Planet, Prosperity.”

It was a reflection of his promise to align US diplomacy with the interests of the middle class. This has tied any success abroad to his efforts to get Congress to advance his environmental, tax, infrastructure and social policies. It could be harder to get the world to commit to his stated goals if Americans refuse to fully embrace them, one of the risks of Biden’s choice to knit together his domestic and foreign policies.

Before leaving Washington, Biden pitched House Democrats to get behind a scaled-back $1.75 trillion “framework” that he believes could pass the 50-50 Senate. It remained to be seen whether lawmakers would embrace the package or send Biden back to the negotiating table, as some key priorities like paid family leave and steps to lower prescription drug costs were excised from the bill, which will be paid for with hiked taxes on the nation’s wealthiest and corporations.

“The rest of the world wonders whether we can function,” Biden told the lawmakers, according to a source familiar with his remarks.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked the trip as she tried to rally Democratic votes around the separate $1 trillion infrastructure package, attempting, unsuccessfully, to build support for a vote on Thursday before Biden arrived in Rome.

“When the president gets off that plane we want him to have a vote of confidence from this Congress,” she said. “In order for us to have success, we must succeed today.”

While Biden was in the air, Pelosi, facing opposition from progressives who also want assurances that the scaled-back social spending plan will pass, pulled the plug on a Thursday vote and instead set out to pass yet another stop-gap funding measure for a range of transportation initiatives.

Biden’s trip abroad comes as he faces an increasingly pessimistic nation at home, and souring views of his handling of the nation’s economy. According to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, just 41% of Americans now approve of Biden’s economic stewardship, down from 49% in August and a sharp reversal since March, when 60% approved.

Americans are split on Biden overall, with 48% approving and 51% disapproving of his handling of his job as president. Only about a third of Americans say the country is headed in the right direction, also a significant decline since earlier this year when about half said so.

Domestic politics, global implications

One consequence of Biden’s decision to so closely link up his domestic and foreign policies is that both are now at the mercy of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, whose votes are essential in a Senate evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Biden aides have hoped for, among other things, a more than $500 billion investment to combat climate change in the United States, which would help efforts to persuade China and other nations to make investments of their own in renewable energy.

“It’d be very, very positive to get it done before the trip,” Biden said Monday.

But as talks slogged on, administration officials began to play down the significance of Biden’s spending plan still hovering in limbo. White House press secretary Jen Psaki stressed that the president can still work the phones from Rome, the city that gave birth to the word “Senate.” She suggested that foreign leaders can see beyond ongoing backroom talks with US lawmakers in order to judge Biden’s commitment.

“They don’t look at it through the prism of whether there is a vote in one body of the legislative body before he gets on an airplane,” Psaki said.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan, though, has framed the bills as vital to the nation’s security. “Making these investments in American strength will be very important to our national security going forward,” he said.

Reaching for a deal that has had a perilous journey thus far, the president is beginning his trip abroad with an expert in the power of prayer. Biden, the nation’s second Catholic president, will meet Friday with Pope Francis at the Vatican in a visit that is part personal for the intensely religious commander in chief and part policy, particularly around matters of climate and confronting autocracies.

Delicate diplomacy

Biden will also pay a visit to the Italian hosts of the G-20 summit before he sits down with French President Emmanuel Macron. Biden is trying to close a rift with France created when the US and UK agreed to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, supplanting a French contract in the process.

Biden is also expected to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who backed down just days ago from threats to expel Western diplomats and whose purchase of Russian surface-to-air missiles has upended his country’s participation in the F-35 fighter program.

In those and other meetings, Biden is expected to address the Iranian nuclear threat, and Iran’s announcement that it could return to talks next month in Vienna.

He is also set to continue to press wealthier US allies to step up their commitments to share Covid-19 vaccines with lower- and middle-income countries. Some nations have been slow to deliver on ambitious pledges and others have largely stayed on the sidelines. Biden will argue that the pandemic can’t be ended until vaccines are available widely, and that democracies can’t let Chinese and Russian vaccine diplomacy — which often comes with strings attached — take root globally.

Biden will have little interaction with those two most significant of American rivals, as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin participate in the summits only virtually because of the pandemic threat. Those two leaders are critical for broader climate issues at a time of rising energy prices. China has committed to increase coal mining ahead of winter, while Russia’s natural gas reserves give it a degree of political power over parts of Europe.

Beyond the policies and personalities that will be prominent in Biden’s trip, the president will be trying to make the case for democracy itself, arguing that essential aspects — fair elections and representative government — are superior to autocracies in good times and bad.

Heading to Scotland on Sunday night for the climate summit, Biden will lead a large US delegation that he hopes will showcase America’s plans to address the threat of climate change. It’s a sharp reversal from former President Donald Trump, who withdrew the US from the Paris climate accord.

Biden is set to deliver a significant address on climate change and attempt to reclaim the mantle of American leadership. One of the key objections to shifting away from oil and other fossil fuels has been the costs, but the president has been making the claim that nature is already exacting a price with extreme weather from climate change.

Source: FRANCE 24 with AP

The United States and the Taliban will hold their first in-person talks since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan starting Saturday, the State Department said.

The US delegation will meet Saturday and Sunday in the Qatari capital Doha with senior Taliban representatives, a State Department spokesperson said.

The United States has remained in contact with the Taliban since the longtime foes seized Kabul in August as US troops pulled out but the meeting will be the first that is face to face.

“We will press the Taliban to respect the rights of all Afghans, including women and girls, and to form an inclusive government with broad support,” the spokesperson said Friday.

“As Afghanistan faces the prospect of a severe economic contraction and possible humanitarian crisis, we will also press the Taliban to allow humanitarian agencies free access to areas of need,” he said.

The State Department stressed that the meeting did not indicate that the United States was recognizing Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

“We remain clear that any legitimacy must be earned through the Taliban’s own actions,” the spokesperson said.

Letting US citizens leave

The US team will also press President Joe Biden’s key priority of letting US citizens and Afghan allies during the 20-year military operation leave the country.

The United States says that the Taliban have largely cooperated on letting out US citizens. Around 100 remain, predominantly US citizens with roots in Afghanistan who are undecided on whether to leave, according to US officials.

But the United States acknowledges that it was not able to get out most Afghan allies who wanted to leave during a hasty airlift that pulled tens of thousands of people out of Kabul before the withdrawal.

The spokesperson did not specify who would represent the two sides. Senior US officials including Central Command chief General Frank McKenzie met with the Taliban in Kabul in August as US troops took over the airport for the airlift.

(AFP)

Senior Pentagon officials said Wednesday the collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces in August could be traced to the 2020 US agreement with the Taliban signed in Doha that promised a complete troop withdrawal. Joe Biden has faced the biggest crisis of his presidency over the withdrawal in Afghanistan, drawing criticism from Republican US lawmakers.

This week, the US House and Senate started hearings of a congressional review on the troop pull-out in Afghanistan and the war itself. During its second day, General Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command, told the House Armed Services Committee that once the US troop presence was pushed below 2,500, as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unravelling of the Washington-backed Afghan government accelerated.

“The signing of the Doha agreement had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military – psychological more than anything else, but we set a date-certain for when we were going to leave and when they could expect all assistance to end,” McKenzie said.

On February 29, 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in which the US promised to fully withdraw its troops by May 2021, with the Taliban committing to several conditions, including stopping attacks on American and coalition forces. The stated objective was to promote peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Kabul, but that diplomatic effort never gained traction before Biden took office in January.

McKenzie had believed “for quite a while” that if the United States reduced the number of its military advisers in Afghanistan below 2,500, the Kabul government inevitably would collapse “and that the military would follow.” In addition to the morale-depleting effects of the Doha agreement, the troop reduction ordered by Biden in April was ”the other nail in the coffin” for the 20-year war effort, he added, because it blinded the US military to conditions inside the Afghan army: “our advisers were no longer down there with those units.”

Democrat Biden has faced the biggest crisis of his presidency over the war in Afghanistan, which he argued needed to be brought to a close after 20 years of stalemated fighting that had cost American lives, drained resources and distracted from greater strategic priorities.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, testifying alongside McKenzie, said he agreed with the analysis. The Doha agreement also committed the United States to ending airstrikes against the Taliban, “so the Taliban got stronger, they increased their offensive operations against the Afghan security forces, and the Afghans were losing a lot of people on a weekly basis,” he added.

War in Afghanistan ‘a strategic failure’

Wednesday’s hearing with Pentagon leaders was politically charged. Republicans sought to cast President Biden as wrongheaded on Afghanistan, and Democrats pointed to what they called ill-advised decisions during the Trump years.

The previous day, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a similar hearing in the Senate that the war in Afghanistan was a “strategic failure,” and he repeated that on Wednesday.

When pressed Tuesday, Milley also told the Senate committee that it had been his personal opinion that at least 2,500 American troops were needed to guard against a collapse of the Kabul government and a return to Taliban rule.

Defying US intelligence assessments, the Afghan government and its American-trained army collapsed on August 15, allowing the Taliban to capture Kabul with what Milley described as a couple of hundred men on motorcycles and without firing one shot. That triggered a frantic US effort to evacuate American civilians, Afghan allies and others from Kabul airport.

The Taliban had ruled the country from 1996 to 2001.

‘Plain old politics’

US House and Senate started hearings which could become an extended congressional review of the US failures in Afghanistan. This after years of limited congressional oversight of the war although hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were consumed.

“The Republicans’ sudden interest in Afghanistan is plain old politics,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, who supported Biden’s decision to end US involvement there.

Tuesday’s hearing also was contentious at times, as Republicans sought to portray Biden as having ignored advice from military officers and mischaracterised the military options with which he was presented last spring and summer.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas) asked why Milley did not choose to resign after his advice was rejected. The general, who was appointed to his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President Donald Trump and retained by Biden, said it was his responsibility to provide the commander in chief with his best advice.

“The president doesn’t have to agree with that advice,” Milley said. “He doesn’t have to make those decisions just because we are generals. And it would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to resign just because my advice was not taken.”

(FRANCE 24 with AP & REUTERS)

A former senior US Department of Homeland Security official has warned former Republican President Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House would result in “disaster” for the American intelligence community.

“I think it would be a disaster,” Brian Murphy said of Trump’s possible 2024 presidential campaign in an interview on Sunday.

“He puts out disinformation and that’s an existential threat to democracy, and he is one of the best at putting it out and hurting this country,” Murphy said.

He added that such disinformation “polarizes us.”

“Political polarization in this country is at the worst it’s ever been,” Murphy said.

He then went on to say that disinformation and polarization are considered leading threats to the US intelligence community, which is a coalition of 17 agencies and organizations, including the ODNI, and CIA.

This comes despite the fact that Pulitzer Prize winner American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has revealed in a recent article that an axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

“Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands,” Greenwald wrote.

“But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden,” he added.

Meanwhile, Trump has said that only a doctor’s call could prevent him from participating in the 2024 presidential race.

In an interview on Friday, the 75-year-old businessman said that only “a bad call from a doctor or something” could stop him from running.

“Things happen, through God, they happen,” he said. “But I feel so good.”

Trump has alleged that the 2020 election was “the greatest Election Hoax in history.”

Trump believes that the election was rigged by the Washington establishment in favor of Joe Biden, the current US president.

Source: Presstv

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hung onto power on Monday as his main rival conceded defeat, but his Liberals fell short of his goal for a majority win.

Trudeau, in power since 2015 and governing with a minority of House of Commons seats since 2019, decided to gamble on an early vote and capitalise on his government’s handling of the pandemic, which included massive spending to support individuals and businesses and a push for high vaccination rates.

Instead, he will end up where he started after an unexpectedly tight election race characterised by a lacklustre campaign and voter anger at an election during a pandemic.

“You (Canadians) are sending us back to work with a clear mandate to get through this pandemic into brighter days ahead,” Trudeau said, flanked by his wife Sophie Gregoire and their children on stage at a victory gala in the early hours of Tuesday. “That’s exactly what we are ready to do,” he said.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, whose party placed second, conceded defeat as results trickled in late into the night.

Erin O’Toole is closer to becoming Canada’s next prime minister than any Conservative Party leader has been since 2015, when rockstar candidate Justin Trudeau swept a dour three-term incumbent into the history books under a wave of Trudeaumania. O’Toole is no rockstar – his vibe is closer to affable-roadie-turned-band-manager. But a tone-deaf act of hubris by Canada’s flashy frontman could yet score O’Toole the top gig.

When Liberal Party leader Trudeau called these snap September 20 legislative elections back in August, the task looked simple on paper. Reliant on making nice with other factions in the House of Commons since losing his majority (not least due to an embarrassing blackface photo scandal) in 2019 – way back in the Before Times – Trudeau hoped to parlay widespread approval of his handling of Canada’s Covid-19 crisis into votes, a stable majority and a fresh five-year term coming out of the pandemic.

After all, Canada has enjoyed a G7-leading vaccine rollout, escaped abject disaster with the second-lowest Covid-19 fatality rate among G7 nations, and has so far recouped some 95 percent of the jobs lost during the pandemic, outshining its basket-case neighbours to the south on all counts. And through it all, Trudeau was there at the mic – relatably shaggy, bearded and working from home – providing regular updates on the pandemic in progress. (Meanwhile, the hot-button nitty-gritty was being hashed out elsewhere: Healthcare and schools are provincial responsibilities in Canada, not federal ones.)

So as a leader just 15 seats short of a majority in Canada’s 338-seat lower house, why not brazenly call an election two years early? With Monday’s election now strikingly tight, Canada’s political observers have been counting the ways why not.

The consensus suggests Trudeau miscalculated: 1) how little appetite there was (particularly among his own Liberal supporters) for a pandemic election amid a Delta-fuelled fourth wave; 2) progressives’ impatience with lofty Trudeau promises after six years in power, with his ethics woes still close to mind and a creeping suspicion (even among Liberals) that the feminist, Pride-parading modern leader they elected is a cynic at heart; 3) the single-minded loathing Trudeau inspires on the right; 4) the indelicate optics of calling an election on August 15, the very day Kabul fell; and 5) just how primed his rivals were across the board to pull the plug on Trudeau.

Enter stage right, Erin O’Toole.

In the year or so since O’Toole won the Conservative Party leadership, the burly 48-year-old father of two reportedly shed 35 pounds by lacing on his running shoes daily. But he has also shed a significant number of the hardline “blue Tory” stances that won him that Conservative primary, successively dropping pledges against a carbon tax and an assault-weapon ban, to take a run at Trudeau’s job.

Born in Montreal in 1973, O’Toole moved as an infant to Bowmanville, Ontario, now a far-flung suburb in Toronto’s eastern sprawl, after his father took a manager’s job at the General Motors plant nearby. Erin and his two younger sisters lost their mother to breast cancer when he was nine. O’Toole credits his mother’s work sponsoring a family of Vietnamese refugees, thousands of whom were welcomed to Canada in 1979 under Conservative prime minister Joe Clark, with instilling in him a sense of service.

O’Toole doesn’t have the spectacular political pedigree of Trudeau – who was born in 1971 to a sitting prime minister, the charismatic Liberal iconoclast Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and grew up in the limelight.

But the senior O’Toole, too, introduced his son to the heady buzz of the campaign trail, holding local office before serving five terms as a Conservative in Ontario’s provincial legislature.

At 18, O’Toole enrolled at military college and became an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force four years later, flying as a tactical navigator on workhorse Sea King military search and rescue helicopters and rising to captain. He has quipped about his teen dreams of Top Gun and ultimately settling for the wingman role. “I walked into the recruiting centre thinking I was going to be Maverick. And not only was I not Maverick, I was Goose. And I was on an old, antiquated helicopter,” O’Toole told Canadian newsmagazine Macleans last year.

O’Toole, who is younger than Trudeau but looks older with his thinning white hairline, has leaned on his armed forces service to drive home his party’s character message about Trudeau. “When Mr. Trudeau was partying – and we’ve all seen the photos – I was doing search and rescue missions in the military,” O’Toole told a crowd as a chippy last week of campaigning began. “Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives – privileged, entitled and always looking out for number one,” he went on. “He’ll say anything to get elected, regardless of the damage it does to our country.”

Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper has noted that if elected O’Toole would be the country’s first prime minister in more than 50 years with military experience. He served in the regular forces of a peacetime military until 2000, when he moved to the reserves to study law in Halifax. He worked as a corporate lawyer in Toronto, notably for Procter & Gamble, and founded a charity for veterans called True Patriot Love, after a lyric in Canada’s national anthem.

When a Conservative federal legislative seat opened up on his old stomping grounds in 2012, O’Toole leapt at the opportunity and won the by-election. Re-elected three times as MP, he would serve briefly as veterans affairs’ minister in 2015, three years as shadow foreign affairs minister, and stand twice for the Conservative leadership before winning on his third try last year.

In his bid to update his party and bring Conservatives back to power in Ottawa, O’Toole has torn a page from the playbooks that brought success to his conservative contemporaries in Britain and the United States. He’s been vocal in his pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ views, echoing compassionate conservatism à la David Cameron. He’s made a play for working-class votes, mining for disillusioned Liberals like Boris Johnson poached support from old Labour Party bastions. And he’s engaged in sloganeering – “Canada First”, “Take back Canada” – that openly mirrors Donald Trump. O’Toole similarly lobbied to cancel “cancel culture”, mocking “woke” campaigns to re-dedicate public buildings named for founders of the notorious Residential Schools system that brutally oppressed generations of indigenous Canadians, before walking back his comments amid accusations of race-baiting.

Not that grassroots Conservatives are always along for O’Toole’s ride. At a party convention in March, the rookie leader backed a resolution to add “climate change is real” to the Conservative policy book. Delegates rejected it. When a Liberal bill to ban LGBTQ conversion therapy was tabled in the House of Commons in June, O’Toole backed it – but the Conservatives’ deputy leader voted against.

O’Toole, who tested positive for Covid-19 last year, has himself been vaccinated against the coronavirus. But while Trudeau required Liberal candidates to get the jab before campaigning, O’Toole declined to mandate vaccines for his own candidates, even as they knocked on voter doors and visited senior care homes. The Conservative said he preferred rapid testing and calls health decisions a matter of personal choice. As a result, Trudeau, who is seeking to mandate vaccines for public servants and domestic travel, has painted O’Toole as beholden to anti-vaxxers and unequipped to lead a party within which more radical views appear to thrive.

“He can’t even convince his own candidates to get vaccinated,” goaded Trudeau during a televised debate this month. “Mr. O’Toole can’t even convince his party that climate change is real.”

“I’m driving the bus,” O’Toole shot back.

Smiling in button-down shirts and sneakers on the trail, O’Toole hasn’t looked the part of the stuffy humourless Tory leader of old. His pledge to deploy more than $50 billion in new spending over five years, too, is a far cry from Conservative doctrine. Pandemic spending has seen Trudeau run Canada’s highest budget deficit since World War II, easy pickings for a fiscal conservative. But O’Toole’s platform only pledges to balance the budget within ten years and “without cuts”.

“We’re not your dad’s Conservative party anymore,” O’Toole told voters during a campaign stop on Wednesday.

Statistical tie

Down the home stretch, pollsters say Trudeau and O’Toole are in a statistical tie ahead of Monday’s vote. Canada being a parliamentary democracy, there are practical limitations to popular vote polling. The election isn’t a one-horse race – it’s 338 horse races, one in each district – and Trudeau’s and O’Toole’s names only feature on ballots in their own Montreal and greater Toronto ridings, respectively. In 2019, Conservative candidate Andrew Scheer won the popular vote yet still fell 36 seats short of Trudeau’s Liberals. But this time, pollsters say, it’s different.

Under O’Toole’s big-tent rejig, the Conservatives are losing some support in Western Canada, but they can afford to shed votes there and still retain their seats. Meanwhile, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, the TikTok-savvy 42-year-old progressive who has pointedly claimed the sunny hopey-changey mantle from Trudeau after keeping his minority government afloat, looks to be plying key votes away from the Liberals in key Ontario battlegrounds. Trudeau’s fate is squeezed between the two.

“The consensus (seat projection) seems to be a Liberal minority, because of the more efficient distribution of Liberal support compared to Conservatives’ support (which has big wins in the West),” Nanos Research founder Nik Nanos told FRANCE 24. “For the Liberals to win a majority, we would need NDP support to switch to the Liberals in the close of the campaign. It is still possible but unlikely today,” added Nanos, the Ottawa-based firm’s chief data scientist.

Others are more circumspect. In Toronto, Ipsos Global Affairs CEO Darrell Bricker says a majority appears off the table for any party. But as to who will lead Canada’s next minority government, “It’s true suspense,” Bricker told FRANCE 24. “I will genuinely say, on the record and off, I don’t know.”

When Trudeau called the election in August, Bricker said, “I think most political observers couldn’t believe he was doing it.” Ipsos polling showed 56 percent of voters didn’t want an election, with Liberal voters those least in favour. “I don’t know how he missed that… The only people who wanted an election were opposition voters, particularly Conservatives,” he said. Trudeau “didn’t understand how Canadians would view the Machiavellian aspects of this – and his position with Canadians, from being this beacon of goodness and light into being just another politician, and potentially even more cynical than other politicians,” Bricker said. Trudeau’s unwelcome election call “kind of played into all that. It just blew up on him and exploded. And he hasn’t been able to shake it.”Trudeau criticized at debate for calling Canadian election

If the election call itself made the election a referendum on Trudeau, Conservatives were happy to oblige. And the social conservatives among them, at least for now, seem happy enough to look the other way to oust a long-loathed nemesis.

“O’Toole is only rising because people are so upset with Justin Trudeau. So he’s going up basically as the alternate choice,” said Bricker. “He hasn’t offended anybody. He’s become an acceptable option, as opposed to… building any momentum like Trudeau did in 2015.”

The pollster explains that in Canadian politics of late, progressives need to adore a candidate. “They need to feel that they’re voting for hope, they need to plug into emotion around a political leader. The right doesn’t,” Bricker explained. “For the left, it’s like American Idol (or Canadian Idol or Eurovision). For the right it’s like a job interview…. If you look like you can do the job, you’re okay.” The upshot is that, for now at least, O’Toole equivocating on policy doesn’t matter. “Because it’s not about him.”

“The Conservative vote is about one thing right now and that’s Justin Trudeau gone,” Bricker said. “So they are willing to put a lot of stuff away for that,” he said, adding the data shows the biggest motivation for fully half of Conservative voters is removing Trudeau. “I’ve never seen that before,” the pollster said.

Nanos, for his part, says the Conservatives pivoted to casting the ballot question as one of character. “This has been more about O’Toole exceeding very low expectations,” the data scientist said, downplaying the effect of the Conservative’s fluctuating policy. “His steady performance and more progressive and spending platform compared to previous Conservative campaigns has helped inoculate him and the Conservatives from Liberal fear-mongering,” Nanos said.

Caught between a rockstar and a hard place?

Now comes the tense wait. After polls close across Canada’s six time zones on Monday, counting an unusually high number of mail-in ballots requested amid the pandemic could delay the final calls in tight races.

Much of what follows is down to convention. If Trudeau’s Liberals don’t win the highest number of seats on Election Day, he is within his rights as the incumbent to delay conceding the race while he tries to form a government. If Trudeau does make good on late projections and salvage his minority government with a plurality of seats, he may yet emerge a wounded leader, his rivals left and right given a proverbial shot in the arm by a vote of the Liberal’s own making that spun out of his grip.

And what if the rookie O’Toole ekes out a win? “O’Toole’s problem is that he’s got a party that doesn’t necessarily agree with him,” said Bricker, making the business of heading a minority government a particular challenge. The Conservative “sugar high” of ousting Trudeau, as he called it, would be short-lived with a pandemic to manage. From O’Toole’s perspective, Bricker quipped, “the old analogy is the dog that caught the car: ‘I’ve got it. What am I going to do with it?’

Source: France 24