Dispatch from the Front Lines: The tariffs are dead. Except these ones. And those ones.
No peace on the trade front. More weirdness in Alberta. And prayers for Mexico.
Hey, folks. Too bad about the hockey. We’ll have more to say about that later. But for now, we hope you’ll enjoy the latest episode of The Line Podcast. We had a lot to discuss!
And if you’ve seen it already, check out last week’s On The Line, too! In it, Jen interviews Calgarian Paul Hughes from Kharkiv, Ukraine — where he has been volunteering for years.
Firstly, we at The Line are going to have a lot more to say about Alberta in coming days and months. But firstly, we just wanted to make note of Premier Danielle Smith’s address to the province this week ahead of a budget that is widely expected to include a significant deficit.
As per usual, Canada’s “conservative” province has run up its program spending on the back of high oil prices, and now, with a comparative decline in prices, faces a significant shortfall. This is an extremely old story in this province, but this year we have a new twist. Smith took to the airwaves to blame her government’s fiscal mismanagement on immigration.
The government then paired this framing with the release of nine new referendum questions to be posed to Albertans in the fall, several of which will focus on how and when to provide social services to new arrivals.
Why are those questions necessary? Well, no one seems to be quite able to answer that — if immigration is truly so out of control, then it doesn’t make any sense to wait seven months and have a referendum before actually dealing with that problem. The United Conservative Party already enjoys a majority in the legislature — it could take action tomorrow. But we’ll get more into the politics of these questions in a full column presently.
For the moment, we would just like to note two things.