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'You can't do both. You can't take 70, 80, 90 per cent off the bottom line of businesses and expect them to be really happy about investing in the country'

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OTTAWA The federal Liberals spent big in last weeks budget in a bid to get more domestic bio-manufacturing for products like vaccines, but industry experts said it will take more than money to reestablish Canada as a major industry player.

Canadas vaccine roll-out has suffered from the countrys inability to produce vaccines domestically, with all of the shots going into arms currently being made somewhere else. This has left the country susceptible to export restrictions in Europe or America-first style policies or even complete bans as is happening in India where the country is dealing with a horrific new COVID wave.

Industry Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne said he is confident industry and government can work together to reestablish Canada as a leader in bio-manufacturing.

We are in a journey with a common purpose to make Canada a more significant player when it comes to the life sciences industry of the world, he said.

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That journey came with a $2.2 billion price tag that among other things includes $500 million over four years to the Canada Foundation for Innovation to help universities with capital projects related to research. It also provides $250 million to the governments research councils for bio-medical projects and $92 million to adMare, an arms length firm that helps small companies scale up.

There is also $1 billion in the governments strategic innovation fund set aside over the next seven years for bio-manufacturing projects. That money could be used for major deals like the governments decision last month to spend $415 million on a new vaccine plant in Toronto with drug giant Sanofi Pasteur.

Champagne said the pandemic has forced every country in the world to consider its limitations when it comes to pharmaceutical manufacturing and Canada needs to be prepared to step up to the plate.

The government has to be part of the equation, because obviously were competing with many jurisdictions in the world, he said.

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Pamela Fralick, president of Innovative Medicines Canada, said the funding in the budget is offering a lot for the sector and she is pleased the Trudeau government is finally engaging with the industry.

She cautioned, however, that the governments move to further regulate and lower drug prices runs right up against the goal of setting up a flourishing and vibrant industry.

You cant do both. You cant take 70, 80, 90 per cent off the bottom line of businesses and expect them to be really happy about investing in the country, she said.

She said the government should also look at regulatory issues to clear red tape so companies that have developed new treatments can get them to market quickly.

She said the governments goal of getting vaccines made in Canada is more complex than it might seem. Fralick said she is encouraging the government to think about supporting the whole industry from small start-ups to major players.

The Pfizer vaccine is a good example, she argues, because its supply chain is so complex that no one country could ever hope to produce it completely onshore.

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Its 280 components, 86 suppliers in 19 countries. Thats what it takes to get this vaccine from bits and pieces if you will, into the arms of those of us here in Canada and around the world, she said.

Andrew Casey, president and CEO of BIOTECanada, another industry group, said he was also impressed with the budget and said now it is about determining how best to address some of the other challenges.

There is really significant investment into the sector, and now trying to figure out where all these pieces are going.

He echoed Fralick in saying the government has to think not just about lowering prices.

That relationship has to morph a little bit going forward, away from the pure pricing discussion and towards something thats more holistic and benefits Canada in a broader way, he said.

Casey said predicting the next pandemic or what type of vaccine will be needed is impossible to know, but if Canada has a diverse field of bio-medical companies, there is a better chance the technology will be there to fight it.

What you need to do is start to look at a broader landscape, invest in certain areas, and then grow expertise, knowing that parts of that will be really critical to what the next solution is going to be.

Champagne said the government is looking both short and long-term when it comes to growing the industry, with short-term investments now, but with an eye to building a bigger industry over the long term.

He said Canada isnt alone in trying to push pharmaceutical prices down, but he is open to more conversations with industry about some of the broader issues.

There are some long term policy issues that warrant discussions, particularly following the largest, or the most significant, health and economic crisis we had in a century.

Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com | Twitter: ryantumilty

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Liberals' goal to boost bio-manufacturing in Canada inhibited by their own policies, industry says - National Post

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The parliamentary budget officer, two former Bank of Canada governors and aformer senior Liberal adviser have all criticized the big-spending budget

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The reception that greeted last weeks federal budget from fiscal conservatives was predictable. If you agree with American tax reduction advocate Grover Norquist that government should be shrunk down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub, youprobably didnt appreciate a budget that will send federal net debt levels to $1.4 trillion within five years.

The Trudeau government can brush off such criticism as ideological and partisan. It will find it harder to discount the reaction from an officer of Parliament and from respected economists who have been allies and colleagues in the past.

The critique coming fromthe Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux; fromtwo former Bank of Canada governors David Dodge and MarkCarney,and fromformer senior Liberal adviser, Robert Asselin,isthat a budget that claims to build prosperity for the future overstates the amount of growth it is likely togenerate.

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Giroux told thefinance committee on Tuesdaythat a chunk of the $101 billion the governmenttouted as economic stimulus was in reality a continuation of existing COVID-19 support measures.

Dodge told the Globe and Mail this week that a budgetwhichpositioned itself as being pro-growth doesnot invest much in growing Canadas economic capacity at all. My policy criticism of the budget is that it really does not focus on growth, he said. To me it wouldnt accord with something thatwas a reasonably prudent fiscal plan, let me put it that way.

He said that of the $100 billion billed as being a catalyst for growth, he estimates that only $25 billionadds to public or private investment, with the rest increasing consumption.

Those will be painful words forChrystiaFreelandto hear, given Dodge has been something of an intellectual godfatherfor the Trudeau Liberals. His endorsement of the use of temporary deficits to finance productivity-enhancing infrastructure investments were emblazoned on the Liberal policy platform in 2015.

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The finance minister might have expected a more ringing endorsementfrom Carney, the godfather to one of her children and someone who appeared at the recent Liberal convention saying he would do what he could to help the party.The former Bank of England governor appearedon the Herle Burly podcast this week,withformer PaulMartinadviser David Herle,and damned the budget with faint praise.

He talked about how COVID has accelerated the digital and sustainable revolutions and how the budget did some things to push the economy in that direction. But its going to take more than one budget.I dont think the government would pretend otherwise that this is job done, he said. In myjudgment, this was a hybrid budget, in that it had to conquer COVID by doing important things on the social sideandtostart growth. What we are seeing in some other jurisdictions is that the focus is more squarely on the growth. And when the focus is more squarely on growth, more and morespending isdirect government investment or the type of taxes and other measures that encourage private investmentto(create) the growth in jobs and income that we need down the road.

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Even with Carneys fancy footwork,its plainhe would have preferred more investment and less spending.

Asselin, a former budget and policy adviser to Trudeaus first finance minister, Bill Morneau, ismorebluntin his assessment. He labelled the short-term stimulus as a political solution in search of an economic problem in an article in The Hub, a new online commentary website.

He pointed out that the budget assumes economic growth of 5.8 per cent this year, four per cent next year, before moderating to two per cent for the rest of the forecast horizon. He criticized the lack of a coherent growth plan, with the bulk of innovation funding going into a Strategic Innovation Fund that has beenneither strategic nor innovative. Does it drive business investment and make our firms more competitive? Nobody has ever tried to answer this question seriously in Ottawa, he said.

Asselin spoke from experience when he said the most likely outcome of the stimulus spending is long queues of ministers and their senior officials in line at Treasury Board meetings with their budget submissions.

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The budget has added layers of duplication and bureaucratic complexity to a system that was not known for its nimbleness and agility, he said.

In addition to the prospect of disappointing growth numbers, all four economists acknowledgedthe inherent risk of soaring debt loads.

Giroux pointed out that, even with a new fiscal anchor thataims to reduce debt to GDP levels from a high of 51.2 per cent, there is no intention toreduce that ratioto pre-pandemic levels in the low-30s. He said the government has decided to effectively stabilizethe federal net debt ratio atahigherlevel through to 2055, with all the implications thatfollow for future fiscal room.

Dodge said that, while the rising debt burden is a concern, it is not yet a problem and wont become one as long as interest rates remain lower than growth.

On the rising debtlevel,Carney said just because something is possible, doesnt mean it is optimal.He pointedout if the growthstrategy is successful, it will force interest rates to rise, which will have a knock-on impacton debt servicing costs. The PBO has estimated that a one per cent rise in interest rates would cost $4.5 billion more in the first year and an increase of$12.8 billionby year five.

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But while most economists agree the debt is manageable, there is a sense of missed opportunity in the budget.Asselin accused the government of contriving a false economic premise to justify spending on unfocused and unimaginative structural spending.

All wouldclearlylike to see more public capital investment, more incentives for private investment or, ideally, both.

Instead, we have a federal government that isfailing tocreate the conditions neededto make Canada the best place in the world to do business.

Just three days after the budget, Canadian chip makerAlphawave decided to move its headquarters to the U.K., and issue shares on the London Stock Exchange to fund a new researchcentre in Cambridge, England.

Thats not Ottawas fault necessarily but it isnt helping.

An additional $12 billion to bolster Old Age Security in the budget isgoodnews for seniors but it does very little tocatalyze long-term growth.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

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John Ivison: Federal budget criticism that will be hard for the Liberals to brush off - National Post

Author James Baldwin

Novelist and essayist James Baldwin. Credit - Ted ThaiThe LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In discussions about race relations today, the works of James Baldwin continue to speak to the present, even decades after they were written. So it is worth remembering that, at the very height of his influence, Baldwin experienced the same frustration that some Black activists, particularly on campus, feel about white liberals today: their refusal to acknowledge their complicity in the regime of white supremacy. In Baldwins case, the liberal backlash was widespread, and effectively marginalized him for a time.

The very first piece on the front page of the very first issue of The New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963, was a review of Baldwins The Fire Next Time by F. W. Dupee of the Columbia English department. Dupee (a former Communist Party organizer) took exception to Baldwins apocalyptic tone. Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? Baldwin had written. The answer, Dupee wrote, is that [s]ince you have no other, yes; and the better-disposed firemen will welcome your assistance.

Baldwin had abandoned criticism for prophecy and prescription for provocation, Dupee said. He was goading white racists, who were in a better position to cause trouble than Black people were, and it is unclear to me how The Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, can do nothing except inflame the former and confuse the latter. The point was repeated by Kenneth Rexroth in the San Francisco Examiner. The Fire Next Time, he wrote, is designed to make white liberals feel terribly guilty and to scare white reactionaries into running and barking fits.

At the end of the year, Baldwin participated in a Commentary symposium, Liberalism and the Negro. Baldwins fellow symposiasts were Gunnar Myrdal, Nathan Glazer and Sidney Hook, the epitome of liberal integrationist opinion. It became a war almost from the start, and Baldwins most persistent antagonist was Glazer. This was not surprising. Unlike the others, Glazer had worked in the American government. He served in the Housing and Home Finance Agency, precursor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), when Kennedy was president, and he had just published, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot. Glazer had written most of the book, which was based on research into the conditions of ethnic groups in New York City. He must have felt entitled to believe that he had a better grasp of government programs and of the facts on the ground than Baldwin did.

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The argument of Beyond the Melting Pot is that many Americans retain their ethnic identities regardless of the degree of their assimilation in other respects, and from this it followed that Black Americans should do the samethat is, they should become like other ethnic groups. The trouble, Glazer said, is that the Negro insists that the white world deal with his problems because, since he is so much the product of America, they are not his problems, but everyones. But once he becomes willing to accept that he is a member of a group, he will be able to take responsibility for himself and other members of his community.

Baldwin knew what he was in for, and he set the stakes early on. [T]o my mind, you see, he said, before one can really talk about the Negro problem in this country, one has got to talk about the white peoples problem . . . There is a sense, he went on, in which one can say that the history of this country was built on my back. To the suggestion that he become a member of one of the ethnic groups competing for their share of the pie, his answer was: What pie are you talking about? From my own point of view, my personal point of view, there is much in that American pie that isnt worth eating.

Glazer responded that its not prejudice that slows racial progress as much as ignorance, incompetence, and bureaucratic inefficiency. [T]he problems are a product of the kind of unwieldy institutions we have, he told Baldwin, the kind of feudal country we have, the kind of recalcitrant special interests that have developedamong them Negro interests. And so we all fight it out.

To this kind of argument Baldwins response was if you dont know what Ray Charles is singing about, then it is entirely possible that you cant help me. It is a good bet that none of the white men sitting around the table had ever willingly listened to Ray Charles. But they all wanted to help Black people, and they were being told that this was the reason they probably couldnt.

White liberals who identified with the Kennedy Administration resented being told they were not getting it. But even white liberals who may have considered themselves politically purer of heart expressed impatience. With Baldwin, Susan Sontag wrote in The New York Review of Books, passion seemed to transmute itself too readily into stately language, into an inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory.

The Commentary symposium was published in March, 1964. In August, Esquire ran a profile of Baldwin that had been commissioned by the magazines editor, Harold Hayes, who thought that Baldwins war on white liberals was absurd. The writer, Marvin Elkoff, dutifully portrayed Baldwin as mercurial and high-strung, and quoted him calling the white liberal blinder, more innocent and ignorant than the segregationist, and saying things like: If you dont realize that the same people who killed Kennedy also killed Medgar Evers, then you dont understand what is going on in the world. In the end, Elkoff concluded, everybody was playing his [Baldwins] game, and of course not nearly as well . . . At bottom he is disaffiliated, a medium of emotion.

At Christmastime, Baldwin published a deluxe boxed coffee table book of photographs with his high school friend Richard Avedon, now a successful fashion photographer. Baldwins essay is a cri de coeur on the banality of American life. It begins with despairing reflections on the artificiality of actors in television commercials and descends into musings like: When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents.

There is a way in which this boutique item, which does not present itself as a book about race, brings the precariousness of Baldwins position into focus. When he said things like the history of this country was built on my back or, in a widely publicized debate with William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union, I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone elses whip, he was using an established conceit of group autobiography (as Malcolm X did in his autobiography, published in 1965.) The understanding is that if these things did not happen to the author, they happened to somebody like the author. The I stands for the group.

White people dont write group autobiographies, however. It was not that people did not believe that when Baldwin lived in the United States, he had encountered racism and discrimination. It was that professionally, he had suffered no more, and arguably less, from efforts to censor him than, for instance, Norman Mailer or Henry Miller had. From the very beginning, he had been supported and promoted by powerful writers and editors, Black and white. He had written bestsellers: the only book that sold more copies than Another Country in 1963 was William Goldings Lord of the Flies. He wrote for Partisan Review and The New Yorker. He had been on the cover of TIME. He hung around with celebrities; he was rich; he had an entourage. And on top of all that, he had been living in Paris for eight years, and when the Montgomery bus boycott turned out to be a success, he turned up on the scene, in 1957, and started telling everyone what it was like to be Black in America.

The New York Review of Books was ready for Nothing Personal. The headline was Everybody Knows My Name, and the reviewer was Robert Brustein, who was soon to become dean of the Yale School of Drama: Now comes Richard Avedon, high-fashion photographer for Harpers Bazaar, to join these other outrage exploiters, giving the suburban clubwoman a titillating peek into the obscene and ugly faces of the mad, the dispossessed, and the great and neargreat [sic]with James Baldwin interrupting from time to time, like a punchy and pugnacious drunk awakening from a boozy doze during a stag movie, to introduce his garrulous, irrelevant, and by now predictable comments on how to live, how to love, and how to build Jerusalem.

[L]ending himself to such an enterprise, Brustein concluded, Baldwin reveals that he is now part and parcel of the very things he is criticizing. Baldwin was one of a handful of Black writers who had a white audience in 1963, and he lost it. He had set the bar higher than many white liberals were willing to jump.

This essay is adapted from Menands new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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How Liberal White America Turned Its Back on James Baldwin in the 1960s - Yahoo News

A reasonable counterpoint: What choice do right-thinking liberals have? American democracy is badly broken unresponsive, unaccountable, broadly disconnected from the will of the people. Decades of gerrymandering have fractured many voting districts to favor the right wing, and the results of the 2020 census may well advance Republicans redistricting strategy even further.

Broad voter suppression laws of the same genus as the latest efforts in Georgia and Texas have opened a gulf between what voters want and what theyre even capable of asking for. And over the last decade, 10 wealthy donors alone have poured $1.2 billion into federal elections, while super PACs and other groups have spent $4.5 billion, with millions in dark money flowing legally and unaccountably into elections nationwide. You can vote for whomever you choose, but your choices are chosen for you by powers beyond your control.

But those powers, too, answer to some authority: capital. Just as workers can marshal the power they have over capital by going on strike, capital can leverage the power it has over governments by using capital strikes.

Occasionally, that kind of intervention can arrive as a welcome relief, especially when turned against countermajoritarian policies promulgated by legislators ensconced in crooked districts carved out to favor them.

So why not a marriage of convenience at least a temporary one? For one: Capital is unfaithful. It can, and does, play all sides. Many of the courageous businesses that protested North Carolinas 2016 bathroom bill, for instance, also donated to political groups that helped fund the candidacies of the very politicians who passed the bill. It isnt possible to cooperate with capital on social matters while fighting them in other theaters; capital can fight you in all theaters at once, all while enjoying public adulation for helping you, as well.

Setting aside the fact that capital can in a single moment be both heroic and diabolical Amazon wants you to be able to vote, but it would prefer if you didnt unionize it is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy.

Capital rallies to the defense of democracy while aggressively quashing that very thing in the workplaces where its workers labor. Its tempting, perhaps even satisfying, to call the governments boss, but after the dressing down, youre still just a customer, worth only as much as you can pay them or make them. That the jerks whove done their best to enervate our democracy are in the same boat as us is a cold comfort.

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Opinion | The Rise of Woke Capital Is Nothing to Celebrate - The New York Times

Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief last week after Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. The crime was heinous, the verdict just, the moral neat. If you think that systemic racism is the defining fact of race relations in 21st-century America, then Chauvins knee on Floyds neck is its defining image.

But what about a case like that of MaKhia Bryant, a Black teenager who was shot and killed last week by Nicholas Reardon, a white police officer in Columbus, Ohio, at the instant that she was swinging a knife at a woman who had her back against a car?

Ben Crump, the Floyd familys lawyer, accused the Columbus police in a tweet of killing an unarmed 15yo Black girl. Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama adviser, tweeted that Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Jarrett wants to Demand accountability and Fight for justice.

An alternative view: Maybe there wasnt time for Officer Reardon, in an 11-second interaction, to de-escalate the situation, as he is now being faulted for failing to do. And maybe the balance of our sympathies should lie not with the would-be perpetrator of a violent assault but with the cop who saved a Black life namely that of Tionna Bonner, who nearly had Bryants knife thrust into her.

Thats a thought that many, perhaps most, Americans share, even if they are increasingly reluctant to say it out loud. Why reluctant? Because in this era of with-us-or-against-us politics, to have misgivings about the lefts new anti-racist narrative is to run the risk of being denounced as a racist. Much better to nod along at your offices diversity, equity and inclusion sessions than suggest that enforced political indoctrination should not become a staple of American workplace culture.

And yet those doubts and misgivings go to the heart of what used to be thought of as liberalism. The result will be a liberal crackup similar to the one in the late 1960s that broke liberalism as Americas dominant political force for a generation.

Morally and philosophically, liberalism believes in individual autonomy, which entails a concept of personal responsibility. The current model of anti-racism scoffs at this: It divides the world into racial identities, which in turn are governed by systems of privilege and powerlessness. Liberalism believes in process: A trial or contest is fair if standards are consistent and rules are equitable, irrespective of outcome. Anti-racism is determined to make a process achieve a desired outcome. Liberalism finds appeals to racial favoritism inherently suspect, even offensive. Anti-racism welcomes such favoritism, provided its in the name of righting past wrongs.

Above all, liberalism believes that truth tends to be many-shaded and complex. Anti-racism is a great simplifier. Good and evil. Black and white.

This is where the anti-racism narrative will profoundly alienate liberal-minded America, even as it entrenches itself in schools, universities, corporations and other institutions of American life.

Its possible to look at Floyds murder as the epitome of evil and not see a racist motive in every bad encounter between a white cop and a minority suspect, including the recent shootings of Adam Toledo in Chicago and Daunte Wright in Minnesota. Its possible to think that the police make too many assumptions about young Black men, sometimes with tragic consequences, and still recognize that young Black men commit violent crimes at a terribly disproportionate rate. Its possible to believe that effective policing requires that cops gain the trust of the communities they serve while recognizing that those communities are ill served when cops are afraid to do their jobs.

It is also possible to recognize that we have miles to go in ending racism while also objecting to the condescending assumptions and illiberal methods of the anti-racist creed. The idea that white skin automatically confers privilege in America is a strange concept to millions of working-class whites who have endured generations of poverty while missing out on the benefits of the past 50 years of affirmative action programs.

Similarly, the idea that past discrimination or even present-day inequality justifies explicit racial preferences in government policy is an affront to liberal values, and will become only more so as the practices become more common. In Oakland the mayor backed a private initiative that was to provide $500 a month to low-income families, but not if they were white. In Vermont, the state has given people of color priority for Covid vaccines.

Ibram X. Kendi, the most important anti-racist thinker today, argues that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. Some liberals will go along with this. Many others will find themselves drifting rightward, much as a past generation of disaffected liberals did.

Joe Bidens resounding victory and his progressive policies are supposed to mark the real end of the Reaganite era of American politics. Dont be surprised if theyre a prelude to its return, just as the last era of progressive excess ushered in its beginning.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Race and the Coming Liberal Crackup - The New York Times