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The Liberals promised in their 2019 budget to work toward creating a national school-food program and have reached out to provinces, territories and key stakeholders over the past months.

Ellen O'Nan/The Associated Press

The federal Liberals are being told to avoid creating a one-size-fits-all national school-food program to replace the existing patchwork of efforts to feed hungry children.

The Liberals promised in their 2019 budget to work toward creating such a program and have reached out to provinces, territories and key stakeholders over the past months.

The design of a new program will provide answers to lingering questions about how soon the program kicks off, how big it will be when it begins, which children will qualify and what meals theyll receive.

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Federal officials have been told to provide provinces, territories and even schools themselves with the latitude needed to deliver programs that meet local needs, said Joanne Bays, co-founder of Farm to Cafeteria Canada. The group seeks to get locally produced food into public institutions kitchens, starting with schools.

The main message was go slow and Canada needs a recipe for success, said Ms. Bays, whose organization receives federal funding to run and evaluate a food program in dozens of schools.

We have lots of other places we can look to see what they have done, but we need to pilot these things in Canada and evaluate and come up with our own unique formula.

Canada is the only member of the Group of Seven countries with large economies that doesnt have a national school-food program.

Instead, there are thousands of food programs for the roughly five million children enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools programs often run by community groups with financial help from governments and charities.

Feeding all school-aged children could cost billions each year, depending on whether funding would provide snacks, breakfast or lunch, or more than one of those. Its a steep budget ask, and also potentially too ambitious for the current system to handle.

Instead, as a start, the Coalition for Healthy School Food has asked the Liberals for $360-million in this years budget to expand existing local programs and grow slowly, similar to what the Liberals did with their child-care spending.

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No one at this moment, I think, is interested in the federal government coming in and funding a brand-new top-down program, for a variety of reasons, said Debbie Field, the coalitions co-ordinator.

Not even that it would be expensive, but primarily it would erase what is on the ground, which would be a bad idea.

A national program would likely require cost-sharing with provinces and territories. Negotiating funding deals would delay any large social program, as the Liberals have found with their housing and child-care strategies.

And those agreements and associated spending were approved when the Liberals had a majority in the House of Commons, which they lost in the October election.

Ms. Field said she isnt concerned the politics of a minority Parliament will get in the way of funding and creating a national program because of cross-party support for the idea at the federal and provincial levels.

Ms. Bays said any federal spending would be more than covered through reduced health-care spending and increased economic activity for local farmers.

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The latest figures from Statistics Canada show that 8.7 per cent of Canadian households, or almost 1.25 million homes, are considered food insecure, meaning they dont have enough money to afford, or otherwise cant get, the amount and variety of food needed for a healthy lifestyle.

In June, ahead of a meeting with stakeholders, the then-minister of social development Jean-Yves Duclos was told that coming to school hungry could be the result of income, lengthy commutes, early-morning sports practices, or just busy morning family routines. That was in a briefing note, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

The reasons explain why groups want the Liberals to work toward a universal program that isnt based solely on income: Poverty isnt the only reason some children dont eat.

Ms. Bayss group is conducting 21 round tables in every province and territory to get a better sense of how a program should be framed, particularly for Indigenous communities.

Continuing talks with federal officials are important, she said, because the more people feel that theyre engaged in whats being put out there, the more successful that program is going to be.

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More:
Liberals set table for national school-food program, warned to avoid top-down approach - The Globe and Mail

Leave it to politics to turn a show as mundane as Project Runway into the subject of a brief scandal.

During the latest episode of the long-running show, in which aspiring designers compete against each other, one of them took criticism of his boring design as a chance to get a little salty.

I cannot see Karlie wearing it anywhere, honestly, one judge said of the outfit, referring to host and judge Karlie Kloss.

To that, contestant Tyler Neasloney responded, Not even to dinner with the Kushners?

For context, Klosss husband is Joshua Kushner, brother to Jared Kushner, who is a senior adviser to his father-in-law, President Trump.

Kloss, however, had been dating Kushner since 2012, long before Trump's campaign. The couple is also vocally liberal. Kloss is pro-Hillary Clinton, pro-Planned Parenthood, and pro-gun control. According to reports, the rest of the Kushners dont like her very much.

So after Neasloneys comment, Kloss looked understandably shocked. Thats your husband, Neasloney noted, as if the comment werent politically charged.

Keep it to the challenge, Kloss responded.

The clip went viral, with plenty of liberals on social media applauding Neasloney for his snark. The way he ended her, one commenter gushed.

Apparently, it doesnt matter that Kloss is a Democrat who appears to be estranged from the Trump-y side of the family. Its been hard to marry into the Kushner family, she said this summer. But I choose to focus on the values that I share with my husband, and those are the same liberal values that I was raised with and that have guided me throughout my life.

So why dont liberals love her? Because she doesnt spend every waking moment trashing her pro-Trump family, la George Conway. Conways public sparring with wife and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway has made him something of a resistance hero, and its even inspired a Saturday Night Live skit. Liberals accept Conway because hes willing to sacrifice family loyalty for loyalty to their political orthodoxy.

Until Kloss starts trashing the Kushners on Twitter, she will be loathed for prioritizing her family over her liberal ideals.

Read more:
Liberals hate Karlie Kloss for the same reason they love George Conway - Washington Examiner

Last Oct. 21, Canadians elected a minority government for the fourth time this century. And while past minorities in Canada have lasted on average slightly over one year and a half, there is a general feeling that, barring a major scandal, this legislature could last way beyond that mark considering the Bloc and NDP both hold the balance of power, and that the Conservatives are now searching for a new leader.

Nevertheless, five polling firms have published voting intention polls in the past month, and their data have generally converged (see list of all federal pollshere). Here is a quick recap:

(Note that Nanos federal numbers are publishedbehind a paywalland are therefore not shown here.)

What do all these polls have in common? They all show the NDP and the leaderless Greens polling modestly above their 2019 election results. With the Greens expected to nominate a new leader in 2020, it will be interesting to see how (or whether) it will affect voting intentions. Should the governing Liberals disappoint green-leaning voters in the next 12 months, we could witness a significant shift in voting intentionswhich could dramatically flip the national seat projections.

Adding these poll results to the 338Canada electoral model, here is the updatedpopular vote projection:

On the graph above, the coloured bars indicate the 95 per cent confidence interval and the black dots, the latest poll results (AR: Angus Reid; LE: Lger; AD: Abacus Data; EK: EKOS).

Once again, the Liberals and Conservatives remain in a statistical tie with support from nearly a third of the electorate apiece. The NDPs average stands just below 18 per cent and the Greens hold steady at 8 per cent. The Bloc Qubcois is at 30 per cent in Quebec (7 per cent nationally).

By breaking down the levels of support by provinces and regions, we calculate the following338Canada seat projection:

Unsurprisingly, considering voting intentions have not moved much since October, these seat averages remain close to those of the election results:

Even though the Conservatives will most likely be without a permanent leader for the better part of 2020 (more on that below), these numbers suggest a snap spring or summer election would be incredibly risky for the Liberals: The Bloc has coalesced a significant fraction of CAQ-leaning Quebec nationalists (andFranois Legaults approval ratings of latehave been higher than any Quebec Premier in the past 30 years); the NDPs core base remains strong, and the Greens should be able to improve their standingsespecially with a new leader. Hence, with the Conservative supportsfloormost likely around 30 to 32 per cent nationally, the Liberals have little to no room to grow in the short term.

About the Conservatives: With Andrew Scheer announcing his resignation as leader in mid-December, one might have thought the party would organize a quick, 2018 Ontario PC-style leadership race. In 2018, Patrick Brown resigned from the PC leadership in late January and Doug Ford was designated PC leader on March 11, 2018, so a snap leadership race and conventioncanbe done. However, it was announced before Christmas that the CPCs policy convention scheduled for April 2020 in Toronto has been postponed to November 2020 (and moved to Quebec City). Whether the new CPC leader will be chosen before then is not known for now.

There is always room for improvement, but it has been a fairly good year for Canadian pollsters: the Alberta, P.E.I., Newfoundland and Labrador and Manitoba provincial elections yielded mostly expected results, and the federal election was almost called spot on. In 2020, we look forward to several significant leadership races: federal Tories and Greens, the Quebec and Ontario provincial Liberal parties, the Parti Qubcois, and the B.C. Greens. We will also keep an eye on the Saskatchewan general election scheduled for Nov. 2.

Oh, and we will take an occasional peek at whats going on south of the border.

Happy new year, dear readers.

Continue reading here:
The year-end 338Canada projection: Nowhere to go for the Liberals - Maclean's

How miserable are you feeling as you contemplate 2020? Putting aside our individual circumstances, the answer is often closely linked with how we are minded politically. A series of body blows to centrist thinking since the honeymoon period after the cold war gave way to a financial crisis and bitter backwash, followed by the arrival of Donald Trump and a gaggle of nationalist-populists around the globe. Add a resounding Boris Johnson majority at home, midwifing a Brexit on untrammelled terms and liberal grumpiness has its reasons.

But it feels like the right moment to ask whether the gloom-deploying strategy has been so smart. A far-left Labour party served up a recipe of predictions of disaster to dim the fairy lights of the holiday season and suffered calamity at the polls. More broadly, liberals (and not just the Lib Dem kind) need to think about how unattractively miserable they have become and what they might do about it.

One key reason Johnson has prevailed is his ambition and direction. This is being linked with a less attractive character trait, namely recklessness. But here is a politician who has carefully exploited Barnumesque moments to emphasise that he is different from the dreary run of his peers. Some people deem that innately hilarious; others find the antics and confection of his speeches wearing a man-child in leaders clothing.

Still, it would require a political tin ear not to heed his appeal to parts of the country that rejected his partys forebears with such gusto.

North-west Durham, where I grew up, and nearby Bishop Auckland (which has acquired Agincourt significance for victorious Conservatives) are two such fiefs. They switched political course in large part because they were fed up waiting for the Brexit moment to come and because of the not unreasonable view that if you feel left behind in an area where for decades the only language has been Labour, it makes sense to change the language.

A stalwart Labour-voting friend in a Durham constituency told me a couple of weeks before the election that he kept encountering people who were considering switching intentions because Johnson was someone you could sit down for a beer and have a laugh with.

Back in the enclosed political drawing room of Remainy central London, the denunciations of his moral turpitude were a repeated theme. I wish he would just go away, snapped one acquaintance (pointlessly, it turned out).

Reality check it was Anna Soubrys Independent Group for Change that shut up shop at the end of 2019. When I email a prominent Tory defector to the Lib Dems to ask what comes next, he replies simply: Time to do something else. Sands today shift extremely fast and perceptions can differ widely, even before we reach the extremes of politics. Where Johnsons critics saw egregious moral weakness, an on-off relationship with the truth and a threadbare promise to deliver more spending while dealing with the economic and logistical challenges of leaving the EU, a lot of other people disagree. As one of his cabinet puts it: Boris is a personal Rorschach test, in which the inkblot takes on multiple meanings.

Enthusiasm, even if misdirected, is more alluring than bearing a grudge about someone elses vision. Yet the tentacles of pessimism have spread much more broadly among liberals, who traditionally believed in harnessing the best of human endeavour. Liberalism acknowledges the continuing fight of individuals and society against overweening power or obscurantism, but it also needs determination and flexibility.

Does the language of centrist progressives still say this with any gusto? Or is it locked into predicting disasters? The overuse of catastrophic to describe a range of Brexit outcomes is followed by a new contender in the cliche charts deeply troubling (in which the deeply bit means something happened that one had not predicted and is thus confused about).

If the BBC gets unfairly into hot water on charges of skewed impartiality, I might suggest to commissioners, including my beloved bosses at Radio 4, that the tone and range of ideas can tip too easily into woe is us. As much as we relish the Greta Thunberg blasts on climate warnings and lawyers giving stern takes on how democracies might perish, it does reflect a mindset captured by the Pet Shop Boys satirical Miserabilism: Make sure youre always frowning/ It shows the world that youve got substance and depth.

Somehow, the Conservatives have acquired a key liberal trait and vice versa. Tories have long been aligned to a view of mankind with roots in stoicism and gradual change. Yet the leap to leave the EU was also a moment when headstrong instinct prevailed over caution.

Liberals (in the British tradition) flourished politically as the Whig party, embracing institutional and social reform. Even when they miscalculated or sometimes failed (as in the liberal interventions of the early 2000s), the guiding desire was to engage with an evolving world. This did not always make them right, but it did make them a force to be reckoned with in democracies and on the international stage.

These days, the general mode of communication is a miffed sense of being rejected, while telling everyone they were right all along and you will one day realise this. I keep thinking back to Jo Swinsons election night speech, which wanted to tell us that she stood by an open, welcoming, inclusive society (so far, so good), but ended blaming nationalism for eviscerating her party, rather than a poorly thought through Brexit strategy. After a rollicking SNP defeat, we can forgive a bad note or two, but that sourness needs to be dealt with by her successors or anyone with an intention to revive a third force between the far poles of British politics.

Just telling voters that they are the dupes of some vague but regrettable force does not feel open about why the progressive project is struggling in Britain and beyond. Battered centrists, who exist across the parties and beyond them, will need to respond to a new political settlement. They may have to bite their tongues as the prime minister, seeing a changed Conservative landscape before him, boosts investment in the north of England and entrenches in political territories that the centre-left deemed, in the fond but patrician language of Blairism, our people.

The projected reopening of the Newcastle-Ashington-Blyth railway line to boost deprived towns isolated by poor infrastructure will serve as a symbolic moment for the Johnson re-engagement with northern lands (and a useful fillip for more devolution, since the idea was hatched locally, before the election).

Such prospects also offer openings for local people, since they demand attention to the kind of detail and practical decision-making that centrists have long cared about how projects work in practice, the consequences and opportunities for communities and environmental protections. Decentralising will encourage fresh thinking about how to reboot sagging projects such as the city academies for areas outside the metropolis and strategies for public sector revival that go beyond raising spending levels. That is the kind of progress liberals should hold the government to delivering, when the honeymoon is over.

To recover relevance, liberalism needs to change the way it sounds and how it thinks about itself, to make the arguments that matter on how societies heal and flourish, the balance of state and market, and the need to engage voters fully on climate change without alienating them by preachiness. Too many of these arguments will go unheard if the overall tone is self-pity and Bregret. A Greek chorus telling us how awfully the national drama is going will not sell tickets to the great progressive revival.

Lesson one: cheer up a bit. Then figure out how to take on the battle of ideas that still counts.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor at the Economist and presents Across the Red Lines on Radio 4

See the original post:
Theres a lesson in Boris Johnsons jolliness. Liberal miserabilism is a turn-off - The Guardian

I used to enjoy a good ideological sparring. You could almost wake me up in the middle of the night for a fight about ethical theory or big ideas in political philosophy.

These days, I flip between that keenness and deciding which debates to prioritise.Its not because I now lack curiosity about ethical and political theory, but because I do not have a students penchant to ignore the question of how best to divvy up increasingly limited time.

In my first book, A Bantu In My Bathroom, I argued that black people are as capable of racism as white people are. I did so because, first, it is a view I hold and, second, I was and still am of the view that there are seriously flawed psychological and normative errors embedded in the counterview that denies my position.

Nowadays, I have almost no appetite, unless I am pushed very hard, to explain and defend my view. I decline most invitations to discuss with fellow black people whether we can be racist. This is because my priorities have shifted.

I think the elimination of white supremacy in the world is a far more urgent goal to work towards than a footnoted definitional debate between black interlocutors on an interesting theoretical question about the elasticity of the terms racism and racist.

What it means to live in an anti-racist society and how we will achieve that end-goal are questions of more important political and intellectual inquiry at this point in my life. The contingent world history of racism is a history of anti-black racism and white supremacy, undeniably so, and we had better get on with the intellectual and activist labour to focus on fighting white supremacy. That is why I have semi-retired myself from the debate on whether black people can be racist.

I am beginning to feel the same about debates on liberalism although Im not quite as jaded about this subject. But I am quickly heading in that direction.

Here is why. We need to ask whether any political party has the ideas, concrete plans, leadership and other skills to rescue this country from the perpetual brink of disaster. Who can ensure that millions of poor black people have opportunities to become economically self-sufficient and to live with dignity, and perhaps even to flourish?

I think the theoretical debate about liberalism is becoming a useful and intentional distraction by those who do not want to come out as anti-poor and anti-black.

Lets be honest about the liberalism debate in the South African context. What we really want to know is whether the Democratic Alliance should be a liberal party (still) and, if so, what kind of liberalism it should punt? Much of the criticism levelled against former party leader Mmusi Maimane is that he moved the party away from its traditional roots.

This whole debate is dishonest. First, we should not give Maimane credit he doesnt deserve. He is a very nice guy, but he couldnt write anything near an impressive undergraduate exam paper on liberalism or political philosophy more generally. To accuse him of moving the DA intentionally away from its traditional roots is to impute to him a grand ideological project he never had. He was weak in part because he was ideologically inchoate. Maimane enjoyed political titles and nominal power. This is what drove him, not deep political thought.

Second, there is a more fundamental dishonesty by those who clamour for the DA to return to its imagined classical liberal roots. This is all word play deployed by mostly a bunch of conservative and libertarian men who dont have the guts to say they dont care much for an interventionist state that takes social security seriously, and redistributive race-based policies aimed at redressing past injustices. They end up writing endlessly obscure thought pieces on platforms the average voter doesnt go to or care for, navel gazing about well-established political philosophy debates on liberalism.

We should not let them get away with drawing us into a false public debate about political philosophy. A more useful debate would be about specific policies and issues such as land, inequality, poverty, affirmative action and, yes, identity.

As a voter, I want to know from any politician answers to such questions as: How would you grow the economy? How would you stem job losses? How would you help us become less unequal? What is your position on the land question? Does race matter? Why or why not? How would you go about dismantling the remnants of apartheid spatial planning? How would you mend state-owned enterprises? What, if any, should the future role of state-owned enterprises be in our political economy? What is your view on the welfare state? To what extent, if any, should we trust markets to help us ensure access to education, healthcare and other primary social goods? How do we reduce the gap between constitutional normativity and daily battles along the legal value chain that suggest we have not yet entrenched the rule of law, and constitutional values, firmly enough?

I appreciate that ideological commitments can guide one in answering these more specific questions. That is partly why Im not yet completely disinterested in a debate about the future of liberalism. I have argued before that one can be both liberal and black, and defended my preferred view of liberalism, which is one that centres egalitarianism.

As I get older I no longer have time for humouring false debates. The bull in this debate is the dishonest motive of way too many people who enter the liberalism debate not so much to rehearse their theoretical convictions (which would be fine) but to avoid revealing their views on the practical issues that are of material and immediate concern to millions of South Africans still living on the margins of society.

This leaves me somewhat discombobulated. I do think liberalism can serve us. But only liberal egalitarianism can do so. As a student of philosophy, I am also annoyed by non-experts, of all backgrounds, who fail to appreciate the complex taxonomy of liberal positions, often arguing as if there is one way of being liberal when liberals routinely and richly disagree with one another. If I was a DA politician (which I do not, nor ever desired to be), I would push for a kind of liberal egalitarianism that is rooted in the specific experiences of black people, the survivors of white supremacist and apartheid economics and politics.

Why would that make me liberal? Because freedom and individualism matter to me as fundamental values worth foregrounding, and social structures such as family, church and other group-level entities, can be oppressive when autonomy isnt cherished, and protected by a liberal state.

But our individualism can only flourish when we have the goods with which to develop and express our individual selves. That is why Im still convinced a liberal defence of a strong state is coherent. Liberalism must be in service of egalitarianism and the state should be arranged to achieve these outcomes.

The political left in this country are wrong to assume they alone have the political tools with which to articulate a caring and responsive state that pays attention to the history of anti-black racism and the phenomenology of still miserable contemporary black life.

But, when all is said and done, this theoretical battle must not be entered into with people who want to pull wool over our eyes. The salient question right now for South Africa isnt whether there is a future for liberalism but whether those who call themselves liberals are willing to sign up for a political programme of action that aims to get us to an anti-racist society in which black people in particular can enjoy living meaningful lives just as our white brothers and sisters have always enjoyed. That, and that question alone, should be the one we should wake each other up to debate.

Debating liberalism at the theoretical level is as distracting as an endless footnoted debate about whether the label racism can apply to Andile as well as to Steve.

Read more:
Don't be distracted by liberalism debate - Mail and Guardian