Apparently, in March of this year, Liberal parliamentarians invited NDP MPs to a closed-door meeting at which they conspired to move next year’s election date back a week.
A week’s delay isn’t much. What’s the big deal?
Well, it’s not the principal, it’s the money.
The Liberals and New Democrats concocted their plan to move the election from Oct. 20 to Oct. 27, just so 28 of their caucus mates would qualify for MP pensions of about $78,000 a year.
Members of Parliament must serve at least six years in order for their pensions to vest fully. For those MPs first elected in 2019, Oct. 20 would be a day or two too early. Therefore, for them to “earn” their full, tax-supported, lifelong payouts, they would have to be in office another week.
Then, in order to cover their tracks in this little plot, the two parties came up with the excuse that next year, the festival of Diwali will fall on Oct. 20. The Liberals and New Democrats claimed it wouldn’t be fair to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists for whom Diwali is a cultural celebration.
There was, though, no discussion of the fact that, if the original voting date was kept, the last week of campaigning would conflict with Thanksgiving 2025, or that Alberta municipal elections were also scheduled to be held Oct. 20.
Just Diwali was offered up as the excuse, undoubtedly because, in an ’Aha!’ moment, the Liberals and New Democrats thought they had found the perfect multicultural screen for their little pension subterfuge.
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine one of the secret plotters exclaiming, “Hey, guys, if anyone calls us out on this, we’ll just label them racists. That always works!”
I’m guessing Quebec Liberal MP Sherry Romanado thought she’d come up with the perfect ‘Gotcha!’ moment this week when the Liberal-Lefty scheme was raised at the House Affairs Committee of the Commons.
“There are 32 Conservatives who were elected in 2019 who would benefit from this, too,” Romanado is reported as having said by Blacklock’s Reporter.
Yes, Ma’am, you’re right. There are 32 Conservatives in the Class of ’19. But they are not likely to get punted by voters next election the way most Liberals and many Dippers are. The Conservatives are likely to be around another four years, so the date change is unlikely to affect their pension eligibility, one way or the other.
Besides, Conservative MPs voted against the bill to change the election date.
If this proposal was designed out of cultural sensitivity and not just money-grubbing, why were only Liberals and New Democrats invited behind the curtain?
Not even Bloc MPs were invited. If the meeting had no nefarious motives, why the cloak-and-dagger routine?
This kind of ‘We’ll scratch your backs if you’ll scratch ours’ mentality is proof the Liberal-NDP non-aggression pact is back on, at least informally.
Frankly, the Liberals and the New Democrats are so alike mentally and ideologically that they don’t need a formal agreement to think and act (to spend and tax) together.
Although NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh made a big deal in early September of tearing up his formal supply-and-confidence agreement keeping the Justin Trudeau government in power, there has not been a moment since when the Liberals were in any danger of falling as a result of the NDP voting against them.
Indeed, this week, after the Bloc failed to extort pension and marketing board concessions from the Liberals, and Bloc Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet threatened to pull the government down, there was trusty old Singh saying Canadians didn’t want him to force an early election.
Pension revelations could cost taxpayers $4.7 million a year. That’s a good example of the high cost of the continuing Trudeau-Singh coalition.