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The Liberals moved quickly yesterday to pass the Harper government’s budget and avoid being labelled the party holding up economic stimulus after learning that their delaying tactics were denying employment insurance benefits to workers who recently lost their jobs.
The Liberals had planned to study the budget in the Senate until the end of the month until they discovered that some employment insurance claimants would lose five weeks of benefits if the bill was not passed immediately.
“A Liberal will never come between an unemployed worker and the employment insurance that he or she needs,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said at a hastily arranged news conference. Hours later, the Liberal-dominated Senate passed the budget 50-4, with five abstentions.
Mr. Ignatieff had been talking to Liberal senators in recent days, trying to persuade them to stop studying the budget bill, which includes measures they find unpalatable such as changes to pay equity. The Conservatives, sensing an opportunity to paint the Liberals as obstructionist, had been attacking Mr. Ignatieff ferociously in recent days over the delay.
They painted his party as overly partisan and indifferent to the plight of the unemployed.
The Liberal about-face takes them out of the firing line and perhaps back on the offensive when Statistics Canada releases new jobless numbers this morning. The Toronto-Dominion Bank forecasted yesterday that unemployment could reach 10 per cent by the end of the year and that 600,000 Canadians could lose their jobs in that time.
“There is no doubt that 2009 will go down in history as one of the most difficult economic years for Canadians,” said Beata Caranci, TD’s director of economic forecasting.
She predicted Canada’s economy would contract by 2.4 per cent this year, a full percentage point lower than TD’s December forecast of minus 1.4 per cent. Liberal finance critic John McCallum said the TD projections, which are gloomier than other institutions’ numbers, prove that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s sunny outlook this week was incorrect.
“Did [the Prime Minister] abandon the 500,000 Canadians who will become unemployed? Does he not care about 10 per cent of Canadians who will be unemployed this year?” Mr. McCallum said in the House of Commons.
Mr. Harper responded to Liberal attacks by accusing the opposition of trying to score political points at the expense of the unemployed.
“The gamesmanship is that the leader of the Liberal Party continues to want to cash in on bad economic news while not offering this country any constructive suggestions. He and his party were playing a game in the Senate with this bill. …” Mr. Harper said.
“[Mr. Ignatieff] would be well-advised, rather than to just be a critic, to act constructively in dealing with this economic crisis.”
The Conservative government has been working to restore Canadians’ confidence in the economy, all the while reminding everyone that a full recovery is a faraway proposal.
TD slashed its global forecast to minus 1.6 per cent for 2009 yesterday, down from previous expectations for a slight growth of 0.5 per cent.
“The capitulation of the U.S. consumer at the end of 2008 has been sharper than expected,” the forecast report said. “This has been a key catalyst for causing the year-over-year decline in global trade to double and distribute the economic shock around the world.”
According to TD, the job market will feel the pinch severely because the country’s income is plunging. Corporate profits were down 59 per cent at annual rates in the fourth quarter of last year, and will continue to plummet the bank said.
With a report from Brian Laghi