Month: May 2024

If there has even been such a thing as the world’s greatest circus, this is surely it: the trial of Donald J. Trump.

And just when you thought it could not get any more pathetic, lurid, absurd, crazier or demeaning (have your pick), this week a new clown car rolled on in: crammed with Trump’s cronies, allies and most significantly, potential running mates for the 2024 general election.

It appears Trump is determined to make his VP selection resemble the latest season of “The Apprentice.” This week’s tasks included assailing the judge’s daughter and attacking witnesses. A ceremonial ring kissing doesn’t capture it. When you consider Trump was content to feed Mike Pence, his last VP, to the wolves on Jan. 6, it’s more accurately described as auditioning for the role of sacrificial lamb in the school play. Let’s pray the curtain never opens.

Now, I usually share the view of most pundits that VP selection rodeos are nothing more than a sideshow to the main act. In most cases, fair enough.

In this case, not even close.

If Trump is elected, he will be a lame-duck president — unable to run again — and whoever he chooses as his VP will have an inside track to becoming the next president. Meaning: the stakes could not be higher.

What’s more, if Biden (a former VP himself) wins he won’t be permitted to seek another term either. Combined with the increasing likelihood that he won’t be able to last a full second term, that puts a renewed spotlight on Kamala Harris.

The 2024 presidential race will primarily come down to six battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — all of which Biden won in 2020. While he need not win all six again, his path to victory is severely obstructed if he cannot hold on to most. Yet, this past Monday, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that Trump was ahead in five of those six states.

What does this mean for the VP X-factor? Everything.

If Trump selects a VP from one of these key states, that will go a long way toward locking it up. Moreover, a wise, more centrist choice might give Trump the bump he needs in these states — most of which only narrowly went blue last time. Overall, so long as Trump does not choose a noted dog-killer (seriously) his selection will likely be a major asset to his campaign.

What does this mean for Democrats? It’s time to wake the hell up.

The fact is, a trial about Trump’s alleged hush money payments to a porn star has not damaged his standing in the polls one iota.

Rather, he is pulling ahead.

The morality play is a bona fide crowd pleaser and its production is not damaging but empowering its protagonist.

And that means Democrats simply cannot continue to cross their fingers and hope the justice system takes care of their problem for them. The irony here is palpable. Were the conspiracy Trump is peddling true — that this entire trial is a political witch hunt concocted by a Machiavellian Biden in a DNC backroom — it would be achieving the exact opposite of its intention. Tantamount to fighting fire with gasoline.

And yet, instead of providing the Democratic ticket with a much needed shot in the arm, the current VP instead offers a unique disadvantage — with analysis by FiveThirtyEight pegging her approval rating at a historically abysmal 38.2 per cent. In other words: she’s a liability, not an asset.

But that is far from the Democrats’ biggest worry. In a week meant to spotlight the moral deficiencies of the Republican candidate, the Democrats’ electoral vulnerabilities were underlined with crystal clarity.

If there was any doubt left, this trial definitively proves the Trumpian media circus is alive, well and works only to his benefit.

This means one thing and one thing alone for the Biden/Harris ticket: desperate times call for desperate measures. They need to break out that war chest and start fighting like their backs are against the wall.

Because that’s where they are.

With six months to go, time is running out before the circus is the only show in town.

It’s not rocket science.

Ensure families have access to affordable, high-quality child care and guess what? You get drastically better outcomes. Not just for kids, who get a fair start in life, but also for parents, who can return to the workforce far earlier and with greater confidence.

For those, like myself, who advocated for the national $10-a-day child care strategy for years, achieving these results was never driven by short-term political calculus. We understood that the true impact of this policy would unfold over decades, not just in months or years; that politics, at its best, is one generation making and keeping a promise to the next.

Alarmingly, of late, that promise has shattered.

Since the Government of Canada and all 10 provinces signed agreements to reach $10-a-day child care, demand has surged — far outpacing the creation of new spaces for it. In many regions, new families are now faced with mounting wait-lists of Kafkaesque absurdity. Your child graduated middle school? Terrific! A space at the local daycare just opened up.

What makes this failure even more concerning is that it does not exist in isolation. It’s part of a far wider trend of economic pressures facing young families. And that pressure has contributed to a plummeting national fertility rate, now at an all-time low of 1.33 children per woman.

The first step toward addressing this problem is acknowledging its gravity. Demographic math says that to replenish our population, the fertility rate must rise to 2.1 children per woman. Working toward that rate helps avoid the dreaded inverted population pyramid.

In other words, a structural imbalance that invariably leads to collapse, where we have too many retired seniors and not enough working age Canadians to fuel our economy. Japan is the textbook example, where experts predict economic doom due to a chronically low fertility rate and a ballooning elderly population.

But let’s be clear. Realistically, Canada’s fertility rate alone won’t be raised high enough to get the number of people we need — immigration will always be part of the conversation.

However, in light of the current immigration challenges facing our country, believing that we can rely solely on mass immigration to replace our population and ignoring our fertility rate is utterly nonsensical. It’s like trying to fill a bucket with a large hole in the bottom — no matter how much water we pour in, we’ll never achieve a sustainable level if we don’t first address the factors behind the leak.

The second step is framing this issue correctly. Although it cannot and should not be divorced from it, fertility is not solely a women’s health issue. Nor should our policy to address it be seen exclusively through this lens.

To acquire the correct framing, we simply need to listen — because young couples who want kids are telling us exactly why they’re not: they can’t afford it. The bottom line is that Canadians will either have no children, or less of them, if they cannot afford a home, let alone diapers.

Therefore, the third step must be to enhance incentives and support for fertility health care. Polls show a majority of Canadians support more incentives, such as tax credits, to encourage childbirth. However, these measures won’t count if couples can’t conceive.

On this front, we need stronger funding for IVF, which many Canadians rely on despite its high costs, particularly those in the LGBTQ+ community. While seven provinces, including Ontario, offer some fertility funding, substantial increases are crucial to boost our fertility rate.

We also cannot forget that male infertility rates have rapidly risen. And this lack of knowledge often results in the burden of male fertility unfairly falling on women.

The decision to have children or not is deeply personal and varies by circumstance, but Canadians who want children have been crystal clear: they need greater support. And in a year where the conversation has largely been about a broken immigration system, we have overlooked this crucial piece in our national demographic planning.

Addressing this oversight and bolstering support for young families are imperative to ensure the well-being of not only this generation but all those to come.

Democrats are running out of time as Donald Trump’s troubles are only making him stronger

We are not having enough babies and that’s a problem for all us