Finance Minister Bill Morneau has tabled his third budget. Here is a look at the highlights, new measures and key numbers:

• $21.5B in new spending over 6 years, including the fiscal year just ending.
• $18.1B projected deficit for 2018-19 (including $3B for risk), falling to $12.3B by 2022-23.
• $750M over 5 years to improve cyber security.
• $231M over 5 years to address the opioid crisis, including $165M this year.
• 5 weeks extra leave for two-parent families under the EI Parental Sharing Benefit (June 2019).
• Legislation promised this year on federal pay equity – but no price tag yet.
• $172.6M more over 3 years for clean drinking water on reserves.
• $1.4B over 6 years in new funding for First Nations Child and Family Services.
• $2B over 5 years in additional foreign aid under the Feminist International Assistance Policy.
• $10M over 5 years for an RCMP unit to review 25,000 cases of sex assault deemed “unfounded.”
• $1.3B over 5 years to conserve land, waterways and wildlife and protect species at risk.
• $100M over 5 years to develop rural broadband innovation, including low-earth-orbit satellites.
• New judges – 6 for Ontario, 1 for Saskatchewan – and more money to help ease court backlogs.
• $173M to address irregular border-crossings and asylum seekers.
•  $6M for a new process to hold federal leadership debates during election years.
• $50M over 5 years to one or more independent organizations to support local journalism.
• $30M over 3 years to promote women and girls’ participation in sport.
• $81M over 5 years to help families inadvertently caught up in the no-fly list.
• Free admission for kids to national parks will be made permanent.
• Creation of advisory council on implementing national pharmacare – but no money yet.
• Some retired or little used paper currency will no longer be legal tender.

National Human Trafficking Hotline Human trafficking is a heinous crime that disproportionately affects women and girls, particularly Indigenous, newcomer and low-income individuals. The Government is committed to putting an end to gender-based violence and proposes to provide $14.51 million over five years, beginning in 2018–19, and $2.89 million per year ongoing, to Public Safety Canada to combat human trafficking by establishing a National Human Trafficking Hotline, including an online portal and a referral mechanism to social services and law enforcement. This hotline will help protect those vulnerable to being trafficked and enable victims to access the necessary social and law enforcement services they need. As this initiative proceeds, the Government will work with provinces and territories to ensure effective implementation.

(TLN) Laval mayor Marc Demers has announced that two city councillors will henceforth be representing the city on committees at meetings of the Union of Quebec Municipalities (UMQ).

Dib and Tassoni

Saint-Martin city councillor Aline Dib and Laval-des-Rapides city councillor Isabella Tassoni were selected for the task of interfacing with other member municipalities at UMQ meetings.

While Dib will be sitting on the UMQ’s Commission for Culture, Leisure and Community Life, Tassoni will be on the UMQ’s Commission for Women and Governance.

Representing Laval

“I am very pleased to see that the respective competencies of Mrs. Dib and Mrs. Tassoni have been recognized within the UMQ,” said Mayor Demers. “They are certain to do an impeccable job while positioning Laval and its large projects among those of the major cities in Quebec.

“Our accomplishments could serve as inspiration for the ways things are done elsewhere,” added Demers, “while we in Laval will be profiting from the exchanges to add to our expertise.”

Laval well represented

Laval is well represented on the UMQ, with Mayor Demers being a member of the governing board, as well as vice-president of the UMQ’s caucus for major cities.

The mayor also sits along with Laval city councillor Stéphane Boyer on the UMQ’s commission for intelligent cities. In the meantime, Councillor and Laval executive-committee member Sandra Desmeules sits on the UMQ’s committee for its annual assizes.

Martin C. Barry

Set to retire from politics in June when he’ll be stepping down as MP for the riding of Outremont, former NDP leader Tom Mulcair says he’s feeling confident about his future on the faculty of one of the country’s leading universities and as the head of an environmental group that organizes Earth Day in Quebec.

In an interview with Newsfirst Multimedia last week, Mulcair – who first entered politics in 1994 as the Liberal MNA for the Laval riding of Chomedey – said he will be teaching political science beginning this summer.

New horizons for Mulcair

On Friday last week, the University of Montreal announced that Mulcair is joining their political science faculty as a visiting professor in the newly-created Master’s degree program in environment and sustainable development. Jour de la Terre had previously announced that Mulcair was taking on the leadership of the organization as volunteer board president.

“I can say that I’m in a very good place in my career right now,” said Mulcair. “I’m very satisfied that the number one job that Jack [Layton] and I had set for ourselves we were able to accomplish – which was breaking through in Quebec for the NDP.

Proud of NDP’s achievements

“We still have 16 outstanding MPs. And I’ll be leaving at the end of the spring session, but I’m convinced that the party is going to be able to find an excellent candidate to replace me and they’ll be able to take that into the next election and I’m sure that things are going to go well.”

The year 2015, a federal election year, was momentous not only for Mulcair, but for the two other party leaders vying for the country’s top elected position. For the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau, it meant becoming the country’s leader, while for the incumbent Conservatives’ Stephen Harper the election brought about the end of his political career.

A setback for the NDP

As for fate of the NDP, Mulcair said, “We were always very prudent, and I was always very prudent never to get ahead of ourselves. Polls would go up and be in our favour and then they’d go back down. We were convinced we had a good offer on the table.

“And, in any event, we slid back to our third-party position that we’d been in before. But I am proud of the fact that I got the second-highest number of seats in the NDP’s history: 44 seats is the second-highest that we’ve ever had. And it’s second, of course, to the fabulous Orange Wave of 2011.”

A letdown after election

Mulcair said he underwent a period of feeling disenchanted following the election. “You feel a great deal of disappointment that the great ideas we had put forward are not going to come to pass,” he said. “So knowing that Canadians were going to be stuck with the Liberals again, and knowing those Liberals from my 40 years in government, I knew what was going to happen.”

Although he hasn’t been the NDP’s leader since last October when the party’s new leader, Jagmeet Singh, succeeded him, Mulcair remains outspoken in his criticism of Justin Trudeau, whose 2015 sweep set back the NDP and thwarted any ambitions Mulcair might have had to be in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Still critical of Justin Trudeau

“This is the first sitting Prime Minister in Canadian history to break the law,” said Mulcair, referring to the Parliamentary Ethics Commissioner’s ruling that Trudeau breached the country’s Conflict of Interest Act when he vacationed at the Bahamian home of  the Aga Khan.

“Watching Mr. Trudeau be found guilty by the ethics commissioner has an effect on all of us, because it’s a question of ethics. He’s often very flippant when he reacts to that. He tries to pirouette away from it, saying ‘I won’t do it again.’ … A Prime Minister has to show ethics at the highest level. He has to be a model. And Justin Trudeau’s ethics have been shown to be totally lacking.”

A passion for politics

With politics clearly still very much in his blood, Mulcair said it his intention to have his university students benefit from his four decades of political experience as well as his views on future political developments in Quebec and Canada.

“You can be sure that the 40 years of experience I have in government will allow me to inspire them to get involved publicly to make sure that workers’ pensions are protected and the environment is protected for future generations,” he said. “These are all things that I believe in passionately and that won’t change when I leave politics.”

(TLN)

After participating last week in a meeting of the Mayors’ Caucus of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in Ottawa, Laval mayor Marc Demers said he feels confident the federal government will be paying attention in its 2018 budget to municipalities’ needs, including social housing, infrastructure, mass transit and the local impact of legalizing marijuana.

Asked about marijuana revenues, Demers said he was confident the provincial government would take its responsibility seriously in seeing that sums which are supposed to be reaching municipal governments will be doing so. At the same time, he noted that the FCM’s next board of directors meeting will be taking place in Laval from March 6 – 9.

Martin C. Barry

The head of the province’s largest association of retail merchants issued a stark warning to cities last week, saying they could end up becoming the biggest losers in the growing shift to online sales when property and business tax revenues bottom out.

Tax revenue losses

“As I’ve said before and as I say everywhere I go, the first losers in the shift towards the web if they don’t join forces is going to be the cities,” said Léopold Turgeon, president of the Conseil québécois du commerce de détail.

Speaking at the City of Laval’s first annual Forum Innovation Commerce at the Château Royal on Feb. 15, Turgeon pointed out that “the less there are businesses, the less there will be fiscal revenue” for municipal governments.

Go with e-commerce

While most people are aware by now of the impact that web and online marketing are having on the real-world retail landscape, this is the first year that the City of Laval decided to organize a half-day seminar dealing specifically with the problem.

“The new wave in the future is really e-commerce,” Laval executive-committee vice-president David De Cotis, who gave the opening address, said in an interview with the Laval News.

Get on the web

“In order to succeed, they will have to become increasingly aware of the e-commerce concept, get on the web and to do business on the web as well,” he added. “It’s fine to have a retail store, but you have to start thinking at the same time beyond those borders and go on the web.”

According to De Cotis, there are 38,000 small and medium-size businesses in Laval, “and we want to encourage them all to have an online presence,” he said. De Cotis was asked by the Laval News about the extent to which online retailing is affecting the retail presence in Laval.

Small business suffers

“It’s not only affecting Laval, it’s also affecting the greater Montreal region,” he said. “The Amazons and the Alibabas of this world are taking, like it or not, business away from small business entrepreneurs whether it’s in Laval or Montreal and so forth. And, you know, when there are empty businesses there is less employment. And that’s why we want to encourage as much as possible our businesses to stay in business and employ people while being successful at what they’re doing.”

In his speech, De Cotis noted that retailing and wholesaling today account for a quarter of all jobs in the Laval region. Last year, that number equalled 38,292 jobs. Many of these are in key locations throughout Laval, such as the Carrefour Laval, the Centre Laval or any of the eight other major retail malls on the territory. In addition, there are many hundreds of other retail hubs all over Laval.

The need to go digital

In 2016, there were 1,669 retail businesses in Laval, he continued, and 830 wholesale enterprises. He pointed out that from this perspective, Laval is increasingly a magnet for businesses of this type seeking to set up in proximity to the Montreal region’s international airport (which is only a short distance from Laval).

“As deputy mayor and being responsible for economic dossiers with the City of Laval, I can only insist on the importance, even the urgency, of doing digital,” said De Cotis. “The numbers demonstrate it clearly.”

Consumers headed online

While studies suggest that the retail sector is holding up on its own, De Cotis noted that they also indicate that more and more consumers are buying online, and these are local economic losses which are going to the advantage of major online retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba.

“There is no question of giving up,” he continued. “To the contrary, we must face up to this challenge with confidence and by rallying four forces. We are convinced that the capacity to adapt and to innovate by the players involved in commerce in Laval and their partners will make all the difference.”