The Fall Economic Statement released yesterday is necessarily shaped by a high degree of uncertainty. Despite promising reports that we may have an effective vaccine against Covid-19 within months, the pandemic is very much with us and economic recovery is far from certain as quarantines and lockdowns continue.

Newly appointed minister of finance Chrystia Freeland faces the daunting task of putting Canada on the path to a more sustainable and equitable future. Inevitably, even while rightly continuing to run a large deficit for now, she will have to make some tough choices between competing, urgent priorities.

The federal government has just announced a new program to expand loans to struggling non financial corporations – the Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility. It’s role  deserves serious debate.

At this time, it is impossible to know the course and consequences of COVID-19 cases arising from the novel coronavirus. A probable outcome seems to be a spread of the illness among the general population, before it stabilizes and/ or an effective vaccine is developed which could take several months or even longer

A new report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer shows that the personal income tax cut proposed by the Trudeau Liberals will cost more in terms of lost revenue than first thought, and will strongly favour high income earners and families.

In recent years, progressives and social democrats have begun to embrace a much bolder tax fairness agenda than was the case even five years ago. This is especially true in the United States where Democratic Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both made the case for a significant tax on large holdings of wealth, the closure of personal tax loopholes for investment income such as stock options, and serious corporate tax reform. In the 2019 federal election, the NDP similarly called for a wealth tax, higher taxation of capital gains in the personal income tax system, and a higher corporate tax rate.

The Conservative platform put forward by Andrew Scheer delivers tax cuts for the relatively affluent, to be paid for by largely unspecified cuts to spending on social programs and public services. That is a poor deal for ordinary working families who get much more each year in program benefits like public health care and post-secondary education and child benefits and public pensions than they pay for in personal income taxes.

The competing personal income tax cuts proposed by the Liberal and Conservative parties in this federal election are almost identical in terms of goals and re-distributive impact, and neither advance a truly progressive agenda.

Of late, many mainstream Canadian media pundits have sided with centrist Democrats in the United States to argue that a left-wing Democratic nominee would lead to the re-election of President Donald Trump. For example, Konrad Yakabuski wrote in the Globe and Mail on August 2 that “their (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) hate-on for private enterprise has cut them off from the mainstream United States. Instead, they seem to have embarked on a kind of space odyssey 2020.”

It is widely argued that the rise of extreme income and wealth inequality, combined with the stagnation of wages of the middle-class and working class, have helped fuel the rise of right-wing populism and racism around the world. Many in the political centre, and not just the left, have called for robust policy measures to help create more equal societies and to counter the perception – and reality – that the economic system is rigged against ordinary working people.