{"id":61257,"date":"2015-09-15T00:25:01","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T16:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=61257"},"modified":"2015-09-15T00:25:01","modified_gmt":"2015-09-14T16:25:01","slug":"refugee-crisis-seniors-health-tax-issues-begin-new-week-of-campaigning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2015\/09\/15\/refugee-crisis-seniors-health-tax-issues-begin-new-week-of-campaigning\/","title":{"rendered":"Refugee crisis, seniors’ health, tax issues begin new week of campaigning"},"content":{"rendered":"
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OTTAWA — Party leaders are attempting to shift the public’s focus to domestic issues including taxation and health care as another week of campaigning in the federal election begins.<\/p>\n

But questions surrounding Canada’s role in alleviating the refugee crisis in the Middle East continue to dominate headlines.<\/p>\n

And the trial this week of a former top aide to Conservative Leader Stephen Harper accused of influence peddling could also cast a pall over the campaign.<\/p>\n

But the Tories will be doing everything they can to cast light on their fiscal record while in office as the Finance Department unveils year-end figures for fiscal 2014-15, which could show that the government was on track to balance the budget.<\/p>\n

Last month, the department reported a $5-billion surplus for the April-June quarter, though Harper’s opponents said that data was not up to date.<\/p>\n

Harper repeated his party’s pledge to lower small business tax rates during a campaign stop in Ottawa’s west end Sunday, where he attacked the Liberals and New Democrats over their proposed tax plans.<\/p>\n

While campaigning in Vancouver, where his party hopes to make gains on Oct. 19, the NDP’s Tom Mulcair announced that a government under his leadership would spend $1.8 billion over four years bolstering health care for seniors.<\/p>\n

The NDP is hoping to frame week seven of the 11-week campaign around health ahead of the next leader’s debate on Thursday in Calgary.<\/p>\n

But it was Mulcair’s promise to help Syrian refugees that had some of his party’s supporters calling for even greater action.<\/p>\n

Many New Democrats are urging their party to increase its election commitment to resettle 46,000 people over four years to as high as 100,000.<\/p>\n

An emotional debate over how best to help some of the four million refugees who have fled fighting in Syria was fuelled earlier this month by the images of a dead three-year-old boy from Syria washing up on a Turkish beach.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, former Harper senior adviser Bruce Carson goes on trial Monday in an Ottawa court on one charge of influence peddling related to his work with a company that was trying to sell water-filtration systems to First Nation reserves.<\/p>\n

The Carson case follows on the heels of the trial of Sen. Mike Duffy, which forced the Tories off of their message at the beginning of the campaign in August.<\/p>\n

Carson has pleaded not guilty to the influence peddling charge, as well as other accusations of illegal lobbying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OTTAWA — Party leaders are attempting to shift the public’s focus to domestic issues including taxation and health care as …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":50594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1482,18,483],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking","category-news-ca","category-politics","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}