Author: Benjamin Lopez Steven

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Sunday morning in Rome that his Liberal government will table a budget this fall — a decision he argued is the right one because there’s “not much value” in rushing out a budget at the earliest opportunity.”We will have a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall,” Carney said at a media conference in Rome, where world leaders have gathered to commemorate Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural mass.”You do these things right and that’s what we’re going to do.”The Liberals have faced sharp criticism from their opponents since Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said on Wednesday that the Liberals would not table a budget this spring and instead present a “substantive” fall economic statement, which is like a mini-budget.Carney defended his government waiting until the fall to table a budget and argued “there’s not much value in trying to rush through a budget in a very narrow window — three weeks — with a new cabinet [and] effectively a new finance minister.”The House of Commons is set to return on May 26 and is expected to rise on June 20, meaning the federal government would have less than a month to pass a budget if it wanted to do so before MPs return in mid-September.Carney leaves a news conference at the official residence of the Canadian ambassador to Italy in Rome on Sunday.

After a delay due to a blizzard, Elections Canada has validated the results in Nunavut and confirmed NDP incumbent Lori Idlout has prevailed over Liberal challenger Kilikvak Kabloona.The results were posted on Elections Canada’s website Friday evening. Validation is a procedure in which Elections Canada double-checks and verifies the numbers reported on election night.It took more than two weeks for Elections Canada to validate the results because the final ballot box from the community of Naujaat was delayed. It was sent to Iqaluit but got stuck at the airline cargo facility in Rankin Inlet when a rare late-spring blizzard hit Iqaluit on Thursday.Because of the delay, Idlout could not be sworn in as the Nunavut MP — something she told The Canadian Press was frustrating because constituents were reaching out to her for assistance but she could not officially act as an MP.The validated results show Idlout beat Kabloona by 41 votes. That’s a thinner margin of victory than the preliminary results Elections Canada posted shortly after election night, which showed Idlout beat Kabloona by 77 votes.The 41-vote difference is not enough to automatically trigger a judicial recount, which occurs when the number of votes separating a winner and a runner-up is less than 0.1 per cent of the total votes cast, according to Elections Canada’s rules.There were a total of 7,868 valid votes in Nunavut, according to Elections Canada’s website. That means the difference would have needed to be seven votes or less to automatically trigger a judicial recount.Two outstanding recountsThe current standings have the Liberals two seats shy of a majority government, with 170 MPs. The Conservatives have 143 seats, the Bloc Québécois 22, the NDP seven and the Green Party one.There are still two outstanding judicial recounts, but the Liberals need to hold one riding and flip another, meaning the most seats they could have is 171.The Liberals need to hold onto the seat they have in the Newfoundland and Labrador riding of Terra Nova-The Peninsulas. A judicial recount there is still in progress. Before the recount, Liberal Anthony Germain led Conservative Jonathan Rowe by 12 votes.WATCH | Here’s how an automatic recount works:Here’s how the automatic recount will work for Terra Nova-The Peninsulas12 days agoDuration 2:09It was the tightest race in all of Canada in the federal election on April 28. Just 12 votes separate the winner, Liberal Anthony Germain and the unsuccessful candidate, Conservative Jonathan Rowe. The CBC’s Heather Gillis explains what happens next. A recount in the Ontario riding Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore is scheduled to begin on May 20. The current result shows Conservative Kathy Borrelli beating incumbent Liberal Irek Kusmierczyk by 77 votes.On Friday, a judicial recount in the southern Ontario riding of Milton East-Halton Hills South confirmed that Liberal Kristina Tesser Derksen won the seat by a margin of 21 votes over Conservative Parm Gill.Meanwhile, the The Bloc Québécois is calling on the Superior Court of Quebec to order a byelection in the riding of Terrebonne, where the party lost by one vote, as Elections Canada revealed issues with five more mail-in ballots.The House of Commons is set to resume on May 26.