Canadian politics 2022
Since there doesn't seem to be a recent thread dedicated to this overall topic, and I think All Saints should be kept clear for weather and gardening chats...
@Sober Preacher's Kid
Assuming these picketers are actually trying to get votes, it's pretty pointless to attack the NDP, since few people from the progressive fold are gonna leap-frog several spaces rightward and start voting for the Ontario Party. They'd be better off focusing their animosity on the Conservatives, try to convince right-wingers that Ford and company are a buncha Liberals in disguise.
(Though I suppose holding these sorta protests could just be a way of getting their name out there, regardless of who the target is. Not likely they'll convince anyone not to vote NDP, though.)
@Sober Preacher's Kid
I had the most interesting experience today. The Ontario Party picketed the local NDP campaign office while Jagmeet Singh was there. They were beligerent, bellicose, and rude.
Sigh. The Ontario of my childhood is dropping away.
Assuming these picketers are actually trying to get votes, it's pretty pointless to attack the NDP, since few people from the progressive fold are gonna leap-frog several spaces rightward and start voting for the Ontario Party. They'd be better off focusing their animosity on the Conservatives, try to convince right-wingers that Ford and company are a buncha Liberals in disguise.
(Though I suppose holding these sorta protests could just be a way of getting their name out there, regardless of who the target is. Not likely they'll convince anyone not to vote NDP, though.)
Comments
Well, maybe the general public(myself included) wouldn't know about these matters, but I would think for a registered political party, the onus is on them to familiarize themselves with the laws, and I would assume ample information is provided to them. So my sympathy for the Ontario Party is somewhat limited here.
My first assumption was that Charest was the best choice, since he'd draw in the old tories and maybe parts of Quebec, and the harperites would still vote Conservative because they have nowhere else to go.
But everyone else seems to think Poilievre is the man. Personally, I think the "populist moment" might soon be coming to an end, and Bernier might have been a one-trick-pony coasting on covid skepticism(sorry for the mixed-metaphor). But I guess we'll see.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservative-leadership-debate-edmonton-1.6448477
There's an issue I was not expecting to come up in this election, or any other.
From the little I've read about this, the book seems to have been more "alternative medicine", rather than fundamentalist Christianity, and not particularly focused on homosexuality.
And I'm betting it was either self-published, or at least some sort of obscure crank press. So, possibly not the kinda thing you'd be able to sniff out, even with the most thorough of vetting processes.
(Honestly, this guy sounds like someone who'd fit in more with the wackier sections of the Green Party.)
'Vetting', as I heard from a friend, is a euphemism for castration, though he may just have been referring to his dog.
(Note that I am having to cover up bigoted language used by candidates for a party that trumpets the banishment of hate-speech from the internet. Yeah, bad optics all around.)
Just watched a couple of videos of the confrontation, including one produced by the protestors themselves. I'll offer a qualified defense of them on the charge of racism, the qualification being that it really was impossible for me to figure out WHAT they were promoting. It just seemed like random insults and vulgarities, with "traitor" being the closest thing to anything political, and even that had no context.
I did enjoy the way Singh kept waving and thumbs-upping the people who were flipping him the middle-finger.
At the moment it seems to be Poilievre’s race to lose. Without knowing anything about the inner workings of the CPC (any of them), I suspect that Charest might meet the same fate as O’Toole in relatively short order. There’s no point in having a centrist leader if the party doesn’t want to be a centrist party.
The real issue of course is whether Poilievre could make the CPC electable as leader. I can see it happening, possibly - he’s a true “base” CPC conservative, but also fluently bilingual, and not particularly invested in religious conservatism per se. He’s been around since long before the truckers, and past performance suggests a certain amount of political street-smarts. Lots of Canadians would never vote for him, but all he needs is a plurality of votes in a majority of ridings… and frankly he seems to be very much the calculating type.
And, in any case, the anti-Trudeauism centre of his spiritual life and vision will not do him much good should he be up against a new leader-- and Ms Freeland would be the likely successor.
One of my contacts said that Polièvre's lack of creds among parliamentarians will hurt him, but I felt obliged to mention that Diefenbaker had the same problem, but was PM for six (albeit chaotic) years. He did note that Patrick Brown and Leslyn Lewis have strong membership recruitment campaigns, which might help them get points (each riding gets 100 points, allocated by choices in that district's voting; a preferential transferable ballot is use, and should there not be a 50% plus one majority, the bottom candidate's preferences will be transferred until there is a 50% majority). As voters are not that accustomed to the preferential ballot, the results might be unexpected (or not!).
I think two big factors for Poilievre are whether he can avoid alienating potential voters in the suburbs and how intent the electorate is on turfing out the Liberals. A change of leadership could change the second factor, though some may not see Freeland as strongly distinguishable from Trudeau.
I don't quite buy the defense of immaturity, if the party in question also runs candidates from the age-range in question. It seems to me that you can't put a twenty-year old up for office, but then when it's revealed that one of your other candidates did something stupid at the age of twenty, reply with "Well, we all know twenty-year olds have pretty bad judgement."
A somewhat better defense is to argue that the actions occured in the past, and your thinking has changed since that time. So not "I was young and stupid at the time", but "In the sixteen years since that happened, I've had to reflect and realize it was wrong." This argument does not depend on being any specific age at the time of the transgression, eg. a 56 year old could say it about something he did at 40.
Right now, I don't see any major anti-Liberal backlash on the horizon, though I don't see them becoming astronomically more popular, either. Freeland would probably hold together the same coalition that's kept Trudeau in office, but not expand it by much.
All parties surgically extract their candidate's personalities, put them in frozen nitrogen and only give them back if they lose.
This is why "anti-politicians", eg. H. Ross Perot, can get a bit of temporary traction early on, by portraying themselves as straight-talkers who say what they mean, never mind political niceties.
(This schtick, of course, eventually falls flat, when voters discover that straight-talk doesn't sound so great when you disagree with the opinions being expressed, and implicitly start to wish that the politician would start playing by the rules.)
I wouldn’t expect a major backlash either - a question of where the swing vote swings. If Poilievre does manage to attract any kind of swing vote though clearly it’s not going to be an old/red Tory swing vote.
Up until I saw a news article a few minutes ago, I assumed you were using "The New Blue Party" as a nickname for the Ontario Party. But I gather they're a separate group.
And apparently, there's still the Freedom Party, founded by cannabis-activist Marc Emery in the 80s. So at least three right-of-Conservative parties in this province. I'd suggest they all merge, but I'm guessing the Freedom people are libertarians, and wouldn't really like joining with SoCons.
I suspect that would be an uncomfortable cocktail party. On the other hand, reading up on the FP on Wikipedia, I was a little surprised to find out how thoroughly Libertarian they were. Not just about cannabis.
I ran into a New Blue Party lawn sign walking through the Riverdale neighborhood of Toronto yesterday. Any kind of blue is pretty thin on the ground in that part of the world so a bit of a surprise.
Yeah, Emery has pretty much always been a consistent libertarian on all the issues(his wife posed in her underwear for a Ron Paul meme captioned "Liberty Turns Me On"), so I would assume the same of any party he founded.
Which would render the party, like all libertatian groupings, completely unsellable. As I like to say, the kinda people who cheer when libertarians champion the right for fundamentalists to home-school their kids are gonna be horrified at the idea that someone has an inalienable right to open a gay BDSM club across the street from their home.
The NDP demanded that the Liberals turf the candidate, but the Liberals refused, leading cynical journalists to speculate that they're protecting THIS guy because, unlike the other three, he's a viable candidate.
I Googled the law professor you mentioned who turns out to be Noel Semple, whom I remember slightly from my U of T days. Smart guy, opinionated, and
unable to resist the urge to push back against the powers-that-were in lefty student politics at U of T at the time. Reading the piece now (Google Noel Semple Varsity), I think it’s more about that strange dynamic than about LGBT people per se. (As I understand it, the debate was about a special levy, over and above regular club funding available to everyone.)
Hey, thanks for the info on the column.
Yeah, seems more like a classical-liberal argument against alleged special privileges for certain groups, rather than an attack on gays. At most, he's probably guilty of understating the difficulties still faced by glbqt people in the 2000s.
That said, classical-liberal arguments are sometimes used as a cover for outright bigotry, eg. people opposed to same-sex marriage claimed gays were asking for "special rights", which was nonsensical. Granted, I don't think that's what Semple was doing in that article, but I also question how charitable the Liberals would be if it were a Conservative who'd written something similar.
Second, I have never ceased to be amazed at how "Strategic Voting" never works in the NDP's favour, even when it's the larger party, has more candidates and a bigger campaign budget and fundraising.
Speaking of which, there are so many extra full-time paid NDP campaign managers and other staff on the ground that the usual bets are off.
The Ontario Liberals have been coasting on perceptions of a reputation and their Federal brother's coattails for years.
BRITISH COLUMBIA- Liberal in name only. Think the Japanese Liberal Democrats or Australian Liberals. The BC Liberals were a shell party that got revived in the 90s to scoop up the remnants of the right-wing Social Credit Party.
ALBERTA, SASKATCHEWAN, MANITOBA -Ideologically more similar to federal Libs, but electorally non-existant.
QUEBEC- Similar to feds in terms of supporting minority rights(ie. English and immigrants), but throughout the 1970s to 2000s, the more pro-business of the two major parties, compared to the leftist PQ. Possibly pushed somewhat to the left these days, with the rise of the conservative CAQ. A former Liberal premier, Charest, is now running for federal Conservative leader, on a "Hey, at least I'm not a trucker" platform.
MARITIMES AND NEWFOUNDLAND - Generally supportive of federal Libs' centralizing tendencies, but probably mostly because their economic plight makes them unlikely to mouth off too much(iow. don't bite the hand that feeds you). Historically a strong social-conservative contingent, anti-abortion etc.
I'm not sure what formal ties exist between all these parties and the feds. In BC, probably none.
What about in Ontario, though - and not just the Liberals in Ontario, but also the PCs, NDP (I know it’s a more nationally interconnected party), and Greens?
The federal CPC has a more western base which arguably differentiates it somewhat from its Ontario counterpart. Though the federal party has a rather unstable identity at the moment, reflected the fact that it’s in the process of selecting its third leader since circa 2015, which makes comparison difficult.
Well, I will read into the record that the post-Harris Ontario Tories were a pretty major stream feeding into what I'll call Harperism. This is something that Ibbitson absolutely LOVES pointing out, but which scandalized Central Canadians often neglect to mention in their narrative about how the cuddly old Red Tories got hijacked by the western "Reformacons". In the last election, for example, 31% of the Conservative seats came from Ontario, with an extra 8% coming from Quebec.
The Western contingent likely pushes the Conservatives hard on resource extraction, though with even Justin Trudeau supporting a couple of pipelines here and there, I doubt a hypothetical East-Of-Kenora-Only Conservative Party would be much greener than the real-life version.
And in 2011, when they won their majority, almost 44% of their seats came from Ontario.
(Of course, as a percentage of their overall electorates, more Albertans than Ontarians voted Conservative.)
Yeah, the last time I can remember a serious riff between the Ontario Tories and either the federal PCs or Harper Conservatives(*) was when Trudeau sr. was implementing the NEP in the early 1980s, Bill Davis was supporting it, Peter Lougheed was opposing it, and I THINK Joe Clark was opposing it as well.
(*) Not sure what sort of relations existed between the Mike Harris Tories and Reform/Alliance during the interregnum, but I'm guessing they were fairly cordial. Interestingly, Ralph Klein in Alberta was known to distrust Reform and prefer the PCs.
The Ontario NDP and rhe Federal NDP are formally one Party but are de facto independent of one another. They share a membership list but more importantly share staff extensively.
The federal Liberals cut ties with their Alberta counterparts in the early 1970s, when Trudeau made some weirdo deal with the provincial Socreds to dump the provincial Liberals, in exchange for the federal Socreds voting with the government in the Commons.
Not much benefit for Social Credit ensued out of this arrangement, except for Ernest Manning, who got a Senate appointment from Trudeau as part of the bargain.
Kenney's provincial career always struck me as a fluke. Under normal circumstances, he woulda been too SoCon for most voters(no, contrary to the myth, Alberta does not have a recent history of electing wild-eyed fundamentalists; Klein wasn't even a monotheist), but the conservative movement was in such a shambles after Prentice's attempt at a one-party state and Notley's subsequent victory, it was ripe pickings for someone with even a modicum of successful political experience.
That said, it's probable that at least some of the anti-Kenney vote was from covid-skeptics who are even more reactionary than he is, so who knows where this will go. I think the smart money is on Brian Jean, who actually won a byelection on an anti-Kenney platform while running for Kenney's party.
See my post above. And for the record, there is at least one recently active Shipmate living(I believe) in Alberta. And while I haven't lived there for over 20 years and could probably not name one current cabinet minister besides Kenney himself, I regard myself as having a fairly good knack for the broad contours of the political culture.
When he set that bar for himself, he was probably expecting to get something like 66% of the vote, but thought making 50%+1 the magic number would make 66% look like a stunning victory.
(An on-line high-five for anyone who can spot the historical allusion in my above paragraph.)
You rang?
My flabber is well and truly gasted; I genuinely did not see Kenney leaving, because he has a Trumpian attachment to power.
Without turning this into a Hell thread, I can say wholeheartedly that there are very few politicians I detest as much as the Ted Cruz fanboy who has caused so much damage to this province. His pandering to the most extreme elements of the UCP doesn’t seem to have paid off, but it has left divisions that will make it much more challenging for any rational competent Premier to govern.
I can’t think of a single member of the current UCP cabinet who wouldn’t be a nightmare as interim party leader. I actually would have preferred that Kenney stayed in place, as Rachel Notley could have beaten him handily, I believe.
Brian Jean isn’t as much of a psychopath as Bumbles, but he ain’t no prize.
I imagine much of the hour+ delay in the press conference tonight involved prying JK’s fingernails off the door frame of the Premier’s office.
I'm thinking Jean at this point is almost certainly more sellable than Kenney. I agree he's not much different, but he seems to project a slightly more urbane image, and is unencumbered by all of Kenney's scandals(some of which IIRC resulted from attempts to damage Jean politically). He might play well with voters who consider themselves conservative but are turned-off by the hayseed image.
Interesting to see how Edmonton will go. I'm tempted to say the old hometown has now completed the transformation to a permanent progressive majority, though in 2008 they went majority Tory(with a northern leader FWTW), and again in 2012(though that was at least partly to block Wildrose).
Joe Clark? He set his bar at 66% and came in well below IIRC, so the exact reverse of Kenney.
You get a high-2.5. Right guy, wrong story.
I'm actually not sure what bar Clark set for himself, or if he even set one. But 66% is what he ended up with. And then he decided that wasn't enough, so called a leadership convention, which amused a lot of people who thought 66% was more than respectable.
Supposedly Clark met Prince Charles some time shortly afterwards(maybe when he was at External Affairs) and the Prince greeted him with "So you're the man who thought 66% wasn't good enough." (Not sure of the validity of that; it is maybe suspicious that Charles allegedly responded exactly the same way as Canada's chattering classes did.)
Smith, of course, was the Wildrose leader who failed to win the premiership in 2012 after the lake-of-fire controversy, and then finished off her career by supporting Prentice's plans to absorb his opposition. I gather she's been working in the media the last few years, but recently quit and now just posts on social media.
Smith made a point of aligning herself with social liberalism after the lake-of-fire business, and I wonder if voters have forgotten about all that, along with her much-maligned floor-crossing later on.