I only found out about it because of a conversation years ago with an American from the Pacific Northwest(apparently, it's taught in schools where she came from). I actually had to look up the date on wikipedia.
The Conservatives are set to break 40% for the first time since 1988(including years when the old PCs were still in competition with the various Reform permutations, with their combined totals taken as one bloc). And that's with the man in the White House providing the worst advertising possible for contemporary conservatism, including threats to annex Canada itself.
Any mandate remaining for Mr Singh will have to do with the NDP executive. From his stement, he steps down when his successor is chosen.
In any case, I liked when Mr Carney thanked PP and Mr Singh at the beginning of his statement. And that PP was fairly graceful in his concession. These are not empty gestures as they indicate to supporters how the principals regard their fates.
The Conservatives are set to break 40% for the first time since 1988(including years when the old PCs were still in competition with the various Reform permutations, with their combined totals taken as one bloc). And that's with the man in the White House providing the worst advertising possible for contemporary conservatism, including threats to annex Canada itself.
I’m not totally surprised as this was really the CPC’s election to lose, for any number of reasons. The Liberals were reaching their best before date after 10 years in power, cultural politics is moving to the right, and specific Liberal policies eg the carbon tax were highly unpopular. If Harris had been elected President I strongly suspect we would be seeing a Poilievre government now or in the imminent future as soon as an election was held. But the Liberals got lucky at the exact same time as Poilievre and the CPC got unlucky.
I was talking to a colleague who was up into the early morning hours last night watching the results come in (I gather partly out of morbid fascination at P losing his seat). She did mention the phenomenon of NDP ridings swinging Conservative and I was also reading commentary on FB (not always the most reliable source) about the same phenomenon. This is worrying in the same way that Trump attracting votes from some unexpected quarters was worrying.
She did mention the phenomenon of NDP ridings swinging Conservative and I was also reading commentary on FB (not always the most reliable source) about the same phenomenon. This is worrying in the same way that Trump attracting votes from some unexpected quarters was worrying.
I don't know how much you can read into that, because there very well may be local factors at play. In Alberta, it's not unheard-of for constituencies and ridings to swing between Conservative and NDP, for reasons now only partly descended from the NEP(*). And nowadays, with the extermination of the Liberals provincially, that's likely to be the main electoral binary for a while(**).
(*) Being even more pro-nationalization than the Liberals didn't stop the provincial NDP from beating them to official opposition status in '86 and '89, and the Liberals themselves were forgiven by a lot of the urban electorate in the '93 election.
(**) Yes, with "free enterprise" Danielle Smith facing off against a socialist opposition in Edmonton, it is looking quite a bit like "The Bennetts vs. The Socialist Hordes" in neighbouring BC all those years.
And I now read in the Globe that that my suspicion may not be true on a popular vote level… I forget who the columnist was, but they accidentally used the abbreviation NPD, which may be the first time in history the Globe spoke about the NDP in French.
I'm gonna call a Liberal minority right here. Probably recklessly, 'cuz this is gonna be a pretty volatile election season, but that's what I'm gonna call.
Hooray for me!!
I'll confess that in the final stretch I WAS thinking of switching my prediction to Liberal majority, but figured that would look pretty gutless.
I’m looking at the ridings in BC, especially Vancouver Island, where there was an NDP incumbent and the Tories managed to take the seat this time because the progressive vote was split. Is this because too many formerly NDP voters voted for the Liberals? If so, they do so out of tactical voting trying to keep the Tories out, thinking that the NDP were toast even their own riding, was it because they wanted to give the Liberals a majority because they were spooked by Trump, or was it for some other reason? It seems to have backfired, assuming that most NDP and Liberal voters would prefer the other progressive party over the Tories (is this true in all ridings)?
And why do so many overwhelmingly Francophone ridings around Quebec City vote Tory? Is it really the legacy of “le ciel est bleu, l’enfer est rouge” or is there some other reason?
Note that I am not talking about the Eastern Townships, where I might understand a history of voting Tory, but about ridings farther north around Quebec City.
And why do so many overwhelmingly Francophone ridings around Quebec City vote Tory? Is it really the legacy of “le ciel est bleu, l’enfer est rouge” or is there some other reason?
Going on second-hand impressions, that would be my guess. Though I suspect these days the religious identitarianism has secularized into just old-stock suburbanite chauvinism, and they're less panicked about blasphemous JWs and Communist hordes and more about turbans and car-thieves.
I think it was with the ascension of Joe "Canada is a community of communities" Clark in 1976 that the PCs fully reversed themselves into the party of decentralization and provincial rights. As I think I've detailed elsewhere on the forum, this position played well with the more business-oriented sections of Quebec nationalism, culminating in the beau-risque alliance under Mulroney.
A few years back, Chantal Hebert wrote a book about Stephen Harper's more-or-less successful efforts at improving his party's fortunes in Quebec during the 2006 election. Since publication, the CPC's fortunes have bounced between about five and ten seats, most of them, I THINK, in that Quebec City area you reference(*). I can't recall her argument in extreme detail, but it boiled down to: "Quebec nationalists don't care if Harper's a bible-thumping Alberta oil stooge, because all they want him to do is hand more power over to Quebec, and it doesn't matter if he slashes social programs because Quebec can just grab the money from Ottawa and create its own provincial programs."
One thing Harper DID do was a symbolic mulroneyization of the Constitution, with Quebec's supposed distinctiveness entered into one of the non-binding pre-ambulatory sections. That probably played okay with the strip-mall nationalists in Quebec, while not alienating franco-phobic Conservatives in English Canada.
(*) Just re-reading your post while on break from this one, I see you were specifically curious about why it the suburbs of Quebec City in particular. I'm less qualified to address that one, except to obverse that those areas are the metro of a major city, but on the less cosmopolitan end of the scale. So maybe a heavier concentration of the old-stock, petit bourgeois car-dealer types I've been slandering?
And why do so many overwhelmingly Francophone ridings around Quebec City vote Tory? Is it really the legacy of “le ciel est bleu, l’enfer est rouge” or is there some other reason?
Note that I am not talking about the Eastern Townships, where I might understand a history of voting Tory, but about ridings farther north around Quebec City.
It is notable how consistent the Conservative numbers have been in Quebec since Harper's first victory in 2006. Seat counts...
2000 - 1
2004 - 0
2006 - 10
2008 - 10
2011 - 5
2015 - 12
2019 - 10
2021 - 10
2025 - 11
2011 was the year the NDP swept Quebec, so I'm guessing that some of the Conservative losses were to them, but I really don't know.
In Alberta, it's not unheard-of for constituencies and ridings to swing between Conservative and NDP...
For example, Edmonton Griesbach went Conservative in 2015(its first election) and 2019, NDP in 2021, and swung back to the Conservatives on Monday.
BC is usually a three-way. Western ridings have long been prone to switch between the NDP and Tories due to te weakness of te Federal Liberaks there and the near extinction of provincial Liberal Parties in those provinces.
BC is usually a three-way. Western ridings have long been prone to switch between the NDP and Tories due to te weakness of te Federal Liberaks there and the near extinction of provincial Liberal Parties in those provinces.
Yeah, the western provincial legislatures have pretty much achieved Ernest and Preston Manning's vision, first enunciated in their 1967 book, of a political spectrum dominated by one solidly left-wing and one solidly right-wing party, with the centrist brokerage-party gutted out. And if current trends can be accurately discerned, Ontario might be heading down the same path.
Oddly, the federal parliament as a whole has proven itself stubbornly resistant to this ongoing erosion of
grittery, with Monday's not-atypical results giving the Liberals an overwhelming majority in the maritimes, substantial majorities in Quebec in Ontario, near-ties in Sakatchewan and BC, the usual Edmonton and/or Calgary non-conforming freakozoids, and 2 of the three seats in the territories.
In Alberta, it's not unheard-of for constituencies and ridings to swing between Conservative and NDP...
For example, Edmonton Griesbach went Conservative in 2015(its first election) and 2019, NDP in 2021, and swung back to the Conservatives on Monday.
BC is usually a three-way. Western ridings have long been prone to switch between the NDP and Tories due to te weakness of te Federal Liberaks there and the near extinction of provincial Liberal Parties in those provinces.
If the NDP is traditionally the party that can beat the Tories in these ridings, wouldn’t tactical voters know to back them even in this election? Because when you look at the results in some of the Vancouver Island ridings and elsewhere in BC, it looks like there was a swing towards the Liberals (even if the NDP still polled ahead of the Liberals) and that split the progressive vote enough to let the Tories win.
In Alberta, it's not unheard-of for constituencies and ridings to swing between Conservative and NDP...
For example, Edmonton Griesbach went Conservative in 2015(its first election) and 2019, NDP in 2021, and swung back to the Conservatives on Monday.
BC is usually a three-way. Western ridings have long been prone to switch between the NDP and Tories due to te weakness of te Federal Liberaks there and the near extinction of provincial Liberal Parties in those provinces.
If the NDP is traditionally the party that can beat the Tories in these ridings, wouldn’t tactical voters know to back them even in this election? Because when you look at the results in some of the Vancouver Island ridings and elsewhere in BC, it looks like there was a swing towards the Liberals (even if the NDP still polled ahead of the Liberals) and that split the progressive vote enough to let the Tories win.
One would think so, but an astonishing number of electors are barely aware that they are voting in constituencies-- they are voting presidentially seemingly without any thought as to how their choices would affect the end results.
I first discovered this decades ago in the days when I canvassed in elections and was astonished then. It never ceases to amaze me. I have so often explained how it works, only to be received with wide-eyed stares indicating either 1) slow realization, or 2) disbelief annoyed by factual information.
I see the King and Queen are on their way in a few weeks.
Which feels on the side of the Atlantic like an epic bit of Commonwealth-Solidarity-Trump-Trolling.
Possibly. But I doubt that either Trump or most of his followers will read much significance into it. Maybe if Charles and Camilla had cancelled a trip to the USA but were still visiting Canada.
"Strategic Voting" is a development of "Lend Us your Votes" and I have yet to find an example of it ever working the in the NDP's favour.
In order for it to work that way, you'd need a situation where both the Liberals and the NDP were viewed as parties of the left(IOW not Ross Thatcher Liberals) and the NDP was the more powerful of the two parties.
So...
LIBERAL-LEANING VOTER: Well, I'd like to vote Liberal, but I'm worried the Conservatives will get in, so since the NDP has the better chance in my riding, I guess I'll go for them.
Probably not a lot of elections like that in Canada. The Liberals tend to be the natural governing party, so it's more likely New Democrats kowtow to them.
I see the King and Queen are on their way in a few weeks.
Which feels on the side of the Atlantic like an epic bit of Commonwealth-Solidarity-Trump-Trolling.
Possibly. But I doubt that either Trump or most of his followers will read much significance into it. Maybe if Charles and Camilla had cancelled a trip to the USA but were still visiting Canada.
I am far from certain about that. God alone knows what (or if) his followers can read, but Trump will be puzzled that he is not the first priority for the King, and will be aware that this is a riposte to his annexation nonsense. He will also be aware (as he gets his information from television) of what Charles says at the opening of Parliament, which is likely to be very Canada-in-the-world oriented, and will have few if any declarations of obeisance to the US presidency.
I suspect that they will have trouble figuring all of this out, but will be very much aware that it is Not About Them. And that, perhaps, is the point of the visit especially as, given the King's health and age, this may be his only one.
I see the King and Queen are on their way in a few weeks.
Which feels on the side of the Atlantic like an epic bit of Commonwealth-Solidarity-Trump-Trolling.
Possibly. But I doubt that either Trump or most of his followers will read much significance into it. Maybe if Charles and Camilla had cancelled a trip to the USA but were still visiting Canada.
I am far from certain about that. God alone knows what (or if) his followers can read, but Trump will be puzzled that he is not the first priority for the King, and will be aware that this is a riposte to his annexation nonsense. He will also be aware (as he gets his information from television) of what Charles says at the opening of Parliament, which is likely to be very Canada-in-the-world oriented, and will have few if any declarations of obeisance to the US presidency.
I suspect that they will have trouble figuring all of this out, but will be very much aware that it is Not About Them. And that, perhaps, is the point of the visit especially as, given the King's health and age, this may be his only one.
Well, we've had poll after poll showing Canadians en masse don't want annexation, The Star-Spangled Banner booed at hockey games, a nationwide boycott including the removal of American booze from government liquor stores, not to mention the collapse of tourism heading south of the border and attendant economic damage. And with all that, Trump still persists in believing that there's a significant market for his manifest-destiny schtick in Canada.
So, I'm not entirely convinced he interprets reality's indicators quite the same way most world leaders do. Granted, yeah, he might realize that Charles and Carney are trying to project some sorta imperial unity, but I doubt it will make much difference in his willingness to ride that particular hobbyhorse.
(That said, maybe the fact that it's Big Important Men putting on the transatlantic chest-thumping, rather than just yokels boycotting Jack Daniels, will drive the point home?)
The obvious take away was that the NDP fell so far in the eyes of their supporters that they voted Liberal instead.
The Conservatives received record numbers of votes, and increased their seat counts from the previous parliament. They didn't so much lose as the Liberals became the benefactors of the NDP collapse.
The obvious take away was that the NDP fell so far in the eyes of their supporters that they voted Liberal instead.
Or that soft-dippers saw blocking Poilievre as an urgent enough task that they did not have the luxury of voting for their first choice.
The Conservatives received record numbers of votes, and increased their seat counts from the previous parliament. They didn't so much lose as the Liberals became the benefactors of the NDP collapse.
Indeed, this was one of the most impressive performances for an otherwise losing party that I've seen in a while. And it says sonething that the Conservatives seem happy to have Poilievre stay on, even countenancing the sacrifice of a winning candidate in order to facilitate a by-election.
The obvious take away was that the NDP fell so far in the eyes of their supporters that they voted Liberal instead.
The Conservatives received record numbers of votes, and increased their seat counts from the previous parliament. They didn't so much lose as the Liberals became the benefactors of the NDP collapse.
An interesting spin on the CPC’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory… seriously, had they run a candidate with any view to crossover appeal, they would likely be in government now. They decided to gamble that the voters would be so eager to turf Trudeau that they could run well to the right of where most Canadian voters are and they lost that gamble this time around at least.
I’m sure many NDP strategists with access to better numbers than we have are thinking hard about what happened this time around. If you look at the polls there’s a clear dip in NDP numbers at the time the election was called which makes it look like many voters deciding that this election was about keeping the CPC out and deciding (perhaps counterproductively in some cases) that the Liberals were their best chance of making that happen. That said I’m continuing to see suggestions that there’s a meaningful proportion of NDP voters (and not just NDP ridings) that are flipping conservative, which if true is something the NDP needs to think about.
I've had occasion over the past few days to chat with some Carleton voters during an excursion to fabled Manotick. Of an informal and anecdotal poll of six, four had voted for Bruce Fanjoy (the Liberal victor) and of these four, two had supported Mr Polièvre previously; the other two had voted for Mr P2. His behaviour during the convoy had turned the two former Tories to the Liberal candidate; a third had always voted Liberal, and a fourth had not voted this time but felt that P2 was too annoying. Of the two Conservatives, one was a big fan, and the other less so, but was voting against the departed Justin.
Predictions for the new boundaries had given P2 a slightly greater margin-- I know the area around Carleton and it is solidly blue-- any orange is not the party colour but the Orange Order.
...I know the area around Carleton and it is solidly blue-- any orange is not the party colour but the Orange Order.
Overlap between the two signified organizations in one person is not unheard of, but was likely more common in the time of T.C.Douglas. To take a totally random example of a New Democrat from the old days.
One has not had the pleasure of Orange Squared until you chair a NDP Riding AGM wherein Abolishing Separate Schools in Ontario is discussed. The sight of urbane LGBTQ++++ gender nonspecific Poli Sci grads wholrheartedly agreeing with Followers of King Billy is very jarring.
One has not had the pleasure of Orange Squared until you chair a NDP Riding AGM wherein Abolishing Separate Schools in Ontario is discussed. The sight of urbane LGBTQ++++ gender nonspecific Poli Sci grads wholrheartedly agreeing with Followers of King Billy is very jarring.
"Orange Squared". Well done.
My fellow Golden Bear Archbishop Garnsworthy was the man who compared Bill Davis' school-funding policies to Hitler's takeover of German education(*), but seems(via wiki) to have held relatively progressive views on most other topics.
Not sure how Garnsworthy voted. I do seem to recall hearing that it was the NDP under Stephen Lewis who had championed Catholic funding in the 1970s.
(*) For the uninitiated, Davis' policy simply extended existing K to 9 Catholic funding to high schools, so it wasn't like the Second Coming of Bloody Mary or anything. Mostly, there was a lotta shock because Davis' Tories had traditionally been the guardians of protestant purity in the province.
(**) Except for his support of Sabbath laws, which makes him not so much a sectarian bigot, as just a proponent of institutionalized boredom.
We discussed this a while back. I remember thinking that while Garnsworthy’s comments were a little over the top, and possibly not coming from a good place, he was wasn’t necessarily wrong on the issue of principle. Davis had just helped shepherd the new Charter of Rights through the constitutional repatriation process which guaranteed among other things religious freedom and religious equality.
My experience with Catholic education in Ontario has been generally positive and I don’t feel any personal investment in making publicly funded Catholic schools a thing of the past (despite rather serious disagreements with the RCs on some issues). But I’m not sure that expanding it further was the right thing to do in the 1980s. Certainly it would have been politically impossible practically speaking only a few years later.
As an aside I seem to recall that prior to full funding there were already Catholic high schools - obviously not publicly funded, but probably reasonably priced compared to elite private schools (schools not country clubs…) and I assume a possible expenditure for many families who felt strongly about continuing Catholic education for their children past Grade 10.
We discussed this a while back. I remember thinking that while Garnsworthy’s comments were a little over the top, and possibly not coming from a good place, he was wasn’t necessarily wrong on the issue of principle. Davis had just helped shepherd the new Charter of Rights through the constitutional repatriation process which guaranteed among other things religious freedom and religious equality.
The Charter is an interesting aspect to bring up. I assume publically funded confessional schools don't trespass on religious rights, since they don't stop anyone else from practicing their faith. Section 15, I think, talks about equality before the law, which schools for-one-but-not-for-all would seem to violate. Unless "the law" just means dealings with the police and the courts?
I'm embarrassed to say my recollection is so sketchy that I can't say for sure if religious schools have been tested under the Charter and found compliant, but I would assume it's happened?
My experience with Catholic education in Ontario has been generally positive
Mine too. I know at some other schools in town, the kids were heavily propagandized with conservative social views(anti-choice films as a mandatory school event, fundy-adjacent lectures on the evils of rock music etc), but my place was more folk-massy, both in tone and content. There was a lot of the usual social bigotry about, but this was an era when such attitudes were happily promoted by the popular culture, including Mother Corp. (lookin' at YOU, Air Farce!), so it's really hard to delineate what specific role our schools played in the whole mess.
and I don’t feel any personal investment in making publicly funded Catholic schools a thing of the past (despite rather serious disagreements with the RCs on some issues). But I’m not sure that expanding it further was the right thing to do in the 1980s. Certainly it would have been politically impossible practically speaking only a few years later.
If it were put to a referendum, I'm pretty sure I'd vote to abolish confessional school boards.
But it's not an issue I would advise any politician to pursue, unless he was REALLY sure that public opinion would swing his way(as, I assume, was the case in Newfoundland and Quebec). If your coalition is just the local humanist-society bake-sale brigade and some pissed off metalheads in pentagram shirts, you can expect a lotta storm and thunder, followed by inevitable defeat.
From a Charter perspective the issue isn’t religious schools per se but public funding. In strict theory it might be possible to have public funding made available equally for any religious school (though as I recall John Tory lost an election by floating that idea…) but practically speaking it would be a legal nightmare. There was litigation around the issue in the early 1990s. The bottom line is that (a) yes exclusive funding of Catholic schools would ordinarily violate the Charter, but (b) it’s protected by the Constitution Act 1867 which takes precedence and (c) no this doesn’t mean that everyone else gets funding too.
(though as I recall John Tory lost an election by floating that idea…)
Might've mentioned this before, but I don't know how McGuinty was able to get away with using "We don't divide children by religion in this province" to slap down John Tory's proposal for extending funding to Muslims. I mean, charitably, MAYBE he meant it to be understood as "I really wish we didn't have Catholic schools myself, but we're stuck with them, so let's not compound the error by giving more groups sectarian privileges", but I really doubt that's the message he was trying to convey.
Plus, his whole set-up about how when he travels around the world, people from less tranquil locales ask him how Ontario manages to avoid violent religious conflict, was just so much maudlin BS.
Thanks for the rundown on the legalities of the issue. Yeah, I was wondering if it might be a case of the older parts of the Constitution overruling the Charter, and I guess it is.
When it comes to Separate Schools in Ontario, it's One of Those Quirks like the Monarchy in the UK or the Electoral College in the US. It makes no sense theoretically but it's history.
Also, there are two clear political around Separate School funding in Ontario:
1) It's the Third Rail of Ontario politics: you touch it, you die. See Jorn Tory.
2) We discuss it once a generation. We discussed it 15 years ago and are not due to discuss it again until 2040.
When it comes to Separate Schools in Ontario, it's One of Those Quirks like the Monarchy in the UK or the Electoral College in the US. It makes no sense theoretically but it's history.
....
It's the Third Rail of Ontario politics: you touch it, you die. See Jorn Tory.
Though I wonder why separate schools were easier to get rid of in, say, Newfoundland. (Quebec, I'll assume, has its own unique dynamics.)
We discuss it once a generation. We discussed it 15 years ago and are not due to discuss it again until 2040.
Sounds about right, since it was 25 years between Davis' heretical enfoldment and Tory's attempt to extend the generosity to Muslims.
There's more to say later but s.93 is the last legacy of the old United Province of Canada. Separate schools were protected in legislation in Upper Canada only in 1863 through the canny maneuvering by John A. Macdonald and the votes of Lower Canada legislators. s. 93 entrenched that legislation once Lower Canada's members no longer had a vote on Upper Canadian matters after Confederation.
The new Canadian cabinet. My MP ( Wayne Long) is now a Secretary of State.
arney’s cabinet has 28 ministers and 10 secretaries of state (people who have specific roles, but aren’t necessarily connected to a particular department).
Twenty-four are new ministers, and 13 of them are first-time MPs.
Here’s the full list:
Shafqat Ali, President of the Treasury Board
Rebecca Alty, Minister of Crown-Indigenous relations
Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs
Gary Anandasangaree, Minister of Public Safety
François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Finance and National Revenue
Rebecca Chartrand, Minister of Northern and Arctic Affairs; and Minister responsible for the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency
Julie Dabrusin, Minister of Environment and Climate Change
Sean Fraser, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; and Minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency
Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Transport and Internal Trade
Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture; and Minister responsible for Official Languages
Mandy Gull-Masty, Minister of Indigenous Services
Patty Hajdu, Minister of Jobs and Families; and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario
Tim Hodgson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources
Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry; and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions
Dominic LeBlanc, President of the King’s Privy Council for Canada; and Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade, Intergovernmental Affairs and One Canadian Economy
Joël Lightbound, Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement
Heath MacDonald, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food
Steven MacKinnon, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
David J. McGuinty, Minister of National Defence
Jill McKnight, Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence
Lena Metlege Diab, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
Marjorie Michel, Minister of Health
Eleanor Olszewski, Minister of Emergency Management and Community Resilience; and Minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada
Gregor Robertson, Minister of Housing and Infrastructure; and Minister responsible for Pacific Economic Development Canada
Maninder Sidhu, Minister of International Trade
Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation; and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario
Joanne Thompson, Minister of Fisheries
Rechie Valdez, Minister of Women and Gender Equality; and secretary of state (small business and tourism)
Secretaries of State:
Buckley Belanger, secretary of state (rural development)
Stephen Fuhr, secretary of state (defence procurement)
Anna Gainey, secretary of state (children and youth)
Wayne Long, secretary of state (Canada Revenue Agency and financial institutions)
Stephanie McLean, secretary of state (seniors)
Nathalie Provost, secretary of state (nature)
Ruby Sahota, secretary of state (combatting crime)
Randeep Sarai, secretary of state (international development)
Adam van Koeverden, secretary of state (sport)
John Zerucelli, secretary of state (labour)
Last Friday, Carney and his cabinet got approval from the GG to spend an additional $33 Billion. This spending was not approved by parliament, and thus not subject to a non-confidence vote.
Now Champagne (Minister of Finance and Revenue*)has said that they will not present a budget this year. Again, avoiding a non-confidence vote.
Carney is acting more like Trump every day. He seems to think he is not answerable to anyone.
* Never in my lifetime have these been combined. Finance is a Department. Revenue is an Agency - not a Department. hmmm. Pretty sure that is a problem.
Perhaps, since Finance won't be preparing a budget, they will lay off half their staff?
This is a common misunderstanding of the Government of Canada's fiscal processes. Governor General's Special Warrants are intended for just such use as the election interrupted the appropriation timetable.
The House of Commons can vote against such expenditure if it so wishes as a specific motion of confidence but I doubt such a motion would pass.
We were in Scotland during the election and were surprised at how well-informed people were about it. Carney seems to have been accepted as that rarest of all creatures these days - a statesman - a decent person with strong credentials for the job who is not there for personal gain, thereby raising him far above the idiot trump and his creeping sycophants.
There were many jokes about the 51st state, but one shopkeeper had put up a world map showing the former USA divided into Canada South and Mexico North. It seemed to be giving much pleasure to the customers.
As a former Reserve member this CBC article caught my attention this morning. It talks about the difficulties they are having retaining new recruits. I expected large attrition numbers. I was shocked that they seem to consider less than 10% attrition to be a major problem. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/military-retention-program-defunding-1.7536509
Comments
I only found out about it because of a conversation years ago with an American from the Pacific Northwest(apparently, it's taught in schools where she came from). I actually had to look up the date on wikipedia.
The Conservatives are set to break 40% for the first time since 1988(including years when the old PCs were still in competition with the various Reform permutations, with their combined totals taken as one bloc). And that's with the man in the White House providing the worst advertising possible for contemporary conservatism, including threats to annex Canada itself.
In any case, I liked when Mr Carney thanked PP and Mr Singh at the beginning of his statement. And that PP was fairly graceful in his concession. These are not empty gestures as they indicate to supporters how the principals regard their fates.
Ha! That's hilarious. But in the end they went with the line the Americans wanted to draw. Not your best option this time, I would think.
I’m not totally surprised as this was really the CPC’s election to lose, for any number of reasons. The Liberals were reaching their best before date after 10 years in power, cultural politics is moving to the right, and specific Liberal policies eg the carbon tax were highly unpopular. If Harris had been elected President I strongly suspect we would be seeing a Poilievre government now or in the imminent future as soon as an election was held. But the Liberals got lucky at the exact same time as Poilievre and the CPC got unlucky.
I was talking to a colleague who was up into the early morning hours last night watching the results come in (I gather partly out of morbid fascination at P losing his seat). She did mention the phenomenon of NDP ridings swinging Conservative and I was also reading commentary on FB (not always the most reliable source) about the same phenomenon. This is worrying in the same way that Trump attracting votes from some unexpected quarters was worrying.
I don't know how much you can read into that, because there very well may be local factors at play. In Alberta, it's not unheard-of for constituencies and ridings to swing between Conservative and NDP, for reasons now only partly descended from the NEP(*). And nowadays, with the extermination of the Liberals provincially, that's likely to be the main electoral binary for a while(**).
(*) Being even more pro-nationalization than the Liberals didn't stop the provincial NDP from beating them to official opposition status in '86 and '89, and the Liberals themselves were forgiven by a lot of the urban electorate in the '93 election.
(**) Yes, with "free enterprise" Danielle Smith facing off against a socialist opposition in Edmonton, it is looking quite a bit like "The Bennetts vs. The Socialist Hordes" in neighbouring BC all those years.
US "journalist" 🤣🤣 vox pop to Adnan Karavelic (who he?)
"How do you view same-sex marriage?"
"In Canada, we just call it marriage. And since it's not hockey, nobody really cares which team you're playing for".
Hooray for me!!
Over 14% of the NDP's caucus will come from Alberta, with Saskatchewan providing exactly O%. Cradle of Canadian social democracy, my ass.
And in Quebec, we have both Heaven bluer and Hell redder than in 2021.
And why do so many overwhelmingly Francophone ridings around Quebec City vote Tory? Is it really the legacy of “le ciel est bleu, l’enfer est rouge” or is there some other reason?
Note that I am not talking about the Eastern Townships, where I might understand a history of voting Tory, but about ridings farther north around Quebec City.
Going on second-hand impressions, that would be my guess. Though I suspect these days the religious identitarianism has secularized into just old-stock suburbanite chauvinism, and they're less panicked about blasphemous JWs and Communist hordes and more about turbans and car-thieves.
I think it was with the ascension of Joe "Canada is a community of communities" Clark in 1976 that the PCs fully reversed themselves into the party of decentralization and provincial rights. As I think I've detailed elsewhere on the forum, this position played well with the more business-oriented sections of Quebec nationalism, culminating in the beau-risque alliance under Mulroney.
A few years back, Chantal Hebert wrote a book about Stephen Harper's more-or-less successful efforts at improving his party's fortunes in Quebec during the 2006 election. Since publication, the CPC's fortunes have bounced between about five and ten seats, most of them, I THINK, in that Quebec City area you reference(*). I can't recall her argument in extreme detail, but it boiled down to: "Quebec nationalists don't care if Harper's a bible-thumping Alberta oil stooge, because all they want him to do is hand more power over to Quebec, and it doesn't matter if he slashes social programs because Quebec can just grab the money from Ottawa and create its own provincial programs."
One thing Harper DID do was a symbolic mulroneyization of the Constitution, with Quebec's supposed distinctiveness entered into one of the non-binding pre-ambulatory sections. That probably played okay with the strip-mall nationalists in Quebec, while not alienating franco-phobic Conservatives in English Canada.
(*) Just re-reading your post while on break from this one, I see you were specifically curious about why it the suburbs of Quebec City in particular. I'm less qualified to address that one, except to obverse that those areas are the metro of a major city, but on the less cosmopolitan end of the scale. So maybe a heavier concentration of the old-stock, petit bourgeois car-dealer types I've been slandering?
For example, Edmonton Griesbach went Conservative in 2015(its first election) and 2019, NDP in 2021, and swung back to the Conservatives on Monday.
It is notable how consistent the Conservative numbers have been in Quebec since Harper's first victory in 2006. Seat counts...
2000 - 1
2004 - 0
2006 - 10
2008 - 10
2011 - 5
2015 - 12
2019 - 10
2021 - 10
2025 - 11
2011 was the year the NDP swept Quebec, so I'm guessing that some of the Conservative losses were to them, but I really don't know.
BC is usually a three-way. Western ridings have long been prone to switch between the NDP and Tories due to te weakness of te Federal Liberaks there and the near extinction of provincial Liberal Parties in those provinces.
Yeah, the western provincial legislatures have pretty much achieved Ernest and Preston Manning's vision, first enunciated in their 1967 book, of a political spectrum dominated by one solidly left-wing and one solidly right-wing party, with the centrist brokerage-party gutted out. And if current trends can be accurately discerned, Ontario might be heading down the same path.
Oddly, the federal parliament as a whole has proven itself stubbornly resistant to this ongoing erosion of
grittery, with Monday's not-atypical results giving the Liberals an overwhelming majority in the maritimes, substantial majorities in Quebec in Ontario, near-ties in Sakatchewan and BC, the usual Edmonton and/or Calgary non-conforming freakozoids, and 2 of the three seats in the territories.
If the NDP is traditionally the party that can beat the Tories in these ridings, wouldn’t tactical voters know to back them even in this election? Because when you look at the results in some of the Vancouver Island ridings and elsewhere in BC, it looks like there was a swing towards the Liberals (even if the NDP still polled ahead of the Liberals) and that split the progressive vote enough to let the Tories win.
One would think so, but an astonishing number of electors are barely aware that they are voting in constituencies-- they are voting presidentially seemingly without any thought as to how their choices would affect the end results.
I first discovered this decades ago in the days when I canvassed in elections and was astonished then. It never ceases to amaze me. I have so often explained how it works, only to be received with wide-eyed stares indicating either 1) slow realization, or 2) disbelief annoyed by factual information.
Which feels on the side of the Atlantic like an epic bit of Commonwealth-Solidarity-Trump-Trolling.
Possibly. But I doubt that either Trump or most of his followers will read much significance into it. Maybe if Charles and Camilla had cancelled a trip to the USA but were still visiting Canada.
In order for it to work that way, you'd need a situation where both the Liberals and the NDP were viewed as parties of the left(IOW not Ross Thatcher Liberals) and the NDP was the more powerful of the two parties.
So...
LIBERAL-LEANING VOTER: Well, I'd like to vote Liberal, but I'm worried the Conservatives will get in, so since the NDP has the better chance in my riding, I guess I'll go for them.
Probably not a lot of elections like that in Canada. The Liberals tend to be the natural governing party, so it's more likely New Democrats kowtow to them.
I am far from certain about that. God alone knows what (or if) his followers can read, but Trump will be puzzled that he is not the first priority for the King, and will be aware that this is a riposte to his annexation nonsense. He will also be aware (as he gets his information from television) of what Charles says at the opening of Parliament, which is likely to be very Canada-in-the-world oriented, and will have few if any declarations of obeisance to the US presidency.
I suspect that they will have trouble figuring all of this out, but will be very much aware that it is Not About Them. And that, perhaps, is the point of the visit especially as, given the King's health and age, this may be his only one.
Well, we've had poll after poll showing Canadians en masse don't want annexation, The Star-Spangled Banner booed at hockey games, a nationwide boycott including the removal of American booze from government liquor stores, not to mention the collapse of tourism heading south of the border and attendant economic damage. And with all that, Trump still persists in believing that there's a significant market for his manifest-destiny schtick in Canada.
So, I'm not entirely convinced he interprets reality's indicators quite the same way most world leaders do. Granted, yeah, he might realize that Charles and Carney are trying to project some sorta imperial unity, but I doubt it will make much difference in his willingness to ride that particular hobbyhorse.
(That said, maybe the fact that it's Big Important Men putting on the transatlantic chest-thumping, rather than just yokels boycotting Jack Daniels, will drive the point home?)
The Conservatives received record numbers of votes, and increased their seat counts from the previous parliament. They didn't so much lose as the Liberals became the benefactors of the NDP collapse.
Or that soft-dippers saw blocking Poilievre as an urgent enough task that they did not have the luxury of voting for their first choice.
Indeed, this was one of the most impressive performances for an otherwise losing party that I've seen in a while. And it says sonething that the Conservatives seem happy to have Poilievre stay on, even countenancing the sacrifice of a winning candidate in order to facilitate a by-election.
An interesting spin on the CPC’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory… seriously, had they run a candidate with any view to crossover appeal, they would likely be in government now. They decided to gamble that the voters would be so eager to turf Trudeau that they could run well to the right of where most Canadian voters are and they lost that gamble this time around at least.
I’m sure many NDP strategists with access to better numbers than we have are thinking hard about what happened this time around. If you look at the polls there’s a clear dip in NDP numbers at the time the election was called which makes it look like many voters deciding that this election was about keeping the CPC out and deciding (perhaps counterproductively in some cases) that the Liberals were their best chance of making that happen. That said I’m continuing to see suggestions that there’s a meaningful proportion of NDP voters (and not just NDP ridings) that are flipping conservative, which if true is something the NDP needs to think about.
Predictions for the new boundaries had given P2 a slightly greater margin-- I know the area around Carleton and it is solidly blue-- any orange is not the party colour but the Orange Order.
Overlap between the two signified organizations in one person is not unheard of, but was likely more common in the time of T.C.Douglas. To take a totally random example of a New Democrat from the old days.
"Orange Squared". Well done.
My fellow Golden Bear Archbishop Garnsworthy was the man who compared Bill Davis' school-funding policies to Hitler's takeover of German education(*), but seems(via wiki) to have held relatively progressive views on most other topics.
Not sure how Garnsworthy voted. I do seem to recall hearing that it was the NDP under Stephen Lewis who had championed Catholic funding in the 1970s.
(*) For the uninitiated, Davis' policy simply extended existing K to 9 Catholic funding to high schools, so it wasn't like the Second Coming of Bloody Mary or anything. Mostly, there was a lotta shock because Davis' Tories had traditionally been the guardians of protestant purity in the province.
(**) Except for his support of Sabbath laws, which makes him not so much a sectarian bigot, as just a proponent of institutionalized boredom.
Sorry. It was K to 10 that was getting funded prior to Davis' full surrender to Babylon.
My experience with Catholic education in Ontario has been generally positive and I don’t feel any personal investment in making publicly funded Catholic schools a thing of the past (despite rather serious disagreements with the RCs on some issues). But I’m not sure that expanding it further was the right thing to do in the 1980s. Certainly it would have been politically impossible practically speaking only a few years later.
As an aside I seem to recall that prior to full funding there were already Catholic high schools - obviously not publicly funded, but probably reasonably priced compared to elite private schools (schools not country clubs…) and I assume a possible expenditure for many families who felt strongly about continuing Catholic education for their children past Grade 10.
The Charter is an interesting aspect to bring up. I assume publically funded confessional schools don't trespass on religious rights, since they don't stop anyone else from practicing their faith. Section 15, I think, talks about equality before the law, which schools for-one-but-not-for-all would seem to violate. Unless "the law" just means dealings with the police and the courts?
I'm embarrassed to say my recollection is so sketchy that I can't say for sure if religious schools have been tested under the Charter and found compliant, but I would assume it's happened?
Mine too. I know at some other schools in town, the kids were heavily propagandized with conservative social views(anti-choice films as a mandatory school event, fundy-adjacent lectures on the evils of rock music etc), but my place was more folk-massy, both in tone and content. There was a lot of the usual social bigotry about, but this was an era when such attitudes were happily promoted by the popular culture, including Mother Corp. (lookin' at YOU, Air Farce!), so it's really hard to delineate what specific role our schools played in the whole mess.
If it were put to a referendum, I'm pretty sure I'd vote to abolish confessional school boards.
But it's not an issue I would advise any politician to pursue, unless he was REALLY sure that public opinion would swing his way(as, I assume, was the case in Newfoundland and Quebec). If your coalition is just the local humanist-society bake-sale brigade and some pissed off metalheads in pentagram shirts, you can expect a lotta storm and thunder, followed by inevitable defeat.
https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/1996/1996canlii148/1996canlii148.html
Might've mentioned this before, but I don't know how McGuinty was able to get away with using "We don't divide children by religion in this province" to slap down John Tory's proposal for extending funding to Muslims. I mean, charitably, MAYBE he meant it to be understood as "I really wish we didn't have Catholic schools myself, but we're stuck with them, so let's not compound the error by giving more groups sectarian privileges", but I really doubt that's the message he was trying to convey.
Plus, his whole set-up about how when he travels around the world, people from less tranquil locales ask him how Ontario manages to avoid violent religious conflict, was just so much maudlin BS.
Thanks for the rundown on the legalities of the issue. Yeah, I was wondering if it might be a case of the older parts of the Constitution overruling the Charter, and I guess it is.
Also, there are two clear political around Separate School funding in Ontario:
1) It's the Third Rail of Ontario politics: you touch it, you die. See Jorn Tory.
2) We discuss it once a generation. We discussed it 15 years ago and are not due to discuss it again until 2040.
Though I wonder why separate schools were easier to get rid of in, say, Newfoundland. (Quebec, I'll assume, has its own unique dynamics.)
Sounds about right, since it was 25 years between Davis' heretical enfoldment and Tory's attempt to extend the generosity to Muslims.
arney’s cabinet has 28 ministers and 10 secretaries of state (people who have specific roles, but aren’t necessarily connected to a particular department).
Twenty-four are new ministers, and 13 of them are first-time MPs.
Here’s the full list:
Shafqat Ali, President of the Treasury Board
Rebecca Alty, Minister of Crown-Indigenous relations
Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs
Gary Anandasangaree, Minister of Public Safety
François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Finance and National Revenue
Rebecca Chartrand, Minister of Northern and Arctic Affairs; and Minister responsible for the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency
Julie Dabrusin, Minister of Environment and Climate Change
Sean Fraser, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; and Minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency
Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Transport and Internal Trade
Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture; and Minister responsible for Official Languages
Mandy Gull-Masty, Minister of Indigenous Services
Patty Hajdu, Minister of Jobs and Families; and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario
Tim Hodgson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources
Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry; and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions
Dominic LeBlanc, President of the King’s Privy Council for Canada; and Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade, Intergovernmental Affairs and One Canadian Economy
Joël Lightbound, Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement
Heath MacDonald, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food
Steven MacKinnon, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
David J. McGuinty, Minister of National Defence
Jill McKnight, Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence
Lena Metlege Diab, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
Marjorie Michel, Minister of Health
Eleanor Olszewski, Minister of Emergency Management and Community Resilience; and Minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada
Gregor Robertson, Minister of Housing and Infrastructure; and Minister responsible for Pacific Economic Development Canada
Maninder Sidhu, Minister of International Trade
Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation; and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario
Joanne Thompson, Minister of Fisheries
Rechie Valdez, Minister of Women and Gender Equality; and secretary of state (small business and tourism)
Secretaries of State:
Buckley Belanger, secretary of state (rural development)
Stephen Fuhr, secretary of state (defence procurement)
Anna Gainey, secretary of state (children and youth)
Wayne Long, secretary of state (Canada Revenue Agency and financial institutions)
Stephanie McLean, secretary of state (seniors)
Nathalie Provost, secretary of state (nature)
Ruby Sahota, secretary of state (combatting crime)
Randeep Sarai, secretary of state (international development)
Adam van Koeverden, secretary of state (sport)
John Zerucelli, secretary of state (labour)
Now Champagne (Minister of Finance and Revenue*)has said that they will not present a budget this year. Again, avoiding a non-confidence vote.
Carney is acting more like Trump every day. He seems to think he is not answerable to anyone.
* Never in my lifetime have these been combined. Finance is a Department. Revenue is an Agency - not a Department. hmmm. Pretty sure that is a problem.
Perhaps, since Finance won't be preparing a budget, they will lay off half their staff?
This is a common misunderstanding of the Government of Canada's fiscal processes. Governor General's Special Warrants are intended for just such use as the election interrupted the appropriation timetable.
The House of Commons can vote against such expenditure if it so wishes as a specific motion of confidence but I doubt such a motion would pass.
There were many jokes about the 51st state, but one shopkeeper had put up a world map showing the former USA divided into Canada South and Mexico North. It seemed to be giving much pleasure to the customers.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/military-retention-program-defunding-1.7536509