Canada General Discussion (2019-)

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From Reg Whitaker, a distinguished Canadian political scientist:

Absent the Turners and Martins who dominated economic policy in previous Liberal governments, the star turn of Mark Carney, former governor of the Banks of both Canada and England, served to show just how far off-centre the Liberals have now moved. Instead of the austerity and inflation-fighting mania of earlier bank governors, Carney urges a capitalism more concerned about reducing inequality and achieving a greener economy.

It is easy to be cynical about Liberal promises. No doubt a number of these aspirations will never see the light of day, and others may be severely compromised when enacted.

But the NDP are mistaken to claim unbroken continuity from a past when the Liberals campaigned from the left and governed from the right.

The old "Government Party" -- the classic big-tent, middle-of-the road brokerage party that could shift as easily to the right as to the left in response to changing wind direction -- is dead and buried.

Seismic shifts in society, economy and in political marketing and communication have rendered brokerage politics all but obsolete.

Big data, micro-targeting and social media have sharpened the boundaries between groups of voters and are polarizing electorates along increasingly tribal lines which are pulling away from each other.

Tribalization is not as advanced in Canada as it is in the U.S., but it has pulled the Conservative party much further to the right, consolidating their base of about a third of Canadians, concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan, with their petro-state economies and ideology to match.

The other two-thirds are split between Liberal, NDP, Green and Bloc Québécois supporters who have a great deal in common in political values and policy preferences (broadly on the moderate centre-left) but are divided regionally on partisan lines -- which leaves open the possibility of the right-wing minority imposing itself on the country over a fragmented majority.

Practically, Liberals have no hope of breaking into the solid Tory base, but must consolidate the centre-left to avert a Tory win.

https://rabble.ca/news/2021/04/liberals-emerge-convention-ready-govern-left

The identification of the Bloc as having similar "political values" to the Liberals and NDP is striking, since their return to relevance at the last election did not seem like it was based on any political values that the Liberals and NDP share. I'm curious now to what extent this thinking that the Bloc is really a party of the left like the others is common among the Canadian political class; obviously it was widespread in 2009, but that was 2009.

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https://twitter.com/MarkGerretsen/status/1385951915339616260

I dislike the posting of context-free tweets on this site, because I have no idea what point you're looking to make here, but criticism of the Ontario government's draconian lockdown policy seems to me to be not just warranted but necessary. It's good that it's coming from the Tory benches, since the Liberals and NDP seem unlikely to call for anything but even more lockdown.

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Social Credit, then Liberals - why have the Tories not been the main rightist force in BC at state level?

MaxQue did a good job of answering this question, but I'd add that its premise is flawed, in that in western Canada it has historically been unusual for the main right-wing party to have "Conservative" in its name. Consider the partisan breakdown of provincial legislative assemblies in the West as of 1963:

Manitoba: 36 PC, 13 Lib, 7 NDP, 1 SC
Saskatchewan: 37 NDP, 17 Lib
Alberta: 60 SC, 2 Lib, 1 Lib/PC coalition
British Columbia: 33 SC, 14 NDP, 5 Lib

Manitoba here is the obvious outlier, not BC. In the other provinces, the local "Conservative" brand was discredited by the Great Depression; when the accompanying rise of socialism led non-socialists to coalesce behind one electoral option, it didn't make sense for it to be the Conservatives.

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There's something faintly ridiculous about questioning the long term viability of a party that's *checks polling average* only down 5-6 points to a government in its second term. Obviously the Tories aren't doing great right now, but it's silly to act like they can't possibly make up that small of a gap in a country like Canada and the Liberals will govern forever and ever amen.

Yeah, I find the tenor of posts here (mostly mileslunn's, I guess) incongruous with the fact that, last I checked, the Conservative Party won the most votes at the last federal election.

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The BC-ization of Canadian federal politics would be interesting, even more interesting would be a 25x3 split of Canadian politics. Here's what I mean:

- Tories never recover from the current numbers and 25% becomes their baseline
- The NDP gains among left-liberals who see the NDP growing and want a bolder vision in power. The NDP hits a ceiling at around 25%, because the more radical elements keep the centrists out
- The Liberals hold on to around 25%, made up of core Liberal supporters

The remaining 25% are swing voters, Bloquistes, Greens, fringe party voters, etc.

This wouldn't be that crazy either.

This would be extremely crazy! As I have pointed out previously with reference to these wide-eyed predictions of doom, literally two years ago the Conservative Party received more votes than any other party. You can come up with elaborate reasoning for the Tories' demise if you want, but the actual issues are a poor leader coupled with the problems that opposition parties worldwide have faced in establishing a message during the pandemic.

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Exactly I am from BC and BC is the most Western province and largest in West and is in many ways more aligned with Ontario than Alberta or Saskatchewan.

If this were the case, then the Reform Party wouldn't have won a huge majority of BC constituencies in 1993 and the Liberal Party would have won even a single BC constituency in 1980. More recently, in 2019, the Conservative Party won the most votes and the most seats in British Columbia; the only other provinces where that was the case were Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. It might be true that residents of downtown Vancouver feel more connected to downtown Toronto than they do to the rest of the West, but voting patterns certainly do not suggest that this feeling is shared by the electorate of British Columbia in general.

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It doesn't seem surprising that Conservative polling would move toward more normal numbers as the thought of an election becomes increasingly real to voters.

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It seems like every poll has some sort of shocking result when looking at the crosstabs by province, which suggests that those provincial breakdowns are not very reliable.

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Re: the next election

The Tories got a shade under 34% last time. Say they need to pick up six points to form government (probably a bit less than that, but suppose for argument sake).

Does anyone seriously believe that the Liberals have six points worth of white collar professional types, who were put off by pro-choice, pro-carbon tax, Liberal-gun-ban-accepting O'Toole, but would embrace the Tories if they moved just a little bit more left?

A significant chunk of those six points are going to have come from the PPC, and perhaps the Bloc Quebecois,  some sort of accomodation is going to have to be reached to win those voters over. Even among current Liberal/NDP voters, the path of least resistance is probably going to be in the voters concentrated in places like Northern Ontario and rural Newfoundland, not the Andrew Coyne types. Those voters aren't going to be won over with the sorts of things pundits usually think the Tories should do.

To be really blunt, if Poillievre becomes leader, I'd be more nervous for the party if he runs on a platform of fiscal orthodoxy, than if he does the sort of cultural conservative stuff pundits wring their hands over.

The appeal of this position is obvious, but the issue is that voters who chose right-of-Conservative parties in 2021 are politically marginal and concentrated in uncompetitive ridings. Obviously Canadian voters are uniquely volatile, et cetera, but since I have a file with 2021 results by riding I decided to do a little exercise.

If 100% of People's Party and Maverick Party voters had instead voted for the Conservative Party, the effect would be a loss of 15 Liberal seats, 6 NDP seats, and 1 Bloc seat, for a Conservative gain of 22 seats. This would give us a result of Liberal 145, Conservative 141, Bloc 31, NDP 19, Green 2. Even an extreme scenario of every right-wing voter instead voting Conservative would still have resulted in a Liberal government. The Conservative loss in 2021 is not attributable to bleeding votes to the right.



If we consider instead the prospect of winning over Liberal voters, winning over 7% of Liberal voters from 2021 would deliver a Conservative minority government. Winning over 15% of Liberal voters from 2021 would produce a Conservative majority. As it happens, 15% of Liberal voters would be 7,500 fewer than the total number of People's Party voters, but those votes would be far more valuable. Another way to put it is that winning back all the People's Party voters would not be enough, but convincing half as many Liberal voters would mean a Conservative government.



As it is, Canada's electoral geography puts the Conservative Party at a disadvantage, and trying to consolidate the right flank would mean doubling down on that disadvantage. The realistic options for a Conservative victory that don't involve trying to win over Liberal voters are mobilizing non-voters or flipping Bloc voters. The former seems unlikely and the latter is perilous. Winning isn't necessarily the only thing that matters in politics, but if Conservatives want to pursue a more overtly confessional strategy, then they should be aware of what they're doing.

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For the Conservatives, I would say keep stuff mostly the same including blue collar workers strategy except replace the appeal to muh centrists in urban areas strategy with a Rob/Doug Ford strategy.

General outline of things

1. Target every single non-urban/non-metropolitan riding held by the Liberals or NDP. Especially Northern Ontario and Newfoundland where were some big swings towards the CPC.

2. Try to emulate the Ford brothers and work hard on ethnic outreach for GTA seats. Strategy could be transferable the Vancouver area as well.

Sometimes I think about the Rob Ford crack video. Any politician could have sent someone down to the ethnic neighborhood to pick up drugs and then consumed them with his rich friends, but what made Rob Ford distinctive is that he actually smoked the crack there. If you want to be less flippant, you can look at the ethnic composition of the football teams he coached. The point here is that Rob Ford actively liked immigrants and wanted to be around them. That's the sort of thing that can't be replicated just by passing out Punjabi-language flyers in Brampton.

It also seems unlikely that the sort of soft anti-vaccine (or even just anti-lockdown) pressure coming from the right flank of the Conservative Party would play well with minorities. This is a repeated issue facing the Conservative Party when it comes to winning Liberal votes.

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Presidentialization of the PMO has basically been made inevitable by our unimaginably hyper-partisan legislative branch. A "rebel" in Canada is an MP who votes with his party only 97% of the time.

This analysis appears backward. Every country that uses the Westminster system imposes such rigid discipline. It can reasonably be said to be a defining feature of parliamentary government. By contrast, presidential systems allow far more freedom to individual legislators, because they are elected in their own right (rather than to bring about a specific government) and because the continued existence of the government is not dependent on their actual support.

I can think of four Liberal MPs - Lamoureux, McKay, Tassi and Scarpaleggia - who were all social conservatives until Trudeau came around and made those views punishable by removal. A Westminster purist would see more issue with MPs not being allowed to differ from party lines, than someone saying "I'm running for PM" in a Youtube video.

This here is confusion of internal party democracy with outward voting records. Members of the House of Representatives in Australia vote just as loyally with their party as in the Canadian Commons, and yet legislative caucuses are so strong that they cause severe political issues there. Political parties in the Westminster system basically rely on a democratic centralist model, where internal debate is permissible but external dissension is not allowed. It is perhaps true that party discipline for Canadian legislators was looser in the past than it is now, but you cannot find one country in the world using the Westminster system where regular disagreement is not punished.

The presidentialization of Canadian politics embodied by Poilievre is the product of right-wing embrace of American political customs. The reason for this seems straightforward enough: Canadian political institutions and traditions are associated  with the Liberal Laurentian elite. This is why, if memory serves, Liberal voters are the most supportive of the monarchy in opinion polls. This is also why the right-wing occupation of Ottawa has all kinds of American right-wing imagery.

In theory Singh is in a great position to act Prime Ministerial and talk tough without having to actually deal with the consequences but he's reverted to his usual HR speak of "we can't tolerate racism" and "this is unacceptable". I've had a problem with Singh's leadership for ages but I think I can put a pin on the biggest problem he has: he has zero expectation of becoming Prime Minister, to the point where he's been a Federal leader for years yet can't give a straightforward answer whenever anyone asks what he'd do in response to any given problem as PM. At this moment his two biggest opponents are squabbling in the dirt and he can go any direction he wants and plausibly come out on top. He can get tough and talk about seizing trucks or charging million dollar fines or he can be conciliatory and talk about ending divisiveness and bringing people together but instead he's just copying Trudeau but without the force of government behind him. The NDP desperately needs a more ambitious leader but the base inexplicably loves him.

Plenty of people here recognized this after the election (I remember on election night the NDP woman was talking about how proud everyone was of Jagmeet rather than having any thoughts at all on the NDP's failure to make any significant gains), but when I talked about this a Dipper here gave me a metaphor about how life is a highway and the journey (which I guess here means participating in the political process) is more important than the destination (presumably this means actually forming government) and really who cares about whether you ever reach the destination when the Trans-Canadian Highway is so beautiful? NDP activists love Jagmeet Singh because he's a born loser just like they are. He can't even imagine winning so he doesn't have to challenge them in any way.

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The presidentialization of Canadian politics embodied by Poilievre is the product of right-wing embrace of American political customs.

Bullsh*t. Explain Justin Trudeau if you think this is a recent phenomenon. Do you think Trudeau is this great Parliamentarian that goes to the House of Commons and makes this passionate speech on an issue and then legislation comes raining in from his lieutenant that passes and then receives Royal Assent? Look at his record, the answer to that question is no. The Liberals made last minute decisions on very weight things (e.g. renovation of NORAD), dissolved Parliament so none of these decisions would get debated on the Commons floor, have an election, "we need a government that can respond to the challenges of today" blah blah blah all that sh*t, then once the election was over it took them forever to announce a Cabinet and have Parliament sit again, just in time to say "we must rush a few bills through Parliament before end of year!", and it was about 3 months until they had mandate letters for their ministers published. This was an election where almost literally nothing changed, why it took so long to get things going I don't think anyone has an idea other than the governing party could not be bothered. All that time where Parliament is not sitting, there's still crises going on, there's still decisions being made, it's just the Parliament has no say in it. Who does? The presidentialized Prime Minister and his unelected inner circle. Meanwhile, Cabinet Ministers have become more irrelevant than ever on being allowed to have an independent policy-making power from PMO. Trudeau did not invent these things coming into being, he's just exacerbated them and made them worse than ever before. Meanwhile he's a weak touch on the problems facing the country.

From your response it seems like you think that I like or am sympathetic to Justin Trudeau, so let's get that out of the way. I don't and I'm not.

The behavior you describe Trudeau's government engaging in, controlling parliamentary sittings to render the legislature subordinate to the executive, is neither particularly "American" nor at all alien to the Westminster system. Ship money was so important in the 1630s because the English government refused to let Parliament sit for a whole decade. Trudeau's behavior is in keeping with the very oldest Westminster traditions, far older than Canada as a nation. Stephen Harper behaved in the same way when he prorogued Parliament in 2009 or 2010 so that the opposition couldn't remove him. None of this is what I'm referring to.

What is being discussed here is Poilievre saying "I'm running for Prime Minister" rather than "I'm running for leader of the Conservative Party". Justin Trudeau would not do this, and this is not because he's a more respectable or more honorable person or whatever other characteristics you might think I'm attributing to him. He wouldn't do it because Liberal voters are deeply attached to the outward language that distinguishes Canada from America in a way that Conservative voters are not.

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And as for the "Americanization" of our politics, yeah again that's not news by any stretch, and Poilievre isn't introducing a new element here. I think if you follow Canadian election campaigns without understanding the system, you could easily be mistaken into thinking it's a presidential campaign.

One may lament Americanization, but that too is a natural conclusion. Our parliamentary system is designed in the image of the British one, and that's a country most Canadians have quite little familiarity with, especially their politics. Meanwhile the US is, like, right there. Many Canadians follow American politics more closely than their own, and this isn't some insidious conspiracy, it's just what happens when you share a border with the single most influential country in history.

I will say that it's easy for Canadians to overstate how similar to America their political process is. As a specific example, every American who visits Canada around election time is startled by the sheer number of color-coded signs. There's no real equivalent in America.

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Doug Ford has announced that he will remove the vaccine passport system from Ontario "very soon".

History has taught us that appeasement makes the aggressor only more aggressive. Ford needs to set an example in order to create a credible deterrence to prevent future transgressions.

Are you suggesting that the proper response would be to punish everyone with more lockdowns?

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The quality of this thread has plummeted over the last few days.

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It's a shame how indifferent the NDP is to this government using emergency powers to restrict civil liberties. Tommy Douglas was far more critical of the government using emergency powers in a much more serious situation.

This isn't your grandfather's NDP anymore.

One recalls that the young Jack Layton was drawn to the NDP thanks to Tommy Douglas's principled opposition to the invocation of the War Measures Act. The contemporary NDP would never do such a thing because it would involve taking any sort of stand at all.

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Talking about "trends" like they represent some sort of unstoppable force is annoying enough normally, but it's absurd in the context of Canada. In the riding in question here, the Conservative vote has basically held steady over the last decade and the decline in the NDP vote is largely the product of Liberal gains. Is the lesson here that the rising red tide will engulf all remote white ridings?

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Talking about "trends" like they represent some sort of unstoppable force is annoying enough normally, but it's absurd in the context of Canada. In the riding in question here, the Conservative vote has basically held steady over the last decade and the decline in the NDP vote is largely the product of Liberal gains. Is the lesson here that the rising red tide will engulf all remote white ridings?

Not really though. In 2011 and 2019, the drop in NDP support mainly helped the CPC, and in 2021, the PPC (Libs lost vote share in all three examples). The main exception is 2015, when the Trudeau Liberals were at their most popular.

I know "trends" are overemphasized by many on this forum, but in the case of Timmins-James Bay, the rightward trend is pretty clear.

There is a "rightward trend" in that the NDP vote has declined and all other parties are to the right of the NDP. This is the overall change over the last decade:

NDP: ‒14.85 pp
Con: ‒4.7 pp
Lib: +8.63 pp
Grn: ‒2.2 pp
PPC: +13.12 pp

The Conservative Party share of the vote has decreased appreciably over that span, and the Liberal Party vote has increased significantly. On that basis we could talk about the dramatic rightward shift in every sorts of place in the GTA that voted NDP in 2011 and (unlike this riding) don't vote NDP anymore.

If you were instead to add 100% of People's Party votes to the Conservative column, it's true that you would then see an increase in the Conservative share of the vote, although it would still be less than the Liberal increase. This would, of course, be grossly inappropriate, since a) there's no reason to assume that all PPC voters would have voted Tory if they had not been presented an alternate option, and b) there's no reason to assume that the alternate option will disappear.

It's undeniably true that the NDP vote has gone down a great deal. Maybe that's because of trends the like of which cannot be stopped, much like how depopulation and automation have cut into the NDP base in rural Saskatchewan. (Timmins—James Bay, of course, has very little in common with rural Saskatchewan.) Alternately, maybe the NDP decline over the last decade is because a) the NDP vote has declined almost everywhere in that span, and b) the NDP is led by a Toronto politician whose appeal is entirely in his identity, an identity that has little valence in northern Ontario. In any case, the idea that this inevitable decline would be accelerated by the local MP becoming party leader is ludicrous, as if local residents would see Charlie Angus on television during the leaders' debate and suddenly realize to their horror that they'd been checking the NDP box because of muscle memory the whole time.

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I love the last name of the author, too: Richler. Say what you will about the Globe and Mail but it certainly knows its audience. I'm reminded of the article demanding that the Women's World Cup open in Toronto and not Edmonton.

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I love the last name of the author, too: Richler. Say what you will about the Globe and Mail but it certainly knows its audience. I'm reminded of the article demanding that the Women's World Cup open in Toronto and not Edmonton.

He's the son of Mordechai Richter.

Well, as Duddy Kravitz's uncle told him, a man is nothing without land. Perhaps that explains his attachment to his property.

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Seems the Greens have a new leadership candidate. Elizabeth May.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2022/07/28/elizabeth-may-set-to-join-green-party-leadership-race-sources-say.html

Isn't she just basically Canadian Jill Stein?

I still think the Greens would be well-suited by figuring out a way to cooperate with the NDP.

I'm not a huge fan of Elizabeth May but I don't think that's a fair comparison at all. She has, if nothing else, made a concerted effort to be seen as a serious politician.

Historically, the Green Party has been closer ideologically to the Liberal Party than to the NDP. (This was certainly the case during May's leadership of the party.) The Liberal Party has in the past been curiously interested in helping the Green Party to establish its credibility, most notably in 2008 when no Liberal candidate was nominated against May in exchange for the purely symbolic gesture of the Greens not nominating a candidate in Stéphane Dion's extremely safe riding. On Vancouver Island, probably the federal Green Party's strongest region in the country, the interests of the NDP and Green Party are directly at odds, since the NDP vote comes in large part from workers in extractive industries.

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Out of curiosity, I ran the numbers for Vancouver Island constituencies in the past four elections (2011 numbers are notional):

	2011	2015	2019	2021
New Democratic	38.5%	33.4%	31.3%	37.4%
Conservative	38.5%	21.2%	24.2%	25.9%
Green	14.6%	23.8%	27.0%	14.6%
Liberal	8.0%	21.4%	16.0%	17.9%
People's			1.1%	4.1%

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Oh God, it's not even the United Party, so far as I can tell. Isn't BC United Wayne Rooney's team? Just a brutal name.

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Somehow the same country where an ostensibly major political party keeps putting forth Turban Man year after year for DEI reasons also contains a distinct society where the jury is still out on the Jews. In conclusion, Canada is a land of contrasts.

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It's really weird to me that Al of all people is cherry-picking poll results to create some sort of narrative that doesn't exist (and that some here are lapping it up), but here are the cross-tabs:



As you can see, Quebecers have a more negative view of Christianity than Judaism.

not really beating the "racist society" allegations with this one