Canada General Discussion: Trudeau II

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In other news, infrastructure minister Amarjeet Sohi read out condolences to the bus driver in Winnipeg who was stabbed to death. He started by pointing out that he was a bus driver, after which the Conservatives guffawed in a sneering and elitist attitude. House leader Candace Bergen refused to apologize for that disgrace.

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Good to see Mulroney becoming a point man to manage sensitive relations with the US, and also China.

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http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/lisa-raitt-bernier-oleary-voter-fraud-1.4032482

Leadership race now a circular firing squad, even without the microwaved Trumpism.

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I hope she runs, resigns from Parliament and gets destroyed by Nenshi.  Addition by subtraction.

You know how this works. She won't resign while campaigning for mayor, and then when she's destroyed she'll say voters gave her a mandate to continue being their voice in Ottawa. It doesn't matter either way because she's in a safe blue seat.

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If what they claim is true, then when was the last time the entire political establishment of a country was decapitated on such a scale?

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Apparently one of the claims against JT is that he had a consensual relationship with a male conservative staffer, and that both parties were aware during the 2015 election. If that's really it, this is a nothingburger.

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Scheer isn't helping himself every time he harps on and on about the Agha Khan, as if anyone south of Queensway cares.

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Scheer isn't helping himself every time he harps on and on about the Agha Khan, as if anyone south of Queensway cares.

What should he be pushing exactly? Liberal corruption sounds like a winning issue to me.

Nobody ever explained what was the quid pro quo in exchange for the vacation, and the polls show that voters have simply tuned out.

Scheer should, if he is cunning, learn from Harper's ruthlessness and willingness to silence his backbenchers whose bozo eruptions doomed the 2004 Conservative campaign. But the landscape will be even worse than in 2004, since the Liberals will be eager to attack him as Harper-lite. Worse, they could attack him as Trump-lite, a charge that he will find hard to refute without alienating his base.

Before anyone says the Conservatives are at their bottom and could only go back up, keep in mind that the Liberals were in the exact same position a decade ago (30% of the vote, 100 or so seats, a leadership race that leads to an upset by a not-a-leader who goes on to lose byelections to the government). And frankly, when they're actually posting nonsense like this, it doesn't look like they really understand why they're where they are.

The NDP should appeal to those who voted Liberal and feel disappointed at a government that is basically Harper-lite with a smile. They could point out that some of Canada's biggest social achievements were done under a Liberal minority that depended on NDP support, and make inroads in inner-city ridings to at least offset their expected losses in Quebec.

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Miles touches on the point I was trying to make. This board and many analysts seems to have two biases when assessing Scheer's performance (and Singh and Trudeau's but it seems to come up most often with Scheer); progressive bias, and political junkie bias.

The progressive bias is not understanding that the Tories face a different calculus from the Liberals and therefore will behave in a puzzling manner to many progressives. A party with a low ceiling that needs to turn out a large base alienated from the other parties is very different from being a centrist party with a smaller base but a much higher ceiling. To apply this to the Aga Khan case: so what if there is no smoking gun? It keeps the base motivated and has the added benefit of not being prone to "bozo eruptions" like say an immigration gaffe would be.

The other side of progressive (or conservative in many cases) bias is saying things are bad politics because one doesn't like them. Take the Khadr settlement for example. I read many columns in the media and posts on Atlas discussing how the Tories were discussing non issues or risking backlash by attacking the settlement despite the bulk of Canadians opposing the decision, including a majority of Liberal and NDP supporters. This language seemed based on opposition to the Tories position rather than a rational evaluation of the Tories political strategy.

The Omar Khadr payout was almost exactly like the niqab issue in 2015: perhaps the majority of Canadians agreed with the Conservatives, but they didn't like the attitude exhibited. As a result, Scheer received virtually no post-election leadership bump.

And it's not my idle punditry. The strategy employed by the Conservatives has, materially, not worked: they have lost not one but two long-held seats to the government. They should have held these seats to at least stay in the game, and instead bizarrely spun these losses as wins. This indicates their strategy of merely motivating their base isn't working, especially when it also depends on a simultaneous Liberal slump and NDP surge (entirely outside their control).

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The Conservatives aren't the only party that can and will use that tactic. "Scheer's campaign was/is run by a neo-nazi propagandist" or "Harper is slinking around as the Conservative Party fundraising director" are also easy to digest to a target demographic.

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If you look at the 12 by-elections since the last election, the Tories have seen their share of the popular vote go up in 9 down in 3 so while certainly not enough to win a general election hardly a disaster.  Yes agree those losses look bad although also both were won in 2015 largely due to local candidates and the Liberals attracted star candidates (admittedly if they do this across the country they could pick up several).

I think the problem with many on both sides is those on the right think Trudeau is hated as much as they hate him which is false thus why he would almost certainly win an election if held today.  But I think many progressives wrongly assume support for conservative ideas is much smaller than it is.  Conservatives aren't the majority far from it, but they aren't a tiny minority, there is still a solid 30% who sit on the right side of the political spectrum.  Also calling the party extreme right works with some but I find most people make their own judgement of where they think a party lies not what those from other parties say it is.

The Conservatives could just as easily have recruited star candidates. South Surrey White Rock was previously held by Dianne Watts, who herself was a star candidate who clearly believed she was just wasting her time being a backbencher of a party that won't win in 2019. They could have simply convinced her not to resign, and not trigger a byelection at all. So blaming their losses on Liberal star candidates smacks of sour grapes. And if the Liberals continue to appear to hold the upper hand, they will continue to have better luck attracting star candidates.

Agreed, that Conservatives don't understand that their hatred of Trudeau isn't shared by those outside their bubble. Also agreed that I think the absolute worst (barring a Scheer-BBQing-kittens scandal) the Conservatives could do is like Dion in 2008. It wouldn't require any of the Conservative base voting Liberal: a small minority of that base (say 10% of their 30% base, so 3% of the electorate) concentrated in say 20 ridings could be convinced to stay home, or worse not to donate. Insinuating that the CPC is infested by the far-right would merely serve to convince those who voted Liberal in 2015 and who feel disappointed at Trudeau's centrist policies and are tempted to vote NDP (say 5% of the total electorate), to stay with them. In our age of microtargeting, the parties don't even need to run messages for everyone, when they can channel their finite budgets into advertising to limited swing demographics like the two mentioned.

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Good thing the Harper government rushed through the sale of a controlling stake of CWB to the Saudi state, even when a consortium of Canadian farmers were raising money to propose a higher offer.

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I still don't see how that means less than 90-odd seats, since all those hard nationalist votes have to go somewhere here next year in a 2-party race. Maybe some close ON suburban seats from last time, taking only Fundy Royal and NB Southwest out East.

Maxime Bernier last night goes on twitter tirade on diversity that I think many would say is bigoted.  While tough to say the exact impact as no election coming up, probably a good thing for the party he was not chosen as leader.  Kick him out and that could divide the party, but let him stay on and he might say or tweet something stupid during the election campaign which sinks the party.

See this is what I mean. Dude has repeatedly shown he has no discipline. He'd have a much, much higher downside risk in a campaign than Scheer.

Frank Graves of Ekos says that since the June Ontario election, the Federal Liberals have surged in Ontario from a 10 point deficit to a 10 point lead. And, that was before the Twitter feud with the Saudis, which will surely boost them further.

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The official theme song of the Halifax convention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQzU6mXwrHw

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Neither of these two parties were founded by the frontrunner of the previous leadership race who then lost by the narrowest possible margin, and then spent the next year sniping at the leader. And even if Bernier's party fizzles out, Joe and Jane in Oakville will have heard that Andrew Scheer is a bumbler who no-comments out of every controversy.

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The way this infighting has played out has been very Canadian. In Britain, Bernier and Scheer would be openly feuding for weeks with their supporters openly commenting to tabloids. In Australia, Bernier would have called for a surprise leadership vote after one or both byelection losses. In the US, the two would be relentlessly touring Iowa drumming up support for next January's caucus. In France, the two would have viciously traded insults before Bernier goes out with a bang and Scheer faces an open rebellion.

But here, the tensions have been simmering for weeks and after Bernier goes, the entire party establishment closes ranks.

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I think it's a case by case basis. The Alliance (Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance) coexisted with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. But the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist Leninist) was ordered by EC to register as Marxist Leninist Party of Canada due to likelihood of confusion with the Communist Party of Canada. Probably the former, since it's a more relevant precedent.

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Also, as with Scheer, I'm not sure why everyone thinks the leadership is so disastrous. They're both facing a fairly popular  first term Liberal PM. One has to grade this on a curve and given the circumstances  I'd say they're both doing ok. They can always be turfed after an election loss.

He has shown a lack of leadership whenever the party was confronted with a thorny issue. Every time the media asks him a tough question, his handlers simply respond "no comment", thus allowing the media or even the Liberals to answer that question for him. No one has any idea what he stands for, other than some vague platitudes about a positive vision.

Finally, when Maxime Bernier quit, he revealed that the last time Scheer spoke to him was nine days earlier during their last caucus meeting. So Scheer made no effort to prevent an embarrassing split, and just let it happen, for a whole nine days???

And what's with the defeatist attitude about Trudeau and the next election? Even if it's an uphill battle, at the very least the Conservative Party could reduce the Liberals to a minority which would pave the way for a victory in the next vote. But as it stands, there's the real chance the Trudeau Liberals would win 200+ seats with just 37% of the national vote. Jean Chretien would be proud.

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I know. I meant more in terms of what the electoral map could look like, based on Craig Oliver's comments. That's a big *if* though; assuming Quebec conservatives align more with Bernier's politics. The leadership election proved that the Tory base in Quebec is not that libertarian, but perhaps the voters are?

The Tory base, or the party membership which included dairy farmers who were convinced by Scheer to sign up?