Canada General Discussion (2019-)

[Oryxslayer]

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/182-unmarked-graves-discovered-near-residential-school-in-b-c-s-interior-first-nation-says/ar-AALD7Wx?ocid=msedgntp I think we will see a lot more.  I bet the final numbers will be several thousand.  While no easy solution, probably makes First Nations issues and reconciliation a much higher priority than in past which is a good thing.

Just popping in to note that the Residential schools issue would probably be narrative #2 if Trudeau called an election right now, after COVID of course. This is arguably why I wouldn't call an election right now, cause the stage appears to be set for an election where the Tories are not in competition for power, which then opens the door for more Libs to go NDP (plenty of reasons, but the NDP tend to have the best brand on First Nation issues), which then denies Trudeau his majority and puts him back at square one.

[Oryxslayer]

https://www.hilltimes.com/2021/07/05/they-havent-got-a-competitor-whos-even-remotely-close-liberals-on-track-to-win-majority-in-expected-september-election-but-still-a-few-wild-cards/304638

Unbeatable electoral titan, the Rt. Hon. Justin Pierre James Trudeau, Baron Teflonshire? Or the Theresa May of the loyal North American colony? That's gonna be the main question of this election because lord knows the Tories are a mess.

Expectations are set pretty high for the LPC right now. Anything short of a majority will feel like a Theresa May-esque faceplant, where an election held categorically to win a majority leads to a minority. According to 338Canada, there's about a 50% chance of this happening (their latest projection puts the Liberals at exactly 169 seats, one off a majority). Maybe their internals are looking better, as seemed to be the case in 2019 when the Liberals were acting pretty bullish while the rest of us were thinking they wouldn't cross 140. But based on the public polls, I wonder if Trudeau is being too bullish about getting ready to call an election to gain a majority.

It's easy to look at the CPC's disarray and think the Liberal path to a majority is easy-peasy, but I'm not so sure. If nobody thinks the Tories can win, strategic voting will soften and the NDP will make gains. Being held to a minority in 2019 wasn't so bad, but if that happens in 2021, it signals a serious vulnerability in the Liberal Party. Put simply, if they can't win a majority now, I struggle to see how they can do so in 2025, or whenever the 45th Canadian election gets held.

I have felt for a while that Trudeau calling an election right now would be a mistake, mainly because a dominant Liberals and directionless Conservatives is a recipe for certain types of urban voters to feel safe defecting from the Liberals to their natural NDP home. Which in an instant would likely nullify any net gains made at the expense of the Tories.

[Oryxslayer]

I heard some projections suggesting that the NDP will get up to 36 seats, which is where they were before 2019, where do you think those gains will likely come from? Probably not Quebec

The LPC of course, which is why Trudeau's gamble has more facets than just his lead over the Conservatives. If the Liberal lead on election day is similar to present, there will be no need for ABC voting among NDP voters, so you probably see some large swings to the NDP in specific Liberal seats. This is of course a generalization and not a seat-by-seat breakdown, but the Liberals must fight on all sides for their majority, not just against the CPC.

[Oryxslayer]

Also remember that Provincial NDP =/= federal NDP or even the federal Liberals, every provincial party is kinda its own thing and tries to accommodate the provincial electorate. Notley pushed for pipelines like every Alberta premier. This is also something to remember for Quebec: QS =/= NDP, they differ on key policies, and do not cooperative. But they have enough indirect overlap on progressive policies that base QS voters in places like Sherbrooke and the Plateau are also NDP voters federally.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/CanadianPolling/status/1489275288970223624?s=20&t=Zcm5GP...

I know in last election we saw some Green -> PPC swings under the hood, but the thought then was that this was just anti-establishment voters. But maybe there is more too it?

[Oryxslayer]

Rachel Notley must be the happiest woman alive.

She would be happier with Kenney still in office. With the most unpopular premier in Canada gone and a new one coming in, there is the potential for UCP  recovery with a change of image.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/MickeyDjuric/status/1686773366655418368?t=30ALjmmJslDJMVnDEU...

[Oryxslayer]

I'm not sure if this is coordinated or how coordinated this is, but the Prairie/Western provincial New Democratic Parties all seem to have adopted vaguely populist centre/centre slightly right policy focuses.

All three are provinces more Conservative-favoring than the nation, sometimes very much so. This pushes the center of gravity towards their policies.

Then there is the fact that in all four Western provinces there presently exists more or less a two-party duopoly. This is in contrast to the provinces east of Kenora where there have mostly been 3+ party systems for a while now. The western NDP therefore is the catch all big-tent party for those left of conservative-inclined center of gravity. This obviously catches most of the Federal Lib and NDP voters, but also some Cons. On the other side is a variously-named party either in line with or even more committed to national Conservative policies, since their electorate is almost entirely federal CPC and now PPC voters.

[Oryxslayer]

Notley bleeds orange. No way she runs as a Liberal.

Nowhere mentioned in the article is if she speaks French though.

Anyway, she probably would do very well in a general election, though one wonders if the NDP would actually pick her. She may be too right wing for the base. FTR though, I would support her in a heartbeat despite me being quite a bit to her left.

I can't imagine Notley winning the federal NDP leadership given her support for the fossil fuel sector (even if it isn't supportive enough for enough people in Alberta.)

Don't forget though of former NDP Premiers who later ran Federally, it's two to zero for the Federal Liberal Party (Ujjal Dosanjh and Bob Rae.)

On the other side of the coin, she would be coming into the Liberals as an outsider of potentially dubious loyalty, at a time when they seemingly are full of prominent party loyalists who will win reelection even if PP comes to power. And if he doesn't, then Trudeau's successor will be internally selected and appointed. The Liberals aren't at the point or in the mindset where they need a unconventional hero to save the day.

The piece's hypothetical is seemingly that after whatever election may come, the ground will be fertile for a parliamentary NDP career. Which of course is a huge hypothetical on top of many what-ifs. Singh would need to step down of his own volition, at a time when the federal NDP is seemingly looking more and more like his 'American Progressivism.' 79% of 2021 NDP voters approval of him according to Angus Reid last week. Despite his past lackluster electoral performances, the NDP would probably still have to lose seats in a GE for him to go, which is not immediately apparent. That's an unknown no matter who wins. If it's PP, like the present polls say, then the NDP still make net Gains off urban (mostly) Liberal seats to counter losses to the CPC in Northern Ontario and BC. That would give the party even more of an urban progressive identity, making it harder for Notely to step in. If it's the Libs winning, then things could potentially just remain stagnant, like in 2021.

The next big hypothetical would require outmaneuvering the Libs while in opposition to reverse the 2.5 duopoly in their favor, like 2011. This is obviously all but impossible in the Libs win reelection. And results would still be expected in time when the following election comes, which would probably elect the Conservatives in a Time-for-Change moment. It's possible if PP is in charge, but then you face another issue. Where it matters electorally, voters tend to instinctively go for the Conservative option in Blue vs Orange elections, and need a reason to look at the NDP. Mabey Notely is the person who can convince voters in the York and Durham regions to give them a chance, but thats just one more hurdle on top of a mountain of them.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/CanadianPolling/status/1691497118064582665?t=nhq9r4SX7DdOnUi...

Note that in relation to the Singh discussion, the Abacus poll's numbers or even this more hyper-urban Nanos NDP sample from last week, are how Singh survives a Conservative wave despite another disappointing performance. Cause the people he aligns with will absolutely take a handful of net gains and a much more urban NDP even though by any historical comparison it will be another under-performance.  

[Oryxslayer]

Why have the polls got noticeably worse for the Liberals just recently?

"Housing is not a Federal responsibility" - Justin Trudeau, July 2023, in the middle of the biggest housing crisis in Canada since WW2.
Not hard to see how things got out of control here, and despite what people might say, PP has been screaming about inflation and affordability for years now so he has credibility here.

When it comes to "small-government" style conservative policy - cutting red tape, deregulation, streamlining -  the one arena you'll find it readily desired among <45 is in the realm of housing. To his credit, PP is saying not just Tory talking points, but also the type of stuff than would make a urban 'working-families' style US YIMBY proud. Canada will always have the issue of everyone wanting to be in or around 4 cities, ensuring demand will always notably outpace supply, but come on, you guys can do better than this:

[Oryxslayer]

When an NDP leader makes gains, even small ones, they have historically been kept around. The party is not like the Conservatives who don't care about having a revolving door for their leadership.

Singh may be ineffectual at growing the party's support, but the party's numbers are not bad from an historical standpoint. During the Layton years, the party routinely polled even lower than now, but Layton was always able to increase the numbers during the election campaign. And Singh has done that too (though, to a lesser extent).

He is really missing the ball right now and is being quite ineffectual of course, but he's not going to get turfed until we see a seat loss.  

The obvious counter to this is that the NDP are a smaller party right now than when Singh took over - even after we exclude Quebec from consideration. And when the government is down in the polls, the NDP isn't really benefiting at all according to most estimates. He's good at making the party faithful feel good, but testimonialism doesn't take parties from being taken for granted to having actual leverage.

I guess you could say I agree with the 338 piece on this from a few weeks ago.

[Oryxslayer]

I mean this situation is not like America's redistribution whatsoever, so we shouldn't compare apples and oranges. Canada isn't exactly in the business of cutting seats, countries historically with this tradition have favored just consistent expansions of the legislature to prevent reallocation, with the exception of extreme and unavoidable population and seat loss. That's what happened here: Alberta wasn't denied a seat cause Quebec maintained one, the parliament just got bigger then initially put forward.

The second point is that Canada does not have OMOV strictness. Every Atlantic province is waaaaayyy over-represented compared to it's actual population, but old provisions lock in the region's seat counts based on what they were historically. Then within the provinces you often have severely undersized districts in the far north. There are allowed to be as such to facilitate indigenous electoral access,  because the region is so remote that a equitably sized seat would not be sensible to the scattered communities, or both.

As long as FPTP is maintained, the Tories won't stop any of these traditions. Like changing FPTP itself, they benefit the parties with the ability to access power on their own.

[Oryxslayer]

I think shifts have been happening for following reason.  Note polls are a snapshot and can change.

Quebec:  It has been pretty steady there and kind of makes sense as housing less of an issue and things people upset with Liberals haven't been impacting Quebec.  At same time I find Quebecers have shallowest loyalty to any party so they are prone to massive swings, but typically during election campaign, not before.  See 1984 and 2011 as examples of this.

Conservatives are also starting to do better in Quebec, tbf. There have been a few polls with the CPC above 20% in Quebec, which we haven't seen since the brief-lived O'Toole surge in 2021 (in an actual election, 20% would be the best performance since 2008). Probably more a case of rising tides lifting all boats than anything specific about Quebec.

But Quebec seems to mostly be an afterthought for the Tories, because of how steep the odds are there. Short of a serious surge, they can only realistically pick up 4-5 ridings. Atlantic Canada, despite being much smaller, offers more target seats, and the big prize is obviously southern Ontario. So apart from the nationwide Poilievre bump this summer, there's really not much of an effort to get Quebec to vote Conservative, because there's not much ground they can realistically gain there.

Also because if push came to shove and PP won a minority, Legault would see that the Bloc lets them govern.

[Oryxslayer]

You guys can’t have it both ways :


- We want to restrict development for a “Greenbelt”

- We want to build more houses


You have to choose and it seems like you guys have chosen option 1 , so then you have to live with the consequences of that policy decision

This is a lie that Doug Ford used to cover his ass. The developers who proposed building on the Greenbelt were planning multi-million dollar mansions, without paying development charges to municipalities. There's plenty of land to build enough houses for everyone, within what is currently low-density sprawl.

I mean at the end of the day buying out a existing property at ~1 million right now and upzoning it is going to be harder then building on new land. The choice of what to build there and whose doing the construction may have been poor (or it might have been a sign of how awful the demand side of the market is), but it's easier and quicker built than purchasing from an individual who fortunately wants to sell - despite it being more financially prudent to sit on the nest egg - and then negotiating NIMBY laws and current residents.

TBH a healthy housing market should have good amounts of not just Single Family Homes, large apartment complexes, but also everything in between. Developers and buyers shouldn't have to unnecessarily pick and choose. But Canada and the GTA housing market are anything but healthy - they are among the most pricy in the world.

[Oryxslayer]

I don't think the NDP wants to be blamed for handing over the government to Skippy, so they're probably going to continue their timidity in their role as junior partners in the confidence and supply agreement.

Agreed.  Layton got blamed in 2006 by many on left over Harper winning even though wasn't his fault.  I mean it was voters who made decision but agreed want to avoid that.  I think bigger problem both parties face is changing electorate.  Loss of Red Wall in UK and Obama-Trump counties are not unique to respective places, we are seeing same thing.  Main thing is parties need to pivot.  For Liberals upper middle class suburbs much like Biden is where they will compensate and already have by and large.  For NDP, urban core ridings is where they will make up for potential loss of blue collar resource based ones.  

So even though things not looking good for NDP now, I do think NDP can still gain seats.  If they were to sweep downtown Toronto, gain Halifax, a few in Montreal like Laurier-Sainte Marie, maybe another seat or two in Edmonton, a few left leaning in Lower Mainland, that could offset the more blue collar ones many expect them to lose (not saying they will but real risk).

I've been a bit out of the loop - do we think the most likely scenario is the next election is around two years from now in 2025? Or could we see one sooner - and if so, when?

I know the Grits are very unlikely to pull the plug right now given their unpopularity...would Jagmeet be able to break the confidence and supply agreement if he wanted to? Would the NDP want to anytime soon (to vote with the Tories, Bloc and Greens to dissolve Parliament?)

I'm bored, I want an election to follow lol. Not knowing if the wait will be 2 years or only a few months is agonizing when you're an election geek!

Well, maintaining support is the majority position,  but not by the overwhelming margins one would in theory expect with PP polling at a majority:

https://twitter.com/CanadianPolling/status/1705350390730883270?t=fZQgORwCRXtEr6J...

[Oryxslayer]

https://apnews.com/article/zelenskyy-trudeau-canada-ukraine-parliament-b0f23d207592031cedb030292eb3ae01

Apologies for the photo but the text can't be copy pasted.
Can anyone tell me what the 1st Ukrainian Division is? Searching it on google gives me a Waffen SS unit called the 1st Galician. Did the Canadian parliament just salute a Waffen SS collaborator?

It's definitely being said in various online spaces that that's the case, yeah, which is disturbing and completely unacceptable if true. I haven't been able to find reliable sources spelling it out but it's a definite, and disquieting, possibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwdQ2O5MlAg
Go to 48:00 minutes in the link

We have here in the chamber today, we have here a Ukrainians war veteran who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians at the age of 98

Everyone clapped.

When I read an article about Zelensky's speech, I thought I misread when I saw "WWII veteran who fought against the Russians" but I guess not. I know there's some degree of "enemy of my enemy" going on here, both in a WWII context and a modern one, but this is a really bad look. I might be getting overly paranoid but I think this little detail is getting conveniently left out from some media coverage...

https://twitter.com/ctvottawa/status/1706024245426364843?t=qdWYomIifOva9GFSuJfms...

OTOH this isn't new: The Ukrainian diaspora in Canada has always been happy to remember the legacy of Ukrainians with problematic histories. Every few years there's a story of a monument being defaced cause of who it commemorates.

[Oryxslayer]

The Harper Conservatives made big inroads among Orthodox Jews, who previously had a low voter turnout. An interesting pattern in the GTA is that the Jewish community was clustered along Bathurst Street, and the more this community became upwardly mobile, the more it migrated northwards along Bathurst Street. These turned a few seats in North York and the York Region into play. The Jewish community in Montreal (anecdotally) became smaller but more Orthodox with the rise of Quebec nationalism. You can spot where they are clustered based on poll-by-poll maps, but they are too small to affect any seats.

Most non-Orthodox Jewish Canadians behave as one would expect: middle to upper middle class, with a somewhat socially liberal bent. They would be "naturally" Liberal-leaning voters, but could turn Conservative if the conditions are there.

But, anyway, I think the mood has shifted enough that Trudeau can be compared to the famous lettuce.

If Rota resigns what are the odds it flips in a by election? Seems like a fairly swingy liberal leaning seat.

If he resigns, he may still keep his seat in Parliament. But, the riding is somewhat safe Liberal seat, though the Tories barely eked out a win in 2011 (though, it was so close, after redistribution the Liberals still would've won it on the new boundaries). However, provincially it's a safe PC seat right now, but that's more to do with the MPP being the former mayor of North Bay.

In 2021 this is one of those seats where Conservatives + PPC were greater than the winning liberals. Obviously there's more going on, but given what's going on in national polls (and not just most -CPC ones) it would be a flip, especially given the circumstances of a hypothetical resignation, unless the remaining Libs and NDP voters consolidate thanks to unique by-election circumstances and attention.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/DavidColetto/status/1707346630305865746?t=6tLyc-KO2hItyDC8Ag...

So this poll came out. I find it fairly informative,  cause it's going to be perhaps the only federal poll of the province for a long time, perhaps until the GE if even. So there is data here with a respectable MOE rather than the usual absurdly small sample size of the N&L subsample in Altantic Canada polls.

I would put the numbers here as only a bit worse that 2011 for the liberals, just with the Conservatives pulling the voters rather than the NDP.  However,  the Tories having a more efficient vote distribution means the liberals probably only hold St. John's South and Avalon,  compared to the 4 seats held in 2011.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/CanadianPolling/status/1709259684362834023?t=iHY6Xa1k3X2zCqU...

Confusing timing to have the vote

From one of the safest liberal seats to.

[Oryxslayer]

Liberals seem to want to tie Poilievre to Trump and wondering if others think it will work or not.  I tend to think it actually might.  I don't think you will see a massive swing, but might help push NDP down and maybe lead to a few Red Tories/fatigued Liberals crossing over but I doubt it will erase a 15 point deficit.  At most maybe a 5 point swing.  Main thing though is a lot depends how they play it as people don't have to believe it per se, just must find it plausible for it to work.  But if seems too over the top and people don't even find it plausible it won't work.

If they want to actually tie him to Trump, then they better be prepared gamble on the November (snap) election like Sunak seems to want in the UK.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/rachaiello/status/1775909023004443060?t=SDnSjAGzLxXqtNPEifIj...

Notably all three are in areas that on paper the Tories would be looking at for gains under current polling or similar. Their retirement,  especially Angus's, further complicates the NDP position. It is also another sign that the NDPs federal policies are becoming more Urban+First Nation and less labor.