Canada General Discussion (2019-)

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If one read nothing but National Post coverage of the pandemic, you'd think Canada was a unitary state with no provincial governments.

Let me guess, this is a right wing publication?

Of course. Originally founded in 1998 by convicted fraudster and Donald Trump hagiographer Conrad Black, on the basis of the older financial paper Financial Post (which is now the NP's business section).

It's now part of the Postmedia media conglomerate, founded in 2010 with the former publishing properties of Canwest. Postmedia is now owned at 66% by Chatham Asset Management, a US media conglomerate with close ties to the GOP.

The National Post now is supposed to be, I guess, the upmarket right-wing newspaper. Except that it's actually a very bad newspaper, and I'm not saying that because I disagree with its editorial stance: it has seemingly very few journalists (most of their articles are copypasta from Reuters, AFP etc.) and a lot of their paper is opinion/editorials disguised as 'news'. It certainly isn't a newspaper of record, although they do a good job at pretending that they are. We need to read it everyday at work and it is the butt of many jokes with my coworkers (about how bad it is).

More worrying is the fact that Postmedia now controls a huge chunk of English-language local newspapers and tabloids: they also own the trashy Sun tabloids (Toronto Sun etc.), local broadsheet dailies (the main traditional local newspapers in Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and most towns in Ontario) and a few remaining community newspapers. Usually with the exception of local news, there isn't much difference between those publications.

Also all their websites are a f-ing pain: they have a bunch of scrolling ads, videos popping up and other annoying things that make it look more like casino slot games websites than legitimate news website.

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Anti-Racist and Anti-Islamophobia Trudeau makes a strong stance by... not showing up to vote on labelling an ongoing genocide a genocide. Good to know!

The funniest moment of the vote was this:

https://twitter.com/Gray_Mackenzie/status/1363957132731760647

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(Does the formula favour small provinces like Yukon, Prince Edward Island etc.?)

The apportionment formula in 1867 - when there were only four provinces - split equally between Ontario (24), Quebec (24) and the Maritimes (NS and NB at the time, with 12 each, reduced to 10 each in 1873 when PEI joined Confederation and was given 4 seats). After 1915, when all current Western provinces had joined Confederation, the Senate was expanded to give a fourth of the seats to the four Western provinces (24 total, 6 each), in line with the existing 24 seats each to ON, QC and the Maritimes. This has remained unchanged, and seats have been added when Newfoundland joined in 1949 (6, has had been laid out for them since 1915), and one each for the territories after 1975. So now we have Ontario, Quebec and the group of four Western provinces having 24 seats each and the four Atlantic provinces having 30 seats total. So, yes, this is a massive overrepresentation of the Atlantic provinces -- NS, NB and NL have more seats than any of the four Western provinces on their own, even if their populations are now significantly smaller. Newfoundland (pop. 520,000) has the same number of senators as BC (pop. 5.15 million). The West (pop. 12.1 million) has the same number of senators as the Maritimes (pop. 1.9 million).

ON: 1 per 614,800
QC: 1 per 357,331
BC: 1 per 858,839
AB: 1 per 739,376
MB: 1 per 230,155
SK: 1 per 196,372
NS: 1 per 97,944
NB: 1 per 78,207
NL: 1 per 86,739
PEI: 1 per 26,635
NT: 1 per 45,136
YK: 1 per 42,192
NU: 1 per 39,407

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(Does the formula favour small provinces like Yukon, Prince Edward Island etc.?)

The apportionment formula in 1867 - when there were only four provinces - split equally between Ontario (24), Quebec (24) and the Maritimes (NS and NB at the time, with 12 each, reduced to 10 each in 1873 when PEI joined Confederation and was given 4 seats). After 1915, when all current Western provinces had joined Confederation, the Senate was expanded to give a fourth of the seats to the four Western provinces (24 total, 6 each), in line with the existing 24 seats each to ON, QC and the Maritimes. This has remained unchanged, and seats have been added when Newfoundland joined in 1949 (6, has had been laid out for them since 1915), and one each for the territories after 1975. So now we have Ontario, Quebec and the group of four Western provinces having 24 seats each and the four Atlantic provinces having 30 seats total. So, yes, this is a massive overrepresentation of the Atlantic provinces -- NS, NB and NL have more seats than any of the four Western provinces on their own, even if their populations are now significantly smaller. Newfoundland (pop. 520,000) has the same number of senators as BC (pop. 5.15 million). The West (pop. 12.1 million) has the same number of senators as the Maritimes (pop. 1.9 million).

ON: 1 per 614,800
QC: 1 per 357,331
BC: 1 per 858,839
AB: 1 per 739,376
MB: 1 per 230,155
SK: 1 per 196,372
NS: 1 per 97,944
NB: 1 per 78,207
NL: 1 per 86,739
PEI: 1 per 26,635
NT: 1 per 45,136
YK: 1 per 42,192
NU: 1 per 39,407

Yes; even if there should be a slanting in favour of smaller provinces, that is excessive.

It should be noted that what Western Canadian Senate reformers usually want is a Triple-E senate - elected, equal, effective - a concept initially popularized and advocated by the Reform Party in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The Charlottetown Accord constitutional reform proposal would have created an equal senate with each province represented by six senators (and territories by one), with an option for indigenous representation, but would not necessarily have been elected as it would have given provinces the authority to decide on the method of selecting their senators (including indirect elected by the provincial legislature) and it would generally reduced the enumerated powers of the Senate. Western Canada, and the Reform Party, felt that Senate reform didn't go far enough so the Charlottetown Accord was rejected across Canada and in all Western provinces (with over 60% opposition in Alberta, BC and Manitoba).

Triple-E kind of died out as a popular idea among right-wing politicians pretty quickly: by 2000, the Canadian Alliance was no longer explicitly advocating for it and Harper's Conservatives initially campaigned on a much vaguer notion of making the Senate an "effective, independent, and democratically elected body that equitably represents all regions" (2006 platform) and only proposing to create a "national process for choosing elected Senators from each province and territory". In power, as noted, Harper found himself (unsurprisingly) unable to do anything. In 2008 and 2011, the Conservative platform pushed for Senate reform (mostly term limits and holding Senate nominee elections à la Alberta), but after the Supreme Court's reference ruling in 2014 essentially killed off those ideas as easy reforms. In his last two years in office, Harper deliberately did not fill any vacancies, letting 22 vacancies accumulate by 2015. In the 2015 election he ran on a promise of continuing this moratorium on Senate appointments, a slow scorched earth strategy to eventually force debate on Senate reform, although if reelected his decision not to fill vacancies would likely have run into legal/constitutional problems of its own.

The Supreme Court's 2014 reference ruling has basically killed substantive Senate reform as doing anything substantive - term limits, changing the apportionment of seats, holding elections, abolition - would require the general 7/50 amendment formula or unanimous consent of all provinces (abolition), and nobody is in the mood for constitutional debates and  crafting some kind of Senate reform that would have a realistic chance of meeting the 7/50 formula is very unlikely today (abolition is basically impossible). I guess this means that, for the foreseeable future, Trudeau's Senate 'reform' is the best we can realistically ask for. The Conservatives, on their end, having acknowledged that Senate reform as they would like is extremely unlikely / not a hill worth dying on, seem to have run out of ideas. It wasn't mentioned formally in the 2019 Conservative platform, and Andrew Scheer said that he would have ended Trudeau's reforms and returned to traditional political patronage appointments.

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On the fascinating topic of the Senate, the qualifications to be a senator have remained unchanged since the BNA Act of 1867, except for the mandatory retirement age of 75 adopted in 1965. Senators need to be citizens over the age of 30 (and less than 75), must own real property with a net value of at least $4,000 in the province they are appointed, have an overall net worth of $4,000 in real and personal property and be a resident of the province for which they are appointed. The 2014 Supreme Court reference held that property and asset qualifications could be repeal by the unilateral federal amendment procedure... but...

The other archaic aspect of the Senate is that Quebec's 24 senators are appointed to represent one of the 24 electoral divisions... which are Canada East/Lower Canada's electoral divisions in the Legislative Council of Canada (pre-Confederation upper house of the united Canadas) as defined in the consolidated statutes of 1859. Quebec senators must hold their real property in the division for which they were appointed, or be a resident of said division. The boundaries of the division are based on municipalities and counties which existed in 1859 - but Quebec's counties were abolished by the local government reforms of the late 1970s (which created the MRCs), and the provincial boundaries of Quebec have also changed since 1859, with the enlargement of the province in 1898 (Abibiti and parts of northern Quebec) and 1912 (rest of northern Quebec incl. Nunavik). So the end result is that Quebec's senate divisions are based on administrative divisions which have long disappeared or been modified, do not correspond at all to modern administrative divisions, exclude a huge chunk of the province (so Abitibi and northern Quebec is technically 'not represented' at all in the Senate) and have archaic names which are often weird to modern ears.



To get back to the possibility of repealing the property and asset qualifications, while that is possible through the unilateral federal amendment procedure, doing that would also have a knock on effect on the subsection of the constitution which requires Quebec senators to have their real property qualification in their respective divisions, and therefore require them to reside in the electoral divisions for which they are appointed. An amendment to this subsection would fall within the scope of another amendment formula (special arrangements applicable to one province) and would require the consent of Quebec's National Assembly - and I doubt that the Quebec National Assembly would allow such a simple change without demanding something else in exchange... So even Quebec's anachronic senate divisions are here to stay.

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In addition to her tireless efforts at reconciliation Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett also has time to snark First Nations MP's on Twitter

Justin will need to stage a photo-op or take a knee to make up for this soon!

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A map of winners is slightly misleading. As Hatman said, the region is strongly federalist and weak for the PQ, who have been basically irrelevant there since 2003. Most of those ridings were two-party races where CAQ got as much vote as in the pale blue seats they won, the Liberals just got more. In 2014, PQ's antics made everyone rally behind the PLQ and for a while it looked that CAQ might get wiped out.

As for the ADQ, before 2007 they had FPTP working against them, then immediately after their big breakthrough they spectacularly imploded and turned into a joke party. Interestingly, in the 1970s, the region was briefly a stronghold of créditistes under the wonderful madman Camil Samson ("we take good God out of schools and sex enters!"). For them, the magic of FPTP worked the other way and they won every seat on tiny shares of the vote - as low as 29% in Mégantic.

tl;dr probably just bad luck

Yes, this is accurate. The Chaudière-Appalaches is a federalist-leaning region, and the Francophone vote in the region has been consistently less péquiste since the very beginning in 1970, so naturally the provincial Liberals - as the federalist party of choice - is/was quite strong in that region, although the provincial SoCreds enjoyed a flash in the pan success and the ADQ was strong in 2003 and 2007. In 2014, the CAQ - which was not expected to perform well in that election but ended up doing quite well - gained votes (and seats) from the PQ in other regions of Quebec (like the North Shore suburbs of Montreal), while losing votes (and seats) to the Liberals in regions like the Quebec City suburbs and Chaudière-Appalaches. As to specific results, we shouldn't forget the power of personal votes and strong incumbents/candidates either: for example, Robert Dutil (grandson of a politician and brother of a successful businessman), a former provincial Liberal cabinet minister under Bourassa, regained his old seat of Beauce-Sud in 2008 and held it until his retirement in 2015 (the PLQ retained it in a by-election but lost it badly in 2018).

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Did an airport run yesterday and completely forgot that there's still a mask mandate in federally regulated institutions. What a silly rule.

The federal government absolutely loves utterly useless Covid legacy rules - the mask mandate is probably the least silly of all, when you consider things like ArriveCAN (the lack of which apparently forced a fully-vaccinated couple returning from a day trip to Plattsburgh to quarantine!) and the random arrival testing which is costing over $1 billion now.

My personal favourite, which they quietly dropped a month or so ago, was the apparent requirement that all travellers returning to Canada needed to wear a mask in public spaces for 14 days after their return.

I'm going to France in a bit over a month so I look forward to dealing with our federal government's incompetence at the airports.

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https://twitter.com/FP_Champagne/status/1641781781912231938

The latest wisdom from our beautiful Liberal government: less competition and a merger is actually more competition. You wouldn't understand, you're too stupid to understand, the Liberal Party knows what's good for you.

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Elon Musk is like an unfunny edgy teenager, and Pierre Poilievre has managed to turn into an Elon Musk reply guy.

As awful as the current government is (and it really is), the current opposition is somehow even worse. Very high chance I just return to my tried and true 'April Ludgate' ballot scribbling option in the next election, definitely not voting for any of the parties as they stand.

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Not really all that unexpected, particularly if you were privy to some of the various rumours in Ottawa's political bubble that have been circulating about both of them for years (which are not really worth discussing).

She had been much, much less publicly visible in recent years (since the infamous India trip, which the media blamed on her in part?) and basically only was seen in public with the PM on very important occasions like elections, the Coronation and some official functions. Her demeanour around him was also pretty telling at times.

Regardless, it's all their private business.

Canadian politics remains a world-leader at the creation of euphemism, doesn't it? 'Meaningful and difficult conversations' - fantastic!

At least no one is 'resigning to return to the private sector' (yet).