Canada General Discussion (2019-)

[StateBoiler]

RIP https://twitter.com/DuaneBratt/status/1307375189601050624

I don't mean for this to sound at all callous, but it's really amazing that Canada hadn't seen a former PM pass away since 2000: 20 years ago! With the recent news of Chretien's wife passing away too, it feels like the near future will see Canada lose quite a few historic policy-makers, & that's really unfortunate.

RIP, Prime Minister.

And before that, it had been 21 years since Diefenbaker died. So, just 2 deaths in 41 years.

We had the same thing down south. Lyndon Johnson died in 1973 which meant then-president Richard Nixon was the only living one with all his predecessors deceased. We had no presidential deaths then from 1973 until Nixon's death in 1994. Nixon due to Watergate didn't do the pomp and circumstance, so that didn't occur until Reagan's death in 2004. We had 2 deaths in 31 years, but you guys tend to have more Prime Ministers than we do presidents.

Carter is in his 90s so his death can come any day and wouldn't be a surprise. Then you have 3 presidents that were all born in 1946 (Clinton, G.W. Bush, and Trump), so should in theory die all around the same time.

[StateBoiler]

Can Canadians explain to me why when Harper prorogued parliament when he held a minority it was this travesty of democracy that made international news, and when Trudeau did it to stop investigation of the WE Charity scandal from hurting the Liberal Party further in a minority parliament (as well as going back on a campaign promise) it's not even discussed here on this thread or board I believe, or makes larger news?

[StateBoiler]

Can Canadians explain to me why when Harper prorogued parliament when he held a minority it was this travesty of democracy that made international news, and when Trudeau did it to stop investigation of the WE Charity scandal from hurting the Liberal Party further in a minority parliament (as well as going back on a campaign promise) it's not even discussed here on this thread or board I believe, or makes larger news?

Hmm, I could've sworn I grumbled about this on the thread... anyway to answer your question:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias

Ridiculous. Virtually all of the Canadian media leans to the right, so, if there is any bias it would be against the Liberals.

Everyone in this Canada general political discussion thread is a right-leaning Canadian media member?

Go back through the thread. There's a few posts about Bill Morneau resigning, WE Charity shutting down operations in Canada, and nothing else.

[StateBoiler]

Can Canadians explain to me why when Harper prorogued parliament when he held a minority it was this travesty of democracy that made international news, and when Trudeau did it to stop investigation of the WE Charity scandal from hurting the Liberal Party further in a minority parliament (as well as going back on a campaign promise) it's not even discussed here on this thread or board I believe, or makes larger news?

Harper move cancelled three months of Parliament sitting.
Trudeau move postponed the end of summer recess by a week.

Harper also prorogued Parliament to prevent an imminent defeat of his government with the other parties poised to take power, that wasn't the case with this prorogation.

It was still wrong, because the purpose of the Liberals was clearly to shut down the investigation into the WE charity scandal, but the anti-Democratic nature is much less serious.

I find that explanation disingenuous. The Prime Minister's family are involved in a corruption scandal, the Finance Minister falls on a knife never admitting blame, and we're going to whisk that away? It was clearly a move to stop the Trudeau government from falling when they only hold a minority to start with. They couldn't do what they did with SNC Lavelin and just vote to not investigate because they didn't have a majority.

The Boys in Short Pants podcast Twitter had a funny line when Morneau was fined $300 post-fact for violating the Canada Elections Act. "I got a $280 ticket for jaywalking once. It was -20C I was wearing a T-shirt and trying to catch a cab. Don't judge my life choices."

[StateBoiler]

I find that explanation disingenuous. The Prime Minister's family are involved in a corruption scandal, the Finance Minister falls on a knife never admitting blame, and we're going to whisk that away? It was clearly a move to stop the Trudeau government from falling when they only hold a minority to start with. They couldn't do what they did with SNC Lavelin and just vote to not investigate because they didn't have a majority.

The government was in no danger of falling- CPC was still in the middle of its leadership race and the NDP was broke, with bad poll numbers to boot and had no intention to go into an election.

On the other hand in case of Harper there was a full blown confidence and supply agreement between the opposition parties and he was about to lose a confidence vote within days had he not prorogued.

The two situations are no remotely comparable.

The end result is the exact same. I agree "government falling" is too strong but the prorogation was to preserve the government's place and standing by quashing an investigation into its actions. If anything it's worse because no one was accusing Harper of political corruption when he prorogued, they were just upset by a political manuever. Harper didn't break any laws in the lead up to it. What Trudeau did was a political manuever to stop an investigation from shining light on the actions of MP's that hit close to home. How is that possibly fine to anyone with a neutral state of mind not colored by their political leanings?

[StateBoiler]

The Boys in Short Pants podcast Twitter had a funny line when Morneau was fined $300 post-fact for violating the Canada Elections Act. "I got a $280 ticket for jaywalking once. It was -20C I was wearing a T-shirt and trying to catch a cab. Don't judge my life choices."

Not sure that line about Morneau is funny. Maybe you had to be there?

Great podcast. Recommend it to anyone with an interest in inner workings of Canadian government, although I find it good to listen to because it explains the behind the scenes of how government operates which at least in the U.S. literally no one from the left, right, neither, or the media ever does.

It's from 2 government staffers: one NDP and one Conservative. https://soundcloud.com/boys-in-short-pants/

[StateBoiler]

It looks like the Liberals are doing everything they can to force an election. There is a precedent for a modern winter election.  The 1980 election following the defeat of the Joe Clark government was held on February 18, 1980, but, back them, campaigns were two months long, so it would have been called sometime in December.

Pierre Trudeau started his victory speech with the line "Fellow Canadians, mecheres  amis, well, welcome to the 1980s."

I'm going through the Boys in Short Pants podcasts, and I'm up to February of this year where they start the podcast saying "it seems like we've not had a government for 6 months...Committees are now back to work but aren't doing a whole lot...probably because the Liberals don't have a majority of Committee seats". Are the Liberals really wanting to shed this minority parliamentary status, but Covid is in a way kind of blocking them?

[StateBoiler]

Was there any more political fallout to the Payette resignation?

[StateBoiler]

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/glavin-canadas-actions-toward-china-grow-more-and-more-humiliating?fbclid=IwAR0xaPZm-3LvFV4bwrw4b9nOreDd2WOUtAtDbUz5OazOhUbUGjYKD1V8_jI

[StateBoiler]

You don't need to bridge the divide. Just let the PC-equivalent run a center right UK Tory style campaign that runs on a carbon tax and beating down SoCons for those key upper middle class urban/suburban votes while the Reform-equivalent runs with all the policies that let it dominate the Prairies and that (especially recently) provided inroads in postindustrial ex-NDP regions like Essex and Oshawa.

As it stands a single Tory leader is forced to choose between their base and growth, whereas two Tory leaders could get both. If anything being divided is a good thing, since that makes it harder for Trudeau to do his usual trick of painting the Tories as Republicans to alienate centrist suburbanites.

Also, of course Trudeau is at his peak when he's paying a huge portion of the population to stay home. The same trick worked quite a while for Bolsonaro. But the real question is what happens to his popularity when the bill comes due, either in the form of austerity and service cuts when the BoC raises rates or inflation if it doesn't. I've seen zero explanations for how we're going to handle the debt (let alone provincial debt) when real rates aren't negative.

I'm sure Trudeau will capitalize by holding an election sooner rather than later though, ideally by baiting the other parties into forcing it somehow.

The PCs and Reform/Alliance merged *because* the alternative was another decade of Liberal majorities with ~35% of the popular vote. More specifically, the PCs never recovered from the shocks of Mulroney's last years, and were a spent force. It's possible that, given another decade, the Alliance Party could have itself evolved into a big-tent centre-right party, but we'll never know.

There would certainly be room for a moderate, centre-right party. Unfortunately, the First Past The Post system makes it unviable.

That was with both parties stepping on each others toes, though. By a brief scan of the '93 results it looks like the PCs and Reform combined had enough votes to win several dozen ridings that they otherwise would have lost, particularly in BC, SK, ON and NB. Strategic primaries/dropping out (probably) wouldn't have been enough in '93 but in ['97 there were even more split ridings](http://esm.ubc.ca/CA97/results.html).

The PCs weren't what they used to be but they were hardly dead in the water considering Charest managed to get them from 2 to 20 seats.

20 seats. Wow, congrats, they're a smaller right-wing version of the NDP.

I liked the Boys in Short Pants' take on the PC's in the aftermath of Peter Mackay losing the Conservative leadership race to Erin O'Toole: not a majority of the Conservative Party, historically paid lip service to conservativism but were Grit-ish as far as selling out their constituencies in the end compared to Reform/Alliance who were significantly more genuine (a point made by the NDP member of the podcast), and that the "PC section of the party" are heavily overrepresented in national media.

[StateBoiler]

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-biden-trudeau-talk-build-back-whatever/

U.S. and Canadian relations continue to struggle post-Trump.

[StateBoiler]

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-biden-trudeau-talk-build-back-whatever/

U.S. and Canadian relations continue to struggle post-Trump.

Most of Biden's foreign policy has been pretty loathsome in my estimation, but his willingness to stand up to Trudeau's oil worship, even if it turns out to be disingenuous kayfabe, is a rare bright spot in the post-neocon morass.

Your post tells me you did not read the article.

[StateBoiler]

https://www.hilltimes.com/2021/10/25/liberal-mps-want-to-know-why-leadership-taking-their-sweet-ass-time-to-call-first-post-election-caucus-meeting-say-liberal-sources/324277?fbclid=IwAR2ljZmFTE3zzEhNEdYrYY14EaBZ0QXgsXB0JT5OyFNPeVa5YioUPJvN8hI

[StateBoiler]

Boys in Short Pants
@shortpantspod

Cabinet Observations:

-Surprisingly few machinery of government changes
-Big title bump for Joly, but Foreign Affairs hasn't been prioritized in this government
-Sajjan to International Development, a fairly soft landing for him
-Blair demoted, it's not clear how much the President of Privy Council role entails, Emergency Preparedness is like 1% of the Public Safety portfolio
-Filomena Tassi steps into a big role at Public Services and Procurement
-Joyce Murray gets fish, shifting it back to the West Coast post debacle last year
-Guilbeault to Environment and Climate Change will be interesting, giving the reigns to an activist who might not play well with some stakeholders
-Most of the new women are in junior portfolios
-Tough day for Chagger and Garneau
-The experiment with centralizing the regional economic development agencies has ended, turns out people like regional slush fund ministers
-Accountability exists for letter campaign literature theft caught on camera
-Tourism probably isn't the portfolio Albertans had in mind

[StateBoiler]

There were an additional 28 deputy shadow ministers for a grand total of 83 in the official opposition shadow cabinet or caucus officers.

So ridiculous that "leadership" has so many people.

How many of Trudeau's ministers control zero or minimal budgets/staffs tied to their position?

[StateBoiler]

Boys in Short Pants podcast got Erin O'Toole on as a guest a couple weeks ago. Long-form, 68 minutes.

[StateBoiler]

Honest perspectives on your party from political opponents aren't always worthless - but the operative word in that is *honest*. Too often, they are transparent self-interested bad faith takes.

Yeahmore media outlets don't treat certain people as grains of salt on everything and say: "we're only going to publish anything you say if you ridicule your own side or praise the other side".

[StateBoiler]

This government readout of a ministers' meeting on Russia-Ukraine yesterday set Paul Wells off.

https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/this-just-in-the-pm-has-been-phoning-cabinet-ministers/

Today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly, Minister of National Defence Anita Anand, Minister of International Development Harjit S. Sajjan, President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair, and Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Sean Fraser to discuss security concerns in Ukraine. They were joined by Chief of the Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre, Interim Clerk of the Privy Council Janice Charette, and other senior officials.

During the call, the Prime Minister and ministers discussed the latest developments in Ukraine. They condemned Russia’s military buildup in and around the country as well as Russia’s annexation and illegal occupation of Crimea. They underlined the need for Russia to de-escalate the situation and uphold its international commitments, and emphasized Canada’s commitment to continued coordination and engagement between allies and partners.

Minister Joly, who is currently in Ukraine, provided an update on her work with her Ukrainian counterparts in support of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression. She met yesterday in Kyiv with Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Denys Shmyhal, and Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, Olga Stefanishyna, and met today with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Minister Anand highlighted the role of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) for military training and capacity building in Ukraine through Operation UNIFIER, which has trained more than 12,500 members of Ukraine’s Security Forces since the mission began in 2015. Approximately 200 CAF personnel are currently deployed to Ukraine under Operation UNIFIER. The minister noted she recently spoke with her Ukrainian counterpart.

Together, the Prime Minister and ministers raised the need to find a peaceful solution through dialogue. They reaffirmed Canada’s steadfast support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and considered current and future assistance to Ukraine. Prime Minister Trudeau emphasized that any further military incursion into Ukraine would have serious consequences, including coordinated sanctions.

The Prime Minister and ministers agreed to continue closely monitoring the situation over the coming days and weeks.

He made an article that I linked above but this was his initial reaction afterward:

Honestly, this is one of the strangest things I've seen in 28 years in Ottawa. It's a bland, fictionalized description of the PM and some cabinet ministers chatting among themselves about a terrifying diplomatic crisis that could yet turn into a shooting war in Europe. Great that they had this chat. Does any of them have anything they now want to say directly to Canadians? Or to any of our allies? Or to the potential adversary? Does any of them imagine that this bit of transcribed theatre  is at all close to being the best way to get out whatever message they might hypothetically have in mind?

I wonder whether they think Canada has some other, real government somewhere that's doing actual things while they have undergraduates write out the scripts of their imaginary conversations. I'm not sure how to break the news to them that no, they're supposed to be the actual government.

[StateBoiler]

I was watching the trucker protests on the news and yikes these guys are an embarrassment. They took an otherwise issues that some people may agree but turn it completely toxic

Give me 100 people organizing on any issue and I'll be able to find the 3 idiots and get them to talk portraying the group in the worst light possible. The larger the group, the easier to find idiots. It's one way how the media gaslights the public.

[StateBoiler]

For a protest that's all about restarting the economy and restoring freedom, they didn't respect the thousands of retail and restaurant workers who lost hours, or the local business owners who lost customers, or the local residents who endured their honking and diesel exhaust. It's far beyond a few idiots with Nazi and Confederate flags. The group itself is a nuisance, and in any other context, would have been ordered to disperse long ago.

"People think what they want is freedom. What they really want is order."

-Imperial Army officer on the 2nd season of the Mandalorian

[StateBoiler]

Paul Wells in his article shares that Michael Chong may have inadvertently caused this to happen now.

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/erin-otoole-and-the-multiverse-of-madness/

I'll leave my unnamed source behind soon, but perhaps only after canvassing a few more issues with him or her. First, this MP believes only Chong's Reform Act makes this sudden, quick crisis possible. And that the party leadership unwittingly prodded the rebels into quick action, starting with Chong. Last week columnist John Ivison quoted the urbane Toronto-area MP attempting to perch O'Toole's opponents on the horns of a dilemma: they could wait for a review vote in the party's convention in 2023, or they could invoke the Reform Act now. "We are a rule of law party and we have two processes laid out - the caucus process and the one through the party constitution at a national convention," Chong said. "To short-circuit that, to have an expedited third ad hoc option does not follow these processes." This received close attention in the caucus. Perhaps Chong thought he was ensuring the party would wait until next year. No such luck.

[StateBoiler]

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.

It was kind of my take at the time of the last election - O'Toole went to the left from Scheer which is what all of the non-Conservative vote and media in Canada told the Conservatives to do if they want to form power again, and it did not result in any increase in voting support from the 2019 election to the 2021 election.

[StateBoiler]

The problem here is that the residents in downtown Ottawa have suffered way beyond what's reasonable protest, and the protesters openly don't care about the consequences to other people. Freedom ends when other peoples' freedoms are damaged - in this case, the freedom to enjoy a quiet night's sleep, the freedom to earn a living at the mall, the freedom to attend school, and so on.

In your country and mine we removed the freedom to earn a living at the mall and the freedom to attend school in the last 2 years for extended periods of time.

[StateBoiler]

How can Peter Mackay be considered a serious option that has a chance of winning?

[StateBoiler]

Pierre Poilievre has announced he's running for "Prime Minister", without even mentioning Conservative leader. He's obviously doing the Trump strategy of gutting the party as an institution and turning it into his personality cult.

Your country has presidentialized the Prime Minister position already as demonstrated by the Parliament and committees rarely meeting the last few years and everything handled by an unelected bureaucratic PMO, and if Trudeau's Liberals are not a personality cult, what are they?

Anyway, business question. What naval-minded military installations does Canada have in its far north? If it's minimal, what other military installations do they have that are intended to cover their Arctic territory and near sea lanes?