Canada General Discussion (2019-)

[MaxQue]

103,000 people will be removed from the federal voters register because they are not citizens.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/elections-canada-set-to-eliminate-100-000-non-citizens-from-voters-registry-1.4403532

Not sure how you get on the voter rolls, without being a citizen, but a good move to protect the integrity of democracy

The federal list was made from the provincial ones (in provinces that had one) in the late 90's, could easily come from sloppy provincial work.

I also suspect the automatic voter registration section of filling a tax report might be linked to it.

[MaxQue]

Forgive my Brit ignorance, but why has "3 seats" Campbell become a thing again?

2 seats. She tweeted than she hoped Dorian would destroy Mar-a-Lago.

[MaxQue]

Globe says Caroline Mulroney and Michael Fortier might be interested in replacing Scheer.

This is one of the reasons I think we should let Scheer have another kick at the can; we invested a lot of time and money into his brand, and I'm not seeing any compelling candidates to start over with. MacKay is the only strong alternative IMO and he gives me strong paper tiger vibes.

This is probably at least in part due to Harper's overly leader-centric style and failure to develop his front bench. They had a few strong contenders but those are mostly unavailable. Stuff happens, people move on etc, so ideally one would want several plausible strong successors in a party, which will whittle down during an actual leadership election. I wonder if the Liberals will suffer from the same issue when Trudeau goes.

Possible. There was reports that some Liberals were lobbying Mark Carney as replacement if Trudeau lost.

[MaxQue]

Andrew Scheer has resigned as Conservative leader.

[MaxQue]

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.

[MaxQue]

https://twitter.com/CNoelSRC/status/1318956056907862022 No election.

Wonderful. Hopefully, it will give more time for the NDP caucus to realize we need to get rid of Singh, who can't say a sentence without talking about race or talk about anything not related to his experience of a racialized person.

Importing those tired american tropes is very bad and is destroying the base of the party.

[MaxQue]

Something I have just found out that sounds absolutely ridiculous, like something Kafka would come up with, but it's actually true: throughout history, Canada has had 55 Superintendents-General of Indian Affairs/Ministers of Indian Affairs/Ministers of Crown-Indigenous Relations or some variations thereof. Of these fifty-five ministers, a grand total of zero (0) were actually Indigenous.

I've often wondered why this is too; it seems so absurd to not be intentional. My best guess is that no government has wanted to seem like it was favouring one Indigenous group over another.

It's more about Indigenous representation in high-level Cabinet. Only 3 ever were in "real" Cabinet positions (excluding Ministers of State and other junior positions) and none currently.

[MaxQue]

If the ONDP are down 10 points they've lost the strategic voters.

Well, I suppose you may be on to something. If promiscuous progressives were willing to vote John Tory (who at that point in his career was a failure as a politician) to stop Ford (even when they could've easily voted for Olivia Chow, who had been leading in the polls until the early summer) in the 2014 mayoral election, they won't mind voting for del Duca, I guess. We get what we deserve in this province.

So does the NDP who should have dumped Horwath after the 2014 election.

[MaxQue]

If the ONDP are down 10 points they've lost the strategic voters.

Well, I suppose you may be on to something. If promiscuous progressives were willing to vote John Tory (who at that point in his career was a failure as a politician) to stop Ford (even when they could've easily voted for Olivia Chow, who had been leading in the polls until the early summer) in the 2014 mayoral election, they won't mind voting for del Duca, I guess. We get what we deserve in this province.

So does the NDP who should have dumped Horwath after the 2014 election.

I don't know, while the NDP underperformed the polls in 2014, a lot of that was strategic voting to keep Mr. 100k job cuts out of power. The 2014 Ontario election was decent for the NDP in that they built a good base in diverse parts of the province, particularly a lot of Tory areas in the southwest that could have been won in 2018.

But Horwath changed her persona from "populist but moderate steel town slugger" to "generic left-liberal" in 2018, which never really made sense to me. It was clear that Wynne was DOA in 2018, the orange wave in urban Ontario was more or less unstoppable. Maybe the old Horwath couldn't have won "bourgeois left" seats like Toronto-St. Paul's, but there were few seats like that where the Liberals could have held on, or the PCs could have come through the middle.

I think she failed to adequately distinguish herself from Wynne other than on Hydro. But the NDP was never going to win over the 905 Wynne Wave seats, they had much more potential in the postindustrial southwest. Cambridge, the two Kitchener Tory ridings, Sarnia-Lambton, Chatham-Kent, Brantford-Brant, could all have gone NDP with a fitting campaign, as well as places like Peterborough and the Soo. Who knows if a change in strategy could have done it, but Horwath's change in persona most likely did more harm than good for the NDP.

Like even if the WWC strategy only kept the PCs from getting an overall majority, such a result would have put the NDP in a position of relative power over the Liberals. If the OLP propped up an NDP minority, it would force the legacy Liberal party to play second-fiddle, and historically when you look at other provinces, that's what tends to kill the Liberals. If they let Ford govern with a minority, it would hurt the Liberals' credibility with their own supporters who would feel betrayed that their leaders could have stopped Ford but refused. But since Ford got a majority, the NDP doesn't have these cards at their disposal, and the rudderless Liberals are bouncing back.

That decision to change her persona shows she lacks the political skills to be a efficient leader.

[MaxQue]

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

The party was utterly destroyed in the Great Depression. They were so divided on how to react to it that they did absolutely nothing while in power and the party executive decided to not choose any candidate and let every riding do their own things. Some riding associations ran candidates as Independents, others as Conservatives, some created an Unionist Party supporting current Conservative Premier and finally others created the Non-Partisan Independent Group who suppored a WW1-era former Conservative Premier (who died during the electoral campaign).

End results, they went from 35 seats (out of 48) to 2 for NPIG, 1 unionist, and 1 pro-Tory Independent.

After that, they made an anti-socialist deal with the Liberals and made a Australia-style Coalition (even appearing on ballot as Coalition). The Tories were clearly the junior partner and they still were bitterly divided between 3 factions (merging into Liberals, status quo and breaking away). Finally, the  Liberals dropped them and changed the voting method to STV.

Come the first election under that system, Social Credit wins (being the 2nd favorite party of CCF, PC and Liberals). Social Credit returns to FPTP and becomes the main opposition to the left. Lost all their seats in 1956 and only won 3 seats since then (2 in 1972 and 1 in 1975).

Unlike the Liberals, it fell in disarray, usually struggling to run more than 10 candidates and failing often to even reach 1%. In the SC collapse election in 1991, they only had 4 candidates and got an amazing 426 votes province-wide.

[MaxQue]

Surprised nobody's brought up Quebec's unilateral amendment of the constitution.

I'm not surprised Trudeau supported this decision, he needs Legault voters in the next election. But he may just have opened up a can of worms.

I could see a right wing party, especially Jason Kenney in Alberta, seeking to declare their province with English as the only official language and getting a unilateral amendment to the constitution to get it declared as such.  

We'll see if there is a large desire to still remove French from cereal boxes, but even more, we'll see if the federal Liberals and the other national parties show a double standard in the treatment of Quebec and the English speaking provinces.

One other possibility is a new English rights federal party starting up in Quebec.  That could threaten at least 5 to maybe 10 Liberal seats in Montreal.

Anglophones in Quebec are actually not up in arms about Legault new laws (it's full of symbolism, but doesn't change much in the day to day lifes) and Quebec legal scholars seem to think that using unilateral amendment (which is totally legal) instead of the province-Commons-Senate one used for the deconfessionalization of Quebec and Newfoundland school systems (in the 90's) would make that change have very limited judicial effects.

[MaxQue]

Surprised nobody's brought up Quebec's unilateral amendment of the constitution.

I'm not surprised Trudeau supported this decision, he needs Legault voters in the next election. But he may just have opened up a can of worms.

I could see a right wing party, especially Jason Kenney in Alberta, seeking to declare their province with English as the only official language and getting a unilateral amendment to the constitution to get it declared as such.  

What is this, the early 1990s? Anti-French sentiment hasn't been that much of a thing lately.

This. If Kenney were to pull a stunt like this (I doubt it), it would be about pipelines or carbon taxes, not language.

I think Kenney still has federal ambitions and while yes with way things are going in Alberta, chances of him every becoming PM are pretty close to zero, but he knows something like this would end that.  Also he says Legault as an ally since despite differences, both want Ottawa to stay out of provincial affairs.

More likely you get a municipality somewhere doing this.  In addition unlike 90s, we have a much larger immigration population so an English only policy would come across as not just anti-French, but anti-immigrant too thus why less likely. 

Municipalities don't have a Constitution that's part of the federal Constitution.

[MaxQue]

Surprised nobody's brought up Quebec's unilateral amendment of the constitution.

I'm not surprised Trudeau supported this decision, he needs Legault voters in the next election. But he may just have opened up a can of worms.

I could see a right wing party, especially Jason Kenney in Alberta, seeking to declare their province with English as the only official language and getting a unilateral amendment to the constitution to get it declared as such.  

What is this, the early 1990s? Anti-French sentiment hasn't been that much of a thing lately.

This. If Kenney were to pull a stunt like this (I doubt it), it would be about pipelines or carbon taxes, not language.

I think Kenney still has federal ambitions and while yes with way things are going in Alberta, chances of him every becoming PM are pretty close to zero, but he knows something like this would end that.  Also he says Legault as an ally since despite differences, both want Ottawa to stay out of provincial affairs.

More likely you get a municipality somewhere doing this.  In addition unlike 90s, we have a much larger immigration population so an English only policy would come across as not just anti-French, but anti-immigrant too thus why less likely. 

Municipalities don't have a Constitution that's part of the federal Constitution.

True, but could make municipal bylaw as that is what Sault Ste. Marie did in 1990.  But at same time I think backlash to that would be much stronger as many would see it as anti-immigrant too.

It was thinkfulyl stuck down by courts and a non far right mayor apologized in 2010 for that disgusting piece of bigotry.

[MaxQue]

Surprised nobody's brought up Quebec's unilateral amendment of the constitution.

I'm not surprised Trudeau supported this decision, he needs Legault voters in the next election. But he may just have opened up a can of worms.

I could see a right wing party, especially Jason Kenney in Alberta, seeking to declare their province with English as the only official language and getting a unilateral amendment to the constitution to get it declared as such.  

What is this, the early 1990s? Anti-French sentiment hasn't been that much of a thing lately.

This. If Kenney were to pull a stunt like this (I doubt it), it would be about pipelines or carbon taxes, not language.

I think Kenney still has federal ambitions and while yes with way things are going in Alberta, chances of him every becoming PM are pretty close to zero, but he knows something like this would end that.  Also he says Legault as an ally since despite differences, both want Ottawa to stay out of provincial affairs.

More likely you get a municipality somewhere doing this.  In addition unlike 90s, we have a much larger immigration population so an English only policy would come across as not just anti-French, but anti-immigrant too thus why less likely. 

Municipalities don't have a Constitution that's part of the federal Constitution.

True, but could make municipal bylaw as that is what Sault Ste. Marie did in 1990.  But at same time I think backlash to that would be much stronger as many would see it as anti-immigrant too.

It was thinkfulyl stuck down by courts and a non far right mayor apologized in 2010 for that disgusting piece of bigotry.

Absolutely and if done it would probably be somewhere in rural Alberta.  The same place where you lots of anti-lockdown, anti-mask types and many who think individuals should be able to own assault weapons and thought Trump was a good president.  While a small portion of Canada, such communities do exist although very much a minority.

Well, we have a winner for pushback! Notorious anti-Quebec MP and former incompetent Justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould.

[MaxQue]

I don't wanna open a thread up yet since it's way too soon but we all think its better than 50/50 odds for a fall election?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-electoral-urgency-clause-1.6053095This along with the motion to allow for final speeches in mid-June seem to be pointing to an early call.

Oh it's happening. With vaccinations sorted out, there won't be a more opportune time for the Liberals to pull the plug. The Bloc has said they want an election too. The CPC will ring their hands for a few days about Trudeau calling an early election - then again, the man could hardly breathe air without causing a Conservative outrage. The NDP and Greens probably don't want an election though, the latter are in an internal crisis (not that it matters what a caucus of three thinks), and the NDP doesn't have anything to gain from a potential Liberal majority. But the Liberals seem to want an election, so they'll get it. The only real roadblock is the LPC's class of 2015 worrying about their sweet sweet pensions, which won't be an issue in a couple of months.

The Bloc, however, is opposed to a October election as it would clash with the Quebec municipal elections. They seem to only support an election called called in August for mid-September.

[MaxQue]

So, I guess the Greens are back to being a de facto regional party now?

Perhaps not even. The other MP is pissed at her and Elizabeth May husband resigned from the board.
All because of a leader with confused loyalties, who cannot choose between Canada and Israel.

[MaxQue]

I'm pretty sure I saw a letter in a newspaper calling Israel an apartheid state and calling for trade sanctions against them signed by multiple Liberals.

[MaxQue]

We've talked before about how Anglo pols sound in French, particularly in the last two Tory leadership races. Turning the question around a bit, how do Trudeau, Blanchet and Bernier sound in French? How about Jean Chretien or Gilles Duceppe?

Obviously they're all fluent, but I'm curious about their class/regional aspects of their accents.

Bernier, Blanchet and Duceppe speak perfectly "educated" French (except when they purposely decide to sound working-class, which is not uncommon for Blanchet). Trudeau has a poor vocabulary and often uses anglicisms or false friends and wierd sentence structures. Jean Chretien spoke a working class French (sometimes sounding wierd due to his speech/face paralysis issue).

[MaxQue]

We've talked before about how Anglo pols sound in French, particularly in the last two Tory leadership races. Turning the question around a bit, how do Trudeau, Blanchet and Bernier sound in French? How about Jean Chretien or Gilles Duceppe?

Obviously they're all fluent, but I'm curious about their class/regional aspects of their accents.

Bernier, Blanchet and Duceppe speak perfectly "educated" French (except when they purposely decide to sound working-class, which is not uncommon for Blanchet). Trudeau has a poor vocabulary and often uses anglicisms or false friends and wierd sentence structures. Jean Chretien spoke a working class French (sometimes sounding wierd due to his speech/face paralysis issue).

Didn't Chretien get some criticism for speaking a working-class/hick French and validating the supposed stereotypes Anglos have of Quebec?

I might be misremembering, but if true then I think it's hilarious because
1. Most English Canadians wouldn't be able to tell if you sound like a Parisian professor or a fisherman from Gaspe lol it's all jibberish to people who don't speak French

While this may be true, I find it incredibly easy to tell the difference between a Parisian accent and a Quebec accent, and I am in no way fluent in French. Anyone who makes even the slightest effort to train their ear will immediately be able to tell the difference. It's fairly easy to tell the difference when they're speaking English too (e.g. do they pronounce th's like z's or d's?)

Also, if he is old, the fisherman from Gaspe won't have a Quebec accent, but a Maritime/New Brunswick/Acadian one.

[MaxQue]

CAQ MNA Claire Samson (Iberville) expelled from CAQ for sending a donation to the Quebec Conservative Party.

[MaxQue]

Finally, you mention disparagingly social conservatives. There is an incredible sanctimony amongst social liberals; an inability to understand how people could disagree with them. This is unhealthy and unnecessary. For one thing, ethnic minorities are often quite religious and socially conservative. However, you probably cannot run an explicitly socially conservative federal campaign. My solution would be a broad church. Canada, after all, is a parliamentary democracy . Individual MPs have a conscience and should vote with it. So controversial issues like abortion and so on should be free votes. You could then run socially conservative candidates in rural areas; always emphasising that you are a broad and not dogmatic party which accepts differences of opinion as legitimate. I'd point to the regular votes in the UK in the 1970s and '80s on reintroduction of capital punishment. They were always free votes, and the Tories were always split (about 60-40 in favour). But politicians of all stripes understood that these are exceedingly delicate moral questions which cannot be whipped or swept under the rug.

What you propose is exactly what the Conservatives are doing right now.

The problem is that the socially conservative base is not approving of that, because they will never be a majoirty in Parliament and so, they will never get what they want (they didn't under both Mulroney and Harper). They want the party leader to be in agreement with them, the party to campaign on those questions and some even want whipped votes on those questions.

[MaxQue]

Finally, you mention disparagingly social conservatives. There is an incredible sanctimony amongst social liberals; an inability to understand how people could disagree with them. This is unhealthy and unnecessary. For one thing, ethnic minorities are often quite religious and socially conservative. However, you probably cannot run an explicitly socially conservative federal campaign. My solution would be a broad church. Canada, after all, is a parliamentary democracy . Individual MPs have a conscience and should vote with it. So controversial issues like abortion and so on should be free votes. You could then run socially conservative candidates in rural areas; always emphasising that you are a broad and not dogmatic party which accepts differences of opinion as legitimate. I'd point to the regular votes in the UK in the 1970s and '80s on reintroduction of capital punishment. They were always free votes, and the Tories were always split (about 60-40 in favour). But politicians of all stripes understood that these are exceedingly delicate moral questions which cannot be whipped or swept under the rug.

What you propose is exactly what the Conservatives are doing right now.

The problem is that the socially conservative base is not approving of that, because they will never be a majoirty in Parliament and so, they will never get what they want (they didn't under both Mulroney and Harper). They want the party leader to be in agreement with them, the party to campaign on those questions and some even want whipped votes on those questions.

Then see my comment about ignoring their more radical fringes. Just like the Corbynite left, they cannot expect to dictate policy when they only form a small portion of the electorate.

Hard to ignore the fringe when they are a majority in some provinces, the majority of activists and the source of a big chunk of the money.

[MaxQue]

Scheer had a great opportunity in 2019. Trudeau's main weakness with moderate LPC-CPC swing voters was the perception of corruption that resulted from SNC. Scheer could have made that campaign about increasing accountability, strengthening lobbying rules, or at least being more transparent about the government's dealings with corporations. What kind of policies he would put forward, or whether they would be effective, are completely immaterial as long as people believed that he could succeed where Trudeau failed.

SNC was a very tricky weapon. Using it was toxic in Quebec (SNC going down meant 10000 persons losing their jobs) and there was a counter-argument that EU countries makes deals like that all the time and that Canada refusing to do so was putting European businesses in front of Canadian ones. I think it's less damaging to look corrupt than anti-Canadian business.

[MaxQue]

CAQ MNA Claire Samson (Iberville) expelled from CAQ for sending a donation to the Quebec Conservative Party.

And she is now a PCQ MNA.

[MaxQue]

Scheer had a great opportunity in 2019. Trudeau's main weakness with moderate LPC-CPC swing voters was the perception of corruption that resulted from SNC. Scheer could have made that campaign about increasing accountability, strengthening lobbying rules, or at least being more transparent about the government's dealings with corporations. What kind of policies he would put forward, or whether they would be effective, are completely immaterial as long as people believed that he could succeed where Trudeau failed.

SNC was a very tricky weapon. Using it was toxic in Quebec (SNC going down meant 10000 persons losing their jobs) and there was a counter-argument that EU countries makes deals like that all the time and that Canada refusing to do so was putting European businesses in front of Canadian ones. I think it's less damaging to look corrupt than anti-Canadian business.

The Conservatives used SNC as proof that the Liberals were coddling Quebec at Alberta's expense again.

"They gave SNC a pass to save Quebec jobs, while wanting to shut down Alberta tar sands" was the line they repeated, even when Scheer refused to explain how he would have handled SNC differently. It was completely dishonest, which was fitting, given Scheer's own dishonesty about himself.

Making the SNC scandal about poor Alberta  being a victim again was also very stupid, as the average Ontarian probably doesn't like Alberta any more than Québec.