Canada's federal election: Monday, September 20, 2021

Is the opposition about to snap?

Quote:

Opposition parties are ratcheting up their calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau to resign, with the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois saying that the Liberals could be facing a fall election, if actions beyond their apologies over their roles in the WE Charity controversy aren’t taken.

In a new statement in French Friday afternoon, Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet said that in light of the ongoing developments in the WE Charity controversy, and what he called a betrayal of Canadians’ trust that Trudeau and Morneau have demonstrated, it’s time for them both to go.

If not, his party plans to consult Quebecers about possibly tabling a motion of non-confidence when the House of Commons resumes in late September. Because the Liberals are currently governing with a minority, their government could be toppled if they lose a confidence vote.

...

While the ballots are still being cast to name the next federal Conservative leader, perceived front-runners Erin O’Toole and Peter MacKay have both expressed their outrage over the affair and have committed to holding the Trudeau Liberals to account if they are elected.

Are the Conservatives that stupid to engage in such an act of self-immolation as that? Sure the WE scandal is atrotious and should not have happened. I honestly don't think that issue will gain any traction. It seems across the country, voters have one thing on their minds: when and how are we going to get out of this pandemic? Never mind the optics of trying to force an election with rallies and line-ups to vote, despite assurances that everything will be safe. I think voters would punish any party seen as responsible for an election during a pandemic. In addition, can anybody tell me what the Conservatives want to do about it? The NDP arm-twisted the Liberals into giving CERB, and the Bloc did likewise for disability payments. Trudeau's popularity soared during the pandemic, you think  he's going to hesitate to remind people of that? This after the Conservatives failed to credibly go after the government for its mishandling of the crisis in the early days. Sure they have anti-China rhetoric, but Harper signed the free trade agreement with China, something the NDP would to very well to point out during a campaign stop. Even though he's a lame duck, the image of Scheer in the airport without a mask when authorities are asking (and in some cases mandating) that masks be worn in more places, won't look good for the party.

The oppostion dared Trudeau to refuse. He took the dare. He is governing as though he has a majority. Harper was the first to do it. 

“The Conservatives put forward a motion that clearly outlines their lack of confidence in the government,” Trudeau told reporters. “The opposition is going to have to decide if they want to make this minority parliament work or whether they have lost confidence in the government.”

Trudeau is right. If the Conservatives do not have confidence in the government the remedy is an election. If the opposition parties don't want to do that because they aren't ready for another election whose fault is that?

Canadians are stuck voting against parties instead of for a party. The least bad wins. That Liberals are the least bad option in the minds of voters says a lot. 

NorthReport wrote:

Paul Wells Is in a league by himself https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/i-think-this-parliament-is-broke...

Rempel Garner spent some time this weekend congratulating herself for doubling the time the motion would allot for production of this mountain range of documents. Instead of giving the government two weeks, she’s now pleased to give them a month. This gesture of farcical magnanimity is best understood as a kind of performance art. It’s like suggesting that somebody shove a Buick up his nose—but expecting to be congratulated for giving him an extra two weeks to do it....

That Erin O’Toole seconded Rempel Garner’s motion casts similar doubt on the new Conservative leader’s own judgment. That the other opposition parties have hitched their wagons to this Macy’s parade of a motion helps to explain why the Liberals rebound so smartly in the polls after each of their missteps: because an election is never a referendum on the incumbent but a choice among alternatives, and if none of the alternatives can even pretend to be serious then voters will simply send everyone back to their previous spots on the gameboard.

 Which is why there is no point in paying attention between elections. 

Paul is very obviously going for the NDP vote. She is moving the party left on basic income and national daycare and pushing hard on the diversity issue which will help her. Auto-NDP voters could easily decide to reward the Greens because no one expect the NDP to actually win anyway. People who are just looking for a more progressive could easily go Green as a message vote. 

That Paul managed to pull in 31% is pretty impressive even if it was just a by-election. 

Singh is going to have to push for more in the next budget and dare the Liberals to call an election.  They may end up losing seats, maybe not, but either way they are losing their identity unless it is to become Liberal lite.

Kropotkin, we live on one planet. BC can do nothing without Canada for climate change. As a country we could have an enormous impact on the world through negotiating progressive trade deals. If Canada proposed a truly progressive trade deal people in the EU would rise up in support. It is dreaming in technicolor? Of course. It is entirely unrealistic. Pie in the sky hope. But climate change is an emergency. To give up hope is to resign ourselves being doomed. We may be doomed no matter what we do but it is better than nothing. Aren't all revolutions unexpected to some extent? It is only in hindsight they are predictable. It takes people who won't take no for an answer and who will demand better. 

North Report, nonsense:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2020/10/14/a-message-of-thanks-to-our-suppor...

Throughout our campaign, we put forward a boldly progressive platform – a platform unlike any that mainstream Canadian politics has seen. Despite the obstacles put in our way, we came within a hair’s breadth of winning, and did so by doing politics honourably.

We drew thousands of new members to the party. We raised the hard questions and answered them with thoughtfulness and integrity. We spoke from the heart. We spoke truth to power.

With your amazing support, we have begun to build a movement. 

In the days and weeks ahead, we will engage with Greens and other progressives to transform that movement into an unstoppable force of principled, progressive politics. 

We know with every fibre of our being that the time is now.

We warmly welcome your thoughts as to how to build upon the foundation we have laid in this campaign. Please feel free to share those thoughts with us by sending an email to [email protected].

It can be done if the effort is put in by enough people. 

NorthReport wrote:

We had better start shoring up the NDP as Trudeau doesn't seem to be cutting it https://globalnews.ca/news/7434839/canada-political-fundraising-2020/[/q...

As far as I recall the Liberals are always signficantly behind the Conservatives in fund-raising. As long as the Liberals raise enough to run a normal campaign they will win based on policy. The Conservatives usual approach of attacking the leader of the Liberals won't work this time. People won't be voting for Trudeau. They will be voting against O'Toole and for financial supports for business and people. 

Pondering wrote:

Kropotkin, we live on one planet. BC can do nothing without Canada for climate change. As a country we could have an enormous impact on the world through negotiating progressive trade deals.

That is my point. When are you and your neighbours going to elect progressive MP's. Do you really think we can wait for two or three election cycles as you've suggested?

I have been arguing against corporate trade agreements since I came on this board 18 years ago. Your belief in the ability of trade deals to save the environment is naive at best. We need less international goods flowing and more local infrastructure every where on the planet not new global trading networks.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Pondering wrote:

Kropotkin, we live on one planet. BC can do nothing without Canada for climate change. As a country we could have an enormous impact on the world through negotiating progressive trade deals.

That is my point. When are you and your neighbours going to elect progressive MP's. Do you really think we can wait for two or three election cycles as you've suggested?

I have been arguing against corporate trade agreements since I came on this board 18 years ago. Your belief in the ability of trade deals to save the environment is naive at best. We need less international goods flowing and more local infrastructure every where on the planet not new global trading networks.

Trade deals and eco-socialist governments are the only mechanisms I know of that could have an international impact significant enough to have an impact on emissions.  

Lascaris taking over the Green Party is a long shot. Even if we succeed in that getting him to the PM seat is a very long shot. I just don't see any other path that has any chance at all.

Vote NDP as the best of a bad lot but don't fool ourselves into thinking have an NDP PM would change things enough to have a significant impact on climate change. 

If Canada proposed changes to CETA for required emissions reductions and required worker protections and minimum taxation of corporations etc. activists in Europe would be galvanized. Once CETA was revised pressure could be applied to other countries. 

Pie in the sky? Maybe. But what is the alternative? We just going to sit around and wait for someone to figure something out? I think someone has figured it out and I don't see any downside in supporting his fight to gain control of the Green Party and put eco-socialism on the national stage. 

To be fair, Quebec was ready to deliver an NDP government in 2011. It really was the southern Ontario left that wasn't on board even with a historically unappealing Liberal leader like Ignatieff at the helm. I think it might be a deeply embedded intergenerational family identification with the two big Corporate parties. The excuse that people won't vote NDP because of Bob Rae just isn't credible anymore.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Pondering I have been trying to put eco-socialism on the public agenda now for 48 years since I first supported an NDP candidate who was a leader in the fight against acid rain. Please convince your friends and neighbours they should think the same way. My friends and neighbours and our progressive MP's that we send to Ottawa are waiting for you to get you collective shit together and do something except sit at keyboards and talk about change. Apparently you believe the troika will save us from capitalism and I think the Greeks experience with electing eco-socialists tells me change needs to be locally based.

In the meantime send some progressive MP's to Ottawa instead of right wing Liberals and Bloc MP's and lets see whether change through our political system is possible. It certainly is not when the people of Montreal and Toronto vote for the status quo parties.

I'm doing what I can through supporting Lascaris. I would convince others if I could but as we have seen I am not particularly persuasive. Nevertheless whether we like it or not our futures depend on worldwide action. What we are continuing to do when it is entirely unnescessary is beyond insane. 

I may be late to the eco-socialist party but isn't the point to recruit more people? 

I can't convince people of anything. Lascaris can. That is what makes him such a good leader. He and Haddad are the future of eco-socialism if there is one. I can't imagine him not having the support of QS. 

Casting blame is counter-productive. 

Demographics favor eco-socialists because people under 40 place far more emphasis on climate change and that will only grow but it also takes a leader able to convince people it can be done. 

New poll from Abacus:

November 16, 2020

Our latest national polling data shows that an election held today would see the Liberals with 38% support, 8-percentage points ahead of the Conservatives. This is the largest lead for the Liberals since June and a 4-point gain in about a month. The Liberals lead in every part of the country except the Prairie provinces, where the Conservatives have the upper hand.

38% Liberals

30% Conservatives

15% NDP

8% BQ

6% Greens

(Nov. 6-12, 2020)

https://abacusdata.ca/liberal-conservative-vote-november-polling-abacus-data/

NorthReport wrote:

https://www.todayville.com/us-vs-them-is-an-increasingly-common-philosop...

Hogwash. Us versus them is nothing new. Provinces and the feds have been bickering and blaming each other forever.  The Trump phenomenon was created by the Republicans back in the tea party days as they destroyed public education and fed the anger of the working class against elites. 

“Ordered populism rests on the belief in a corrupt elite, and the idea that power needs to be wrested from this elite and returned to the people. Oriented toward authoritarianism, ordered populism emphasizes obedience, hostility toward outgroups, a desire to turn back the clock to a time of greater order in society, and a search for a strongman type to lead the return to a better time.”

Does that type of politics exist in Canada? It sure does, Graves says, and it’s been on the rise for the past few years. His research says that view is shared by as much as a third of the population and its ascent is accompanied by increases in polarization, inequality and a decline in the middle class.”

The fact that we don’t have a true “Trump” populist strongman here does not mean the voters do not seek one......

Perhaps we should support those who are contrarian to the wishes of the elite. Is there an updated Trump out there to lead?

Just asking.

He's referring to O'Toole. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318884862_Growing_Apart_Partisa...

Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sorting that is comparable to that in the US. Over time, likeminded citizens have increasingly clustered into parties, with increasingly stark divisions between partisans......

We also suspect that current concerns in Canada have been lessened somewhat by the election of the Liberals in 2015, which is particularly striking when contrasted to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Yet, as we show below, the 2015 election results are not the product of reduced partisan divisions. This paper thus sets out to correct this misperception, partly as an exploration of the Canadian political landscape, but also as a test of the generalizability of a trend that has been so prominent in recent studies of the US. We aim, in short, to assess the extent to which Canada has experienced increased partisan sorting around policy preferences.....

The literature on party polarization in Canada suggests further reasons to suspect similarities with the US. Despite the fact that Canadian parties have historically been ideologically incoherent (Clarke et al., 1996), recent decades have witnessed shifts in the party system that have increased the importance of ideology (see, for example, Carty et al.,2000). Both party manifesto data and expert assessments of parties point toward meaningful and expanding ideological distances between parties, especially since the 1980s (Cochrane, 2010; Klingemann et al., 2006)....

Party competition in Canada has historically been characterized not by competition between left(/labour)- and right-oriented parties, but rather by strong, ideologically-flexible centrist parties (and mostly, just one party), put in power by broad-based regional coalitions (see Johnston, 1988; Carty et al., 2000). Yet the party system has been marked by increased polarization since the 1980s (see, for example, Cochrane, 2010), and our analysis offers support for the conjecture that Canadian parties are currently more effective at capturing (and perhaps enhancing) ideological divisions in society. It also serves as a useful reminder that the 2015 election was not the product of Canadians coming together in their support for redistribution, bur rather the electoral success of a pro-redistribution plurality. Whether this distribution of preferences, and the way in which it is captured by the party system, would withstand increasingly polarized and/or populist elite politics remains to be seen. For now, this much is clear: increased partisan sorting, at least regarding attitudes about redistribution, is readily evident in Canada.

Bunch of hogwash. One party, the Progressive Conservatives split up then the Reform side took over. Because of their increasing polarization even they know they can't get a majority anymore. 

If there were rising resentment of corrupt elites the Liberals would be doing much worse. There are multiple alternatives and these are polls not actual votes so people have no reason to pretend to vote Liberal. Nor does it mean everyone is hunky dory with Liberal corruption. It just means the Conservatives are so bad they aren't being considered as a viable alternative. 

Regardless of how people answer questions about redistributive policy the grand majority of Canadians want strong social services, healthcare and pharmacare. We don't classify these policies as redistributative. 

They will not be able to manufacture a Trump style polarization in Canada. Or at least not one big enough to allow the Conservatives to take power. I do hope they go all Trumpian. 

NorthReport wrote:

Latest poll Libs 37 Cons 31 NDP 20 (Up 3%) Bloc 7 Grn 3

This was a Research Co. poll dated December 17th. 

The last four polls on Wikipedia (November 29 to December 13) show chronologically the NDP at 20% (Leger), 19% (Angus Reid) 19% (Campaign Research) and 23% (Leger), showing definite improvement during the last month for the party. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_44th_Canadian_fede...