Author Topic: Canadian Politics 2019  (Read 18029 times)

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #30 on: October 14, 2019, 08:45:22 AM »
As the polls move towards a minority government (although keep in mind that the aggregators still say things like "85 to 190 seats, 19 times out of 20", and that in 2004 back when people had landlines listed in phone books the Liberals got 6% more of the vote than expected) another complication in coalition forming would be that the government of Alberta wants three bitumen pipelines (one to the Gulf of Mexico, one east to the St. Laurence, and one west to Vancouver- they want a fourth too but even Trudeau agreed that it would have never passed an environmental impact assessment if the assessors had not been told what answer to give).  The Bloc are not happy about imperialistic Anglos threatening the sacred soil of la belle province (a train full of oil crashed in Quebec in 2013 and killed at least 42 people, and there was a spill of fossil fuels into a Vancouver harbour), but they have a wing which is just as morally flexible as anyone in the Liberals or Conservatives, they might accept pipelines through Columbie-Britannique et les États-Unis.

I believe there is a way to reach a compromise on pipelines and related issues, but our system of government does not really encourage that.

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #31 on: October 14, 2019, 09:12:33 PM »
Do you think there would be pressure, in the event of the Conservatives being the largest party without being a majority, for the other parties to ensure they as the "winners" were included in a government? That's a discourse I've seen in some countries (which to me is absurd - if two or three other parties can collectively outvote one party, the fact it's plurality-larger than them is irrelevant) and I'd be interested to know if Canada has seen it rear its head at all.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #32 on: October 15, 2019, 08:42:39 AM »
I think its traditional that the Governor General offer the largest party the first chance to form a government.  Many aspects of the Canadian constitution have not really adjusted to the fact that we have more than two parties, I am told that there is no actual guidance on how to form the cabinet in a true coalition government, mostly we have minority governments with one or more other parties agreeing to support confidence motions.  (Actually, you and Glauring might want to look up the Canadian prorogation crisis of 2008 and compare it to recent events in the UK).

Meanwhile, the ritual cries of "if you want to save the country from the {heartless Conservatives/socialist NDP, separatist Bloc} at this uniquely important moment, you have to hold your nose and vote {Liberal/Conservative}" are being issued by the parties and their unregistered agents in opinion columns, and the election acquired a Ciceronian moment when Justin Trudeau was widely suspected to be wearing lorica body armour under his toga suit at a rally in Missisauga Ontario.

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #33 on: October 15, 2019, 05:48:27 PM »
It is also perfectly possible that no two parties (other than Liberal + Conservative) will have a majority of seats which would really be unprecedented in Canada (although again, last election the polls predicted a Liberal minority ... one reason why I don't vote tactically is that I think it overestimates how much a voter can know, the other is the problem 'I vote based on how I guess everyone else will vote, but they vote based on how they think I will vote').

I don't read French media, so I don't understand what has been happening in Quebec.

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #34 on: October 17, 2019, 07:32:26 PM »
Politik ist die Kunst des Möglichen - Otto von Bismark - Politics is the art of the possible

The Conservatives’ promises are ... mostly stupid, while the Liberals’ are ... mostly meaningless. - Andrew Coyne, a small-c conservative commentator, "Bad policy versus no policy — the real difference between Conservatives and Liberals" (25 September 2019)

I had a couple of women, constituents, come to my office and say, ‘We fought so hard to get a seat around the table, and you got there and you gave it away.’ It kind of stunned me. My answer to them was, ‘We didn’t fight hard to get a seat at the table so that we [could] do things the way they’ve always been done and let the boys still run things the way the boys have been running things.’- Jane Philpott, independent MP for Markham-Stouffville and former cabinet minister, interview with Jason McBride, "Can Jane Philpott Change Politics?" https://thewalrus.ca/can-jane-philpott-change-politics/


"Politicians, I think, need to figure out how to have those conversations which will allow us to introduce evidence-based policy in a politically palatable way ... Polling can't substitute for good public policy." - Jody Wilson-Raybould, independent MP for Vancouver Granville and former cabinet minister, interview with Canadaland (Oppo podcast #31, 4 June 2019)


  If one story encapsulates the state of the parties in Canada it is the saga of Doug Ford, premier of Ontario.  Doug Ford was the quieter of the two Ford brothers: when his brother was city councillor, he was busy with business, when his brother was mayor he was city councillor, when Rob Ford had to step down for health reasons (and after being caught on video smoking crack cocaine with teenagers) Doug ran for mayor and lost.  Rob Ford died of cancer in March 2016.  In January 2018 the provincial Progressive Conservative leader was accused of sexual assault and stepped down just before an election.  Doug then moved into provincial politics, was narrowly elected party leader, and a few months later became premier by default because too many Ontario voters were tired of the 15 year old Liberal government but not enough agreed which other party to support.  He got 40.5% of the vote which is 1% more than Stephen Harper ever did.  Since election his administration has been less shambolic than Boris Johnson's but not what you could call disciplined.  That is a bad outcome from the party's point of view (rather than quietly implementing the planks of their unwritten platform, he announces something shocking then backs down after massive public protest), but they were not able to keep someone without at least one term as MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly ie. the provincial parliament) from becoming leader just before an election they expected to win.

  Each of the big three parties seem to be divided between those who think that the thing to do is to offer more or less the same policies as everyone else and focus on playing the game, and those who got into politics to DO SOMETHING and suspect that offending the opinion sections of the Globe and Mail and the National Post is about as consequential as offending tumblr and that people will like policies they don't tell pollsters they like, and vice versa.  I don't like the term 'establishment,' because I think you can find both views everywhere from people interested in running for parliament for the first time to senior advisors and ex-cabinet ministers.

  There are also regional differences.  BC (which has the ports and the fragile coastal ecosystems) and Alberta (which has the tar sands and the royalties thereof) are never going to see eye to eye about oil pipelines, and many provinces have their own party system: Saskatchewan is governed by the Saskatchewan Party (est. 1997), and in BC until the last election we had a two-party system, with the NDP representing the public sector unions and the Liberals representing capital (the Greens, lead by a distinguished physicist, have now wedged their way in).   In this and the last election, federal parties who want to win seats in Quebec are torn what to say about local politicians who want to ban visible religious symbols such as crucifixes or niqabs (Bill 21, An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State).  And keep in mind that some ridings in Canada are already the size of the whole United Kingdom, so some kinds of proportional representation are not practical. 

  I have trouble using the word ideology for the federal Liberals at all, but they have a few neocons like Michael Ignatieff and greens like Stéphane Dion and a few genially corrupt elders.  Broadly speaking, they are for the kinds of things that the Globe and Mail, New York Times, or Economist say are good things, for listening to credentialed experts, and for not rocking the boat.  The pressures of keeping their big coalitions together and the small temptations available to people who play along tend to boil any strong political philosophy out of them.  That said, the three-party consensus in Canada is heavily shaped by the policies of earlier Liberal governments, bold ideas like our immigration system or free trade, but I just don't see any sign that today's Liberals think hard about principles before making policy.  Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott obviously saw that differently than I do.

  The NDP are for the postwar welfare state (their great achievement was introducing single-payer healthcare in 1961) and unions, but they have the problem that the only people who talk about "socialism" in Canada are right-wing columnists and maybe the odd student debate society, and that mass unionized workforces are not what they once were.  I think they have tension between the "workers' party" and social justice wings, because if you are serious that First Nations who never surrendered their land have rights to it, then you can't just hand that land over to a resource company in exchange for jobs.  The remainder of the old-school left, from back when Communism was a thing, hang out in the party but are marginalized: occasionally someone says something nice about FARC (seriously?) or suggests that the Palestinians might not entirely be to blame for troubles in the occupied territories and the press jump on them like starving wolves.  The beige wing of the NDP issues ads which sound like they come from an online insurance brokerage ("the NDP can save you money on your phone bill, just call ...") with language around affordability, "hard-working Canadians," and sinister big business which echoes Conservative language about entrepreneurs and ominous foreign threats or Liberal language about the middle class and nameless people who want the country to go back not step forward.  They can point out that they have formed provincial governments and are the first party to support something which later becomes Liberal policy, but they have never formed a federal government, and only been the second-largest party in parliament ("official opposition, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition") once.

  The Conservatives ("Tories") tend to learn authoritarian, against regulation of business, and for natural resource development and privatization, but under the skin there are all the different movements within mainstream Anglo right-wing circles today: market-oriented people, policy geeks who want to get rid of the Senate (traditionally a place for the Liberals government of the day to park elderly supporters) or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (seriously!) or expand rights around firearms, American-style libertarians, religious conservatives, climate-change deniers, people who really don't like LGBTQ+/Moslem/brown people ... the Freemen on the Land (warning, RationalWiki) and Neo-Nazis get kicked out when they show themselves in public.  You sometimes meet the term "red tory" which had a fairly consistent meaning in the 1950s (they were kind of in favour of class distinctions, Anglo, and skeptical of free trade), but is now something vague like "moderate Conservative."  They are the most successful at fundraising and get a consistent 29% to 39% of the national vote.

  Jason Kenney the premier of Alberta gives a sense of what a fiery speaker within the party says, Ezra Levant and Maxime Bernier can get printed in less respectable places but say things which keep them just outside the bounds (but Maxime Bernier almost became head of the Conservative Party of Canada back when he was presenting himself as an American-style libertarian, and Scheer likes to hint that he has deep socially conservative convictions which he would never, never let the party act on unless the polls change).   This Kai Nagata article gives an idea of the kinds of people who could conceivably have become leader after Harper stepped down (because he is not a sympathizer, I think he deliberately picked moderate voices).

    Federal parties in Canada consist of a leader (who does not have to be a MP), cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers (who do not have to be MPs, but actual serving cabinet ministers are traditionally MPs), a group of MPs ("caucus"), a collection of riding associations, some kind of national council or assembly with the party secretary and so on, and the obligatory youth/student association.  The Liberals and Conservatives have national meetings, I don't know if the other parties do.  Both of the biggest two parties claim several hundred thousand members, so about 1% of the population each, but that is after Trudeau and the post-Harper leadership contest.  The Conservatives in particular have had issues where a riding association wants one candidate, but the party bosses in Ottawa want another, https://lfpress.com/news/national/election-2019/parachute-candidate-in-london-north-centre-not-the-first and their 2017 leadership election (with ranked ballots ...) had some irregularities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Canada_leadership_election  The NDP are having trouble finding candidates for all 338 ridings this year.  Its not always easy to get a sense of the people running in your riding due to lack of local reporting and strict message control by the parties.  A common gambit is to find a candidate or MP who has, or used to have, a controversial opinion on some national issue, get it into the national press, and challenge the party leader to disown them.  The problem is that what shocks the national media may or may not shock you (and vice versa), and that this is a crude weapon, it can't dig out things which require local knowledge.

Remember when Steven Harper was held in contempt of Parliament by majority of the members? And the Governor General let him get away with ignoring this and treating it as merely a partisan stunt? ... Our elections seem to have been transformed into something like a plebiscite on who makes the best Prime Minister. ... our 19th century institutions are in a shambles because we don’t remember the 19th century principles that made them effective, and we haven’t replaced them with more recent principles and institutions - Steve Muhlberger, Democracy in Trouble (2013) https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2013/07/democracy-in-trouble.html

Formal democ­ra­cy, in such places, rides like a float­ing cork on an ocean of invis­i­ble influ­ences, tan­gled pow­er struc­tures and murky social forces. - Phil Paine, A New International Body (2006) http://www.philpaine.com/?p=425

    In my previous post, I described the broad consensus on policy between the three largest parties.  Many areas of policy have been declared beyond debate this year.  If you would like to restore diplomatic relations with Iran, reverse the Conservatives' harsh new policies on sex workers, or try economic policies which would give the University of Chicago Economics department an attack of the vapors you have to look to human-rights groups and some parts of the NDP or the Greens, or go into municipal or provincial politics (two provincial governments have experimented with Guaranteed Minimum Income, the previous Ontario legislature considered moving towards a circular economy, and for about 10 years before pot smoking was legalized, several big-city police forces had a policy of ignoring small-scale possession and use).  If you are on the right and think abortion is murder, gay marriage is a sin, or public services must be cut soon and drastically you have to lobby within the Conservative party while your MP sticks to the party line (citizen Andrew Scheer probably shares these opinions, but party leader Scheer has decided that they are not in the interests of the party).  The people who run the three big parties are not very imaginative, and they are all asking the same pollsters and commentators to show them policies which will win 30-40% of the vote and 90% of the power. 

  However, the media and party machines which used to enforce this consensus are weak, leaving just the voting system and Canadians' distrust of extreme positions.  A day may come when Canadians remember their courage, when they forget they are supposed to be the polite country and break the bonds of dead ideas, but the 21st of October 2019 is not that day.  For now, a Strache or Le Pen or Johnson is nowhere near power, but put someone like that in the Prime Minister's Office and the rest of the federal government could not put up much resistance.  And nobody expected that Doug Ford would become premier of Ontario, or the NDP would end the 44 year reign of the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta (and yes, I mean forty-four years, Canadian politics are weird), until a few months before it happened.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2019, 07:45:23 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #35 on: October 17, 2019, 11:42:32 PM »
Quote
Each of the big three parties seem to be divided between those who think that the thing to do is to offer more or less the same policies as everyone else and focus on playing the game, and those who got into politics to DO SOMETHING and suspect that offending the opinion sections of the Globe and Mail and the National Post is about as consequential as offending tumblr and that people will like policies they don't tell pollsters they like, and vice versa.  I don't like the term 'establishment,' because I think you can find both views everywhere from people interested in running for parliament for the first time to senior advisors and ex-cabinet ministers.

Yeah, this is one of the big and very noticeable divides in politics - a managerialist/powergamer dynamic versus an ideological dynamic. I think there's an establishment/anti-establishment dynamic that's different from that and instead addresses the willingness of a candidate to undermine the foundations of the system they're running in, for whatever ends (whereas the managerial/ideological dynamic is about the extent to which they have any underpinning policy goals beyond the pursuit of power). So you can have a managerialist but anti-establishment populist candidate (this is very common in countries with less developed party systems where oligarchs fulfil this role by railing against the other team of oligarchs), or ideological managerial candidates (the reformist tendency), or anti-establishment ideologues, or establishment managerialists. All of this is quite separate from the ideological distinctions we usually consider, but has an important impact. (And I don't think the terminology/ideas I've mentioned here are quite crystallised in my head as a model yet, but it's something I've been thinking about a fair bit in recent years).
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #36 on: October 18, 2019, 10:21:17 AM »
Quote
Each of the big three parties seem to be divided between those who think that the thing to do is to offer more or less the same policies as everyone else and focus on playing the game, and those who got into politics to DO SOMETHING and suspect that offending the opinion sections of the Globe and Mail and the National Post is about as consequential as offending tumblr and that people will like policies they don't tell pollsters they like, and vice versa.  I don't like the term 'establishment,' because I think you can find both views everywhere from people interested in running for parliament for the first time to senior advisors and ex-cabinet ministers.

Yeah, this is one of the big and very noticeable divides in politics - a managerialist/powergamer dynamic versus an ideological dynamic. I think there's an establishment/anti-establishment dynamic that's different from that and instead addresses the willingness of a candidate to undermine the foundations of the system they're running in, for whatever ends (whereas the managerial/ideological dynamic is about the extent to which they have any underpinning policy goals beyond the pursuit of power). So you can have a managerialist but anti-establishment populist candidate (this is very common in countries with less developed party systems where oligarchs fulfil this role by railing against the other team of oligarchs), or ideological managerial candidates (the reformist tendency), or anti-establishment ideologues, or establishment managerialists. All of this is quite separate from the ideological distinctions we usually consider, but has an important impact. (And I don't think the terminology/ideas I've mentioned here are quite crystallised in my head as a model yet, but it's something I've been thinking about a fair bit in recent years).
And maybe people who want to change personnel vs. people who want to change systems?

Because of strict party discipline and the lack of local reporting, it can be hard to tell where your MP fits.

There was a lot of turnover in the Liberal party from 2006-2015, and 2015-Trudeau came out with some specific promises which would have changed how federal politics works in Canada.  If he had implemented electoral reform, accepted that unceded land belongs to the inhabitants not the Crown, and enforced the shiny new ethics handbook which he issued to new MPs with stern warnings, those would have been a big deal.  But instead he imitated Barack Obama's governing style, letting people project their hopes for reform on him while he ran a quiet, managerial government (and like I said, the prime minister of a majority government in Canada is an awful lot like a dictator, he could have fulfilled more of his pledges if he had wished to).

One kind of diversity which government in Canada desperately needs is people with a quantitative or experimental social science background who can push back against the analysts: "that change is within standard deviation so tells us nothing.  You wrote that poll to determine the answer it would give.  Is that the question we should even be asking or is it just something that 20 old-media pundits and their 20,000 remaining readers care about?"

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #37 on: October 18, 2019, 10:43:40 AM »
Based on the precedent of the British Columbia election of 2017, one possible outcome is that the Conservatives end up with the most seats but well short of a majority, the government steps down and the Conservatives come in, they fail their first confidence vote and a new government consisting of the Liberals plus one or two smaller parties comes in (or possibly a confidence and supply agreement ie. the smaller parties agree to support confidence motions but are not formally part of the government).  But there is not really a precedent for what to do if the largest party cannot get a majority of votes for confidence motions, other than to hold another election.

A good managerial government would have spent the last four years adjusting things to deal with the reality of a many-party system, but if it does not poll as something important to voters, and if there is no powerful force pushing for the change ... the Prime Minister's residence at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa has been semi-habitable for more than a decade because the government is always scared to spend a few ten million dollars on maintenance and upgrades.

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #38 on: October 19, 2019, 03:34:06 PM »
Journalists have been dutifully smacking Andrew Scheer's knuckles for the following statement:

Quote
We’re not going to ask other parties for support. We’re going to put our platform out to Canadians about how we’re going to lower taxes, make life more affordable. And we will implement that agenda. We expect that other parties will respect the fact that whichever party wins the most seats gets to form the government and that they will understand that if Canadians — when Canadians — endorse our platform, that we would have the right to implement it.

Its never been the case that the party with the most seats has a 'right' to form government and the other parties have to cooperate, any more than its been the case that the candidate with the most votes has the 'right' to become President of the United States (its all about getting a majority of parliament behind a government), but a lot of Canadians don't really understand our system.  Anyways, we will know who is in the new parliament on Monday evening and then the negotiations can begin.

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #39 on: October 20, 2019, 05:05:36 PM »
One more detail: a backwards Canadian custom is that elections are not scheduled for a holiday (like in Austria, where they always seem to be on Sundays) and not an automatic national holiday (like in Australia).  This year 4.7 million votes were cast in advance (there are options to mail in the ballot or drop it off at various locations).  At 2015's turnout levels that would be 27% of the total ballots cast.

Edit: According to Section 56.1 of the Canadian Elections Act, general elections shall be held on the third Monday in October unless the Governor General dissolves parliament early or the Chief Election Officer judges that that day is not appropriate.  Why the people who wrote that clause in 2007 did not chose Saturday or Sunday I can't say

Nobody in the country except some parties is silly enough to try electronic voting when the choice is "which of these six people do you want to be your member of parliament".

I would be satisfied with the most likely outcome which is the Liberals coming to an agreement with one or two other parties to form the government, possibly after the Conservatives try and fail.
« Last Edit: October 20, 2019, 10:08:56 PM by dubsartur »

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #40 on: October 20, 2019, 08:28:52 PM »
One more detail: a backwards Canadian custom is that elections are not scheduled for a holiday ... and not an automatic national holiday
Very probably inherited from the UK, along with various other aspects of the "Westminster" system. UK elections are almost always on Thursdays, as far as I can tell for no better reason than that's how we've done it for a long time.

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #41 on: October 20, 2019, 09:32:37 PM »
Admin hat on: consider editing additions into previous posts rather than multiple posting. Multiple posting is fine if a time has elapsed/you're reporting an update on something, but if you're e.g. just having another thought on the same day as a previous post, edit it in and use a horizontal rule tag to separate the sections if that's needed. This means we get more variety of responses/discussion per page, which helps any other readers who want to catch up.

And yes, the Thursday election thing at least apocryphally dates back to when people got paid on Fridays, so Thursday was when fewest people would be in the pub: there's no good reason for it now.

An interesting quirk in Austria is that as elections are indeed always Sundays, the general election voting intention question in a poll is known here as the Sonntagsfrage - the "Sunday Question". Might be the case in Germany as well, not sure.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #42 on: October 22, 2019, 08:30:02 AM »
Fair enough.  Looking back to 2000, it seems like there has been a preference for Monday elections, but see previous discussion of the secrecy of the Conservative government which introduced fixed-term elections.

So far the results: 156 157 Liberal MPs (33.1% of the vote), 122 121 Conservative MPs (34.4% of the vote), 32 Bloc (7.8% of the vote), 24 NDP (15.9% of the Vote), 3 Green (6.5% of the vote), and Jody Wilson-Raybould.  Maxime Bernier lost his seat by 6,000 votes, Jane Philpott by around 3,000.  Its possible that one or two seats will change when the last 1% of the polls close or in case of recounts and large numbers of overseas ballots.

In Victoria: 31.2% of the voters chose Green (and got 1 seat), 29.1% of the voters chose NDP (and got 3 seats), the other 40% got 0 seats

I won't dignify the people using terms like "election miracle" with a response, this election things headed down the median of the probability distribution (although relying on aggregations of national polls for your riding is a fool's game, in 2015 a candidate who had withdrawn his candidacy got 8,000 'strategic' votes).  Even the slight shift of votes away from the Greens and PPC towards the Conservatives and Liberals between the polls and the election was typical.  Both the NDP and the Bloc kept enough seats to retain official party status in the house of commons (which was not certain) and Maxime Bernier lost his seat (which was not certain either).

This year, like 2008 and 2011, people in marginal ridings are reporting robocalls telling them that the polls had been moved to Tuesday.  A judge ruled that the calls in 2011 were probably the result of a rogue Conservative operative.

I keep finding more people analyzing aggregates of polls, and the problem is that is fun and you can do it from the comfort of your own chair but it tries to answer a question everyone will know by midnight on election day ("who won?") not the important question which is "what will the various candidates and parties do with power if given it?"

Edit: And oh no, Guardian, its not true that "the election was also a veritable death knell for the country’s fledging far right party, the People’s Party of Canada."  It took the Greens more than 20 years to get their first Member of Parliament, and there are still people who want to refight the Slaveholders' Rebellion of 1861, do you really think one election will stop their fellow travellers?  And talking about a minority government and a confidence-and-supply agreement in the future tense not the subjunctive is bad grammar, although they are the most likely outcome.
« Last Edit: October 24, 2019, 04:45:49 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #43 on: October 22, 2019, 12:20:20 PM »
Now to cross fingers and hope that Jagmeet Singh insists on electoral reform as the price of confidence & supply, I guess. I think/hope that now is a moment to go for that, and I think it'd be hard for Trudeau to refuse, say, a referendum on STV with automatic adoption of the system if passed (possibly with compromises like making it AV in some of the biggest ridings and having multimember STV seats elsewhere).

And yes, CBC's polling analysis seems to be one of the winners of the election, that's pretty much the expected result. I do like that they actually showed a range of seats rather than saying "X poll number will mean X seats" which far too many "analysts" do, especially in the UK.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #44 on: October 23, 2019, 08:53:16 AM »
Now to cross fingers and hope that Jagmeet Singh insists on electoral reform as the price of confidence & supply, I guess. I think/hope that now is a moment to go for that, and I think it'd be hard for Trudeau to refuse, say, a referendum on STV with automatic adoption of the system if passed (possibly with compromises like making it AV in some of the biggest ridings and having multimember STV seats elsewhere).
Electoral reform is not one of Singh's six stated priorities, it looks like he has decided to focus his leverage on issues which are direct vote-getters (versus "with this new voting system, I can vote for the party I want and not feel like I am throwing my vote away.")  He or Justin Trudeau could surprise us though, the NDP have thoughts on electoral reform and nobody expected the Liberals to add it to their platform in 2015.  For all my whining (6.4% of the vote gives the Greens three seats, but 7.8% gives the Bloc 32 seats?!), I am satisfied with this outcome and I hope I have energy to start writing letters to my MP and MLA.

If the new government comes up with something unexpectedly good, maybe I will post it here?

Aside from the technical question whether the new government is a minority/confidence-and-supply/coalition, I would watch for whether the relations between the Liberals and the smaller parties are amiable, or the Liberals saying "here are the bills we wrote.  You can pass them or call another election that you can't afford to fight."  The Conservatives played that way from 2006 to 2011, but it would be harder for Justin Trudeau given his political persona and given that the Liberals have their own fundraising problems. 

Meanwhile some commentators are talking about "the nastiest campaign ever" when no party leader confessed to or was accused of rape, sexual assault, murder, Marxism, sociopathy, being in the pay of a hostile Power, abusing their email privileges, or antisemitism :headdesk:  So thanks for providing a space where I could put my thoughts in order that is not as nasty and full of BS as many other places for talking about politics on the Internet in writing (how is it that so many commentators can toss off things that five minutes with a browser would show are not so, or speak so confidently about the characters of people they have never met?)

And yes, CBC's polling analysis seems to be one of the winners of the election, that's pretty much the expected result. I do like that they actually showed a range of seats rather than saying "X poll number will mean X seats" which far too many "analysts" do, especially in the UK.
Yes, Éric Grenier at the CBC and Philippe J. Fournier at Macleans and L'actualité seem to have a pretty good understanding of statistics and the limits of what they are working with, and they write the actual articles for newspapers and magazines. 

For more demonstrations that Canadian politics are weird, a commentator at Macleans found this 2015 Bloc ad where an oil spill morphs into a niqab-wearing face (warning: YouTube), and Elizabeth May's speech after the results were in said that their campaign was a Children's Crusade (she was some kind of minister before she became a MP, and the Green movement obviously gathers people who want to protect Creation, rural folks worried about what the lumber company did two valleys over, and urban readers of science news or the five most important ecology journals).
« Last Edit: October 23, 2019, 10:37:25 AM by dubsartur »