Exilian

Here we go again.

A much less election heavy year though there are some big ones coming up - for example Germany, Canada, and Australia, all three of which look like good prospects for right wing challengers to centre left governments struggling with cost of living issues.

We'll also likely start seeing the impacts of various 2024 elections more, especially re the course of the new US administration and how that affects the wider world.

This essay by Emmet Macfarlane goes over how the Prime Minister (elected by party members) and his apponinted Office have come to marginalize both parliament and the cabinet ministers in Canada https://emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/how-canadian-political-parties-select

Parliament has been prorogued until March 24 and an election is likely to be called shortly thereafter.  This will result in a Conservative majority and the Liberals holding just a few seats in big cities and parts of the Maritimes, but how many seats and with whom as leader can still be decided.  To change that outcome Justin Trudeau would have had to resign in summer 2023 and given the widespread anti-incumbent turn (and lukewarm enthusiasm for the Liberals) the Tories would almost certainly have formed the next government anyways.

Also re Canada, I've seen that former Bank of England governor Mark Carney is running to lead the Liberal Party: it feels like leading a party into a more or less certain electoral defeat seems a pretty thankless task to be running for.

Quote from: Jubal on January 19, 2025, 09:28:36 PMAlso re Canada, I've seen that former Bank of England governor Mark Carney is running to lead the Liberal Party: it feels like leading a party into a more or less certain electoral defeat seems a pretty thankless task to be running for.

I sure don't understand why anyone would want to be Liberal leader under the circumstances. I think that tossing Trudeau was good for MPs as citizens (he works for them, not vice versa) but the new PM will promptly lose an election then be blamed by the rest of the party.

When a former Conservative staffer was asked to write on how the election could be later than May, he had to start (https://thehub.ca/2025/01/15/sean-speer-everyone-is-assuming-an-election-is-imminent-what-if-thats-wrong/) "well, what if the new PM offers the NDP something to vote confidence, and then what if they pass a bill to overrule the Fixed-Term Election Act ..."  Not very plausible.

If you don't live in the USA, it can be hard to understand some of the cartoonish corruption there which the Democratic establishment and the civil service often support. It gets tied up with partisan nonsense and yelling at the TV so its hard to know what is real.

Here is the story of how from 2013 to 2016 some jobs as air-traffic controller in the USA were secretly earmarked for people of a specific race https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring  If you want to understand the anti-establishment turn in the North Atlantic, its worth understanding the many aspects of life in 2024 which suck and which establishments show little interest in improving (Congress actually got rid of the mechanism which allowed race-based hiring in 2016 but did not uncover the whole story).

A lot of righties in the USA feel that Old Media cover up stories like this or Biden's health decline.  He always seemed kind of frail to me and back in 2020 he said he would not run a second time due to his age.  And his administration seemed better than average and I care about outputs not whether there is a single Decider at the top or who that Decider is.

Quote from: dubsartur on February 05, 2025, 03:46:35 PMHere is the story of how from 2013 to 2016 some jobs as air-traffic controller in the USA were secretly earmarked for people of a specific race https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring)  If you want to understand the anti-establishment turn in the North Atlantic, its worth understanding the many aspects of life in 2024 which suck and which establishments show little interest in improving (Congress actually got rid of the mechanism which allowed race-based hiring in 2016 but did not uncover the whole story).

Huh, yes, I sort of expected some initiatives in the US would end up being that kind of scandalously blunt but it's an interesting case study.

I was less convinced by the end sections, in that questions like "are there other pressures alongside the above contributing to staff shortages" don't seem to have been dealt with (and if the answer is "no", then that's interesting, but it's something you need to prove to make the case that the scandal's knock-through effect is key, especially given that AIUI this was a 2013-16 scandal and we're now a decade on from it). The problems of e.g. early retirements and COVID stripping out experienced parts of key workforces have also affected lots of sectors in recent years and there's no balance-of-factors done. I think I'd also say that the closing "appeal to both sides" felt a bit... analytically lacking, though I can see why it was done that way in current circumstances.

And of course the comments and boosts around this sort of thing are all doing "this is why diversity is bad, destroy the Democrats", and then they wonder why people in my position go "well if I'm being asked to sign up for armadilloty, badly done corporate diversity initiatives, but you're only giving me the alternative of (at best) nepotistic oligarchy, yes I'll fight for the former and no I'm not prepared to equate those things". And sure, that's where the partisan nonsense comes in, but if there's one thing I've learned politically, it's that anti-corruption is vital but anti-corruption campaigners need to be handled with a lot of care because "let's sweep all the corruption away and put someone Strong And Decisive And Incorruptible in charge" is a very, very common move to pull which usually at best solves nothing. And I find the idea of "I am against the binary by being perfectly in the middle of it" rather tiring, not least because it creates the sort of idea-space that reinforces the binary just so someone can maintain their own self-description as a centrist.

Re the original piece, I'm not familiar with the author's work more generally, but nosing through some of it, it seems to be its own sort of Very Online (the sort that imagines itself to be Sensible And Moderate And In Touch whilst believing that what disaffected voters want is less economic interventionism and that the left are institutionally in control) whilst also spending a lot of time criticising the Very Online for being Too Online. But that brings us back into the Weird Internet Communities thread...

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Anyway MEANWHILE some things happening around the world:

• It's not obvious that Frederich Merz's immigration shenanigans and resulting protests in Germany have changed much in German polling. The AfD are still on about 22% to the CDU/CSU's 30. A big part of the parliamentary balance will be which of Die Linke, the BSW, and the FDP get over the line and into the chamber: all three are hovering pretty close to it, which means ca 15% of people's votes are riding on whether their party gets over the line or not. Which is one of the problems with non-preferential voting systems!
• Twitter is being sued by German activists who say it's not providing them with information to track disinformation content which they're obliged to give under the Digital Services Act.
• In a signal that this really is a strange year, Bulgaria has a government now! Led by GERB (Conservatives) plus the Socialist Party (clue largely in the name), There Is Such A People (weird anti-corruption right wingers), and Democracy, Rights and Freedoms (the less corrupt part of the Turkish party which has now split in two). That leaves the other half of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the centre-left-liberal PP-DB group, the fascists (Revival), and the other fascists (Morality, Unity, Honour) as opposition.
• It is becoming obvious that Trudeau leaving and/or the trade war has helped his party - a bit. The Liberals are still polling 19 points behind in the 338 average, but that's down from a 25 point lead not long ago.
• The Turks & Caicos Islands have an election on Feb 7: their last election brought in a new centre-left government, with their other party, a right-wing group, reduced to one seat.
• Vanuatu has a new government with a five-party coalition. I've not seen any suggestion that this will significantly alter very much even in Vanuatu, where people mostly seem to be frustrated that the parliaments keep being weird factional messes where nobody can tell what's going on.

Quote from: Jubal on February 05, 2025, 05:52:51 PM

Quote from: dubsartur on February 05, 2025, 03:46:35 PMHere is the story of how from 2013 to 2016 some jobs as air-traffic controller in the USA were secretly earmarked for people of a specific race https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring)  If you want to understand the anti-establishment turn in the North Atlantic, its worth understanding the many aspects of life in 2024 which suck and which establishments show little interest in improving (Congress actually got rid of the mechanism which allowed race-based hiring in 2016 but did not uncover the whole story).

Huh, yes, I sort of expected some initiatives in the US would end up being that kind of scandalously blunt but it's an interesting case study.

I was less convinced by the end sections, in that questions like "are there other pressures alongside the above contributing to staff shortages" don't seem to have been dealt with (and if the answer is "no", then that's interesting, but it's something you need to prove to make the case that the scandal's knock-through effect is key, especially given that AIUI this was a 2013-16 scandal and we're now a decade on from it). The problems of e.g. early retirements and COVID stripping out experienced parts of key workforces have also affected lots of sectors in recent years and there's no balance-of-factors done. I think I'd also say that the closing "appeal to both sides" felt a bit... analytically lacking, though I can see why it was done that way in current circumstances.

Yes, if you are American I think a lot depends on whether you think "this is a typical program hidden under the DEI label but the lamestream media don't want us to know the truth" or "some blatant pork like this got included under the DEI label and was quietly stopped to avoid a scandal."  But I think a lot of anti-establishment politics in the USA is driven by experiences like "our Democratic-majority state government is paying huge sums for a high-speed rail project that will never carry a car" or "I have to pay kickbacks to get permission to build a garage in my backyard and my Democratic mayor responds with form letters" whereas we foreigners see other aspects.  I do not know ANY way to learn the details without living there given that you can't trust American journalists (of the centrist or reactionary kinds) and you sure can't trust the kind of people who used to post hourly on Twitter
 
And yes, another doctrine of smart righties in the USA is that The Left controls almost all institutions (the Cathedral from Menicus Moldbug one of those weird Internet people, the Blob from UK Tory discourse after Brexit).  Of course four year degree/no degree is becoming a dividing line in the USA, and its hard to get a senior administrative office without such a degree, so sometimes "The Left" means "people with a four-year degree" rather than people who support specific policies.

I like that description of the blogger's space (I think Will Stancil who he mentions is a Twitter personality, Steve Sailer is an Internet racist who lurks in comment threads).  I hope that with the decline of Twitter journalists are spending more time out in the world talking to people, and less scrolling their feeds.  The people who feel ideologically oppressed or unable to speak freely are often people who posted a lot on Twitter where they got dogpiled for not following the changing party line (no idea what its like after the Muskening).

BC United, the onetime party of capital supplanted by a more populist and reactionary party, can't decide whether to dissolve itself or try to recover.  It owed $930,000 in December 2024, not sure if that is net or if some of that is balanced with assets. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kevin-falcon-resignation-calls-1.7452616

In a tale as old as time, the people who said "we need to unite to defeat that other party" are finding that many voters and activists respond "hold on, if its a choice between the other party and your movement I will vote for a third party or stay home."

Quote from: Jubal on February 05, 2025, 05:52:51 PMRe the original piece, I'm not familiar with the author's work more generally, but nosing through some of it, it seems to be its own sort of Very Online (the sort that imagines itself to be Sensible And Moderate And In Touch whilst believing that what disaffected voters want is less economic interventionism and that the left are institutionally in control) whilst also spending a lot of time criticising the Very Online for being Too Online. But that brings us back into the Weird Internet Communities thread...

Tracing Woodgrains is also an anti-anti LessWronger (wrote a long criticism of David Gerard's activism) and law student who just launched the Centre for Educational Progress (https://www.educationprogress.org/p/schools-should-pursue-excellence) "to orient education towards a culture of excellence" (sounds good if you know anything about public education in the USA) with Lillian Tara, Harvard graduate student, self-proclaimed eugenicist (https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/inside-pronatalism/) and former CEO of Prontalist.org, founded by Simone and Malcolm Collins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_and_Malcolm_Collins) (oh crap).  But a lot of people in the USA won't post specifics about corruption and bad government because they are scared of empowering the far right, so I have trouble finding details from savory sources.

Edit: TW was also an admin on r/theMotte, an offshoot of the Slate Star Codex for culture war threads which was created that part of the original subreddit got too spicy for Scott Alexander. https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/02/20/human-biodiversity-part-6-the-motte/

Yeah, part of America's malaise is that it seems to be asking people at times to vote on "do you want a government that does things", and then whether what the government is doing is corruption and drone strikes on middle-eastern weddings or what the government is doing is restraining oligarchy and funding healthcare research and food stamps gets weirdly sidelined. So the Democrats become the party of the state (in all its aspects) and the Republicans become the party of the oligarchs carving up the state (and so a potential repository for votes against the state).

I don't think that's a fully accurate picture of what's actually happening, because the Democrat and Republican coalitions don't fit those buckets coherently, but I think it's a framing that sometimes helps explain bits of Americans' electoral reactions.

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Notes on the rest of the world (since we're in the not-America thread, nominally):

• 338 Canada has lowered the odds of the CPC getting an absolute majority to 74% from more or less 100% at the start of the year. Looking at the numbers, the Liberals are still numerically well behind, but they seem to have a really good mathematical vote distribution in Ontario specifically that's enabling them to (in the prediction) somewhat outperform there in votes to seats ratio.
• The news are very much talking up Peter Dutton's chances of leading the right to a victory in Australia. They're not massively outpolling the left in two party preference vote, and Albanese is still just about leading Dutton in preferred PM, though he also has a lower approval rating. I'm not sure the Australian election is going to be as simple as the punditry expects, given the polling numbers.
• German polls aren't really moving, so next week's federal vote there will still probably be Union 30ish, AfD 21-22, Green and SPD about 15 each, Linke, BSW, FDP all hovering on the 5% line. Linke seem to have come from being the least likely of the small parties to make it in to now being the most likely, they've had a big membership & enthusiasm surge since the start of the year, reportedly mostly driven by younger women joining.

Quote from: Jubal on February 17, 2025, 11:13:22 PMYeah, part of America's malaise is that it seems to be asking people at times to vote on "do you want a government that does things", and then whether what the government is doing is corruption and drone strikes on middle-eastern weddings or what the government is doing is restraining oligarchy and funding healthcare research and food stamps gets weirdly sidelined. So the Democrats become the party of the state (in all its aspects) and the Republicans become the party of the oligarchs carving up the state (and so a potential repository for votes against the state).

I don't think that's a fully accurate picture of what's actually happening, because the Democrat and Republican coalitions don't fit those buckets coherently, but I think it's a framing that sometimes helps explain bits of Americans' electoral reactions.

Another part of the Zeitgeist is that many tech billionaires feel kind of meh about having built payment processors and social networks and spreadsheets. Jaan Tallinn didn't write a Bachelor's thesis on how to develop a distributed digital video-phone, he wrote it on interstellar travel. When did John W.I. Campbell Jr. publish a story about heroic software engineers?

So many of them want to build rocket ships or laser guns or seasteads or giant pipelines to direct water to an atomic desalination plant in Colorado (seriously! (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-water-than-rain-can-provide-refilling-rivers-with-desalination/)), something HARD with MECHANICAL ENGINEERING that sucks down MORE POWER.  For some reason, subways or artificial reefs or water treatment plants do not count, and they can't just take up wood turning or bicycle repair like a normal ageing techie.

German election this weekend.

A chart someone made of donations of 35,000 Euros or more (the public reporting threshold) to German political parties since the fall of the Traffic Light coalition:
(https://i.imgur.com/piL0UbB.png)

Source (I haven't double-checked the numbers but a quick glance looks right)
https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/praesidium/parteienfinanzierung/fundstellen50000/2025/2025-inhalt-1032412

• That's a lot of money to spend on failing to keep the FDP in parliament.
• About 2 million of the AfD's four and a bit was a single big donation by an Austrian businessman, which is being investigated for potential fraud (https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000257954/afd-spender-aus-vorarlberg-droht-verfahren-wegen-beweismittelfaelschung-und-geldwaescherei) and may actually have been given to him by a Swiss billionaire in order to pass on to the AfD.
• This puts how much Americans spend into perspective: The Montana senate race alone had about ten times the total in the above graph spent on it in 2024.

Anyway, as to how the actual election will go, the polls are mostly in agreement that we'll get a parliament comprised of the CDU/CSU in clear first on 29-31, the AfD in second on 20-21, the SPD in the 15-18 range, the Greens more like 12-15, Die Linke maybe on 7 or 8, and the BSW and FDP probably on fourish, maybe five and a place in parliament if they have an especially good night. That almost certainly results in a Union-SPD coalition, that's the only 2-party coalition that has the numbers and doesn't involve the AfD: the question is really what the SPD want out of that. Merz will not be able to get them in for free, and his very right-wing instincts might well clash with the SPD feeling they need to distinguish themselves.

Likely points of agreement: the new coalition will need to amend the constitution and remove Germany's debt brake, everyone agrees on this now. The SPD won't want to go as far as Merz on unravelling climate protections, but there's likely to be some step back there. Merz needs some sort of anti-immigration move, which is another reason he can't really go with the Greens, but the SPD possibly won't want to go too far on that either. We'll see.

There is finally some grumbling in the legislature against Javier Milei the president of Argentina after he rugpulled a crypto scam https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9x9j89evxo Someone involved did a SBF and held a long interview in which he confessed to crimes so fast that the interviewer had trouble keeping up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqizJTbxAEM

Quite hard to know what Milei's actual approval is: Argentine opinion polling is somewhat limited. We'll find out for sure in October at the legislative elections.

Meanwhile Germany is starting to negotiate a Grand Coalition, though the SPD in third place are probably feeling less grand than they might do. There really isn't a viable alternative available, so for both parties it's something of a must that they find something that works.

After one of BC's 87 MLAs was expelled from the Conservative caucus for insulting residential-school survivors in a podcast interview (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/dallas-brodie-removed-from-b-c-conservative-caucus-1.7478162), two others resigned in solidarity (!)

People out in the boonies seem to be getting excited about whether or not the unmarked graves at one specific school have been found (AFAIK nobody says "yes"), not that for 90 years Canada operated a system that ripped children from their homes, tried to destroy their cultures and languages, exposed them to cold, hunger, disease, and abuse, and did not even provide meaningful education.  Nobody disputes that, nor that thousands of First Nations children died early deaths because of this system.  So I think its a double alternate-reality: people who have convinced themselves that debating about that one specific school is a cutting point, and people who have convinced themselves that mocking survivors is much more acceptable than it actually is.  Maybe they found some social-media troll who claimed that the graves had definitely been found and convinced themselves that anyone off their social media service care what the troll says.

A report that a ground-penetrating radar survey had found possible unmarked graves at a residential school brought the schools to the attention of many settler-Canadians.  Its well documented that many children died at these schools and many were disappeared, the only questions are about the details (say, the difference between an unregistered cemetery with wooden crosses which rotted and an unmarked grave). 

Meanwhile I see even Canadians who don't acknowledge that our choices were dealing with orange Julius while prorogued and holding a Liberal leadership race, or dealing with him in the middle of a Federal election which a Trumpist was almost certain to win.  No good options since the PM did not resign in summer 2024 or summer 2023 and since the US election went the way it di.

Liberal leader and PM-without-a-seat Mark Carney has called an election with the Liberals and Tories approximately tied in voter intent.  He already implemented one major Tory policy by ending the individual carbon tax after the April rebate payment.  Trump's threat to annex Canada caused about 10% of voters to shift their intent from NDP to Liberal, and 10% of voters to shift their intent from Conservative to Liberal.  The election is the earliest possible, Monday 28 April (roughly five weeks away).

On the weird Internet communities front, Carney is really into spicy autocomplete despite being a banker where precision and factuality matter.

Something called the Toronto Star was one of the papers which had an excitable headline about the Kelowna residential school in 2021.  Its only read by people in TO and other journalists (although back when I read newspapers I wonder how many journalists read even one paper a day given some of the things they forgot and some of the patterns they failed to recognize) https://www.thestar.com/

Doug Saunders once published the book Maximum Canada (meaning population 100 million https://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/ ).  After an American pundit talked about 1 billion Americans, Pierre Polievre is complaining about the Century Initiative, a lobby group with Saunders' original goal https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/  Usually its Canadians who adopt bad old idea that the Americans are abandoning.

According to 338 Canada, the "neck and neck in the polls" thing may be a little misleading insofar as the Liberals probably hold a structural advantage in seat numbers: a dead heat in the polls on polling day probably equates to a Liberal win in seats terms. The Conservatives conversely have a much more solid base in their rural ridings but in a sense "stack" too many votes there so the distribution is less efficient. So at present from a career perspective many Conservative MPs have better job security but the Liberals are more likely to form governments.

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Over here in Europe, the Portugese have set their general election date for 18 May, coinciding with the first round of the Polish presidential election. In France, François Bayrou's government holds on to existence by the skin of its teeth, plagued by internal arguments, and in Germany and Austria new centrist coalitions are completing negotiations (Germany) or starting governing (Austria). None of them feel very optimistic - it does feel like, with one or two exceptions, governing parties have been facing very bad headwinds for most of the last 10-15 years such that the political penalty for being in government is becoming very tricky to deal with. There's always some incumbency penalty, but my gut feeling is that it's dangerously large right now.

The other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament. Quebec and the maritime provinces have a number of special favours written in to the rules for the size of parliament and the western provinces were not good negotiators last time it came up.

This would not be such an issue if JT had fulfilled his promise to replace First Past the Post, because then winning 60% of votes in a riding would be 50% better than 40% of votes, and not "exactly the same result."

Quote from: dubsartur on March 30, 2025, 05:12:43 PMThe other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament.

How many more seats should the west have, out of interest?

Quote from: Jubal on April 02, 2025, 09:12:21 AM

Quote from: dubsartur on March 30, 2025, 05:12:43 PMThe other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament.

How many more seats should the west have, out of interest?

That is a technical question and I don't have a reference offhand.  Its also complicated because parliament will expand from 338 to 343 seats after this election. 

Wikipedia gives population of Canada 41.5 million Q1 2025
population of BC 5,722,318 in Q1 2025
population of Alberta 4,960,097 in Q1 2025 (obviously these are all estimates)

So BC and Alberta have 25.8% of the population of Canada, and would have got 87 MPs under representation by population.  They actually had 80.

This site seems pretty reliable although I don't know where the figure 339 comes from https://businesscouncilab.com/insights-category/analysis/why-alberta-continues-to-be-under-represented-in-ottawa/ Note that the number of electors per MP varies by a factor of 3:1 or 3:2 if you exclude tiny Prince Edward Island (somewhat smaller and much less populated than Crete).

The UK likewise has some particular carve-outs for island areas (Orkney and Shetland being consistently the least populated seat).

Canada has voted!

The Liberals did a little less well, and the Conservatives a little better, than the last few weeks of polls suggested, but the result is still a situation where the Liberals are clearly remaining in government (an enormous turnaround from the start of the year). And the Conservatives losing Polievre's seat feels pretty stark as a symbolic rejection which will make the defeat feel sharper narratively than it really is numerically.

Sucks to be the NDP though. I think this was a situation where there really may have been no right answer for them.

On another note - it's interesting to me that the Conservatives feel like they're more competitive in some city centre seats, and the Liberals & NDP in some big rural seats, than would be the case in much of the UK or US. I may be wrong but the maps I've been nosing through make that divide look a bit less sharp than elsewhere.

Rural seats in Canada are traditionally contested between the NDP and the Conservatives (or their offshoots such as Reform). A third of the population of Canada lives in three metropolitan areas so its hard for the big parties (especially the party of the credentialed professional class) to represent the rest of the country.

A lot of first- and second-generation immigrants are obviously very conservative (and because of Canada's discriminatory labour market, first-generation immigrants tend to be in jobs that don't require academic and pseudoacademic credentials like construction trades, driving, or real estate rather than engineering, teaching, or accounting).

The Green Party of Canada appears to have lost one of its two seats, and the remaining MP is age 71.

Yes, that aspect of the NDP reminds me a bit of Britain's Liberal Democrats in some ways - obviously the Liberals and Liberal Democrats are sister parties, but in terms of electorate, the NDP role of being the left-of-centre party in outlying rural areas is definitely a Lib Dem thing in the UK (though combined with being a surburban centrist party more in the Liberal mould, whereas Labour is largely a party of urban and industrial areas).

But it is interesting to me as well that in Canada, Conservative regions have Conservative cities - Edmonton and Calgary are mostly returning Conservative MPs - rather than the situation where Conservative regions tend to be those with smaller cities and more fully rural populations. To take my own very Conservative part of the UK, it would still be almost unthinkable for our Conservatives to win every seat in, say, Cambridgeshire or Norfolk, because the city of Cambridge or the very urban university seat of Norwich South are both completely outside their reach. The largest city in the UK in which the Conservatives are genuinely competitive in every parliamentary seat in the city is probably Milton Keynes, which is a fraction of the size of Calgary.

One thing that differentiates the Conservative Party of Canada from their international equivalents is that they are not the party of racism or xenophobia. There are elements of the Conservative coalition that want to be, spurred by American and Americanized propaganda over social media, but Barack Obama would have been satisfied as a Tory backbencher if he had grown up in Toronto instead of Chicago.

In addition, the rules for creating ridings in Canada ensure that they are diverse (often lumping parts of smaller cities with larger rural areas).

Edit: example story https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/prince-george-kamloops-riding-size-1.7510314

Quote from: dubsartur on April 30, 2025, 07:32:15 AMrules for creating ridings in Canada ensure that they are diverse (often lumping parts of smaller cities with larger rural areas)

Interesting, almost the opposite of rules in many other places. In the UK a general rule is to try and stick to council boundaries where possible etc and if a city isn't quite big enough for two seats, it will sometimes get "inner" and "outer" (York) or one relatively unpacked seat and one very urban one (Norwich). There's some semi-rural sprawling seats but those are mostly "well heeled rural" - essentially a wide commuter belt seat, like South Cambridgeshire, which doesn't have a lot of "rural issues" type stuff on the agenda compared to, say, Mid Norfolk, because the electorate & economy is more built around Cambridge commuters.

At current count, the winning candidate in one riding (Terrebonne, QC) is ahead by one (1) vote.  Another thing that would not matter with a better electoral system than first past the post!

I would like to know where "twelve seats for official party status" is defined.  Currently three parties have it, down from four in the last election (out of five parties with seats).

Quote from: dubsartur on May 12, 2025, 04:19:05 AMI would like to know where "twelve seats for official party status" is defined.

A quick google suggests "The Parliament of Canada Act" and "the By-laws of the Board of Internal Economy" - having just looked up the text of the act, there's notes in sections 50, 62, and 62.3 that pertain to 12 member parties. S50 refers to rights to appoint Privy Councillors, S62 and S62.3 are about additional remuneration for party leaders. So I guess any procedural benefits to party status are in the By-laws. It feels like amending to "12 members or at least five percent of the national vote at the last election" would be a very reasonable thing for the NDP to ask for to reclaim party status, given they're going to presumably be propping the Liberals up on some stuff.

Recent election news!


Philippines: Honestly Philippine politics is very confusing even for me as a politics nerd, but it seems like broadly the main factional split is the Marcos vs Duterte families, with some liberals/independents as potential swing betwen the two. The president's Marcos-supporting parties did well in the lower house election but the president did a lot less well in the senate, winning half the seats up for grabs for his faction but losing a lot of the rest to pro-Duterte or liberal candidates. The president (Marcos) is trying to remove his own VP (who is a Duterte), so it kind of depends whether the politicians outside the family struggle decide to take out the Duterte faction as best they can before trying to turn on Marcos, or make cause with the Dutertes to get Marcos out first.

Portugal: The centre-right have fallen short of a majority and it's not clear how anyone gets one. It takes 116 seats for a majority, the PSD (centre-right) and Liberal Initiative (hardline fiscal conservatives) combine for 98 seats. There are 11 seats held by smaller parties to the left of the socialists, but even then, the Socialist left + Chega far-right will be over the majority line as a combination, and the centre-right can't work with either. It's creating a similar problem to France or Bulgaria, where the country is divided into blocks that won't work with each other under any circumstances.

Poland: Looking now very tense for round two. Both PiS and the far right outpolled expectations, so if the conservative right wing vote consolidates, conservative historian Nawrocki of the formerly governing PiS will win. However, it's not that simple. Left-centre votes will probably flow to Trzazkowski, the centrist, quite efficiently, whereas far right votes won't necessarily go to Nawrocki as easily.

Romania: weirdly, Romania went fine? Nicusor Dan beat the polls and beat the far right to win fairly handily in the end. He's an anti-corruption politician with a background in mathematics, he was a founding member of the country's liberal party and left because he wanted to focus on anti-corruption rather than human rights, but he's probably still one of the least worst people who could reasonably have won. I'm not sure why the Romanian diaspora are much more far right/anti-establishment than those back in the country, I'd be interested to know that.

Well, in Poland the election result sucked with a narrow Nawrocki win, which is going to hamper the centrist government a great deal in the coming couple of years.

On the plus side, South Korea went pretty well with a clear win for the liberal opposition.

And in case you didn't think there were enough elections this year, we get a bonus one in the Netherlands, where Dick Schoof's right-wing government has collapsed after its largest party, the anti-immigration hard right PVV, pulled out. Current polling still has the PVV as very narrowly the largest party, but close to both the centre-left PvdA/GL bloc and the right-wing VVD, their other largish coalition partner. The old-school christian-democrat style conservatives, the CDA, have been brought back from the dead by a big flow of votes from the BBB and NSC which have also both been in the coalition.

So at present I think the most likely next Dutch government will be GL/PvdA + VVD + D66 + CDA for a centrist coalition. Anything to the right of that requires the PVV, unacceptable to the GL/PvdA and the 66, anything to the left would mean ditching the VVD to take in almost every other party of the left (DENK, Volt, PvdD, Socialist Party), and that would be a nightmare to run and I doubt the CDA would sign up to it (I'm not even sure the '66 and Volt would work with the SP due to differing views on Europe).

British Columbia now has three populist right-wing parties in the legislature after MLAs pushed out of the official opposition formed their own parties (John Rustad's Conservatives, One BC (https://1bc.ca/), and Centre BC (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/karin-kirkpatrick-new-political-party-centre-b-c-1.7506533)) and five parties in the legislature in all (with the NDP and the Greens).

Two MLAs in Alberta are trying to reestablish the Progressive Conservative Party (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/peter-guthrie-scott-sinclair-progressive-conservative-party-alberta-redux-1.7574565) because the governing United Conservative Party has a leader with a brain fried on right-wing podcasts.

I find it deeply shameful how Americans look at the corruption and downright evil of their two established parties, and the fecklessness and folly of the two minor parties, and say "welp, I guess there is nothing we can do" and not create a new party like adults. There are structural obstacles, but the USA went from about 30% of the adult population allowed to vote to 90% in 50 years (numbers are wild-ass guesses but see eg. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections)). Women and Black Americans and Asian-Amercans and Native Americans all had to overcome massive obstacles to get the vote.

The new Liberal PM of Canada is a gullible (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-is-canadas-ai-minister-just-an-industry-spokesman-now/) authoritarian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Canadian_Economy_Act) who says whatever he thinks will get him elected but people who read his book saw signs of the former.

BC Conservative leader John Rustad has accused some of the breakaway MLAs of trying to blackmail their former colleagues https://vancouversun.com/news/john-rusted-bc-conservative-mla-blackmail-accusations  He then walked back the exact accusation https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rustad-blackmail-claim-opposition-caucus-1.7571750

It probably says something about my circles that most Canadians I know are quite sour about Carney's government already, but it's actually if anything slightly increased its advantage over the Conservatives since the election. Are the Conservatives just in a horrible mess federally or something?

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A bit of European poll watching lately:

• In the Netherlands, the likely centre coalition after the elections later this year remains VVD-PvdA/GL-D66-CDA, but the balance is shifting: the VVD have been dropping sharply in the polls and the CDA gaining, though it's unlikely to yield enough of a boost for the CDA to allow them to make a VVD-less government (and the CDA probably wouldn't want that anyway). A government of the right, however, now becomes further out of reach because the CDA and PVV won't work together.
• The Czech election looks like it'll result in an authoritarian coalition based around ANO, the big-tent populist party that left the liberal for the far-right block in the European parliament in the last few years. The post-communist-Eurosceptic Stacilo are possible coalition partners for them, as are the SPD, a more extreme far right Eurosceptic nationalist party. Between those three they will almost certainly have the 101 seats for the majority line, and it's very hard to see any of the other options working with any of them (the other three blocs likely to enter parliament being Europhile-conservative Stacilo, the localist Mayors & Independents bloc, and a Pirate/Green list.)
• Portugal now has a minority centre-right government, and seems to have avoided the Bulgaria problem by just having everyone agree to let them get on with it for now.
• Speaking of Bulgaria, the split in the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) has been the main set of shifts: the APS (Alliance for Rights and Freedoms) which split in a dispute over who led the DPS now seem to be kind of collapsing, after leaving the government over it having to negotiate for votes with their erstwhile colleagues and their reportedly very corrupt leader Peevski. Peevski has now replaced the APS in supporting the government.
• In Poland, the Third Way electoral alliance collapsed in June, which means there's now two small centre and two small left parties all of which might struggle to hit electoral thresholds, which is all quite bad news for the future.

Quote from: Jubal on August 18, 2025, 01:25:35 PMIt probably says something about my circles that most Canadians I know are quite sour about Carney's government already, but it's actually if anything slightly increased its advantage over the Conservatives since the election. Are the Conservatives just in a horrible mess federally or something?

I don't think anyone really likes Mark Carney.  He is a centrist neoliberal with a PhD in economics and a background in central banking.  But Pierre Polievre is a MAGA nutcase and the NDP have no leader at all (and said a lot of economically illiterate things during the last election: centrist economists have a lot of problems, but they are going to spend the next 50 years pointing to the second Trump administration to illustrate their lessons on the importance of free trade, an independent central bank, comparative advantage, etc etc etc.).  And Canada has no good options today and Carney is competent and can form and follow a strategy even if its a centrist neoliberal strategy.  We could do worse!

Trying to break a strike after 12 hours because people who can afford to take vacations by air are facing unexpected expenses is very neoliberal, but its not the worst thing a PM of Canada could do.

For my entire lifetime, Canadian elites were rewarded for integrating more closely with the USA and centralizing power within Canada eg. the dictatorship of the Prime Minister's Office and all the cozy little monopolies and oligopolies in different industries.  That path now leads to becoming something like the elite of Puerto Rico, but they don't know what else to do.  Just the fact that Canada may finally get free trade between provinces like is normal between countries tells you something.  Flailing like Carney embracing chatbots (but they are provided by US or Chinese companies, run on US cloud services, and embody the values of the US elite) or promising 5% defense spending (but will that include a stronger electrical grid and emergency response services; and wait, if climate change is a major security threat, why try to shove pipeline projects where people don't want them at RCMP gunpoint) show the extent of the confusion.