Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: dubsartur on September 25, 2019, 01:07:13 PM
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So we are at the beginning of one of our six-week elections. Would there be any interest in a post on Canadian politics for non-Canadians focusing on structures and the fairly limited stakes?
There are many structural issues which affect most European and settler societies in the 2010s, and idiosyncratic things which are specific to a country, and American and British media are dreadful at separating the two. Looking at the former in other countries where you don't have preconceived opinions can be helpful.
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Yes please - understanding more about Canadian politics would be welcome.
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Yes, I'm enough of a politics nerd that I do have quite a few preconceptions about Canadian politics, but I'd be interested to hear your take.
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"There are
seven kings five parties which are mighty in the world Ottawa."
- Ibn Battuta, I mean, your humble scribe
For our sins, Canada still has first-past-the-post elections (ie. whichever party gets the most votes in a riding gets the seat, and whichever party has a majority of seats forms the government). The problem is that in any given riding, at least three parties will get 25% or more of the vote, and which parties varies from province to province. So outcomes are chaotic: the federal Liberals had 36 seats before and 184 seats after the 2015 election. Election campaigns last six weeks and the biggest parties each spend a few tens of millions during that period. Broadly speaking, a Prime Minister with a majority government is a dictator limited only by their own conscience and Canadian tradition. (For example, our main bill of rights has a 'notwithstanding clause' (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/notwithstanding-clause): federal and provincial governments can declare that it does not apply in a particular case for five years at a time).
Three of the largest federal parties (the beige (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html) Liberals, social-democratic New Democratic Party, and Quebec sovereigntist Bloc Québécois) are falling apart: membership is down, donations are down, voters are quite willing to switch parties, and their ideologies don't inspire a lot of passionate support. The fourth, the Conservatives, are a shotgun marriage of two right-wing parties with different regional bases, and they just hived off a former leadership candidate who is founding the local Xenophobe Party franchise (https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/platform) and another who has switched to provincial politics. The federal Greens look like they will gain some seats (about 4 or 5 out of 308, up from 1 at the last election) but they are crippled by our voting system, 10% support does not translate to 10% of seats and some people vote for the least odious party which they think might win their riding.
Another structural issue is the ongoing collapse and centralization of the media. Its symptomatic that it took the foreign Time magazine to uncover the first photo of Justin Trudeau in blackface (using old-fashioned legwork to search through published sources like yearbooks!), and another major newspaper printed an op-ed full of white supremacist talking points (https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/11/Vancouver-Sun-Anti-Immigrant-Op-Ed-Newsroom-All-Staff-Meeting/) because there were not enough eyes in the review process (the career of Margaret Wente (https://mediaculpapost.blogspot.com/), who recently retired from her job as an opinion columnist, is also worth studying).
Like in most countries, parties and the media respond by focusing on simple messages about charismatic leaders: Justin Trudeau and the late Rob Ford are obvious, but the Ottawa media have decided to portray Jagmeet Singh the current leader of the NDP as a bumbler. (Jack Layton, the leader of the NDP from 2003 to 2011, also got a lot of attention until he died of cancer). These messages can be sold to a national audience, whereas the audience for research on the five or so candidates in each of 308 ridings is much smaller. In Austria, you can compare how the conservative People's Party is focusing on their leader Sebastian Kurz and a new turquoise colour to replace their old black branding.
In the last election Justin Trudeau used the standard Liberal playbook since the middle of the 20th century: throw out a lot of promises to green, social democratic, and anti-authoritarian voters and warn about the scary Conservatives, then ignore the promises which threatened anyone with power once he was elected. Three typical examples are breaking his pledge that the 2015 election would be the last under First Past the Post (choosing a new system might have been divisive), dealing with the government of Alberta's desire to run pipelines from the tar sands through other jurisdictions to the sea by rejecting the most dangerous one and approving the others (the previous government had a base in Alberta, and candidate Trudeau said on camera that the environmental assessment on all three would be restarted from scratch), and pressuring the attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to allow a construction company in Quebec to make a plea deal which would have preserved its right to bid for federal contracts (she resigned and is now running as an independent). His biggest policy successes were legalizing pot smoking, negotiating a not-terrible revision of NAFTA with the current US administration, and a cabinet with plenty of women and racialized people (although several of the most prominent have quit the party or just become very quiet). Alex Usher's take on his record in education policy (http://higheredstrategy.com/the-liberal-record/) is probably fair.
The Liberals and Conservatives don't have much to talk about this year: the Liberals have some surgically targeted tax cuts and spending and talk about "going forward not falling back" which does not quite name the current US president or previous Prime Minister, the Conservatives are publicly indignant about running the country on behalf of Quebec construction companies which is totally different from running it on behalf of the Alberta branch of multinational oil companies, I have no idea what the NDP are saying. The Greens have an ambitious program to start seriously dropping our use of fossil fuels (Canada has one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world, the Liberals support a small carbon tax, the Conservatives can't say what they would do to reduce emissions). Currently the Conservatives and Liberals have about equal support in national polls, but what really matters is support within individual ridings with their individual balance between the parties, and nobody but the parties has money for polls like that. (Éric Grenier is Canada's Nate Silver https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/%C3%A9ric-grenier-1.2765555 ) And because Canada has a federal system, many policies will require negotiating with provinces, their different governments, and their regional rivalries (the Supreme Court of Canada just confirmed that we do not actually have a right to transport goods from one province to another (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/supreme-court-free-beer-1.4625574), despite that having been one of the key reasons for Confederation in 1867).
If you don't live in or want to move to Canada, the only change you are likely to notice is environmental policy: a Conservative majority would return to being actively obstructionist on international climate change treaties, a Liberal-Green or Liberal-NDP coalition government might start to bring our emissions down. A Conservative majority might be more pro-CCP but that is hard to say, the current US president does not like them and the Canadian Conservatives tend to identify with the American Republicans even though they are really a center-right party like the US Democrats (had he been born in Canada, Barack Obama would have been happy as a Conservative backbencher for a Toronto suburb).
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After a quick look, I would say that the NDP are talking about affordable housing, expanded public healthcare (universal drug and dental benefits), and ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. One of the challenges that the federal NDP have is that many core social-democratic issues such as health care and education are provincial responsibilities, so creating new federal policy requires messy negotiations with different selfish provincial governments. But they were the second-largest party in 2011, and had about the same support as the Liberals at the start of the 2015 election, so things could change fast.
Edit: And also worth saying ... ending fossil fuel subsidies was in the Liberal platform in 2015, so not a terribly novel thing to say you support in Canada. A lot of Green and NDP arguments have to be framed as "the Liberals say they support X, but they won't deliver unless their lobbyists tell them it is OK."
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I have a few response thoughts and queries.
Firstly, I definitely agree about the issue with scrutiny of local candidates, it's a major problem in lots of political systems and I really don't know how we fix it. It's one of those problems that basically in our current system is in the reach of two groups of people to solve - one being politicians elected under that system, and the other being billionaires. Also yes that multi-party FPTP is just awful. Given the UK polling currently has something like Lab 22/LD 22/CON 30, which is an amazing mess waiting to happen, we'll probably see a very bad example of this there soon.
Apropos of nothing, I also have to admit that I find the term "riding" for a constituency sounds somewhat antiquated and quaint in a good way :)
And yeah, the whole actual election campaign sounds a bit grim, I guess I'm hoping for a Lib/minor party coalition which might actually force PR out of the system, I think that's the only way either the UK or Canada will get it in the near future (meanwhile in the US even that is a million miles from being an option!) It's a pity Trudeau failed on that, and I worry it'll come back to haunt Canada's non-conservative forces. I'd be interested to know more about the internal functioning of some of the parties, especially what the actual ideological blocs/wings are in them.
For me, I'd note that actually Canadian policy matters perhaps more than most, because as a British liberal, the Canadian liberals are considered sufficiently part of the family that what they do helps set the overton window. I think that's true more widely - in discussions I've had in the UK even outside explicitly Lib Dem circles, things like Canada's comparatively good refugee & asylum policies are much more likely to be cited than Canada's somewhat wobbly climate record. To some extent this is centre-leftists/centrists in the rest of the anglosphere buying into the "Trudeau the progressive" picture, which is as you say rather dubious, though of course if it leads to them emulating the Can-Libs' manifesto policies rather than their governing style it may not be all bad!
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Thank you! I will try to get back to this in October. I agree that it is important to have one world leader representing the postwar consensus, especially after Angela Merkel retires. And the lack of electoral reform is my biggest disappointment (we also failed to pass it for the third time in British Columbia).
Part of the problem was that back in 2015 when the "anyone but Harper" vote was divided and the Liberals were in third place, Justin Trudeau threw out a lot of promises. When they won he had a beautiful opportunity, but not a lot of experience in life or politics, and he chose advisors like Gerald Butts the former head of World Wildlife Federation Canada:
In the spring of 2010, Stewart came into the office to discover that all signs of the tar sands campaign had vanished from the WWF-Canada website. Some staff demanded answers. One never came from Butts, Stewart says, but a director quietly told him: “We’re not doing that anymore. Priorities have shifted. The focus will now be on corporate engagement.”
Stewart says this exemplified a pattern of leadership from Butts. “He would be gung-ho about something, but after talking to Bay Street types and realizing they wouldn’t go for it, he would drop it.” Stewart believes Butts’s commitment to climate action was real and profound. “But he came from a world of politics in which you get the best deal possible given the prevailing balance of power,” he says, “while I come from the world of social movements, where we try to change the balance of power so the necessary becomes possible.” Stewart could understand this strategic difference, but Butts’s latest move was the last straw. He resigned in protest.
Stewart today works in a similar climate advocacy role at Greenpeace Canada.
Edit: Butts became wazir Principle Secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau, then stepped down over allegations that he had pressured attorney general Wilson-Raybould to grant that Quebec construction company a favour.
Justin Trudeau strikes me as someone who sincerely believes that racism, sexism, the exploitation of indigenous territory, etc. are bad things, but who also believes that he can find a way to make everyone happy. So if there is already a pipeline from the tar sands to Vancouver, a bigger one must be OK; get the provinces to accept the principle of a carbon tax and it can be raised later; and if your Attourney General does not understand why its very important that that construction company can still accept federal contracts, she must just not understand, explain it to her slowly and she will see the rightness of your position. I am not sure he groks that if you let diverse people into power, they are going to see the world differently than you do.
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For me, I'd note that actually Canadian policy matters perhaps more than most, because as a British liberal, the Canadian liberals are considered sufficiently part of the family that what they do helps set the overton window. I think that's true more widely - in discussions I've had in the UK even outside explicitly Lib Dem circles, things like Canada's comparatively good refugee & asylum policies are much more likely to be cited than Canada's somewhat wobbly climate record.
In retrospect, I agree that refugees are a major policy success for Trudeau: there are about 60,000 Syrian refugees in Canada, and he has not closed a loophole where asylum seekers in the United States can seek asylum in Canada as long as they enter the country outside a legal crossing point. (Canada and the USA have a 'safe third country agreement' (https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions-agreements/agreements/safe-third-country-agreement.html) which in practice means that migrants from Latin America can't enter Canada except through the regular immigration system, but its not so clear any more that the USA is a safe place if you are Moslem or queer or dark-skinned). Taking in a share of Syrians sets a good example, and it is a promise which he kept.
(Although Canada kept out of the American intervention in Iraq, we just happened to deploy all the ships we had to the Indian Ocean and the army to Afghanistan at the same time, and Canadian special forces and aircraft have been thoroughly mixed up in the wars in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, so we can't really say we have nothing to do with the refugee crisis).
And Philippe J. Fournier is also trying the 'statistical' approach at 338canada.com but again its much harder to predict than an American presidential election and there is less money for polling, I would not pay it too much mind.
I am thinking about how to describe ideological divisions inside parties, its hard to be sure unless you are there, especially because of tight party discipline on MPs.
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Mm, yes - in the UK, the structures of the parties vary so differently that the ideological factions have variation accordingly. Labour is big enough to have obvious ideological factions among the MPs, and the Tories have one major ideological faction (the ERG), one dying and collapsing ideological faction (One Nation), and a lot of MPs who don't have factions so much as plotting cliques. The Greens have no parliamentary factions because they only have one MP and one lord (and they avoid mentioning the latter to save embarrassment), and the SNP don't factionalise at Westminster level because all they need to do is sit and be critical of the government from a vaguely centre-left perspective and propose independence as a panacea. The Lib Dems don't currently have much by way of parliamentary factions as the parliamentary group is too small, and there's a range of ideological groupings in the party though it varies to what extent those work as functional factions in terms of actually contesting for power rather than just presenting policy ideas. Some, like the Social Liberal Forum, are more think tank than faction, others like the Radical Association function as policymaking factions that contest battles over the content of the manifesto primarily (and in the LDs and Greens, due to their conference system, you can in theory contest and win concessions on manifesto content without needing to secure lots of powerful positions higher up in the party, unlike in Labour or the Tories).
It's interesting if party discipline is tight - what causes that? Generally, UK parties struggle to heavily discipline their MPs unless under a particularly dominant leader who wields the patronage levers effectively.
Justin Trudeau strikes me as someone who sincerely believes that racism, sexism, the exploitation of indigenous territory, etc. are bad things, but who also believes that he can find a way to make everyone happy. So if there is already a pipeline from the tar sands to Vancouver, a bigger one must be OK; get the provinces to accept the principle of a carbon tax and it can be raised later; and if your Attourney General does not understand why its very important that that construction company can still accept federal contracts, she must just not understand, explain it to her slowly and she will see the rightness of your position. I am not sure he groks that if you let diverse people into power, they are going to see the world differently than you do.
This is pretty much the Nick Clegg brand of politics - I think Nick genuinely means well, too, but what really killed us in coalition was the fact that he wanted to show coalitions could work and run a responsible well meaning reforming government, whilst the Tories wanted to make cuts, sell stuff off, knife the Lib Dems in the back and win the next election. And they pursued that with an effective single-mindedness that the Cleggite LD wing failed to cope with.
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It's interesting if party discipline is tight - what causes that? Generally, UK parties struggle to heavily discipline their MPs unless under a particularly dominant leader who wields the patronage levers effectively.
I don't know, I would have to research but generally the power of the Prime Minister's office as enforced by the party whip ratchets up and up but never down. Most votes have all the Liberals voting one way and all the Conservatives voting another, with possibly a few abstentions or strategic absences.
Stephen Harper's insight was that if he tightly controlled the speech and votes of his MPs, and the speech of civil servants and government-funded scientists, he could get 40% of the vote, win a majority, and sit in a room with his cronies quietly trying to remake Canada in his own vision with little technical changes. He offered the different movements within the radical right a deal: shut up when the press is listening and I will give you some of what you want, open your traps and go back to being in opposition while the Liberals run the country. Of course, that makes it hard to say what you will get if a party forms government.
There is actually some pushback against this within the Conservatives: towards the end of the Harper administration, the Conservatives actually put forward a private members' bill restricting the power of party leaders and whips over MPs, but I think it failed. The Conservatives in particular have had issues where a riding association wants one candidate, but the party bosses in Ottawa want another, and their 2017 leadership election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Canada_leadership_election) (with ranked ballots, nothing so primitive as First Past the Post ...) had some irregularities.
The SNC-Lavalin affair (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNC-Lavalin_affair) began when the Liberals wanted to channel a big public works project through one of the Quebec companies they have a relationship with, but that company was under investigation for paying bribes to the Libyan government and Al-Saadi Gaddafi, and if the charges went through they would not be eligible for federal contracts for the duration of the court case. Jody Wilson-Raybould was both Justice Minister and Attourney General, and when she was told by a series of senior officials that it was very important that SNC Lavalin get a plea deal, she replied that as attorney general (and someone who had read the Liberals' new ethics code when she was elected) she had decided that they were not eligible. The Liberals and Conservatives expect almost total obedience from cabinet ministers and MPs, and deals between officials with public funds or resource rights to grant and companies which can hire workers in the right riding, donate to the party, or invite the ex-cabinet minister to join their board shortly after he leaves office were the bread and butter of Canadian politics in the 1990s.
There is a recent proposal to separate the two roles of cabinet minister and Attorney General, but it does not sound like the current government is interested.
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In 2014, the most rebellious Conservative MP Michael Chong voted differently than his party leader 1.5% of the time. (https://www.macleans.ca/politics/the-rathgeber-experiment/) In the next parliament, Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith voted differently than his party leader 11 out of 90 times (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wherry-erskinesmith-dissent-rebel-1.3639881) and got a reputation as a maverick. Occasionally a few MPs cross the floor and join another party or a private members' bill is passed, but something like what happened in Westminister since Boris Johnson tried to prorogue parliament would be unprecedented in Canada.
Harper was controversial because he did not just restrict MPs' votes, but also their public speech and the speech of government employees and scientists receiving federal funds. While he was Prime Minister, almost no scientists in Canada were willing to speak to the press about climate change or the environmental implications of resource development.
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Mm, 11/90 sounds like a normal rebellion rate to me. And I'd expect ministers to stand down in Wilson-Raybould's case in the UK system: the rule of total loyalty when you're in a ministerial office still more or less does apply here. The thing that sounds most weird from a UK perspective is Harper's attempts to shut MPs up in what they say: until very recently our parties have been able to whip most MPs for most votes here, but that doesn't usually stop there being more or less measured public disagreements on direction and strategy, and the formation of factions as ideological groups try to secure various jobs or policy concessions from the leadership.
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Mm, 11/90 sounds like a normal rebellion rate to me. And I'd expect ministers to stand down in Wilson-Raybould's case in the UK system: the rule of total loyalty when you're in a ministerial office still more or less does apply here. The thing that sounds most weird from a UK perspective is Harper's attempts to shut MPs up in what they say: until very recently our parties have been able to whip most MPs for most votes here, but that doesn't usually stop there being more or less measured public disagreements on direction and strategy, and the formation of factions as ideological groups try to secure various jobs or policy concessions from the leadership.
Either of us could look into statistics, it might be that Trudeau is running his party with a light whip which would be another thing to his credit since reformers in all parties talk about it. I get the impression that the Conservatives' voting record under Harper was more typical for recent Canadian parliaments.
My personal and subjective take on the SNC-Lavalin affair is that most Canadian governments would have done the same and the only difference is that this government had a Minister of Justice who objected when asked to do something she believed was wrong, but it shows that Justin Trudeau is not as reform-minded as he lets on, and refusing to accept that "no means no" from a First Nations woman is a bad look. One problem is that confidentiality rules prevent Wilson-Raybould from speaking about some of the things which made her leave the party (she was shuffled into another cabinet position after she refused to cooperate) and another is that combining the (partisan) Minister of Justice and (non-partisan) Attorney General in one person faces them with many dilemmas.
Meanwhile in this year's exciting campaign, it has been revealed that Andrew Scheer, head of the Conservative Party of Canada, lied about his career before parliament! Instead of a glamorous insurance broker (which is a specially licensed profession like pharmacist or engineer) he was a clerk for a company which sold insurance. :o
The outcome is quite uncertain, especially for the NDP, but not because of bold policy promises by any of the big three parties that you can expect they would take concrete action to achieve.
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Yes, I suspect you're right about SNC-Lavalin. But it's a very depressing saga all round.
Would I be right in assuming that in a hung parliament, the liberals would have an obvious edge in coalition forming? I get the sense that, say, the NDP rather hate the Liberals but would find it politically impossible to become coalition partners with the Conservatives, given the option.
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Yes, I suspect you're right about SNC-Lavalin. But it's a very depressing saga all round.
Would I be right in assuming that in a hung parliament, the liberals would have an obvious edge in coalition forming? I get the sense that, say, the NDP rather hate the Liberals but would find it politically impossible to become coalition partners with the Conservatives, given the option.
I think so. The problem is that Canada does not really have precedents or a legal framework for coalition governments (there was almost one on two occasions early in Stephen Harper's career, but he outmanoeuvred the opposition). Traditionally the largest party gets the chance to form government and gets through confidence motions one vote at a time. Its enough to make you want to :pangolin:
I believe that the current NDP-Green provincial coalition in BC is not a formal coalition, just two parties agreeing to vote together.
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After sleeping on it, Jagmeet Singh (NDP) said during the campaign that he would not back a Conservative minority after some Andrew Scheer quotes on gay marriage appeared in the press, and Elizabeth May (Green) has said for years that she wants to work with all parties but the Conservatives just don't accept the science around climate change and that is not negotiable for her. She has been talking about something like a government of national unity on climate policy to break the cycle where the Liberals say the right words but schedule change in the distant future, but can always point out that they offer green voters more than the Conservatives offer. What the Bloc Quebecois would do is hard to say, they tend to have a social-democratic orientation in a French, "build good citizens for the secular State" way, and Conservatives don't like separatists, but in the past they have been willing to negotiate on almost any specific point.
The dilemma for reform-minded, green, or social-democratic voters is that the Liberals make a lot of promises then implement the ones which are easiest ... do you try to work within the party which runs the government three years out of five, or try to build up a smaller one which is committed to your issue but is marginalized by our laws? When reporters asked the Minister for Environment and Climate what her suddenly announced policy of Net Zero emissions by 2050 would mean in the next four years (Net Zero is code for "maybe you can still burn a little bit of oil if we solve carbon capture and storage?"), they quoted her as saying this:
The point is right now, we need to get elected, we need to get through this election because the choice is really clear. If we are re-elected we will look at how best to do this.
Now, that is a quote by a reporter, and readers of the Language Log know that quotes by reporters are not at all the same thing as transcriptions from a tape, but often it seems like the Liberals discovered some issue yesterday that NGOs, the chattering class, and other parties have been talking about for 25 years.
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Mm, yes. Basically, the question "how do you campaign for a coalition under FPTP when that's when only way to get what you want but is also incredibly hard to deliver" is a sort of extraction of that issue. A small-l liberal voter should basically want the Liberals to lose Liberal-NDP (or any Liberal-Green) marginals but hold or gain ground against the Conservatives, which is a tough ask as far as national messaging goes.
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Mm, yes. Basically, the question "how do you campaign for a coalition under FPTP when that's when only way to get what you want but is also incredibly hard to deliver" is a sort of extraction of that issue. A small-l liberal voter should basically want the Liberals to lose Liberal-NDP (or any Liberal-Green) marginals but hold or gain ground against the Conservatives, which is a tough ask as far as national messaging goes.
Yes, First Past the Post creates all kinds of dilemmas and hides decisionmaking inside internal party discussions. If you have a policy you want your party to adopt, the party leaders want to know "will at least 30% of voters support this?" and they have access to confidential polls and databases of what voters said in contact with campaigns, but as a politically engaged person you don't have access to that, how it was collected, and whether they are being honest about what it says (choose how the poll is worded and you chose the answer). And the rise of a second strong party on the left can lead to a government on the right getting the majority of seats, and vice versa.
The usual solution has been to focus on winning seats in one region: the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (1932-1961), Social Credit (1935-1991), NDP (1961-present), Greens (1983-present), and Reform Party (1993-2004) all came from the western half of the country, while the Bloc are Québécois obviously (and its worth rolling some of those names and dates around in your mouth, because Canadian politics has been weird). Many of these have formed provincial governments, but never been part of a federal government for more than a few years.
I think a system of proportional representation would be better because it lets people vote for the party which they think best represents their views, no need to guess which two candidates are most likely to win your riding knowing that all the other voters are also guessing. It would also prevent a party with 40% of the vote doing things which the other 60% hate. But the only way it could happen would be a NDP majority (it has been in their platform since 2004) or something like 2015 where the Liberals got scared of ending in third place and promised it.
If I finish the next big post, it will talk about what all of the three biggest parties agree on this election (eg. that Canada should take in one net immigrant per year per 100 or 200 residents using a bureaucratic system which favours educated, working age people from all parts of the world; that life in prison is the ultimate penalty; and that mass surveillance and the reduction of civil liberties since 2001 are acceptable). Political commentators often talk about how parties are different, but the edges of the Overton Window are just as important.
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It's my view that in developed FPTP systems, the most likely way by far that the electoral system gets changed is via a coalition where the minority party forces it. I don't think any party can be effectively trusted to change the system that delivered them power.
And yes, I agree that not enough is discussed about the edges of the window.
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Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Ärzt gehen - Helmut Schmidt when asked about a colleague's bold proposals - If you have visions, see a doctor.
Every big party in Canada publishes a colour platform before each election, but there is also an invisible platform of things the leaders of the three big parties agree on. Canadians take many of these for granted, and it is hard to see the water you are swimming in, but the planks of this platform include:
- the basic structure of government, the relationship between different levels of government, etc. (The NDP have pledged to change the voting system, and a lot of policy geeks in their party have thought about it, I would bet at least 2-1 that a NDP government would do this)
- the government of Canada is secular, religion is a private matter
- life in prison is the ultimate penalty
- health care should be single-payer with universal insurance supplemented with plans organized through employers (some Conservatives want an expanded system of private clinics, some on the left want to expand the public system to cover medicine and dental care)
- women may chose to terminate their pregnancy
- couples of any gender can get married
- a party's candidates should reflect the gender and ethnic makeup of the country (this is relatively new, but nobody believes that a row of pasty-faced older men can beat this year's Liberal candidates)
- the use of alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis is legal but heavily regulated (the third substance is new on the list, but too many Canadians smoke pot for the Conservatives to reverse legalization, and there are voices in all the parties for decriminalizing other drugs)
- one of the most important things about any proposed policy is its effects on the budget: proposals should come with audited cost estimates and commentators should earnestly discuss whether they are realistic (this goes back to the Liberal Red Book in 1993, but the underlying ideology is slightly older)
- Canada should let in one net immigrant per 100 or 200 residents per year, using a points system which favours credentialed, working-age people from all around the world and giving them a path to citizenship. If there was something fishy in the 2017 Conservative leadership race, it was probably because insiders knew that Maxime Bernier was strongly against immigration and judged that if he made that party policy, they would lose most of their seats.
- international trade should be free of tariffs (so there is a free flow of money and goods, but a carefully regulated flow of workers)
- Canada should stick with the existing money and financial system (the Greens and NDP want to tax large companies which operate in Canada but hide their revenues in another jurisdiction, and the Greens talk about replacing GDP with a "wellbeing" metric, but I would class both as tweaks on the level of the EU moving away from the Visa and Mastercard networks)
- Canada should stay aligned with the American system of power (the Harper government signed a deal to sell the Saudis 13 billion dollars worth of LAV-III infantry fighting vehicles which the NDP might cancel, but conspicuously going neutral or organizing Phil Paine's League of Middle Democracies (http://www.philpaine.com/?p=425) is not in the cards)
- mass surveillance of the population of Canada by foreign companies is acceptable (the Greens object to this, but they also pledge to "regulate Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to ensure that only actual people, with verifiable identities, are able to publish on those platforms.")
- the erosion of civil liberties since 2001 is acceptable (with the NDP a bit wobbly since they have never been the ones getting daily reports from
the secret police the Mounties and Five Eyes, but its not something they campaign on)
I would argue that the three biggest parties mostly agree about economic and foreign policy and just disagree about what kind of mixed economy to have and how closely to follow the foreign policy of the United States. The Conservatives reduced the census to just a population count and ended Canada Post service to many residential addresses, the Liberals brought back the long-form census and halted the changes to Canada Post, the NDP would reverse the changes and maybe introduce postal banking: all things which matter to Canadians, but not the kind of thing which would make someone in Ukraine or China say "that is wonderful/horrible and you must support it/stop it!" That is why I say the biggest issue this year is climate and environmental policy, because historically Canada has held international negotiations back.
(Full disclosure: I come from Elizabeth May's riding and am happy with her as my MP)
There is also a lot of talk on the centre and left about reconciliation with the First Nations, especially since a report on the residential schools came out, but very little action because after 200 years of genocide the survivors don't have a lot of leverage. And the Liberals and Conservatives like to talk about the north and the need to defend it, then look at how few voters live there and how expensive it is to do things there and quietly leave things as they were. There is currently no working railroad from the rest of Canada to a port on Hudson's Bay, so icebreakers have to sail all the way back to the St. Laurence River every fall and return every summer. And every few elections, someone talks about reforming military procurement so things don't come 20 years late and twice as expensive as budgeted, but that never changes either.
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I don't know if anyone but Jubal is still reading this, and he says he is burned out on politics, but the Samara Centre for Democracy has some reports based on interviews with retiring MPs since 2004. https://www.samaracanada.com/research/political-leadership/mp-exit-interviews/volume-ii/flip-the-script The picture of more and more decisionmaking being assigned to groups of appointed party staffers, who lay out what MPs must say when they engage with other MPs and the decision they will then make, matches other things I have read ... 'debates' and 'committee meetings' still take place but party staffers decide in advance what the outcomes will be so they become increasingly empty.
The Electoral College in the United States went down the same path: it was envisioned as a group of wise men who would gather in a smoke-filled room and chose the best president, it became a group of men and women who are told who they will vote for, make that vote, and go home.
The Liberals and Conservatives claim several hundred thousand members each (almost 1% of the population) after Justin Trudeau and the 2017 Conservative leadership contest, but:
In some cases—particularly in ridings where the party had not been successful in recent elections—the riding association existed on paper only. One MP recalled: “I couldn’t find the electoral district association president. It was difficult to find them just to tell them that I would like to run.” Another described the nomination ‘process’ this way: “We didn’t have a nomination, there was no local association—you go and have your paper, sign people, and—whatever.” ... open, contested nominations were surprisingly rare: 34 out of 54 interviewees ran unopposed and were acclaimed as candidates. ... Nominations were not seen as contests for the support of a true mini-public of members committed to the local party. Rather, according to one MP, it was about “the bulk sale of instant memberships, [which makes it] very easy to take over nominations.” Another MP was blunt about the implications of this: “Members never remain members for long, anyway. So it’s a kind of fake democracy.”
So there are some big issues we could be working on that people in different parties could work together to solve, but this parliament we had a managerial kind of government that avoided structural changes.
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In the latest exciting scandal, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been discovered to be a ... dual citizen with the United States :o (The Conservatives have given dual citizens in other parties a hard time and complaining about 'birth tourists': the tiny number of people who visit Canada pregnant intending to give birth on Canadian soil and claim Canadian citizenship for their child). And a few candidates have had to step down as the other parties' volunteers finished reading their Twitter and Facebook posts from 5 to 10 years ago and emailing screenshots of the juicy ones to reporters.
The heads of the Greens, NDP, and Liberals chose the day of the Climate Strike to promise specific actions to reduce emissions or increase tree cover, while the head of the Conservatives used it to promise to build more highways. He also found he had other commitments during Pride ::) But right now the Liberals and Conservatives seem to have about the same numbers of supporters, so one of the two will almost certainly form the next government, possibly with help from a smaller party.
This year there is a third-party Debates Commission to decide which party leaders take part in the main televised debates. It excluded Elizabeth May of the Greens from the main French language debate (because they don't have any MPs in Quebec) but included Maxime Bernier of the anti-immigrant People's Party in all the debates (because he currently has a seat). The Greens are accusing it of bias.
I mostly wrote these to put my thoughts in order, but please let me know if anything is unclear.
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I also misrepresented one aspect of SNC-Lavalin affair: according to documents and testimony, the Liberals added deferred prosecution agreements to Canadian law at the express request of SNC-Lavalin, then asked the attorney general to declare that they were eligible.
But we only know because the Liberal MPs elected in 2015 included some women of honour, other governments would have never put someone in that position who would make the matter public.
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In the latest exciting scandal, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been discovered to be a ... dual citizen with the United States :o
I take it Canada doesn't have anything like Australia's "no dual citizenship" clause for MPs?
I mostly wrote these to put my thoughts in order, but please let me know if anything is unclear.
It all seems clear to me, and interesting - please keep posting. I haven't really had any questions so far, but it's good to get a clearer picture of national politics in a country other than my own, and as a member of the Liberal Democrats in the UK, also good to get a better understanding of what we might regard as our sister party in Canada.
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In the latest exciting scandal, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been discovered to be a ... dual citizen with the United States :o
I take it Canada doesn't have anything like Australia's "no dual citizenship" clause for MPs?
No, we are free of that mess, although one small-C conservative commentator who should know better is using this to pontificate about how Canada should not allow dual citizenship because loyalty to a nation must be absolute and exclusive ::) He does not say that loyalty is reciprocal, and when a Canadian citizen is accused of a crime by the United States and its allies, including places like Syria in 2004 or Egypt after the latest military coup, the government and the civil service side with the accuser not the citizen (http://www.justiceforhassandiab.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/CBC-News-2018-09-15.pdf). Most countries do not allow that either.
Oh: one tactical issue this election is that most of the seats which could go Green are in British Columbia, three hours earlier than Ontario and Quebec (and the seats in between will mostly go Conservative). Voters who want Anyone but Conservative can check the initial results and exit polls before they go to vote after work. If the Liberals do well in eastern Canada, these ridings are likely to tilt Green, if they do poorly they might go NDP or Liberal (but then again, when your favourite candidate might win, you are more likely to stick with them).
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The head of the Green Party of British Columbia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_J._Weaver), a distinguished physicist (and founder of cool indy-web projects (http://victoriaweather.ca/)), has announced that he will not run for reelection and is stepping down as leader. In his time in office, the party won three out of 87 seats and broke the previous two-party system where one party was for the public sector unions and the other was for capital. Since Jubal is interested in the structure of parties, I have excerpted his Wikipedia article:
Weaver joined the British Columbia Green Party in October 2012 as the party's deputy leader and candidate for the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head.[14] He was elected in the 2013 provincial election as the first Green Party MLA in British Columbia's history. ...
In August 2013, Weaver chose not to take on leadership of the BC Green Party stating: "I have an ambitious agenda for my term as MLA and achieving this requires focus and hard work. I consider it in the best interests of my constituents, the party and the province if, for now, I focus on my role as MLA and support a new interim leader who can concentrate on building the party."[18]
However, Weaver also stated that if he decided to re-run in the 2017 provincial election and was still the only elected BC Green Party MLA, he would then seek leadership of the party.[19]
On 24 November 2015 Weaver announced his bid to run for leader of the British Columbia Green Party. He was acclaimed to this position on December 9, 2015.
In the 2017 election, Weaver was reelected and the BC Green Party increased their share of the popular vote to 16.8%
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A CBC debate on climate change scheduled at the University of Ottawa for 16 October has been cancelled when no Conservative candidate could be found to participate (https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/conservatives-refuse-to-participate-in-national-climate-debate) ::) And yet the problem is that for 25 years, federal Liberal policy on climate change has been "that sounds real bad and someone should do something about it, how about after the next election?"
The current government did introduce a nominal carbon tax (CAD 20/metric ton of CO2-equivalent, with many exemptions and a promise not to raise it before 2022) but this simple, market-friendly approach just inspired conservative governments in the provinces to try to suffocate the system in its cradle. With First Past the Post and strict party discipline, offering a policy that other parties could support encourages them to stretch the Overton Window in the opposite direction.
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Honestly they should just empty chair people in those situations. One party's non-participation shouldn't block debates from going ahead, it's absurd.
I note that the CBC tracker has distinctly upped its chances of the Conservatives being the largest party, not because they've gained any votes but because the BQ is getting a noticeable boost in support which is likely to deprive the Liberals of seats in Quebec.
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They did that with an earlier debate which Justin Trudeau chose not to attend. (There are quite a few debates in English and French, and its not universally agreed which ones are important and who gets to participate). Climate change policy is a complicated subject and it would have been good for policy experts in each party to have to answer some questions.
Oh, Jaghmeet Singh has listed six priorities which the NDP would work towards in the next parliament (including if hypothetically they are not the largest party):
- A national, single-payer universal pharmacare plan and a national dental care plan.
- Investments in housing.
- A plan to waive interest on student loans.
- A commitment to reduce emissions, to end subsidies for oil companies and to deliver aid to oilpatch workers to transition them out of fossil fuel industries.
- The introduction of a "super wealth" tax and a commitment to closing tax loopholes.
- Reducing cellphone bills.
Anyways, my ballot is in the hands of der Post.
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There is one riding in Vancouver (Burnaby North-Seymour) where the Conservative candidate was rejected by the party too late for her affiliation to be removed from the ballots. Someone found a video from 2011 where she told a reporter that anti-bullying programs are really plots to recruit children to the gay lifestyle :o The candidate is still campaigning and was not quick to change her branding to distinguish herself from the party she was formerly representing ::) Other candidates in the riding include a gay man and a non-binary person, and that riding is the end of the Government of Canada's Trans Mountain pipeline (the pipeline to Alberta already exists, but the government of Canada and the government of Alberta want to expand it (TMX), the problems are that most of the pipeline runs through unceded indigenous territories, that many of us are not convinced that the pipeline would just replace oil being transported by rail, and that any future breaks or shipwrecks will be at BC's expense, but the royalties go to Alberta). The incumbent is an anti-pipeline Liberal.
On one hand it is good for the rest of the country to see what some LGBTQ+/racialized people still have to face, but its depressing that these things are still popping up :pangolin:
In an interview, Jagmeet Singh has said that he would decriminalize sex work. I can't explain the situation as well as one of the Red Umbrella organizations could, but traditionally in Canada prostitution has been legal but keeping a bawdy house and soliciting in public have been forbidden (so if a group of workers want to share a house and hire a security person/secretary/accountant, that opens everyone involved to prosecution, and advertising had to be euphemistic). Around 2013 the Supreme Court of Canada said this violates the right to a safe work environment, the Conservatives responded in 2014 by banning buying or advertising sexual services and restricting solicitation to areas far away from residences, the Liberals looked at the law and left it be (they may be hoping that another Supreme Court ruling will go against it).
The Conservatives dragged several parts of criminal law in a harsher, less evidence-based direction (eg. mandatory minimum sentences, bills which could be titled An Act to Fight Freedom Here at Home So We Don't Have to Fight It Over There) and the Liberals have not dragged them back.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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 (http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/projets-loi/projet-loi-21-42-1.html)). 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 (http://"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Douglas")) 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 (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freeman_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 (https://lfpress.com/news/canada/read-the-full-text-jason-kenney-responds-to-amnesty-internationals-criticism-of-his-fight-back-strategy/wcm/2041b512-656c-43ba-946b-5224ccbe9277) 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 (https://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/03/Who-After-Harper/) 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.
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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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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 (https://thewalrus.ca/what-the-death-of-local-news-means-for-the-federal-election/), 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?"
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Based on the precedent of the British Columbia election of 2017 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/41st_British_Columbia_general_election), 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.
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Journalists have been dutifully smacking Andrew Scheer's knuckles (https://election.ctvnews.ca/scheer-says-party-with-most-seats-should-have-right-to-form-government-1.4642331) for the following statement:
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.
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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 (https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-2.01/page-9.html#h-204214), 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.
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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.
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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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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 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-robocalls-voters-polls-misleading-1.5329199). 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.
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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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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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyUpGGZnHU0) (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).
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I may be a bit overly hard-line on this but really anyone in Singh's position who doesn't go for electoral reform, regardless of his priority list, isn't up to the job. In the long run, the NDP - and therefore their political goals - stand to benefit hugely from it. Fundamentally, Canada as a whole has a fairly reliable centre-left lean (by my brief checks, I don't think there's been a vote majority for centre-right/right parties since 1984) and any sort of decent electoral reform would make the NDP reliably a governing partner. Failing to press hard for it would feel like gross short-termism, to me. And yeah, I think coalition negotiations are something the press are often bad at covering but I'll be interested to see what emerges.
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
You're very welcome! :)
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I may be a bit overly hard-line on this but really anyone in Singh's position who doesn't go for electoral reform, regardless of his priority list, isn't up to the job. In the long run, the NDP - and therefore their political goals - stand to benefit hugely from it. Fundamentally, Canada as a whole has a fairly reliable centre-left lean (by my brief checks, I don't think there's been a vote majority for centre-right/right parties since 1984) and any sort of decent electoral reform would make the NDP reliably a governing partner. Failing to press hard for it would feel like gross short-termism, to me. And yeah, I think coalition negotiations are something the press are often bad at covering but I'll be interested to see what emerges.
I agree, replacing FPTP would have so many good effects and I think the Liberals would still be the largest party in government more often than not. Human beings are just not suited to play the game which FPTP in a many-party system creates. Jaghmeet Singh became leader after I left Canada so I don't have a strong feeling of what kind of person he is, and apparently he was still talking about electoral reform as a priority in October.
Edit: Apparently he talked about electoral reform again on October the 24th so three days after the election. NDP doctrine is mixed-member proportional representation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation) with a referendum after the second election held under the new system.
Quebec will hold a referendum on switching to mixed-member proportional (https://www.fairvote.ca/pro-rep-for-quebec/), the party introducing it had promised to introduce it directly. I believe Alberta briefly used a system like that for urban ridings after the First World War but the next government changed its mind.
The commentariat likes to speculate which parties will replace their leaders after the election. Is that something which British journalists get excited about? To me, we spend way too much time talking about leaders and less about how to organize ourselves to achieve our goals, too much trying to predict the future and not enough on what policies would be best. I have lots of thoughts about politics but I have not been brave enough to turn them into action other than the occasional march :(
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Elizabeth May has said that she intends to step down as party leader sometime after this winter but before 2023, the date to be determined by the party's judgements about how long the new government will last. She will continue to serve as MP.
Justin Trudeau has said that he will lead a minority government not a coalition and is talking about "working with all the parties." If he really plans to take it one vote at a time, negotiating with the Conservatives on pipelines and the other parties on pharmacare, it will be an exciting parliament for politics-watchers.
And humh, she is considering running for Speaker of the House of Commons which would require stepping down as leader if elected.
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After the Green Party of Canada annual convention and council meeting on the weekend of 2 and 3 November, Elizabeth May has stepped down as party leader but will remain as MP. A former CBC journalist named Jo-Ann Roberts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo-Ann_Roberts) is interim party leader until the leadership election in 2020. I don't know anything about her.
As I said, I think she is a good MP, and since I have never fought an election I won't be a "back-seat driver" about what she did or did not do in 2015 or 2019.
In terms of building a shared model of reality, a bad sign is that the Alberta and Saskatchewan commentariat are complaining bitterly about the Liberals (who gave them 2 out of the 3 pipelines they wanted, and passed a bill C-69 on pipeline regulation which the Greens say is littered with places for ministers to over-rule environmental concerns). Alberta is still the province with the highest GDP per capita, and they chose to collect minimal taxes and rely on oil royalties rather than take a 'Norwegian' approach of saving and investing the oil revenues (they have such a fund, but not much money stayed in it for long while the Progressive Conservatives were in charge). I am sure the children's books in Alberta have the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper :)
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Mm, something I've noticed politically is that there's rarely as much difference as there logically should be between disappointing people a bit and a lot. This is probably exacerbated if people don't have a commentariat who point out when a compromise is a compromise, but it makes for very odd political calculations. I think it's worsened by far in FPTP countries where voters don't get to see parties making compromises and having to justify them all the time as a normal matter of course.
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Although one of my Italian friends is outraged at the perfectly normal coalition switch which just happened in Italy ... even though in a system like Italy you just vote for your party and then its MPs have to negotiate with the other parties and try to form a government.
One problem with just refusing to talk about so many topics is that you give up the chance to educate people on why those are off the table. To build a consensus, you have to admit that more than one position is possible in theory and talk about the consequences of moving to a different one.
Meanwhile Don Cherry, a mossy old troll of a hockey commentator, was fired for saying that he does not see enough recent immigrants wearing a poppy for remembrance day. (I would say that in the parts of Canada where I have lived, Remembrance Day is pretty free of jingoism, except the occasional undertone of "support the troops" and "they died for our freedom" in the newspapers). I hope nobody introduces him to YouTube and he just crawls into a nice deep sunless cave for the winter.
Edit: And nope, he has appeared on Fox News with someone called Tucker Carlson and on the Rebel Media, a far-right, online-only outlet which wants to be Canada's Breitbart.
Edit:/ And double nope, he is launching a podcast called Grapevine. That is what the slick young sophists do for the old lumps of dried bitumen who actually believe their own patter.
Edit: And triple nope, Quillette, a right-wing online magazine aimed at the urban and universitied, plans to publish an article "The Day the Social Media Mob Came for Me" under his name.
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Brian Mulroney, former Progressive Conservative PM (from 1984 to 1993), has come out with a speech citing Thomas Aquinas (Canadian PMs are usually Catholics from Ontario or Quebec) and arguing that politicians should take serious action to reduce emissions even if it will be unpopular. Lisa Raitt, former deputy leader of the Conservative Party who lost her Toronto seat in October, has said that her party needs to think seriously whether being the party of the tar sands is something they can win elections on (while pointing out that the Liberals had the same targets from 2015 to 2019 as the Tories had until 2015 ... see previous discussion about differences in rhetoric versus differences in actions).
Ooh! And Jason Kenney, Premier of Alberta and probably Conservative Party leadership hopeful sometime next decade, just fired the election commissioner who is investigating allegations that he provided $60,000 in funds to someone who ran for head of his party, said all the nasty things which needed to be said about Kenny's most dangerous rival, then dropped out of the race and endorsed Kenney (it may also shock you, but there were issues with the electronic voting at informal polling stations linked to Jason Kenney's campaign). The elections officials in Canada are about as nonpartisan as librarians so this is a big deal.
This is known as the 'kamikaze campaign' scandal, because Canadian politics are weird.
Lastly, Paul Wells explains some of the Ottawa media's gripes about the structure of Justin Trudeau's cabinets:
If you have a minister of middle-class prosperity and a minister of economic development and an entirely separate minister of rural economic development and a minister of workforce development—remember when the workforce was part of the economy? OK, boomer—and a minister of small business and a minister of finance and a minister of industry and a treasury-board president, who’s running the economy?
It’s a trick question, of course. None of them is. Differences among them will be settled at the Block Formerly Known as Langevin, from whence emissaries will be dispatched to inform the eight economic ministers of their opinions.
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The United Conservative Party of Alberta are planning to change the Elections Finance Act in spring 2020. Banning corporate and union donations was one of the NDP government's first acts (again, they replaced a 44 year old government in a petro-state ... can you imagine the level of corruption?) and funding violations may be what sends premier Jason Kenny to prison instead of the Prime Minister's Office.
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And what is surely the most exciting political news of the evening, Andrew Scheer has announced that he is resigning as head of the Conservative Party of Canada. He will continue to be a MP "for the near future." Apparently he was first elected MP at age 25 and has been MP ever since.
He was accused of diverting party funds to pay for his children's private school.
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Is there much speculation about his likely replacement?
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There is, but so far the likely candidates are keeping their cards close to their chests. Jason Kenney may not be happy because he is in the middle of loudly picking a fight with Ottawa as he drives Alberta into a recession in the name of austerity. There is also speculation about why this comes out now, and whether someone lured Andrew Scheer into accepting the funds with the express purpose of leaking it (although keep in mind that a year ago an avuncular Conservative MP and former cabinet minister (http://"https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tony+clement+sexting+scandal&t=canonical&ia=web") resigned after sending "sexually explicit photos and a video" to someone on Instagram who turned out to be an agent of a Foreign Power, not everything is about Canadian politics).
There is some talk that they will try a short leadership race in case the current government collapses (the one which ended up Scheer vs. Bernier took almost two years).
I won't touch the opinion pieces explaining that the secret for Conservative victory is for the Conservatives to adopt the writer's pet policy, or speaking of returning to strong conservative principles which somehow unite the factions within the actually existing Canadian right, with a sixteen-cubit sarissa.
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Heh. I worry that I'm about to be writing the UK Lib Dem equivalents of those opinion pieces in the near future...
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Well, as long as you are honest about your qualifications and goals! I just got tired ten years ago of the dishonesty ("do you really know anything about the inner workings of that party, or do you just buy drinks for people who swear they do?"), poor thinking ("momentum? seriously?"), and resistance to evidence ("you said that your party had to do that because they lost the last election, now you say they have to do the same thing because they won") of the professional havers-of-opinions who write so many of those.
On the lighter side, the Liberals want Jody Wilson-Raybould to move out of her nicely located, cabinet-minister sized office. They don't understand why anyone could see something funny (https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/12/update-white-journalists-still-not-seeing-the-irony-of-demanding-wilson-raybould-give-office-back/) about telling an indigenous woman that she has to stop occupying territory as soon as the original owners ask for it back.
And a SNC Lavalin executive has been found guilty on all charges for corruption in Libya.
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Yes - I think it's at least fair to say that I do have a better window than the average journalist on the internals of the party, and my political affiliations and goals are reasonably clear ones!
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Jaime Girard, head of fundraising for the Conservative Party of Canada, is interim executive director after a Scheer supporter resigned. Dates for the CPC leadership race will probably be announced in the spring: so far the rumours about who might run focus on an assortment of current and former MPs and cabinet ministers.
Its common for people who relocate for work to have the cost of their children's education covered, but Stephen Harper very pointedly sent his children to public school (a friend taught one of them), and someone leaked the expense controversy to three Canadian newspapers. So if you are conspiracy-minded, things may be afoot inside the CPC. (In the same way, someone in the LPC probably chose to try to make Jody Wilson-Raybould's office into a story on the Friday before the verdict in the first SNC-Lavalin trial was announced on Monday).
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The CPC will vote for leader on 27 June.
And there are still around 500 Canadian Forces personnel in Iraq (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-forces-middle-east-iran-iraq-1.5414321) (and some more in Syria), mainly special forces who can be deployed without questions in Parliament and don't have to give access to reporters. With the murder of Qassem Suleimani there may be casualties with maple leaves on their sleeves ... on the bright side, its hilarious seeing American officials complain that Iranian policy in Iraq is dominated by the military and the Iranian equivalent of the Foreign Office has to catch up. Oh, and Trudeau has not bothered to re-establish embassies in Iran after Harper shut them down (Harper was very much aligned with B. Nentinyahu on foreign policy).
There has been very little public discussion about Canadian military intervention in Syria and Iraq, and its hard to figure out exactly what is happening.
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Minister of National Defense Harjit Sajjan has announced the "temporary suspension" of Canada's participation in the NATO training mission in Iraq and Canadian Special Forces cooperation with Iraqi forces in northern Iraq. I am not sure if that leaves loopholes for other Special Forces to remain, the numbers in the Associated Press story (250 trainers + "dozens" of special forces) do not match the "roughly 500" soldiers who were said to be in Iraq a few days ago. I think there are also Canadian aircraft in country although Trudeau withdrew the CF-18 fighter-bombers. And there are probably some personnel left to guard the Canadian Forces base at Irbil (Arbela) as part of Operation Impact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Impact).
The wars in Syria and Iraq since 2001 are very complicated, most of the participants practice mass murder, rape, torture, (the bombardment of settled areas and destruction of civilian infrastructure) XOR (the use of civilians as human shields), and ethnic cleansing, and I just don't believe that the Government of Canada has enough knowledge and will ("Mosul is far, and the way is dusty, Washington is near and Westjet flies direct") to intervene in an ethical way.
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Two of my room-mates in Canada and one of my house-mates in Austria are from Iran. Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates has comments on Ukranian Airways Flight 752:
A high proportion of the Toronto-destined passengers on board – both those who were Canadian citizens and those who were not – were associated with Canadian universities. From what we know, the plane carried 51 people employed at or studying in 23 Canadian post-secondary institutions. This included eight professors/instructors: two professors from the University of Alberta (one of whom held a Canada Research Chair), two doctoral students/instructors at École de technologie supérieure, a couple who taught at Cestar College in Toronto, one instructor with appointments at both Ontario Tech and Centennial College, and a dentist in Halifax who seems to have had a connection with Dalhousie’s dental school (this has not been confirmed by the school). The flight was also carrying at least twenty PhD students, mostly at the Universities of Alberta, Toronto, Western, and Windsor.
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There was, perhaps, a moment of fleeting wonder that so many talented people connected to our schools could come from one faraway country. But they do. Iranians in Canada are among the country’s most educated ethnic groups, and the number of student visas issued to Iranians has increased fourfold in the last four years. And though they are especially numerous in the GTA’s northern suburbs and parts of BC’s Lower Mainland, they are, like many ethnic groups in Canada, spread widely across this huge country of ours.
(Canadians think that what distinguishes us from Europeans is the number of immigrants we take in. This is not true – many European countries accept just as many immigrants as we do. The difference is, over there they end up geographically clustered. A Dutch academic friend of mine had his mind blown wandering along Bloor Street when he came to visit a few years ago. It wasn’t the number of ethnic restaurants that he saw; it was the fact that you had the Turkish one next to the Korean one, next to the Ethiopian, next to the Mexican one, which to him was totally inconceivable. Canada’s secret sauce, as Doug Saunders astutely pointed out in his excellent book Arrival City, is the way they get stirred around and don’t just cluster in one place. The result is that when a tragedy like this happens, it’s a genuinely pan-Canadian one)
It says something quite profound both about Canada and Iran that so many people from so far away could contribute so much to life in a new country. And it is why I think we need to think very seriously, very soon, about the ways to commemorate the dead. Because it is a complicated story. It was an Iranian tragedy, involving mostly ethnic Persians, over Iranian airspace. And yet it involved so many Canadians, and Canadians-to-be, people who contributed so much to country. It is about mobility – most, in fact, travelled back and forth relatively frequently – but also about identity (and how Canada does not really require immigrants to abandon their cultures). It is a story of deeply entwined fates, shared across two continents and thousands of kilometres.
On racism and colonial attitudes in Canada:
Maxwell Johnson thought his appointment at the Bank of Montreal would be routine.
He's been a customer since 2014 and wanted to open an account for his 12-year-old granddaughter so he could transfer funds to her electronically when she was on the road for basketball games.
But at the Dec. 20 meeting at BMO's Burrard Street location in downtown Vancouver, an employee questioned the identification he and his granddaughter presented.
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He says the employee then told them to come upstairs to retrieve their identification. Not long after, they saw police walking toward them.
"They came over and grabbed me and my granddaughter, took us to a police vehicle and handcuffed both of us, told us we were being detained and read us our rights," Johnson said.
Johnson says when he saw his granddaughter in handcuffs, crying, he was heartbroken.
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The Vancouver Police Department corroborated Johnson's account of what happened. Spokesperson Sgt. Aaron Roed said VPD officers detained them after claims from BMO that he and his granddaughter were committing a "possible fraud" that was in progress and identified the two as suspects.
A lot of First Nations and Métis will tell you they get followed in shops, stopped by police, turned down for apartments and jobs, and otherwise treated as interlopers in settler society (not to mention the serial killers who prey on indigenous women and girls who the police have traditionally been reluctant to acknowledge). And if they go back to the reserve, they turn on the TV to hear ex-prime ministers ranting (https://aptnnews.ca/2016/04/13/former-pm-chretien-on-attawapiskat-people-have-to-move-sometimes/) about how they need to move to the city where there are economic opportunities.
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(Canadians think that what distinguishes us from Europeans is the number of immigrants we take in. This is not true – many European countries accept just as many immigrants as we do. The difference is, over there they end up geographically clustered. A Dutch academic friend of mine had his mind blown wandering along Bloor Street when he came to visit a few years ago. It wasn’t the number of ethnic restaurants that he saw; it was the fact that you had the Turkish one next to the Korean one, next to the Ethiopian, next to the Mexican one, which to him was totally inconceivable. Canada’s secret sauce, as Doug Saunders astutely pointed out in his excellent book Arrival City, is the way they get stirred around and don’t just cluster in one place. The result is that when a tragedy like this happens, it’s a genuinely pan-Canadian one)
This was particularly interesting to me - not a way I'd thought of that particular difference before.
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(Canadians think that what distinguishes us from Europeans is the number of immigrants we take in. This is not true – many European countries accept just as many immigrants as we do. The difference is, over there they end up geographically clustered. A Dutch academic friend of mine had his mind blown wandering along Bloor Street when he came to visit a few years ago. It wasn’t the number of ethnic restaurants that he saw; it was the fact that you had the Turkish one next to the Korean one, next to the Ethiopian, next to the Mexican one, which to him was totally inconceivable. Canada’s secret sauce, as Doug Saunders astutely pointed out in his excellent book Arrival City, is the way they get stirred around and don’t just cluster in one place. The result is that when a tragedy like this happens, it’s a genuinely pan-Canadian one)
This was particularly interesting to me - not a way I'd thought of that particular difference before.
You are welcome! Alex Usher's journalistic gadfly style is not always my thing, but I think he said some things that needed saying on a topic where the rest of us are often going around and around on the same themes (such as which government to blame or how to use Flight Tracker 24 dot Com ...)
A former diplomat published an opinion piece arguing that the government of Canada could use a joint crash investigation as one step towards resuming diplomatic relations with Iran.
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Today, I announced that effective Monday, January 20 I will sit as an independent MLA in the BC Legislature (http://www.andrewweavermla.ca/2020/01/15/weaver-step-bc-green-caucus-sit-independent/). As the BC Green leadership race unfolds, I believe that it is important for the BC Green Party to develop a new vision and voice independent from mine. My presence in the BC Green caucus could hinder that independence. Sitting as an independent will also give me a better opportunity during the upcoming legislative sitting to attend to personal matters, including a number of health challenges affecting my family.
I am tired and confused.
Global News has announced (https://globalnews.ca/news/6403415/organized-crime-bc-casinos-rcmp-report/) that in January 2009, the RCMP provided the government with a report stating that a BC government employee allowed a businessman “connected to Asian organized crime” to buy part of a BC Lottery Corp casino. That employee was later hired by another casino. The report provided evidence of money-laundering in casinos (walk in with a hockey-bag full of cash, buy chips, play a bit, walk out with a bag which the tax authorities will be told has become heavier) and the kidnapping of two six- and eight-year-old children in BC at gunpoint to encourage their parents to pay debts. In April 2009, the BC Liberal government of the day responded to the report by defunding and disbanding the RCMP anti-illegal gambling unit.
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It feels strange that after I left, my home city and its hinterland have become places of world importance with Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ in downtown Victoria and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex hiding in North Saanich (https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=north+saanich&polygon_geojson=1&viewbox=). (Oh, and a skeevy abandoned hotel burned down (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-fire-1.5124254) within blocks of the two firms' former offices, and the caretaker has not been seen since).
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The worst thing about these updates continues to be that I can look at all the bizarre nonsense happening in Canadian politics and still conclude with solid justification that it looks like a comparative beacon of sanity compared to my home country. As, apparently, can the Sussexes, given that the UK is still basically racist enough to bully people on literally royal levels of privilege out of the country...
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I don't really follow the news any more but I am trying to do what good newspapers and magazines do: pass on some things about how society works in a particular place and time and how weird events shed light on it. Its just getting harder and harder to find that between the clickbait and the op-ed.
The focus on the Duchess of Sussex' ancestry did feel like something out of Louisana or Brazil circa 1880, and I am not reading or hearing what readers of the Daily Mail see and hear.
I am sure there will be plenty to talk about when the Conservative leadership race kicks off (in the middle of a US presidential race and an internal Democratic Party election of their candidate for president ...)
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One of the Green Party of British Columbia's two remaining official MLAs (out of ~87 in the Assembly) has announced she is running for the leadership.
Peter MacKay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_MacKay) has announced he is running for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. In the course of the teleprompted announcement it became clear that he speaks French about as well as I do (J’ai sera candidate!), which is a problem if you want to become Prime Minister of a country that is about 25-30% Francophone, especially if you come from a province with a significant francophone population and were MP from 1997 to 2015 (he did not run in 2015).
As a prosopographer, I will fill in some of the connections that Wikipedia does not spell out: Minster of National Defense under Harper, formerly dating Belinda Stronach (daughter of Austrian-Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Stronach)) until she crossed the floor, then dated a daughter of Quebec billionaire Paul Desmarais (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Desmarais) and a CTV News director, eventually married Nazanin Afshin-Jam who imigrated as an infant from Iran (and Harper really did not like the current regime in Iran) ... and in terms of policies and persona he is one of the less exciting candidates!
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The struggle over pipelines has reached the territories of the Wet'suwet'en in northern interior British Columbia. The elected councils of the individual bands and component nations approved the pipeline, but the hereditary chiefs don't. Generally, the further west you go in Canada, the less the British bothered to find a legal figleaf before claiming land and declaring indigenous governments out of existence and trying to replace them with something simple and standardized: most of British Columbia is unceded land and the ethnography is what you would expect for fiords and temperate rain-forest then high mountains then plateaus and forests than more high mountains than leeward foothills. So now there are nation-wide rail blockades (in a Canadian winter!)
Edit: also worth saying ... the RCMP have been storming into camps with rifles and balaclavas arresting protestors and pointing scoped rifles at them "for observation purposes" and threatening to arrest journalists photographing the scene. And the position of the Wet'suwet'en chiefs is that they are still sovereign over the full extent of their traditional territory, whereas the band councils have carefully limited authority defined by the Indian Act. I was always taught that you never point a firearm at anyone or anything you are not prepared to shoot: using a scope as ersatz binoculars is the kind of thing which comes up in comedy films!
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Yeah, I've been hearing a lot about the Wet'suwet'en crisis via Mastodon etc. My instinctive sympathies are with the people having guns pointed at them by the RCMP. Is the fact that the councils approved the pipeline and the chiefs didn't indicative of an actual disagreement between those two bodies, though, or just that the councils are proportionally easier to lean on?
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I think its very hard to understand internal politics unless you are physically and socially present. The jurisdictional issues between the band councils and the herditary chiefs make things even more complicated.
Some people are saying that the band councils were told that the pipeline was going through and they could sign the papers and get the money or they could not sign and not get the money.
This piece (https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-wetsuweten-are-more-united-than-pipeline-backers-want-you-to-think/) by someone who claims to have spent months in the area uses the phrase "The Wet’suwet’en are not a nation divided, they are a nation with differing opinions on the best route to a better future after history of oppression." That sounds like weasel words to me.
Edit: Meanwhile 10 people have met the requirements to run for leader of the CPC, and a similar number want to run but have not yet rounded up enough signatures and money (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/baird-not-run-conservative-leadership-1.5463429). Some stalwarts are out, including former interim leader and cabinet leader Rona Ambrose, Harper's pit bull John Baird, Maxime Bernier, former Quebec premier Jean Charest, Premier Doug Ford, both of the Mulroneys (yes, two of former Progressive Conservative PM Brian Mulrooney's children are senior in Ontario or Ottawa Conservative Party politics), former premier of Saskatchewan Brad Wall, and of course Alberta premier Jason Kenney.
The lucky ten range from well-known and well-connected names like Peter MacKay (who I talked about before) to Aron Seal (https://www.millennialconservative.ca/) who wants everyone to know he is a cannabis entrepreneur, chronically depressed, and supports abortion rights (and can save lots of money by "cutting waste" and that "in the public (education system), parents are suckers") But I had not heard of Andrew Scheer or Maxime Bernier before the 2015 leadership contest.