Canadian Politics 2019

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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 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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[dubsartur]

In the latest exciting scandal, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been discovered to be a ... dual citizen with the United States  (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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[Glaurung]

In the latest exciting scandal, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been discovered to be a ... dual citizen with the United States 

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.

[dubsartur]

In the latest exciting scandal, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been discovered to be a ... dual citizen with the United States 

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.  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).

[dubsartur]

The head of the Green Party of British Columbia, a distinguished physicist (and founder of cool indy-web projects), 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%

[dubsartur]

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    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. 

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[dubsartur]

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   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 

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.