Author Topic: Canadian Politics 2019  (Read 18030 times)

dubsartur

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Canadian Politics 2019
« on: September 25, 2019, 01:07:13 PM »
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.

Glaurung

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #1 on: September 26, 2019, 10:40:53 AM »
Yes please - understanding more about Canadian politics would be welcome.

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #2 on: September 26, 2019, 04:26:28 PM »
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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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #3 on: September 26, 2019, 05:30:36 PM »
"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': 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 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 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 because there were not enough eyes in the review process (the career of Margaret Wente, 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 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, 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). 
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 05:51:16 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #4 on: September 26, 2019, 07:34:39 PM »
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."
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 10:21:37 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #5 on: September 27, 2019, 03:18:47 PM »
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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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #6 on: September 27, 2019, 07:43:17 PM »
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.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2019, 09:40:06 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #7 on: September 30, 2019, 10:09:38 PM »
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' 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.

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #8 on: October 01, 2019, 11:31:07 AM »
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.

Quote
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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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #9 on: October 01, 2019, 01:00:45 PM »
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 (with ranked ballots, nothing so primitive as First Past the Post ...) had some irregularities. 

The 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.

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #10 on: October 01, 2019, 02:52:20 PM »
In 2014, the most rebellious Conservative MP Michael Chong voted differently than his party leader 1.5% of the time.  In the next parliament, Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith voted differently than his party leader 11 out of 90 times 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.

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #11 on: October 01, 2019, 05:38:24 PM »
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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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #12 on: October 01, 2019, 08:22:33 PM »
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.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2019, 09:41:07 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #13 on: October 01, 2019, 10:20:06 PM »
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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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2019
« Reply #14 on: October 01, 2019, 10:36:49 PM »
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.