Author Topic: Canadian Politics 2020  (Read 11224 times)

Jubal

  • Megadux
    Executive Officer
  • Posts: 35495
  • Karma: 140
  • Awards Awarded for oustanding services to Exilian!
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #15 on: March 21, 2020, 09:06:34 PM »
Yes, that's a very different expectation set - the only leadership campaign in my lifetime in a UK political party to have included a major membership rise was that of Corbyn for the Labour party, and that was very controversial - the expectation here is that member recruitment isn't even really the leader's priority, and that leadership elections are conducted between the pre-existing members of the party.
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #16 on: March 27, 2020, 09:14:38 PM »
On 26 March the CPC suspended the leadership context despite Peter MacKay pointing out the Canada held national elections while we were fighting the Krauts and Stornoway would be a great place to self-isolate.  They will reconsider the decision on 1 May.

The Liberal minority government tried to grant itself unlimited powers to tax and spend without parliamentary oversight until December 2021, after media protests the opposition parties admitted that that might not be a good idea.  One rogue Conservative MP attended the bare minimum quorum (with 2 metre social distancing ...) against the wishes of his whip to deny unanimous approval to the final bill.

I would say that Trudeau is handling this pretty well because he knows he doesn't know anything about epidemiology, and because for whatever reason this situation does not run into a contradiction in his ideology in the way that all the things he promised in 2015 ran head on into "but I don't want to bother anyone with power."
« Last Edit: March 27, 2020, 09:36:56 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #17 on: April 26, 2020, 10:51:05 AM »
Something light: former prime minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull released an autobiography, and he and his ghost writer chose Justin Trudeau as their person to tell scandalous anecdotes about, mostly related to the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #18 on: May 08, 2020, 02:24:46 PM »
Details continue to emerge about the spree killing in rural Nova Scotia during the stay-at-home order by a gunman disguised as a RCMP officer with a variety of vehicles disguised as RCMP vehicles.  Local journalists do not have a lot of resources.

Justin Trudeau has responded characteristically: rather than working to make our current systems for managing and tracking firearms more effective and work harder with border control and US local police to slow the trade in US handguns for Canadian weed, or even finish implementing the bill his government passed in 2019, he wants to ban more semi-automatic rifles.  At present there is not really data to say where most firearms used in assault and murder in Canada come from, but gun crime tends to be related to organized crime or domestic violence (Canada does have firearms storage regulations which reduced the rates of accidents, suicide, impulse crime, and housebreakers picking up some firearms with the video console and the jewelry box). 

And since you can import a semi-automatic handgun and a box of 50 cartridges for the price of importing a kilo or two of narcotics, and hundreds of tons of controlled substances cross the border every year ... But banning certain weapons sounds good on TV, institutional reforms take longer and are harder to explain. 
« Last Edit: May 08, 2020, 02:48:13 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #19 on: May 14, 2020, 05:48:26 PM »
And humh, the accused murderer was banned from owning firearms for life in 2002, and a neighbour says she reported him to the police for stockpiling firearms and beating his spouse but was brushed off.  While tracking down the suspect in his RCMP disguise, one group of officers shot up a fire-hall because an officer from another unit was standing next to it and they decided that the officer was the suspect. 

The RCMP are the only police force in most parts of rural Canada, and they have long-standing issues with competence, racism, and sexism which a series of directors and governments have been unable to solve.  So again, its easier to pass a new law than to make the ones which already exist effective.

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #20 on: May 19, 2020, 06:39:05 PM »
And by 20 April the police submitted a document where "multiple witnesses" said that the accused murderer had boasted to them about having multiple firearms https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mass-killing-nova-scotia-search-warrant-1.5575059 That often happens in Canada: information just does not jump all the hoops in the bureaucracy to trigger action.

Meanwhile Canada has announced that it will resume issuing export permits to sell Light Armoured Vehicle armoured cars to Saudi Arabia.  They have promised us that they will not use them to commit human-rights abuses and that the videos from religious minorities in their kingdom and Houthis in Yemen are fake news and anyways the factory that makes them is in a strategic riding ::)

What Ensaf Haidar (the wife of Raif Badawi) and Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun and other less famous Saudi refugees in Canada think about this I do not know.

Edit: Oh wow, back in 2011 they had a tip saying that he had caches of handguns and long guns at two specific locations and was talking about killing cops.  Again, murder and arson are very illegal in Canada and it was illegal for the shooter to own any firearm made after 1898, but laws are not magic spells, you have to actually set up systems to enforce them and carry those systems out.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2020, 09:27:41 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #21 on: May 25, 2020, 07:46:33 PM »
Former BC Green Party leader and current independent MLA Andrew Weaver just tweeted that his two colleagues were not willing to back his threat to reject a confidence vote and go back to the polls over a NDP plan to develop BC's liquid natural gas industry https://www.politicstoday.news/british-columbia-today/weaver-says-green-mlas-were-afraid-to-stand-up-to-ndp-over-lng

Twitter makes everyone stupid and he or a close family member are suffering a very serious health problem which he does not want to talk about (between the lines, his decision to become an independent seems to have been that he can't promise to be at the legislature whenever the Green party needs his vote).

Meanwhile in Alberta, Jason Kenney just withdrew a policy against developing open-pit coal mines in environmentally sensitive areas, and declared that fossil fuels are an essential industry but checking whether orphan wells are leaking or birds are drowning in tailings ponds is not.
« Last Edit: May 25, 2020, 07:53:44 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #22 on: June 05, 2020, 07:48:10 PM »
Prominent Conservative Party of Canada member Stockwell Day has stepped down from some positions with large Canadian businesses and media corporations after seeming to deny that there is such a thing as structural racism in Canada.  Columnist Rex Murphy also has egg on his face and may be considerably less prominent in the future.

A Liberal MP was charged in early April with breaking and entering, harassment, and assault https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/marwan-tabbara-charged-1.5600249

And Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou's first attempt to have the proceedings to extradite her to the USA thrown out was rejected, and the BC supreme court suddenly decided that due to very serious technical reasons other parts of the case could not be completed in fall 2020 as planned and might have to extend until, for example, the last week of January 2021
« Last Edit: June 05, 2020, 11:02:23 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

  • Megadux
    Executive Officer
  • Posts: 35495
  • Karma: 140
  • Awards Awarded for oustanding services to Exilian!
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #23 on: June 06, 2020, 01:10:31 AM »
I note meanwhile that Trudeau is enjoying a significant poll bounce at the moment, like other leaders during Coronavirus,  indeed somewhat better than that of most of his Anglosphere counterparts. The Liberals' maintenance of a vague atmosphere of competence (at least to the external viewer) seems to have its own rewards in this sort of situation I guess.
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #24 on: June 06, 2020, 09:11:06 PM »
Yes, 4000 years of history tell us that situations like this boost support in the state unless they monumentally screw up.  I don't know if any heads of state will bring things to the point that they have to throw themselves off the cliff to restore fertility to the land, but some sure seem to be trying hard to restore the Old Ways.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk about cases of police in Canada killing a woman named Chantel Moore during a wellness check called by a friend, throwing a woman named Regis Korchinski-Paquet off her high-rise balcony in Toronto after being called in by family concerned about her mental health (police say she fell), stepping back into their car to calmly drive it into an angry drunk in Nunavut (there is video), and the courts dropping all charges against the people arrested by police in with long guns and baclavas for defending Wetsuweten territory (so if they were unarmed, and committing no crime, why did the police violate firearms safety 001 by pointing a firearm at something they did not intend to shoot?) 

Edit: other political consequences of the current situation ... premier Legault in Quebec (high infection rate, collapse of care for old people in assisted living facilities) and premier Jason Kenney in Alberta (blatant support for the oil industry and attacks on public-sector workers and environmental monitoring during a recession) are in trouble, while premier Doug Ford in Ontario has roused from his political deathbed by doing the obvious things (putting together a team of MDs and PhDs, having them create a simple and clear policy and going on TV to look serious and explain it, splashing lots of money around ... this kind of thing was not his strength before but I guess either the polls or the coronavirus statistics sobered him up).
« Last Edit: June 06, 2020, 11:12:46 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

  • Megadux
    Executive Officer
  • Posts: 35495
  • Karma: 140
  • Awards Awarded for oustanding services to Exilian!
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #25 on: June 07, 2020, 11:20:41 AM »
Yes, I'd seen some stuff about Doug Ford doing a good job, which from what I'd heard about Doug Ford was a surprise to me.

And yes - I think the interesting thing to compare is not whether crises boost support for incumbents, it's by how much they boost it and for how long. The UK conservatives saw a much smaller bounce when the crisis started and are now at significantly worse levels than that, for example. The Austrian conservatives saw a modest bump in support, while the German conservatives got a much more significant bounce. Trudeau's bump seems to be toward the bigger end of the spectrum and isn't obviously collapsing as the crisis goes on.

How much does implicit or explicit comparison with the US as main neighbour influence Canadian views on these sorts of international issues do you think?
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #26 on: June 07, 2020, 01:28:38 PM »
I think that comparisons with the USA are a big factor in all Canadian federal politics these days.  One of the big barriers the Conservatives would have to overcome to form government is all the people looking south of the border and saying "Trudeau may not be perfect but he's better than that."

Ontario has big problems (high infection rates, conditions inside assisted living facilities breaking down and needing the military called in) but Doug Ford seems to be doing the basic things you expect a premier to do in a pandemic whereas earlier his style of governing was chaotic.  He started out very unpopular so it was easier to rise than fall.

On the current situation, Anglo-Canadian police and corrections officers borrow a lot of their culture from the USA, especially the ones who see themselves as warriors.  And I will be interested to see how much the protest movement focuses on specifically Canadian problems around the RCMP and harrasment of indigenous people, versus the US-oriented Black Lives Matter.  There were two cases in recent years where young indigenous men were shot dead by civilians while committing property crimes (sleeping in a stolen vehicle, trying to steal a car parked in a locked garage) and the shooters were found not guilty.
« Last Edit: June 07, 2020, 01:38:00 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #27 on: June 20, 2020, 08:37:19 PM »
The Conservative leadership race continues with a four-way debate in French.

It turns out that the shooter in Nova Scotia withdrew half a million dollars in cash from Brink's / CIBC Intria on 30 March before committing his crimes on 18 and 19 April.  Governments have strongly discouraged large cash transactions for decades as part of the War on Drugs, so if you want to do them it helps to have connections, and Macleans is investigating the possibility that the shooter was working with an intelligence organization such as the RCMP.  In the west of Canada, many First Nations believe there are serial killers who are either associated with local police or who the local police ignore as long as its only indigenous people who disappear; its also well known that spouse abusers in rich countries cultivate relationships with the police to use their databases to track down their ex-partners, or just have any phone calls from neighbours handled discreetly.

I hope that some of my colleagues will be brave enough to talk about slavery in what became British Columbia in the 19th century (quite a few of the peoples around the Salish Sea enjoyed raiding their neighbours and hauling anyone that they could catch back to work for them).  The history of the British Empire, war, peace, and slavery is complicated.

Oh, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was expelled from the House of Commons for calling a Bloc MP whip failed to support an anti-racism bill racist.  I have not read the text of the bill so I have no further comments except that in Canadian and USA political discourse, calling someone racist is seen as more shocking than some racialized killings.
« Last Edit: June 22, 2020, 09:07:26 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #28 on: July 03, 2020, 11:56:58 AM »
Parliament has been meeting quite irregularly since the 2019 election, the opposition has not been very effective, and our Fearless Leader's support in the polls is jumping.  Just to add to the fun, an "armed" active-duty Canadian Forces reservist just burst through the gates around Rideau Hall by ramming them with a black truck at 6.40 am on 2 or 3 July.  He was apprehended by the RCMP at 8.30 am after the crash disabled his vehicle.  (So there were almost two hours of "dialogue" between break-in and arrest).

Its wonderful how some kinds of people can be peacefully apprehended while carrying a weapon and committing violent crime within earshot of the Prime Minister and Governor General, while other kinds of people get tossed to the ground or run over by the same police force for being insufficiently submissive, isn't it?

Edit: the suspect now faces 21 different firearms charges, including possessing a restricted or prohibited weapon, and one witness thought he was carrying a long gun.  I would expect someone in his position who had not been preparing to commit a crime for some time to have a semiautomatic rifle with plenty of 5-round magazines, and possibly a pistol or revolver with a capacity of up to 10 rounds (but transporting that would get much more attention from police if he was stopped on the long drive from northern Manitoba). 

Edit: and oh wow, now they say he was carrying four loaded firearms, including a M-14 with a high-capacity magazine (probably a standard-issue 20 round mag from the USA) and uttered a threat against the prime minister.  A battle rifle is no joke, even in semi-automatic only and with mostly 10-round magazines.  Assassination has not been a part of Canadian politics since Thomas D'Arcy McGee and the Chilcotin War, but now two prime ministers in a row have been attacked by lone gunmen.

Edit: and yep, he had "a Norinco M-14," a "high standard revolver" (High Standard seems to be a manufacturer), and two non-restricted shotguns (that could mean break-open, could be pump-actions with a significant magazine capacity, what was available probably depended on the local hunting laws).  As a Canadian Ranger he would have been issued with a Short Magazine Lee-Enfield or a similar bolt-action rifle.  And he started posting a lot of pandemic conspiracy theories in March.

The one high-capacity magazine is significant, anyone can make something which goes bang but reliable magazines to feed rapid fire are hard, so banning them is an effective means of harm reduction.  And the charge sheet includes uttering threats of death or bodily harm.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2020, 11:27:11 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #29 on: July 13, 2020, 07:12:49 PM »
On the topic of whether politicians have fairly fixed personalities and interests or respond to events: the Trudeau government is in trouble for giving a $19.5 million contract to WE Charity / Free the Children which paid $350,000 to two of the Trudeau family for speaking between 2016 and 2020; Sophie Trudeau, the prime minister's wife, is a prominent volunteer with the organization.

Edit: in fact, Sophie GrĂ©goire Trudeau was tested positive for the new coronavirus after attending a We Charity event in the UK on 4 March.  Canadaland, which was the first news agency to obtain receipts for the payments by the charity to Trudeau, keep saying "$900 million contract", but the contract was to process $900 million in grants not to be paid that much.
« Last Edit: July 14, 2020, 08:36:46 AM by dubsartur »