Canadian Politics 2020

[dubsartur]

So after a couple of very eventful years, Canadian politics are in a sleepy phase.  Newly goateed Justin Trudeau seems to have realized that he does not actually know what he wants to do after his advisors talked him out of his pledges from 2015, the Conservative leadership race is just getting started (Aron Seal seems to have dropped out because he could not secure his first 1,000 nominations by members by 27 February, party stalwarts Peter Mackay and Erin O'Toole are the only candidates who have already passed all stages of the application process), Canada is caught between the USA and China after the USA thought it would be a good idea to charge a Huawei executive while she was passing through Canada and have her extradited south of the border, and Coronavirus is keeping people at home and indoors.

[dubsartur]

In university affairs, many Canadian universities have relied heavily on recruiting students from South and East Asia, because in most provinces they are allowed to charge foreign undergraduates something close to the cost of instruction and because the population of Canada is ageing.  Some tiny (<10,000 students enrolled) universities and colleges like Cape Breton University have a majority of international students.  So if there are major reductions in international travel due to fears of coronavirus/US-Iranian or US-Chinese tensions, that may hit them.

[comrade_general]

This coronavirus is such a joke. 14 people in all the US have died and people are going nuts. Meanwhile over 16,000, that's sixteen thousand, have died from the flu so far this season and no one cares. Where's that joker meme when you need it.

[dubsartur]

Indeed, when your base standard for a plague is "a third of the population dies," a possible 2% fatality rate looks a bit quaint.

[dubsartur]

With coronavirus my understanding is that the issues are:

- We may have lost the chance to prevent it from becoming endemic.
- National health services have mostly been made too 'efficient' to be able to handle a double-digit percentage of the population going down with something infectious and life-threatening at the same time
- The political establishment lacks the will to impose effective quarantine measures soon enough, and rising movements just want to throw furriners into camps not listen to a bunch of MDs and epidemiologists go on and on about vectors and "a 2014 article in JID"
- it could mutate into something nastier, this is a new disease and we don't know how it will behave

It has spread very rapidly in South Korea and Italy which are not as poor or as badly governed as China.

[dubsartur]

Also, before the 20th century the height of treatment for most contagious diseases was bed rest and basic nursing.  When someone stumbled onto something that actually worked, they could not prove it and they could not spread it so a little while later a new fad took over, much like alternative medicine and diets today.  It took until the 19th century to go from miasma theory to germ theory. 

If you took away the respirators and the unlimited supply of clean water and healthy nutritious food, COVID-19 would have a much higher fatality rate than 2-4%.  And we don't have enough respirators, hospital beds, etc. for the whole population.  Canadian politicians and commentators are very much stuck in 'social conflict' thinking and don't know how to deal with issues that don't care about how they feel like climate change or epidemic disease (or a mugger).

[dubsartur]

The Ontario Liberal Party now has an elected leader: Steven Del Duca.  His biography is out of central casting (age 47, law degree, advisor to former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty, MP 2012-2018 and Minister of Transportation under Katherine Wynne 2014-2018) but he won solidly so party members must think he is a good choice.

[Jubal]

I still kinda want to understand what makes the Can-liberals tick better than I do at the moment. But I don't have the energy to wade into political theorising at the moment, even the blogposts on "what actually is liberalism" and "what is radical liberalism" that I really want to write to have something to point people at when they incessantly tell me that my political philosophy is a contradiction in terms.

[dubsartur]

The relationship between federal and provincial parties is complicated too.  It might be pretty close in Ontario, but in BC the Liberals are the party of capital and not very interested in the kinds of social policy that get a Justin Trudeau out of bed in the morning.  Ujjal Dosanjh who is interested in those kinds of issues held offices as a BC NDP cabinet minister and premier and a Federal Liberal MP.

Sophie Trudeau has tested positive for COVID-19 after a trip to the UK, Justin Trudeau is self-isolating.

[dubsartur]

On Monday 16 March mirror universe Justin Trudeau has banned entry to Canada except for Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and "at this time, Americans."  There is talk of financial aid to workers and businesses and of invoking the Emergencies Act which is the 1988 successor of the War Measures Act which was last invoked by Trudeau the Elder in the 1970 Front de libération du Québec crisis.  Meanwhile the Health Minister of British Columbia, next door to Washington State and already having some differences with Ottawa over pipelines, states that "we remain concerned that access to visitors from the United States continues to be allowed."

Premier of Ontario Rob Ford has declared a state of emergency and various First Nations leaders are requesting that people not travel into their communities due to limited resources.

Edit: Jason Kenny has declared a state of emergency on Tuesday the 17th too.  BC, Alberta, and Ontario are the three provinces with the highest rates of confirmed cases.

Edit: BC declared a state of emergency on Wednesday the 18th.

The province of Alberta is considering decriminalizing drunk driving and replacing the criminal charges with fines. 

[Jubal]

How open actually is the US/Can border across much of its length? Is e.g. commuting across it something anyone actually does, or would it be far too much of a faff to be remotely sensible?

[dubsartur]

How open actually is the US/Can border across much of its length? Is e.g. commuting across it something anyone actually does, or would it be far too much of a faff to be remotely sensible?

I am trying to find the words for how big this is but just one bridge between Detroit and Windsor ON carries half a billion dollars of trade a day and several hundred thousand people cross the border on a normal day (ignoring things like the library that was accidentally built with the entrance in one country and the loans desk in another, or all the surprisingly heavy kayaks which pass between San Juan Island and Vancouver Island and return half an hour later).  Ontario and BC are probably the most integrated provinces, there are not so many in the prairies and the Maritimes are next to very rural parts of the United States (but if you live in one of those parts, crossing into Quebec to get drunk on your 18th birthday or visiting the hardware store in Maine is a big deal).  There are people who commute daily or on the weekend, nations with a US half and a Canadian half ... and "nobody can defend this border so we have to learn to live with each other" has been British and then Canadian policy since 1815.

And there are a few bits of the USA which are only accessible by land from Canada: Alaska is the most famous, but there are also ones like Point Roberts, Washington and the Northwest Angle of Minnesota.

I think that "at this time" is code for "my ministers tell me they need a few days to figure out how to do this without ending automobile production north of Mexico three days later."

Edit: And yes, later on the 17th "Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the talks" report that "Canada and the United States are finalizing a deal to close their shared border to non-essential travel — an extraordinary measure designed to slow the spread of COVID-19."

[dubsartur]

The Conservative leadership race is facing serious hurdles given that the basic activity of an internal party election is sending people door to door and around ballrooms gathering signatures and donations.  They are down to four candidates and one possible and people inside the party are talking in public about changing the rules.

The border closure is looking a bit sinister: refugee claimnants will no longer be allowed to cross into Canada outside of official border crossings (and can't use official crossings because of the Safe Third Country Agreement with the USA and (quoth the Ceeb) "there will be exceptions for some foreign nationals coming to Canada to work, study or live permanently.

The exemptions include seasonal agricultural workers, fish and seafood workers, caregivers and all other temporary foreign workers, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

But IRCC warns that people planning to come to Canada under these exceptions should not travel immediately. The government will announce when the exemptions are formally in place, which is expected some time next week.

Travel exemptions also include international students who already held a study permit or had been approved for one when travel restrictions kicked in on March 18."

[Jubal]

The Conservative leadership race is facing serious hurdles given that the basic activity of an internal party election is sending people door to door and around ballrooms gathering signatures and donations. 

This is fascinating to me - in the UK, I'd increasingly assume that the vast majority of campaigning for a party leadership campaign was mailshots and online activism. There's almost nowhere that has a high enough density of party members that door to door work would be a good use of your activists' time.

And yes, I'm afraid that many of these borders won't get back to being as open as they used to be for some time

[dubsartur]

A big part of campaigning for a party leader in Canada is just trying to get new members for the party, most of whom will lose interest within a year (the Samara Centre for Democracy reports have some details).  This time the Conservatives are trying to crack down on that by requiring a percentage of votes to be people who were already members at the start of campaigning and carefully not mentioning the police investigations into how Jason Kenny became leader of one of Alberta's conservative parties then took over the other.