Author Topic: Canadian Politics 2021  (Read 16791 times)

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #60 on: September 30, 2021, 10:57:05 PM »
On the rise of the People's Party of Canada, its worth noting that in Alberta, the social-democratic, workers' New Democratic Party and the Liberals collectively gained almost 10% in vote share, while the PPC and the regional-nationalist Maverick Party gained about 6% between them.  The Conservatives went down from 69% of the vote to 55% in Alberta.  The Greens dropped from 2.8% of the vote to 0.9%.

A CBC reporter seems surprised by this, but the NDP were the first party in Canada to break into national politics from a regional base, and that base was in the west.  Traditionally the NDP and Conservatives fight for rural seats west of Ontario because the Liberals are a bit too central-Canadian and urban.  So the big three parties are still perfectly capable of persuading each other's voters to switch sides, and only a minority of the people leaving the Conservatives are choosing radical new parties.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2021, 01:53:00 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #61 on: October 09, 2021, 07:27:27 AM »
The substantive policy issues (such as they are) in October are the form of the new government (will the Liberals make long-term agreements with one or more opposition parties or build a majority for each bill separately?), the composition of the new Liberal cabinet, and a group of bills regulating speech on the internet which were abandoned in-progress when the election was called and will have to start again with the first reading.  Four women out of the 35 Liberal cabinet ministers lost their seats.  Journalists say that cabinet ministers in this government have mostly been figureheads with ill-defined, overlapping responsibilities and that staffers appointed by the Prime Minister's Office are the ones who actually decide and implement policy.  OTOH, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott were Liberal cabinet ministers under Trudeau.

Justin Trudeau celebrated his holding on to office with a small scandal.  Having created a National Day of Truth and Reconcilation because it was a Truth and Reconciliation Committee recommendation which didn't take anything away from people with power, he spent the first such day on vacation on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  Many people just took that day as a holiday, but it would have been wise for a PM to do something with indigenous people or residential-school survivors or just stay home.

Derek Sloan, the Ontario MP who was ejected from the Conservative caucus after repeatedly aligning himself with white supremacists, came fifth (less than 3% of the vote, behind the PPC) in his new riding in Alberta.

And after the recount, the two leading candidates in one riding were only 12 votes apart.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2021, 07:39:28 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #62 on: October 16, 2021, 04:12:08 AM »
We now have a date for the announcement of the new cabinet (26 October) and the first meeting of parliament (22 November).  The opposition leader are asking why we have a three-month break in parliament in the middle of a pandemic and a tainted drug crisis (the last government was dissolved in mid-August), and I rather agree.  But if your concept of government is sitting in a back room while deciding which of your employees to obey ... (shrugs in I just live here)

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #63 on: October 16, 2021, 10:10:53 AM »
And after the recount, the two leading candidates in one riding were only 12 votes apart.
We had a seat in 2017 which the SNP took by a margin of two votes (North-East Fife).

I was discussing Canada recently when discussing UK boundary changes with friends and the differences of political culture: it's a serious issue here that Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross, the northernmost mainland constituency, is being expanded into a new Highland North due to its low population, which will be over-massive to the point where it'll be very hard for the MP to rotate around the towns and do advice surgeries and so on. However, most countries don't have quite this practice of direct access to MPs - and so e.g. Nunavut is a single-member constituency despite being many, many times the size of the UK.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #64 on: October 22, 2021, 03:34:44 AM »
The size of rural ridings is already one of the barriers to proportional representation in Canada.  Its hard to persuade rural people to be even more physically and socially removed from their representative.  A likely solution is to switch the ten biggest metropolitan areas in Canada into groups of ridings and distribute those proportionally, while keeping FPtP for large rural ridings.  A third of the population of the country live in three metropolitan areas.


Two issues I have talked about before continue to grind forward: no less than ten servicemembers of the rank of general / admiral and up and one commander in charge of the Canadian Navy's training school in Halifax have been investigated, retired, or shifted into less visible positions due to accusations of sexual misconduct https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/sexual-misconduct-military-senior-leaders-dnd-caf-1.6218683

And after the incident in December 2019 when an indigenous grandfather and an indigenous child were handcuffed for trying to open bank accounts with their First Nations status cards, the Vancouver Police are changing their policy on handcuffing people taken into custody https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vpd-makes-policy-changes-following-bmo-handcuffing-incident-1.6218439
« Last Edit: October 22, 2021, 04:23:33 AM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #65 on: October 22, 2021, 10:13:16 AM »
Why not do the whole thing STV, mostly multi-member seats but with some single-member seats in the big rural areas (which become AV preference voting single-member seats, like Australia's)? That would seem the obvious solution to the issue to me.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #66 on: October 22, 2021, 04:49:47 PM »
Why not do the whole thing STV, mostly multi-member seats but with some single-member seats in the big rural areas (which become AV preference voting single-member seats, like Australia's)? That would seem the obvious solution to the issue to me.
Its hard to remember the Before Times and separate the talking heads' pretexts from actual voters' concerns, but as best as I could recall the objections to STV were that its more complicated and that it could favour the Liberals.  But its hard to remember the Before Times and there was a lot of nonsense thrown up by people who like being able to get 95% of the power with 35-40% of the vote.  Elizabeth May believes that the parliamentary committee could have found a system they agreed on if Justin Trudeau had given them a bit more time.

How would multi-member seats under STV work?  Keep eliminating the candidate with the least votes until there are n candidates left not one candidate left?  Would not that create problems where there are say five members and one party has 40% support and should get two seats?

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #67 on: October 24, 2021, 10:55:32 PM »
Yes - you have a quota, and in each round of counting, you either eliminate the lowest placed person or redistribute unused votes from someone over the quota. Parties are expected to run as many candidates as there are seats, so you do have quite a lot of candidates to rank. If a party has about 40% of the raw/first preference vote in a five member seat, they will almost always end up with the two seats that will imply: even if all the 40% go to one of their candidates, that candidate then gets way over quota and donates their surplus to get another one over the line.

The precise counting mechanics of STV aren't the simplest thing in politics, but on whether it does the job and is fair, it hits all the metrics one should want out of a voting system, and it's not that hard to vote in or run: I've run STV votes on numerous occasions without issues.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #68 on: October 26, 2021, 01:13:31 AM »
My thoughts on what Jubal is saying are too complicated and unformulated to write, but meanwhile former Liberal PM Jean Chrétien has come out full genocide apologist, of the "I had to go to boarding school and when I was minister of Indian Affairs 1968-1974 nobody told me about this child abuse stuff" variety https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/jean-chr%C3%A9tien-tlmep-comments-1.6223637  He was also allegedly lobbying the current Prime Minister on behalf of China over their hostage-taking and the Huawei executive.  For context, the first book by a former civil servant describing the systematic abuse and willful neglect in the residential schools was published in the 1920s.  And one function of Indian Affairs is keeping very detailed track month by month of the number of First Nations, Métis and Inuit in Canada, so they absolutely knew that many kids were going into those schools and not coming out.



And yelp:

Quote
While Jean Chrétien was minister of Indian affairs, his federal department received several reports — including one addressed directly to him — of mistreatment and physical abuse of children at residential schools, government records show.
...
A cursory look at the historical record reveals that while Chrétien was minister, his department received at least four reports outlining allegations of abuse and mistreatment of children at St. Anne's Indian Residential School, which operated in the Fort Albany First Nation, along Ontario's James Bay coast.

The department also received reports of abuse from other residential schools during his tenure, including two from one that sat about 130 kilometres north of his hometown of Shawinigan, Que., records show.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/chretien-residential-schools-abuse-minister-1.6224844
« Last Edit: October 26, 2021, 04:10:38 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #69 on: November 03, 2021, 01:10:58 AM »
Pundit and consultant Alex Usher had a post a few weeks ago which might help understand why I am so doubtful whether Liberal promises will be fulfilled:

Quote
The thing you need to understand about Liberal Party of Canada promises is this: they aren’t meant to be taken literally.  Seriously, don’t do it.  They put almost no serious into crafting them – hell, the drafting of this one seems not to have started until the writ dropped, which is why we had the hilarious spectacle of Trudeau insisting this was the most important election of a generation/in the history of Canada/since the early Cretaceous period and yet have no idea what he was campaigning on until about halfway through.  This is a rather unhinged way for a governing party to behave, when you think about it, but there it is.

The best way to think of a Liberal manifesto is as a kind of semaphore to the electorate (Editor’s note: I had to look that one up too).  The breadth of issues covered by the promises and the wonkiness of the language used to describe them signals to the electorate that Liberals are smart and have a plan.  The specifics of that plan are irrelevant – they’ll change them as they go along and gather better ideas.  At best, the plan tells you “these are the issues Liberals will pay attention to once elected.”  So, you need to pay attention to the headlines under which Liberal promises are rolled out, but not the actual specific wording of the promises.

I don't trust the author but he does have a sense of how politics works in Ontario.

Meanwhile the federal and provincial governments are still forcing roads and gas pipelines through unceded indigenous territory which has never had a road cut through it at gunpoint.
« Last Edit: November 03, 2021, 03:23:21 AM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #70 on: November 03, 2021, 12:38:40 PM »
This is, if true, actually quite an unusual way for parties to behave: most sizeable parties anywhere that might actually get elected tend to follow through on a big chunk of manifesto promises, if only because often nobody's got time to radically redevelop ideas once they get into government so working through manifesto detail as a To Do list is a path of least resistance.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #71 on: November 04, 2021, 02:43:24 AM »
This is, if true, actually quite an unusual way for parties to behave: most sizeable parties anywhere that might actually get elected tend to follow through on a big chunk of manifesto promises, if only because often nobody's got time to radically redevelop ideas once they get into government so working through manifesto detail as a To Do list is a path of least resistance.
Yes, the transition of Canada from a parliamentary democracy to a dictatorship of the Prime Minister created many problems where the ministers can't make everyday decisions without authorization from the Prime Minister's Office, and the PMO has its full headspace committed to tracking polls (sigh) so can't observe orient decide and act on some estoeric issue of labour policy or procurement or whatever the issue is.  The whole strength of a parlimentary democracy is that the work of becoming a domain expert and implementing policy is spread out across a team of ministers and MPs, you don't need to wait for a Julius Caesar who can reform the calendar and restructure the legislature and write learned treatises and hobnob with foreign princes.

When the Prime Minister is so far from a serious thinker or details person as the current PM, its even worse.  Trudeau made a good figurehead in 2015 (his credentials as a feminist, anti-racist, and honest person have tarnished a bit since then), but he was never the person for working out exactly how the things in speeches were going to be achieved from day to day and bill to bill.


Yet another Conservative leadership candidate is disputing the result of an internal party election.  This time it was for head of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba and the challenger does not seem to have many non-partisan supporters https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/shelly-glover-the-self-declared-premier-manitoba-doesnt-need/
« Last Edit: November 05, 2021, 10:11:20 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #72 on: November 17, 2021, 02:54:03 AM »
The RCMP have caught systematically lying about an incident where they indiscrimately pepper-sprayed protesters at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island.  This incident took place close to settlements, not in the backwoods where the RCMP can keep out or distract independent observers.

And the freemen on the land, a type of crank which is vocal on the prairies, have been glomming on to the anti-vaccine movement just like the white supremacists.
« Last Edit: November 17, 2021, 06:59:05 AM by dubsartur »

Pentagathus

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #73 on: November 17, 2021, 02:52:12 PM »
Getting pepper sprayed at fairy creek sounds like a euphemism. Or like the plot of a horror film for children.


Is Canada mandating vaccination or is this just about businesses requiring proof f vaccination and suchlike?
« Last Edit: November 17, 2021, 03:13:38 PM by Pentagathus »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2021
« Reply #74 on: November 17, 2021, 10:24:50 PM »
Getting pepper sprayed at fairy creek sounds like a euphemism. Or like the plot of a horror film for children.

Is Canada mandating vaccination or is this just about businesses requiring proof f vaccination and suchlike?
Its even better because police try not to say pepper spray any more, they have some acronym.

Health care is a provincial responsibility in Canada, and in BC right now you only have to provide proof of vaccination to eat at restaraunts, go to movie theatres, use gymnasia, and so on, and to work in some jobs like "nurse" or "MLA."  I did not have to provide proof of vaccination when I got my retail job which involves some dealing with customers.  But just the possibility that they might have to get vaccinated gets the anti-vaxxers excited.