Author Topic: Canadian Politics 2022  (Read 12875 times)

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #15 on: March 15, 2022, 03:29:29 PM »
Former Quebec premier Jean Charest has announced his candidacy for Conservative Party of Canada leadership.  He will probably present a moderate and Canadian conservatism, whereas current front-runner Pierre Poilievre pushes the Overton Window of Canadian politics with ideas that are fermenting in the US right.  But because the CPC has a strong base in the prairies, its going to be hard for a very Quebecois person to compete with someone who grew up in SK and got a degree from the University of Calgary to network.

In further signs that many Canadian police are not living in the same world I am, the Vancouver Police Department released a military-style recruitment video with long guns, rappelling, etc. 

Smart crooks in Canada commit fraud and other white-collar crime (very unlikely to be seriously punished in Canada) but below that are drugs and real estate in city centres.  One of those colourful characters just got murdered in Edmonton.

Edit: on Tuesday 15 March, former Wildrose Party leader Brian Jean was elected to the provincial legislature of Alberta as a United Conservative Party candidate in a by-election.  Since he thinks UCP head Jason Kenney should resign (and ran against him for head of the party shortly after it was founded), expect fireworks.
« Last Edit: March 16, 2022, 06:04:08 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #16 on: March 22, 2022, 10:51:21 PM »
Pro Jubali: the federal Liberals and NDP have signed a Confidence and Supply agreement.  The list of priorities is very Canadian.  And a local Communist party (which is a party in the same sense that neighbourhood ten-year-olds and the Montreal Canadiens are both hockey teams) gets tangled in a knot about the Russian invasion of Ukraine https://www.cheknews.ca/local-communist-party-organizes-ukraine-rally-calling-on-end-to-war-992819/

Edit: oh, and the next Ontario election will probably be in May or June.  Rob Ford may not be tossed out of office for mishandling the pandemic.

Edit: ouch, Alberta premier Jason Kenney told his caucus staff "I will not let this mainstream conservative party become an agent for extreme, hateful, intolerant, bigoted and crazy views. Sorry to be so blunt with you but you need to understand what the stakes are here.  The lunatics are trying to take over the asylum. And I'm not going to let them." (The UCP was Kenney's creation so what does that say about him?)  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kenney-recording-ucp-alberta-leadership-review-staff-1.6396647
« Last Edit: March 24, 2022, 11:48:06 PM by dubsartur »


dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #18 on: April 22, 2022, 04:15:43 AM »
Here is a weird human one: one of the Canadian forces generals accused of sexual misconduct with subordinates has resigned and says he is headed to Ukraine to help their armed forces.  That is an alternative to "spending more time with his family."

Most armed forces have a "moral turptitude" clause in their expectations of recruits don't they?  They often have to accept some less than ideal recruits.

Macleans has a long piece on a notorious illegal fisher in BC.
« Last Edit: April 22, 2022, 04:52:02 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #19 on: May 19, 2022, 02:49:45 AM »
Welp, Alberta premier Jason Kenney has resigned after only getting 51% support among party members in a leadership review.  The man who would be Prime Minister is a one-term premier!

More skeevy things are coming out about RCMP behaviour before, during, and after the Portapique massacre (but not the underlying cause for the RCMP's strange behaviour).

And a hospital infection control officer, Dr. Jennifer Grant of UBC, has joined the Urgency of Normal anti-infection-control propaganda outfit We did not go back to pooping in the drinking water after cholera or doing surgery with unwashed hands after Semelweiss #urgencyOfFecalNormal

Canada's strong response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is encouraging, but also typical of Canadian foreign policy this century: Canadian governments are glad to send troops or weapons into any local war the US supports, as long as not too many Canadians will die, but not interested in learning about the local situation or making long-term plans.  Their world is very provincial even though Canadian is cosmopolitan.  Canadians have fought in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq (after the expulsion of the Americans), and Syria and none of those turned out great.  Ukraine is pretty safe for us, but if say China attacked Taiwan a Liberal or Tory government might do something foolish.


I wonder if Prince Charles' trip to Canada is preparation for Liz's death?  Reinforce monarchist sentiment in advance?
« Last Edit: May 20, 2022, 06:18:44 AM by dubsartur »

Glaurung

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #20 on: May 22, 2022, 10:26:43 AM »
I wonder if Prince Charles' trip to Canada is preparation for Liz's death?  Reinforce monarchist sentiment in advance?
I'd expect that's part of it, at least: I'm sure all royal visits to Commonwealth countries include promoting "The Firm" as an important element, and even if this one was planned some time ago it will still have been in the knowledge that the Queen wouldn't be around for much longer. Also, Charles will want to renew personal contacts with the current generation of national and provincial leaders.

I imagine they're hoping it goes better than William and Kate in the Caribbean...

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #21 on: May 31, 2022, 08:27:10 PM »
Finally some more Canadian policy news:

Quebec has passed its bill requiring immigrants to the province to interact with provincial institutions in French after only six months of residence.  This is naturally producing a counter-reaction from indigenous and visible minority groups.

Indy news outlets object to the latest bill to subsidize old media on the grounds that its just a handout to old media and excludes online-first outfits.

The federal government wants to ban the import or sale of new handguns and buy back a list of long guns.  As I have said before, the problem is that most firearms used in attacks on strangers in Canada seem to be illegal imports from the USA.  The government is not very good at tracking and identifying them.  Its not clear to me that a handgun ban would have the desired effects, but it would spoil the fun of shooters and collectors.  And enumerating badness ("these 1500 models of firearms are Prohibited") is always a failure compared to enumerating goodness ("all firearms firing brass cartridges manufactured in 1898 and before are Permitted").  When we limited magazine capacity, which does seem to have been effective policy, we said "magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds are Prohibited" not "the following magazines are prohibited: Glock A4 12-round, Glock A4 15-round, ..."

There is an Ontario provincial election on 3 June.  So far it looks like Doug Ford will survive his terrible handling of the pandemic because under First Past the Post, a party with 35-40% support can beat 60-65% support for the two main opposition parties.

Edit: oh, and BC received an exemption from the law criminalizing small amounts of drug possession.  As I think I have said, tainted drugs are killing more people in BC than COVID.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2022, 09:38:27 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #22 on: June 03, 2022, 03:58:08 AM »
Welp, another Canadian election returns the status quo ante comitionem.  A Conservative government under Doug Ford in Ontario with the NDP as the second largest party (their leader won her seat but is stepping down, the Liberal leader did not win a seat).  Ontario and Quebec handled the COVID pandemic almost as incompetently as the US and UK.  People in Ontario says he and his party followed the modern Canadian Conservative playbook of avoiding reporters and debates as much as possible in favour of photo-opps and scripted public statements.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2022, 06:06:27 AM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #23 on: June 03, 2022, 11:23:54 AM »
Am I right in thinking that Ontario's progressive wing probably suffers especially from the lack of preference voting or proportionality? I've heard a lot of vote splitting grumbling from Canadians in that respect.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #24 on: June 03, 2022, 06:29:13 PM »
Am I right in thinking that Ontario's progressive wing probably suffers especially from the lack of preference voting or proportionality? I've heard a lot of vote splitting grumbling from Canadians in that respect.
First Past the Post creates many problems for people who want Anyone But Conservative, and it encourages the Liberals and Conservatives to aim at pleasing 40% of voters regardless what the rest of the country thinks.  Wikipedia gives 40% Conservative (83 seats), 24% NDP (31 seats), 24% Liberal (8 seats), 6% Green (1 seat).

Edit: FPTP also encourages similar parties to fight over the same ridings, rather than expand their support across the province or nation.

Only 43% of elegible voters voted.  Part of the problem may have been that everyone is exhausted.

Former Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate Derek Sloan tried his luck in Ontario and failed to win a seat.  I have talked about him before.

I don't know much about the Ontario Liberals and whether they are a party of the establishment with vaguely universitied urban lefty sentiments like the federal Liberals.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2022, 03:50:03 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #25 on: June 08, 2022, 05:56:31 PM »
Macleans has a profile of Liberal cabinet minister Anita Anand.  A juicy bit and one of interest to Jubal:

Quote
when Oakville Liberals gathered at a local banquet hall that June to vote, Anand emerged as the nominee. The general election was in mid-October, so that summer and fall were a blur of maps, driveways and doors to be knocked. Because Anand is a talker, canvassing became a delicate ballet, as aides tried to move her along at the doors while the rest of the team was waiting halfway down the street. She ended up beating the Conservative candidate by seven percentage points.

Soon after the election, she was summoned to a meeting with some of the transition team advising the second-term Trudeau government. They wanted to know about any skeletons lurking in closets, so she knew they were vetting her for something. A week later, she pulled into a parking garage at Toronto Pearson International Airport in her husband’s pickup truck, a coat thrown hastily over the dishevelled clothes she’d been wearing at home when her son called to say his car battery had died. They’d connected the jumper cables and she was sitting in the truck, with her son hollering at her to start the engine, when her phone rang with a call from the PMO switchboard. First she screamed, then she answered. They told her to be in Ottawa to meet with the Prime Minister the next morning.

Anand walked into the room a jangle of nerves; she had met Trudeau a few times, but didn’t know him in any real way. When he told her he wanted her to be the minister of public services and procurement, she gathered herself and responded, “I would be so honoured,” just as she’d rehearsed in case she was rattled in the moment. “On my way out I shed a little tear,” she says. “And then I had to go find out what public services and procurement was.”
...
When she’s had her way with the speech, she and her team rehearse media questions. Her press secretary, Daniel Minden, does an eerily perfect imitation of the default journalist tone of a snotty teenager who’s just caught you sneaking into the house drunk. In response, Anand rhymes off the talking points and line items from the week-old budget that she’s still committing to memory.

Her previous career was as a law professor, so not particularly helpful in preparing to buy the government's stuff, but if your vision of government is a flock of appointees doing the work while MPs come and go as figureheads without authority to make decisions (shrugs)  She seems to have done all right.  And the federal Liberals have a problem of disrespecting people (including Parliament!), and letting them know they disrespect them, while verbally denying it because that would be uncouth.

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #26 on: June 08, 2022, 07:19:22 PM »
Yes, I guess the specialist vs democratic choice-maker in government is an issue in democracies way back to Athens. But the attempt to square that circle by not having the minister make any choices or be a specialist is a bit of an overly Humphrey Appleby brand of problem-solving.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #27 on: June 09, 2022, 04:45:49 AM »
Yes, I guess the specialist vs democratic choice-maker in government is an issue in democracies way back to Athens. But the attempt to square that circle by not having the minister make any choices or be a specialist is a bit of an overly Humphrey Appleby brand of problem-solving.
I know nothing about Anand besides this article, but her career in parliament looks like how Trudeau probably envisioned his policies around sex and race working out: appointing people who are different from him but fit smoothly into the Liberal machine.  Although the interviewer noticed one difference:

Quote
Anand still misses hashing out intricate concepts with academic colleagues. That may be why she is more open by default than other prominent members of a government that has made a maddening art of centralized control and message management. The hitch comes when Anand talks about her current portfolio. On the topic of defence, she frequently slips into talking-point mode, suddenly less frank or willing to acknowledge uncertainty or conflict, falling back on a canned phrase or fact. The shift is stark, as though someone rolled down metal shutters over a storefront.

It will be interesting to see whether as she gains more experience in parliament, she grows more independent or goes along to get along.

Jubal

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #28 on: June 09, 2022, 12:39:50 PM »
I think that's a problem in politics generally: whilst many important gains to be made are by having voices who are willing to bring new things to the table, in practice parties tend to promote people who are either a) easier to work with in their current systems or b) have big enough egos and personal bases to carry them up the ladder. It's especially noticeable on issues like race, and can easily end up with the people who get to the top tables either being so self-focused that they don't bring wider community issues to the table effectively, or so people-pleasing that they don't raise them either.
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dubsartur

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Re: Canadian Politics 2022
« Reply #29 on: June 28, 2022, 04:19:12 PM »
The Mass Casualty Commission found that the RCMP failed to send them some pages of notes from a conference call with the RCMP Commissioner and a RCMP officer in Nova Scotia.  These pages state that the Commissioner told them that their failure to release information about the weapons used by the mass shooter was harming the Trudeau government's plans for harsher gun control measures.  The government denies the allegations that they interfered politically but one of the people who was on the conference call says that the notes are correct.

In my view, police should always release precise information about firearms used in crimes.  This is important for public understanding of what happened, and for deciding what policy would be wise.  If most handguns used to shoot strangers in Canada are smuggled from the USA (as most experts suspect), then policy to reduce shootings should probably focus on discouraging criminals from doing that rather than say further restricting handgun ownership.  Police forces in Canada are currently very ineffective at finding the origin of firearms used in crimes and sharing it.

So its very very unfortunate that we have to squeeze this information out of public institutions with FOIPOP requests or (in this case) political interference.  And this story reinforces the suspicions of many gun owners in Canada that firearms policy is not being based on evidence and harm-reduction, but on pleasing ignorant people in big cities.

This is also a second way in which the RCMP appear to have mislead the public about the mass shooting in Portapique NS.

Edit: Meanwhile the NDP Premier of BC is resigning due to cancer, and the federal Green leadership contest has begun
« Last Edit: June 29, 2022, 06:24:49 AM by dubsartur »