Canadian Politics 2022

[dubsartur]

Tamara Lich, one of the organizers of the Ottawa convoy protest, is back in jail after a judge decided that she violated her bail by attending a celebration to receive an award.

The inquiry will not allow the victims' lawyers to cross-examine the Portapique shooter's common-law partner on the ground that she was a victim of domestic violence.  Several aspects of her story are unconfirmed or hard to believe and prop up questionable stories which the RCMP is trying to tell (especially her claim that she spend all night in the freezing woods barefoot in a T-shirt and yoga pants, and only emerged on the morning to tell the police her story).  We know that the RCMP lied about only learning that the shooter was disguised as a police officer on the morning after (recordings show several people telling the RCMP on the night before that a man in a police car with a police uniform is shooting people) and its possible that they leaned on her to support their timeline or she was more involved in the preparations than she wants to admit.  Its obviously a difficult situation and many people who knew the couple say that she was physically abused by him.

Edit: Also, Canada accepted Germany's urgent request to return a Siemens tubine belonging to Gazprom which was being repaired in Canada by Monday 11 July.  That sentence embodies a lot of things about the Russian economy, Germany's post-1989 relationship with Russia, and the gap between the Trudeau government's rhetoric and its policies. Gazprom seemed so surprised that on Wednesday they made up an excuse why they can't accept the turbine and resume supplying natural gas to Germany at the full contracted rate.

[dubsartur]

More disfunction inside the Green Party of Canada around the kind of issues lefty people on American social media like to yell at each other about https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/green-party-president-quits-tells-members-the-dream-is-dead-1.6579335 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/green-party-leadership-1.6590602

Enough people have quit the committee for the leadership contest that its not clear if it will be able to continue.

[Jubal]

Is the leadership contest committee in this case the people running the contest (essentially the returning officer etc) or do they have a different function?

[dubsartur]

Is the leadership contest committee in this case the people running the contest (essentially the returning officer etc) or do they have a different function?

AFAIK the Leadership Contest Committee was created to govern the leadership contest (it creates rules and so on).  The governing body of the GPC is the federal council.

I would imagine that they nominate the local election officials or define a procedure for choosing them.

[Jubal]

Right - in the LDs as the similarish system i know better, the federal board (equivalent here to the fed council) would write the election rules ahead of time, and then the returning officer is responsible for everything and for making any rulings on those roles once the election starts.

[dubsartur]

I think they created special terms for this contest given the issues which plagued the previous leader and contest (plus COVID etc.) https://www.greenparty.ca/en/leadership-contest/rules  So its not a routine bureaucratic step like raising a motion at a meeting of the federal council.

[dubsartur]

The indigenous grandfather and granddaughter arrested for trying to open a bank account with their First Nations ID card settled their lawsuit against the Vancouver police.

A 15 year old in Alberta with a perforated appendix had to wait 2 1/2 hours to get a hospital bed and 29 hours for surgery due to the stress which COVID is placing on the health care system.  Meanwhile Canadian provinces are removing the requirement to wear a mask inside hospitals.

My understanding is that the pandemic is about as bad in Ontario as in the USA, other than a somewhat higher rate of vaccination and boostering.  In my province it seems flat since spring 2022.

Leaders of the accellerationist separatist Diagolon movement were arrested in Canada on charges of assault, pointing a firearm, use of a restricted weapon in a careless manner and mischief.  They also talked about raping the wife of the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.  Diagolon is Alaska to Florida, the movement spends a lot of time eating cannabis and talking about what a wonderful country it would be once that area was cleansed of undesirables, and is very white - the symbol for Diagolon is a white line ("where the sensible people will live") in a black field ("the places that will sink into the sea or explode").  They also talk a lot about shooting and / or hanging people.

Edit: Macleans has a long-form piece on how families and criminals moved back and forth between Canada and the USA in the late 20th century https://www.macleans.ca/longforms/my-father-was-a-criminal-how-i-found-out/

And the BC Liberal party (the party of capital, in a two-party system with the party of the public sector unions) is considering changing its name to BC United because right-wingers who watch a lot of TV or follow too much social media are angry at the Liberals https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2022/09/27/Please-Advise-BC-Liberal-Rebrand/

[dubsartur]

COVID is exploding in some provinces but provincial governments are holding firm to their denialist positions (acquired immunity acquired immunity notbody wants to go back to home office).

Its mid-October and there has been no rain for months on the west coast of Canada.  This is killing salmon and cedar trees.

Danielle Smith is now head of the United Conservative Party and premier of Alberta.  Among her policies are unilaterally passing an act to remove Alberta from some areas of federal jurisdiction such as gun control, and making the unvaccinated a protected group in AB human rights law because, quoth Smith, the unvaccinated are the most discriminated against group in Canada the past 50 years (so in Smith's words as soon as the Canadian government stopped mass kidnapping of indigenous kids into schools or foster homes, the most discriminated-against group was not visible minorities or religious minorities or gays and lesbians but people who refuse to be vaccinated; some of the restrictions such as on cross-border travel were requirements by the destination country, but never you mind).

[Jubal]

Is that sort of platform Smith has sufficient to win in somewhere like Alberta? Or does it actually pass the point of "slightly too wingnut for the electorate"?

[dubsartur]

Is that sort of platform Smith has sufficient to win in somewhere like Alberta? Or does it actually pass the point of "slightly too wingnut for the electorate"?

I would take a bet at 2:1 that her UCP will lose the next election, because they are physically or ideologically incapable of dealing with the big issues AB faces such as overdependence on oil revenues and COVID-19 and because they are incumbents in hard times.  In many ways, they have similar problems to the British Conservatives: a large share of the party membership has lost contact with physical and political reality, so leaders have to either satisfy them and outrage most of the electorate and nearby powers (whether Ottawa or Brussels) or use normal politics and be pulled down by members who see this as betrayal.

Electing her will raise questions among the voters who accepted the UCP as heirs to the old Progressive Conservatives who were corrupt but not so blatantly wingnutty (former premier Ralph Klein was an alcoholic and problem gambler, but AFAIK he did not invent new policies after downing five shots of whiskey and losing $7,000 at the casino)

Edit: Journalists are systematically going through Smith's public statements and newsletters from the past year and finding flirting with the idea that Ukraine just needs to be neutral to stop the Russian invasion here and sharing posts from an antisemitic blog there.  Lots of people had to reorient their thinking about Russia and Ukraine this spring and sort through competing narratives from convincing sources with agendas, but it shows that she is not great at avoiding saying things which critics can turn into soundbites, even after she was pretty sure she would be premier soon (and that she absorbs a lot of ideas from weird rightists).

[dubsartur]

The province of BC has a new leader by default after the candidate who broke with the party establishment by opposing the establishment candidate was ruled to have violated election rules https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/10/20/With-Appadurai-Out-Can-Eby-Rest-Easy/ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/david-eby-ndp-leadership-campaign-elections-bc-1.6623522  This really does not look good, because BC is in the middle of multiple crises: floods in winter, droughts in summer, refusal to mitigate COVID-19, mass deaths of trees and salmon, tainted drugs, and unaffordable housing.  To me, this is not the time for the government to say "everything we are doing is fine, this leadership contest should be a formality."

Party leadership contests in recent years have a history of irregularities which the courts and police keep at arms length from.

Another Albertan is calling Daniel Smith's faction of the UCP (foreign, irrational) Republicans rather than (native, rational) Conservatives https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/conservatives-alberta-united-conservative-party-annual-general-meeting-edmonton-1.6623529  That is an eccentric reading of the conservative movement in Canada but it does show that merging two parties into the United Conservative Party did not make factions go away or let both sides speak the same language.  "conservatives and republicans no longer speak the same social language. They do not consume the same media and therefore do not have the same social frames of reference."

IIRC, there is an argument that public opinion does not exist without mass media to create it.

BC had its municipal elections this week, the local mayoral campaign was basically personality politics (the two candidates could not describe different policies they would impliment, just utter polite nothings and accuse each other of being all talk, no action or just in the race out of a desire for attention).

Edit 2022-10-26: oh, and the police who arrested the First nations grandfather and granddaughter for opening a bank account refused to attend the apology feast so the nation says they can't accept the apology https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/heiltsuk-reject-apology-call-out-vancouver-police-chief-adam-palmer-for-denying-vpd-racism-1.6628452

[dubsartur]

Right now there are two big issues in Canada.  Doug Ford the premier of Ontario is about to invoke the Notwithstanding Clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to force school workers back to work before waiting for the case to move through the courts or a strike to begin.  And since January the government has raised interest rates from 0.25% to 3.75% to counter inflation.  The problem is that if there are actual shortages of fuel, food, labour, etc. due to the war and the COVID pandemic, hiking interest rates can't change that , but it does make life much harder for people with a mortgage or small businesses which need loans.  They are gambling that most of the rise in prices is due to it being easy to borrow more money and bid higher, rather than an aging and COVID-riddled population, the removal of Russian oil and gas and Ukrainian grain from the world market, etc. etc. etc.  Other measures to reduce inflation such as higher taxes for forced savings are taboo to the federal Liberals and Conservatives.

Edit: oh, and a fixer says he was hired in 2019 to entrap then Calgary mayor Nenshi into accepting kickbacks https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/mayor-nenshi-calgary-alleged-plot-1.6636091  This story was broken by the online-first outlet Canadaland which does some investigative reporting and a lot of blathering about what one reporter said another reporter said.

Edit: Wow!  After 55,000 education workers striked the Ontario government agreed to repeal the back-to-work legislation which invoked the notwithstanding clause as soon as the legislature resumes https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cupe-strike-labour-board-ruling-expected-1.6642824

[dubsartur]

Three trivial things in Canadian politics and one potential policy one.  The BC Liberal Party members (= party of capital) voted to rename themselves BC United although it still has to be confirmed at their convention.  If they change their name then no provincial party will be allowed to call themselves the Liberals for some time.  MP Elizabeth May became joint leader of the Green Party of Canada with a 32 year old black man named  Jonathan Pedneault.  And after swindlers stole or lost the assets of the FTX crypto exchange in the Bahamas, the federal Liberals have started to point out that the new Tory leader was boosting cryptocurrency just last year.

And doctors and public health officials in BC and Ontario have started to say out loud that letting COVID, RSV, and influenza roam free was not a bad idea and that effective masks would help.  They are not yet talking about air quality in the papers and the offical policy is still to remove public health measures one by one rather than update them to what we know in 2022.  Hospitalizations and excess deaths have not significantly declined since the last vaccinations in spring 2022  per the BC CDC and the BC COVID-19 modelling group.

I see lots of people still wearing cloth masks or dental masks or uncovering their noses, and that is a failure of education or availability.  Anyone willing to mask should be in a N95 or higher mask or respirator in public indoor spaces.

[Jubal]

What wing (if any) of the Canadian Greens does May represent? Are there clear internal political factions with organising bodies, or is it a more loose field?

Vienna continues with FFP2 masks on public transport but little else in place: maybe ten percent of people mask up in shops.

[dubsartur]

What wing (if any) of the Canadian Greens does May represent? Are there clear internal political factions with organising bodies, or is it a more loose field?

Vienna continues with FFP2 masks on public transport but little else in place: maybe ten percent of people mask up in shops.

The federal Greens have never had more than 3 MPs, and for most of this century Elizabeth May was both their only MP and the party leader.  She has distanced herself from the shambles in the federal leadership.  OTOH, Canadian parties have become vehicles to glorify the Leader and for a long time she was not just the leader but the only MP.  Its hard to decide whether the party seemed focused around her because talking about the Leader is all journalists know how to do, or because she liked attention.  So if you want to be an anti-Mayist you can say that she was secretly orchestrating the chaos from behind the scenes to get back in the spotlight.

I don't think it would be possible to get a neutral view on the shambles inside the federal leadership because anyone who is close enough is friends with some of the parties or associates themselves with one of the factions (and there are confidentiality requirements).  Recent Green platforms have had some contradictory things or things which seem poorly thought out.

BC was one of the homes of the world Green movement, and one source of conflict is how to get the party seats outside of its base in BC.  That is a circular problem since a party will reflect the interests of its voters and especially those voters with MPs.  They used to have a MP in Nova Scotia and I think they have one in Ontario.