Watching the YouTube video of Tory's encounter with the U Of O student, I guess I can see why it woulda raised some eyebrows. The nickname is the first thing Tory mentions after the guy says where he's going to school, and the guy says he'd never heard it. Somewhat awkward exchange, even though the student seems to take it as a joke.
And still a bit of a stretch to try and make that into a campaign issue.
There's always-- and I think every party has a few of these-- campaign workers (they have been known to call themselves strategists) who yearn desperately for a goatcha moment which, in their fantasies, will derail their opponent's campaign. Most of them, like this one, fizzle ("it seemed like a good idea at the time" is one which I have heard more than once), but some have been known to capture public attention.
There's always-- and I think every party has a few of these-- campaign workers (they have been known to call themselves strategists) who yearn desperately for a goatcha moment which, in their fantasies, will derail their opponent's campaign. Most of them, like this one, fizzle ("it seemed like a good idea at the time" is one which I have heard more than once), but some have been known to capture public attention.
In Canadian politics, genuine "Rum Rome And Rebellion" game-changers seem relatively scarce.
There was, of course, the "Yvette" business during the 1980 Quebec referendum, when a feminist pequiste cabinet-minister accused the wife of Claude Ryan of being like the subservient character of that name in a children's reader, thus outraging large swathes of Quebec women voters. But I think the sovereigntists were always gonna lose that one anyway.
More recently, you had the 2012 Alberta election, which added the phrases "bozo eruption" and "Lake Of Fire" into the political lexicon. Arguably, that derailed what would otherwise have been a Wildrose victory, though it was an odd sort of Gotcha: the comments had been up on the bozo's blog for months, and in fact had already been publicized by other activists, before somehow hitting the news late in the campaign.
Masks are not mandatory for voters during the Saskatchewan provincial election. Are for poll workers. There's a shortage of poll workers. Duh.
329% increase in active cases in 2 weeks.
Somehow the conservative Sask Party is going to win again. Ran up the debt again. The Sask Party is a reformed Progressive Conservative party, after Grant Devine's gov't destroyed the economy, tan up the debt, and eventually half his cabinet charged with fraud. Brad Wall who quit as premier was on Devine's staff. It's always the NDP which has to fix the out of control spending
During the election it emerged that in addition to being convicted of drunk driving premier Scott Moe had not been prosecuted for another DUI. And the surviving son of the crash where he killed a woman finally learned during the election that it was the premier who killed his mom. It's news but not talked of.
We also learned about additional Alberta millionaires and corporations which has given money to the Sask Party.
It's all not very nice. Meanwhile the stories from Alberta with Jason Kenney are worse.
There's always-- and I think every party has a few of these-- campaign workers (they have been known to call themselves strategists) who yearn desperately for a goatcha moment which, in their fantasies, will derail their opponent's campaign.
The weekend Globe covered the news of Kathleen Wynne's retirement, which brought to mind Tim Hudak's enthusiastic efforts to derail his own campaign in 2014. I remember people connected to the Liberal party who thought they were dead in the water until Hudak opened his mouth and starting talking. Unfortunate that Doug Ford was unable to repeat Hudak's performance in 2018 - not for lack of effort, mind you.
There's always-- and I think every party has a few of these-- campaign workers (they have been known to call themselves strategists) who yearn desperately for a goatcha moment which, in their fantasies, will derail their opponent's campaign.
The weekend Globe covered the news of Kathleen Wynne's retirement, which brought to mind Tim Hudak's enthusiastic efforts to derail his own campaign in 2014. I remember people connected to the Liberal party who thought they were dead in the water until Hudak opened his mouth and starting talking. Unfortunate that Doug Ford was unable to repeat Hudak's performance in 2018 - not for lack of effort, mind you.
What exactly did Hudak say that derailed his campaign? Something to do with that gas-plants thing?
There's always-- and I think every party has a few of these-- campaign workers (they have been known to call themselves strategists) who yearn desperately for a goatcha moment which, in their fantasies, will derail their opponent's campaign.
The weekend Globe covered the news of Kathleen Wynne's retirement, which brought to mind Tim Hudak's enthusiastic efforts to derail his own campaign in 2014. I remember people connected to the Liberal party who thought they were dead in the water until Hudak opened his mouth and starting talking. Unfortunate that Doug Ford was unable to repeat Hudak's performance in 2018 - not for lack of effort, mind you.
What exactly did Hudak say that derailed his campaign? Something to do with that gas-plants thing?
I think Hudak generally struck many voters as just too extreme, but it was the promise to fire 100,000 civil servants that sealed the deal for a lot of people.
When you say "It's news but not talked about", you mean that it's being reported, but people are avoiding it in general conversation?
If so, I wonder why that might be. Misguided concerns about respecting Moe's privacy? Or people just don't care because they like him so much? Or...?
A cynical friend from Humboldt told me that it was because most drivers on rural roads were half-cut, seeing such accidents as par for the course. One of the students in the office from my Days of Importance flew his car off an angled turn at (the police believed) 140 kph and his promising political career came to an end in a crumpled car in a drainage ditch.
Rural and small-town Canada has an unsavoury history of not paying much attention to such things.
Frankly, I thought, on the basis of my unscientific daily walk through the neighbourhood, that Ms Paul was on track to do even better. She did do well enough to give the Liberals some pause. I'm too busy to bother with the poll-by-poll breakdown, but it would be interesting. Anyway, well done, Ms Paul.
@NOprophet_NØprofit Different routes navigated by whim, counting signs by impression rather than by abacus, distracted by people and dogs, lost in my own (what passes for) thoughts.
I was teasing, you know. I thought it a lovely phrase, giving me an image of a thoughtful professorial person, who I presumed also would be muttering a bit. Samuel Marchbanks came to my mind. And also was considering discussing with the dog later today if we should walk scientifically or unscientifically.
Have we had part of this conversation before? My father, before he died, talked about Robertson when he was the editor of the Peterborough Examiner. In the 1940s to 60s my father's family had a cottage at Clear Lake. My fathers words were that Davies was a "fop and a dandy. Capes and rings. Seemed to be acting all the time. Rather silly. Hope he didn't take himself seriously."
Davies was complicated, I think. His public persona, both in person and in writing, was quite baroque, but there’s a lot going on under the surface I think. @Pangolin Guerre mentioned Fifth Businesses on a Heaven thread which has prompted me to re-read. FB and What’s Bread in the Bone are his best books, I think, though unlike PG I did enjoy his late books, even if they never reach the heights of his earlier work and missteps are occasionally positively cringeworthy.
@NOprophet_NØprofit yes, you're right, that we have had that exchange previously. @Marsupial , I think that "baroque" not only captures the man, but that he might approve. And, I think that you're quite right that his baroque patina hid deeper, darker currents. Though not 'dramatically' as affecting, I would include The Manticore amongst RD's best, and Rebel Angels for its roman à clef and grand guignol finale. @Sober Preacher's Kid regarding the Examiner - it could be worse - it could be part of the sunmedia chain!
I agree with the Manticore. I also very much liked The Cunning Man. Which also draws on Jung but does dive unfinished exploration of indigenous culture early on.
Heard tell his funeral was rather dramatic also. Including clouds of incense.
@NOprophet_NØprofit yes, you're right, that we have had that exchange previously. @Marsupial , I think that "baroque" not only captures the man, but that he might approve. And, I think that you're quite right that his baroque patina hid deeper, darker currents. Though not 'dramatically' as affecting, I would include The Manticore amongst RD's best, and Rebel Angels for its roman à clef and grand guignol finale. @Sober Preacher's Kid regarding the Examiner - it could be worse - it could be part of the sunmedia chain!
It was formerly owned by Sun Media, until they sold to Torstar two years ago.
@NOprophet_NØprofit yes, you're right, that we have had that exchange previously. @Marsupial , I think that "baroque" not only captures the man, but that he might approve. And, I think that you're quite right that his baroque patina hid deeper, darker currents. Though not 'dramatically' as affecting, I would include The Manticore amongst RD's best, and Rebel Angels for its roman à clef and grand guignol finale. @Sober Preacher's Kid regarding the Examiner - it could be worse - it could be part of the sunmedia chain!
It was formerly owned by Sun Media, until they sold to Torstar two years ago.
What is it that you dislike about the paper? And was there any sort of change in content or quality after it changed hands?
As the resident Albertan here. I guess I should post something to mark Don Mazankowski's passing, though I can't really say he made much of an impression on me either way. I didn't even remembered that he had been Minister Of Finance. (Always assumed that was Michael Wilson's show all the way to the '93 election.)
I suppose it's notable that he managed to get through the full two terms of Mulroney's tenure while being untouched by scandal, given how much of an issue, or at least a perceived issue, that was for the government.
I know he was one of the Conservatives who supported the reinstatement of capital punishment, which is not a plus in my books.
When Brian Mulroney gave his impassioned speech against the death penalty, Mazankowski was one of the Tories who sat poker-faced through the oratory, while other MPs were banging their desks. I can still remember the photo in the media.
Yeah, that happened. The BC election, that is. The NDP's gamble paid off with a majority and the Liberal leader has resigned. My own NDP MLA got 64% of the vote in a riding that is supposedly gentryfying. Obviously we're getting the right sort of gentry. The annoying Greens still exist, and won West Vancouver-Sea-to-Sky, once a Liberal stronghold, and their first seat on the mainland.
Given the shitshow that is about to unfold South of 49°, it's a good time to be Canadian.
@NOprophet_NØprofit yes, you're right, that we have had that exchange previously. @Marsupial , I think that "baroque" not only captures the man, but that he might approve. And, I think that you're quite right that his baroque patina hid deeper, darker currents. Though not 'dramatically' as affecting, I would include The Manticore amongst RD's best, and Rebel Angels for its roman à clef and grand guignol finale. @Sober Preacher's Kid regarding the Examiner - it could be worse - it could be part of the sunmedia chain!
It was formerly owned by Sun Media, until they sold to Torstar two years ago.
What is it that you dislike about the paper? And was there any sort of change in content or quality after it changed hands?
Sun Media I despised, they hollowed it out. The editorials, formerly written locally were replaced with formulaic right-wing Sun drivel from Toronto. The Examiner used to be so middle of the road it had yellow line down its centre, as it were. It had a repuation for being literate but not highbrow or pompous, very much a traditional rural Ontario stance.
The Examiner was always proud of, and respected for, being Robertson Davies paper.
The Sun reduced it from four full sections to two half sections, got rid of all the local reporters and my favorite section, the Odd Spot, a little chuckle story on the lower left of the front page,
To see the paper with which I learned to read and discovered politics in reduced to a ghost its former self crying out in a voice that wasn't its own was painful.
Torstar bought a hulk though. The days of the local newspaper are numbered. But I will shed a tear when it passes.
Yeah, I feel a similar nostalgic resentment at what has become of the Edmonton Journal, starting with the breakup of the Southam chain in the mid-90s.
For all the usual talk about Alberta being the reactionary snake in the progressive Canadian Eden, I don't think Edmontonians had ever seen a genuine Fleet Street-style conservative daily until Toronto's Sun chain opened its first regional outlet in 1978. While the Journal was running op-eds and cartoons criticizing the police for raiding a gay bathhouse in 1982, the Sun was covering the ensuing trial via an ostentatioulsy anonymous reporter called "Pink Leather".
(And there may indeed have been some Journal reporting that was less than enlightened on the raids. The Sun was definitely in a league of its own, however.)
Indeed. The decline of the local newspaper is the invitation for local corruption. The local in my home town (The Timmins Daily Press) does, by comparative standards, an OK job covering local issues, but is much more interested in local sports than anything else. Living in Toronto, I know more about the politics and shenanigans via gossip than via website. Heard in a Toronto pub, "Did you know that..." not printed in the Daily Press.
The Saskatoon Star Kleenex Phoenix is half National Post and article-verisments for cars. I read the obituaries. Which are like the sports pages, rather sad these days, and only about who lost.
Would it be sufficiently purgatorial to review the practice of mocking newspaper names? Is this a particularly Canadian phenomenon? The Mope and Wail? The Victoria Times Communist? The Halifax Chronic Herald? The Montreal Barf? The Ottawa Urinal? The Ottawa Shitizen? Cornwall's Standard Freeloader?
If I but had proper funding, I would have been able to provide a comprehensive list. A friend's father was a very temporary editor (apparently there's a story there) of what he called the Rocky Mountain Boutonniere.
National Fishwrap was how I heard it referred to...
When I was an undergrad at U of T there were two campus-wide student newspapers - The Varsity, which has been the "official" student newspaper since God knows when, and the Newspaper, which as I recall was founded by some Varsity defectors who found the then-current incarnation of the Varsity a little too ideologically left-wing for their tastes. (The Newspaper was not by any means a right-wing paper, as I remember it, but the tone of paper was a little more politically relaxed, so to speak.) Anyway, for their April 1 issue the Newspaper would always do a mock version of some other better known paper - the one I remember most distinctly was "The Globe and Male".
john holdingEcclesiantics Host, Mystery Worshipper Host
It was the Grope and Flail, in my memory -- and the Halifax daily was the Chronically Horrid.
You know, returning from Europe, quite penniless, I got a gig as a photog with the Newspaper. Of course, I never saw a cent. Fun, though.
The Newspaper's claim to fame was that it did have, as you put it, "more relaxed" attitude to politics. Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Kingwall, and Bruce Headlam appeared in its pages. I appeared in The Varsity, to The Varsity's (at one point, potentially litigious) ire.
Follow-up to the BC election: The NDP grabbed two more seats - both former Liberal strongholds - and the Greens have now lost their mainland seat by a whisker, and there will be a recount.
My friends and I were so stressed about the USA election that we forgot to be deliriously happy with our solid NDP majority and the shellacking of the Liberals.
The civic elections in Saskatchewan - all towns, cities, school boards - which were held today are delayed. Snow of 24" and drifts 6 to 8 feet. Voting resumes on Friday.
I'm thinking that the defeat of Trump will give Trudeau some leeway to argue that the US is once again a safe third-country, in order to get the courts to reverse their previous ruling that it was not.
I believe the government was already operating under a six-month grace period in which the old classification was allowed to stay in effect(ie. they could still treat the US as safe when booting refugee claimants out of Canada). So any liberalization or perceived liberalization under Biden will probably come at just the right time for Trudeau.
I wondered whether readers of this thread might perhaps be interested in this BBC radio programme about the Quebec Emergency of 1970, made a few weeks ago for the 50th anniversary. Many of you are probably familiar with the subject, but you might be interested to hear how it's presented for a non-Canadian audience.
You now have to create an account to listen to BBC programmes online, but I don't think it's difficult.
(I should point out that despite my Ship name I'm British, not Canadian, and my use of the name is only indirectly connected with Nova Scotia, but I do have relatives and friends elsewhere in Canada, including Quebec)
If nothing else, give a minute to soaking up the narrator's bored, detached delivery. He manages to maintain that exact tone throughout the whole thing.
And Rene Levesque's response to the murder of Pierre Laporte, at 59:30, is a classic. When we watched that in high-school, it was a bit of a kick to hear that kind of language in a school film. (Levesque was a master of English vernacular.)
And Rene Levesque's response to the murder of Pierre Laporte, at 59:30, is a classic. When we watched that in high-school, it was a bit of a kick to hear that kind of language in a school film. (Levesque was a master of English vernacular.)
For some context to this, Levesque's party was in no way allied with the FLQ terrorists, but the general public perception was that they were on the same side of the relevant issues(think the SDLP and the IRA, as an analogy).
And the politician who had just been murdered by the FLQ was a former cabinet-colleague of Levesque's, from his erstwhile career as a Liberal minister.
So that bit of footage is showing what was almost certainly the worst moment of Levesque's political life.
It was considered somewhat scandalous in anglo and federalist circles that some of the FLQ members, including the man who allegedly strangled Laporte, went on to have relatively respectable careers in Quebec society.
I used to sorta think so too, until I moved to Korea, and found out about stuff like this.
Granted, Hirobumi was a considerably nastier piece of work than Pierre Laporte, though by the standards of his day, probably wasn't much worse than William McKinley or Lord Kitchener(imagine the Philipines putting up a statue honouring the guy who shot McKinley). And he was apparently considered respectable enough in Japan to be included on their money up until 1984.
Just for the record, I tried clicking on the audio program at Shubenacadie's link, and as far as I can tell, it started playing without my opening an account.
Comments
And still a bit of a stretch to try and make that into a campaign issue.
In Canadian politics, genuine "Rum Rome And Rebellion" game-changers seem relatively scarce.
There was, of course, the "Yvette" business during the 1980 Quebec referendum, when a feminist pequiste cabinet-minister accused the wife of Claude Ryan of being like the subservient character of that name in a children's reader, thus outraging large swathes of Quebec women voters. But I think the sovereigntists were always gonna lose that one anyway.
More recently, you had the 2012 Alberta election, which added the phrases "bozo eruption" and "Lake Of Fire" into the political lexicon. Arguably, that derailed what would otherwise have been a Wildrose victory, though it was an odd sort of Gotcha: the comments had been up on the bozo's blog for months, and in fact had already been publicized by other activists, before somehow hitting the news late in the campaign.
329% increase in active cases in 2 weeks.
Somehow the conservative Sask Party is going to win again. Ran up the debt again. The Sask Party is a reformed Progressive Conservative party, after Grant Devine's gov't destroyed the economy, tan up the debt, and eventually half his cabinet charged with fraud. Brad Wall who quit as premier was on Devine's staff. It's always the NDP which has to fix the out of control spending
During the election it emerged that in addition to being convicted of drunk driving premier Scott Moe had not been prosecuted for another DUI. And the surviving son of the crash where he killed a woman finally learned during the election that it was the premier who killed his mom. It's news but not talked of.
We also learned about additional Alberta millionaires and corporations which has given money to the Sask Party.
It's all not very nice. Meanwhile the stories from Alberta with Jason Kenney are worse.
The weekend Globe covered the news of Kathleen Wynne's retirement, which brought to mind Tim Hudak's enthusiastic efforts to derail his own campaign in 2014. I remember people connected to the Liberal party who thought they were dead in the water until Hudak opened his mouth and starting talking. Unfortunate that Doug Ford was unable to repeat Hudak's performance in 2018 - not for lack of effort, mind you.
When you say "It's news but not talked about", you mean that it's being reported, but people are avoiding it in general conversation?
If so, I wonder why that might be. Misguided concerns about respecting Moe's privacy? Or people just don't care because they like him so much? Or...?
What exactly did Hudak say that derailed his campaign? Something to do with that gas-plants thing?
Initial story
Follow-up by a former producer of a talk radio show
I think Hudak generally struck many voters as just too extreme, but it was the promise to fire 100,000 civil servants that sealed the deal for a lot of people.
A cynical friend from Humboldt told me that it was because most drivers on rural roads were half-cut, seeing such accidents as par for the course. One of the students in the office from my Days of Importance flew his car off an angled turn at (the police believed) 140 kph and his promising political career came to an end in a crumpled car in a drainage ditch.
Rural and small-town Canada has an unsavoury history of not paying much attention to such things.
I think that this even beats out the 2019 election in Guelph, where Steve Dyck came second, with 25% of the vote.
Davies was complicated, I think. His public persona, both in person and in writing, was quite baroque, but there’s a lot going on under the surface I think. @Pangolin Guerre mentioned Fifth Businesses on a Heaven thread which has prompted me to re-read. FB and What’s Bread in the Bone are his best books, I think, though unlike PG I did enjoy his late books, even if they never reach the heights of his earlier work and missteps are occasionally positively cringeworthy.
Heard tell his funeral was rather dramatic also. Including clouds of incense.
Pretty bad.
It was formerly owned by Sun Media, until they sold to Torstar two years ago.
I was there, actually - as I recall, highish Anglican but not over the top.
Coincidentally, I finished Fifth Business and was just starting in on the Manticore when I saw PG’s post last night.
What is it that you dislike about the paper? And was there any sort of change in content or quality after it changed hands?
I suppose it's notable that he managed to get through the full two terms of Mulroney's tenure while being untouched by scandal, given how much of an issue, or at least a perceived issue, that was for the government.
I know he was one of the Conservatives who supported the reinstatement of capital punishment, which is not a plus in my books.
When Brian Mulroney gave his impassioned speech against the death penalty, Mazankowski was one of the Tories who sat poker-faced through the oratory, while other MPs were banging their desks. I can still remember the photo in the media.
Given the shitshow that is about to unfold South of 49°, it's a good time to be Canadian.
Sun Media I despised, they hollowed it out. The editorials, formerly written locally were replaced with formulaic right-wing Sun drivel from Toronto. The Examiner used to be so middle of the road it had yellow line down its centre, as it were. It had a repuation for being literate but not highbrow or pompous, very much a traditional rural Ontario stance.
The Examiner was always proud of, and respected for, being Robertson Davies paper.
The Sun reduced it from four full sections to two half sections, got rid of all the local reporters and my favorite section, the Odd Spot, a little chuckle story on the lower left of the front page,
To see the paper with which I learned to read and discovered politics in reduced to a ghost its former self crying out in a voice that wasn't its own was painful.
Torstar bought a hulk though. The days of the local newspaper are numbered. But I will shed a tear when it passes.
Yeah, I feel a similar nostalgic resentment at what has become of the Edmonton Journal, starting with the breakup of the Southam chain in the mid-90s.
For all the usual talk about Alberta being the reactionary snake in the progressive Canadian Eden, I don't think Edmontonians had ever seen a genuine Fleet Street-style conservative daily until Toronto's Sun chain opened its first regional outlet in 1978. While the Journal was running op-eds and cartoons criticizing the police for raiding a gay bathhouse in 1982, the Sun was covering the ensuing trial via an ostentatioulsy anonymous reporter called "Pink Leather".
(And there may indeed have been some Journal reporting that was less than enlightened on the raids. The Sun was definitely in a league of its own, however.)
I don't think that's a particularly Canadian phenom, because I know on the Ship I've seen mention of The Daily Heil and the Torygraph.
By the way, your list left out the Toronto Scum and the National Pest.
When I was an undergrad at U of T there were two campus-wide student newspapers - The Varsity, which has been the "official" student newspaper since God knows when, and the Newspaper, which as I recall was founded by some Varsity defectors who found the then-current incarnation of the Varsity a little too ideologically left-wing for their tastes. (The Newspaper was not by any means a right-wing paper, as I remember it, but the tone of paper was a little more politically relaxed, so to speak.) Anyway, for their April 1 issue the Newspaper would always do a mock version of some other better known paper - the one I remember most distinctly was "The Globe and Male".
The Newspaper's claim to fame was that it did have, as you put it, "more relaxed" attitude to politics. Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Kingwall, and Bruce Headlam appeared in its pages. I appeared in The Varsity, to The Varsity's (at one point, potentially litigious) ire.
My friends and I were so stressed about the USA election that we forgot to be deliriously happy with our solid NDP majority and the shellacking of the Liberals.
The Saskatoon Star Kleenex carried the story.
I believe the government was already operating under a six-month grace period in which the old classification was allowed to stay in effect(ie. they could still treat the US as safe when booting refugee claimants out of Canada). So any liberalization or perceived liberalization under Biden will probably come at just the right time for Trudeau.
You now have to create an account to listen to BBC programmes online, but I don't think it's difficult.
(I should point out that despite my Ship name I'm British, not Canadian, and my use of the name is only indirectly connected with Nova Scotia, but I do have relatives and friends elsewhere in Canada, including Quebec)
Thanks. I might try to start a BBC account to give that a listen, but I usually eff up when I attempt something like that.
If you're interested in the subject, here is an old documentary about the October Crisis, made not too long after it happened.
If nothing else, give a minute to soaking up the narrator's bored, detached delivery. He manages to maintain that exact tone throughout the whole thing.
And Rene Levesque's response to the murder of Pierre Laporte, at 59:30, is a classic. When we watched that in high-school, it was a bit of a kick to hear that kind of language in a school film. (Levesque was a master of English vernacular.)
EDIT: Sorry, this is the documentary.
For some context to this, Levesque's party was in no way allied with the FLQ terrorists, but the general public perception was that they were on the same side of the relevant issues(think the SDLP and the IRA, as an analogy).
And the politician who had just been murdered by the FLQ was a former cabinet-colleague of Levesque's, from his erstwhile career as a Liberal minister.
So that bit of footage is showing what was almost certainly the worst moment of Levesque's political life.
I used to sorta think so too, until I moved to Korea, and found out about stuff like this.
Granted, Hirobumi was a considerably nastier piece of work than Pierre Laporte, though by the standards of his day, probably wasn't much worse than William McKinley or Lord Kitchener(imagine the Philipines putting up a statue honouring the guy who shot McKinley). And he was apparently considered respectable enough in Japan to be included on their money up until 1984.