Bickerin' Beavers: Canadian Politics MMXXIV
Trudeau's recent reference to Poilievre as "Dear Leader" struck me as highly unoriginal(I don't think a month goes by when I don't hear someone call a political opponent that), not to mention rather desperate. And it didn't really fit, because, as bad as I think Poilievre's policies are, he hasn't really made himself the object of a personality cult, in the manner of Kim Jong-un or even Donald Trump. Plus, the insult doesn't quite fit for someone who is still in opposition.
If the Liberals ARE trying to portray the Conservative Party as an extremist dictatorship-in-waiting, Danielle Smith's appearance on stage with Tucker Carlson would probably be a better tree up which to bark. Though I actually have no idea what was said there, or even what the occasion was.
If the Liberals ARE trying to portray the Conservative Party as an extremist dictatorship-in-waiting, Danielle Smith's appearance on stage with Tucker Carlson would probably be a better tree up which to bark. Though I actually have no idea what was said there, or even what the occasion was.
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Trudeau is getting long in the tooth and the Tories smell blood. However the NDP have a trademark on sucking the blood out of the Liberal Party. We haven't cracked the marrow yet to get Pharmacare so we still need a bit more time to slurp.
Well, sure, but if he wins, he wins. So far, whatever he's doing seems to be working in his favour.
And yeah, he does come off quite like the nerdy objectivists I knew and loved in my U of A days. But that might be sorta like pointing out in 1983 that Mulroney had the style and mannerisms of a slick lawyer from the Quebec countryside.
And it would seem that the objectivist psychobillies actually just got handed at least a theoretical win by Justice Mosley of the Federal Court, though how far Poilievre can go in exploiting that is another story. I haven't been following the Conservative response, but I'm guessing it's something like "Point out that the courts say Trudeau was wrong to impose the EA, while trying not to look like you're pandering to the people who are most outraged about it."
Agreed that the NDP probably won't agree to bring the Liberals down any time soon. Cool metaphor, by the way.
The slur(?) as Dear Leader might be a reference to events leading to the curious silence of Michael Chong during the Conservatives' peculiar attack on the Ukrainian trade deal. There are rumours about strict internal discipline, but I've not yet heard anything worth repeating aside from this incident.
It'll be an interesting year.
The EA ruling will not help the Tories much. As I said on another thread, the main problem was the lack of action in the government constitutionally responsible for law and order in Ottawa: the Givernment of Ontario.
They push this issue they score an own health on Doug Ford.
That's some seriously renegade auto-correct there! (I'm assuming you meant to write "own goal".)
re: Ford...
Yeah, I agree, he's the main villain, but I'm wondering if public opinion in Ontario is ever going to attain a full realization of that fact.
In other words...
Is there any greater awareness of Ford's culpability now than there was on June 2, 2022?
It’s not that surprising to me that the Conservatives are doing well after almost a decade of Liberals in power, but I admit to finding the extent of their gains surprising. Poilievre is a polarizing figure with a lot of obvious negatives but based on the current 338Canada numbers he currently looks poised to take much of the 905-land swing vote back from the Liberals. (On the same numbers the NDP looks poised to take back some traditional strongholds in downtown Toronto.)
Justin Trudeau is also a polarizing figure(even in Ottawa, there are people wearing F*CK TRUDEAU masks, and I saw an old guy in a hospital waiting area a while ago randomly start telling the room about how Trudeau is responsible for the problems in the health-care system), but he has still managed to scrape together over a decade in power. You don't have to be the object of universal adulation to effectively capitalize on a given political situation.
I admit my comment came partly out of frustration that Poilievre appears to be the best the CPC has on offer at a time when the country arguably could use a break from the Trudeau-supported-by-Singh show.
My perception of the next election, whenever it comes, is that it’s going to be decided by who is perceived as having the worst negatives - whoever has the worst negatives loses. Whereas when the Liberals were elected in 2015 I think it wasn’t just a question of getting rid of Harper but to a greater or lesser extent a broad cross-section of the country actually thought that putting the Liberals in power would be a good thing. (My father, whose susceptibility to JT’s charisma is decidedly limited, once explained his vote for the Liberals on the basis that they were the closest thing on offer to a Joe Clark Tory.)
The Liberals seem to have lost the confidence of many MOTR/centrist voters who at the moment seem to giving their support to the CPC. This makes no sense if it’s supposed to be on an assessment of Poilievre’s positive qualities, at least from the perspective of the traditional MOTR voter, but makes perfect sense if they have come to the point of thinking that anything would be better than four more years of Trudeau.
That said, the Liberals have dragged their feet on both, in particular pharmacare. I would say that any party that had Bill Morneau as Finance Minister will not embrace pharmacare. Turkeys don't vote fir Christmas.
If the Liberals demure and dissemble on pharmacare (as I expect they will) then pharmacare is thhe issue the NDP will hang on them.
I was part of a large group at the NDP federal convention that initiated and passed a motion saying that if pharmacare isn't delivered on time (deadline this spring) then the NDP caucus has member confidence to walk away. If it isn't in motion soon, then it's just all talk.
Also you never get anywhere in negotiations if you're not prepared to walk/strike.
Yes. JT in 2015 was under the archetype of centre-left politicians who get portrayed as having a substantial emotional relationship with the public, whose deep moral and cultural aspirations the politicians are thought to somehow embody. Old Man Trudeau and Rene Levesque being probably the most famous recent example in Canada, with kiwis David Lange and Jacinda Ahern getting that spin in the GLOBAL media, at least.
I came of political age between the 1979 and 1984 elections, and thus my founding impression of Pierre Elliot Trudeau was "Washed-up has-been, despised across the country(*), but remembered from back in the day as a sexy idealist."
(*) Yes, his electoral fortunes fluctuated during that period, "Welcome to the 1980s" and all that. But after the NEP/oil-price collapse, the night-of-the-long-knives, 6 and 5, salmon-arm salute, that one last patronage binge etc, the guy was unquestionably vilified nationwide. With the predictable results in 1984.
In a similar way, the Conservative plunge of 1993 had much to do with their internal meltdown.
As of now, Conservatives are hoping that little attention will come their way (note the internal directive to MPs to not comment on the Alberta premier's transitioning strategy) and that a general disgruntlement with the economy and a weariness with Justin T will do the trick. And are keenly watching the US election, as they are known to have a ricochet effect.
I imagine that there are NDP activists diligently doing seat-by-seat analyses as we speak.
Thanks for the recollection, and the analysis.
I'm still inclined to think that, given the widespread animosity toward PET from about '82 onward, the '84 results were a foregone conclusion. Though, assuming there were other factors at play...
I wonder what woulda happened had Joe Clark decided that 66% was enough, and led the tories into the 1984 election. Maybe less support in Quebec, unless he successfully exploited the constitutional backlash with his "community of communities" vision and managed, like Mulroney, to swing Levesque's endorsement.
My alternative history guess is that Mr Clark would have had a strong minority/weak majority government, with about 80 Liberals, 40 NDP & perhaps 10 nationalists, all plus or minus a dozen. While Clark worked intensely on his French and campaigned hard in Québec, he was never received warmly and I do not think he would have obtained more than a dozen seats. Governments are more effective with a working opposition and the Liberal civil wars would not have been as destructive. And, without Mr Mulroney, there would have been no Meech Lake accord and its failure, and the attendant rise of the Bloc.
However, like all alternative histories, it is best off on the science fiction shelves.
The info allegedly passed was non-stop secret, but still, I dunno. I think it's time for Canada to start actively conducting foreign Intel-gathering of its own, if for no other reason than with everyone from India to Rwanda to Ortis' gangster buddies apparently robbing us blind via espionage, we're starting to look like doormats by not doing any of our own.
Well, we're part of the Five Eyes, so we must throwing something into the pot, so as not to be viewed as freeloaders. Not sure what that might be, or how we would acquire it.
However it is not difficult to find another agency to carry out foreign intelligence, Canadian Forces Intelligence Command springs to mind.
There is VERY little about this on the internet, the only things I've found being an interview with Malcolm Fraser(the former head of CARE Australia) on YouTube, in which Fraser complains about CIDA's deception, and astonishingly berates his assistant for trying to argue that CARE Australia's contract was with CIDA, not the Canadian government. The trotskyist website WSWS also has an article about it.
New information on the case of two jailed Australian aid workers
YouTube:
How NOT TO manage a television news interview
Maybe the junta was spying on Papandreou? Though his Canadian sojourn was well before the 2000s.
What agencies thought they were doing in Ottawa is quite beyond me, but they may have somehow thought that the Canadian government was as interested as they were, and that there were hordes of bureaucrats working on these files. For cluelessness, I give the example of a Ukrainian diplomat I met at a reception in about 1990-- he was certain that my department had "dozens" of staff working on Ukrainian Canadian community issues--- I took the opportunity to introduce him to the single colleague whose responsibility it was (as well as a portfolio of western and eastern European ethnicities-- about 12% of one person's time was working on Ukrainian Canadian community issues). The diplomat clearly thought I was lying and was borderline offensive in expressing this sentiment.
As a side issue, we used to vet invitees to GG and PM events-- this colleague twice saved ministers from embarassment with agèd Nazi collaborators à la case of Mr Speaker Rota. Nobody does any of this any more, as we have seen.
These days it's Indian and Pakistani jaspora politics that give Ottawa headaches.
Time-consuming detail work is not thought to be exciting enough for most staff. Staff, political or permanent, are rarely nerdish enough to think of it. Although one of a disappearing generation, I always made a point of seeing that ministers etc are properly briefed. I recently had to cobble together a list for a function and every name had 2-3 lines of background as well as contact info. That's not been the norm for years.
I have also experienced enough political campaigns to know that most people don't understand how boring but necessary campaigning is; that especially includes vetting, risk management and prevention of embarrassment. But then the party rides you to prevent a blowout in the media, it's utterly necessary,
Of course, the reactionaries didn't get their way on everything, and Mulroney prob'ly only got their vote again because of free-trade in '88, with any lingering gratitude for the agreement nowhere near enough to offset the resentment caused by perceived Eastern favoritism(not sure how he thought he was gonna get away with that CF-18 stunt) combined with inaction on numerous neo-con crusades, thus leading to the relative triumph of Reform and ABSOLUTE slaughter of the tories in '93(granted, his failure to protect Quebec from alleged constitutional humiliation helped on that last one).
Overall, I think he continued the Bennett and Diefenbaker pattern of the tories being only an intermittantly governing party, in periods when Liberal corruption and calcification(sometimes combined with economic downturn) render that party temporarily unfit to rule. I also think that general pattern continues under the post-Manning conservative parties.
His GST didn't do much to help tory re-election prospects either.
Mulroney, of course, had the last laugh on that one.
That shoulda read "so-con" crusades, eg. abortion, anti-gay rights etc.
I don't have a ton of personal affection for the guy myself. That said, his premiership was the first that I was cognizant of start to finish, and with a mature understanding of political ideology(*). It also seemed to mark a clear break in my mind from what I had come to know as the post-Expo '67 Liberal Canada. (The vibe for the quasquicentennial was somewhat different than what I understand the one for the 100th to have been.)
Overall, I think he kinda got unfairly singled out for corruption, but I guess he set himself up for that with "You had an option, sir!"(a phrase which now apparently warrants it's own wikipedia page). One memorable exchange from parliament, against a Manitoba New Democrat who was attacking Mulroney on patronage during Pawley's rule in Manitoba...
I'm guessing the scandal involved Quebeckers, and Mulroney's comparison was partly meant as a dog-whistle to people in Quebec who thought they were unfairly stereotyped for corruption.
Also remember him replying to some allegation involving wrong-headed decision-making:
A somewhat irreverent context to reference Our Lady, so maybe not aimed at Ultramontanes per se, but anyone in certain communities with a nostalgic memory of small-town glad-handers who always knew the common argot.
(I will concede that I don't know French, so am unaware of how widespread that type of rhetoric woulda been among Quebec politicians at the time. I suspect it woulda been more of a Tory than a grit thing, in any case.)
No, he broke that mold. He was the first Conservative since John. A. Macdonald to be re-elected to a second majority (Borden doesn't count because the party system imploded in 1917). Unfortunately it cost Canada the soul of the old PC party.
Or, as I like to say, the NDP is where the Liberal Party used to be, the Liberals are where the PC's used to be, the Conservatives are where the Socreds used to be and the Social Crediters are as pleased as punch in their upgraded digs in the Conservative Party.
True, but I was thinking in terms of straight number of years in power, rather than minority vs. majority. For number of years, the Grits from 1921 onwards have been winning hands down.
Granted, if you balance off number of years with control of government, Mulroney does indeed do the best, as he had a majority for 100% of two terms.
(But, Jesus, what an aftermath!)
And with Smith and Poilievre dallying with the conspiracy-theorists, it's actually the Aberhart version of Social Credit we might be getting.
For every cancellation of an Alternative Energy and Oil Substitution Progamme or refugee boatload dogwhistling, there were a hundred personal notes or calls to people in distress or rating congratulations. While at the time I did not think much of this, the prevailing viciousness of many of our current political types brings it into context for me.
At least the papers are mentioning his looseness with satchels of banknotes, a situation from which David Johnston, then an academic on Stephen Harper's retainer, rescued him.
But, as the cashier at my Italian butcher said this morning, he was wrong but generally he tried to do the right thing.
Coincidentally, right now I am reading persona non grata, conservative theorist Tom Flanagan's memoir of commiting public career-suicide by playing devils advocate on a particularly combustible criminal justice issue in 2013. Flanagan is especially bitter about the back-stabbing he thinks he got from his former disciples Stephen Harper and Danielle Smith, and tosses in a couple of unflattering anecdotes.
According to Flanagan, when Belinda Stronach crossed the floor to the Liberals in 2005, Mulroney was recovering from a near-fatal bout of pancreaitis, but still found the time and energy to call Harper to offer consolation. A couple of years later, however, when Mulroney got into trouble in that Airhus scandal, "Harper told the entire conservative caucus not to talk to the former prime minister", among other indignities.
I suppose it's easy enough to condemn Harper on that, though given that Mulroney was largely responsible for the PC's near shutout of 1993, AND that corruption played a big role in the disintegration of his image, one can possibly understand Harper not wanting his government associated with ol' Lyin' Brian at that particular moment.
(Another colorful detail is that in the aftermath of Flanagan's controversial remarks in 2013, the PMO's office called him to deliver a reprimand, which included an aide reciting "a garbled version of
Given that Flanagan, while seemingly not a so-con himself, was immersed in a political subculture where bible-thumpers are a major part of the scene, I can't imagine it was THAT shocking for him to hear violent and vengeful biblical imagery quoted by party activists into his answering machine.
But, yeah, probably best avoided in dealing with those "outside the flock", so to speak.
From Canada's Largest Majority AND beating the Liberals at Free Trade/Reciprocity to auditioning for Hinterland Who's Who as they were reduced to a single breeding pair.
The Progessive Conservatives in Mulroney's second term, Canada's wildest ride,
Yeah. First off, the Liberals were historically the pro-reciprocity party. And it was a Trudeau-appointed commission that had recommended free-trade in 1985. Not to mention that John Turner was the epitome of the corporate Liberal who would be especially pro-life market, and stay away from close identification with the kind of labour and activist groups who supported protectionism in the 1980s.
And on the other end, it was Mulroney himself who had previously rejected free-trade, by invoking the grand old tory tradition with "That issue was settled in 1911."
I think the general consensus is that Turner forced himself into supporting continued protectionism, but after a while, actually started to believe his own rhetoric.
Looking back all I would say with certainly is that he was much better than what his successor party currently has on offer.