Canadian Politics 2017: I've Got a Pipeline Straight to the Heart of You

OK, reading the "controversial opinion" thread, I have a sense of where you're coming from:

Looking at the development the last five years, it's getting clearer and clearer that the West should have bombed Syria in 2013.

― Frederik B, Saturday, 8 April 2017 04:11 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm saying it was worth the risk of regime change, of regional war, of whatever, because we did the opposite and it has failed disastrously, and whatever would have happened it would have been handled by Obama instead of Trump.

― Frederik B, Saturday, 8 April 2017 05:39 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maybe you prefer the Tories?

I have no idea whether or not you're an idiot, but if you're joining a political party because they manage to respond to the gassing of civilians with the right words, then you're acting like an idiot. They're raising 'valid concerns', but what are they going to do about it? Great if they have actual policies for helping refugees, but what are they going to do with Assad and Syria? What is their larger plan?

And I don't have one either, I'm just so fucking frustrated that we've gotten to this point, where Trump is doing what Obama should have been doing in 2013. Assad gassed his own people again. What was Trump supposed to do? And now Rubio is out there saying that perhaps Assad could use his wmd's on America as well, and boy, that will obviously turn out well.

The 'don't do stupid shit' of the Obama doctrine just kicked the can down the road, until a moron took over. Sometimes you need to do the shitty thing to ensure it won't be done less moronic.

I'm not sure what thread would be right to ask this question, but what would it take for people to consider that Obama might not have made the right choice in 2013? How much worse would it have to get?

Oh, and it's supposed to say it 'will' be done less moronic, of course.

Well, first, no, that wouldn't be my only reason for joining the party. I was a member in 2011 and have voted for them in every federal election except 1997. They had lost me over the last few years but I had already been considering whether to rejoin since a leadership convention is coming up (one of the few times when it makes a difference whether you join a party or not). People who read these threads semi-regularly instead of driving by to post snark probably have some context for this. The leadership convention is where you get to vote for a leader who hopefully has detailed policies and a plan. Joining a party doesn't even mean that you're necessarily voting for the party; it just means that, for a small fee, you get to be involved in deciding these thing.

Secondly, frankly, I think people who want to drop bombs on another country have more of a responsibility to show a larger plan. "OK, this is fucked up. We don't have all the answers yet so let's make sure that we're following international law and try to achieve some kind of multilateral consensus on how to deal with it, especially because we know the West has fucked up this kind of thing before" seems to me like a perfectly reasonable stance to take right now, especially for a Canadian opposition party.

"+ Right now, what we can do is try to help the people who are being hurt in a direct way."

Fred, the NDP are essentially leaderless at the moment. Words are pretty much all they have.

can we not call people idiots here please. this is the Canadian politics thread, we shouldn't be escalating things beyond "hoser".

Fred, do you even know who Don Cherry is?

The math has been overdone at this point, we have decades and decades of evidence than western military action in the middle east are doomed to catastrophe for everyone involved. It seems evident to me, like climate change and free health care. If it is a platitude to state a desire to increase the amount of refugees and not use bombs then vive les platitudes and vive le NDP.

Anyone here knows Peter Julian well? Alexandre Boulerice (perhaps one of the biggest NDP figure in Quebec) announced his support for him.

An actually critical article about Trudeau in the international press: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/17/stop-swooning-justin-trudeau-man-disaster-planet?CMP=share_btn_fb

(I don't know enough about any of the NDP candidates yet tbh, probably the least about Julian.)

it's not guardian's first

i recall reading another one criticizing him but forget for what

how are we feeling about the BC election? I am not permitting myself to feel hope that Christy will get turfed

I didn't know there was one tbh. Being out of the country does this to you, apparently. So the NDP have been leading the polls for a while - this has happened before, hasn't it?

they were leading the polls last time around by a decent margin and not only did the liberals win, but in fact extended their majority.

I'm just back from vacation but i think i better start volunteering with my local ndp mla's campaign as our riding was fairly close last time

i am not confident, but will be bummed if the liberals win again

NDP in with a decent chance. Their platform rollouts have been good and generally well received. Fears about Horgan's electability seem to be dissipating. I was at the media thing where he announced the housing platform last week and was really quite impressed. He was really on point with media questions, talked about Site C dam, LNG and housing with intelligence and energy. Only needed a couple of small slams at the Liberals to totally win me over. Here in the city we maybe forget that this election has to be won in the interior and up north. He's a big guy, a logger's son who may end up being more appealing in the sticks than any of their leaders since Harcourt.

There is the usual narrative that the Greens will spoil the NDP's chances but we get that every time and it never really pans out. They are polling quite high at 18% supposedly, but maybe few people are actually aware of Andrew Weaver and what a spluttering mansplaining twat he is. Highest they ever got was 12% of the vote and that was with an excellent leader (Adriane Carr) and the NDP at their lowest point.

I'm hopeful (but usually wrong.) If the Liberals get back in then this town is truly fucked.

andrew weaver is awful, he gets into nasty arguments with citizens on facebook all day

I voted for John Horgan in the last NDP primary before the 2013 election, he was really charismatic and articulate in the debate I attended (Mr. Dix was somewhat less so)

You're right about the interior, all the attainable lower mainland and island seats won't be enough. I guess that's why i'm still pessimistic that the map will flip in our favour. I do feel better about the NDP messaging than in the last 2-3 elections, it's much more focussed on why the Liberal corruption screws voters over

andrew weaver is pretty hilarious on social media. he started a long argument with a green candidate on the timeline of a friend who is a union exec and an ndp member and was seemingly unaware or indifferent to how much he was airing dirty laundry on a political opponent's profile

Last weekend he tweeted to two NDP candidates, one gay & one trans, trying to nail them on some fake LGBT issue. When they politely told him to check his facts he accused them of getting "in a tizzy" about it.

did you see that the greens accidentally outed one of their own trans candidates? The candidate is playing it off but it's pretty gross

The Greens are largely total amateurs politically so being not embarrassing is very difficult for them.

it's all that patchouli

Patchouli, and money. Weaver's riding, Oak Bay, is an intense concentration of crystal stores, homeopaths, golf courses and marinas. The Greens want to build more "affordable" housing but you can bet your ass it won't be in Oak Bay.

Canadian greens seem like they are painting a noble ecofriendly sheen on the most entitled of NIMBYism

Was legit impressed by May in 2015 (although I voted for Paul Dewar) and voted for Ontario Greens instead of any of the miserable major party options in the 2013 Ontario election. Idk anything about the BC party, though.

i am a green at heart, voted green when i lived in scotland. when i got to bc i took an interest in the greens and was put off almost immediately by almost everything i heard about them. very much in the anti-gm foods, pro-chiropractic wing of the green movement and quite at odds form the eco-socialism id expected, being used to european greens

Anyone have any thoughts on this, which will apparently be tested in Ontario soon?: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/04/18/ontario-embraces-no-strings-attached-basic-income-experiment.html

I don't really know what to make of the idea. These are the questions that come to mind for me too:

“But if a basic income is going to be good for everyone, how do we make sure it is not subsidizing a cheap labour strategy?” adds Frache. If it is to support people who are unable to work or who cannot work due to care-giving or other reasons, a basic income that brings them within 75 per cent of the poverty line still leaves them in poverty, she adds.
...
Anything that is universal and beneficial would be tremendously expensive, Frache adds.

“If we fund basic income, what is the risk of something else being squeezed out? What social programs will be lost? Housing subsidies? Daycare subsidies?” she asks. “There is no way we will have a basic income program that will be in addition to all the existing social programs.”

so happy o'leary's out

Yeah baby

im ambivalent. could see arguments that he would've been a disaster for the cpc but equally wouldn't be totally surprised if he was a populist canadian trump success.

xp- this guy is my favourite writer on Canadian public finance and he has collected his writings here:

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/kmilligan/research/basic-income.htm

Maxime will lose imo

Yeah I was having nightmares about O'Leary's potential popularity

i still get nightmares from my econ class at ubc

O'Leary was the only potential Conservative leader that I imagined beating Trudeau's Libs in an election so this is relieving.

That said, Leitch is by far the scarier candidate in terms of policy and rhetoric.

yeah if she gets to be leader it will be so toxic for the country regardless of whether she ever were to lead the tories to electoral success.

well she's got some competition, and they're not as extreme as her? putting aside my fantasies of dismantling the cbc that she has proposed

o'toole wants to give tax credit for student debt

bernier, whose now endorsed by o'leary, is a more complex case -- good and bad there

but most canadians are against allowing entry to more asylum seekers, so pretty sure that's a given for most cpc candidates, so you still have to tread carefully with the tories

god, glad he is gone. and for theses reasons too.

Good riddance.

In other news, looks like a rewrite of NAFTA is no longer in order. Our new neighbours would rather withdraw from it completely: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/us/politics/nafta-executive-order-trump.html

While I have my concerns about NAFTA (ones that hardly anyone brings up), my current status in the US is "NAFTA Professional" so idk what would happen if the agreement was scrapped. (I mean, the university would probably just have to sponsor me for a visa.) I'm a little ... bemused by the idea that Canada has been consistently exploiting the US through unfair trade practices. Also, my admittedly superficial impression is that Notley is fighting this as much as anyone in Canada, perhaps more than Trudeau?

i haven't read the article but my understanding is that trump wants to leave nafta because he wants to exclude mexico from a lot of the benefits that it would receive by being in a trade agreement with the us that includes canada

in part, this is why the gov't of canada was supposed to push for keeping nafta or at least keeping all countries in the agreement

trump got his way though (which was likely). pundits are saying canada will probably benefit from a trade agreement that is only canada-us, and could renegotiate for a fairer agreement. trump has said that he has no problems with the way things are with canada, but that he is concerned with how things are going with mexico -- obviously in all of this, it's mexico that will get royally screwed, and canada, as usually, had to play along with the us

trump has said that he has no problems with the way things are with canada

This is NOT what he has been saying over the past week.

Presumably, Trump realized that he did not have enough enemies and brainstormed ways to antagonize one of the US's closest allies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-04-25/trudeau-s-reward-for-courting-trump-is-a-trade-war-over-lumber
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/nafta-what-do-trump-and-canada-want/article33715250/
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/04/24/rachel-notley-donald-trum_n_16209596.html

Remember this?

http://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/805067/quebec-canada-difference-ouvrage-racisme

what did jagmeet do now?

I was wondering the same thing.

Pomenitul, that's an interesting link. Without passing judgment on Quebecers or ROC Canadians, though, I'm not sure that asking people whether they would describe themselves as "a little racist" or "very racist" is the best way to measure levels of racism in a society. Also, wtf @ statistical measurements of <<joie de vivre>>.

What do British Columbians think of this Site C dam business?

(I mean, tbc, I'm sure there were options for "not at all racist" etc too. Just that I'm unconvinced that self-description is the best metric.)

i hope there was an "I'm the least racist person you've ever met" option

Site C seems to me like a boondoggle, and I am confused as to why our local right-wing wants to spend 10 billion dollars of public funds on a makework project. the more I read about its impact on local farmland and its contempt for indigenous treaties, the less I like it. That said, I can see why the NDP made the call to keep it, and I think they are avoiding short-term pain in exchange for long-term economic and environmental damage to our province.

I think the BC NDP is on a political tightrope and needs enthusiastic support from workers and environmentalists, and can't afford to lose any part of their base. even some flagging of enthusiasm will hurt their chances of ever forming majority govt.

Without passing judgment on Quebecers or ROC Canadians, though, I'm not sure that asking people whether they would describe themselves as "a little racist" or "very racist" is the best way to measure levels of racism in a society. Also, wtf @ statistical measurements of <<joie de vivre>>.

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Saturday, December 23, 2017

Belated reply: methodologically, it's doomed from the start, yet I found it weirdly accurate in light of results across the border (51% admit to holding a negative opinion of African-Americans) and in France (35% consider themselves at least 'a little bit' racist).

What it comes down to, imho, at least these days, is that laïcité is used by some in Quebec as an excuse for all-out xenophobia, while others are aware of its risks yet knowingly cling to it in spite of its bad rep in the anglophone world because they believe that religion represents a dormant threat to modern societies. Quebec's relative outspokenness in the latter department is sometimes an awful thing (re: that superfluous burqa ban), sometimes a great one (I say this as someone who would never consider moving back to my home country, Romania, in no small part due to its increasingly theocratic, i.e. openly homophobic, sexist and racist, ideology).

i hope there was an "I'm the least racist person you've ever met" option

Lol.

I gather that BC NDP is basically siding with unions over environmentalists and FN groups on this?

(this = Site C)

Yeah, and I guess going along with what the mainstream media wants. This will cost them much of their activist base, but cancelling site C would have lost them a different part of their base. A political lose-lose decision that the Liberals left Horgan with.

good post pomenitul

OTM

lol:

http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/columnists/peter-menzies-blame-quebec-when-your-netflix-bill-goes-up-1.23130188

that's an interesting op-ed niche...

The whole Netflix thing is so weird. I subscribe to Netflix so I don't really mind it not being taxed but it seems ridiculously unfair that Canadian companies that offer streaming services have to be taxed but any foreign companies offering the same service are not required to be taxed. Just seems like an obvious loophole that should be closed (either by taxing everyone or no one) and I don't even get why anybody is debating this.

What it comes down to, imho, at least these days, is that laïcité is used by some in Quebec as an excuse for all-out xenophobia, while others are aware of its risks yet knowingly cling to it in spite of its bad rep in the anglophone world because they believe that religion represents a dormant threat to modern societies. Quebec's relative outspokenness in the latter department is sometimes an awful thing (re: that superfluous burqa ban), sometimes a great one (I say this as someone who would never consider moving back to my home country, Romania, in no small part due to its increasingly theocratic, i.e. openly homophobic, sexist and racist, ideology).

― pomenitul, Tuesday, December 26, 2017 11:32 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would agree it is sometimes a great one if the catholic religion was making a big comeback but it isn't. After all, the cross in the national assembly is here to stay. Really the only target is different very small religious minorities.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec-opposition-parties-balk-at-marking-mosque-shooting-with-day-of-action/article37538523/?cmpid=rss&click=sf_globefb

But this week, the province's two main opposition parties made it clear that, while they support a commemoration, they believe Islamophobia is a loaded term.

The Parti Quebecois says the term is too controversial, while the Coalition Avenir Quebec deems the word inappropriate because Quebecers "are not Islamophobic."

Ihsaan Gardee, director of the Muslim council, attributed the parties' position to identity politics in an election year in Quebec.

"In our view, when arguing semantics, it draws attention away from the core issues of hate and Islamophobia and anti-Muslim discrimination that are being discussed and how to effectively address them," Gardee said Tuesday.

The whole Netflix thing is so weird. I subscribe to Netflix so I don't really mind it not being taxed but it seems ridiculously unfair that Canadian companies that offer streaming services have to be taxed but any foreign companies offering the same service are not required to be taxed. Just seems like an obvious loophole that should be closed (either by taxing everyone or no one) and I don't even get why anybody is debating this.

― silverfish, Wednesday, December 27, 2017 12:23 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The alternative would be a special Netflix tax that would go to help funding Canadian cinema and television series. A bunch of european countries went this route, Germany and France notably. As you know I am certain, instead of that tax, Joly basically bargained with Netflix that they invest 500 millions here in Canada. I really do believe that Melanie Joly is making sure the 500 millions investment is managed by Netflix because 1. Telefilm has been absolutely incompetent at building up a lucrative film industry in Canada whereas Netflix has the strong incentive of building a more efficient and larger infrastructure, retaining talent, etc 2. Netflix is already a much better international distributor than anything Can-Con has ever had access to, 3. Ubisoft (a foreign company) and Cirque du Soleil (a Canadian one) have been successful content creating companies that got shit tons of subsidies (much more than Netflix is getting at the moment), 4. there was a danger that that big three telecoms was going to gobble up the entire private film/tv series content creation market, now there is not only one but two different alternative paths.

I am still not under 100% sure this is best idea. But I am certain that doing nothing would have been way worse.

I copied and pasted the recent posts to the 2018 thread: Dynasty, s3: Canadian Politics 2018