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

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

damn

sorry sund4r

i actually read latimes' softwood lumber article a couple days ago and just totally forgot about it

i remember g&m's softwood lumber article from a couple days ago was "unlimited" and i couldn't read it so i read the latimes one

so weird for them to put that article behind a paywall

https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2017/04/25/president-trumps-tariff-on-canadian-softwood-lumber-imports-will-hurt-america-most/#5f728ddf2232

But Trump’s trade team doesn’t have even a basic grasp of international trade economics. Peter Navarro has a Ph.D in economics from Harvard, but that doesn’t make him an expert on trade: his doctoral thesis was on why corporations donate to charity. And Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s background is in business, not economics. Both are protectionist to the core, as is Trump himself. All three are practising voodoo economics of the worst kind, to the detriment of the people they claim to serve.

...

Canada could end up having to tolerate a level of tariff that it considers unfair, because the alternative is a highly damaging trade war. Sometimes it is better to put up with bullying.

But sometimes it is better to dig your heels in. This policy promises to be extremely costly for Americans – as Canada was quick to point out:

"This decision will negatively affect workers on both sides of the border, and will ultimately increase costs for American families who want to build or renovate homes. The U.S. National Association of Home Builders has calculated that a $1,000 increase in the cost of a new house would put home ownership beyond the reach of more than 150,000 American families, and jeopardize thousands of jobs in the American home construction industry."

Lumber, of course, is a global commodity: it is as yet unclear exactly how global prices will respond to the tariff. But these estimates are similar to those produced by the Cato Institute in 2000 (I told you this was a long-running dispute):

"We calculate that trade restrictions add an estimated $50 to $80 per thousand board feet to the price of lumber, which drives up costs and shrinks profits for lumber users. The resulting addition of $800 to $1,300 to the cost of a new home prices some 300,000 families out of the housing market, denying them the dream of home ownership."

It is not just homebuyers who suffer from trade restrictions, either:

"Protectionist trade barriers in the softwood lumber industry impose great costs on businesses and consumers here in the United States in order to enrich a few lumber producers. To put employment figures in perspective, it is noteworthy that workers in the major lumber-using sectors outnumber logging and sawmill workers by better than 25 to 1."

The “major lumber-using sectors” include home construction and repair, industries which together employ thousands of Americans.

Nor is the impact limited to lumber-using industries. The Canadian dollar has already dropped sharply versus the US dollar: the weakness of the loonie, if sustained, will mitigate the impact of the tariff on Canadian producers, while the dollar’s strength will make all imports from Canada – apart from softwood lumber – cheaper. The tariff will therefore raise input costs for lumber users, and make it harder for other American businesses to compete with imports from Canada. This is bound to raise both consumer prices and unemployment.

Effectively, this policy subsidises one industry while imposing higher costs on others. It is obviously intended to hurt Canada, and it will of course have some impact there: but the principal pain will be felt by American citizens. The Cato Industry dubbed it a “beggar-my-consumer policy”. But it is also a "beggar-my-industry" policy - and that is much more harmful. Subsidising one small industry at the expense of other industries that employ far more people and contribute much more to American GDP makes no economic sense at all.

Protectionism always most hurts the people it aims to protect. Please, Mr. Trump, buy yourself some sensible trade advice – before you wreck the lives of the people who elected you. You promised them a better future. They are not likely to forgive you if you let them down.

man i always try to have a balanced few on things but this is quite possibly the dumbest thing trump has done so far

A very few things in life are zero-sum games. The entire philosophy of Trump is that everything is always a zero-sum battle.

But yeah, the death of NAFTA plus a burst of the real estate bubble (once causing another) would be devastating to our economy :(

And if Le Pen gets elected we can kiss CETA goodbye.

So everyone's completely on board with free trade these days? I admit my relative naivete about economics and don't have a 100% decided opinion all these trade deals (CETA does seem worthwhile and, like I said, my current status in the US depends on NAFTA). However, I'm just old enough to remember when the entire centre and left were opposed even to free trade with the US in 1988. (Even the Liberals were an anti-free trade party.) I'm sort of interested in how the shift came about. Does it just seem to work for most people? The way that investors can sue our government over environmental laws under NAFTA is what concerns me most, and I remember that it's what the centre/left warned about in the 80s and 90s.

the bc leadership debate on tv last night was about the worst thing I've ever seen

Was it worse than the GOP primary debates in the US?

didn't actually watch those!

it was just extremely poorly moderated. as in there would be 30-40 second stretches of two of the leaders talking over each other.

no-one came across well. clark came across most like a politician, most composed, and least agitated. but was completely glib and her party is a joke.

andrew weaver the green leader is a pompous ass with only two gestures, he ended up with a ted cruz-like globule of spit (saw a clip of this from the repub primary debate) on his lip at one stage too.

horgan comes across angry, agitated and inarticulate.

immediately after the debate i was ranting to my wife about the quality of it when the local ndp mla george hayman knocked on our door, which felt quite surreal

xxxp

according to your article, gov't of canada is being sued for $6 billion (CAD too!)

canada exported USD$295 billion to the US in 2015:

U.S. goods imports from Canada totaled $295 billion in 2015, down 15% ($53 billion) from 2014, but up 1.7% from 2005. U.S. imports from Canada are up 165% from 1993 (pre-NAFTA).

https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/americas/canada

trade deficit was USD$15 billion

i haven't studied free trade, so from my understanding and a supply chain perspective, free trades are good because, theoretically, it pressures companies to adhere to global standards ("standards of the world marketplace") that, at least in theory, are supposed to promote fairness and be held to higher scrutiny, like environmentally friendly operations and greener technology

yes, canada has done "poorly" in this regard, because it was supposed to promote more greener tech/solutions, and it is still pretty high on the list of environmentally friendly countries but it went down a few spots in the rankings because of the pipelines and ft mcmurray

it's a weird situation of give and take but it doesn't help that the us's way of negotiating is by bullying smaller countries, but again, theoretically, it's supposed to allow for lower-priced items at a consumer level. canadians don't always see this (e.g., american mfg'd books are more expensive in canada) because the gov't of canada imposes higher taxes and because quantity imported into canada is less (due to canada's low population or low demand), plus the greater the distance travelled to import a good the higher the cost (e.g., fruits from mexico), but even this has exceptions due to surplus and established trade chains/routes (basically less man hours spent, and how efficient they run their chain), which canada does benefit from (you'll sometimes see cheaper fruit from chile than mexico in bc eg)

having said that, there are so many opinions/books on free trade and when there is trade, there's always a winner and a loser

xpost. Missed the debate but I hung around outside the CBC building to get some photos of the leaders when they arrived. There was about 200 NDP supporters and about 200 Liberal supporters and I haven't seen that kind of tribal spear-shaking since I was last at a Kilmanock/Ayr United match. Got close enough to smell Christy's perfume. She smelled really good.

thankfully it didn't devolve into auchinleck talbot vs cumnock juniors level of frenzy

Well it's still mid-season, wait till the end of season relegation battles. Afterwards I milled around with the orange massive, scammed my way onto Horgan's bus after he'd gone into the CBC and got driven back to the West End while they all chanted and waved scarfs. It was fun.

I'm going to volunteer this weekend in my neighborhood (mount pleasant), i bloody hate going door to door so hopefully i can leaflet or something.

Standing on a corner with a big sign and cheering anytime someone honks is fun.

They were doing that last night and I joined in for about 5 mins which is how I earned their trust to let me on the bus.

haha

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/trump-nafta-us-canada-mexico/article34818889/

Instead, sources suggested the move was effectively a negotiating tactic designed to rattle Ottawa and Mexico City, put pressure on the U.S. Congress and throw red meat to the President’s base. Saturday is the 100-day mark in Mr. Trump’s presidency, a symbolic milestone when he will want to show his supporters he is acting on his agenda.

Mr. Trump, however, would have faced challenges in Congress, the courts and from businesses if he tried to issue the notice, and even greater hurdles if he actually tried to pull out of NAFTA unilaterally.

...

Canada’s NAFTA strategy – which has mostly consisted of trying to charm Mr. Trump and convince the United States that keeping markets open is in the country’s best interest – would not change as a result, the source said.

After Mr. Trudeau’s conversation with Mr. Trump, this strategy appeared to have borne fruit.

B.C. Premier Christy Clark, however, urged Mr. Trudeau to hit back at Mr. Trump by banning exports of U.S. thermal coal from her province’s ports.

At a campaign event in Surrey, B.C., on Wednesday, less than two weeks before election day in the province, Ms. Clark said the United States had become “hostile” on the trade front and Canada should “ban filthy thermal coal,” an industry particularly close to Mr. Trump’s heart.

...

Last week, he labelled Canada’s system of dairy price-fixing “very unfair” to U.S. producers and this week, he accused Ottawa of being “very rough” with the United States on softwood after his country levied tariffs averaging 20 per cent on Canadian lumber.

And he threatened to “get rid of NAFTA for once and for all” if Canada and Mexico don’t agree to “very big changes” in the deal.

The Trump administration is expected to formally notify Congress of its intent to renegotiate NAFTA within the next two weeks. That notification would trigger a 90-day countdown to the start of formal talks.

The process reported Wednesday would have been separate from that. Under Article 2205 of NAFTA, any country can withdraw after providing six months’ notice to the other two countries. If the United States pulled out, NAFTA would remain in force between Canada and Mexico.

ultimately and importantly:

For one, it is unclear whether the President has the authority to take the country out of a deal without the consent of the U.S. Senate, said Andrea Bjorklund, a trade-law expert at McGill University. Any order to that effect could face a court challenge, she said. And Mr. Trump would face pressure from both Congress and businesses affected by the move.