Canadian Politics Thread

cuet!

Possible ground for the Opposition to work (although who knows what will sway the public?): http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/story/2011/03/29/cv-f35-costs.html

Hey symsymsym, we are neighbours.

For one thing, the Bloc don't get as embroiled as the Parti Québécois in some of the more odiously anti-anglophone components of the language debate on the island. A week doesn't go by without some Parti Québécois-connected nutjob talking about how the English eat French babies or whatever. PQ-funded think tank reports that Chinese dépanneur owners are selling cigarettes made of out shredded ENGLISH newspapers. Overall the PQ seem more committed to keeping Québec white and stupid than anything else. I could never, ever, ever vote for a party like that.

The Bloc however is more of an actual political party with an eye for a multi-cultural, progressive, and resolutely French-speaking future for Québec as a province, or country, or whatever. I get Duceppe leaflets every once in a while and I like what he has to say. If it wasn't for the weird fragility and blunted aspirations of the English community on the island I'd vote Bloc. Ah fuck, maybe I will. The problems of other anglos are not really my problems and Duceppe probably has a bit to do with why this is the only neighbourhood in the entire country worth living in. Better to be awesome than English, I guess.

Ha, I forgot about that aspect of the PQ. I guess I was mainly still thinking of Levesque-style socialism. QS is probably more what I'm looking for.

This seems like it could be a potentially winning/salvaging strategy for the Opposition but it would require a near-total reversal of what the Liberals have been doing so far and seems unlikely: http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums//index.php?showtopic=18437&pid=647006&st=0&#entry647006

(referring to the OP)

QS is a party made up of all the remnants of Québec's various Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist-Leninist, Workers Parties, blah blah blah etc. etc. They field exactly one compelling candidate, a man whose father still holds weird pseudo-revolutionary training camps/supper clubs on a farm in the Eastern Townships. Membership seems comprised of some D&D guys, a couple of crust punks, and some of the softer elements of the militant French language defence groups.

QS could not get elected anywhere other than the Plateau. The fact that it's even a party is testament to how odd a place the Plateau is. In the only provincial electoral district in Canada where Live Action Role Playing is more visible than baseball as a public sporting event, fantasy certainly plays a role.

I may have screwed up my boundaries here. Can't remember the eastern border of Amir Khadir's Plateaustan (as the media are fond of calling it).

wait west.

hello everything! we vancouver ilxors are few but proud

Yo. It's nice to be in a riding where it's possible to vote for the candidate and think less about the party politics. I'm not a huge NDP fan but I'll vote for her for sure. She's proved herself to me on a personal level. I work on the frontlines in social housing and she actually sought me out to get some off the record/ground level feedback that was not filtered through the sector organisations/BC Housing information machines. I'm not a party member or anything - she just found me via my job description and invited me to meet her, asked intelligent questions and listened to what I had to say. I really respect her for that.

Ha, fields, OK, it's been 10 years since I lived in Montreal (for a year) so I'm kind of talking out of my ass wrt QC provincial politics. I guess I'm just really disappointed with Charest, though I really tried to like him for a while.

that's awesome. her office helped a friend of mine receive a scholarship from ubc that he deserved and they were trying to deny him. her level of constituent outreach is pretty amazing.

xp

I need to move downtown (live in N Van now).

East Van, Bryan. Downtown has Hedy Fry. Did anyone see that article in one of the papers last week talking about Trevor Linden possibly running as a Tory against her?

Here it is

Ha, I wish Canadians were as obsessed with politics as with hockey!

What a tool: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/story/2011/03/30/cv-election-harper.html

It's like he keeps trying to spin the election as some sort of Presidential-style race.

Just looked at a boundary map. Showing my ignorance of Vancouver, I would consider the western boundary of Vancouver East as downtown (especially the northern portion), even though it's probably not. Anyway, doesn't matter. I should move there.

xpost,
13,929,093 votes cast in 2008 federal election
16,600,000+ viewers of Canada-U.S. Olympic men's final hockey game last year

;_;

those #s are closer than i would have guessed!

16.6M could include a lot of people unable to vote, but the point's taken.

Just read this: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/canada-watches-its-democracy-erode/story-e6frg6ux-1226030310248 Is it overly cynical to think that Canadians would assume that the same things would happen anyway if another government was in place? We've gotten so used to this shit that we would believe and just shrug at anything?

well that article is making me feel bad about being so indifferent to the outcome of this election.

but yeah, I think one of the big reasons so many people don't care about this is that they think the liberals are just as bad about these kinds of things, and who can blame them really. I mean this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship_scandal is still pretty fresh in the minds of lots of people (at least here in quebec) and is often cited as one of the reasons people refuse to vote liberal.

What Peter said + I'm guessing those sorts of issues matter less to most people than the country's economic performance during the recession (regardless of who deserves credit for that) or their lower tax bills. (Many people are probably glad that their money isn't going to a group like Kairos anymore and are relatively unconcerned about the Parliamentary niceties.) The sponsorship scandal probably had such an impact (everywhere in the country) because of the huge sum of taxpayer money that involved. Also, it had quite a bit of time to percolate before it really hurt the Liberals: They still won the 2004 election, remember! Tasha Kheiriddin made the point that if the Opposition gave e.g. the in-and-out campaign financing issue some time and maybe waited for a Supreme Court ruling, it could make more of a difference.

Also, while Ignatieff is growing on me, he hasn't really inspired much passion in most people. I'm able to forgive McGuinty's government a number of things because the alternative is so much scarier to me.

This said, I live in one of the safest NDP ridings in the country so I might not have the best sense of what the average CPC voter in the general public thinks.

"... taxpayer money that was involved."

I was one of the few people who didn't care about the sponsorship scandal because a) all the alternatives to a Liberal-led government were far worse than having the Liberals stay on, and b) I'm kind of Morbs-ian in that I think most governments are intrinsically corrupt and that's just something you have to deal with.

Look at it this way: the G20 meeting cost taxpayers TEN TIMES as much as the sponsorship scandal did.

Overall the PQ seem more committed to keeping Québec white and stupid than anything else.

a comment like that confirms me it was a mistake to click on this thread :-)

To be fair, we got something for the cost of the G8/G20 summits. We can question how wisely it was spent but, as far as we know, it wasn't simply being funnelled back into the CPC.

We also got something for the sponsorship money -- some of it went toward its intended purpose. Anyway, a lot more money got blown on G8/G20, but if the Tories lose the election, it won't have anything to do with how they handled the G20 summit.

... unfortunately.

um. what did we get, exactly, for the g20 btw?

what i got was no work because so many agencies had to shut down or slow production while downtown toronto was on red alert for an entire week.

yeah the g8/g20 thing is actually way worse than the sponsorship scandal now that I think about it

Seriously? I can't tell anymore.

I wasn't at all crazy about how a lot of things were handled wrt the G8/G20 summits, as my posts on this board should have shown. But, for better or worse, as far as anyone knows, the money was actually used to host major events of international significance. The costs did seem a little high but there were two summits and the accounting was done differently than at other summits. (This seems to suggest that our G8 costs were normal. The G20 costs were higher than at other summits but there are arguments that it might be due to how numbers were reported.) So far there haven't been any official findings that money was pissed away on corrupt partisanship or grossly and inappropriately misspent. There are suspicions and defences, arguments on both sides. Not the case with the sponsorship scandal, where we have actual convictions, a major commission, and an Auditor General's report showing, according to the Wiki link, that up to $100M "was awarded to Liberal-friendly advertising firms and Crown corporations for little or no work."

So far, I think the violations of protesters' rights was the most indefensible thing that we know about for sure but there is little to show that the federal govt or the CPC was directly responsible for those.

I can't tell anymore.

(whether people are being serious about the G8/G20 summits being worse than the sponsorship scandal.)

So far there haven't been any official findings that money was pissed away on corrupt partisanship or grossly and inappropriately misspent.

i'd like to introduce you to Tony Clement.

"grossly inappropriate" pretty much sums up how i feel about that stunt.

Overall the PQ seem more committed to keeping Québec white and stupid than anything else.

a comment like that confirms me it was a mistake to click on this thread :-)

Permalink
― Sébastien

well this thread just took a distinctly Canadian turn - but you forgot to apologise!

sorry

(whether people are being serious about the G8/G20 summits being worse than the sponsorship scandal.)

I'm being serious. If the issue is the amount of taxpayers' money that was spent, and spent inappropriately (with returns not justifying the cost) then there's no comparison. If the issue is corruption, then Thermo's article about Tony Clement's riding pretty much sums it up. I'm sure his wasn't an isolated case.

Plus, the Liberals who were involved in the scandal aren't the same people that are running now (which was for the most part true in '04 and '06 as well), which can't be said about the Tories who are running in this election. So anyone who's holding a ten-year grudge against the Libs and wants to keep punishing them by voting for another party out of sponsorship scandal spite is an idiot.

I was thinking about the Tony Clement thing this week when I was talking about the election with my mom ... she asked "which party should I vote for if I want the roads to get fixed? The roads in Toronto are horrible" and I said "you should move to northern Ontario if you want to drive on nicer roads because that's where the Tory ridings are and that's where they're spending all our money!". Thermo posted that story on fb a few months ago and I was pretty disgusted by it (despite my stated indifference to most political corruption of that kind).

What Clement did is run-of-the-mill pork-barrel politicking and it's contemptible. Still, though, the money that was designated for bridges or an airport runway actually went to bridges or a runway, you know? The issue is just favouritism and unfairness in terms of where this infrastructure investment was targeted. This is not on par with awarding millions of dollars in contracts to firms that did no or very little work at all and instead donated some of the money back to the governing party or else rewarded party members in other ways. That is outright theft of taxpayer money. The in-and-out financing issue could potentially be more comparable to this, albeit on a significantly smaller scale.

Plus, the Liberals who were involved in the scandal aren't the same people that are running now So anyone who's holding a ten-year grudge against the Libs and wants to keep punishing them by voting for another party out of sponsorship scandal spite is an idiot.

I definitely agree with you here.

Anyhow, as much as I hate to say it, the Liberal deserve this. They've been running an impeccable campaign so far.

I'm a little frustrated that the NDP seems to have actually removed its platform from its website for this campaign. Even the Greens have something really thorough online. That said, I do think Layton has been presenting some interesting and substantial ideas, although it's got to hurt to have the Liberals poach many of his strongest policy proposals.

Yeah just went on NDP site to see if they'd updated their platform section and it's the same as it was when this all kicked off. Their main page seem to be updated pretty often though.

Not trying to shift discussion, but any thoughts on May being excluded from this year's debates? My initial reaction is that it's a pretty unfair move considering she was allowed in last time; I know the argument is usually 'no seat no debate' BUT I think the Greens have made enough gains to move beyond 'fringe' party status at this point. Okay so 6.8% of the national vote isn't huge but neither is the Bloc's 10% and they're allowed in...

I think that a requirement of having to have one elected member of parliament in order to participate in the debate is pretty reasonable.

and I say this as a person who has voted Green several times in the past

i honestly don't care if she's in or not.

I can't stand these debates anyway. The rules and protocol are apparently set up to make the whole tone as bland as possible. I much prefer a live one-on-one grilling from a tough TV interviewer that isn't afraid to ask difficult questions and is intelligent and confident enough to call them on their bullshit answers. I'm thinking of Paxman in the UK. I'm not sure Canada has someone like that.

Michael Moriarty?

They need to have some kind of objective and fair criterion to determine who gets to participate in the debate. Going by whether a party holds any seats in the Commons seems like a perfectly reasonable one to me. The Greens held one seat in 2008 so May got to participate then.

Yeah just went on NDP site to see if they'd updated their platform section and it's the same as it was when this all kicked off.

There actually used to be a lot more there before the campaign began. (My links upthread don't work any longer.)

How do you think this will affect the NDP's chances in AB, where they kicked off the campaign?