Dynasty, s3: Canadian Politics 2018

how we feeling, ontario?

well, at least I never have to hear about the fucking 6ix dad ever again

i've got some great news for you https://globalnews.ca/video/4584411/ontario-municipal-election-norm-kelly-says-6ix-dad-persona-will-go-on-despite-election-loss

"super-popular"? He lost!

Mixed signals on Toronto's Trump Index: Mammoliti lost, Goldy drew 25,000+ votes and finished third.

Watson beat Doucet 71%-22%, with 10 candidates splitting the remaining 7%. This is... OK, I guess, but I think I'm actually a little angry and disappointed that Doucet didn't start campaigning earlier and harder. Apparently, he didn't even take his campaign that seriously until he noticed that young people were signing up to get involved. I guess we'll probably have another four years of pandering to condo developers combined with some real support for art and culture and parks and cyclists. Hopefully the new council can push for some action on housing. We had no real Trump/Ford hard right/populist option, which I should be thankful for. My councillor was re-elected with about 75% of the vote. Guy I went to high school with was elected in Stittsville, which is maybe the most notable surprise.

I haven't seen school board results yet. These actually seem p important these days.

I don't know anything about this 6ix Dad business.

OK, both Erica Braunovan and Lyra Evans were elected to the school board; they should fight against the Ford govt's agenda as well as anyone will.

I gather that Vancouver elected a former NDP MP as mayor. Vancouver municipal politics seem confusing to me: aiui, you don't have wards and do have political parties?

Goldy drew 25,000+ votes and finished third.

People are justifiably worried about this, but to be honest, it was a *really* distant third (3.4%, I think?), and given that her actual politics aren't a million years removed from Rob Ford's (just replace the populist dogwhistles with uncloaked xenophobia), I was expecting her to do better than this. Seeing Rich@rd $pencer get teary about it on Twitter was pretty sweet.

Is there any word on overall turnout yet? I imagine it has to be low, everyone I spoke with was demoralized throughout the entire campaign.

Lowest since 2006 in Toronto.

vancouver has an at-large system, so no wards, and municipal parties and slates. there were lots of independents and new parties running after the collapse of Gregor's Vision Vancouver party, so in our ballot we had to choose 27 names (for council, mayor, parks, and school board) out of a list of 158 names. Kennedy Stewart was a nominal independent, but obviously actually NDP, and he affiliated himself with a new local party called OneCity.

the at-large system is truly terrible. if every voter voted "rationally" for only one party and every party ran a full slate, there would only be one party on city council every time. There has also been research about how candidates with south asian names consistently underperform the rest of their party slates, and this election east asian candidates underperformed their parties, and none were elected to city council.

That's definitely different, yeah.

good/dispiritng overview of the TO results https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-meet-the-new-toronto-council-same-as-the-old-toronto-council/

Today in Conservative humour

(make sure you watch the video)

I have a new job where I work with mostly well-off suburbanites in their mid-30s to early 40s and it's been a crash course in depressing reactionary trash :/

Wow @ that video.

Btw, it was hard to focus on Canadian politics last week with all the madness going on worldwide but ugh @ CAQ: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-chador-religious-symbols-1.4876212
and no surprise here but the repeal of Bill 148 in ON is still a disappointment: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-open-for-business-bill-148-repeal-1.4874351

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/clement-scheer-explicit-photos-1.4895295

this is the funniest story in canadian politics this year

lots of fist-hand testimony on twitter about how he's a serial instragram creeper of young women

that is a perfect typo

lol

He's out of the Conservative caucus now. Is this the Instagram stuff?

Scheer said Wednesday new evidence has come to light to suggest this incident was not isolated — and that Clement is alleged to have engaged in similar behaviour in the past.

My DMs today (and late into last night) involve a significant number of women who have confided experiences with Tony Clement that range from similar to mine, to much, much worse. These are real women and I believe them. If you need to talk as well, feel free to reach out.

— Claire McWatt 🇬🇾 (@ClaireMcWatt) November 7, 2018

Young women VICE spoke to said Tony Clement often went on deep-timeline liking sprees after midnight. https://t.co/zV8F5oVDdk

— VICE Canada (@vicecanada) November 7, 2018

Just gonna leave this here

#pr4bc #prdebate #yepprorep pic.twitter.com/vimMefto0a

— BC NDP (@bcndp) November 9, 2018

so painful from Horgan

obv vote for PR tho please BC.

i might be a citizen in time for the next provincial election and it would be nice to be able to vote for a loony-left, non-NDP party under a PR system

In light of Doug Ford's milestone in francophobia, it's hard not to agree with the separatists when they argue that not only does English Canada not give a fuck about the French language and French Canadian culture in general, it doesn't seem to find bilingualism desirable either. I'm currently living abroad so I haven't been following Canadian politics very closely of late but this story doesn't appear to have elicited more than a collective shrug in the ROC.

La Presse's editorial sums it up nicely, for the most part: https://www.lapresse.ca/debats/editoriaux/paul-journet/201811/16/01-5204580-speak-ontarien-please.php

Assumed this revive would be for the Ontario PCs' revolting display of transphobia or Ford's latest round of cuts. Hell province.

Hadn't read about those yet. Triple whammy then.

'Nbd' – most Canadian media outlets, it seems. Was the transphobia part of his platform or just thinly veiled?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/trans-support-leader-ontario-debate-gender-identity-1.4910813

I don't see what cuts to provincial French services in Ontario (which I oppose) have to do with Quebec separatism tbh.

The scrapping of rent control on new buildings might be what I'm most angry about.

Back when those misreported stats about English usage in QC came out, I read an outraged editorial in Le Devoir that made a big point about the symbolic importance of there being several anglophone unis in Quebec and no independent francophone uni in any other province. Maybe not a quick jump to secession from there, but the idea that ROC would prefer it if French died off is surely part of the emotional argument for separatism

I can't even find a recent budget estimate for the French Language Services Commissioner. The 2014-15 budget was only about $1.2 million, and if the services are just being folded into the provincial ombudsman, how much can they possibly be saving?

the La Presse editorial noted that their budget represented 0.02% of Ontario's deficit

rob otm. The asymmetry is staggering.

xps

the idea that ROC would prefer it if French died off is surely part of the emotional argument for separatism

I mean, I get how it works as a pretext but it seems like concern trolling if separatists are in fact using this as grounds for Quebec sovereignty. How are francophones in ROC helped if Quebec separates? When (and why) have separatists been invested in bilingualism or the state of French language services in other provinces of a country they don't want to be part of. Official national bilingualism was obviously the child of an arch-enemy of separatism.

The Journet editorial in La Presse is good btw and I agree with it.

Also, it's been consistently clear that the PCs don't gaf about fiscal efficiency, since they paid out large sums to cancel green energy contracts that were near completion.

It's not that separatism would help the cause of Canadian francophones in the ROC, it's more that exasperation at the general climate of indifference, even antagonism, can rouse a desire for a clean break. Like rob said, it's an emotional response (an understandable one, imho) to a sense that the French language and francophone culture ultimately don't matter in a Canadian context, despite Trudeau's claims to the contrary. Whether this actually strengthens la francophonie in North America is a different can of worms, of course. It's just that when you live in a country where you're constantly being told to 'stop whining' or even 'fuck your insignificant language', it can be hard to stick to reasonable discourse, especially since an inverse scenario in Quebec would be met with deafening cries of 'we knew they were racist all along' or the like.

Speaking of said hypothetical scenario, Jean-François Nadeau's suggestion made me laugh:

Imaginez un peu cette scène de pure fiction : une annonce oblique de François Legault, lancée dans l’arène publique pour faire éclater au grand jour la vacuité de nos pensées à l’égard de la minorité française au Canada. Quelque chose qui dirait à peu près ceci :

« Désormais, dans un souci de conserver la francophonie canadienne vivante — sans quoi ce pays ne sera plus qu’une vague banlieue de Cincinnati —, le gouvernement du Québec utilisera tous ses fonds destinés jusqu’ici aux services aux anglophones afin de financer les services aux francophones d’Ontario et, s’il le faut, d’ailleurs aussi. Le gouvernement québécois a bon espoir que la communauté anglophone du Québec comprendra cette nécessité économique pour contrer les injustices générées par le pire des conservatismes. Pour les plaintes, évidemment, prière de vous adresser directement au bureau du premier ministre Doug Ford. »

I could be wrong but I'm not really sure if budget cuts in Quebec would be met with deafening cries of racism in ROC, even ones that targeted anglophone services. As far as I can remember, widespread outrage about bigotry in Quebec has usually come in response to active government efforts to legislate regulations concerning the religious symbols or clothing people can wear in various situations or to actively regulate where English or other languages can be used or taught, which is different. There might be a case to be made that withholding public funding that was previously earmarked to support a minority language is equally harmful
or discriminatory but I do feel like it would be seen differently.

For the curious, a good high-level overview of recent Canadian right-wing fuckery courtesy of Luke Savage:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/18/toronto-doug-ford-reveals-canadian-rights-disdain-for-the-charter-of-rights

Depressing. The amount of people who casually accept that might makes right is higher than we like to think.

The Canadian "left" (such as it is) has never been prepared to handle this and it'll continue to get steamrolled until or unless it grows a fucking backbone. I'm not holding my breath.

[extended string of violent epithets redacted]

anyway they passed back-to-work legislation this morning

Going back to the ROC francophones' situation there's a rather significant segment of the separatist movement that made ignoring the pleas and concerns of the ROC francophone one of their core values. Some, not all, prominent Quebec intellectual separatists have made it clear that ROC francophones are none of their concern. Those minorities would be some sort of lost cause to be used as a warning for the situation of french in North America rather than an opportunity to promote the french language within the ROC. All in all, it is kind of staggering that over the last 5 decades so little has been done for those ROC Francophones, by both their home provinces AND Quebec. Now, just look at Legault doing fuck all to amend the situation, just like the PQ, just like the PLQ did nothing to really help those people. In some intellectual milieux, including the press, the debate of whether citizens of Quebec should call themselves French-Canadians or Quebecois have been reignited; to me that is just proof of very timid solidarity Quebecois have for the ROC francophones (and other francophones of North America).

I could be wrong but I'm not really sure if budget cuts in Quebec would be met with deafening cries of racism in ROC, even ones that targeted anglophone services

― Locked in silent monologue, in silent scream (Sund4r), Monday, November 19, 2018 5:44 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh boy it would. Quebec bashing has happened for much less (lol pastagate), thankfully.

Pastagate fits into this category, I think:

active government efforts to ... regulate where English or other languages can be used or taught

My suspicion is that English Canadians would regard a government doing something differently than a government not doing something.

Idk, though, I could be way off.