Abacus Data’s latest polling has the federal Conservatives out to their biggest lead in over a decade. Unless there is a drastic change over the summer, Canadians ought to prepare for a Conservative majority at some point in the next year or so.
At the Museum of Vancouver, ‘True Tribal’ explores the visual language of mark making from around the world. Reclaiming Wet’suwet’en Storytelling in ‘Yintah’ Reclaiming Wet’suwet’en Storytelling in ‘Yintah’
At this year’s DOXA, catch a new wave of Indigenous-led docs. A Q&A with Freda Huson and director-journalist Michael Toledano.
No one should be paying closer attention than Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party.
A change of government in Ottawa would have a major impact on provincial politics in Alberta. With no whipping boy or scapegoat in Ottawa, the provincial UCP would need to shift focus and even rebrand.
At the same time, the Fair Deal strategy launched by the Jason Kenney government and accelerated by Smith has created a set of demands and expectations upon the next prime minister that may be difficult to walk back.
Why would Smith rebrand as PP will give her what she wanted. PP is not for federal power and jurisdiction over local affairs. He wants a weak federal government.
PP is so fake, it will be painful to see him as a prime minister, but Trudeau had his shot at election reform and lied to people, so he is ultimately to blame.
To be honest, the Liberals don’t want election reform, at least not the way you think.
If we have proportional representation, the Liberals (and the Conservatives, let’s be honest) would never govern again.
As it stands, it’s quite possible to form a majority government with ~35% of the vote, which suits the LPC and CPC just fine, as they can just swap chairs every four to eight years. Under PR, they’d need to win >50%, which hasn’t happened in almost fifty years, and even before that was still very, very rare. The LPC or CPC would need to share power with the NDP or BQ to get anything done, which means that a) parliament would have to represent the electorate, and the electorate is much for left-of-centre than the people they vote for, and b) the LPC and CPC couldn’t depend on the favour of their donors since buying them wouldn’t really worth the money it is today.
The Liberals would sooner go through a twelve-year term in the wilderness than see a Canada that’s run like a western European country. So yes, they’d rather lose, and lose hard, knowing they’d be back in eventually, then advance real electoral reform and lose their sole access to the levers of power forever.
@Snowshadow @psvrh @skozzii i plead american ignorance of canadian politics. but russian troll farm and 50 cent party’s modus operandi is interference in the west via internal divide and conquer on easily manipulated topics
that’s all twitter is now, and such disinfo and manipulation accounts are active on mastodon as well, and we will see them more and more
luckily, we have more responsive mods and better network architecture here to handle their psyop
So just like now then. The Liberals are backed by the NDP and maintain power.
Germany has been dominated by two parties since the war under MMP. And proportional representation has done absolutely nothing to inhibit the right wing authoritarians coming into power in much of Eastern Europe, and making gains in Western Europe.
In Israel, Netanyahu’s Likud control government with the support of 24% of the electorate in the last election. He had to put together a dog’s breakfast of even more extreme parties to do it, but that’s always a possibility in that sort of system.
@Sir_Osis_of_Liver @TSG_Asmodeus @skozzii @psvrh
And yet
ANOTHER account with zero followers that makes three of you who opened accounts in June 2023.
This will not be comforting to the vulnerable people who will inevitably be hurt by Pollievre’s government.
No, it’s no comfort at all. It also wouldn’t be an issue if people didn’t so quickly and consistently vote against their interests.
Everyone pointing to Trudeau and blaming him for breaking his promise on voting reform still voted for Trudeau when the NDP has been running on voting reform for decades.
People don’t actually want it. They just want someone to blame.
You know, this bad take about Trudeau having “lied to people” is part of the reason we are going to end up with a CPC majority government undoing good progress across a whole host of important issues.
Trudeau absolutely lied about electoral reform.
No, sorry, this take is a meme, not the truth of what happened. We don’t have electoral reform because the NDP banded together with the CPC to kill it in committee. The NDP, a rump party, couldn’t get what they wanted so they got nothing at all.
The CPC, NDP and GPC deserve every bit as much blame, if not more, for the failure to move away from fptp. Why? They banded together in committee to poison any hope of getting electoral reform past the Senate or even the house. Trudeau , naively I think, promised to do things differently from Harper. True to his promise he balanced the electoral reform house committee by popular vote, instead of using his majority power. This meant that the opposition parties could outvote the liberals in committee and, seemingly forgotten by everyone, the opposition parties welded that power to deliver a complete nonsensical , posion pill filled committee report / reccomendation to the house which had no real chance of passing. That document, a worst of all ideas document if I ever saw it, threw out all ideas put forward by the LPC (the majority in the house, who had a free vote on this) instead favoring CPC demands for a referendum, NDP demands for a vague and nonspecific system that wasn’t STV, but was proportional. The GPC and Bloc got in on it, and passed this report that had no chance , none, of passing the house. Even if it had passed the house it wouldn’t have got past the Senate and the committee delayed their report so long nothing could be done before the next election.
I know parliamentary procedure is boring, and most people don’t follow it, but I do and I saw what happened here. The LPC failure was only in so far as they didn’t just stomp all over the opposition to impose their changes. The LPC acted in good faith instead and got politiked so bad people still blame them, reducing the whole thing down to “Trudeau break promise”.
So the Liberals —who had a majority government and declared that we would never have another election using FPTP— chose to put a bunch of people in a room together who they knew wouldn’t agree on anything, and then those people came back and said “yeah sorry we couldn’t agree on anything”, and the Liberals were just like “yeah no worries. We didn’t expect you to agree on it… Wow, electoral reform is really hard! We give up!”
And you don’t view that as the Liberals killing electoral reform? You are a sucker falling for their incredibly transparent attempt to pawn off the blame. It was absolutely their responsibility and their fault.
Anyone with experience in politics knows why the Liberals did what they did.
IF the Liberals had pushed through the legislation, the CPC and Bloc were both going to portray it a Liberal power grab, and that message would definitely get traction. The CPC had already said they’d revert back to FPTP, and the Bloc was making noises that they’d back them up.
That’s why the Liberals went out of their way to do what they did. What they didn’t expect was the NDP going all or nothing on MMP, a system that laypeople find difficult to understand, and certainly not one to be explained easily in a sound bite.
Internal Liberal polling, not the dog and pony online poll, found that most people didn’t care, but could easily be convinced it was a power grab. They were putting a lot of effort in something that had no upside, but a pile of potential downside.
They cut their losses, and aside from online forums, paid little price for it.
Congrats on having “experience in politics” (whatever that means), but it seems like you just used a lot of words to agree with me:
Trudeau lied about electoral reform.
Trying to justify it with Machiavellian politics doesn’t change that simple fact.
No. That’s a completely reductivist take. They gave it a shot, the NDP were MMP or bust, the CPC got the others to agree to a referendum that they knew would fail. At that point the project was dead.
I do think that the NDP going all or nothing on MMP is what ultimately killed the whole thing for the LPC, what was the final nail anyway. Reading that committee report broke my heart, to be honest, because I wanted ER to succeed, but I knew it was dead when the CPC/NDP/Bloc wrote the majority committee report and didn’t put anything the LPC could vote for in it.
MMP is the best system though, I don’t see why the NDP pushing for it is considered bad. You really only get one shot at electoral reform, why put in a system like STV that’s barely any better? Pleanty of other countries use MMP without issue.
I’m sorry you’re wrong about this. There was no conspiracy to kill ER from the onset, no lie, just a failed attempt to build a cooperative process that varying interests killed for their own, largely self serving, political reasons.
That you can’t tell a lie from something that didn’t quite work out is, I think, a common failure in the electorate, so at least you aren’t alone in this frankly poor understanding of what happened.
Yep. That was the biggest reason I voted for him.
As they say down south, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… You can’t get fooled again! (Because I’ll be voting NDP.)
NDP is a big part of why you didn’t get electoral reform. Probably one of the key influences in killing it.
We didn’t get electoral reform because the Liberals torpedoed their own efforts. They went out of their way to find the most self serving electoral method possible.
If they wanted to do it right, look to countries who have successfully implemented. Follow NZ’s process, for example: A two part referendum, Q1: Keep FPTP or switch. Q2: Which new system, with several options.
This is, again, a bad take. The Liberal electoral method was party policy for years and years by 2015. They didn’t go out of their way to find it, Liberals from a cross Canada went to local policy workshops, voted, and raised their choice of electoral reform method at plenary / policy convention. They had also rejected a referendum, given they had just won a majority mandate with ER on their platform. But the reforms the LPC wanted were killed by an NDP/CPC coalition in committee.
I don’t care if they asked a ouija board. They came up with the wrong answer that didn’t serve Canadians in a fair and equitable manner, it served themselves. That’s the bottom line.
If you really think the Liberals are truly interested in electoral reform, look no further than the vote results of Motion M-86. Only 25% of Liberal and 3% of Conservative MPs voted in support of the motion.
No, he didn’t. This is the fantasy narrative that election reformers tell themselves.
The reality is that these efforts always blow up because there is never a consensus on what to change it to, and the general public just doesn’t care.And with the blowback they got for their efforts, they won’t touch it again for at least another 15-20 years. The CPC would never even consider it. The NDP are as far from power as ever being essentially dead east of Ontario, and spotty through the rest of the country.
So people can sulk if they want to, but it’s going to be status quo for the foreseeable future.
There absolutely was a consensus. Trudeau created a commission on electoral reform to find out what the best system for Canada would be. That commission came back that a Proportional Representation system was the recommendation. That’s not the answer Trudeau wanted (himself favoring a watered down STV) and so he canceled the whole idea.
No, not the committee, in the electorate.
You can get a small majority to support switching away from FPTP. Then the supporters split into MMP, Ranked, STV, and a number of hybrid systems. That’s the primary reason why it has repeatedly lost at the provincial level.
Considering forest fires started in March this year, from hot-spots left over from last year’s record-shattering forest fires…
“Unless there is a drastic change over the summer” is going to be videos of PP saying ‘axe the tax’ overlaid with videos of people escaping the flames and their homes burned to the ground.
The issue is Con voters don’t care. Hell the Cons voted against adding ‘climate change is real’ to their platform.
Good luck everyone.
