Open for Business: Canadian Politics 2019

Romania post-89 and Italy post-92 might count, although I would need to be convinced regarding stability in both cases. Based on Wikipedia, Denmark's PM has mostly been Social Democrat or Venstre since WW2 (and exclusively since 93), with two exceptions, one of whom was PM for three years? (11 years of Conservative People's Party does count for something.) I do think that weakening the stranglehold of a couple of party leaders would be a good thing, which could come from greater empowerment of MPs, greater empowerment of smaller parties, or both. It does seem like we'd very possibly still end up in the situation of having to hope for a 'lesser evil' of two main leaders as our head of government (the context in which the comment was made that I responded to), regardless of electoral system. I do find it interesting that any type of democratic system does seem to gravitate towards a binary. I don't know exactly why that should be the case - in principle, it should possible for a polity to organize itself around e.g. the four quadrants of the Political Compass or any number of other sorts of groupings - but it seems widespread.

I think the reason that most countries end up with a two party system is that people tend to vote against a party just as much as they vote for a party and this means that they will often end up voting for whichever party they think has the best shot at beating whichever the party they want to vote against, which makes it very difficult for a third party to gain any ground. I think for a lot of people, when voting for a third party you take the risk of splitting the vote on "your side" and handing over power to the other side.

At least this is what I feel is happening in the Canada and U.S.

already feeling like the brownface scandal isn't moving the needle much

i feel like this being released by the party that has demonized refugees/immigrants/muslims/thegays has taken a lot of the bang of it.

In other news, climate change skepticism appears to be on the rise:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-survey-suggests-canadian-trust-in-science-may-be-eroding/

About one-third felt scientists were influenced by government agendas. Another third thought science has been swayed by corporate agendas.

Are these supposed to be incorrect views?

i feel like this being released by the party that has demonized refugees/immigrants/muslims/thegays has taken a lot of the bang of it.

I half-wondered if it was released by the Liberals: Tories can't go after him without looking like hypocrites and inviting scrutiny of their record. NDP risk looking like politically correct scolds if they go after it too hard. Nationalists in Quebec, otherwise sworn enemies of the Liberals, rush to defend him. Everyone starts talking about Trudeau's record on immigration and multiculturalism. Probably unlikely but an idle thought. Afaict, my brown-skinned friends or family who have commented on it mostly seem to think it's a bogus issue, fwiw.

NDP on track to lose most to all of their QC seats, acc. to Grenier?: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/ . That saddens me a little, esp since their platform is probably much better than it was last time around.

Even the Bloc is polling better. And the cons are currently in second place. :(

Is this mostly over Singh's religious symbol? I listened to a brutal interview with him on Radio-Canada a week or so ago where Singh kept trying to talk about the health and survival of the country as opposed to the party while the interviewer kept coming back to "OK, but you can't do anything about that if you don't have any MPs".

I guess the NDP's presence in Quebec only stemmed from an election when Jack Layton was the only major party leader who spoke good French and grew up in Quebec so this might just be a return to normal?

Likely a bit of both, but predominantly the former. Most Quebecers are in favour of Bill 21 at the moment…

:(

Libs and NDP are neck-to-neck in my riding, which has been the NDP's for years:

http://canada.qc125.com/districts/24039f.htm

Fingers crossed…

odds of winning for my riding are currently LPC: >99%

Wow, they list only a single Ontario riding as "NDP-leaning".

http://canada.qc125.com/districts/ontario.htm#list

:(((

Those numbers are garbage. There likely has not been any polling done for many individual ridings. Must be some algorithm based on the last election plus the current federal or provincial polls.

Probably true

It says on the website that it's "a statistical model of electoral projections based on opinion polls, electoral history of Canadian provinces and demographic data".

They have the liberals with a good lead in my riding, but from what I can tell they are getting trounced by the NDP in the lawn sign war.

blaming quebec for the plummeting NDP seems like bad logicking: the whole country has reacted listlessly to their current communication strategy and leadership.
the big difference is that unlike in other parts of the country (where leftists' only other alternative is the greens or the liberals), in Quebec there is another option - albeit one that advocates for a new form of systemic racism.

That site has popular NDP encumbents here in BC losing to neophyte tories. Not likely, My prediction is that the NDP will do fine and end up with close to 50 seats.

How is the Bloc a leftist alternative?

Lucien Bouchard introduced Quebec to austerity.

If you don’t have separatists sentiments, you have no good reason to vote Bloc. Quebec is stuck with the same alternatives.

NDP is losing in Quebec because Quebec progressives are happy with Trudeau and the Liberals and the keynesian policies.

Reading over the BQ platform, they are a little more progressive on some issues than I expected. Still, a lot of their proposals boil down to devolving federal powers to the provincial government of Quebec (anything that effects the environment or land of Quebec, the CRTC; the imo ridiculous demand to be able to withdraw from national programs with full compensation and no conditions) - esp with the current QC government, I see no reason to believe that any of this would result in more progressive/left-leaning policies.

if you don't think the Bloc are left-wing (in a canadian political context) then i don't know what you're thinking

Sund4r - the evidence for that is exactly what you're quoting. Almost everything that doesn't fall into your devolution category (or cultural protectionism/secularism) is... a left-wing policy.

and if you read the CAQ's policy platform you might also be surprised by their progressivism on several issues

on economic and environmental issues, the quebec population is at least 45 degrees (if not 90) to the left of the rest of the country

not that i'll vote for them this time

Sund4r - the evidence for that is exactly what you're quoting. Almost everything that doesn't fall into your devolution category (or cultural protectionism/secularism) is... a left-wing policy.

A lot of the platform falls into those categories, though!

In any case, I do agree that the BQ were generally left of centre when they were more prominent in the House pre-2011; they were practically the Quebec wing of the NDP at times. I found them worryingly xenophobic and nationalistic in the last two elections.

I don’t see how you can square the economics of Charest, and Bouchard, who’ve been elected and re-elected since the late 90s on the promise of cuts, as progressive. But to each their own I suppose.

Sean and VHS made some fair points so I'll apologize for jumping to wondering whether QC's loss of interest in the NDP came from biased motives.

I really want a provincial Quebec NDP.

If I were in QC I would probably vote QS tbh

(speaking in my shit capacity as an ex-Mtler)

I can’t vote for separatism.

I guess I think of QC separatism not as a Concrete Thing Likely To Actually Happen as a (from the left at least) at least semi-rational rejection of the status quo, sort of adjacent to how the UK Labour party has been resistant to taking Brexit entirely off the table. But of course for me it's purely academic.

That's how I view QS as well, with the proviso that I have far more sympathy for that kind of separatism than I do for Brexit.

these days quebec separatism is tugged between Scottish-style progressive nationalism and xenophobic pure-laine uh homegrown québecois nationalism. I think more the latter than the former. but enough of the latter - especially within QS - that I'm still a soft separatist.

I have far more sympathy for that kind of separatism than I do for Brexit.

I definitely feel the opposite. At least we have plenty of pre-EU British history to refer to.

Britain has never been oppressed by the EU.

Btw, in case there was a misunderstanding, by 'that kind of separatism' I meant what sean describes as 'Scottish-style progressive nationalism'.

I would need more convincing wrt the oppression of one of the founding provinces of Confederation, actually (and possibly even wrt Scotland). That would probably be a very long discussion, though, so I think the key points for me are that i) I don't think the province is currently oppressed and ii) the separatist option in this federal election is not QS but the BQ so that's the platform I am more concerned with atm. If I still lived in Quebec, I could see how I might throw a protest vote to QS provincially; the BQ do seem much more intense about laïcité.

That would indeed be an all too lengthy discussion, but yeah, QS is adamantly opposed to Bill 21 (they're a '514 party' according to their detractors), whereas I wouldn't be surprised if Bloc supporters were of the opinion that it doesn't go far enough, so aside from the separatism (which comes across as halfhearted in QS's case, as in 'we'll bail if the country as a whole doesn't agree with our progressive aims'), and without accounting for the differences between provincial and federal politics, they don't have all that much in common, although you're right to point out that the Bloc's platform is more left-leaning than you'd think.

right/left as generally understood in ROC and U.S. doesn't really work for the Bloc (or the PQ). They are definitely left-leaning economically and are even progressive on many social issues, but at the same time are anti-immigration and anti-religious-minorities.

Looking at the PQ budgets and the literature around them since Bouchard’s election all the way to Marceau’s 2014 budget, I don’t see a single proposal that isn’t austerity laden. The evidence is clear that when it comes to economics, the PQ has long switched to the right. That’s the raison d’être of the QS.

Hm, this (by HuffPo writer Amy MacPherson) is long and throws a lot of stuff out there but it does raise some curious questions about how the brownface scandal was broken. Does seem strange that it came from a US magazine, naming as source a mysterious businessman who no one can track down and whose connection to the school is unclear. Maybe these things don't matter if the story is true? Still, if foreign interference and campaign regulation are issues that matter, it might be worth considering.

https://freethepresscanada.org/2019/09/23/dirty-tricks-behind-trudeau-brownface-blackface-scandal/?fbclid=IwAR0n_X2k8UMphms3NIfVXsInZuJse5wqRDRH_Xw-fqICEbMumUgS6mr-Z-U

It’s the russians! They never forgot 1972 and Henderson’s goal.

Lol

I love the idea of Russians wanting to interfere with canadian elections and having this dark and elaborate and secret plan and in a bunker somewhere but ~ ‘Master Putin we forgot to take in account Quebec’s abject indifference to Canadians minorities and their issues. Our plans has failed!’

the separatism (which comes across as halfhearted in QS's case, as in 'we'll bail if the country as a whole doesn't agree with our progressive aims')

Going back: I should probably let this go, esp since i don't even live in QC, but I think this actually gets at why I have a hard time with the QS idea of 'progressive Quebec nationalism'. QS has never been more than a third party; they are currently doing especially well by holding 10/125 seats in the National Assembly, six of which are concentrated in one city. There is very little evidence that their province as a whole agrees with their progressive aims, perhaps no more so than significant pockets in BC, which is currently led by a fairly progressive NDP/Green government, or Manitoba, which had 17 continuous years of NDP government recently, or even Ontario, whose 15-year Liberal government tried to spearhead some major labour and environmental reforms in its time. The idea that Quebec sovereignty could be grounded in a civic nationalism built around multicultural, social democratic values that are so distinct from the rest of Canada's as to potentially justify separating the country (without any of the "xenophobic pure-laine ... québecois nationalism" that we all seem to agree is currently more dominant) just seems frankly far-fetched to me. (The idea of fundamentally incompatible values between Quebec and ROC seems particularly dubious when the governing centre-left national party, led by a Quebecer, enjoys majority support in Quebec). At least in the case of Scotland, the 'progressive nationalist' party actually has majority support within Scotland, while a right-wing party governs nationally, allowing them to credibly make the claim that their subnational jurisdiction shares their distinct values.

tl;dr Progressive Quebec nationalists will probably have to choose between progressivism and nationalism imo.

<i>(The idea of fundamentally incompatible values between Quebec and ROC seems particularly dubious when the governing centre-left national party, led by a Quebecer, enjoys majority support in Quebec). </i>

agree - separatism under Harper had a lot more juice to it (and maybe we'll see with Scheer...) In Scotland, the SNP's rise in influence really came about suddenly, after decades of something closer to a BQ identity - and what fed it was Cameron's (then, later, May's, and now Johnson's) Tories.

So I think that a push for SOVEREIGNTY here would require a federal government with whom Quebecers disagree more
but the rise/return of the federal NDP or provincial QS in Québec depends in very large part (imho) on the state of the Bloc/Parti Québécois. Those are the natural homes for progressive (separatist-friendly) francophone Quebecers, and they will only consider the alternatives en masse at times when the Bloc or Parti are in tatters (or, as was briefly the case in recent years, oddly right-wing).