Old & Corrupted: Canadian Politics 2024-25

a new hopefully Zing-friendly thread

Weirdly, since this thread was begun, the old one now loads in Zing. I’m guessing witchcraft is at work.

After the 2021 election, my one staunch conservative friend and I were talking politics (as we inevitably do, despite our goodwill attempts to avoid it) and I said that Trudeau was going to try to contest the next election because his massive ego wouldn’t let him bow out gracefully; he would have to be crushed into the ground by an opponent or forcibly chucked out by the party (which would never do so). My friend expressed surprise and said I was the only person he’d met that thought that, besides Ben Mulroney (these are the circles he frequents on the 364 days a year when he’s not slumming it with me) — that everyone he knew expected Trudeau to step down as leader as soon as a suitable replacement could be found, since the dude was so obviously done, as in nobody was voting for him, just against the Conservatives. Yet here we are. Wildly unpopular, deeply ineffectual, inspiring nobody, and committed to fucking running again, banking on the hope that Pollievre is so distasteful to us that we’ll hold our nose and swallow a medicine spoonful of Trudeau yet again.

A reasonable leader would have set the party free to groom an inspiring successor well before any election talk was in the air. But nOoooo…

When PM Alt-right Milhouse is in power, I hope JT at least has the sense of shame that it’s his fault, and that it haunts him haggard. (This will be small comfort for the rest of us, suffering under an austerity budget, rights and liberties being curtailed, and federal services and infrastructure being sold off to Telus and Shopify.)

What I still don't really get is why people's understandable fatigue with JT and the Liberals necessarily means a turn to lite fascism. I'm familiar with this routine pendulum swing in other contexts, but I moved here in 2014 when the NDP was on the cusp of majority viability and I'm still confused about what happened to stifle that. (tbf I can't even come close to understanding what people see in conservatism these days, so the problem isn't really my ignorance)

Not that I disagree with the point that JT's vanity is a disaster for us all!

Layton had some magic about him, I can’t think of it any other way than that. He talked about love being a primary motivating force in politics and somehow didn’t sound like a hippie! If he hadn’t died, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he’d have become our first NDP PM.

And now we’d all probably be sick of him too, moaning about how disappointed we are that he didn’t live up to his promise. Ah, but maybe not…

Heard on CBC radio that there are Liberal MPs who are calling Poilievre weird. Maybe a little too transparent? Strange, flaky, peculiar--there are other words that work.

Canadians don’t have an original thought in our heads when it comes to politics.

that peculiar Pierre

I suppose the Liberals might have trouble going after him with "phony" but that's my main impression, and if they keep doing stuff like this maybe it would stick? https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/20/canada-conservatives-video-other-countries

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-imeR4n9PU

“Weird” works because it points out how fucked up the maga worldview is and delegitimizes it all in one swell foop. I wish there was another word, one that meant “weird and boring and unoriginal and an opportunistic hack and a dweeb and a conman and a tryhard and someone you do fucking well not want running the goddamn country.”

In other news, hey BC can you get your head out of your ass? Every other province who votes in the conservatives has voted in DEEP FUCKING PROBLEMS with them, don’t be stupid.

yeah this shit's getting scary with the BC United/Libs pulling out today

and the BC Conservatives are definitely the Polievre/Danielle Smith version, not the Ford nation types or the PCs

Interesting development: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-staffers-gaza-montreal-byelection-1.7306984

I went back and found this post i made in the 2020 Canadian politics thread

so uh are the BC Liberals even going to exist by the end of this election

― josh az (2011nostalgia), Thursday, October 15, 2020 5:21 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Only took just under four years but this finally came true

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jagmeet-singh-ndp-ending-agreement-1.7312910

I'm getting nervous.

Are the NDP in any position to benefit from a sudden election?

Couldn't say, though I'm sure someone far more knowledgable on the subject can. Just dreading P.P.

Are the NDP in any position to benefit from a sudden election?

I could see some typical liberal voters going to the NDP if they think the Liberal party is a lost cause. There is nothing in the polls indicating something like that is going to happen though, it seems like all ex-liberal voters are going the other way.

weird how Jagmeet is not giving any clear explanation for ending the agreement now. There's nothing about it until the end of the article:

On Tuesday, NDP labour critic Matthew Green said the NDP has been re-evaluating the deal since Labour Minister Steve MacKinnon directed the Canada Industrial Relations Board to impose binding arbitration less than 24 hours after Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Canadian National Railway locked out their workers after failing to reach a deal at the bargaining table.

"After Sellout Singh did this stunt today, he is going to have to vote on whether he keeps Justin Trudeau's costly government in power, or whether he triggers a carbon tax election."

Right then, let's all talk like we're back in the schoolyard.

Shut up Skippy, you dirty taint.

lord knows I don't know what regular Canadians think about anything tbrr, but is the carbon tax really such a hot issue that "carbon tax election" is a thing anyone other than PP will get juiced about?

We have an encampment 15 minutes west of town at a prominent gas station. They will be protesting the carbon tax until they all die of old age, even if skippy scraps it.

There’s so much fucked about this ginned-up outrage about the carbon levy, but the thing that gets me is that if PP was to scrap it, our exports would drop by like 40% overnight, since so many of our biggest trading partners have requirements about this. So the Cons will get in, then after a review they will keep the levy, and everyone will be absolutely fine with that.

Fuck this country North America humanity right now.

"Sellout Singh"--the anxiety of influence.

Pollievre has no anxiety about it at all. He’s like “It worked for the orange guy, it’ll work here” and sleeps posturepedic-soundly every night.

Oh, I know--just granting such transparent imitation pseudo-loftiness.

I sincerely hope the Dems CRUSH the US election & go hard on “neighbourly” social programs and that takes the wind out of PP’s pseudo-sails & puts _some_ in the NDP’s at least. I’m sure that fear-calculus is beeping in PP’s little lizard brain & is at least half the reason he’d love Singh to trigger an election this fall.

If I were Singh, the taunt that I was triggering “a carbon tax election” would be enough to keep me from doing so quite decisively. But I’m petty like that.