Senate The Canadian Politics Thread

Bonne fête nationale de l'Acadie à tous les Acadiens et à ceux qui célèbrent l'Acadie! Bon 15 août!

Happy Acadian Day to all Acadians and those who live in and celebrate Acadia! Happy 15 of August!

 

Thanks for inciting me to look up and read up on Acadia.

 

I read a story that the Bloc may cause a vote of no confidence and call an election in the fall which, during a pandemic, I immediately looked up how to vote by Mail for Canadians which would tick me off so much if they want us to vote in this climate like crazy Yankees.

Apparently you can vote by mail in Canada but can on sign up when the election is called so I'm sure that won't be a bust :/

https://www.elections.ca/Voting-by-mail

 

The Tories and NDP would have to vote with the Bloc. The Tories will when they have a new leader, but I don't know that the NDP will.

 

Erin O'Toole won the Conservative leadership after three incredibly delayed ballots.

 

I made the worst decision of the summer and made myself stay awake just to watch the results live--wasn't worth it, I can tell you. Got the first round around 1:30 AM...

So basically MacKay crushed the Atlantic and won urban centres in populous provinces. Lewis won Saskatchewan (lol) and was competitive in Alberta and BC. O'Toole got the rest-- just as I predicted, won by crushing it in Québec and by getting the vast majority of second votes from Sloan and Lewis. MacKay's 33% at the first round was too weak for him to remain at the top, he'd have needed around 45% to win.

O'Toole faces great challenges. He's a moderate who campaigned as such in 2017 but who tacked to the right in his 2020 bid. Whilst he's more convincing than Scheer on social issues, I don't know if he can overcome the harm he did in public perception by pandering to "the base" during his run.

The first post-leadership race Léger poll puts the numbers at LPC 39%, CPC 27%, NDP 19%, BQ 9%, GPC 5%. Which is a noticeable drop for the Conservatives. The Liberals will be tempted to put an ad replaying all the O'Toole campaign shenanigans during general elections and destroy his electability the way they did Scheer's. From a cynical POV, if SNC Lavalin didn't destroy the Liberals, why would WE charity?

And these elections may come sooner than expected. All they have to do is imitate Blaine Higgs and fake a "had to call snap elections for stability" blah blah blah and get themselves a majority. With no regard of the pandemic we're in.

Speaking of Higgs...that's just a big fat power grab attempt. Ignoring the fact that the vast majority of New Brunswickers didn't want elections, and that there was an unprecedented all-party cooperation during COVID. That he wasn't in any way going to fall in the near future regardless of seat distribution being PC-20, LIB-20, Green-3, Alliance-3. He doesn't care about the lives he's risking, he just wants his majority so he can dictate whatever he wants at the population. I hope it bites him in the ass.

 

New Léger poll gives the Greens around 30% in Fredericton! Green gains are absolutely in the horizon for September in New Brunswick.

 

Ouache. So Higgs' pandemic power-grab was a success. He now has a 2-seat majority to do what the heck he wants to do (of course he has avoided elaborating on his "plan" during the election so who knows what he'll do with cuts and whatnot). Two out of the three anti-French Alliance MLAs got reelected-another ouache there. The three Greens got reelected-yay! They increased their vote share and they came very close to flip Moncton Centre & Fredericton North, not to mention placing as a good second place many ridings throughout the province. Vickers lost his bid to get his seat and stepped down as Liberal leader. Depressing but expected results in NB...

 

Bummer that Higgs got his majority. I hope other minority leaders don't see this as a good sign to call an election.

The US backed down on their stupid and pointless aluminum tariffs just before we were about to announce our dollar-for-dollar retaliation. Because, I guess, we were going to retaliate?

 

Horgan is signalling he wants to go to polls too, unfortunately. He'd be in a good position to get himself a massive majority in BC, and my guess is he doesn't want to wait another year to do it. Problem is it would be a much bigger risk than in NB because they actually have a surge in community cases over there...I really hope he doesn't do it but that's what I'm reading from him atm.

And of course we all know that Trudeau is just *itching* to go to the polls and get himself a majority government too. I don't want to be forced into voting (again) federally after just one year of his minority parliamentary shutdown, but...I can just feel the Liberal strategists organizing in the back room. I have a feeling New Brunswick is going to be used as an example of COVID elections and I don't like it one bit.

As for the tariffs...I'm usually not one to ask fo retaliatory measures but with Trump it was the only leverage we had. I hope this administration understood they were shooting themselves on the foot with their actions. Strength is the only thing Trump responds to, for better or worst.

 

Former Canadian Prime Minister John Turner passes at age 91.

 

PM for 79 days in '84. Only Sir Charles Tupper had a shorter term.

 

Canada splashes cold water on China.

Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne said during an interview to The Globe and Mail that Canada has decided to stop negotiating a free trade agreement with mainland China. He added that the Canada-China trade agreement is no longer worth pursuing and Canada has decided to give up on the free trade negotiations that had already been initiated 4 years ago, in 2016, saying that "the China of 2020 is no longer the China of 2016", when negotiations started. This blow to China from the liberal government of Justin Trudeau comes at a moment when relations between the two countries are at a low since the 1970's, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, and when China still holds the two Michaels (Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor) as hostages among the Huawei judicial affair. At the beginning of this months, China's ambassador to Canada, Cong Peiwu, has been clear saying to the French Canadian newspaper, La Presse, that the two Michael won't be liberated as being part of a bargain, even if Canada liberates Huawei's CFO, Meng Wenzhou.

 

Well, this comes off as a surprise:

Canada's navy has sent one of its warships through the Taiwan strait, between mainland China and Taiwan, as tensions between Taiwan and China have increased during the past few weeks with the PRC sending over fighter jets and bombers flying over Taiwan's airspace, since the PRC considers Taiwan as part of its territory (even if the PRC never had control over the island since the defeated Chinese Nationalists of the ROC retreated on Taiwan in 1949). This comes at the moment when diplomatic relations between Canada and China are at their worst, and after the U.S. navy and aircraft carriers sailed through the South China, a potential conflict zone between China, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei, as all of these countries claim sovereignity over this territory and China has been building artificial islands with military bases...

Article from the National Post: https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-p...ar-taiwan-at-time-of-heightened-china-tension

 

I guess our navy needed something to do.

The NDP helped pass the throne speech, preventing an election. Hallelujah. A Liberal minority being propped up by the NDP isn't the worst thing in the world.

And the Green Party have a new leader, Annamie Paul. @Empress Shatterpoint you're our resident Greenie, how do you feel about how things went?

 

If we were having another federal election, a year after the previous one, and especially in the middle of a global pandemic, I would have said: "No thanks!"

Let's focus on fighting this pandemic.

 

I mostly feel wonderful about these results. Annamie Paul was my first choice, with David Merner being a close second. So I got what I wanted for the first time in any of the party leaderships I have participated in.

I'm kinda worried that Lascaris got so close though. It shows a clear divide in the membership that wasn't present when May was leader. Prior to the race, the membership was mostly social democratic (like me), with maybe a few single-issue environmentalists across the political spectrum. But due to the massive entryism that happened during this leadership race, lots of eco-socialists, marxists and communists that had spent their lives dissing the Green Party (and the NDP) joined the GPC with the goal to elect Lascaris and change the core of the party.

Now that their guy lost, they're already cancelling their membership so hopefully they'll take their shtick elsewhere. They've already failed with the NDP and Greens, so their only option is to create a brand new party, which is fine by me. But it worries me that an antisemite like Lascaris (he's engaged with the dual loyalty trope with two Liberal MPs & Israel and has defended Hamas terrorists) came that close to winning.

But I'm glad that the Green Party of Canada will remain what it has been, which is a Green Social Democratic party committed to implement environmental measures and ambitious social programs. Paul is charismatic and bilingual, and has great experience as a human rights lawyer. Despite the propaganda put forward by die hard NDP partisans and bitter eco-socialists on Twitter, Paul is a clear progressive who will rival the NDP on progressive policies. And in my honest opinion, she's far more competent than Jagmeet Singh. I foresee increased electoral success with her as leader.

I'm relieved to have not become a political orphan. Which I'd have become if the centrists (Murray, West) or the eco-socialists (Haddad, Lascaris) had won. But social democracy prevailed. I still have a political party to participate in and to vote for in the next federal election-yay!

 

I totally agree. Canada has done a good job mostly with Covid. I would like it kept that way. So my Grandma can eventually leave her house

 

I personally think Canada has done an awful good on COVID. Flights and borders stopped/closed too late, lateness in testing, etc. The Atlantic provinces and the territories have done a good job though.

Unfortunately, there's now an outbreak in a Moncton nursing home. After having almost completely eliminated the virus. It's under investigation.

 

Quebec and Ontario, but especially Quebec, are the worst provinces in fighting Covid-19. The Quebec provincial government is being criticized a lot for some confusing messages to the public during its daily press briefings...

 

What do you guys think of letting in citizens who currently don’t live in Canada. We are planning on going up in a few weeks and Quarantining for two weeks as per guidelines. But do you guys thinks it’s fine for citizens who live outside the country coming and going? I am genuinely curious on this. Since I doubt my family up in Toronto would give me an unbiased response.

 

Yeah I've been following that. At least during the first wave, a lot of blame could be put on the issues at the airports and Québec's early semaine de relâche. And Québec public health did miss the occasion to stop health workers from working at multiple CHSLD, unlike BC public health that put these restrictions in nursing homes during the first week. It's also worth noting that Québec has a higher proportion of seniors in their long term care homes than other provinces, and that didn't help the death toll. So not all these things could have been avoided.

But...now that Québec is in its second wave...it's kinda been blundering it in unexpected ways. They and Ontario reopened way too fast. All these bars and karaokes and other high transmission areas. Then the CAQ had a weird anti-federal-COVID alert stance just because it came from the federal government. No masks in schools for too long. And you're right that they're contradicting themselves over and over again, no clear directives from anybody. I don't know what's going on but OUF.

To be fair though...even if the government had been better, all of these anti-mask protests and lax attitude from the youth make it hard to stop the spreading. I think maybe people everywhere are getting sick of living under COVID and adopting a "who cares" attitude. Which is really bad for vulnerable populations.

@Jedi Knight Fett

I think that people should avoid non-essential travel in and out of countries. And by that I mean, unless you have a critically ill family member in Canada or work that takes you there, you should avoid coming. Obviously as a citizen you have a right to come back to Canada anytime so it's up to you, and you seem to be the responsible type that will self-isolate.

But unless you plan on moving back, you're just putting yourself and others at risk. A lot of people get COVID just by going through airports. You could be COVID free right now and catch the virus on a plane or from a border security agent. So my advice...if you are set on coming and can realistically cross the border by car, do it. Otherwise good luck anyway.

 

I'm in Ontario and the climbing numbers are alarming but I generally just look at my own city of Hamilton, which has about 129 active cases, 16 today which is much higher than the usual 5, still pretty bad but not entirely terrifying. But Toronto having like 300 a day which is crazy.

The list of essential workers allowed into Canada, which includes hockey players and movie stars, has the 14 day Quarantine period which has seem to have worked. So yeah let people across the border, if they lockdown for 14 days. Otherwise, build that wall, yo!

 

I'm in a similar boat as you. Speaking as a Canadian citizen in the US who has no real business in the country right now, but would desperately like to visit my family in Toronto and Montréal, I think it's safer and smarter to wait.

Unless I move to Toronto way sooner than I'm currently planning on, which is early 2022, I'm not going to think about crossing the border until we're given the all-clear. Not only is it safer for myself, but more importantly, it's safer for everyone else I may come into contact with. Avoiding non-essential travel is the right thing to do at the moment.

 

The only reason we are going is my mom has been wanting to see her mom for a long time and in all likelihood the border won’t open up until sometime in mid 2021 at least