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Federal Election 2019

I think people actually view a vote of non-confidence as a something that isn't ever a misnomer and that it is always used justly. I think it's incredibly naive to think that a vote of non-confidence isn't an attempt to gain control from the governing party. A governing minority party has the right to call an election (why should the opposition only decide when to call it if it gives them an advantage?) and that's literally the end of it.

I'm also annoyed that people think it was a waste of time because the result was similar to what we already had, to which I would argue: the outcome doesn't determine the importance of democracy so much as the process. We had to have a vote sometime and if covid is with us three or four years down the line or more do we just stop the democratic process altogether?

Was it a miscalculation on the Liberals' part? Absolutely. But if they knew in advance that they would've gained essentially nothing they probably wouldn't have called it in the first place.

For a democratic country Canadians really hate the process, which is so beyond comical to me. People are carrying on like the campaign was one of the longest and most expensive in history when it was one of the shortest.
 
Sorry HS, that wasn't meant as a criticism of you or the Cartoon, it just sparked something in me I'd been meaning to vent about for a day or so.

Bender said:
I'm also annoyed that people think it was a waste of time because the result was similar to what we already had, to which I would argue: the outcome doesn't determine the importance of democracy so much as the process. We had to have a vote sometime and if covid is with us three or four years down the line or more do we just stop the democratic process altogether?

Was it a miscalculation on the Liberals' part? Absolutely. But if they knew in advance that they would've gained essentially nothing they probably wouldn't have called it in the first place.
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Yeah, although I might also add that I don't necessarily agree that the Liberals(and the Conservatives to some extent) didn't gain much. I think the Liberals are in a much better position now than they were after the last election. I think it helps them a lot to have a few MPs in Alberta(and you have to figure at least one of them will be prominently in Cabinet). I think it's a good message to them, and Trudeau maybe especially, that the 2019 results weren't just about embarrassing photos of him or scandals but that if they want to win a Majority again they're probably going to have to campaign on real ideas and policies that mean something to people.

Likewise, if the Conservatives are ever going to form government again they'll need to make gains outside of the west and they did that to some extent. Flipping seats in Atlantic Canada is a big thing for them and you'd think, although with reports that the knives are out for O'Toole in some corners this may not be the case, that those incremental gains would be a good message to them that any further advancement probably won't be made by running back to the right, courting SoCons or just trying to find a new messenger for their same old ideas.

And lastly, I can't help but think that at least some analysis of this election is kind of rooted in an old fashioned way at looking at Canadian politics. We've had 6 elections in the post-Chretien era and of those, 4 have resulted in minority governments and the only Majority governments we've had were brought on by fairly unusual conditions. Harper's was only because of the complete, but short-lived, collapse of the Liberals under Ignatieff and Trudeau's now looks like it was more his being fresh-faced and new and exciting than it was an actual political shift. The idea that a Minority government is actually sort of a loss may be a relic of the 20th century that doesn't hold true going forward. I don't think most Canadians want a system where one party dictates the entirety of Federal politics after winning 38 or 39% of the vote(or with the Liberals possibly doing it with 35 or 36%). I think a lot of people look at European style coalitions outside of, you know, Italy and see kind of a decent system of governance where things get done and compromise keeps most people happy.
 
The Conservatives definitely need to re-embrace their old PC base if they want to have a real shot at a majority any time soon. I have to imagine their potential losses to the PPC by moving more to the center are less significant than the losses they'd suffer by moving further away from it in any meaningful way. I think there's a large portion of the electorate that would embrace more conservative fiscal policies as long as it didn't mean more conservative social, environmental, etc., policies.
 
I'm not convinced of that. I think the Conservatives becoming more moderate is the way to go. While vote splitting and so on happens, the fact is, two elections in a row, no party has had more votes.

My riding has never had a Conservative MP, yet this year they came close. All night long it flipped between Liberal, NDP, and Conservative. O'Toole certain appeals to me much more than Scheer. I think he can improve with another couple years as opposition leader.

Quebec is the linchpin I think.
 
bustaheims said:
The Conservatives definitely need to re-embrace their old PC base if they want to have a real shot at a majority any time soon. I have to imagine their potential losses to the PPC by moving more to the center are less significant than the losses they'd suffer by moving further away from it in any meaningful way. I think there's a large portion of the electorate that would embrace more conservative fiscal policies as long as it didn't mean more conservative social, environmental, etc., policies.
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This may just be a core ideological difference but I can't help but go for kind of a smart-alec reply here and say that there is a large portion of the electorate who embrace fiscally conservative policies but not social ones and they're called the Liberal party. I mean, let's be real. Trudeau isn't out here promising to implement a UBI or nationalize the telecoms. 

I think the problem with the idea of more Conservative fiscal policies is they're either broadly unpopular when you campaign on them(lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy or, say, deep cuts to social services) or you effectively have to lie about them and go for punchy soundbites and say "We're going to cut waste and those big government salaries!" and then get to cutting EI and Healthcare when you win which is tricky long-term.

I think if there's going to be a swing towards "conservative" fiscal policy it may have to be as much about redefining what conservative fiscal policy is. Like, you know, the thing in Finland where they've decided to end homelessness by just building homeless people apartments without any conditions. That's based on the pretty solid concept that doing that is cheaper than the inevitable costs associated with letting people live on the street. And a policy designed to save the government money seems fairly conservative. But if you tried that in North America, the Conservative response would almost certainly be "So my tax dollars are going to lazy bums? How come I don't get a free apartment? I'd love to just sit around and get free stuff and not have to work."

I think you can make a lot of conservative cases for things that have been positioned as left wing economics and maybe to his credit, I think that might have been what drove O'Toole to some extent to "move towards the centre". Like, it's probably bad for housing prices to be this high for everyone except people who profit on housing. That means less money for consumer goods and everything else. So shouldn't a conservative government take real drastic steps to ensure housing costs drop?

Again, I don't want to get too political theory-y here but I think Conservatives are going to have to decide at some point if conservatism means maintaining a certain equilibrium, in which case that might have to mean corrections on both ends of the scale from time to time or if it just means the unbridled pursuit of growth that benefits markets is always good for everyone despite the overwhelming evidence that it's only benefitting those at the top. If it's the former, you might be able to sell it. If it's the latter...it's hard to see that working.
 
Nik said:
Sorry HS, that wasn't meant as a criticism of you or the Cartoon, it just sparked something in me I'd been meaning to vent about for a day or so.
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It?s all good, I was just messing with you a little.
 
Nik said:
.
2. Even if Politicians being hypocrites doesn't do it for you and is sort of to be expected, isn't there a big messaging problem too though? If you're going to say that calling the election during the pandemic was reckless and ill-advised then you're de facto arguing that Trudeau should have dealt with the frustrations of a minority government and remained Prime Minister until the pandemic was over or his 4 years was up. So on the one hand you're trying to sell people on "Trudeau has been a terrible Prime Minister, he needs to be replaced urgently" while also making the case that the best thing for the country would be if he'd decided to be Prime Minister for the next two years. Voters took all this in and delivered a result that...will probably see Trudeau stay on as Prime Minister for at least the next two years.
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Isn?t that sort of what the NDP implied was an optimal outcome when they tried to get whoever approves these things to not approve the snap election? They didn?t really have a case that there was an urgent need to replace Trudeau as PM.

An honest and sincerely held belief, or a fear of getting pasted by a popular PM using the goodwill he?d accrued? Partisans and cynics will find mileages vary.

But the real messaging problem seems, in the end, to have belonged to the guy who called the election with an objective in mind and whiffed. Whatever polling responses that indicated satisfaction with his handling of the pandemic might have included things like ?not calling an election? in the mix of things that add up to ?handling the pandemic.?
 
mr grieves said:
Isn?t that sort of what the NDP implied was an optimal outcome when they tried to get whoever approves these things to not approve the snap election? They didn?t really have a case that there was an urgent need to replace Trudeau as PM.
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Yeah, which was pretty strange. A Governor-General(that's the whoever approves these things) refusing the request by a sitting PM to dissolve Parliament would have been, to put it mildly, very unusual. A bit of an own goal by Singh on that one.

mr grieves said:
But the real messaging problem seems, in the end, to have belonged to the guy who called the election with an objective in mind and whiffed. Whatever polling responses that indicated satisfaction with his handling of the pandemic might have included things like ?not calling an election? in the mix of things that add up to ?handling the pandemic.?
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I'm not sure what sort of bumpkins you think we have up here running our political parties but I'm pretty confident that a sophisticated outfit like the Liberal party would have factored that into their internal research. If I had to guess why they didn't win a majority I'd ascribe it more to not adequately factoring in how the various safety precautions would depress turnout and a bad reaction to the sort of shambolic campaign they ran rather than just people being mad about the election call. 
 
Ha! I generally trust ?bumpkins? to have better sense than my own country?s very sophisticated, very well resourced political minds. In my adult life, the best & brightest on the US center left have only put together majorities twice: in the immediate wake of the opposition overseeing a once-in-a-century financial collapse and then a once-in-a-century pandemic.

I think the Canadian Liberals probably have the brightest minds that get into politicking for the center left, and must?ve been unclear in my post, though I thought I was pretty clear previously: it?s not that the election in a pandemic is inherently bad, but that it predictably will eat into the favorability ratings for one?s handling of said pandemic in the absence of a compelling reason for said election presented to voters. The amazing handling of the pandemic was not, it turns out, manifestly a reason for voters to hand Liberals a majority, and it?s a ?shambolic campaign? assumes that, plus a bit of fear-monger if about a conservative majority, it is.
 
mr grieves said:
I think the Canadian Liberals probably have the brightest minds that get into politicking for the center left, and must?ve been unclear in my post, though I thought I was pretty clear previously: it?s not that the election in a pandemic is inherently bad, but that it predictably will eat into the favorability ratings for one?s handling of said pandemic in the absence of a compelling reason for said election presented to voters.
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No, I got that. I just think that the actual results of the election may show that a majority may never have been in the cards regardless or, if it was, that there's a compelling reason to think that the reason the Liberals didn't get it has nothing to do with the reasons you seem to think. Like, I get it the tautologic reasoning, if the Liberal's "compelling reason" was good enough to win a majority they would have won a majority and they didn't so it wasn't but that ignores the dozens of factors in an election that have nothing to do with the Liberals or that are outside of their control that also influence the outcomes. For instance, you know, realistically for the Liberals to win a majority they had to do better in Quebec and it looked like they were on pace to until a badly phrased question in the English language debate gave a boost to the BQ. That has nothing to do with the Liberals and the case they had for calling the election.

Likewise, earlier you seemed to want to say that the Liberals had a messaging problem which is a different thing than saying they didn't have a compelling case to make. You'll notice I said their campaign sucked, not their platform. If you think the Liberals were only going to be proven wise to call this election if they came up with a compelling "reason" to call it that was so blindingly powerful and persuasive that it rendered every other possible factor in the election irrelevant to the brilliance of their message and resulted in a majority no matter what, then you're not really being fair to the process of how elections work.

But I think maybe more to the point, and something that might clear up some of the things you seem not to understand about Canadian politics, is that I really don't think the decision to call an election from the Liberals(and you should probably think of it in that context rather than just the PM deciding unilaterally to do it) was taken in the vein of "We're calling this election to win a majority and if we don't win a majority this election is a calamitous failure". I think any party calling an election wants to win a Majority but ultimately the aim is to win the election and govern and the Liberals did that. There may be some people in the party disappointed by the scope of their victory(where they added seats, including some in key areas where they didn't have MPs before) but I don't think they're very loud and we're certainly not hearing a lot of whispers about people being upset with Trudeau. They have a renewed mandate. They have a weakened opposition.

So I would be very surprised if anyone at Liberal HQ saw this as a "whiff". It's a solid double. It's a good win for them.
 
Every time Singh bashed one of the other leaders, he just fed into people's thinking this was all about who they didn't want in power rather than who they did.  Many people are outright terrified of Liberal spending habits with no clue how we're going to pay for this.  Singh promised to take our credit card and spend even more that Trudeau.  If he offered up some believable ways how we'd pay for this and tackle the deficit, the NDP had a real chance of stealing a lot of votes.  Singh needs to go or change his act.
 
Of course now that I say this Trudeau has called a last minute press conference tonight so knowing my record with predictions he'll probably resign.

edit: Nope, just China stuff.
 
Nik said:
Of course now that I say this Trudeau has called a last minute press conference tonight so knowing my record with predictions he'll probably resign.

edit: Nope, just China stuff.
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Oh look, Spavor and Korvig are coming home. Guess Liberal haters are going to have to find some other talking point to complain about.
 
Bender said:
Nik said:
Of course now that I say this Trudeau has called a last minute press conference tonight so knowing my record with predictions he'll probably resign.

edit: Nope, just China stuff.
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Oh look, Spavor and Korvig are coming home. Guess Liberal haters are going to have to find some other talking point to complain about.
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I didn't realize their release over 1000 days later absolved the sitting government of any criticism.
 
Frank E said:
Bender said:
Nik said:
Of course now that I say this Trudeau has called a last minute press conference tonight so knowing my record with predictions he'll probably resign.

edit: Nope, just China stuff.
Click to expand...
Oh look, Spavor and Korvig are coming home. Guess Liberal haters are going to have to find some other talking point to complain about.
Click to expand...

I didn't realize their release over 1000 days later absolved the sitting government of any criticism.
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I didn't say they were beyond criticism of the situation, but what I am saying is the amount of anger (which is different from legitimate criticism) toward the Liberals about this when there was basically nothing that could be done apart from influencing the U.S. to cut a deal with Wanzhou/Huawei/China in order to let her go back to China seems pretty ludicrous, and no amount of political grandstanding or magic wand waving was going to change that this was always going to be tit for tat, regardless of what party was in power at the time.

Out of curiousity what should the government have done differently when caught between two superpowers? Tell the U.S. they aren't going to acknowledge their extradition request and send Wanzhou back?
 
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/catholic-residential-school-wilson-raybould-1.6202141

hmmm....
 
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/liberals-win-chateauguay-lacolle-riding-by-12-votes-after-judicial-recount-1.5613815

After a recount, the Liberals hold onto a riding by 12 votes. This takes them to 160 total and, I guess, makes up for the one they lost by 24 votes in Winnipeg.

And while I know it won't, you'd like to think that this might kill the "Well, the Liberals wouldn't have won if not for the GTA" stuff. They could have lost 20 seats more in the GTA then they did, all to the Conservatives, and would still be the biggest party.

The urban-rural divide is real and widespread.
 
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