Canada Election 2015

[Kitchissippi]

Last night's TVO interview with Ralph Nader was interesting with his perspective on how Canada has become more polarized and how we've lost our moderate, socially responsible stance :

http://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/whats-happening-to-canada

It seems like we've lost shared goals of what Canada should become — there was a time when Liberals and Conservatives merely argued about the methods to strive toward similar ideals.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by ozonemania

Never said anything about how they compare to other parties, past or present. You're reading with your own bias, that somehow my argument against the Conservatives is an argument for everyone else. The Harper Conservatives had a choice on how they wanted to govern and they own that for better or for worse.

Woosh.

[*Stardust*]

Originally Posted by Kitchissippi

Last night's TVO interview with Ralph Nader was interesting with his perspective on how Canada has become more polarized and how we've lost our moderate, socially responsible stance :

http://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/whats-happening-to-canada

It seems like we've lost shared goals of what Canada should become — there was a time when Liberals and Conservatives merely argued about the methods to strive toward similar ideals.

I watched it too. Almost puts tears in my eyes.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Stingray2004

Am actually following Quebec quite closely. Again, QC voters can surprise at the end of the day. Very fickle.

Today, QC pollster Leger released a large sample size (n = 1023) in QC and these are Leger`s findings:



http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/poli...uebec-in-new-leger-poll/article26504053/

So yeah, in the RoC, outside QC, it`s now a 2-way race between the Cons and Liberals according to Leger.

Yeah, but as I've been telling you, this 38%/20%/18%/22% basically still results in the exact same distribution of MPs as what we had previously.

~40% well spread... that's total sweep territory in a FPTP system, especially in this province (since we have four major parties, not three).

~50% doesn't do anything more than ~40%.

Now, yes, of course, if you project that 8% drop into the future, sure, eventually, they start to really lose seats if they continue to lose support like that. (As we know though, these trends can't just be extended, the variations are mostly see-saw.)

But ~40%, you're still sweeping the province with that, since everyone else only has ~20%, usually spread just way too thin to do much (notice that BQ with ~20% gets 0 MPs elected, while the concentrated LPC also with a similar ~20% gets at least a dozen MPs... but again are spread too thin outside their strongholds to actually hope to get MPs elected. The Tories, with LESS support than the Bloc who gets zero MPs, actually do get a handful of MPs -- their voting base being less spread, somewhat concentrated in Chaudière-Appalaches and the Quebec City suburbs.)

The debates might change everything, you can never know! I will be watching them, I'm curious.

[rousseau]

Look, the key thing with this election is that Harper has to go. What he's doing is absolutely frightening and enraging. Canada is not a right wing country. Two-thirds of us, the electorate, don't want him in power, but we're split. At this point we need to vote strategically in our ridings to make sure that this conservative nightmare ends.

Vanishing Canada: Why we’re all losers in Ottawa’s war on data
Records deleted, burned, tossed in Dumpsters. A Maclean’s investigation on the crisis in government data

Stories about government data and historical records being deleted, burned—even tossed into Dumpsters—have become so common in recent years that many Canadians may feel inured to them. But such accounts are only the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg.

Statistics Canada no longer provides a clear snapshot of the country, says John Stapleton, a Toronto-based social policy consultant. “Our survey data pixelates—it’s a big blur. And the small data, we don’t know if it’s right.” twitter-birdtweet this

How many Canadians live in poverty now, compared to 2011? We don’t know; changes in income-data collection has made it impossible to track. Austerity measures, ironically, have resulted in an inability to keep track of the changes: StatsCan used to provide detailed, comprehensive data on salaries and employment at all levels of government; now we can’t tell where, or how deep, the cuts have been.

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were-all-losers-in-ottawas-war-on-data/

You know what? Who the 🞵🞵🞵🞵 does this conservative crew think they are? And what the 🞵🞵🞵🞵 are the idiotic conservative voters putting these people in charge thinking? Well, obviously, you even see it in this thread: they aren't thinking at all. They're following a script laid out for them: keep taxes for the rich down, because trickle down something, and communist Big Brother something, and blah blah blah cretinous drivel brain turds because socialist welfare something forcing my children to study 🞵🞵🞵 🞵🞵🞵 in school while worshipping Satan and Mohammed. Ad nauseum.

I don't trust any politician, and don't know how successful the Liberals or NDP will be in power. We all know, though, the damage that Harper has exacted on this country by steering the ship to the right. We know that he will continue to do so if he gains power again.

The two-thirds of the country that do not agree with Harper have to start agreeing with ourselves in order to make sure that this does not 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 happen again.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by Kitchissippi

Last night's TVO interview with Ralph Nader was interesting with his perspective on how Canada has become more polarized and how we've lost our moderate, socially responsible stance :

http://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/whats-happening-to-canada

It seems like we've lost shared goals of what Canada should become — there was a time when Liberals and Conservatives merely argued about the methods to strive toward similar ideals.

If there's one thing that bugs me the most during election time it's vacuous political language which is used to appeal to some abstract emotions but has absolutely no basis in reality. Things like Justin repeating over and over again how "We believe in a BETTER Canada". And the type of political commentary which white washes manipulates, and reinvents history by looking with rose coloured glasses at a time when we all held hands and sang kumbaya on our journey to a "better" Canada.

There is nothing new under the sun folks. The Liberals acted like idiots in the house, the Conservatives are acting like idiots in the house. The Liberals governed with mandates and rammed unpopular legislation down our throats, the Conservatives do the same.

For the longest time in our history, it has been a bitter and rather silly political war between the Grits and the Tories. They have always been pulling our country in different directions. This is what it has always been. We've become more polarized because now we have an extra viable party who is throwing their own attack style into the political discourse. Three viable parties and they are all relentlessly attacking each other to get a bigger piece of the pie.

There are plenty of reasons to not like Conservatives. But this absurd reinvention of history that pretends that Conservatives are the inventors of all the absurdities in our political system is not doing anyone any good. These are systemic issues with our political process which hurt us all.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Look, the key thing with this election is that Harper has to go. What he's doing is absolutely frightening and enraging. Canada is not a right wing country. Two-thirds of us, the electorate, don't want him in power, but we're split. At this point we need to vote strategically in our ridings to make sure that this conservative nightmare ends.



You know what? Who the 🞵🞵🞵🞵 does this conservative crew think they are? And what the 🞵🞵🞵🞵 are the idiotic conservative voters putting these people in charge thinking? Well, obviously, you even see it in this thread: they aren't thinking at all. They're following a script laid out for them: keep taxes for the rich down, because trickle down something, and communist Big Brother something, and blah blah blah cretinous drivel brain turds because socialist welfare something forcing my children to study 🞵🞵🞵 🞵🞵🞵 in school while worshipping Satan and Mohammed. Ad nauseum.

I don't trust any politician, and don't know how successful the Liberals or NDP will be in power. We all know, though, the damage that Harper has exacted on this country by steering the ship to the right. We know that he will continue to do so if he gains power again.

The two-thirds of the country that do not agree with Harper have to start agreeing with ourselves in order to make sure that this does not 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 happen again.

It's not that 2/3s don't want Conservatives. 2/3s don't want NDP and 2/3 don't want Liberals either.

1/3 of us want the government to focus on cutting government services, lowering our taxes, and take the government to task over ensuring government initiatives are economically justified.Those are conservatives.

1/3 of us want the government to consider wide sweeping federal programs such as national pharmacare and national child care. These are NDP supporters.

1/3 of us want the government to increase it's spending and invest more in existing programs, especially during a time of recession. These are the Liberals.

It is completely insane that we cannot expect a minority government with almost equal representation across three parties to come to a reasonable compromise in representing the Canadians that want these things.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by geotag277

If there's one thing that bugs me the most during election time it's vacuous political language which is used to appeal to some abstract emotions but has absolutely no basis in reality. Things like Justin repeating over and over again how "We believe in a BETTER Canada". And the type of political commentary which white washes manipulates, and reinvents history by looking with rose coloured glasses at a time when we all held hands and sang kumbaya on our journey to a "better" Canada.

There is nothing new under the sun folks. The Liberals acted like idiots in the house, the Conservatives are acting like idiots in the house. The Liberals governed with mandates and rammed unpopular legislation down our throats, the Conservatives do the same.

For the longest time in our history, it has been a bitter and rather silly political war between the Grits and the Tories. They have always been pulling our country in different directions. This is what it has always been. We've become more polarized because now we have an extra viable party who is throwing their own attack style into the political discourse. Three viable parties and they are all relentlessly attacking each other to get a bigger piece of the pie.

There are plenty of reasons to not like Conservatives. But this absurd reinvention of history that pretends that Conservatives are the inventors of all the absurdities in our political system is not doing anyone any good. These are systemic issues with our political process which hurt us all.

And, apart from NDP support for PR, only the Liberals have elaborated a plan to try to address some of these systemic issues.

[flar]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Vanishing Canada: Why we’re all losers in Ottawa’s war on data
Records deleted, burned, tossed in Dumpsters. A Maclean’s investigation on the crisis in government data

Stories about government data and historical records being deleted, burned—even tossed into Dumpsters—have become so common in recent years that many Canadians may feel inured to them. But such accounts are only the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg.

Statistics Canada no longer provides a clear snapshot of the country, says John Stapleton, a Toronto-based social policy consultant. “Our survey data pixelates—it’s a big blur. And the small data, we don’t know if it’s right.” twitter-birdtweet this

How many Canadians live in poverty now, compared to 2011? We don’t know; changes in income-data collection has made it impossible to track. Austerity measures, ironically, have resulted in an inability to keep track of the changes: StatsCan used to provide detailed, comprehensive data on salaries and employment at all levels of government; now we can’t tell where, or how deep, the cuts have been.

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/v...s-war-on-data/

In the past couple years, there were two big initiatives related to this within the public service.

The first was an entire day devoted to destroying paper records. Everyone was encouraged to destroy documents. Huge bins were brought in to all the offices and people went wild, throwing out everything summarily deemed to be without "lasting business value." Entire file cabinets were emptied, books, binders, all kinds of stuff, sent to the shredders. Easily millions upon millions of documents were destroyed in one day.

The second was a major cleanup of shared computer storage (servers). This was over a longer period of time. Again, hundreds of thousands of documents and emails were deleted without much consideration. Basically anything more than a year or two old was trashed. Teams were praised for how many documents they deleted. Yay, our team deleted over 20,000 files! Whoopee! All the work that came before us is gone!

Throughout this exercise, people made uneasy jokes about the Government's control of information.

Sometimes a good clean up is necessary, but this one probably had dual purposes.

[kwoldtimer]

[QUOTE=geotag277;7175092]It's not that 2/3s don't want Conservatives. 2/3s don't want NDP and 2/3 don't want Liberals either.

1/3 of us want the government to focus on cutting government services, lowering our taxes, and take the government to task over ensuring government initiatives are economically justified.Those are conservatives.

1/3 of us want the government to consider wide sweeping federal programs such as national pharmacare and national child care. These are NDP supporters.

1/3 of us want the government to increase it's spending and invest more in existing programs, especially during a time of recession. These are the Liberals.

It is completely insane that we cannot expect a minority government with almost equal representation across three parties to come to a reasonable compromise in representing the Canadians that want these things.[/QUOTE]

And that's why, if the current numbers hold, the Liberals and NDP will find some way to work together for at least a couple of years, although the path to that may take a bit of time. It could even prove to be a quite effective government.

[rousseau]

The NDP and the Liberals are closer to each other on the ideological spectrum. From left to right, the NDP is Saskatchewan-Manitoba, the Liberals are Manitoba-Ontario, and the Tories are Newfoundland. Oh, the Greens are BC. But the "big three" are not equidistant from each other.

What's really insane is what Harper is doing to democracy in Canada, how he's muzzling science and trying to either control meaningful data or make it disappear. It's insane, and it's enraging that the unhinged right wing in this country has given its blessing to this Machiavellian power play.

Afraid what the scientists might find? Shut them down!

That's not supposed to be the sort of country Canada is, but the Tories are doing their damndest to turn it into that kind of place.

[flar]

Originally Posted by geotag277

It's not that 2/3s don't want Conservatives. 2/3s don't want NDP and 2/3 don't want Liberals either.

1/3 of us want the government to focus on cutting government services, lowering our taxes, and take the government to task over ensuring government initiatives are economically justified.Those are conservatives.

1/3 of us want the government to consider wide sweeping federal programs such as national pharmacare and national child care. These are NDP supporters.

1/3 of us want the government to increase it's spending and invest more in existing programs, especially during a time of recession. These are the Liberals.

It is completely insane that we cannot expect a minority government with almost equal representation across three parties to come to a reasonable compromise in representing the Canadians that want these things.

No, it is very clear that far more people are against the Conservatives than against either of the other parties. The problem is lots of people are just not "for" any of the parties. I would never call myself a Liberal or NDP or Green supporter, but any of those three parties are far more preferable than the Conservatives.

This is why both Trudeau and Mulclair would not support a Conservative minority, and they are right to think that way. A lack of support does not constitute being babies, it is representative of the will of the majority of Canadians, who have had to suffer under a destructive and undemocratic Conservative government.

[geotag277]

The Grits versus Tories has been a 150 year political war. The Liberals have done plenty of damage to this country with their own mandates. Let's not white wash history here.

And while there may be a few people online, generally the younger hard headed variety who are militant over zealous "anti Harper" personalities (these personalities also somewhat not coincidentally have plenty of free time and dominate social media), there are also plenty of individuals who are malleable in their support across different combinations of parties. Just look at contributions in this thread for example. For every hard headed Nevergold for the liberals or Migs for the Conservatives, there are jmts and MonctonRads who are open and critical of all parties and support can switch.

NDP are quite focused on economic benefit in their platform. They are not so far from Conservatives in that they are focused on language involving balancing budgets and initiatives with economic benefit. That is not so different from Conservative language and ideals.

The Liberals are also focused on economy recover through a platform of tax and spending on existing and expanding Conservative investments in infrastructure and other things. Many of the programs Trudeau is platforming on expanding were first expanded by the Conservative government. There is plenty of overlap there as well.

The extremist language regarding the unprecedented damage the Harper Conservatives have done to our democracy is not only not helping, it is disingenuously white washing the actual history of politics in Canada and sweeping damaging legacies of parties across the political spectrum under the rug. That's also not how we do things in Canada. We should be better than that.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by rousseau

The NDP and the Liberals are closer to each other on the ideological spectrum. From left to right, the NDP is Saskatchewan-Manitoba, the Liberals are Manitoba-Ontario, and the Tories are Newfoundland. Oh, the Greens are BC. But the "big three" are not equidistant from each other.

In terms of the impact we should expect on the daily life in Canada if they had a four-year majority mandate, the LPC and the current (Mulcair) version of the NDP are pretty much both in Manitoba, and the CPC is in Thunder Bay.

They're all pretty centrist. (The NDP used to be more socialist, but Mulcair's version of it isn't.)

The CPC is a big government party, they're barely to the right of anyone. They're a big government party, but with a pro-religion, anti-abortion, anti-science flavor. That's not "the right". The true right would be for the smallest, leanest government, and that government would absolutely keep its nose out of people's betrooms and uteri.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by flar

This is why both Trudeau and Mulclair would not support a Conservative minority, and they are right to think that way. A lack of support does not constitute being babies, it is representative of the will of the majority of Canadians, who have had to suffer under a destructive and undemocratic Conservative government.

Hmm, I would say that if the Oct. election produces a CPC minority, then what's "representative of the will of the majority of Canadians" is a CPC minority.

And if they're a minority, they will be 100% kept in check -- anything they try to do that both LPC and NDP oppose, won't happen.

[flar]

Originally Posted by lio45

Hmm, I would say that if the Oct. election produces a CPC minority, then what's "representative of the will of the majority of Canadians" is a CPC minority.

And if they're a minority, they will be 100% kept in check -- anything they try to do that both LPC and NDP oppose, won't happen.

I completely disagree. A Conservative minority with roughly equal support for three parties is simply a peculiarity of our FPTP system, which you yourself are critical of. A Liberal or NDP minority, with roughly equal support for three parties, also does not give a clear mandate, but has a much better chance of becoming a functional government, because both of these parties are more closely aligned with each other as well as the values of the majority of Canadians. When we look at the Cons, Libs and NDP together, one of these things is not like the others.

[Stingray2004]

Originally Posted by lio45

Yeah, but as I've been telling you, this 38%/20%/18%/22% basically still results in the exact same distribution of MPs as what we had previously.

Oh yeah. Agree Lio. But we are still under 4 weeks away from e-day. If the NDP drops to 35% in QC they will lose a handful of seats. After that, though, it begins to get ugly very fast.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by flar

A Conservative minority with roughly equal support for three parties is simply a peculiarity of our FPTP system, which you yourself are critical of.

I was assuming that they'd also have at least the highest share of the popular vote among the parties (32%+)... but yeah, of course, I agree that if they get a minority by a hair through the sheer luck of closer-to-optimal spread of their voters, while another party actually got more votes than them, then if you asked me personally I'd much rather have the party that got the most votes form the minority government. That would make more sense to me. That is, out of all parties, the party that got the backing of the highest number of Canadians, so they should be the ones having a shot at making a minority work.

As I've probably said already a couple times, I really can't get on board the idea that a vote can be worth much more or much less than another just based on the location where these votes are cast.

Geography shouldn't matter. A vote is a vote.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Stingray2004

Oh yeah. Agree Lio. But we are still under 4 weeks away from e-day.

I'd say, we're mostly two Quebec debates away from e-day...
(FWIW, Acajack compared it to a prostate exam for Mulcair, I chose instead to go with the root canal )

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Stingray2004

If the NDP drops to 35% in QC they will lose a handful of seats. After that, though, it begins to get ugly very fast.

Especially since it might start a spiral outside Quebec.

I have the feeling that one of the main things the NDP has had going for it is the fact that the province with the second most seats appeared (and I'd say still appears...) to be totally on track to massively vote for them.

Just that, alone, is already a pretty good argument to help convince some of the center-left anti-Harper votes to try to coalesce around the NDP instead of the LPC.

The NDP already has Quebec locked in... the LPC in comparison seems to have less solid support, so it makes sense to try to build around the NDP's better base.

If the NDP starts to appear to lose their grip on Quebec, then I would definitely see this helping the center-left vote coalesce around the LPC country-wide.