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Evis posted:Can Toronto form their own province? Seems like we could but it would require changing the constitution, which would require the approval of at least most of the provinces. I don't think most of the provinces would agree. I also don't think Ontario would even allow a referendum to be held. The city could try, but the province would outlaw it, and then we could ignore them and try to run it anyway, but that would require people willing to go to jail over it and it feels like we're not there yet. But fighting for it and making it a real threat could give us some leverage to help us get the reforms we want.
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Sep 12, 2018 14:46
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Goading the province into dissolving the City of Toronto would certainly be something. I'm willing to bet they're dumb enough to try it too. What I really want to know is how long the rest of the province will put up with this Premier Mayor of Toronto bullshit before they remember that the whole reason they hate Toronto to begin with is because we suck all the air out of provincial politics.
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Sep 12, 2018 14:51
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In case you thought the idiotic escalations were over: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-premier-ford-toronto-fight-leaves-council-in-confusion-ahead-of/ The Globe and Mail posted:Lawyers for the City of Toronto are delving into uncharted legal waters for ways to challenge Ontario Premier Doug Ford's plan to use the Constitution's notwithstanding clause to cut city council almost in half with six weeks to go before a municipal election.
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Sep 12, 2018 14:55
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Toronto forming their own province would be a clusterfuck. It's way too integrated into the rest of the golden horseshoe, and lol if you think that the Ontario government is going to be cool with everywhere between Niagara and Oshawa seceding. Honestly if we were going for extreme measures, I would almost say the sanest (although it's still never going to happen) is for the Lieutenant Governor to tell Ford to cool his jets and hold off on Royal assent until after the Toronto elections. That would be a loving mess though.
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Sep 12, 2018 15:05
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tagesschau posted:In case you thought the idiotic escalations were over: I cannot for the life of me see how this election is going to work (it won't) in the time-frame we have, with these appeals ongoing.
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Sep 12, 2018 15:05
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Helsing posted:You're also overlooking the fact that sometimes a dramatic defeat is better than an outright surrender. A good leader doesn't always win but when they lose they lose in the right way, and that requires actually fighting sometimes not just being hyper cautious and reasonable. I think I'm broadly in agreement with you here about the larger point. Do you have an example of such a beneficial failure? Comedy option: the Harper government gave the Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship the power to instantly grant Canadian citizenship to any individual, without limit. You want a constitutional crisis? Why not an international one, too? I want Ahmed Hussen, the current holder of the office and this power, to unilaterally grant Canadian citizenship to a large group of refugees - Syrian, Rohingya, Malian, take your pick - who are not yet in Canada. Then Canada would be forced to intervene in Turkey or Bangladesh or Libya to protect Canadian citizens.
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Sep 12, 2018 15:12
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tagesschau posted:In case you thought the idiotic escalations were over: Interesting bit from this which I feel like probably doesn't apply but I Want To Believe quote:Legal experts say lawyers for the city and the candidates could revive their arguments from their court challenge of the legislation that Mr. Ford’s bill violated “unwritten constitutional principles” of democracy and rule of law. They could also try a rarely attempted legal argument based on a 1988 Supreme Court of Canada case on Quebec’s use of the clause. In that case, the court deemed that the notwithstanding clause cannot be used retroactively to erase a past breach of the Charter.
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Sep 12, 2018 15:30
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ChickenWing posted:Interesting bit from this which I feel like probably doesn't apply but I Want To Believe I'm struggling to see how it's retroactive though. The elections haven't happened yet. The charter hasn't been breached because the law was struck down and technically speaking, the Toronto election is back to 47 seats.
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Sep 12, 2018 15:33
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enki42 posted:I'm struggling to see how it's retroactive though. The elections haven't happened yet. The charter hasn't been breached because the law was struck down and technically speaking, the Toronto election is back to 47 seats. I mean I know as close to 0 as is possible while still reading this thread about it, but based on my layman understanding it would seem like Bill 5 being passed was itself the breach of the charter. The law came into effect (causing the breach), and then was struck down by the judge - so the breach happened, and was rectified. The decision in question sounds like it's saying "If you're going to breach the charter, you have to have full knowledge of it when doing so - you're not allowed to get rejected and try again" (which honestly makes a lot of sense imo) e: clarity
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Sep 12, 2018 15:40
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Helsing posted:I think it's pretty clear by now that a significant part of what we think of as "progressives" - both the voters and the politicos - are convinced, deep down, that the general population is fundamentally conservative and that the only role progressive politics can play is a long series of defensive actions in which you must live in constant fear that you'll give the conservatives an "excuse" to do even more terrible stuff. The result is a political dynamic where liberals are afraid of their own shadows while conservatives just plunge on ahead with whatever constitution bending policies they want. I don't agree with your reasoning here. One of the major functions of constitutional rights is to defend minorities from the whims of the majority. Conservatives are often in the business of assailing minorities while progressives are usually defending them. It's fairly natural then for conservatives to want to undermine the systems which protect minority rights, and equally natural for progressives to want to maintain and expand those systems. Our response should not be to toss out constitutional norms, but to strengthen them.
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Sep 12, 2018 16:10
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ExecuDork posted:I think I'm broadly in agreement with you here about the larger point. Do you have an example of such a beneficial failure? I think a recent example of a "good" political defeat would be the campaign in Argentina to legalize abortion. There have been mass mobilizations by women and activists, taking to the streets and demanding the legalization of abortion. However, the Catholic church mobilized in a major way to block the bill that would legalize abortion and ultimately the bill was defeated by a narrow vote in the Argentinian senate. However, just about everyone understands that the protesters have won the argument and have mobilized enough people to almost guarantee the abortion law will be changed. They suffered a temporary setback but the coalition remains unified and energetic and feels a strong sense of momentum: The Guardian posted:“Things will never be the same, because society has been changed by these five months of debating the law,” said the journalist Soledad Vallejos, a member of the #NiUnaMenos collective that began amid protests against gender violence and became a major force behind the proposed law. Now for an example of losing badly. Actually lets just use the Obama administration because it has dozens of examples. Here's a blog post from way back in 2010 analyzing Obama's first two years in office. I think it makes the point in a succint and convincing fashion. Also as you read this try to reflect on the stuff regarding immigration and national security in light of how the 2016 election went: Rortybomb posted:A few weeks ago Jonathan Bernstein asked liberals “As the 111th Congress winds down, what’s your biggest disappointment of the things you expected to happen?” Here's a follow up the next year looking at the budget: quote:Obama is Bad at Losing, Budget Edition That last line is almost prophetic in light of how the Obama administration's failures set us up for the current Trump administration.
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Sep 12, 2018 16:42
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HappyHippo posted:I don't agree with your reasoning here. One of the major functions of constitutional rights is to defend minorities from the whims of the majority. Conservatives are often in the business of assailing minorities while progressives are usually defending them. It's fairly natural then for conservatives to want to undermine the systems which protect minority rights, and equally natural for progressives to want to maintain and expand those systems. You're only describing one part of the constitution, and the protections is offers are woefully inadequate. When's the last time you were behind the scenes at a minimum wage workplace like a warehouse or kitchen? Do you know anyone trying to get their life started in a big city without having a salaried job? Have you ever gone to a community meetings in a low income neighborhood where the residents are upset about their terribly maintained apartment stock yet fear that any improvements will price them out of the area? Or when you look at the economy - the balance between the FIRE sector and the rest, the trend for wages and benefits, or the fact we're still almost exclusively building auto-dependent suburbs when it's obvious the era of cheap energy and cars and ending - do you think the constitution is protecting people from the future crashing down on them? And when you look around the rest of the world and realize Trudeau is practically the last prominent liberal left, and when you see what is waiting in the wings to replace liberalism... do you really feel protected? Liberal policies have stripped the economy, failed to address climate change or inequality, and create the social conditions that populist conservatives then use to gain power. Do we really have to do what the Americans have done and wait until the authoritarian xenophobes are literally in power before we even dare to reassess whether our smug brand of liberalism has run out of steam? Contemporary liberalism was given its bite at the apple following the 2008 crash. Prominent liberal leaders were in power around the world, often with legislative majorities and favorable courts, and just about everywhere they've overseen more unpopular trade deals, more austerity or austerity-lite governance, and again and again they keep getting beaten by populist right-wingers who take advantage of the fact not many people actually likes or trusts liberals after seeing how they ran the world. Mainstream liberal and social democratic political parties are now mostly in electoral free fall. So what are we clinging to here? quote:Our response should not be to toss out constitutional norms, but to strengthen them. How?
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Sep 12, 2018 16:57
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Helsing posted:Now for an example of losing badly. Actually lets just use the Obama administration because it has dozens of examples. The easy read for the Obama being bad at losing is that he wasn't really all that interested in strongly progressive causes in the first place. He's pretty solidly part of the neoliberal wing of the party who just happens to be charismatic and able to inspire people around vague notions of progressivism without getting into a lot of details. Trudeau is pretty similar. He's someone that it's easy to project the idea of progressivism onto, and while he's by no means a conservative and probably is good on balance on most social issues, he's hardly a radical and things like failing to take a hard line on Ford is less about meekness and more about Liberals and the neoliberal wing of the Democrats being more or less fine with the status quo.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:14
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Edit: this is in response to Helsing Your argument seems to be that the system of constitutional rights doesn't protect those who are economically disadvantaged, which is a fair criticism. But you haven't explained at all how abandoning it helps, which is kinda important here. And is it worth the trade-off given there are other groups who's rights it protects? How to expand the system is a more complex topic than I'm willing to get into here. But the point I wanted to make is that progessives defending our system of rights while conservatives seek to undermine it isn't a symptom of a "defeatist attitude," it's a natural result of the priorities inherent in those political positions.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:18
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At the end of the day, the problem is precisely that Doug Ford isn't respecting the idea of good government or the reasons that the Charter is in place. No one gives enough of a poo poo about the number of seats in Toronto to make this big a fuss. If the specific problem is abusing the constitution, instead of abusing the constitution being a means to some other horrible end, then responding by abusing the constitution worse is nonsensical.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:20
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enki42 posted:At the end of the day, the problem is precisely that Doug Ford isn't respecting the idea of good government or the reasons that the Charter is in place. No one gives enough of a poo poo about the number of seats in Toronto to make this big a fuss. If the specific problem is abusing the constitution, instead of abusing the constitution being a means to some other horrible end, then responding by abusing the constitution worse is nonsensical. I just don't understand how it's an abuse of the constitution to protect and entrench democratic rights and processes at the municipal level. Not loving with ongoing elections is something that at the very least should be part of our unwritten constitution. By acting to protect democratic processes, the norms are strengthened, not abandoned.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:27
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Just in case anyone was wondering how a white nationalist like Faith Goldy would end up being legitimized as a candidate and given a televised platform, it's like this: https://twitter.com/jpags/status/1039909927513407488
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Sep 12, 2018 17:30
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Health Services posted:I just don't understand how it's an abuse of the constitution to protect and entrench democratic rights and processes at the municipal level. Not loving with ongoing elections is something that at the very least should be part of our unwritten constitution. By acting to protect democratic processes, the norms are strengthened, not abandoned. Yes, given that Doug Ford has already announced that he plans to continue using the notwithstanding clause to ram in charter-violating legislation, now would probably be the best time to step in and declare this behaviour unacceptable.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:40
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How indeed. Helsing do you have any suggestions on how we can fight back against conservatism.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:47
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Doug Ford slip of the day: https://twitter.com/DavidHains/status/1039895000790822918 I know it's early yet, but we're off to a good start
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Sep 12, 2018 18:02
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I don't think Trudeau will do anything to remind people that he's not really a credible defender of better democratic representation.
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Sep 12, 2018 18:13
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infernal machines posted:Doug Ford slip of the day: same thread: https://twitter.com/DavidHains/status/1039898830307827715 
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Sep 12, 2018 18:17
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HappyHippo posted:Edit: this is in response to Helsing (Necessary preface: what I'm describing is kind of fantastical right now because the left is so far from power, but what's written below would be the mindset I'd want to see in a contemporary leader of the NDP, this is what I want to believe the NDP would do if if they had the power) Politics is about coalition building, not convincing swing voters. Whenever a progressive government gets into power their top priority should be using every available law and tax measure to eradicate Conservative think tanks and bankrupt conservative industries. Treat any conservative institutions with exactly the same degree of legitimacy that conservatives give to unions. Literally treat the infrastructure of movement conservatism as a cancerous spot that needs to be removed for the good of the body politic. Meanwhile, simultaneously be using every generous handout and trick available to create new left wing institutions, be they unions or think tanks or charities or what have you. That's what it needs to be at this point. War to the death against the institutional basis of conservatism. And that would obviously violate democratic and constitutional norms. Basically the left needs to start viewing the contemporary right not as respectable opponents with different ideas but as an existential threat. They need to be willing to deploy any available institutional weapons. Unfortunately to get anywhere close to do that we'll first need a workable vehicle for some kind of muscular leftism, which means priority one is removing the Horwath and Singh and Mulcair and (yes, that's right) Layton type politicians who are never going to see things this way. So for starters maybe we could actually try to find somebody like Jeremy Corbyn who actually wants to fundamentally change the system instead of just manage it better. And I'm not sure where that Corbyn style politician is in Canada right now. Arcsquad12 posted:How indeed. Helsing do you have any suggestions on how we can fight back against conservatism. Things seem pretty bleak right now but building on what I said above, I think the first thing that needs to change is our mindset. Politics is not a matter of cleaving to the centre to convince swing voters. It's about building a well organized political machine and then using every available resource to destroy the other people's political machines. Right now I think that means abandoning expensive outreach to suburban swing voters and investing party resources into really strong grassroots organizing, with an eye to a long term (i.e. over several election cycles) plan to recruit currently non-voting people to the NDP cause. To do that the NDP needs to be consistent and focused on the real struggles of poor people's lives: precarious employment, expensive and lovely apartment stock, insanely high rents, crappy transit, etc. Ideally try have community activist organizations that are organized parallel to the party and which prioritize people's daily struggles in-between elections. Make the NDP (or the leftist party that replaces it) the political arm of a larger social movement targeting inequality and corruption in government. My thinking here is informed by authors like Ziad W. Munson, Thomas Ferguson and Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, all of whom emphasize in different ways the key role of organizations in shaping both activism and politics. We need to move away from the focus on winning swing votes and invest our resources more heavily in slowly building and expanding a durable coalition of voters. Probably that means abandoning any short term hope of winning government and focusing more on winning enough representation to exact concessions from whoever does win. If it comes down to it, better to let the NDP be a permanent minority party from which the Liberals have to steal ideas to govern, if the alternative is a centrist NDP that occasionally wins elections and then governs as the slightly less corrupt Liberal party, which is all that provincial NDP governments have managed to accomplish and what the current federal NDP wants.
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Sep 12, 2018 18:35
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The thing about the death of left wing politics in the west has a lot to do with the fact that it's basically become at_least_im_not_racist.png except the leftist saying it is actually the guy holding the knife. The left needs to be rebuilt from the ground up if it's going to be anything but the less offensive, slightly softer, somewhat more agreeable boot stamping on a human face forever, which is what it has become today.
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Sep 12, 2018 19:32
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That’s a wonderful though, but money and power is inevitably on one side of the equation. Don’t get into a knife fight if you don’t have a knife. The left needs a knife.
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Sep 12, 2018 19:43
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Jordan7hm posted:That’s a wonderful though, but money and power is inevitably on one side of the equation. Don’t get into a knife fight if you don’t have a knife. The left needs a knife. I like how the saying "don't bring a knife to a gunfight" had to be modified for this because the left banned guns from idioms.
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Sep 12, 2018 19:52
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Guns trigger me
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Sep 12, 2018 19:55
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EvilJoven posted:The thing about the death of left wing politics in the west has a lot to do with the fact that it's basically become at_least_im_not_racist.png except the leftist saying it is actually the guy holding the knife. This is a strange analogy.
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Sep 12, 2018 20:00
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Welp. Now they're booting NDP MPPs out of the legislature. Ostensibly for disrupting the proceedings. https://twitter.com/CP24/status/1039959270664667138 Good show, guys.
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Sep 12, 2018 20:30
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Maybe we should open a dialogue with the Ontario PC Party and ask them why the noise of people hitting their desk hurt their feelings?
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Sep 12, 2018 20:38
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What a goddamn garbage fire. I kind of wish I lived in a more conservative riding so I had a local MPP I could angrily vent at and vote against.
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Sep 12, 2018 21:00
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quote:“'Making the Charter a central part of our Constitution, Canada’s basic law, was a deliberate and focused decision by the prime minister and premiers,' Ontario’s 18th premier explained over the phone yesterday. well jfc Bill Davis if that's what the notwithstanding clause was for then why didn't you write that into the document ffs
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Sep 12, 2018 21:03
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I feel like the authors of these documents should have taken in the contingency of "what if the public elects a complete loving moron?"
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Sep 12, 2018 21:05
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I know we're not big on constitutional amendments like the US is but maybe we should amend it to strike the Notwithstanding Clause. These rights don't really mean anything when a drugdealer with a petty agenda gets elected and decides to say "actually you don't have these rights" I know  is kind of a meme but our system will not survive now that people have realized that /norms/"rule of law" is not legally binding and that they can go and do whatever they want
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Sep 12, 2018 21:08
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Doug Ford is basically Cartman
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Sep 12, 2018 21:13
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The problem with amending the Canadian Constitution is it requires the amendments require 7 out of 10 provinces approval representing 50% of the population so if you open up to the NWC being removed everyone is going to want their own poo poo put in there or else it will never pass. Also Ontario is like 38% of the population right now and they definitely would not pass a change to the NWC, so if you couldn't get it to pass in Quebec, BC or even Alberta you are also hosed.
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Sep 12, 2018 21:17
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It's not something you can just go and do (and this is a good thing that you can't change it willy-nilly) but it's a discussion that I think should be opened up now that people have had a while to see that the Charter isn't so bad after all.
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Sep 12, 2018 21:19
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BattleMaster posted:I know we're not big on constitutional amendments like the US is but maybe we should amend it to strike the Notwithstanding Clause. These rights don't really mean anything when a drugdealer with a petty agenda gets elected and decides to say "actually you don't have these rights" If we are going to set hyper ambitious goals why not focus on stuff that will directly help people? This is a good example of why the Charter isnt so great. It is inherently depoliticizing. It farms out any significant social question to lawyers and judges. But the law can't address the fundamental power imbalances that structure our political economy. If a government actually had the political support and will to power required to change the constitution I would be pushed off to see it wasted on such a minor reform.
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Sep 12, 2018 21:31
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Lawyers and judges following the constitution haven't done too bad of a job but it would obviously better if access to food, clean water, shelter, etc. were enshrined as guaranteed rights.
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Sep 12, 2018 21:38
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apatheticman posted:I feel like the authors of these documents should have taken in the contingency of "what if the public elects a complete loving moron?" Theoretically, isn't that what the Lieutenant-Governor is for?
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Sep 12, 2018 21:56
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