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Ikantski posted:As tedious as that would be, it's still slightly more novel than yet again covering where the NDP went wrong and what they should do differently 3 years in the future. Speaking of the Liberal media though, I thought this was cute. That's kind of the point though, isn't it? By the time an election campaign rolls around you can't change your fundamental strategy. The time to change courses is precisely the three to five year period before the election. And I understand my particular pet peeves and interests aren't going to be interesting to everyone, or that they get tedious after you hear them the fifth or tenth time, so by all means post articles or comments that move the thread in a different direction, but please don't do it by indulging some white noise poster's complaints about the immigrant gang wars that are soon going to drown our beautiful country in blood.
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Nov 12, 2015 19:13
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Trolls can play this thread like it's Baby's First Piano. Pictured below, forums poster do it ironically posts in the CanPol thread. 
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Nov 12, 2015 19:52
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Government regulated weed sounds pretty awful. Decriminalization would be much more preferable.
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Nov 13, 2015 21:11
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Brannock posted:While I'm familiar with the history of the Liberals, I'm curious what (or whether) you see in those letters that suggest to you that the Libs are gonna Lib this time around. Practically every Liberal of note on Trudeau's team is recruited from the Ontario Liberal party, which has a long history of talking progressive during elections and then imposing austerity contracts, cuts to services and handouts to corporations, as well as having a long history of letting friends of the party plunder the province through scandanously mismanaged private-public partnerships (EHealth and Ornge air being the most egregious examples, though handouts to companies like Samsung which never end up delivering the jobs or innovation that they were supposed to are also worth mentioning). The Liberals in Ontario have utterly neglected homelessness, have let healthcare costs increase, did virtually nothing to deal with our huge infrastructure deficit and then, when they belatedly did decide to do something, have funded it by selling off other public infrastructure or by trying to impose taxes and user fees on working class folks so they can maintain the ineffective corporate tax cuts they pushed through earlier in their tenure. With Trudeau specifically you can also look at who he has appointed. His two closest advisers (so far as I know) are Gerald Butts and Katie Telelford, both Ontario Liberals with a long history of involvement in that sordid government. His finance minister is Bill Morneau, who until 2014 was on the board of the conservative think tank the C.D. Howe institute. His chief of staff is Cyrus Reporter, a guy who, went he isn't acting as a Liberal insider, has a long history as a corporate lobbyist for pharmaceutical, telecom and energy companies. His pointperson in inequality is a woman named Chrystia Freeland who, when she was working for Thomson publishing, oversaw the outsourcing of two dozen unionised Canadian jobs to a call centre in India. Hell, one of Trudeau's campaign co-chairs, had to resign just before the election after he got caught writing a guide to prospective lobbyists on how to catch the ear of the new government. And now, unsurprisignly, the Trudeau Liberals are saying exactly what the Ontario Liberals said when they first got elected in 2003: "aw shucks the previous government left us with a bigger shortfall than we expected, we're not sure how many of our budgetary promises we'll be able to keep." Oh yeah, there's also the fact that up until they plummeted in the polls around the start of 2015 the Liberals under Trudeau were mostly signalling that they'd be relatively right wing in their economic policies. They only reversed course after they fell to third and were facing an existential threat as a party. The Liberals will be better than Harper and I'm genuinely pleased with some of Trudeau's early moves but we shouldn't fool ourselves. As soon as the Liberals have to choose between policies that benefit the private sector and good public policy they will side with the private sector, because that's where the base of Liberal support is concentrated. Sure they get their votes from middle class old stock Canadians and working class New Canadians, but if you actually look at the people who become Liberal candidates or advisers then it's a pretty narrow demographic of people (with a few noteworthy exceptions to be sure) and those are the interests that the Liberals actually serve (edit: this is not to say that in literally every case they'll ignore the public, just that when push comes to shove their tendency is going to be to support private interests over public ones, and indeed to probably fail to see that there's even a difference). And once they are done in government they know that they will effortlessly transition to private sector positions where they'll be handsomely compensated for the service they performed on behalf of their real benefactors. This is literally how the Liberal party has always operated and is the closest thing they have to an ideology. Like I said above, they're far better than Harper but they're fundamentally a party of insiders who think governing the country, and enjoying the spoils of governance, are their birth right. Helsing fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 22:35
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The British Redcoats and Navy, various native tribes who opted to side with the British, the Quebecois choosing not to rise up, the reluctance of poorly drilled militia to fight outside their home states and the general reluctance of New England's merchants to fund a war with their main trading partner explain why the territories that became Canada weren't absorbed by the Americans between 1775 and 1815. However, Canada as a political entity exists independently from the United States mostly because in the mid-19th century the British abandoned their mercantilist policies (which took away Canada's favoured trade position) while the Americans started adopting much higher tariffs (restricting Canada's largest non-British market for trade goods) and thereby created pressure among the upper classes to pressure for greater unity. The threat of a stronger American federal government run by the North, which became a very real threat during the Civil War, and the restlessness of rebellious western territories, is what gave the actual impetus for the creation of the country. Still, I remember reading an American pamphlet written in the very late 19th or early 20th century that described what the world might look like in the year 2000 and one of the details that stuck out was the author writing that the first American President born in Ontario had just been elected. So even around 1900 there were semi-serious musings about a continent spanning American federation. Hell, one of the reasons Seward engineered the purchase of Alaska is because he thought it would create an irreversible pressure for the absorption of Canada's pacific coast.
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Nov 15, 2015 03:24
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That's a very good point and illustrates the weakness of my approach, which emphasized state actions. It's also yet another example of American military adventurism leading to the exact opposite of it's intended effect.
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Nov 15, 2015 03:35
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vyelkin posted:Depends how you define middle class. The fact that a couple of effort posts in the CanPol thread did a better job of dissecting the Liberal tax plan than anything I ever saw the official NDP release is just so pathetic that words fail me. The Liberals were very effective at attacking the NDP's pledges and this would have been a way to return fire. Unfortunately the NDP's response to anything they didn't expect was to ignore it and hope it would go away. Ikantski posted:and yet off we go to the climate change conference. If I'm not mistaken we're like the 8th worst country in the world for Carbon emissions and our per capita carbon emissions is higher than anyone else except Australia and the USA. We also have the scientific knowledge and organizational capacity to study the problem. Unlike fighting ISIS, global warming really is an area where the Canadian government could make major contributions, provided the political will was there.
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Nov 15, 2015 18:17
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Dallan Invictus posted:Assuming we are using the same statistics, 8th rank means approximately 1.5% of the global total though? (and the physics of global warming give approximately zero shits about per capita). The major contribution I was thinking of was more along the lines of trying to develop alternative technological solutions or pioneering new social strategies, and then taking the necessary steps to speed their adoption by other countries. Also, in the original context of the comment, our role as a major pollutor means we're well suited to lead the charge against global warming at international conferences by offering to set voluntary targets for reducing emissions. You're right that we could stop 100% of our emissions and still not significantly impact global warming but I think that's a relatively narrow reading of what constitutes a "major contribution". I was thinking more along the lines of the role we can play as a member of the international community, and while we're not on the same level as countries like the USA or China I think we're relatively well positioned. At bare minimum we could try to be an example that the environmentalists of other countries can point to instead of embracing the role Harper was crafting for us as an international pariah.
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Nov 15, 2015 22:26
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PT6A posted:I've already stated that I'm personally opposed to removing Assad at this time. It will have to be done at some point, but it can and should only be done when the authority of the Syrian state is absolute in its territory, so that a halfway-orderly transition of power can be effected. If you think the Syrian state is going to wield "absolute" anything within it's territory any time in the next several decades then you're delusional. Your prescriptions for this situation are so far removed from plausible reality that you might as well be discussing the best way to remove the Dark Lord Sauron from power.
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Nov 16, 2015 00:43
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Taking a page from that terrible mid-2000s Christian Bale movie, the Trudeau Liberals announce that all New Canadians and refugees with be forced to take mandatory tokes of BC bud throughout the day to keep them passive and docile.
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Nov 16, 2015 01:06
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Ikantski posted:Canadian innovation saves the planet from global warming by helping the other countries tweet at China on regular intervals, I can see that. Do you believe that the scientific consensus regarding global warming is accurate, or close enough to accuracy to be genuinely alarming?
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Nov 16, 2015 02:36
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Are you guys really still treating posts from somebody named "do it ironically" as earnest and genuine arguments? Assume for a moment he believes everything he says. Do you think you're going to convince him otherwise? Do you think there are a lot of fence sitters reading this thread who might be swayed by his highly convincing ability to post random links to news stories only tangentially connected to his fever-dream arguments? Please don't make me wake up tomorrow to find 5 new pages of you guys getting played by the laziest troll we've seen in months.
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Nov 16, 2015 02:49
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When the NDP took power in Ontario in 1990 there were businesses taking out ads in the Wall Street Journal telling Americans not to invest in Ontario. Businesses will go quite far to score political points against a party that they perceive is threatening their power. Ikantski posted:I think it's accurate. I'm not genuinely alarmed. Or alarmed in a disingenuous manner. I think it's inevitable and we should be talking about preparation at least as much as reduction. My house is on high ground and I look forward to not having to shovel snow as much. In the case this polar vortex bullshit continues, I've got lots of wood to chop. What purpose does it serve to be alarmed? China has 907 GW of coal electric generation (compared to Ontario's 28 GW total but peak usage is around 18). The purpose served by being alarmed is to generate the political will necessary to start, first, trying to reduce emissions, and second, preparing for a world with higher average temperatures and more extreme weather events. I might add that someone who empathizes with the suffering and dislocation caused by global warming might spontaneously feel alarmed without that alarm being linked to some specific "purpose" but I guess I can't expect everyone to share my own moral intuitions. quote:Their emissions will continue to rise every year until 2030 and they've been caught recently under-reporting their emissions. The scientific consensus (as best I could find) was that we need to start reducing by 2020 to keep warming to just 2 degrees otherwise we're looking at a 4 degree rise by 2040 and that's not good for a lot of people. I think that is going to happen because China is being a bunch of dickbags, sitting on their 4 trillion in cash reserves instead of building CANDUs as fast as they can. China builds products that we use, and they quite logically point out that we're asking them to take on far stricter regulations than the ones we were subject to when we industrialized. If we were actually willing to make some sacrifices ourselves we could probably extract greater concessions from China by threatening to reduce trade with them. It would take adjustments in our own lifestyles but in the past society has endured similar adjustments when facing challenges of a similar scale. One can only speculate about what the world would look like now if the powers that be in the industrialized world had as much dedication to fighting global warming as they showed toward lowering barriers to trade or safeguarding foreign investors from local governments, or to defeating and undermining hostile ideologies like communism and fascism.
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Nov 17, 2015 00:32
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I think the only time I've seen Muskoka beer served was when I'm in the Muskoka region, and I assumed it was as a gimmick. I didn't realize it was sold elsewhere in Canada. Ikantski posted:That's completely illogical. The planet and scientists don't care about what is fair. They've told us that these are the PPMs now, this is the rate that the PPMs are going up and if they get to this amount by this date, we're pretty hosed. I don't get how someone who claims to believe the science can make that argument. You think maybe that China doesn't believe the science and we just have to diplomatically strong arm them into helping save the planet? Well obviously as an individual you should probably act as though it's inevitable and take whatever steps may be necessary to prepare yourself for it. I don't think that means we should stop trying to find political solutions. And going back to my original argument, Canada is about as well positioned as anyone (outside of China, the USA, the EU and maybe Japan) to take a big role in preparing for global warming and trying to reduce it's impact. quote:Maybe if China wasn't communist, the people would read the uncensored science, think about all their future families and would elect a government that would take action on climate change like most of the rest of the civilized world has? If only we'd fought harder against the communism. If only we made free trade agreements conditional on democratic reforms. Too bad our leaders were more interested in breaking the back of the labour movement rather than thinking about our long term national (or species) interests. Our leaders found a fine way to fight Stalinist regimes after World War II, it was called the Marshal Plan and it helped make Europe one of the most stable, prosperous and free regions of the globe, as well as an enduring ally to North America. There was discussion of providing similar levels of aid to South America, Africa and Asia but instead we decided to rely on local strongmen, backed up with invasions and coups as necessary. It's really no wonder the Chinese government aren't willing to sacrifice their economic growth: the developed world is merciless toward any country that isn't strong enough to stand up for itself, and the Chinese know better than most what that entails. Helsing fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 01:52
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Ikantski posted:A fun new game I came up with today is when you hear Left Wing politicians talk about how they're planning to pull out of the fight against ISIS, replace what they're saying with "I want to see young children and women die in horrible ways" The differences between the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP don't amount to much in practice. Western NDP governments were basically Blairites before Blair and the BC, Ontario and Quebec Liberals aren't much different than Conservatives on 90% of the issues, and in some cases might even be worse. Is it really so surprising that people end up fixating on the tribal markers that distinguish them and their friends from the scary out-group? "Progressives" don't really make decisions in any meaningful sense because, thanks to <reasons> the Canadian political spectrum is about as narrow as it's ever been. In a world where politics becomes Coke vs. Pepsi it's inevitable that diehard political junkies will try to find other ways to distinguish themselves from the supporters of the other parties.
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Nov 18, 2015 02:39
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Ikantski posted:Oh come on man, civil servants are dancing in the halls, we're fighting climate change, we're bringing peace to the middle east, legalizing weed and annoying legal gun owners. It's night and day and parliament hasn't even started yet. Look at this group of cabinet ministers and their values compared to the last group, I'd say there are major differences and that should lead to major differences in their decisions. What values? I see a government that practices corporate boosterism, toleration of alternative lifestyles and immigrants, support of the state institutions that benefit it's core supporters, pro-American foreign policy and free trade. Their primary lever for effecting the economy are corporate handouts and boutique tax cuts for the middle class (which a minor adjustment to the tax code thrown in as an election-winning plank). There are some key differences between them and the outgoing Conservatives but I wouldn't say it's like night and day. quote:Perhaps I should have said that conservative parties have virtually no power instead of progressives have all the power, that'd be less likely to offend you guys as progressives and still be accurate. First, I find progressive to be such a meaningless term that it's barely a useful label. I certainly don't identify as a progressive myself, even if I occasionally slip into using the term out of sheer convenience. Second, you're ignoring the extent to which the decisions of private businesses, banks, media outlets and think tanks can shape government and place limits on the scope and extent of government policy. I think it's simplistic and even a bit naive to claim "conservatives" have no influence on policy when the commanding heights of our economy are overwhelmingly controlled by conservative-leaning individuals. You also ignore the extent to which our national and international institutions have been molded along neoconservative / neoliberal lines since the 1970s: progressives may have scored some victories when it comes to accepting alternative forms of sexuality, but our economic debates are all framed in fundamentally conservative language and ideas.
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Nov 18, 2015 16:29
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Ikantski posted:For values, let's compare health ministers, that's a spot where values particularly matter. One one hand, we had Ayn Rand loving, pro-life Rona Ambrose. On the other, we have the family doctor who spent 9 years volunteering in Niger, Jane Philpott. At the risk of invoking the thread's irrational disdain for doctors, I would call that about as night and day of a value set as you'll see in Canadian politics. That's my point though. The political spectrum in this country is about as narrow as it's ever been. Even back in the 1980s there were much more significant political debates about free trade, sovereignty, the constitution, our relationship with America, class politics, gender, race, state ownership, privatization and various other issues. Nowadays the Liberals and Conservatives have mild disagreements on social issues and minor debates on fiscal policy. The Liberals were happy to make deep cuts in the 1990s when that is what capital demanded, and the Conservatives were happy to run lots of deficits and splurge on infrastructure projects when the economy looked shakey. Even on the social front, the conservatives haven't shown any real interest in taking on gay marriage or abortion - income splitting is about as far as they were willing to go on the domestic front. quote:Look, I just had a showerthought that it was notable, especially in the last two years, that Canadians had pretty well rejected Conservative politicians from coast to coast. The banks and private companies aren't making political decisions, politicians are and the huge majority of those politicians are not branded as conservatives. It will be an interesting couple of years for us to find out how the political system behaves when Conservative politicians are removed from it. Banks and corporations absolutely do make political decisions. In fact I don't think the typical distinctions between politics and economics are very helpful here, if anything those distinctions are a way of mystifying the situation. To me politics is fundamentally a question of how society generates and distributes power -- and in our society power is primarily expressed through wealth. Decisions such as when and were to invest your economic resources as a private firm are, to me, more significant political questions than whether or not gays can get married or how many Syrian refugees get let into Canada this year. Canada's elites have settled on a socially progressive and fiscally conservative approach to governing. Within that narrow spectrum you can make mild adjustments depending on your ideology but anyone who tries to step outside a very narrow range of acceptable political options on the major questions of the day: the environment, inequality, globalization, the size of government, the generosity of the welfare state, etc. would immediately face well organized and vicious pushback from the corporate world, the financial sector and the media. Politics under neoliberalism can deliver the occasional bread crumb like national daycare or a pharmacare plan, and those narrow goals are worth pursuing (both as ends in themselves and as a way to mobilize coalitions of voters who might go on to demand further concessions or reforms) but on the fundamental questions of the day there's very littel scope for debate right now.
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Nov 18, 2015 23:43
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Maybe I'm not sensitive enough to this issue because I am a walking check list of privileges and therefore have an easy time shrugging off mean comments that others might find more hurtful, but I really have trouble caring about some politician using salty language, even if it has a nasty gendered component to it. I find almost everything else our "leaders" do to be bad enough already without even thinking about what they say in some meeting with constituents.
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Nov 19, 2015 21:20
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Professor Shark posted:People in power should have more composure than the Grade 10 students I yell at for swearing in the classroom. If they can't even control themselves, how can they be trusted with anything important? Melian Dialogue posted:I disagree wholeheartedly. I expect a little bit of professionalism from an elected official. If you couldn't get away with saying that in a board room or in the public sector, then definitely you shouldn't get away with saying it as an elected official. The "anti-PC" crowd has really gotten stupid and worked up about the gall of people to expect their leadership not to use gendered slurs. Sure. I'm just saying that lot's of behavior that is considered "professional" or is accepted by pros bothers me more than this. I am a lot more bothered by Brad Lavigne working for Hill + Knowlton or Brian Topp founding a firm with Ken Boesenkool. Complaining about unprofessional language from our politicians feels to me like complaining about how uncomfortable the deck chairs on the Titanic are. The only thing that bothers me here at all is -- assuming this guy did say "whore" and not "horde" -- that unfair way that we sexualize female politicians far more than their male counterparts. But even then, practically everything else that politicians do bothers me more than this.
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Nov 19, 2015 22:31
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saints gambit posted:Just a horde of female politicians, sweeping down the hill into the Byward Market laying waste to the pedestrian mall and pushing the patriarchy into the Rideau.  Professor Shark posted:Go fuddle duddle yourself Is there a link to video or audio of the comment?
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Nov 19, 2015 23:44
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So it's like when Anthony Weiner was asked if he had sent out pictures of his dick and his response was "I can neither confirm nor disconfirm (sic) that those pictures are of me" and you're left wondering why anyone thought such a weak denial was even worth making.
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Nov 19, 2015 23:52
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Giving up on a free class used by 60 people because you couldn't design a good poster for it is the most student government thing ever. This stuff is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things but it also makes it easier to understand why "SJW" caught on as a term in the first place, and why so many students are turned off by the left wing activism they encounter while at school.
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Nov 21, 2015 18:44
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I don't know about Ottawa specifically but a lot of undergrad student governments are dominated by a single slate of candidates and as long as you're on the slate you're almost guaranteed to win. You're also probably using your time in student government to shore up your résumé rather than focusing in your current duties. When you're unlikely to lose the job that you're mostly using as a source of income and a stepping stone for career advancement then is it really surprising that you might just shut so etching down to avoid a potential head ache? And bonus points because you can feel self righteous for striking a blow against the Empire. Likely some of these people will be NDP staffers or even backbencher s in a decades, just like the drunk shitheads in the Debate Club will become Liberals and the angry repressed tightwads in the business club will become Conservatives.
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Nov 21, 2015 19:03
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I have zero sympathy for the junkie jihadists who were willing to, if not quite capable of, murdering people. The scandal here is the RCMP throwing away a lot of money in an ill conceived politicized scheme to justify more money and power for their department. If the RCMP just wanted to put these fools behind bars I'm pretty sure there are cheaper, simpler and less legally dubious ways to do so. The elaborate and expensive attempts to manufacture a bomb plot only really make sense if your primary goal is to generate public anxiety or maybe advance your own career.
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Nov 22, 2015 07:39
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I don't really like the idea of the government having a profit based incentive to harass pot growers or sellers. Decriminalization is good but imposing a restrictive government monopoly isn't. I really hope that legalization involves letting people grow their own stuff instead of cracking down harder than ever on growers to protect government or private corporate interests,
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Nov 22, 2015 21:17
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Slightly Toasted posted:Hasn't that always been more or less the political endgame with marijuana? Sell it so you can tax it? I can't speak for others but I mostly support changing the law to reduce the power of the police and also because its a cruel and stupid waste of resources to prosecute people for smoking pot. Taxes don't actually finance government spending so while I'm willing to tolerate user fees and sin taxes up to a point I don't actually think they make very much economic sense, except insofar as the reigning economic orthodoxy would punish us for not pretending that government spending needs to follow the same logic as household spending.
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Nov 22, 2015 23:17
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Personally I find it totally implausible that Justin and his advisers would intentionally exaggerate the number of refugees they were taking in by the end of 2015 just so they could have a nice big round number for electioneering purposes. These are the Liberals we're talking about here.
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Nov 24, 2015 22:50
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Tom Mulcair and the current orientation of the party are a package deal. I don't imagine the NDP could conceivably change directions in a significant way without dumping him. I'm sure he'll take some lessons away from the last campaign so we might get a better presentation of policies and a bit less emphasis on fiscal conservatism (maybe) but I can't imagine a Mulcair led NDP being anything other than a less corrupt and somewhat more progressive version of the Liberal party.
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Nov 25, 2015 17:13
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The much more radical NDP / CCF of the past was able to exercise a lot of influence without ever winning a federal election. Canada doesn't particularly need another Liberal party, especially now that it's clear that the actual Liberal party is not on the verge of being wiped out. My preference would be for an anti-status quo party that offers a stronger alternative to the existing parties by championing policies like free tuition or significantly higher taxes on the wealthy or socialized dental care etc., hopefully while also trying to develop a stronger relationship with workers organizations and activists. My (unrealistic) ideal would be that the NDP should not be a party lead and advised by people who go on to work at cushy political consultancy gigs or law firms. To paraphrase Tommy Douglas, mouseland needs to elect a mouse to lead it instead of choosing between the white cat or the black cat.
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Nov 25, 2015 17:52
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Aces High posted:because they watched The Wire too many times and saw the "bad guys" getting away with murder and drug stuff while the noble police were stuck at the courthouse waiting for the bureaucrats to sign papers This is a weird interpretation of The Wire.
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Nov 26, 2015 00:11
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Apologies folks, this is gonna be a long post. I necessarily brush over some details here so if anyone is feeling particularly masochistic and wants more walls of text they're free to ask me to elaborate on the points I make here. Guy DeBorgore posted:I know most people itt don't find NDP insider chat interesting but I'm gonna push on through: A general comment before I go into the specifics; the level at which you're framing this argument is meaningless. You make a lot of vague allusions to "seriousness" or being a "maturity" but you never actually explain, in any detail, what this means other than trying to protect the careers of the few hundred core NDP staffers (and ironically the centrist NDP wasn't actually able to deliver on that objective). You also imply, without any explanation, that the strategy which just took the party from first to last in the polls, is somehow a formula to win government while dismissing the more radical party of the past which actually played a substantial role in the development of medicare and various other programs. The only real comment you make on policy is to dismiss, without any explanation, the idea of free tuition. The NDP has a pretty good track record as an opposition party. In Ontario their time in opposition helped push Bill Davis in a much more progressive direction. Their role in Parliament during the Pearson years hardly needs to be brought up. I want to see you respond to that and explain why you're so dismissive of those accomplishments. How about we reorient this discussion by focusing on policy instead of typing up a big word salad filled with cargo cult sounding invocations of "seriousness"? I'm a lot more interested in your opposition to free tuition and other such policies than I am in your vague references to being "serious". Explain why those policies are bad ideas from either an electioneering standpoint or a technocratic standpoint, or both. Anyway, to reply to what you actually wrote: quote:So you want a return to the days where the NDP was a permanent 3rd party getting 10-15% of the vote every election? Ok, first of all, given that the NDP just followed your strategy and proceeded to lose their best shot in history at forming government, perhaps a bit of humility on your part is called for. Your claims that a more openly leftwing NDP would only gain 15% of the vote is pure speculation: what isn't speculation is that Mulcair managed to lose the last election quite badly. The NDP also did very poorly in Ontario and BC when it tried to be a "serious" party in the way that you advocate, and Olivia Chow's mayoral bid crashed transformed a commanding lead into an embarrassing defeat after she tried to present herself as a socially conscious fiscal moderate focused on saving taxpayer money. I suppose that one could craft a narrative in which each of these races was lost due to local factors. Chow was a bad candidate, Dix ran a poor campaign, Horwath's team turned out to be incompetent, etc. But to me the pattern is pretty clear: outside the flukey 2011 election (in which I'd argue Ignatieff deserves at least as much credit as Layton for the "Orange Crush") the NDP's "serious" strategy hasn't actually delivered power. Meanwhile Rachel Notley, while not exactly a firebreathing radical, at least ran on a platform of personal and corporate income tax increases, higher public spending, and a major minimum wage increase. She won decisively. Perhaps you'll reply that Notley got lucky and really it was the Progressive Conservatives defeating themselves shortly after the Wild Rose exploded. To which I'd say, so what? At most that proves that the NDP's actual campaign and platform matters a lot less than we want to think. So if the NDP can only really win on a fluke then we might as well have a decent left wing platform for when that fluke occurs. Second of all, I think your comments here betray a profound lack of historical awareness. I mean this in two ways. First, you seem to completely ignore the extent to which the success of the NDP under Jack Layton was a direct reflection of the decline of the Liberal party. Layton's attempts to maneuver the NDP into being a credible alternative to the Liberals only made sense in the context of a declining Liberal party opening up space for a new centrist party. Now that the Liberals have rebounded you'll need to supply a convincing explanation for why it makes sense to continue running as Liberal-Lite. Why exactly would the mass of voters in Ontario choose the faux-Liberal party instead of the actual Liberal party? However, there's also a second way in which I believe that you misread the historical moment. What your post makes me think of, more than anything else, is Francis Fukuyama declaring the "end of history". It's as though the political dynamics that have dominated the Canadian political scene in the last decade or two are some kind of ever present and changeless reality that all "mature" political parties must accommodate themselves to. Look back over the last hundred years of history and you'll find that every twenty or thirty years the political scene in Canada has been dramatically transformed. In the 1930s the federal government basically refused to take substantive action to deal with the Great Depression -- after World War II the political calculus had changed so much that the same political party that had been in power for most of the 1930s was suddenly constructing an expansive welfare state. That state building exercise continued into the 1980s before being dramatically reversed and replaced by yet another set of political assumptions. Anyone claiming to know what the next political-economic paradigm is going to look like is a hack. But the one safe bet, I think, is that the future will open up new political possibilities that are impossible to anticipate in advance. The relevant cliche here would be that we want to "fight the next war, not the last one". Ask the French government in 1940 how well it works out when you assume that the way things were in the recent past is the way they're going to be forever. Since the 2008 financial crisis we've seen more and more signs that the global environment is changing and that this is having impacts on domestic politics. I'm going to save myself some time by quoting from a column in the Tyee that I think phrased this well: The Tyee, posted:Almost invariably, there is nobody less politically minded than somebody who gushes, "I'm a total political junkie!" Of course people who spend too much time "thinking historically", i.e. academics, have their own failings when it comes to practical politics. Certainly there needs to be a mixture of historical thinkers and hard knuckled political brawlers in any successful party. But the problem with the NDP right now is that anyone with any historical vision whatsoever has been frozen out of the party apparatus and the people running things are convinced they've got it all figured out despite a growing mountain of evidence to the contrary. Guy DeBorgore posted:I sympathize, but as someone who worked alongside NDP staffers and is still friends with a few of them, I just can't agree with you. The jobs of those staffers and their MPs depend on winning elections. Now that the party's tasted victory, there's a strong culture of people whose careers depend on finding another victory. And that's not a bad thing, that's just part of being a mature political party that's capable of winning an election. It's a bad thing because these people can't actually win. They're convinced that their losing strategy is a brilliant path to victory despite a lack of actual results. I'm not even going to really address the idea that the interests of a couple hundred staffers should dominate the policy agenda of a supposedly national party. I mean... Jesus Christ dude, did that actually sound convincing when you typed it out? quote:Having a party full of part-timers, activists and grizzled union vets is all well and dandy, but if you actually form government you're gonna need a fleet of high-energy policy wonks who care more about getting poo poo done than about staying ideologically pure. In Greece we saw what happens when a left-wing protest party accidentally wins an election. I was incredibly excited about Syriza's victory because I thought they were going to revolutionize the way politics were done. Instead, they just made a bunch of amateur mistakes and squandered their opportunity. You're going to have to explain this one to me. Are you suggesting that Syriza's difficulties are related to them somehow not having more professional political staffers? Can you actually provide some evidence for that assertion? And how does your analysis deal with the actual political and economic position of Greece vis-a-vis its creditors and the Troika? Also, you are aware that Syriza actually won re-election, right? Which seems to be the main standard you have for evaluating a "serious" political party. Personally I'm also very disappointing in Syriza but your analysis of their failures doesn't seem to line up very well with the facts on the ground. quote:It's not like there's a dearth of leftist organizations promoting all kinds of radical policies. IMO the NDP doesn't need to be another one of those- it should be a serious political party whose job is to win elections and potentially form a government some day. If that means we get a less-corrupt, slightly-more-progressive version of the Liberals, then great! That still sounds better than the status quo to me. The NDP, with it's resources and it's historical association with the left, could play an extremely helpful role as a big tent for the groups you allude to. The party currently views what should be it's greatest strengths as a liability. quote:On the other hand, if there's going to be a society-wide leftist revolution that fundamentally transforms the way politics works in Canada, that's great too! But that shouldn't be the NDP's goal. There's a lot of really smart, driven people working insanely long hours for the NDP, people who frankly do more to advance leftist politics in a single election than a hundred grumpy old Marxists, and those people have staked their careers on the NDP being a professional, serious political party. I don't even know how to respond to such a vague statement. Can you be specific? Give examples? The only concrete success of the centrist NDP that you've listed is keeping a bunch of staffers employed. quote:It's neither fair nor realistic to expect those people to consign themselves to life on the political sidelines. They'll just hold their noses and jump ship to the Liberals instead. Wait, what? Who will "just vote Liberals" instead? Am I understanding you correctly? Are you really saying that those ahrd working staffers who have staked their careers on the NDP are going to vote Liberal? Not only does this make no sense, but even if it's true why do I care? You're describing an insignificant portion of the electorate here unless I'm hugely misunderstanding you. Finally, there's a pretty massive irony here. Right after the centrist NDP ran a campaign which caused over a million NDP voters to switch to the Liberals you're claiming that we cannot change strategies because it might... cause NDP loyalists to switch to the Liberals? It's kind of weird that you offer no explanation or analysis of what went wrong with the NDP campaign. Because from my perspective every dire consequence that you predict is something that has already loving happened. quote:PS: Free tuition and any variant on it is awful policy, even when Barack Obama was doing it. Why?
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Nov 26, 2015 20:05
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My posts are filled with typos like that, but I think it's more a reflection of my dyslexia than my passion. I promise my monitor isn't currently covered in spittle.
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Nov 26, 2015 20:42
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Franks Happy Place posted:I've said this before, but you really need a blog, dude. More importantly, Canada needs more people talking like this and less Eric Grenier. You're too kind. That having been said I am trying to think of a way for us to get in touch that doesn't involve me posting my work e-mail in an open thread.
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Nov 26, 2015 20:43
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Morroque posted:Helsing, I have a Plat Upgrade for you to use to get private messages for the forums. You can email me from my homepage on my profile and I'll get it to you. (Scroll down to the last page link.) Confirm you've mailed me in-thread and I'll send it along. That's extremely generous of you. I'll be in touch some time tomorrow. Lustful Man Hugs posted:Then how do you respond to the fact that pharmacare was part of their platform? Does that sound like lovely worthless centrist pandering to you? I can't speak for anyone else but my problem with the NDP is actually less about this or that position on their platform (overall I think they had a good enough platform last election which is why I volunteered for them and donated a bunch of money) and more about the party's structure and governing philosophy. I don't believe a truly left wing party can simply mirror the organization structure or electoral tactics of the mainstream parties, i.e. the Liberals and Conservatives. This goes way beyond the platform or the campaign. I will try to explain what I mean below. Funkdreamer posted:I will never understand why some people think the NDP would have been embraced for running on a deficit platform. The reaction in the press would have been very different from what the Liberals received, and hint, it would have involved further evisceration of the NDP's daycare plan for debiting us to welfare queens. Did we forget how to do class analysis? Ok, first of all any time the NDP is close to forming government they're going to get bad press. Deal with it. Any realistic NDP strategy needs to start from the assumption that they're going to face a hostile media. This is like the defendant at a criminal trial complaining that the prosecutor is biased against him. And if the NDP ever gets to the point where they're so nonthreatening to the establishment that they don't face a hostile media then they'll truly have completed their transformation into a worthless husk of a party. More specific to your point: Rachel Notley was able to win decisively in Alberta without promising to balance the budget. Note I'm not saying she won because she said she'd run deficits. If anything I think her victory was mostly a reflection of the collapse of the PCs and Wild Rose. But that's really my point here: I think that election platforms, be they left wing or right wing or firmly centrist, are probably less consequential in winning elections than we want to think. That having been said, I do think that the way Mulciar handled the deficit issue was a defining moment in the campaign and destroyed his claim of being the real agent of change. More on that below: THC posted:They failed to differentiate their platform from austerity. It was definitely not an austerity platform, but the Liberals succeeded in branding it as such. That was their failure, but I don't feel it is a mistake to say the federal government should be striving for a balanced budget at this time, without cuts to services. The problem was not with the balanced budgets promise per se (though it was a dumb promise) but with the way it fit into the broader trajectory of the campaign. Let's go over a few of the basics. --Mulcair and the NDP inexplicably based their campaign around the claim that only they could beat Steven Harper. This was truly astonishing to me because it was so eerily reminiscent of Michael Ignatieff's famous claim that there was a Red Door and a Blue Door. "Vote NDP! You have no other choice!" is about the shittiest election pitch imaginable coming from a party that until very recently had been universally regarded as incapable of forming government. The NDP's status as the Opposition made it very clear that in fact almost any party with some name recognition and a decently sized base of support can win a Canadian election. More importantly, this claim set the tone for an incredibly bad campaign overall in which the NDP's rhetorical emphasis on being the "Anyone But Harper" sucked up attention that should have been focused on the NDP's policies. --The balanced budget comment came in a larger context because Mulcair had already voluntarily put the party into a fiscal straightjacket. Mulcair made an ironclad commitment that he would not raise personal income taxes. He promised only a minor corporate income tax increase that didn't even return us to the pre-Harper level. He was also going to waste a bunch of the income from a corporate tax increase by simultaneously cutting the small business tax. He had even said that under his leadership the NDP would still make cuts but that they would be "better cuts" than the ones Harper made. In addition to this, it was already very obvious that Harper's budget -- upon which the NDP's own spending projections relied -- was a political document designed to win the election and not a serious analysis of the Canadian economy. As such it was pretty obvious that had Mulcair won he would have been confronted with at least a mild deficit, so his ironclad commitment to balanced budgets and no major tax increases meant he was already painting himself into a corner. Did everything I list above factor into the decision making of the average voter? Probably not. A lot of it is inside baseball. But on the balance I think all those noises Mulcair made about being a competent centrist administrator meant that when he promised to balanced the budget it helped crystallize an impression about him that he wasn't really an agent of change, and each of the problems I list above played into that. Also speaking from personal experience it demoralized me and caused me to spend less time volunteering than I otherwise would have. I'm probably not alone in that. So whether or not that promise directly cost a lot of votes, it probably sapped the energy of a lot of volunteers whose participation in the election might have been very helpful on E-Day. --When it was revealed that Mulcair had once praised Margaret Thatcher his response was very revealing. He pretty much just ignored the story! It would have been a great moment for him to actually talk about his values and beliefs and how they've evolved over the years. He could have used it as a moment to actually make some comments on his philosophy of governance. Instead here is how he responded: quote:"My No. 1 priority is to get good services to the public," Mulcair said during an afternoon campaign stop in Surrey, B.C., on Wednesday. So not only was that an absolutely tone deaf and stupid response but it also makes it seem like he basically stands by what he said about Thatcher's Conservatives bringing the "winds of liberty" to Britain. Whether or not this seeps down into the consciousness of the average voter it certainly has an impact on people who pay attention to politics and who probably in turn have informal influence over who their friends and family end up voting for. It's also a pretty objective example of Mulcair being a piece of poo poo. Ok, so all that having been said, here's the biggest problem. --The NDP offered very little to leftist voters in Quebec. A lot of people want to pretend that the Niqab issue just came out of nowhere but in my opinion it's more an example of how a campaign with very little to say created a vacuum that got filled up by the Niqab. The centre piece of the NDP's platform was a policy that Quebec, supposedly the base of the party, already had! What did they offer to the Quebecois? Language legislation in federally regulated workplaces? Does anyone really think francophone voters are going to be seriously motivated to vote for a law mandating some bank teller in Saskatchewan must offer service in French? Or that voters were going to be super impressed by Mulcair refusing to take a clear position on a pipeline they overwhelmingly opposed? Perhaps a greater emphasis on pharmacare could have helped staunch the bleeding here but the point stands that Mulcair's tepid campaign basically took Quebec for granted. The point of all this being that When Mulcair finally announced his commitment to balanced budgets on August 25th he was clearly doing more than saying he wouldn't run a deficit. It was obvious that, taken in conjunction with the rest of the campaign, that he was making his priorities clear. Sure a real leftist might want to avoid running deficits, but they'd probably do that by advocating higher taxes instead of lowballing their own promises and relying on the Conservatives' sketchy budget math. THC posted:The party braintrust is certainly in need of a serious enema but this idea that they would win elections by running a Bernie Sanders type socialist campaign is amazingly delusional. THC posted:An NDP that does not form government is what many of their followers want, apparently. They would prefer a permanent rump party as long as it panders to them and their opinions 100% of the time. I don't get it. Are you complaining that people like me don't want to form government or are you complaining that I think the NDP could win with a hard socialist platform? I don't understand how you can be saying both these things at once unless your only real complaint is "why won't you join the NDP cheerleader squad!"
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Nov 27, 2015 03:09
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Dreylad posted:I'm struggling to think of any decent post election analysis of the NDP that was good in the broader Canadian media. I'll repost that article later and we can hash out your problems with it. Might be a better basis for the discussion than my ramblings.
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Nov 27, 2015 03:11
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Apologies for dissapearing midway through a huge discussion I helped to instigate but I've been a bit swamped with work recently. I just wanted to check in and assure people I'll be back and posting long, verbose walls of text any day now. As a CI fan who hasn't enjoyed his 2014-2015 output as much I feel like I need to take a moment to say after reading through the last few pages that it's nice to see Cultural Imperial back in fighting form, ramming home the hard truths our Maple Syrup-sodden brains don't want to accept. I know some of you find him hard to take sometimes. My advice is that you just imagine everything he posts is being spoken by Matthew McConaughey in True Detective: 
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Dec 2, 2015 00:38
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bunnyofdoom posted:Sooooo, is Hal ok? He hasn't posted since th election. In fairness, I don't exactly remember you hanging around here when your party was down in the polls.
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Dec 3, 2015 20:31
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He's a fair weather poster you can't tell me otherwise  I remember a long silence in the summer between about Bill C-51 and the election.
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Dec 3, 2015 20:42
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Poor widdle natural governing party. Heavy lies the crown.
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Dec 3, 2015 20:52
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THC posted:You miserable bitter son of a bitch, why I oughta-- One second thought maybe that shoulda been "heavy libs the crown".
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Dec 3, 2015 21:07
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