Called it:
National Post Headline this morning (online):
True but I was thinking it odd the conservatives couldn’t gather those Northern Ontario votes not that the NDP couldn’t get western ones. After the NDP governing Alberta for the oil price crash it was unlikely the even more left leaning federal party would get a lot of votes.
Overall, I would say that being reduced to a minority is a fair political price for the SNC scandal and other stupid missteps. Hopefully the Liberals have learned the lesson that they can’t pull shit like that anymore, but you would have said that same about the sponsorship scandal 15 years ago, so…
I won’t even play Devil’s Advocate on dumping Scheer – I definitely believe that he should go. His previous cosying up to the likes of Rebel media and his other dogwhistles on racism gave Trudeau the opening to talk his way out of the blackface scandal. If Scheer had credibly moved the party past the “Offensive Cultural Practices” snitch line, if he had used the rise of the PPC to purge the Conservative party of the whackadoodles, then he would have been in position to take advantage. But at best he was slow to repudiate that part of his base, and gave the general impression that he was reluctant to take them on, and it cost him in the centre.
Similarly, the SNC scandal really hurt the Liberals less than a year from the election. It should have been a fatal blow, but the Conservative platform had little to appeal to Canada’s centre, and so over the summer they bled votes.
I get that it’s difficult to reconcile the views of the base with being a broad tent party, but that’s the reality of trying to win an election in Canada. The winning party is the one who threads that needle, but Scheer and the Conservatives didn’t even try. Admittedly the Liberal platform wasn’t much to write home about but the Liberals had the incumbent advantage and could run on their record of big-ticket items like the carbon tax, cannabis legalization and a good economy. The party out of power needs to convince the voters that they will do better but the Conservatives didn’t do that.
In my view, the CPoC lost on climate change. Climate change is going to continue to be a losing issue for them as the effects of climate change become less statistical and more real. Of course, there will always be liars who will claim it will be a hoax, and also some percentage of people fooled by such liars, but those numbers are going to be ever decreasing. I wonder if this is their limit with their current platform style. They cannot get (many) more seats in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. So how do they expand? I was originally concerned they would veer hard right to recapture the PPC vote, but it doesn’t appear that the PPC vote is very relevant (thank fraking crap). If the CPoC couldn’t win under the circumstances of this election, then I think they really need to question whether they can win. And again, climate change was one of the top issues nationally. The CPoC cannot continue to ignore it. Or they can, but I think they can expect to continue to be solely in opposition.
The Conservatives gained about 20 seats, did not lose much ground to the PPC and avoided a lot of foreseeable blunders such as threatening jobs, promoting unpopular social issues of principle or denying climate change. I find Scheer bland but unobjectionable. I think the party will replace him. I don’t think the American citizenship issue or insurance degree were deciding factors.
The Liberals have had a terrible year despite a good economy. Scheer, already guaranteed the Prairies, would (as I said above) done better if he had challenged the Liberals more effectively, come up with a progressive climate policy (which would not have cost him the oil patch if done sensibly) and being progressive on immigration to counter perceptions. He played to the base, won the popular vote, but needed to be more moderate. Many voters were undecided. A progressive policy coupled with modest fiscal restraint might have done better. A decent rookie effort. He won’t be forgiven. I see MacKay making noises in the near future; he didn’t wait until after the election to start making them.
Trudeau’s government simply lacked the enthusiastic support of basically anyone. Let’s be perfectly honest, they were a default choice.
The Trudeau government blew off almost every major election promise they made in 2015, and I was incredulous that the Tories barely mentioned that.
The Liberals were 100 percent beatable and the Tories put up a dreadful leader, no clear platform, no memorable policy, an atrocious overall campaign, and made more unforced errors than a blind tennis player. John Holmes didn’t trip over his own dick as much as the 2019 Tories.
A successful campaign is comprised of at least two of three things:
- A clear, easily understood policy agenda,
- A charismatic leader, and
- Not being caught in a humiliating scandal.
The Tories failed at all three.
Luckily for them, so did the Liberals. 
I find myself in agreement.
From what I’ve seen from friends in Alberta, this is true.
Alberta also seems to think that the economy is doing poorly everywhere in Canada. It is not. Alberta seems to think they are the economic driver for the entire country. They are not. Alberta seems to think that Climate Change is a joke, and nobody believes it is real. This is false. Alberta seems to think that oil corporations will look after the public’s best interests. They will not.
From what I’ve seen on social media, this definitely seems to be the case. People seem incredulous that people would vote for the lying, corrupt, stupid, incompetent Trudeau. No acknowledgement at all that I’ve seen that maybe, just maybe, the message from their paty doesn’t resonate with the rest of Canada.
As has been pointed out, the popular vote is more than half to the centre left, 33.1% Liberal + 15.9% NDP + 6.5% (55.5%) Green compared to 34.4% CPoC + 1.6% PPC (36%). If the vote wasn’t being split between three parties, the conservatives would be getting stomped hard.
And I think it is going to get worse for the CPoC before it’ll get better. With any luck, we’ll see a socially progressive, fiscally conservative party emerge at some point. Then the CPoC can become what they really are, the Alberta regional party (i.e. Reform) and the emergent party can be the national party of centre right conservatism.
I am surprised I have to point this out, but Liberal hardcores think a very similar thing. Your average Torontonian simply cannot comprehend anyone voting Conservative.
The old “well, if this party didn’t exist” argument doesn’t make any sense. If the political landscape were different, every party would also be different. When the Green Party did’t get one percent of the vote, the Conservatives, and PCs before them, still won elections. When the NDP didn’t exist, they still won elections.
A major party will not just sit there and get bombed election after election. They will change and adjust and move towards appeal to half the electorate.
See, we say that, but the Conservatives never seem to actually do that. I was voting strategically throughout the Harper era, in the hopes of exactly this happening, but all they’ve done is move farther to the right. How long is this supposed to take?
Apart from electoral reform, what major election promise did they blow off? This post is disingenuous almost to the point of an outright lie.
No deficit over $10 billion.
A balanced budget by 2019
Electoral reform
Open Access to Information Act and other promises of expanded transparency
There are many other smaller promises that were broken as well - just like every other government. These are just some of the big ones.
I consider his budget and deficit promise breaking to be the worst, because nothing changed to justify doing it. There was no major recession, no natural disasters, nothing unforeseen. He just decided to break it by voluntarily spending the money. That suggests to me that he never had any intention to keep his word, and just said that stuff to deflect criticism that he would be a big spender like his dad.
Before insinuating that someone is a liar (which you shouldn’t be doing in the first place), it’s a good idea to do some basic fact checking first.
https://trudeaumetre.polimeter.org/
143 of 230 promises kept. Note I make no assertion as to the importance of the kept promises. For example omnibus bills are horrible, were promised to no longer be submitted and yet…
Socialism is bred in the bone in much of northern Ontario, so we tend to vote NDP or Liberal.
Go back over a hundred years ago. Read up on the Western Federation of Miners and the Colorado Labor Wars. It was called war for a reason, and socialism was at its core. The Mine Mill Union arose out of it, with Sudbury’s 598 being its last local.
Further to the west, in Port Arthur and Fort William (now merged as Thunder Bay), socialism was the norm for some communities, such as the Finnish community. Read up on the Finnish Labour Temple the next time you’re at the Hoito having breakfast downstairs or watching a band upstairs.
In both Sudbury and Thunder Bay the people who lived there had and continue to have good lives thanks to socialism. And they knew all to well what life was like for workers and their families without socialism.
Living in such places (for me, 17 years in Sudbury and 21 years in TBay where I am fifth generation), socialism is normal, for that is the way it has been here since the decline of the fur trade and the rise of the rail, shipping and mining. Aside from the odd nutter, the conservatives that we have in northern Ontario (and we have some at the northwestern end of the province) are good people (Bill Davis would do well here) rather than people-hating populists like Harris and Ford.
Do we have our problems? We certainly do, particularly when it comes to our shameful and tragic relations between first peoples and settlers that often have TBay vying for murder capital of Canada (about the same murder rate as the State of Texas), but one thing that is certain for us is that the way through to a strong future for us all is to work together as individuals and communities that reach out and embrace others rather than push away others.
Remind me again how they did on keeping the budget deficit in line? You forgot that? Omnibus bills? Come on.
Overloading isn’t a very Green concept, is it?
Sorry to see the BQ picked up 30 seats. Will Quebec secession be back on the national agenda?
Here’s a CNN commentator’s take on the election: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/22/opinions/canada-election-bociurkiw/index.html
Uhh… Stephen Harper’s party won three elections. Can you explain how that constitutes losing? What would that possibly have to do with my point that the party would not remain the same if it kept “getting bombed”?
The Liberal and Conservative/PC parties have been fighting over Parliament for 152 years. Amazingly, they both remain serious contenders; I would remind you that the Tories got more votes than the Liberals. Prior to the Green Party being a serious party, the Tories still won elections. Prior to the NDP being a serious force, or a thing at all, actually, the Tories still won elections. The notion that every vote that isn’t for the Conservative Party is a unified “Not Conservative” block that would always be the same, and therefore that if we got rid of all the other parties and just had Liberal and Conservative that the Liberals would get two thirds of the vote, is - I cannot think of a better word - amazingly silly. Of course that is not what would happen, just as it did not happen in 1984, or 1957, or 1926.
If you remove other parties, you realign the remaining parties. The merger of the NDP, say, into the Liberal Party - something people who are not members of the NDP seem to think would be no big deal, but it would be - would change the Liberal Party and would inevitably change the Conservatives, too. By simple natural selection, Conservative candidates would be likelier to be centrist.
You know instead of requiring a hamfisted poll blackout, the implementing of a PR system would soundly ensure (at its nature) that the election would not be decided until all votes were cast -regardless of region and time zone-. It also has the benefit of all votes equally mattering despite residing in a “safe seat”, or in a population dense riding/province, removes gerrymandering effects (not really a big issue in Canada either way), doesn’t penalize third/new parties, removes the need for monitoring other voters in your riding, and much more.
PR systems are new to Canadians, but they are universally agreed to be fair and would even solve a lot of the problems we have with partisan, urban/rural, and regional alienation. sigh
What if I want to penalize third/new parties? See how much you love the idea when a party like the PPC gets to 5%.