I don’t know how old you are or how varied your life, but this shit is stupid. It is easier, by many orders of magnitude, to break something than to fix it. Technology may get us out of this mess but pretending we can fix whatever we break is not defensible.
- Look at “best practices” in successful countries and realize academics and intellectual thinktanks can provide good advice in balance with business and industry. Canada is a highly educated country — we want smart leaders. But honest and modest, please. Dumb conservatism is not helpful, even in the medium run.
- Good decisions require better data. Improve this in a minimally partisan way.
- Students are our future. Give them good access to great education. Keep standards high, benefit from local innovations, ensure all programs are affordable and offer value. Give talented foreign students reason and ability to stay long-term and reasons to be loyal to Canada.
- Promote conservative views on campus by making them reasonable to students. Eschew hate; emphasize libertarianism, individual liberties and responsibilities; support law and the military while offering independent oversight; offer prestigious summer jobs and scholarships to talented students where they will be needed.
- Plan for the future. Water will be valuable; oil will eventually be superseded. But resist the urge to distort housing markets with incentives that will just raise prices— offer alternatives to largest cities, or encourage micro apartments and densification only where most needed.
- Support mental health. If a million kids are being cyber bullied, do something meaningful about it for the country’s future. If there are few security experts, make this a government responsibility and offer good jobs to help citizens and businesses, which can’t really afford expertise. Make mental health units where doctors and social workers help people where they are; don’t tie up ERs or 50% of policing calls - approach these problems with more resources, expertise, compassion and innovation.
Trudeau would have never made this far if his father wasn’t one of the most iconic PM’s Canada has had, but either way he’s PM now and has been for the past four years. I’d say that Scheer doesn’t really deserve to be PM too as his accomplishments were equally thin, but (for whatever reason) he was voted Speaker of the House (did a shit job at it too) during Harper’s time and was able to parlay that into a successful leadership bid.
Scheer is qualified enough now, I guess.
Scheer is a complete punk and anyone complaining about Trudeau’s lack of qualifications but votes for Scheer oblivious to that is a grade A hypocrite.
Right. I’m no Trudeau fan-boy by any stretch of the imagination, but this kind of sad shit is pretty much one of the reasons why Scheer lost.
I’m sure your hatred of Trudeau with the passion of a thousand burning suns is genuine. But it won’t win you an election.
Trudeau is a nice guy, but maybe less so in private. The same may be true for Scheer. At any rate, we’re stuck with Trudeau for now. I have nothing against Scheer, but all he had to say in the debates was “my personal views are X and I guarantee my party will commit to status quo Y” rather than looking awkward. A more charismatic candidate might help, but only with more attractive policies — the overall problem was not Scheer, but he may be responsible for the platform which (imho) would be wise to incorporate some of my above points.
Of course it is easier to break things. It doesn’t mean you can’t fix them. There are technologies that can remove carbon from the atmosphere existing today. Are they efficient? Not enough to justify their use. If we developed fusion, then they are much more likely to be workable. So, solve that problem and we potentially solve many more at the same time.
I don’t want to win an election. I’m not running. I want elected officials to be a little better than narcissistic racists who just happen to have nice hair. And I’d like the people who support such people to not be hypocrites. I’d also like a pony.
If we develop fusion the oil patch is completely done for. Be careful what you wish for.
The big reason the Conservatives lost, at least in my opinion, is a lack of a real climate change action plan. As I stated previously, I think this is going to increasingly be a problematic for the CPoC. They’ve married themselves to the fossil fuel industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan, so it is hard for them to come out with a climate action plan without demotivating their base or driving them to the PPC. As the effects of climate change become less statistical and more real this is going to become even worse for the CPoC. We’re running out of time to limit the damage caused by climate change and avert a huge amount of human suffering. It isn’t a joke. It isn’t fake. It is, unfortunately, extremely serious, and every nation needs to their part. We cannot continue to say “Well, country X isn’t so we’re not going to either” because that just leads to EVERY nation pointing the finger elsewhere and nothing happening. And again, the outcome will not be a joke. Hundreds of millions of humans, at a minimum, will be directly affected by climate change. And that ignores permanent damage to ecosystems (as if that wouldn’t be cause enough to act).
However, I see recently that we might have a new political party. Alberta is forming the Wexit party as a counter to the BQ. I really hope this happens. It should drain off all the remaining extremists in the CPoC who haven’t already fled to the PPC, and perhaps leave the CPoC to become a real national conservative party like we used to have.
Where do things stand on Trudeau, or someone else, forming a government?
There’s no real question or drama: Liberals will announce their new cabinet in a couple weeks and they have ruled out a coalition. Minority government.
Seriously? If we develop fusion things will work out fine? So to make you happy, we need oil prices to skyrocket so we can extract all that cash from under Alberta THEN we start economically feasible carbon removal technology and cold fusion and fix all the problems? Oy vey.
A Western analogue to the Bloc would be a goddamned disaster for Canada. It could render the country permanently ungovernable.
Maybe, although I don’t think so. I think we would end up with minority coalition governments, and that would be fine.
However, even if true, then if the country becomes ungovernable then maybe the country shouldn’t exist. Or needs an entirely new framework. Certainly, people have a right to form a new political party. I would rather Canada cease to exist then to prevent people from forming a new political party (with some reasonable exclusions, I don’t think a Nazi party or an equivalent should be permitted).
I don’t think a Wexit party will get the kind of support the Wexiters think it will. For one thing, the founders are alt-right conspiracy theorists. And sure they’ll attract the alt-right conspiracy theorists, but the CPoC would be better off without them anyway. They’d probably have a level of support roughly equal to the PPC.
Only if it actually started winning seats. I suspect it would actually draw about as many votes as the PPC did.
Oh Trudeau plans to have his cabinet sworn in by the 20th of November.
Wexit is a farce. If it was a real political ideology it would be active during Conservative rule and not merely exist as a right-wing reaction to the Tories losing an election. If you are basing your “wining conditions” on times when Conservatives lose the house, you’ll always be SOL when they win.
Wexit pretty much exists exactly where conservatives have been winning elections.
I think western separation would be extremely hard to achieve. You will know that the movement has actual clout if you see the leaders of Saskatchewan and Alberta making serious plans to take over the pension plans of the citizens and to stand up provincial police forces to replace the RCMP, along with other means of decoupling from federal control.
I think there is a good chance that provincial leaders will start talking about that, but not because they are seriously considering leaving. Instead, they’ll pander to the base with that talk, and use it as leverage against Ottawa.
That said, if Trudeau is serious about doubling down on energy restrictions and climate change policies, he may force the West’s hand. There aren’t a lot of places that would stand still for having their wealth forcibly kept from them.
What do you think would happen if Trudeau ordered Quebec’s cement plants to shut down (Cement manufacture is a major contributor to CO2 emissions), and it cost the province tens of thousands of jobs, impoverished entire communities, and threw the province back into massive deficits? And for the sake of argument, imagine that Quebec’s cement profits had required them to send a few billion dollars per year to the west, which wasn’t running deficits and had the strongest economies in Canada? And that even though Ottawa destroyed the industry that generated those profits, it demanded that the billions still be paid while the province’s economy spirals down?
Because that’s the situation Alberta is in. Since the election we lost two more major energy companies, along with a few thousand more jobs, citing the difficulties of doing energy business in the province.
Jason Kenney has promised that if we don’t get action from Ottawa to remove the roadblocks placed in front of our oil industry, he’ll put equalization to a referendum in the province. While only about a third of Albertans are in favor of separation, more than half want the equalization referendum, which suggests it would actually pass.
If it did, I imagine the rift between wast and west would get markedly worse. Quebec hates us now - I can imagine how they’d feel if they didn’t get billions of dollars in Alberta taxes per year in equalization.
This is the kind of thing that actually could break up Canada over time. And that would be worse for the east than it would be for the west.
And yet Western alienation becomes a non-issue whenever the Tories take Parliament hill. That’s just pure sour grapes, not an independence movement. Wexiters cry bloody murder up until the day the Conservatives win and get to set the National agenda. That’s why it’s a perennial farce. There no political aspirations beyond run-of-the-mill right wing reactionary politics.