My election day poll is 5km by car or a 2.7km walk.
Advance poll is 2.5km either way.
Guess I have to hike a bit further to vote.
I had a bit of tedious fun while having my morning tea of looking up the polling stations for places I used to live.
The furthest I could find was 2.5km away. For one address, the location was actually in the building next door. I looked up the address of a couple of friends who live in more rural areas, but even then the closest village (crossroads with a church and a half dozen buildings) always has a polling station. Those were all in the 2-3km range too.
I don’t know anyone in a “truly rural miles from anywhere” living situation to look into that, but I assume such people are used to driving to a village to buy toilet paper and bananas, so their polling station is likely in the same range.
I remember voting remotely from on campus for one election a couple of decades ago; so that’s also an option for students who are away from home.
Really, it always has been so easy to vote, I’ve never taken the time to appreciate the logistics of that for Elections Canada.
This is exactly the case for my brother and SIL in rural BC.
And yet somehow we ended up with a PM for 9 years who was a drama teacher and showed it regularly. That person replaced the last guy who was an economics major and was the one who actually got us through the 2008 financial crisis. Qualifications only seem to matter when is supports your choice. Otherwise, not so much.
In some ridings it would. Generally speaking, most Canadians are looking past their MP and to the Prime Minister hopeful, but there ARE ridings where the local personality is dominant. It’s not most, but definitely some.
I mean, the guy the Tories ran against him was a clerical assistant at an insurance broker.
Well, one of them.
But let’s be honest, Uzi’s point is generally correct. People don’t usually care about “Qualifications.” Mark Carney having a resume rather specifically interesting in terms of the current global crisis is kind of a unique situation. No one really cared about Brian Mulroney being a labour attorney and then having run an iron mining company; those things didn’t come up at all in 1984. Jean Chretien already had a reputation as a cabinet minister but so did most of his opponents in 1993. Paul Martin more or less coasted in on Chretien’s work, and who cared Stephen Harper was an economist? Justin Trudeau had no real qualifications at all beyond his last name, he was Handsome Sunny Ways guy.
True. And O’Toole was well-qualified in the conventional sense. But Conservative harping on the Trudeau’s private sector experience when they selected Scheer and Polievre as leaders is historically the basis of the biblical aphorism about the log in your own eye. Not many people know that.
I would say that people sometimes care about qualifications to some extent, and that varies depending on other aspects of the candidate. And it varies by voter. Some voters, like one of my coworkers, decide pretty much based on who they like more based on tv clips. Others vote purely on red team/blue team/orange team allegiance. Still others vote primarily on party platform.
And actually probably the single largest factor in Canadian elections is “how pissed off am I at the guy currently holding office”, which is why the drama teacher beat the economist in the first place.
Nonetheless, qualifications do have some weight most of the time even if they are rarely decisive, and in Trudeau’s second and subsequent election campaigns his resume was not just drama teacher and opposition party leader, but also included actually being the Prime Minister, which is actually a qualification in its own right.
I should clarify that I think Carney is hugely more qualified than Trudeau was and I’d not be surprised if he isn’t any worse than past Liberal PM’s outside of the Trudeau clan which were the worst PM’s in Canadian history.
But I think it is more likely that we will find he is nothing more than a Trudeau in banker clothing. He won’t be a friend to the West, his promise of fast tracking infrastructure projects will come to naught, he will jack up the carbon taxes on industry that will effect people as much as the previous consumer carbon tax, but sneakily he won’t have to pay the carbon rebate to people while getting to blame industry for increasing their prices to compensate, and we’ll be in the same boat, circling the drain, that we were in a month ago.
The conversation about Trudeau being “a drama teacher” always reminds me of a story from high school, where our history teacher was asking the class about skills that would have been favourable/useful to the settlers of Nouvelle France. She was, undoubtedly, thinking about things like being able to hunt, to do woodworking and build a house and barn, being able to skin an animal and make clothes, that sort of thing.
But one kid - one of the drama kids - answers “charisma”.
This got a laugh out of the class and a confused prompt from the teacher about why that would be a useful skill. The student pointed out that if you couldn’t actually do any of those things, or do them well, or became old and injured, then you’d have to have charisma to get your neighbors and community to help you. Charisma would also correlate to general leadership, to get people to help each other, too.
Trudeau absolutely had charisma.
Related, a friend of mine has a drama degree, but is also a medical professional. They say the degree is really useful for pretending you know what the fuck is going on" with your patients.
And is why the drama teacher would have been annihilated this time out and had to resign.
Canadian federal politics are very predictable; if we elect a government, we re-elect them at least once. The only exceptions in the country’s history were the Mackenzie government, Bennett, and the Clark hiccup, which barely counts.
This is why the Tories were foolish to dump Andrew Scheer, to be honest. (Or, having done that, getting rid of O’Toole.) Scheer’s performance in 2019 was actually quite impressive by Canadian standards - we just never dump new governments, and yet he managed to win the popular vote and give the Liberals a scare. Switching out leaders constantly is dumb.
Agreed, except that I was profoundly unimpressed with Scheer.
Granted, my political leanings are pretty distant from the Reform wing of the Conservative Party of Canada, but I’m happy to admit that Harper was a competent, well-qualified political leader (even if I strongly disliked many of his policy preferences) and O’Toole was fine even if, again, wrong about a lot of things. Scheer I had no more use for than Stockwell Day or Polievre. Not that I’m ever going to have a vote in a Conservative Party leadership race.
Nonetheless, despite your and my preference for continuous leadership, the Liberals and Conservatives in our lifetimes definitely like turfing leaders who lose elections. The last time a Liberal leader didn’t resign after losing an election was John Turner, 41 years ago (I had to look that up).
I don’t think it’s that clearcut. Paul Martin went into 2004 with a majority and came out with a minority; went into 2006 with a minority and lost government, then resigned. That’s a clear downward path.
I think Carney’s impressive history made him a shoe-in for Liberal leader. On one side we had Trudeau’s deputy turned ouster Freeland and on the other side Carney with his impressive CV, international connections, and arms length cooperation with Trudeau. The Liberals numbers were looking pretty grim for a long time by then. New blood was meant to ease the crushing defeat to just a defeat, however. Trump.
There’s a lot of factors that brought us here; but ultimately we are here because the Liberal were able to rebound into legendary support. Why did Liberal support reverse so suddenly?
- Trump. He attacked us. After Trudeau (in one of his last acts) directly told Canada that Trump is serious about breaking our economy and annexing us; Canadians believed him. Until then we knew he was crazy and hated his guts, but afterwards we knew we must rally together.
- PP refused to attack Trump for too long. For a long time I still thought the Tories could’ve won. They had insanely high numbers and we hated the incumbency. We also hated Trump. PP could’ve used that. Ford EVEN SHOWED THEM how to win. Attack Trump. attack attack attack. It is political malpractice that it took 2 WEEKS INTO THE ELECTION before PP started to attack Trump. Make no mistake. Canadians wanted to rally behind someone, PP ensured that this person was Carney.
- Carney seems like he was constructed for this job. He’s a mild-mannered, uncontroversial, person of international distinction. Sure he’s not a household name, nor is he a politician, but that isn’t bad.
- NDP/Bloc vote has either collapsed or split. They both were riding high, and the Bloc were projected to take Stornoway. Alas, all dreams now. An earlier election would’ve avoided this. However, I’m not going to say that I would’ve done anything different. The NDP didn’t call an election for a few reasons that were good at the time. However the political winds have thrown us into bizarre territory here.
I’m seeing a lot of Cosnervative supporters post images of big CPC rallies and saying words to the effect of “it’s impossible for this to lose the election!” Be prepared for baseless claims of fixed elections.
How many of those pictures are actually of current CPC rallies? I know that on this side of the 49th, there have been a lot of pictures of “Republican rallies” that were actually some completely different event years prior.
To be fair, I agree with some of PPs points. I would like to see meaningful budgeting, government creating good conditions for investment without committing billions to the trendy idea of the day, transparency, better industrial development, a stronger and more capable military, sensible legal reform. Perhaps Carney could steal good ideas as well as mediocre ones.
One might argue how well each candidate might accomplish these things. I suspect the answer is none of them would. With regard to legal reform, putting great effort behind ideas very unlikely to be considered constitutional seems unwise to me.
One might also consider the Zeitgeist and what ideas are really most important to average Canadians.
All the ones I’ve actually looked at were authentic. Of course they can hold a big rally, millions will vote for them.
It’s an easy and uninformed cliche to dump on “drama teacher” as a kind of useless job or career, but in fact it takes a tremendous amount of varied skills to be an effective drama teacher. And in fact studying theatre imparts many useful skills like effective teamwork and collaboration, logistics, leadership, presentation and speaking, problem-solving, and more. I say this not to defend Trudeau or his qualifications, but the next time you (general “you”) think about sneering towards drama teachers (or students), you might want to educate yourself first. There are a lot of articles and research about this - here’s one.