[Canada] Trudeau gets to work

Thanks Spoons. Rational debate isn’t possible at this stage. I gave up hope on that weeks ago. I have no doubt Canada will still be a great country, even though 2/3 of us don’t support the governing party: just like the last election.

Anyone have links to polls of how people would vote today, now that the cabinet has been appointed but not yet tested?

I wouldn’t be surprised if some who voted NDP were to shift to Liberal.

Harper is not heading up the official opposition, because he resigned. Rona Ambrose is the interim party leader.

So the next question is, why was Harper forced to resign? The answer is in the dramatic change in Conservative Party standing, from a comfortable majority of 159 seats down to just 60, while Justin Trudeau took the Liberals from 36 seats to 148.

So yes, a decisive rejection. The change from majority government to being kicked out of power altogether meant that Canadians clearly weren’t buying whatever Harper was selling. And in terms of popular support as opposed to seat count, you might note the last bullet point below.

Here’s your answer – to which I would add, I’m in that category myself – i.e.- I didn’t vote Liberal and Trudeau wasn’t “my guy”, I’m just impressed with his initial actions on their own merits …
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is getting a lot of love from voters during his political honeymoon, a new poll suggests.

One week after being sworn in, Trudeau is enjoying a 60 per cent approval rating, and almost three-quarters of those surveyed say they are satisfied with the outcome of the Oct. 19 election won by his Liberals.

“He’s off to a good start,” Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff said Tuesday.

“I don’t think the New Democrats (polled) are that disappointed because getting rid of (Conservative prime minister Stephen) Harper was the goal . . .

Among the poll’s findings:
[ul]
[li]74 per cent approve of Trudeau’s gender-balanced cabinet[/li][li]55 per cent of respondents said they would now vote Liberal — up from the 39.5 per cent who actually did on Oct. 19[/li][/ul]

I’m curious as to how they will move on instituting proportional representation and on reducing whipped votes, for those are issues that are important to me when it comes to responsible government. It would be a sea-change for all the parties if these were brought about.

I see someone has already let you know that Harper is not heading up the official opposition anymore. You must have missed his resignation on election night.

Note that I am yet another person who did not vote Liberal, but is very happy that the CPC lost the election. You simply cannot compare the raw numbers, and conclude that 61.5% of Canadians don’t want Trudeau. You seem to be unaware that the NDP, Liberal and Green voters ALL didn’t want Harper.

Essentially, the CPC is a rural Prairies and rural Ontario party now. Back to where they were when they were the Reform Party.

And yes, rational debate is certainly possible. In fact, now that we have better access to science and factual information via the long form census, we can have discussions based in FACT, rather than ideology.

It was easy to miss. Quite exceptionally, he made no mention of it in his concession speech. The party officials put out a quite press release mentioning it, about the same time as his speech.

And all the NDP, Conservative, and Green voters didn’t want Justin Trudeau. All the Liberal, Conservative, and Green voters didn’t want Tom Mulcair, and basically nobody wanted Elizabeth May.

The Reform Party contested two federal elections and won exactly one seat, in total, in Ontario, and I don’t think they even ran candidates in Quebec.

Its 2000 successor, the Canadian Alliance, won exactly two seats in Ontario.

Today’s Conservative Party has rather broader reach than that. You can actually look these facts up, you know.

No. I wanted anyone but Harper, and would have been happy if May, Trudeau or Mulcair had won. Just because I was only able to vote for one of them does not mean that I did not want the other two. There was only one that I did not want – Harper.

That’s a good example of why I want to move to proportional representation.

I don’t like it when a broader reach has a lessened grasp due to first out of the gate. I’m pleased as punch that the Harpers were ditched, but in the long term I think we would be better off as a representative democracy if we leave move away from winner takes all.

You seem to have a VERY poor grasp of the electorate, and what people actually think. There were a huge number of voters that would have been happy with ANY result other than Harper retaining power. You’re simply out to lunch here.

Today’s CPC has been reduced to a MUCH narrower reach than in the past parliament. That was my point, but you seem to have a strange need to use hyperbole. The majority of their seats are rural. The majority are in the Prairie provinces and rural Ontario. They lost the cities, the Maritimes and the north.

But keep on thinking that they did nothing wrong. That’s fine. Perhaps you could join the National Post commentators, and simply declare anyone who does not think Harper was the best as “deranged”. That’s gotta work.

I wouldn’t have. I specifically wanted Tom Mulcair to be Prime Minister, and absolutely would pick Stephen Harper over Elizabeth May seven days a week and twice on Sundays.

Not everyone has the same voting preference, or sees the political spectrum the way you do. The assumption you and Euphonius Polemic make is that all Canadians think one of two ways; either the way you do, or they’re Conservatives. That isn’t how the real world works.

[QUOTE=Euphonius Polemic]
But keep on thinking that they did nothing wrong.
[/QUOTE]

Honestly, what the hell are you talking about? How you made a single post in the last twenty that did not contain a factual error or make some bizarre, illogical assumption?

The Conservatives did more things wrong, both in governance and campaigning, than I could fit into the number of characters the SDMB limits a post to. If we’re just talking about the campaign, it was conducted with remarkable stupidity and just serves as one more example of the fact that parties that lose elections generally deserve to.

However, characterizing the Conservative Party as being like the old Reform Party is wrong. Of course they have less reach than in the last Parliament; they lost. But it is simply a matter of objective fact that the Reform Party was almost entirely a Western party (though not a “rural” party, as you inexplicably and incorrectly claim) and the Conservative Party of today, even after a decisive defeat, has almost half of its seats in Ontario and Quebec. Twelve seats in Quebec would have been unthinkable for the Reform Party. Nor, of course, would it be correct to characterize the spread as largely “rural.” I’m not sure Canada even has 99 “rural” ridings west of the Maritimes.

Cite, please.

The facts are that you stated absolutes: “all . . . all . . . nobody . . . .” I pointed out myself as being an exception. You have now responded with another erroneous absolute. Time for you to back off on the exaggeration and misattribution.

The merged Reform/Alliance/Conservative party obviously was designed to have broader appeal than the original Reform Party. But much of this intended appeal under Harper was a scam. I have maintained for years that this was largely just window dressing to enable right-wing extremists to gain a wider base of support. Let’s remember the history of the Canadian Alliance, which was essentially a renamed Reform Party:
[The Canadian Alliance was] the successor to the Reform Party of Canada … [which] supported policies that were both fiscally and socially conservative, seeking reduced government spending on social programs and reductions in taxation … it was largely seen as merely a renamed and enlarged Reform Party. Former Reform members dominated the new party, and the Reform caucus in the Commons essentially became the Alliance caucus (with a few exceptions). Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney called the party “Reform in pantyhose”, and some opponents referred to the party as the “Reform Alliance” to enforce this perception.

And who was the leader of the Canadian Alliance before it merged with the Progressive Conservative Party? Stephen Harper. My problem with Harper has always been this “wolf in sheep’s clothing” character, and indeed much of his most draconian legislation or attempts thereat were attempted by stealth and dishonesty. Hence the quote in my post #103 from the president of the polling organization that “getting rid of (Conservative prime minister Stephen) Harper was the goal” common to many Liberal and NDP voters.

That’s how they voted.

The point Spoons made is that if one uses the percentage of people that DIDN’T vote for someone as a “rejection” then all candidates were rejected by a majority of the electorate. I was referring to that; if you say ~70 percent all voted against Stephen Harper, then about ~60 percent voted against Justin Trudean, ~80 percent voted against Tom Mulcair, and something like 96 percent voted against Elizabeth May. Indeed, it would have to be deduced that every party has been rejected by the electorate in almost every election in modern times; the last time a party got more than half the votes was when Mulroney’s PCs got just a hair over 50 percent in 1984.

Of course, what is actually a much more accurate statement of the way our system works is that people vote FOR a party, not against one. It’s euphemistically known as the “first past the post” system, not the “first behind the post.” The Liberals won the election not because they got people to vote against the Conservatives, but because they got people to vote FOR them. It isn’t a coincidence that the major party that ran the clearest, most unambiguously “vote for us because we will do specific things” campaign won, and beat out the party that was the other viable alternative to the Conservatives that didn’t do a great job articulating why anyone should vote for them.

It is worth noting that in the grand scheme of things Conservative support didn’t drop catastrophically - from 39% to 30%. The major change, which altered the electoral landscape, was the Liberal Party doubling its support at the expense of BOTH its opponents.

Voting motivations are often a mix between voting-for and voting-against, and I think it would be silly to deny that there was exceptionally strong anti-Harper sentiment in this one, for the reasons I just stated that finally became obvious to large numbers of mainstream Canadians. That’s certainly the opinion of the president of Forum Research as previously quoted. A lot of voters just wanted to get rid of Harper. The Liberals may indeed have taken a lead in the polling because they had a better message than the NDP, but having done so, I think they were propelled to an unexpected majority by voters piling on to make sure they got the job done.

This.

The fact remains that there was a VERY large “anyone but Harper” vote in October. This was incredibly clear to anyone following the election, and to anyone who has seen the reaction of NDP and Green supporters after the election.

The Harper-Reform party is an outlier in Canadian politics. It is far, far away from the other three parties.

You’re quite the sweet talker, ain’tcha? I wonder if you could put an effort forth here to be just a tad more civil?

However, characterizing the Conservative Party as being like the old Reform Party is wrong. Of course they have less reach than in the last Parliament; they lost. But it is simply a matter of objective fact that the Reform Party was almost entirely a Western party (though not a “rural” party, as you inexplicably and incorrectly claim) and the Conservative Party of today, even after a decisive defeat, has almost half of its seats in Ontario and Quebec.
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OK then, the CPC of today is not EXACTLY, PRECISELY, IDENTICAL to the Reform Party of old.

OK? Happy now? Ready to converse without insults?

It has certainly undergone a contraction back towards that base though.

No. The CPC did not, in terms of popular support, regress towards a Reform Party pattern; rather, it contracted its overall vote count in every single region of Canada except Quebec:

NL: 2011 28.4 - 2015 10.3
PE: 2011 41.2 - 2015 19.3
NS: 2011 36.7 - 2015 17.9
NB: 2011 - 2015 25.3
QC - 2011 16.5 - 2015 16.7
ON - 2011 44.4 - ON 35.0
MB - 2011 53.5 - 2015 37.3
SK - 2011 56.3 - 2011 48.5
AB - 2011 66.8 - 2015 49.5
BC - 2011 45.5 - 2015 30.0

What we see here is a general reduction in support across the entire country except for a weirdly consistent one-in-six Quebecois contingent which was more than offset by a total collapse in Atlantic Canada (though in terms of seats, the drop in Ontario was the most costly, even though it was consistent with the national average.)

The Reform Party’s pattern of votes didn’t look anything at all like this. The Reform Party received, in any sense that matters, no support at all in Quebec; in 1997 they got 0.3% of the vote, about even with something called the Natural Law Party, who you may recall as being the guys who said they could use yoga to learn how to fly. Reform support in the Atlantic provices was lower, way lower in fact, that even the CPC’s dismal show this year, and was half the CPC’s show in Ontario. That was in their best year.

The current CPC’s core support looks a lot like what you’d get if you combined the core of the Reform Party and the rump Progressive Conservative Party, which is of course what one should expect. What’s different from before is

  1. The CPC’s support in the Atlantic Provinces fell of a table, and

  2. The NDP’s support in the West is not nearly as strong as it used to be. It’s almost easy to forget how well they used to do out West, but it’s no longer their clear base - there are still a lot of Western ridings where people choose between Conservative and NDP, but they used to pick NDP a lot more. I’m not sure why that is (and it’s not just a 2015 phenomenon; their 2011 support was not impressive against their historical norms.)

Come to think of it, the gap insurers in Canada can best be described as pieces of shit, similar to American health insurers. For example, my coverage included endodontics and fillings. The insurer denied a root canal and denied the glue used to attach a filing. It took a call to each of their legal departments to get them to cut cheques. Sadly, that is the nature of health insurers these days.

Dental insurance is one of the quietest, best run scams in the country.