SNC-Lavalin should have had the government out on its ear. Instead we wound up with a minority government that has only survived due to reasonably competent governing in a pandemic. The opportunity for the Conservatives to be the government in waiting and push the Liberals out was there IF
The inner party fighting didn’t hamstring Scheer
The conservative loud mouths didn’t go after the Chief Medical Officer as some sort of Chinese agent
The Conservatives would frame their solutions as disaster funding/paradigm changing and not welfare/hamstringing our children with debt bromides.
Trudeau should be pushed out by his caucus but right now the question is “if you get rid of Trudeau, who runs the show?” There isn’t a good answer for that.
ETA: Yes Chrystia Freeland would be an excellent choice but she hasn’t seemed to want the position.
I don’t understand what your point is. There were Conservative landslides in the west and more modest Liberal victories in the east. Isn’t that an east/west divide as Sam_Stone was suggesting?
Well, no need to question ourselves since we have the quotes; this was the east/west divide @Sam_Stone was suggesting.
God, that’s not at all what we seen in the last election. Trudeau hasn’t mindlessly enthralled everybody east of Manitoba. People east of Manitoba have a wide differing opinion of Trudeau (and the Liberal party) as evidenced by the election results.
If, anything, one could point out that the nearly unbroken Blue that stretches from the Rocky mountains to Lake Superior is a prime case of voter ossification. Join that with the historical record, and you have an image of an entire region that has locked itself to single party voting.
Looking at the October election and the history of voting in previous elections it becomes obvious. Not only do non-prairie voters have a wide selection of views, but the entire range of Canadian political option is carried solely by Eastern Canada (with the addition of the BC coast, plus the North).
It’s blindly insulting to see the voting record and deduce “Eastern Canada is vote Trudeau til death.”
The more I think about this, the more I think you’re right. Politicians who are caught dirty should be kicked out of office - accepting that politics are dirty and all the politicians are dirty has lowered the bar for our leaders far too low. If you want to lead a country, you should be a person of high integrity.
On a mostly related note, seeing PM Trudeau getting pissy in the House of Commons was irritating - yes, you apologized (your go-to move), but there haven’t been any CONSEQUENCES for what you did, so yes, people are still bugging you about it!
You could have Googled this stuff so easily, but the Liberals did not win a majority of votes in any province in Canada.
The most single-minded voters in any province, and it’s not a close call, are in Alberta; Alberta is totally unique in the entire country in its dedication to just one party; the majority of Albertans have voted for whatever the leading conservative party is since before I was born. Not everyone is like Alberta, Sam; in other provinces the votes do move around.
I was clearly being hyperbolic, unless you think there are a bunch of used puck bags in parliament. My attempt at humor.
The real pojnt is that the liberals have virtually no support west of Ontario, and are pretty much an Eastern party now. Of course they con’t get all the votes - Ontario and Quebec both elect a decent number of conservatives. But the federal Liberals dominate the East, and are nearly nonexistent in the West.
And it’s not just Alberta. The liberals were blown out of Saskatchewan as well, and only took a couole of seats on the coast in BC.
The previous hyperbole isn’t helping your attempts at humour Sam. I’m keenly awaiting your razor wit when applied to O’Toole or Kenney and the blasted wasteland that is the Conservative leadership field.
I think just about everyone would agree that the election of 2019 was the Conservatives to win. A scandal rocked Liberal party was looking weak and ready to be pushed out. So it’s less than impressive when you say that by losing all 5 seats (out of 35 available) in Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2019 that it was a blow out.
Of course it raises the question, what is it about the Conservative party that instills such a monolithic lock on Alberta? What is it that makes a sizeable portion or the population heave is dismay by the simple transition of provincial government to a different party, other than Conservative? I mean Alberta has had single party rule stretching from 1971 to 2020, excluding 4 years of NDP government.
f your objection is that monomaniacally voting for the same party over and over again,like voting for a “used puck bag”, is indicative of poor choices…I’m not sure you’ve made a great point.
Am I cynical for thinking that no matter which party was in power, of course they’re going to hand out the big contracts to organizations they have connections to? Have the Conservatives said who their choice would be and how it would be super ethical? Has the NDP named their charity of choice that lacks any partisan connections, doesn’t do any lobbying yet is somehow worthy of having buckets of government cash dropped on them?
However, should this “scandal” happen to turf the Trudeau government, the Conservatives will then be in the hot seat. And then they will have to deal with the Liberals making a scandal out of every vacation the Conservative PM goes on. When the Conservative PM fires one of his ministers for putting country above party (because as I recall, voting one’s conscience is anathema to Conservatives) are they prepared to eat their own words? And when they start handing out favors like candy as all politicians do are they prepared to survive a confidence vote every single time someone perceives such horse trading as unethical?
I have an expectation that ridings get slight preferential treatment though only through the horse trading needed to get things done. But personal enrichment or tax evasion…nope. I expect that to lose my vote and experience a hit in status.
This looks a little more serious for Morneau who may have made a “serious oversight” of $41,000 complimentary travel. At least Trudeau himself did not family involvement. It looks like there might be an effort to pin the blame on Chagger.
Still, my position remains this will not have much material effect on the Libs and Trudeau. The level of public outrage is muted. I believe Trump may have sucked up all the oxygen. And people may like how Corona was handled, if not the costs, which the government is trying to hide.
I guess it’s small potatoes compared to the Sponsorship Scandal, but surely a smart Liberal politician would want to avoid the appearance of inappropriate fiscal behaviour after that fiasco. Yet here we are, doing this song-and-dance with fiscal oddities again, and I feel like there should be enough here that the Loyal Opposition could rig up a vote of non-confidence if they wished it. That we don’t have one speaks volumes about how weak the other parties value their chances at reelection.
I admit I haven’t followed these particular events very closely, there’s sort of a world news fatigue on my part and I’ve closed off a lot of communications channels I used to leave open. (Testament to you guys that I’m still here, eh?)
I guess I have to say that if the Right Honourable Trudeau were to approach me, on fire, complaining how the pain of burning flesh hurts him so, I’d take a quick moment to see if I could figure out what his angle was before extinguishing the flames.
Well, I think the opposition parties rightly think that the voting public would crucify any party that triggered an election in the middle of a pandemic. Add that to current Liberal polling and they’d have to be insane to try to get a vote of nonconfidence. They’re much better off trying to push Morneau out and bank the possibility of tying Justin to this later. If they manage to convince Trudeau to resign, chances are pretty good they’d be facing Freeland in the next election and I suspect her personal popularity is considerably higher than Trudeau’s is.
I don’t think Trudeau will resign, or even be materially hurt. I doubt even Morneau will resign, though he may (or may not) be found guilty of ethics violations. Unsure as to Freeland’s ambitions, but she is excellent.
The party most hurt may be WE. There is more scrutiny of its odd focus on real estate, which may be perfectly innocent and justifiable.
Although an article in Macleans argues that any charity is poorly served by government and so appealing to someone who can make decisions makes sense. It also argues charities should be judged by their impact.
WE are looking haggard. This has cost them sponsorship from the Ontario government to the big banks. I am not saying anything illegal happened. But things seem very unorthodox.
I wouldn’t want to be involved with a charity where the controlling family are passing expensive real estate amongst themselves using the charity. Whatever the letter of the law, that at least suggests a total disinterest in the appearance of propriety.
Nothing will happen. Trudeau didn’t do it, he tried to stop it, it was all the civil service, there was no time for vetting, the dog ate his briefing papers, there was a pandemic, a horrible flood, an earthquake. How much do you expect one Prime Minister to keep track of? And besides, he SAID he was sorry. So let’s just put this whole mess behind us and move on.
As for Morneau, he just forgot to pay back the money for the crazy insane junket he took his family on. You don’t fire someone for forgetting a little thing like that. It was an honest mistake.
And I’m sure there are no other skeletons amongst the cabinet, but they blocked an inquiry into that just to save time and money.
.svg){kind=link}