Fake populists such as Pierre P. have some advantages over the smooth technocrats that the Liberals tend to favour and represent. A real left party would be able to (wait for it…) capitalize on this by pointing out fake populists have no interest in “the people” but are happy to rev people up to displace the technocrats. The NDP, however, is a party of technocrats with a human face and so are not able to put forward a real program that would represent the majority of Canadians. Or that’s how it seems from the Left Coast.
Speaking from Toronto, "The Centre of the Universe"™, I fully agree with this.
The NDP is at real risk of losing the unions, at least some of them, to Poilievre. What should the NDP do?
I don’t envy the NDP. I never have. They are in a consistently terrible position. Do well means the party most ideologically opposite (and even more so as the CPC sprints further right) is more likely to win. They had that brief moment in the sun as opposition. I am so sick of the Liberals and waaaaaaaay done with the CPC, that I would love to see an NDP win. However, I will continue to vote for whatever party has the best chance of stopping the CPC in my riding. What the heck IS my riding now that I’ve moved???
Ottawa Centre apparently, which is currently Liberal. And there was much rejoicing. Yay.
If I was the NDP I’d remind people if I was a Conservative in charge of the federal budget and I needed to save a dollar for every one I want to spend, I’d start with those big fat public sector unions. There’s gotta be a lot of fraud and waste right there, right? I mean just look at them… they’re unions. They’ve got to be guilty of something. Remember Jimmy Hoffa? And since their union positions protect them from having to do any actual work (unlike you true old stock Canadians out there who work for a living!), we can get rid of those jobs and replace them with minimum wage workers who will actually put in some effort. Everybody wins! Well, except unions but those are obsolete nowadays, right? Conservatives will free you from the tyranny of unions!
You’d think this would be a bug rather than a feature when talking to unions but the Conservative business model is certainly familiar with enticing people to act against their own self-interest.
Meanwhile, the Green Party of Canada seems to be doing a good job of completely imploding.
I wonder if this will make a difference in ridings where there was significant Green votes (over 10%). Presumably many of those voters will go to NDP or Liberal, with fewer going to CPC.
PP himself doesn’t terrify me as much as the fact that he could well win. I had some hopes for Trudeau when he came in, seemed a bit glossy and superficial but I had had enough of Harper’s Bay-Street-meets-Western-Grievance schtick and didn’t have a problem voting for JT. But he proved himself to be a nitwit who’d run headlong into avoidable scandal, and didn’t have the cojones to push through a lot of his key promises. Continuing to fight Native groups in court over restitution even while the graves were being dug up at residential schools was utterly sickening. But as I’ve said before, if the Tories would stop pushing charisma-free, angry Fraser-institute Randian/libertarian idiots, I might vote PC for the first time in a decade and a half. I was rooting for Jean Charest; I suspected he wouldn’t win but I didn’t expect the size of PP’s sweep. It’s truly depressing to think that the Cons up here seem to be following hte playbook of the States in terms of populist assholes.
People sure that the CPC will be unable to win the next election with need to consider who people will vote for when they are exhausted with the current government.
- Green voters no longer exist as the party executive has finally managed to consume itself in an orgy of self indulgent petty differences
- Some NDP voters might split to the Liberals but will likely stay with the NDP
- More left leaning Liberal voters will vote Liberal or NDP if they can’t bear to continue to support the government
- Soft centre Liberal voters might vote vote Conservative - or not vote at all
- Soft center CPC voters might vote CPC or maybe Liberal, but given the state of the Liberal government maybe just not vote at all
- More right leaning CPC voters stay with the party
- Far right might have gone with the People’s Party but since that vanity project has lost steam those votes are now newly minted CPC members.
You only need ~38% or so of votes to manage a majority and the Liberal hold on a number of Ontario seats wasn’t that large last time round. Having the soft centre disengage provides space for the Conservatives to take those places.
So Trudeau (who the convoyites seems to want to … umm … have “relations” with for some reason) announced a $4.5 billion dollar program today. Largely targeted at the poor. GST rebates, dental benefit for kids under 12, some housing subsidies (probably some other stuff too).
PP has immediately come out against this. It will raise inflation! Grrr! Argh!
Now, look, I know PP is the official opposition and so kind of has to oppose but politically this doesn’t seem like something to put up a big fight against. This is going to help poor working Canadians. You know the people he’s trying to claim he wants to help. But as always with the right it is “We want to help you” “No, not that way. Tax cuts for the rich! Trickle down! Trickle down!”
God, I hope he loses bigly.
PP figures he can bullshit the poor working Canadians into thinking he’s giving them “FREEDOMS” while at the same time picking their pockets. It works down south, so why not here.
Alain Reyes is an MP in Québec, elected as a Conservative, who campaigned for Jean Charest. Earlier this week, Reyes announced that he no longer wanted to be associated with the Poilievre party and would sit as an independent from now on.
Today, apparently, Poilievre’s office sent a text message to people in Reyes’ riding, including his own wife and kids, telling recipients to call Reyes’ office and ask him to give up his seat in the Commons. (Presse Canadienne) (National Post) .
He’s not wrong though. It IS inflationary. However, it’s a relatively small amount that won’t have a huge impact. It’s not like the student loan giveaway which IS pretty big. Jason Furman, one of Obama’s economic advisors, said that interest rates will uave to go up an extra .75% to pay for it.
Trudeau’s spending is much smaller, But it will have an impact on inflation. The government is soending money and giving it to people with the highest propensity to spend. So demand goes up, and the money supply increases a bit. Interest rates will have to go up slightly to offset it.
I kind of feel like, when it comes to politics, we’re just slightly smarter than a lot of Americans. Look at the last two CPC leaders. They both played the “I’m a Super Conservative!” role during the leadership contest, and then tried to pivot to, “Hey, I’m a reasonable moderate!” for the election, and it didn’t work either time. Down in the States, that kind of flip-flopping seems to work most of the time. Up here, it just pisses off everyone - the Conservatives feel betrayed, and everyone else thinks, “Come on, you don’t actually expect us to fall for that, do you?”
It remains to be seen whether the Canadian electorate itself has changed. The wisdom was always that the Conservatives needed the NDP and Liberals to do similarly well splitting this vote, while winning enough Quebecois and mainstream independent voters (traditionally tired of the incumbent government and ostensibly scared of social conservatism). They’ll likely win the West (offer may not include BC) and rural Ontario anyway.
Pierre could do well with mainstream policies, using anti-inflation and anti-Justin rhetoric to win the more fractious factions, while avoiding losing them to fringe parties. The question is whether enough of the electorate has changed or is sufficiently tired of Trudeau that he does not fully revert to moderate policy.
Pierre is very sharp, intelligent and politically pragmatic. It is hard to know how sincere he is about some of his policies, but this should become clear if the Libs can hold off the election for almost three years, which is likely.
It will be interesting if PP continues to embrace the anti-government, anti-vax, “freedum to infect others” fringe. The CPC needs to be careful about riding that tiger, lest they lose control. (again see south of the border)
I think a lot will depend on Doug Ford’s disastrous policies. He’s seriously underfunded healthcare, long term care and education. Denying it’s to monetize them, but that’s a lie.
He’s about to institute a policy that sees elderly hospital patients, awaiting a care bed in their community, forced out of hospital and assigned to any available long term care bed anywhere. If they refuse, to be moved away from community and family, the hospitals will be able to bill them an exorbitant rate. (As they have been underfunded too, they will get on board with this, they have been left little choice!)
Due to purposeful underfunding the long term beds most likely to ‘open’ will be at, ‘for profit’ homes (which conservatives like Brian Mulroney are often invested deeply in!) and, just like that, our health care dollars are now being funnelled into ‘for profit’ care.
Dougie gave Brian Mulroney a million dollar award and a medal, AFTER medics called in, during the first Covid wave, spoke up to say the Chartwell homes were unconscionably poorly managed and run, the WORST care they witnessed. Brian Mulroney is not the only conservative who will make bank on this policy.
Kind of like the new highway promise, it won’t fix the traffic problems, but it will funnel cash to Dougie’s construction buddies.
With any luck, the true costs of these disastrous policies, will be all over the news in time for the next federal election.
It’s foolish to think Dougie’s bad policy won’t affect PP’s chances, in my opinion.
I don’t know. They’ll likely just blame Trudeau for any failure in Ontario, and the CPC party faithful will lap it up.
At this point, worrying about “the CPC party faithful” is kind of pointless. It’s everyone else that really matters. PP needs to bamboozle a lot of people who haven’t been voting Conservative if he wants to win. And that includes a lot of people like me, who used to vote Conservative, but have been driven away from the party by their ongoing slide towards the far right.
I can’t imagine anything that PP could do to convince me to come back to the CPC. Charest might have been able to do that, maybe, if he managed to stave off an MPs revolt. But look at the numbers Charest pulled; the current CPC clearly has no interest in winning back my vote.
While I don’t think PP will end up drawing back too many politically active swing voters, I think there is a decent chance that he could mobilize a fair number of people who would have been disinclined to vote at all, including younger conservatives. He seems to have far more charisma than O’Toole or Scheer.
Yeah, but he’s just as likely to mobilize an equal number of younger left wing voters. Young people in general often don’t turn out to vote, so there’s untapped voters on both sides. And polling indicates that on average, Canadians don’t lean nearly as far right as PP is right now. If he leans even farther right, that just gets worse.