Or Harper’s commitment to carbon pollution
What I didn’t see was comments about how the Prime Minister is personally responsible for Pay-Less Shoe’s impending bankruptcy proceedings in the United States. (which I just finished reading about this morning)
Or any comments about how the Canadian Prime Minister is ruining the country, in a column about Donald Trump’s mission to build a wall.
It is well beyond the normal partisan bickering. There is a concerted effort to demonize Trudeau personally in EVERY article on the National Post. They have been running articles DAILY about him for the past 6 months.
At this point, this is the only Conservative Party platform; WE HATE TRUDEAU AND SO SHOULD YOU.
Reading up on Doug Ford, I see that both Ford and Trump are fake-tanned, overweight businessmen with brothers who shortened their lives with substance abuse.
Aside from that, how could Doug Ford be another Donald Trump? He doesn’t give the impression of being sophisticated but I don’t know much about him.
In Yahoo news comments sections, there was nowhere NEAR the amount of anti-Harper invective, back then, as there has been with this absolutely over-the-top, 24/7 anti-Trudeau invective, these days. If anything, I recall WAY too many Harperbots spewing the same shit, back then, as today’s alt-righters do.
With respect to donations, there are pretty strict annual limitations on how much an individual can donate.
For 2018, the limit was $1,575 to a political party, as set out in the Elections Canada website.
For 2018, the limit was $1,575 in total to candidates, riding associations, etc. of a registered party, also as set out by Elections Canada.
So assuming the principals of SNC - Lavalin are about 20 on the Board and executive, and they all donated the max to the Liberal Party and their local Liberal MP, that’s about $63,000. Not to be sneezed at, but not a really large sum when national election campaigns cost in the millions.
As for pension funds, etc., they’re run by professionals, subject to boards that include representatives from the employer and employees. I would think that any investment professional worth his/her salt will have already taken into account SNC - Lavalin’s legal troubles and discounted the stock in their portfolios accordingly. Pension managers always have to be conscious of the risks if one of the corporations they’ve invested in has hit a patch of trouble that could affect its value and ROI.
I think you’re looking a bit too hard for nefariousness, Sam.
W.r.t the recent Ontario provincial election…the Liberals were beaten soooo badly not so much because of what they had done since the previous election but that the PC spectacularly failed to **win **the last election. RickJay has pointed out before Canadian tend to eject governments more than elect them in. The Liberal party in 2014 was ripe for being beaten and until the PCs messed it up they were going to win. Then tack on a further 4 years of tired government and it was like the explosion of a overripe watermelon.
Given that SNC has been mixed up in corruption since the mid-90s*, including bribery in the tens of millions of dollars, that it was being prosecuted for corruption abroad, that the DPA option was added to the criminal code after it became useful for SNC to have that option and that the PMO’s office is getting cagey, it’s not overly suspicious to think that there may have been nefariousness. Maybe there wasn’t but it’s worth journalists and maybe a commission taking a closer look at it.
I wouldn’t say he is, but both are products of the modern movement towards conservative populism. There are similarities in their attitude towards the media and whatnot, but Trump is sure as hell his own specimen.
For eight years Harper was regularly torn up for cutting health care spending, which was always interesting, *because that was not a thing that actually happened. * i bet I saw that claim on Facebook every day. The idea he was going to ban homosexuality or abortion or bring back capital punishment was so commonly stated as fact that some people started believing those things had actually happened.
Of course he did things people disliked, as in fact is the case with ANY Prime Minister. There was also a lot of frothing and hysteria, as there is with ANY Prime Minister. Trudeau will be rightly pilloried for his missteps; you can bet that when the election rolls around a lot of people will be sarcastically asking why it’s going to be a FTPT election when he promised that’d never happen again. He’s also going to be torn up over his absolutely incoherent position on pipelines, the national debt, and the fact his government is no more transparent than the Harper government he said he’d be better than in that regard.
There is no point denying much of the criticism of Trudeau (or Harper) is valid, but a lot of the shrieking about Trudeau (or Harper) is just ridiculous Internet babbling about “Trudumb” and how he (preposterous claim here.) I’m not saying the two men are the same, or equally deserving of praise of legitimate criticism, but the noise level of Internet nonsense is deafening either way.
There probably is a bit of confirmation bias going on… One tends to look more harshly at “the other side”
I agree that Harper did come in for a lot of inane frothing about things that never happened. Most of this though (I believe) came from individuals or fringe sites.
What I’m seeing for Trudeau though, is major players (principally the National Post) printing an article a day about Trudeau, followed by literally HUNDREDS of comments that do nothing more than froth and hate.
I agree that it occurred in the past with Harper. I’m seeing a level of magnitude increase now. Perhaps that’s just due to the times we live in - the level of vitriol has increased. I think though, that it’s a Conservative Party strategy - they think they can get more supporters to the polls through anger and hatred. And they may be right.
The interesting thing is that these unnamed sources - and the Globe and Mail itself - were essentially doing the work of the Conservative Party of Canada for them. And now they are shielded in anonymity because they were “sources”. So we will never know the reasons that they gave information full of “errors”, “unfounded speculation”, and “defamatory statements”
I’ll second this. The hatred and bile that is piling on Trudeau in the comment sections of Canadian media right now is on levels I’ve never seen before. Harper took his licks for sure, but not like this.
Like a few other posters, I’m fairly sure there is organized state troll interference putting the hours in on this. I think we should all be pretty mindful of that when wading into a comment section ‘conversation’.
