I’m genuinely not sure exactly what you’re trying to convey here.
I think he’s talking about this series of British documentaries on the inner workings of Her Majesty’s Government.
I see I am not the only person who sees the stone-throwing as spillover from the MAGAts. There are certain chilling parallels to the relations between Nazi Germany and Austria where local Nazis assassinated the Prime Minister.
Oh, it absolutely is spillover. There is a contingent of Canadian political operatives who’ve seen how successful this crap has been in the US the last decade and a half, and who would just love to import it here.
Absolutely is seepage from the US election strategy! They were even chanting, ‘Lock him up!’
What do you think the chances are they will scream election fraud?
(They won’t be at the debate will they? Surely not with only like 4% of the vote?)
100% I just hope the media treats it as they would someone on the corner screaming about how the Shape shifting Lizard People are taking over.
You mean, “some experts reject claim of lizard people taking over, while others defend the theory”?
Has it? I don’t see much of a correlation. Canadian politics today isn’t terribly similar in any important way to American politics in 2011, is it? What predictive value has this claim had?
The idea today’s Conservatives are somehow more prone to appealing to ignorance would be a good point if it were true, but it’s not. The CPC platform is boring and mainstream. In many respects they’re saying things that would not be out of place in the Liberal or NDP platforms. The messaging of Canadian parties wasn’t any more intelligent ten years ago, or twenty years ago, or thirty. Doug Ford’s a dumbass but he’s a provincial politician, not a federal one, and his administration isn’t really any more conservative than the Conservatives have been in the past.
The Canadian equivalent to today’s Republican Party is not the CPC, not even close. Ideologically, it’s the People’s Party… 10 years ago in the USA, the Republican Party controlled the House of Representatives, most state houses, and was about to lose a narrowly contested Presidential election. Today the People’s Party of Canada controls nothing and will be amazingly successful to win one seat in Parliament.
We’re lucky enough to have a multi-party system, so that the CPC does not have to veer really far to the right to appease the wing-nuts. Instead, they can just syphon off the 4% of the crazies to the “people’s party”. It’s not likely I’ll be a Conservative voter, but I can say at least they are not full on nuts like the Republicans have been in the recent past.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the People’s Party couldn’t get more people on their side. (ha!) But there is not yet evidence that will happen, and the Republicans were being taken over by the crazies a LONG time ago. Of course, that’s just another way in which the two countries are not running in parallel ten years apart; the crazies started their takeover of an existing party a long time ago. In Canada they started a new party.
All democracies will have parallels in some way, but American and Canadian party politics are very different.
The issues aren’t the issues. The issue is how the leaders are perceived. I’ve read the conservative platform and it’s a fairly typical one. More weight to foreign affairs and the military than the other parties but nothing terrible. You can object to their climate approach but it’s an approach and not a rejection of the need for something.
The Liberal platform is not much more than what it was last time though we’ve swapped out electoral reform for day care.
The NPD are just NDPing along.
The Greens are bonkers right now and not worth voting.
The Conservative party used to to be known as the Progressive Conservative party. It dropped the “Progressive” when it merged with the Refrom party, which was more strident, more right wing on issues such as patriarchy, abortion, labour, religion, the environment, etc. It’s where Stephen Harper came from. So the party lurched rightward then, and the effects and results of that are still evident in the Conservative party, even when it “compromises” a little during campaigns and even when governing with a minority government. That it is not right wing amd authoritarian enough for the PP is no consolation.
Then I suppose the more left leaning parties had better start making better arguments to bring that 30% of the country into the fold. And no, Alberta and Saskatchewan do not make up a third of the country.
But don’t forget, Maxime Bernier came within just a couple of percentage points of being elected leader of the standard Conservative party not that long ago. The PPC was largely just his, “Screw you guys, I’m going home” butt-hurt reaction to losing that race. So there’s lots of mainstream Conservatives voters who’d apparently be quite happy with him as their leader, and who might vote for him if they start to think he has an actual shot at winning.
I agree–the left needs to accept the reality of people’s isolation, frustration, and anger, and provide real action and alternatives. I note parenthetically that the Reform party was strong in BC as well, while much of the Conservative vote in Atlantic Canada has lots to do with the system of political patronage rather than ideology. Would also add that social democracy historically has been strong in Saskatchewan and yes, even Alberta (heck, even Social Credit had a leftish critique originally) and the swing to the right there is more complicated than we often think.
In this article, the US historian Rick Perlstein argues that fear of inflation in the 1970s was more of a “moral panic” than a real thing. I think he puts too much on the “oil crisis” and not enough on the ability of monopoly capital to resist competition in pricing and on the banks’ terror of inflation, with both groups well able to influence politics. But that’s just me.
I’m pretty sure we all know the history.
But are they really all that far right now? Really? What changed with regards to abortion? Nothing. Labour? Nothing. Religion? Nothing. The environment? Nothing; you don’t really think the Liberals actually cared, do you? Stephen Harper’s government was milquetoast.
There is a valid set of concerns that government involvement in people’s affairs is detrimental to optimal interactions. That by allowing that type of legislative weight to skew interactions, the need to capture the legislative agenda by groups (unions, corporations, special interest etc.) drives bad behaviours and laws. Furthermore that these entanglements encourage government involvement in areas that it is not suited for.
Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are extremely clever books, made into an extremely witty political TV show very loyal to the source material. Veep was something of an American copy, much less clever.
They are essentially short stories where a politician manages crises. His underlings on the Civil Service have their own agenda and ideas - which he thwarts about half of the time.
This is true. I am not fond of anti-vaxxers. However the PPC should have a place in the debate and not be excluded by some bureaucratic rule.