Rather a lot of scandal, for one.
The Liberals have done a terrible fiscal job, as has been pointed out. That’s not the primary reason they’re disliked, though, since a lot of voters like the promise of more spending.
Ike, I’m a lifelong Liberal. My father was a riding president and I remember at the age of 7 or so running from the phones to the tote board on election day for Bob Kaplan. If the PCs had selected a half-worthy candidate, I could have imagined voting for Christine Elliott. I think Andrea Horvath is a joke. But I don’t get the message of refusing your ballot. To whom are you sending a message?
I wonder what Bill Davis thinks of Ford?
There’s the pity of all this. The alt-right and less strident holders of various anti-social positions flock to the Fords and Trumps of the world. They have pushed a fiscally conservative yet socially positive balance out of the party.
I want social programs advanced in a fiscally responsible way, so I quite agree that the Liberals should be tossed out due to what they have done with the debt, and I agree that getting the debt stabilized and starting to chip away at it is necessary, but there is no way in hell that I would vote for someone like Ford. So here I am, supporting the NDP, who when they were last in power had the guts to take on the spending problem without sacrificing their social efforts.
For the youngsters here, we were in the nastiest recession since the great depression, so Rae’s NDP knocked nearly two billion off civil service costs by having its employees take some unpaid days off, resulting in big unions booting the NDP back to the stone age. That led to the Harris’ Conservatives replacing the NDP and waging war against environmental and social/health programs. That in turn led to the Liberals being repeatedly elected for the most part by borrowing and borrowing and borrowing to try to be able to deliver on their promises.
I have no wish to re-live Harris or join in with Trump, which is what Ford is all about (well, that and drug dealing, and once being the number-two Klingon of the biggest ass ever elected in Canada), so NDP it is for me. Funny how so many people are hostile to the NDP because it pushes social programs such as pharmacare, despite medicare being one of the things that most Canadians would not part with.
As an aside, I don’t like the term “fiscally conservative”, because it sort of creates an assumption that conservative parties have an inherent tendency to fiscal responsibility. I would say that assumption isn’t accurate.
Some conservative parties have been very fiscally responsible in office; others have been spendthrifts.
And some liberal governments have been profligates, and some have been tightwads.
I prefer the term “fiscally responsible” because it’s more neutral. There’s still a value judgment implicit in the term, but it doesn’t suggest in advance that any one party has a lock on balancing the books. You have to assess each party on the merits of their policies and past track records.
Fiscally responsible is a better term. Some social programs save money. In many others, there seems to be little way of even tracking if the program is achieving its goals.
I’m not old. And I’m not young. It seems like every few years there is talk of creative accounting, slush funds, privatization shenanigans, quangos… the impartial auditor general is a start and it is time to make government accounting an arms length activity.
I wish there were better options for this election. A guy like Paul Martin seemed to do a great job of balancing budgets (but was not the best PM and legally dodged millions in corporate taxes).
You’ve convinced me.
And Tanya Granic Allen has been tossed under the wheels of the Blue Bus for comments she made 4 years ago confirming what we already knew, manly that she is a homophobe.
Never heard of her before, but the wiki article on the PC leadership indicates that Paul Fromm offered his endorsement, which she refused.
Even though she refused, i assume that means that Fromm carefully reviewed all the candidates’ positions and concluded that her platform most closely aligned with his own views. :eek:
“Not racist, but #1 with racists!”
While I totally agree that the Conservative party is not necessary fiscally responsible (and nor is the Liberal party necessarily fiscally irresponsible), I’m not in favor of handing the word “conservative” over to a particular party.
To date, most folks are willing to use terms like ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ without necessarily assuming they mean one is adopting the platforms of the Liberal and Conservative parties, respectively (even though they tend to be associated).
Both terms have problems - one associates fiscal responsibility unfairly with the Conservative party; the other, that one set of economic policies is “responsible” (implying that other set is, presumably, “irresponsible”). The difference is that I don’t think the first association is all that universal.
Similar issues arise with “socially liberal”, but there I think even fewer would automatically tag such policies to the liberal party per se. The alternatives are not great: “socially progressive” doesn’t mean, necessarily, the same thing as “socially liberal” (and suffers from the same problem as “fiscally responsible” - namely, that the value judgment that those not following such policies are ‘regressive’).
Well, all of these terms are flawed.
Left and right wings come from the seating arrangements in 18th century France. Liberalism meant something somewhat different in the 19th and 20 centuries as well as recent US elections. Conservatism has also changed.
Granted, some general principles apply but are often more honoured in the breech than the observance. And countries vary significantly in the degree of what they call liberal and conservative.
My views are mainstream in Ontario. Most people want social programs to be delivered in a responsible way, respect for budgets, minimal scandals and political opportunism. Canadian liberal and conservative parties are actually quite similar by independent standards of political scale.
I don’t think a lot of Canadians realize how much a conventional political orthodoxy dominates politics here. You would be hard pressed to find many countries where there is less ideological choice in your (realistic) voting options.
Yup. I certainly agree with that. To be honest, keeping it that way suits me fine.
What I don’t want, above all, is for an importation or influence from across the border of the sort of Manichean divide between the parties as seen in the US - and, more specifically, of any sort of Trump-style populism.
This is what concerns me about Ford. I doubt his policies will be all that different from the norm. I am worried he will import the type of us-versus-them populist scaremongering we see becoming popular elsewhere, with all its attendant evils.
Problem is the Liberals have gone past their shelf life. The usual solution is to stick the other party in power for a bit, on the theory that time out of power keeps 'em more or less keen and honest …
Doug Ford is Toronto politician, my instinct is that he wouldn’t push much us v them stuff. First of all, it’s not like immigration is provincial problem and also his own district is very diverse. I doubt he’d win his own seat if he went that route.
One of the odd things about the Fords is that despite being generally very socially cconservative, even by Canadian conservative standards, they have outstanding outreach to, and popularity with, immigrants and minority communities. As you say, he’s a Toronto politician. Not getting along with immigrants in a Toronto riding is a terrific way to get laughed out of your own party, much less get anywhere in politics, but Ford is WILDLY popular with immigrant groups. His little guy shtick works with people of every background.
Ford is still a terrible choice for Premier, simply because he is, as Malthus points out, a populist asshole whose big ideas are largely whom he wants to punish, not whom he wants to help. I was planning to vote PC all the way, and they did the one thing they coould have done to lose my vote.
I don’t find it surprising. The federal Conservative Party under Harper worked very hard to focus its message on economic and social issues, not immigration or racial/ethnic issues.
They took seriously the argument that some GOP folks like the Bushes made: that a genuine conservative outreach to recent immigrants and ethnic communities could attract them to the Conservative Party.
The Liberals and NDP have traditionally been the party that attracts recent immigrants and ethnic groups because they are welcoming to them, and historically the PCs and Reform had a nativist bent. Harper worked hard to make then new Conservative Party one that offered conservative policies, and moved away from nativism. Remember the backbench Sikh MP who was always sitting behind Harper in the Commons, visible in every Quesrion Period where the PM was speaking? That was obviously intended as a message that the Conservatives were an open party.
And that electoral dynamic would be at its peak in the major cities like Toronto. As you say, a Toronto politician who alienates the diversity vote in Toronto ceases to be an effective politician rather quickly.
“Us against them” can take different forms: in the US it tends to be White nativists versus racial minorities and immigrants, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Ford brothers were (and the remaining one is), famously, popular among some immigrant communities, so I certainly agree he’s not about to turn on immigrants.
However, what he will do is turn on the bogeyman of the “liberal elites” (never mind he’s a millionaire, from the family business), to channel populist rage - both from White and minority, immigrant and not.
Why would he do that? The perfectly safe and obvious path is to attack the capital “L” liberal elites.
Good question.
The reason appears to be to tap into the anger of the working-class, ethnically diverse population - the types who ought to be attracted to the NDP, but who are turned off by that party’s social-progressive stance on various issues: things like gay and transgender rights, this population is often actively against, and things like the environment, they often don’t care about. Immigrants, like home-grown Canadian social conservatives, are more likely to be ‘traditionally religious’ and feel that social progressives of all sorts look down on them and their morality (and are actively working against both).
In short, they care about the perception that ‘fat cat urban elites’ and ‘snobbish champagne socialists’ are doing nothing to (say) get them a decent wage; they like hearing that the reason they can’t afford stuff is that these “others” are stealing and spending on irrelevant nonsense.
The basic message is simple: society is a zero sum game, and if they aren’t doing as well as they like, “the other” (variously defined) must be taking from them. Hence all the emphasis on ‘draining the swamp’.
Wait, you’re saying that’s already the in play strategy? Do you have a link to an ad or interview that demonstrates it?