About 30% of Canadians vote Conservative. Like all Canadian political parties, it is generally moderate and supports much of the status quo. Like the US, this broad tent approach brings tensions from those who would like to see something specific that they value. This may relate to taxes, foreign policy, immigration and social conservatism. The latter is not currently a major force in Canada as most people broadly agree on many issues, especially those affecting public health and, to a lesser degree, education.
But 44% of Canadian conservatives, at least 15% of the population, say they would vote for Trump over Biden. It seems unlikely they would get the chance. Starting from the assumption these are intelligent people, I am genuinely curious about the range of reasons they would do so. Given the tension in the Canadian Conservative party between the status quo and less moderate policies, it would also seem to be relevant.
Yes and no. If you phrase the question as “Biden versus Trump”, there are things about Biden that many people might not like. But the 15% number has stated static in Canada, just like Trump’s popularity in the US, despite a great many controversial actions. These have moved the needle surprisingly little.
Americans I know who like Trump tend to report a pet reason: taxes, judges, his son-in-law, gun control, the entertainment of trolling, seeing the establishment freak out, local issues, religion…. This thread is not meant to judge these values, nor to insult Trump voters since many presumably have their reasons.
Shouldn’t really be that surprising. Culturally, Canada isn’t all that different from the US. A bit to the left overall, but then, so is California compared to the US. And there are more Trump voters in California than in any other state (including Texas).
I think a lot of those conservative Canadians don’t seem to understand that they aren’t part of the United States. The Sovcits, for example, go into Canadian courts and try to cite the Uniform Commercial Code or the U. S. Constitution.
They called them OPCA litigants, for “Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument”. Relevant to your example:
I refused the envelope, and noted that if the envelope was abandoned then I would put those materials in the garbage. I reassured Mr. Meads that I will apply the laws of Alberta and Canada, and that while he is in Court, he will follow the Court’s rules. Mr. Meads’ reply was that was “unacceptable”, and he claimed that the “UCC” is “universal law”.
Oh, I can guess the province. Hell, I practice law in it. The Meads decision, which you linked to, is the leading case on this matter, and has been cited not only in other cases in Canada, but in various jurisdictions around the world. Even American legal scholars have taken note of it, though I don’t believe that it has been used in an American court. Yet, anyway; I’m sure that it will be someday.
It hasn’t stopped the Freemen-on-the-Land/Sovereign Citizens from pursuing their crazy nonsense in Alberta, but it has damped plenty of it down. We’ve all been warned about them by the Law Society (like a state Bar Association), and now I doubt that they will ever get their crazy documents notarized here, and they put great stock in having notarized documents. Note that with very few exceptions, only practicing lawyers can notarize documents in Alberta, so they are out of luck if they come to one of us.
15% of 30% is hardly ‘so popular’, by any stretch.
I think the answer is they are low intelligence voters, clearly.
They were, during the truck convoy, demanding the Governor General get together with the Supreme Court and cancel the elected government somehow. What? That is NOT even close to how anything in Canada works.
These are people who are CERTAIN that they are being cruelly cheated and mistreated because their position doesn’t enjoy a majority position. There simply MUST be misconduct, if they didn’t carry the day. Isn’t that the exact same as, ‘If we don’t win you know there was massive fraud!’
Pretty sure all countries have stupid people. Trump has simply emboldened them all into believing now is their moment to shine.
I was at the Taboo Resort with my ex- a couple hours outside of Toronto, circa 2004, and joined a golf foursome with 3 Canadians who were friends and came there together (my ex- didn’t play golf). When I told them I was from the US, they told me how great of a president GW Bush was, and spent the next 4 hours listening to all the great things he was doing, and how terrible their Canadian politicians were and how they wished Bush was their leader.
I wasn’t a fan of Bush (In the past I would have said I despised him, but after Trump…), but held my tongue for the round. But that round drove home the point that there is definitely a vocal conservative contingent of the Canadian population. I do wonder what those 3 guys think of Trump.
Meads of course is a legal court decision, based entirely on Canadian law, so I don’t know if it could or will ever be cited formally anywhere outside Canada.
But it is far more than that. Justice Rooke took it upon himself to do a deep-dive study of the SovCit movement, resulting in a decision that is also a full dissertation and textbook on the subject. He delves into the background of the movement, how it is packaged and sold, their methods and legal strategies (if you can call them that), and how judges can respond to them. So it is certainly a valuable study for lawyers and judges internationally, even if the decision can’t be formally cited elsewhere. I’ve seen mentions that the decision is studied as far as Europe and New Zealand.
IANAL, but I’ve read bits and pieces of it. Rooke definitely went the whole nine yards in writing it.
I believe that this is the crux of the issue; regardless of where you go in the world there are people who can’t or won’t think critically. As well, some otherwise smart people seem to suffer bigly from identity problems and/or a feeling of belonging, and, as has been discussed elsewhere in this board, Trump and Qanon etc offer that to some people.
Dwayne Lich, husband of the stupid convoy organizer Tamara Lich, for example, thought that the whole occupation of downtown Ottawa was ok, based on first amendment rights.
And while we’re at it, remember that lots of Canadians (almost all, in fact) directly consume the same media as our American neighbors. So it’s not a surprise that our conservative citizens have to some extent fallen for the same propaganda that made Trump a viable candidate in the US. Fox News can infect anyone who hears it, it doesn’t matter which side of the border you’re on.
Not to play up a timeless stereotype, but I suspect that a lot of Canadians don’t want to be so uncouth or impolite to align themselves publicly with such a buffoon. Which isn’t to say that they don’t agree with him or the “Trump but with table manners” wing of the GOP down south. Canada’s like anywhere else: it has a spectrum of political thought with wingnuts at either end. We’re less likely to actually elect someone as utterly insane as MTG to a seat in government, but her kind are out there.
We have the Fraser Institute libertarian types, who overlap with rural western grievance types (“Why does everything have to be so Ontario-centric? Just because they’ve got half the country’s population, and they’re the financial and cultural center of the country, and the national capital is there, why should they have more sway than us? Fort Mac should be the capital! Hang Trudeau!”). That wing of the Conservatives, I suspect, looked south of the 49th, saw Trump accomplishing a lot of their own goals like disenfranchising minorities, targeting LGBTQ+ people, empowering anti-urban and anti-intellectual bigots, taking a blowtorch to environmental safeguards and so forth, and wished they could pull something like that off up here.
When Stephen Harper was Prime Minister, he really tried to put on a public face of bland unity and inoffensiveness, but he had made his bones in the petro provinces and, despite actually being from Toronto found a cultural home out west as the Progressive Conservatives were out there evolving into the (much less egalitarian) CPC. Once and a while during his tenure, some Conservative backbencher would sit for an interview and say something in the ballpark of “Well, maybe we should make homosexuality illegal again…” and there’d be a rush to bring the hammer down with a “No! We’re not like that! Stop it!” but at the same time, you could tell that some in his party wanted to go further than propriety allowed. As above…a lot of them likely wouldn’t mind a dopey populist in charge as long as he could deliver.
I’m hoping the next election might rurn things around a bit. I’ve voted left-leaning most of my life but I’m sick to death of Trudeau. He’s a callow nitwit completely unsuitable for the job. He runs headlong into dumb corruption scandals, and failed to deliver on many of his important pledges. But I’ve held my nose and voted Grit in my riding because the CPC kept offering up weirdos and loons time after time. If Charest gets the nomination come September, I could see myself pulling the lever for the Conservatives for the first time since the Chretien sponsorship scandal. If it’s Leslyn Lewis or, Buddha help us, Pierre Poilievre, I’ll stick with the red or the orange.