The ‘header’ above represents what VanRamblings used to look like.
VanRamblings made it’s début on February 15, 2004 — following on months of work by web developer, Mike Klassen, to create VanRamblings — resultant from a heartfelt plea by Michael and an editor friend of mine, Jay Currie, that …
“Raymond, you are passionate about so many things, and have much to say of interest to people on a broad range of topics. Given the current state of the media industry, although you’ve written for a variety of publications over the years, given the dearth of media outlets to employ you, at present your voice has been silenced.
We believe that it is of critical importance that you be given an outlet where you might present your unique insight on a range of topics of interest to you, and the general public. To that end, we’d like to work with you on creating a blog that will provide you with a creative outlet, and where your voice might make a difference, when you write about the state and nature of society, politics, the arts, popular culture, cinema, web and tech issues, travel and more.”
And thus VanRamblings was born, thanks to encouragement from Mike and Jay, and great — and arduously intensive — web development work by the former.
VanRamblings’ blogging platform from the outset, and for the past 17½ years, was Movable Type — the de rigueur professional blogging platform back in the day.
Over the years, a few technical issues arose beneath the hood of VanRamblings, and although Movable Type long ago fell out of favour among the blogging web developer cognoscenti — the preferred, most used and most reliable blogging platform, WordPress, in 2004 a blogging platform then in its infancy — up until mid-morning this past Wednesday all was well with VanRamblings, until disaster struck — and VanRamblings on Movable Type was no more, kaput, gone, finished.
And thus today, and going forward, a phoenix-like, risen from the ashes re-birth of VanRamblings, this time as a much more reliable — or so I am faithfully assured — WordPress blog!
VanRamblings will return on Monday with coverage of our current and incredibly dispiriting 2021 federal election, now a mere 16 days away from the unthinkable.
A week Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the tragedy that was 9/11.
Sara Colangelo, the award-winning writer and director of the 2018 film, The Kindergarten Teacher, brought her latest film, Worth, to the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, Now, some 19 months later, Netflix makes Worth available on their service — the film starring Michael Keaton and Amy Ryan.
Following the horrific 2001 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Centre and the U.S. Pentagon, Congress appointed attorney and renowned mediator Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) to lead the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
Assigned to allocate financial resources to the victims of the tragedy, Feinberg and his firm’s head of operations, Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), faced the impossible task of determining the worth of a life to help the families who had suffered incalculable losses. When Feinberg locks horns with Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci), a community organizer mourning the death of his wife, his initial cynicism turns to compassion as he begins to learn the true human costs of the tragedy.
In his column in the August 30th edition of The Georgia Straight online, Now Magazine political editor Enzo DiMatteo asks the question, “Has Erin O’Toole got Canadians hoodwinked? — as witness today’s headline above.
The sub-headline for DiMatteo’s story asks if Canadian voters aren’t being “seduced” by a more palatable, re-packaged version of Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole, reminding readers of last weekend’s violent anti-vaxx mob rallies in Bolton and Cambridge, Ontario, where Conservative party supporters and campaign workers — the base of the Tory party? — provided insight into the hate spewing values that represent the core beliefs of, perhaps, a significant contingent of Conservative party members, and what an intolerant 2021 anti-democratic Tory party really stands for.
“Mostly by flying under the radar and keeping the seamier anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and conspiracy theorists in his base (not to mention his caucus) quiet … the party is spending lots of cash on social media polishing O’Toole’s everyman image with photo opportunities of the Conservative leader playing with Fido and feeding llamas (or were they alpacas?). It’s quite a stretch from the photoshopped images of O’Toole the party had been sharing on Twitter to make him look more buff.
QAnon. Yellow Vesters. Flat earthers. They’re all part of the Con base (and growing) since Stephen Harper began stoking populist and Western separatist sentiment (not to mention Islamophobia) in the party more than a decade ago.
As Conservative poll numbers rise, many voters seem to have forgotten about the Trumpeteers that occupy the lower rungs of the party. Make no mistake. They’re the same folks who voted for “True Blue” O’Toole during the party leadership. Remember him? The campaign team behind O’Toole then are the same ones responsible for the homophobia-tinged crusade in the 2018 Ontario election against Kathleen Wynne.
While O’Toole has tried to present himself as a moderate conservative out for the little guy, it’s not the version of conservatism that the party he oversees actually stands for. There’s no progressive in this conservatism. Truth is, many don’t believe in climate change. They don’t believe in (or see) the need for mandatory vaccinations during a public health crisis. They don’t believe in gun control. They don’t really believe in LGBTQ rights. They don’t believe in a woman’s right to choose. Many of them don’t even believe the pandemic is real.
On Sunday, August 29th Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith, asked what turned out to be a provocative question, “Do you know the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world?” The answer: “Here it is: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Charlie Smith goes on to write that he was curious to know if the Conservative Party’s campaign slogan, “Secure the Future”, had ever been used in other political campaigns. Turns out it has. Surprise, surprise. White nationalists just love the Klan notion of “securing the future” for whites.
Enzo DiMatteo pointed out in a column published earlier this year …
“O’Toole has adopted the Trumpian language of the far-right, railing against ‘cancel culture,’ fuelling suggestions that the Liberal government’s pandemic response is part of a socialist ‘Great Reset’ and pulling out the dog whistle on China and the coronavirus every chance he gets.”
In his article, Mr. Smith references a Georgia Straightcolumn written by academic and community activist, Stuart Parker, who is curious as to why Erin O’Toole on August 19th introduced the legalization of amyl nitrate and other “poppers” as an issue of importance in the Canadian election.
“Poppers,” Parker writes, “became known as a gay party drug in the 80s and until the past decade were primarily associated with the gay club scene and online casual sex through applications like Grindr.” Asks Parker, “Why would O’Toole get his health critic Michelle Rempel to raise the legalization of poppers in correspondence with the Minister of Health and follow up with a headline-grabbing poppers legalization announcement?”
Parker believes that Erin O’Toole is making his first intentional, programmatic, planned play for what is known in Trump world as “The Porno Right” — the Incel crowd comprised of typically single or otherwise sexually unfulfilled males whose online world focuses on hate for gender-feminists, who consume an abundance of misogynistic porn (including anal rape) on 4Chan, 8Chan, Pornhub, and XHamster, their hate fuelled by mass consumption of amyl nitrate and an assortment of other “poppers”.
Parker ends his article in the August 20th edition of The Straight, writing …
“But let us recognize that O’Toole’s announcement has very little to do with the health of gay men or even that of career masturbators. But it has everything to do with the Porno Right coming of age as a political constituency that, like its adversaries in the Christian Right, must mostly be courted through coded communication and dog-whistles, dog-whistles that arrived in Canadian politics in Ottawa with the announcement of the legalization of the drug of choice for the Incel Porno Right constituency within the Conservative Party of Canada.”
As we have written previously, Erin O’Toole’s Reform/Alliance Conservative Party hues closer in its leanings to the belief system espoused by QAnon conspiracy theorists, as they gain more influence with each passing day.
In an interview with CTV News host Evan Solomon on a weekend edition of his political observer programme, Overview, former federal New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair stunned the avuncular host by telling Mr. Solomon that he believes we are in the midst of a “wave election” (an election in which one party makes significant gains), that rising support for Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party, aided by the sharpest two-week decline in confidence for a sitting Prime Minister that he’d witnessed in his political lifetime will translate into a massive majority win for the Conservatives, out of power in the nation’s capital since the end of the 2015 federal election.
“As we neared the end of the 2011 federal election campaign, despite all the work that Jack and I had put into growing the New Democratic Party in the province of Québec, our internal polling showed us that we were likely to make only minimal gains, likely only two additional seats in the province, raising our number from three to five. And then the French Leaders’ Debate took place, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking halting French, and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff speaking perfect Parisian French. Only Jack, who’d spent a good part of his childhood in Québec, spoke the familiar language of the Québécois, employing the patois of the Québec people throughout, showing that he was “one of us.” Coming out of the debate, approval ratings for the NDP skyrocketed, such that by election day we won 59 out of 75 seats, while catapulting the NDP into the position of Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition.
In 2015, the federal New Democratic Party began the election with the rock solid support of 35.7% of the electorate, with the Tories stuck at 31.7%, and a hapless Justin Trudeau-led Liberal Party mired at a 23% approval rating. On September 26, 2015, during the Munk debate in Toronto the probable outcome of the election changed, as Mr. Trudeau went after me for condemning the work his father had undertaken, a feckless Stephen Harper standing between the two of us, mute, unamused and confused. Now, Liberal support had grown to 27% by the end of September — which put them a long way off from power — but in the final 19 days of the campaign, Campaign 2015 became a wave election, with support for my New Democratic Party crumbling to as low as 21%, with support for Stephen Harper’s Tories also taking a hit.
Justin Trudeau won that election with 39.7% of the popular vote.
Last week the polling graphic above was fiction. This week? Not so much.
Long story short, when the electorate gets it into their heads they want change — as they have in 2021 — change is what they’re gonna get. In 2021, as support for Erin O’Toole grows daily, only the province of Québec is denying Mr. O’Toole the majority he seeks. Québécois citizens are not fools — in the same way that 2015 support for the Liberals grew from 5 seats to 40, because under no circumstance do the people of Québec wish to be left out of the power equation, I believe that it is only a matter of time before Mr. O’Toole and Conservatives begin to sweep Québec, effectively eliminating the Bloc Québécois as serious contenders for office, while dramatically downsizing the number of Liberal seats in the province.
Make no mistake, with three weeks to go, Canadians are in the midst of a wave election — nothing can stop this wave. On Monday, September 20, as hard as this is for me to voice to you, Canadians will elect a strong, secure majority Conservative government to Ottawa.
God help us all!”
Recent polling in British Columbia shows an utter collapse in support for the Liberals, and a two-way fight for dominance between New Democrats and the Conservatives. The Liberals will be lucky to come away with five seats.
Federal Tory popularity in Alberta — in the 2019 election at 71% — has grown 14 points in the past two weeks, wiping out any support whatsoever for Justin Trudeau, and maybe, just maybe, allowing the New Democrats to hold onto their lone seat in Edmonton. A week in politics is a lifetime.
Support for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has collapsed across the Prairies.
One of the reasons that Justin Trudeau called an unnecessary summer election occurred as a consequence of the internal polling numbers that showed that, thanks to the Liberal party’s work on the COVID-19 pandemic, Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives, the New Democratic Party, and the Bloc Québécois would be all but wiped out come Election Day — with particular application in the province of Ontario, where the Liberals held a commanding 45% to 27% lead over Erin O’Toole’s hapless Conservatives.
Clearly, that is no longer the case, with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals losing more and more support in Ontario with each passing day, as is occurring in Québec and, most surprisingly, in the Maritimes. The only factor in play denying Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives a healthy majority government — support for the Tories in la Belle Province, Québec always a potent decider.
If the politically astute lifelong resident of Québec, Tom Mulcair, is right — and there’s no reason to doubt Mr. Mulcair’s political acumen — the people of Québec will soon jump on the political wave that is currently sweeping the nation and, as Mulcair states will also “not want to be left out of the party, and be denied access to power in Ottawa”, translating into massive support for Erin O’Toole’s Conservative, growing the party exponentially over the next three weeks, gaining as many as 40 seats in Québec, predicts Mr. Mulcair, providing the Tory leader with a comfortable majority in Parliament with which to govern over the course of the next four years.
All of the above said, we’re still three weeks out from Election Day.
If, in fact, a week is a lifetime in politics, absolutely anything could happen over the course of the next 20 days to change the political calculus.
As campaign co-chair on the successful 2015 Liberal campaign, and long a senior advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, although Gerald Butts is probably tearing his hair out at the current state of affairs vis-à-vis Liberal fortunes in the 2021 federal election, Mr. Butts is absolutely correct …
Campaigns Matter
Any day now, Erin O’Toole could step in the muck, and absolutely destroy his campaign, or a Tory candidate or three or five could go rogue, and say something so off-putting that it could destroy the Conservative campaign once and for all, setting the stage for a change in the electoral fortunes of the beleaguered Liberal Party of Canada, allowing Justin Trudeau to pull off a come from behind election victory, once again installing him as Prime Minister of Canada. Everyone likes a good, old-fashioned underdog story.
In 2021, the Leaders’ Debate — when the vast majority of people first take notice of the election — emerges as an especially important and perhaps even pivotal event in the life of the current campaign to form government in Ottawa, after Election Day 2021, on Monday, September 20th. Let’s face it, this election will be about what it was always going to be about: which one of the major political parties and which one of the political party leaders is best prepared to protect families across Canada from the continuing and ongoing ravages of COVID-19, and the deadly Delta variant.
There’s an easy answer to the question above, and it isn’t Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party of Canada. As you’ve heard so many times, “It ain’t over til the tubby, 71-year-old guy sitting in front of his computer, says it’s over.”
Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows. David Herle presents details on the latest EKOS Research data, compiled by founder Frank Graves and his crack team, on the Curse of Politics podcast, above.
In addition, here’s Mr. Graves on Twitter late last night ……
The ‘header’ above represents what VanRamblings used to look like. 
