Decision Canada | Politics | Final Pre-Election Week Wrap-Up

September 5, 2019Canada, Decision Canada 2019, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

2019 Canadian federal election outcome projection | Final Pre-Election Week Wrap-Up

At some point over the course of the next nine days, Prime Minister Justin Pierre James Trudeau will attend at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, the home of Canada’s 29th Governor General, the Right Honourable Julie Payette, to recommend to the Crown that a federal election be called. In 2019, under Canadian law, the election period may be no less than 36 days, which gives the Prime Minister until Sunday, September 15th to “drop the writ”.

One week, or so, from the commencement of the 43rd Canadian general election, how are the five major political parties, and their leaders, faring as Canadians head into the five week long election period?
The Conservative Party

Six weeks out from the October 21st federal election, Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party has emerged as the only Canadian federal political party to have nominated candidates in all of Canada’s provinces and territories which comprise the 338 ridings that constitute the Parliament of Canada.
The Conservative Party goes into the election with the largest fundraising total for any federal political party with $28 million in the coffers to run both the national and the riding-by-riding campaigns, outstripping their four rival Canadian political parties. If elections could be bought, Andrew Scheer would become Canada’s 24th Prime Minister.

Green Party Elizabeth May, New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau march together in the 2019 Vancouver Pride Parade.

Sad to say for the Conservatives, though, the pre-election period has hardly been kind to either Andrew Scheer, or his struggling Conservative party. A couple of weeks back, Mr. Scheer found himself in hot water for failing to participate in any LGBTQ2+ Pride Parades across Canada — when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Green Party leader Elizabeth May and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh were front-and-centre walking arm and arm at the Vancouver Pride Parade — after which (in a series of challenging and ultimately failed press interviews), Mr. Scheer failed again to enunciate a position on LGBTQ2+ issues acknowledging that as Prime Minister he would represent all Canadians, not just right-of-centre Canadians.
On top of that, Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer found himself in hot water arising from the release of a 2004 Canadian Parliamentary video where he rose in the house to decry same sex marriage. And, finally, in the 14-day-old contretemps, Mr. Scheer failed to assure Canadians that he would forbid Conservative MPs from putting abortion on the political agenda in a Conservative Party led Canada — concerning, given that Conservative party members who are also “anti-abortion activists are planning to win 50 ridings for their cause in the upcoming federal election.”
This past week, in his bid to fear monger — a traditional right-of-centre political party tactic — Mr. Scheer sought to scare the bejeezus out of Canadians by suggesting the government of Justin Trudeau would allow infamous child-murderer Jon Venables’ move to Canada after being released from prison in England. Scheer’s post caused widespread controversy. To make matters worse for Andrew Scheer, the British Justice Ministry stated Britain has no intention sending Venables to Canada.
As further confirmation that Scheer’s post was categorically false, and was indeed ‘fake news,’ Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada also added that some people are “inadmissible” to the country under Canada’s immigration law, particularly if they have a criminal record or could pose a risk to Canada’s security. Meaning that even if Venables was headed towards Canada, he would probably struggle to get though immigration.
The Liberal Party

Meanwhile, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has gotten out of the way of the train wreck that has become the Conservative party 2019 bid for government, while making a record 5500 spending announcements this summer totaling $15+ billion, in ridings across Canada, ranging from transit and affordable housing to the environment and infrastructure, with the unstated caveat that all of the commitments made by his government would be cut were Andrew Scheer to become Canada’s next Prime Minister.
The New Democratic Party

Take a look at the graphic above. As of Thursday evening, September 5th, the federal New Democratic Party has nominated candidates in only 54% of ridings across Canada, with no nominated candidates in the provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Furthermore, the NDP goes into the 2019 federal election with a $4.5 million debt from the 2015 election, and less than a quarter of the money raised by either the Conservative or Liberal parties with which to present their case to the Canadian people.
For the first time since the party was formed in 1961, the New Democratic Party will have no campaign plane to take the leader, and the press entourage, across the country, in order that campaigning might take place more readily in all provinces and territories across the country.
According to Éric Grenier’s CBC Canada Poll Tracker, an aggregation of all publicly available polling data, the New Democrats are at 9.4% support in the province of Québec. That places them in fifth place, behind the leading Liberals (32.8%), the Conservatives (23.5%), the Bloc Québécois (18.5%) and the Greens (11%). The very real prospect exists that the NDP may be wiped out in Québec, losing all 15 of the current seats held in the province.
(VanRamblings wouldn’t count out Ruth Ellen-Brosseau in the riding of Berthier-Maskinongé, a popular hard-working NDP member of Parliament.)
On Tuesday, New Brunswick’s Green Party announced the defection of 15 NDP candidates to the federal Green Party. Turns out, though, that eight of the so-called NDP dissidents knew nothing about their defection to the Greens, forcing federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May to backtrack, and restate the number of defections at only seven, while the other eight members of the New Brunswick NDP went on record stating they would remain loyal members of the NDP, and knew nothing about the decision to defect to the Greens. In a CBC interview, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Green Party Leader Elizabeth May “has a lot to answer for.”

Meanwhile, British Columbia and much of southern Ontario remain NDP strongholds, with a popular John Horgan NDP government holding power in Victoria, and a strong presence with Andrea Horvath’s NDP, who elected 40 MPPs to the Ontario legislature in the 2018 provincial election.
In British Columbia, Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan is a lock to hold onto her seat, as is the case with Don Davies in Vancouver Kingsway and Peter Julian in New Westminster-Burnaby. Jagmeet Singh, we predict, will hold on to his seat in Burnaby South. Svend Robinson looks to make a welcome comeback in Burnaby North-Seymour. Yvonne Hanson is running a first rate NDP environmental campaign in Vancouver Granville, as is the case with community activist Christina Gower in Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam — both novice candidates could very well win their respective ridings.

CBC’s At Issue panel podcast | Thursday, September 5 2019 | Upcoming election

The Green Party

Canadians most frequently score Green Party Leader Elizabeth May as the most ethical among her federal counterparts, according to a series of Nanos Research and other surveys conducted over the past 12 months. The Greens will have nominated candidates in all federal ridings by this time next week, and according to recent polling stand a good chance of gaining official party status (12 seats) in Parliament, post the October 21st election.
In the final week of the pre-election period, according to the latest polls, the federal Green Party could elect 5 members to Parliament representing ridings on Vancouver Island, a member or two in Ontario, as well as Québec, and a sturdy contingent of Green Party MPs in the Maritimes.
The fortunes of the Greens rely on the benevolent affability of Ms. May.
Should Ms. May acquit herself well at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Québec (just across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill) during the course of the October 7th federal leaders’ debate, she could very well consolidate support for the Green Party of Canada, and assure official status for the party in Parliament following the October 21st election.
Please find below an episode of The Herle Burly, one of the finest podcasts to come out of Canada, fascinating always, the interviews conducted and conversations led by longtime Liberal Party apparatchik David Herle. In the episode below, you’ll hear Mr. Herle’s recent, fascinating, wildly informative and revealing interview with Elizabeth May. Very much worth a listen.

People’s Party of Canada

Currently polling at 2.9% across Canada, Maxime Bernier and his band of racist, transphobic and xenophobic supporters don’t have a chance in hell of electing anyone to Parliament. Mr. Bernier will not be included in the leaders’ debates. The less said about this group of reprobates the better.

Decision Canada | Taking a Stand Against the New Barbarism

September 3, 2019Decision Canada 2019Raymond Tomlin

Modern barbarism is a malodorous umbrella concept.
Underneath the umbrella are a great many fetid phobias, isms and other behaviours: Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, semi-fascism, scapegoating, stereotyping, bullying, libeling and an aggressive intolerance of everything & everyone who is not to the liking of the modern barbarian.
Over the past two decades we have witnessed the rise of nationalism across the globe, and the rise of anti-environmentalism, nativism, anti-globalization, protectionism, and opposition to immigration.
From the 1990s on, right-wing barbaric populist parties have established themselves in the legislatures of democracies across the globe, ranging from Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Estonia to France, Germany, Romania and Sweden; entered coalition governments in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Finland, Greece, Italy, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia and Switzerland; and led governments in Japan, Brazil, Colombia, India, Turkey, Hungary and Poland.
The “radical right” in the U.S. is also closely linked to barbaric populism, with its roots in the modern Republican party, led today by Donald Trump.
Since the great recession of 2008, barbaric right-wing populist movements, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the National Front) in France, Matteo Salvini’s far right League party in Italy, Geert Wilders’ ultranationalist Party for Freedom and Thierry Baudet’s anti-immigrant Forum for Democracy party in the Netherlands, Frank Franz’s National Democratic Party (formerly Reich Party) in Germany, and Nigel Farage’s UK Independence (now Brexit) Party have only grown more vibrant in voter popularity and strength at the polls, in large measure arising from their avowed opposition to immigration from the Middle East and Africa.
In the U.S., Donald Trump’s political views can best be summarized as right-wing populist, nationalist, Islamophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and based on an aggressive intolerance of anyone or anything not to his liking.

In Canada, we have three left-of-centre, progressive parties from which to choose in the upcoming October 21st federal election: Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats, Elizabeth May’s Greens and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

On the right side of the spectrum we have the neo-barbaric, Andrew Scheer led, Trump-embracing Conservatives, and Maxime Bernier’s far right-of-centre, anti-immigrant, climate-change denying, nationalist People’s Party.
Whether we look south to the Trump admininistration or the far right administration of Jair Balsonaro in Brazil, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, or Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Heinz-Christian Strache’s Austrian Freedom Party, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, or Polish Congressional leader Michal Marusik, every day we live with the reality of the new barbarism of our modern age, a political philosophy reliant on nativism, the promotion of division and fear of the other, barbarism as adhered to by the cheering and jeering hate-filled, reactionary and revolting masses of the unthinking, undereducated and disenfranchised we see in rallies across the globe, best referred to by their correct name: the modern barbarians.
What’s on the line in this year’s upcoming federal election?
If we vote for one of the right wing parties in Canada (not to put too fine a point on the matter): chaos, catastrophe, ultra-right wing nationalism, the decimation of social and economic norms and programmes in order that the interests of a wealthy elite might be best served, an attack on culture, a war against our most vulnerable citizens, political decay and ultimate disintegration, rage, alienation, anomie, the propagation of extremism, demagoguery, a crisis in leadership, and the atomization of our society.
Hyperbole, you say?
Don’t think it can’t happen here. Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are not the Progressive Conservatives of Robert Stanfield, Pat Carney, Dalton Camp, Joe Clark, Kim Campbell, Hugh Segal or, even, Brian Mulroney. The modern Conservative party (a contradiction in terms) realized by Stephen Harper is a disingenuous, far right nativist party (there are exceptions in caucus, Red Tory MPs such as Lisa Raitt, Michael Chong and Michelle Rempel), undeserving of your vote — lest you would wish to have the Trumpian nightmare than has much of the U.S. in its grip visited upon Canada.
Again, just look south, to the United States or Brazil, or to the other side of the Earth, to the European countries written about above. There exists a thin line between order and chaos. As in every election, much is on the line.
In 2019, the stakes are high. Choose which side you’re on.

VIFF 2019 | Award Winners & More at This Year’s Film Festival

August 30, 2019A & E, Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2019Raymond Tomlin

In the 11½ months between the annual Vancouver film festivals, festival programming staff spend their year attending film festivals across the globe identifying for patrons the best in world cinema to bring to our shores, the vast majority of scheduled films set to screen each year only two or three times in Vancouver, never to be seen again in local cinemas. The Vancouver International Film Festival, then, affords appreciative audiences with the singular opportunity to participate in a venture that, during the 16-day running time of the festival, provides viewers with an utterly unique and gently humane window on the world, a not-to-be-missed artistic endeavour.

VIFF 2019’s Contemporary World Cinema programme this year is composed of 47 films from 28 countries, and as the programme suggests, represents:

” … a sprawling collection of award winners, new discoveries, and noteworthy premières, be they offbeat comedies, deeply humane dramas or progressive cinema that pushes both boundaries & buttons, this series is a showcase of the best new work from international filmmmakers.”

Today, four award-winning films worthy of your consideration, films that will screen at the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival in 2019, sometime between Thursday September 26th and Friday, October 11th …

Rigorously charting the fracturing of a grieving former police detective’s world as he comes to suspect that his late wife, who died in a strange car accident, was having an affair with a younger colleague, this deeply unsettling and grimly hypnotic second feature by Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Palmason, A White White Day won both the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award and Critics’ Week prize at Cannes 2019.
As Lisa Nesselson writes in her review of the film in Screen Daily …

A White White Day is an exquisite, complex, visually arresting and emotionally rewarding film, the tug of the splendidly varied landscape in this film both internal and external in a manner that would be hard to pull off in a dense urban setting, the pleasingly off-kilter string score a plus, and the trajectory of the film percolating from tender — the protagonist’s relationship with his granddaughter — to robustly no-nonsense, offering the viewer throughout with a flesh and blood catalogue of ways to be masculine, to be human, and how to grieve.

The film’s title refers to an Icelandic proverb suggesting that on days so “white” that the earth meets the sky, the dead can communicate with those still living.

Winner of the Golden Bear (the top prize) as well as the FIPRESCI Prize (the critics prize) at Berlinale 2019, in early February of this year …

Nadav Lapid’s third feature, Synonyms, emerged (as critics wrote) as …

… deliriously unpredictable, brilliant, maddening, enthrallingly impenetrable and breathtaking in the way it careens from one scene to the next in a whirlwind of personal and political meaning, the film an excoriation of Israel’s militant machismo and a self-teasing parody of Parisian stereotypes, embodied by actor Tom Mercier in this nakedly hypnotic and astonishingly audacious début, which sees Mercier often naked, clothes only a superfluity, his raw physicality the only pure expression of control as he see-saws the imbalance between power and helplessness.

A sui generis work of tormented genius, Synonyms is not to be missed.

This year’s Cannes’ prestigious Un Certain Regard winner, here’s what VIFF 2019’s programme has to say about The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão:

Karim Aïnouz’s (Madame Satã) stylish, colour-saturated “tropical melodrama” tells the story of two sisters, proper Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and freedom-loving Guida (Julia Stockler), in 1950s Rio de Janeiro who are divided by their father’s duplicitous misogyny. Pure pleasure for the eyes and told from a decidedly feminist slant, this is a tale of “high emotion articulated with utmost sincerity and heady stylistic excess, all in the perspiring environs of midcentury Rio de Janeiro.”

Thus far, then, contemporary, award winning cinema from Iceland, Brazil and France / Israel. Let’s now take a look at Queen of Hearts, the Denmark / Sweden co-production that won the Audience Award in the World Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Director and co-writer May el-Toukhy offers a master class in how to shoot a blossoming physical attraction. From shy touching while trying to find the perfect spot for the “world’s smallest tattoo”, to the frankly explicit sex that actually seems sexy … to confuse matters, though, Queen of Hearts explores the inappropriate relationship involving a middle-aged lawyer’s twisting, highly-charged sexual tryst with her troubled teenage stepson, the film on the one hand an impossibly glamorous, sexually charged and immoral melodrama and on the other a subtle Sirkian, almost Hitchcockian tragedy that explores the wages of familial sin and deceit, all while peeling back the veneer of ultra-civilized Scandinavian society. Not to be missed.

VIFF 2019 | Late Summer Early Autumn Film Festival Season

IndieWire coverage of the Telluride Film Festival, with Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson, and chief film critic and deputy editor, Eric Kohn.

VIFF 2019 | Late Summer Early Autumn Film Festival Season

August 23, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Vancouver, VanRamblings, VIFF 2019Raymond Tomlin

Although many believe that the Oscar season begins in mid-May at the Cannes Film Festival, in fact the Oscar race officially kicks off at the end of August with the Telluride (Aug. 30 – Sept. 2), Venice (Aug. 28 – Sept. 7), Toronto (Sept. 5 – 15) and, at the end of September, both the New York Film Festival (Sept. 27 – Oct. 13) and our very own homegrown film festival (VIFF 2019, Sept. 26 – Oct. 11), where most of the upcoming Oscar contenders will make their auspicious and much-anticipated débuts.

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes this year, Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables — débuting at VIFF 2019 as part of the Spotlight on France series — emerged as one of Jeff Wells’ (Hollywood Elsewhere) favourite films at Cannes this year, a film he describes as “explosive, urgent, furious, riveting, breathless and impactful,” and about which VIFF’s festival guide says …

Set in the same suburban Paris neighbourhood, Montfermeil, used by Victor Hugo as the location for the Thénardiers’ Inn in his Les Misérables, débuting director Ladj Ly’s gripping, incendiary police-thriller gives us a young cop, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), who joins an Anti-Crime Squad team led by loose cannon Chris (co-writer Alexis Manenti, superb) and is soon immersed in a world of poverty and internecine power struggles. When images of police brutality start circulating, the shit hits the fan…

The full VIFF 2019 festival guide will be online two weeks from today, on Friday, September 6th, on the same day the glossy cover programme will be available at libraries and various other outlets across Metro Vancouver.
With the summer silly season of dreaded movie sequels having drawn to a close, with box office down 19% this summer over last, the failed popcorn blockbusters are about to give way to the more serious fare all cinephiles cherish, all of which are ready to elbow their way into the Oscar derby.
At the various film festivals that will unspool future Oscar award winners over the course of the next month and a half, new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Noah Baumbach, Terrence Malick, Edward Norton, and more will launch into the awards season or fizzle out.
In respect of VIFF 2019, as more information about the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival becomes available, we’ll publish our idiosyncratic take and insight into the information with which we’re provided. In the meantime, take a look below for films that will début at one or more of the above-mentioned film festivals, including our own illustrious Vancouver International Film Festival …

Writer-director-producer Edward Norton has transplanted the main character of Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel Motherless Brooklyn from modern Brooklyn into an entirely new, richly woven neo-noir narrative: a multilayered conspiracy that expands to encompass the city’s ever-growing racial divide, set in 1950s New York.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

On the cusp of the 19th century, young painter Marianne travels to a rugged, rocky island off the coast of Brittany to create a wedding portrait of the wealthy yet free-spirited Héloise. An emotional and erotic bond develops between the women in Céline Sciamma’s Cannes-awarded subversion of the story of an artist and “his” muse.

In this richly burnished, occasionally harrowing rendering of the persistent scars of war, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), attempt to readjust to a haunted post-WWII Leningrad.

Noah Baumbach’s new film is about the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple — played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson — negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. It’s as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving.

Pedro Almodóvar taps into new reservoirs of introspection and emotional warmth with this miraculous, internalized portrayal of Salvador Mallo, a director not too subtly modeled on Almodóvar himself and played by Antonio Banderas, who deservedly won Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

A searing exploration of the consequences of upholding one’s convictions in a time of terrifying upheaval, this latest work from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) mines the themes of spirituality and engagement with the natural world that have permeated so much of the American auteur’s late-period renaissance. Set in Austria during the rise of the Third Reich, A Hidden Life movingly relays a little-known true story of quiet heroism.