Tag Archives: canada

#CdnPoli | Why Did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Call a Summer Election?

#CdnPoli | Canadian Politics, Canada, Decision Canada 2021, Politics, , , ,

The most frequently asked question over the course, and throughout the duration, of the summer election called by the Prime Minister: why did Justin Trudeau call a needless summer election — particularly when, on Election Day, the final electoral result was a continuing minority Liberal government?

Internal Liberal Party polling conducted last spring, and throughout the summer, registered Justin Trudeau and the Liberals with a 45% approval rating, with Trudeau one of the most well-liked and respected Canadian Prime Ministers since Confederation. In the summer, within the Prime Minister’s office, the pressure on Trudeau to call a snap election was immense.

Prior to the 2021 federal election, the Liberal Party held 154 seats in a Parliament of 338 members. Pragmatically, what that meant for the Liberals was that all of the Committees of the House had majority Opposition party participation, and more importantly, decision-making power that could be — and more often than not was — wielded by the Opposition as a cudgel to serve their own partisan interests: the Conservatives, NDP, Bloc Québécois, and Greens, those parties less interested in the welfare of the Canadian people than scoring points against the government.

As they did during the election, in a display of rank partisanship and future, hoped-for increased electoral success,  and possibly government, the elected members of Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP colluded to make the life of the government as miserable as possible, using the committees not simply to hold the government to account, but to do all in their power to create an impression that Justin Trudeau’s government was both ‘do nothing’, and corrupt.

Little wonder Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted to call a summer election.

Why did Justin Trudeau call a summer election, then? To recap …

  • Throughout the first 8 months of the year, the Liberals had been riding high in the polls, Canadians grateful for the quick action by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to secure the economy, through the introduction of CERB for Canadians who found themselves out of work due to the pandemic; the introduction of both a seniors grant for the poorest seniors, and an ongoing monthly supplement to the Canada Child Benefit to help families weather the storm of the pandemic; and the introduction of any number of business support programmes to keep the Canadian economy afloat. And, of course, securing the tens of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses that would keep Canadians safe, and help over time to bring COVID-19 to an end. Thus far, more than 60 million doses of the mRNA Pfizer, Moderna, and the AstraZenica and Janssen vaccines have been administered to Canadians 12+, with millions more doses to be made available for children aged 5 to 12 years;
  • Focus on the economy and the health of Canadians rather than continue to allow the Conservatives and the NDP to play the sort of unproductive partisan politics that not only made the life of the government more difficult, but in having to respond to the partisanship of the Tories and the NDP on the Committees of the House, inhibited the Liberals from governing as effectively as the government deemed necessary, and to serve the best interests of all Canadians. A majority government, had that been the result of the September 20th election, would have made the life of the government easier, while still allowing the Opposition to hold the government to account.

In respect of the Trudeau government not being able to secure a majority, make no mistake: Shachi Kurl cost the Liberals a majority government.

Going into the English Leaders’ debate, the Bloc Québécois had lost their footing, with all polls showing them unable to retain more than 10 seats in Parliament, for a loss of 22 seats. The support of Québeckers had moved virtually wholesale to hometown boy Justin Trudeau and his Liberal party — which looked to pick up most of the lost Bloc seats, propelling them to a majority government. Then Ms. Kurl asked a damnedly poorly phrased question concerning Québec Bill 21 — banning Québec citizens from wearing religious symbols, and mandating that one’s face be uncovered to give or receive specific public services — the contentious nature of her question propelling the Bloc into a stratospherically high 32-riding seat count, costing the Liberals their much sought after majority.

One final point: the opportunity to exercise our franchise, to go to the polls and cast our ballot in seclusion, to hold our government to account, is central to our nation’s democracy. No election held in Canada, or elsewhere, is ever unnecessary. The opportunity to go to vote in an election is both our democratic right, and at the core of our democracy. Following a 35-day election period, Canadians went to the polls, and collectively decided that a continuing minority government for the Liberals would be for all of us the best possible outcome, and voted accordingly.

#CdnPoli | Erin O’Toole | The Times and Travails of Canada’s Tory Leader

#CdnPoli | Canadian Politics, Politics, , , ,

Poor Erin O’Toole, the beleaguered leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

When Mr. O’Toole ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, or order to defeat his  main rival, Nova Scotia’s Peter MacKay — a well-experienced senior Minister of the Crown in the near decade the Conservatives held power in Ottawa, from early 2006 through until late 2015 — Mr. O’Toole fashioned himself as a True Blue, Harperite social conservative who, although he would not allow a vote on abortion on the floor of the House of Commons were he to become Prime Minister of Canada, stood with and for the socially conservative values held by many members of the Conservative Party.

In a ranked ballot vote held on August 24, 2020, in order to secure victory and the leadership of the Conservative Party, the former Minister of Veterans Affairs in the Stephen Harper government, Erin O’Toole, explicitly sought the support of socially conservative leadership hopefuls, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan, to secure the winning votes in the 3rd round of voting, with 19,271 winning ballots cast in his favour, with his rival MacKay securing only 14,528 votes.

First time leadership hopeful, Leslyn Lewis, had finished in third place on the second ballot with 10,140 votes — many of those votes going to O’Toole on the third ballot. Sloan finished last on the first ballot, with 4,864 votes. Mere months later, on January 18, 2021, Erin O’Toole kicked Derek Sloan out of the Conservative caucus. Note should be made that when Mr. O’Toole recently appointed elected members of the Conservative Party to form the Opposition’s Shadow Cabinet, social conservative Leslyn Lewis did not make the cut.

During the recent federal election, much to the chagrin of the Conservative candidates seeking election or re-election, when Erin O’Toole released the Conservative Party platform early in the campaign, in mid-August, Tory candidates were taken aback that the party’s platform came out foresquare in favour of a carbon tax — contrary to long standing Conservative party policy.

In fact, the Tory platform read, as many disgruntled Conservative Party members complained, as a “red” document, or a Liberal Party lite policy document.

In order to win over Canadians who live in the vote rich Metro Toronto and Metro Vancouver regions of Canada, Erin O’Toole had created a platform document that almost entirely jettisoned Conservative Party dogma, and where it didn’t, during the course of the election campaign, O’Toole “re-adjusted” Tory policy on the fly, all in the hopes of securing centrist urban votes.

The appeasement strategy did not work — under O’Toole’s leadership, the Tories lost four  Metro Vancouver seats, while standing pat in Metro Toronto, where the Liberal Party went onto win a near overwhelming victory.

Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party enters the House of Commons down two seats, in a party riven by division, with a petition launched days ago by prominent Tory Senator Denise Batters calling for a leadership review within 6 months, specifically pointing to Mr. O’Toole’s loss of the 2021 federal election, and his party policy reversals during the course of the election campaign.

To make matters worse for Mr. O’Toole, as the 44th session of the Canadian Parliament gets underway, at a press conference held yesterday morning in Ottawa, Government House Leader Mark Holland told reporters that he believes it would be “statistically improbable” for several Tory MPs to have valid medical exemptions to COVID-19 vaccination — and those who do have them should provide “assurances” they were given for legitimate reasons.

“The Conservative caucus is 119 people,” Mr. Holland told reporters. “Statistically, the likelihood that they would have multiple people who are exempt … is extraordinarily low. There might be some possibility of it but I suppose there’s a possibility that that chair could fly,” he said, pointing to a chair in the room.

If one Conservative MP is claiming an exemption, Holland said, that is “exceptionally unlikely but possible.” More than one Conservative MP claiming an exemption, he said, would be “statistically impossible.”

To be fair, Erin O’Toole’s centrist position on the issues will play much better with the electorate and all but assure the Conservatives victory at the polls, when voters tire of the Liberal Party. Politics is like major sport, though: you’re ‘hired’ … only to be fired at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Still and all, Mr. O’Toole is hardly signaling defeat at the beginning of the current session of Parliament.

Mr. O’Toole has stipulated that battling inflation will be top of mind, by re-naming Mr. Mean, Pierre Poilievre, as his finance critic earlier this month. Poilievre has repeatedly warned about the risk of inflation during the pandemic, and has lately taken aim at the $101.4-billion stimulus package promised in the spring budget, which he now dubs the “$100-billion slush fund.”

In an interview on Friday, O’Toole told National Post columnist John Ivison that his party’s major focus will be on “the economic situation in the country.”

“There’s an inflation crisis, there’s lack of confidence, wages are flat, the cost of everything is going up, so people are actually losing purchasing power as if they were getting their wages cut, and we’ve never seen the country more fractured,” O’Toole said.

Tory House leader Gerald Deltell has said his party was supportive of the initial emergency spending on COVID-19 aid measures because of the unprecedented lockdowns that decimated the economy and forced businesses to close.

But the Tories will now argue that the government was too slow to adjust to changing circumstances, pumping too much money into the economy while running up massive deficits. The result, Deltell has said: businesses are having trouble finding workers & Canadian families are getting hit with rising prices.

For the most part, though, Mr. Deltell told reporters in a press conference held in Ottawa last week, that he could not get into whether his party will oppose various government policies until he sees what’s actually put forward on paper by the Liberals. The Conservative caucus met for two full days prior to the beginning of this session of Parliament to build a strategic political game plan.

“We have a strategy behind each and every issue,” says Deltell. “I can’t be wide open on the strategy right now.”

Here’s CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen in discussion on Parliament’s return, with the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt, the National Post’s John Ivison, and Globe and Mail Ottawa Bureau Chief, Ian Bailey …

See you all back here tomorrow. Thank you for reading VanRamblings.

#CdnPoli | The 44th Session of the Canadian Parliament Begins Today

#CdnPoli | Canadian Politics, Canada, Politics, , ,

The ‘new’ House of Commons is located in what used to be the outdoor courtyard of the West Block on Parliament Hill, while the decade-long renovation of the Centre Block Commons building  takes place

The 44th session of Canada’s Parliament officially commences today, followed by a Speech from the Throne on Tuesday at 9 a.m. PST, to be read by Governor General Mary Simon, who will lay out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s key priorities for his minority Liberal government.

From the last, pre-election, Parliament to this, the Liberals gained 5 seats, the Conservatives lost 2 seats, the Greens lost 1 seat, there’s now one independent, and the Bloc Québécois stand pat at 32 seats

The clock is ticking on the Liberal promise to introduce a host of bills — including the introduction or reintroduction of at least eight bills — within the first 100 days of their new mandate, and the year-end session of Parliament.

The government will sit for only 24 days to get things done in the Commons before the clock runs out on Feb. 3 — with the first two days essentially lost since they’ll be devoted to electing a Speaker, and delivering a throne speech..

The Commons is scheduled to sit for four weeks before breaking for the holiday season on December 17th. MPs won’t return to Ottawa until January 31st.

If the Liberals intend to keep their promises for the first 100 days — and they insist they do — that spells a crammed legislative agenda for the few weeks the House of Commons will be sitting before the new year.

“We have a very aggressive agenda to get to in the coming weeks and that’s what we’re focused on,” government House leader Mark Holland said last week following the Liberals’ first post-election caucus meeting.

Here’s what’s on the government agenda in the next 24 sitting days …

    • Implement last month’s announcement on more targeted emergency aid benefits for individuals & sectors hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic;
    • Pass a bill to impose criminal sanctions on anyone who blocks access to vaccine clinics, hospitals, testing centres and abortion clinics, or anyone who seeks to intimidate or harass health care workers, keeping a promise made by Trudeau as anti-vaccination protests ramped up during the recent, late summer election campaign;
    • An important bill, with NDP support, would provide 10 days of paid sick leave for federally regulated workers, a measure triggered by the pandemic;

    • A bill will be re-introduced  to ban the traumatizing practice of forcing a person to undergo “conversion therapy” aimed at altering their sexual orientation or gender identity. Although Conservatives spun out debate on the ban last time and more than half of the Tory caucus voting against the initiative, banning conversion therapy is strongly supported by all other parties;
    • Combat online hate, including hate speech, terrorist content, incitement to violence, child sexual abuse and non-consensual distribution of intimate images. New legislation will make social media platforms accountable for the content they host;
    • Reform the criminal justice system to address the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Indigenous people: the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for less serious crimes and greater use of conditional sentences, such as house arrest, counselling or treatment, for people who do not pose a threat to public safety;
    • Safeguard Canada’s critical infrastructure, including 5G networks, to preserve the integrity and security of national telecommunications systems.

    The platform also commits the government to a host of other non-legislative tasks within 100 days, including appointing a new federal housing advocate, holding a summit on restarting cultural industries, and working with provinces and territories to create a national paid sick leave plan.

    And, of course, completing the task of bringing all provinces and territories on board for the government’s much needed, and long overdue economic, feminist and family equity issue — $10-a-day national child care.

    More tomorrow on the 44th session of the Canadian Parliament.

Decision 2021 | Day 25 | The 21st Century Belongs to the Conservatives?

Decision Canada 2021, Politics, , , , ,

For 9 long years, Canadian politics underwent a tectonic shift that for the longest period of time since Confederation seemingly buried the liberal elites of yesteryear, during the era of Stephen Harper’s reign as Canada’s Prime Minister.

The thesis propounded by conservative Globe and Mail columnist, John Ibbitson, and pollster Darrell Bricker, Global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs Research, is that  Canada is undergoing a fundamental shift (the eponymous “Big Shift”) that in the 21st century will result in a reformation of Canadian politics, governance, economy and values. The authors argue in their book that the Conservative Party of Canada is the political force best poised to take advantage of this changing landscape, and over the years and in the coming decades will be transformed into what was once the purview of the Liberal Party: the natural governing party of Canada.

Bricker and Ibbitson argue that one of the world’s most consensual countries is becoming polarized, exhibiting stark differences between East and West, cities and suburbs, Canadian born citizens and immigrants. The “winners” — in both politics and business — will be those who can capitalize on these momentous changes.

For almost its entire history, Canada has been run by the political, media and business elites of Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal. For nine long, arduous years, though, these groups lost their power — without most of them realizing their power was on the wane. The Laurentian Consensus, the term John Ibbitson has coined for the dusty liberal elite, had been replaced by a new and powerful coalition based in the West and supported by immigrant voters in Ontario. How did this happen?

So far in the 21st century, though, the Conservatives have governed for only 9 of 21 years. Despite their dispiriting election losses in the 2015 and 2019 federal elections, the Conservative Party has nonetheless continued to remain strong in northern British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, in the rural regions of Ontario, and has even shown strength in Québec — but not in the Maritimes.

In his review in The Globe and Mail of John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker’s book, The Big Shift, journalist and academic Christopher Dornan writes …

“The Big Shift, as its title suggests, is one of those books that purports to divine a single, telling fact to explain Canada. If that fact echoes Jacques Parizeau’s infamous 1995 comment about “money and the ethnic vote,” it is not, as Bricker and Ibbitson advance it, a form of bigotry, but a species of determinism: The political values, and therefore voting tendencies, of new arrivals and first-generation Canadians are contingent on their race and region of origin.

Further, this “Big Shift in power to the West and to suburban immigrants” is not only permanent but “will make Canada inexorably a more conservative place.” Resistance is futile. Bad news for progressives, whether they manage to unite or not. They’re on the wrong side of a fundamental and irreversible demographic shift.”

While both of the book’s authors take great pains to stress that they’ve merely set out to document a “seismic shift” in the demographics of Canada, and what it portends for the political, social and economic future of our nation, for most who would read the book and interpret its internal thesis, from the book’s outset through til its end, it would be difficult to ignore the sense of triumphalism evident throughout Ibbitson and Bricker’s polemical treatise, as if somehow the shift to the “new” — and increasingly right wing — Conservative Party is inalterably inevitable.

“It’s one thing for the Conservative Party to chafe and protest  when in opposition,” writes Dornan. “But, if Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s style of government — which might best be described as “undertaken in a spirit of spite” — offers an example of what Canadians might expect from a Conservative government, it is entirely likely that a goodly number of our fellow citizens would find this approach to governance to be untenable, particularly in a country populated by families who came here to escape entrenched antagonisms. If that ever changes, then the Canada we all love — left and right, newcomer or born-and-bred — will be truly at risk.”

When Canadians go to the advance polls to cast a ballot this week, or to their polling station on Election Day, Monday, September 20th, Canadians must vote not just for the Prime Minister and the government of their choice, but for the future of Canada — our most cherished home — and the uniquely Canadian values of fairness, respect, compassion, equality, inclusion, diversity, safety, peace, and for being there for one another, as collectively we seek to create a more sustainably just Canada for everyone. As in every election, there is in 2021 a great deal on the line.