Quotulatiousness

March 21, 2024

“That is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it’s the single best thing that happened to Poilievre”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney reflects on what he got wrong about Pierre Poilievre and why he misread the situation leading up to Poilievre becoming Conservative leader:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

“Think of Trudeau in late 2019,” he told me from the bar. “India trip. SNC-Lavalin. ‘Thank you for your donation.’ Black and brown face. Canadians were souring on him. They were starting to think he was a fake, and maybe a bit of an asshole. His disapproval ratings were soaring. Then COVID hits, and he’s doing his smiling, reassuring press conferences every day outside his house. His disapprovals tank. Canadians are reminded of 2015 Trudeau. But then pandemic ends, and we’ve got some Trudeau missteps. ‘Unacceptable people’, COVID-era wedges. He’s going back to his 2019 position: people don’t like him.”

“And then,” he told me, “just as Canadians are starting to think the PM is an asshole again, the NDP decides to sign an agreement with him. [NDP leader] Jagmeet [Singh] could not have screwed up more. This is a historical, books-to-be-written-about-it screw up. Because just as Canadians are remembering that they don’t like the PM, Singh is giving those voters no reason to go to the NDP.”

Normally when the Liberal vote collapses, he continued, those voters disperse across all the parties. But CASA, my source told me, was like a funnel, forcing all the voters the Liberals were losing to go to the Conservatives instead of going everywhere. “If you’re angry at Trudeau, if you don’t like him, if you’re sick of him, you can only go Conservative this time. Singh did that. That is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it’s the single best thing that happened to Poilievre. None of us saw that coming.”

He had other thoughts, as did others I spoke to. The People’s Party having been neutered as a threat was something I heard repeatedly, which matters, but not in the way that you think. “The PPC wasn’t a huge draw on our voters,” a senior Tory told me. “People still think the PPC was just our most-right-wing fringe. Wrong. It was drawing voters from everywhere, including typical non-voters. So the problem wasn’t that we were losing votes. The problem was that the fear of the PPC gave too many of our western MPs licence to get away with anything or oppose anything. ‘If we do/don’t do this, Maxime Bernier is going to kill us!’ Guess what? Portage-Lisgar was Bernier’s best possible shot and we annihilated him. No one is afraid of the PPC anymore. No one can use the PPC as leverage against the leader.”

I asked about that — Poilievre’s hold over his own party. In my 2021 column, I had noted that O’Toole never really had full control. Every Conservative I spoke to agreed: Poilievre has the most control over his caucus of any CPC leader they can remember. Better than O’Toole, better than Andrew Scheer, and as good, at least, as Stephen Harper. Not all the MPs were thrilled when O’Toole was replaced, but the smell of impending victory has a way of winning over new friends.

I talked with the source at the bar for a long time, and we covered a lot of ground. A lot has gone right for Poilievre, he said. Some of it is luck, some of it is timing, but some of it is entirely to Poilievre’s credit. My source isn’t one of Poilievre’s guys, so to speak. He’s just long-time CPCer, who served all four leaders of the modern era. He has never hesitated to critique the current leader in our chats, but he gave credit where he felt it due. “Poilievre was talking cost of living and inflation back when the PM was taking time at press conferences to tell everyone he doesn’t care about monetary policy, and when the finance minister and the governor of the Bank of Canada were telling everyone there was nothing to worry about, and when all the economists on Twitter were saying that deflation was the worry. Poilievre was right. In public, loudly, right. About the issue that was about to completely take over Canadian political conversation. He called it. Trudeau, Macklem and Freeland were wrong. People may not remember the details, but they remember that.”

December 7, 2023

Burying the lede … and the victims

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier sent out a fundraising letter to PPC supporters that included some disturbing new data from Statistics Canada:

As usual, the biggest news in Canada is being ignored by all of our crooked establishment politicians and the dishonest corporate media.

Last week Statistics Canada released a report on deaths in Canada (causes of death, overall life expectancy, etc), which include the latest data from 2022.

I’m not a doctor, a scientist, or even a statistician, but when I saw the table below, a few things jumped out at me.

First, deaths related to covid-19 (check the fourth line) were at an all-time high in 2022!

Can you believe that? There were more covid deaths in 2022 than the two years before.

And yet that same year saw the end of mask mandates, vaccine passports, and most covid measures.

For two years the elites blasted us with propaganda and warped our society around this mild illness, but when deaths were rising, they were silent. Bizarre!

To be clear, I am not advocating for any of these unnecessary draconian restrictions to return, I am just demanding some honesty and consistency from our morally corrupt politicians, public health officials, and media!

It has never been so obvious that covid restrictions were not scientific, they were just about politics and control.

But the most disturbing part is what I have circled at the bottom of the table. Deaths with “ill-defined or unspecified causes” have been steadily increasing since 2020.

These deaths have almost TRIPLED since 2020 from 6,841 to 16,043 in 2022.

What could be causing this? What happened in 2021 that could have caused this explosion of unexplained deaths over the last 2 years?

An experimental pharmaceutical product was rushed to market and forced on Canadian society, is what happened.

They told us it was “safe and effective” but over the last few years we have learned more and more about how that covid shot was neither.

Now more and more Canadians are dying from causes very likely related to the covid shot.

And where is the accountability?!

There is no admission of any possible error on the part of the government. On the contrary, it’s still encouraging everyone to get boosters!

There are no demands for an inquiry by the opposition parties to investigate the potential risks associated with the covid jab.

There are no investigative journalists trying to get to the bottom of one of the biggest medical scandals in Canadian history.

No! They’re just trying to sweep it under the rug and move on!

We can’t wait for the political establishment to hold itself to account. We saw throughout the covid years that the government, the opposition, and the media will all work together to protect themselves and each other.

And we can’t let them get away with it!

February 19, 2023

“Enjoy the report”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When the Canadian federal government invoked the Emergencies Act in February 2022, it began a legal timer for the government to set up a formal inquiry into the situation that triggered the use of the act which was intended to provide some clarity on whether the government was justified to do so. This inquiry had no legal powers to punish wrongdoing, but was merely supposed to uncover what went on both in public and behind the scenes at this time last year. The head of the commision, Paul Rouleau, was a long-time Liberal who’d once worked for former Liberal Prime Minister John Turner and had been appointed to the judiciary during Jean Chrétien’s premiership. It was perhaps too much to hope that he might return a report that made Trudeau or his government look bad.

Donna Laframboise started the Thank You, Truckers! Substack to record the events of the Freedom Convoy and the reports of participants, supporters, and opponents of the protests. She clearly wasn’t surprised at this outcome from the commission:

“Enjoy the report”. Those were the last words Commissioner Paul Rouleau uttered before rising and leaving the room yesterday. The room in which he cheerfully announced that the Canadian government was justified when it invoked the Emergencies Act against festive, peaceful, working class protesters a year ago.

Which part did he imagine we’d enjoy? The knowledge that there’s absolutely no accountability in our political system? The knowledge that a vast network of supposed checks and balances (funded year in and year out by the sweat of working Canadians) offers us no protection from tyrannical, rogue politicians?

Three months ago I wrote: Let us fervently hope Commissioner Rouleau is a man of integrity. One who understands that this is his moment. History will judge him by what he does here.

[…]

Given the opportunity to help resuscitate the limp, battered carcass of public trust, this gentleman instead extended every benefit of the doubt to the government, to the establishment, to police goons who crossed lines that should never, ever be crossed.

This is very bad news. Because, as Martin Luther King Jr observed 60 years ago, when peaceful protests get shut down some individuals

    will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.

Many Canadians predicted this result. They had few expectations. They said Commissioner Rouleau was hopelessly compromised by long association with the Liberal Party of Canada. They said that, because the Liberal government had sole discretion to select its own judge, real accountability was never on the table.

The cynics were correct.

In the preview to The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors take a less pessimistic view of their initial sampling of the report:

Justice Paul Rouleau’s report on the federal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act was published Friday. It is thousands of pages long. We have not read it all yet. But we have tackled parts of it, with an eye to answering two questions, for ourselves and for our readers. What the hell happened last year — what went wrong? And: do we agree with Justice Rouleau’s decision that that the federal government’s decision to invoke the act was indeed appropriate?

We’ll get to those questions, but let’s say a few things first.

First: if you sat down to read the Rouleau report to find evidence for what you’d already decided, you’ll find it. We believe that Justice Rouleau has written a fair and balanced report. He is clearly struggling, as we were a year ago, to accurately describe and probably even to fully perceive and understand just what “the convoy” was. Line editor Gurney, in reading Rouleau’s efforts to describe how the protest was both a largely peaceful and lawful assembly and also a meeting place for radical extremists, including some dangerous ones, found himself nodding along in recognition of Rouleau’s thought process. This nuance and complexity was precisely what he tried to convey from Ottawa last year.

Second: the same very much applies to political blame. There’s some for everyone here, folks. The federal government comes in for less than some others, but we don’t see in that any bias, but instead a recognition that none of this should have been the federal government’s problem. If the convoy protests had been effectively handled by local and provincial officials, it wouldn’t have been a federal issue at all. This has long been The Line‘s position, but we have also been critical the Trudeau government’s nasty habit of seeing in moments of crisis not a threat to be defused, but instead, a wedge to be eagerly seized upon and exploited. Justice Rouleau is kinder to the Liberals than we are. Perhaps he is simply less cynical. But he did make a point of criticizing Justin Trudeau for inflammatory language, and we were glad of that.

[…]

Third: Justice Rouleau’s finding that the federal government acted appropriately is more conditional and guarded than we think the overall tone of the report, and much of the attendant media coverage, suggests. We’ll get into this in more detail in a minute, but we wanted this front and centre before we start doing the heavy lifting: Rouleau does indeed side with the government, but it’s a pretty nuanced and cautious alignment. A win is a win, and the Liberals got their win here, but Rouleau’s report isn’t an endorsement of how the feds handled anything last year. It would be better for literally all of us if we tried to remember that.

The legacy media’s ability to sway public opinion has waned, but it still has some strength and this was especially so during the lockdowns where people had less opportunity to see for themselves or to talk with others outside the curated gardens of sites like Facebook. If the media had given the Freedom Convoy coverage the same credibility it chose to give to the violent riots, uh, I mean “mostly peacful protests” after the death of George Floyd, the federal government would not have treated the convoy participants and supporters as cavalierly as they did.

Only one federal political party dared to show any significant support for the protest, and the other day PPC leader Maxime Bernier posted a retrospective on the Freedom Convoy to YouTube:

Individual Conservative MPs may have expressed a bit of timid support but were noteworthy by their unwillingness or inability to do anything in Parliament to force the government to at least talk to the protest leaders or give them any benefit of the doubt.

September 17, 2022

Is it still a conspiracy theory if more than 50% of Canadians believe it?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley posted a link to this rather eye-opening Abacus Data poll summary by Bruce Anderson and David Coletto:

We recently completed nationwide surveying among 1500 Canadians. The focus was on the levels of trust people have in institutional sources of information, and belief in conspiracy theories. This is the first in a series called “Trust & Facts: What Canadians Believe”

44% THINK MUCH OF THE INFORMATION FROM NEWS ORGANIZATIONS IS FALSE

Almost half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement “much of the information we receive from news organizations is false”.

While this means a majority of Canadians have some trust in news organizations, more than 13 million adults (extrapolating 44% to an adult population of 29.5 million) don’t.

Those with no post-secondary education, Alberta residents and those on the right show greater mistrust. But by far the biggest differences are visible when we look at party affinity. The vast majority of People’s Party supporters don’t trust news organizations and a (smaller) majority – 59% – of Conservative voters feel the same way.

Among those who think Pierre Poilievre is the Conservative leadership candidate who best reflects their views, 55% don’t trust media information, while among those who identify with Jean Charest the proportion is much lower, at 27%.

52% THINK OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTS OF EVENTS CAN’T BE TRUSTED

More than half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement “official government accounts of events can’t be trusted”

As with trust in news organizations, those with no post-secondary education, Alberta residents and those on the right showed markedly higher levels of mistrust in government.

Majorities of People’s Party, Conservative and Green Party voters indicate mistrust. Those on the left and Liberal voters show higher levels of trust.

October 15, 2021

“… a preliminary Conservative estimate is that the PPC rise cost them between four and nine seats”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Gurney looks at the federal Conservatives’ efforts in the September election and tries to assess how much the rise of the People’s Party of Canada impacted Conservative fortunes:

O’Toole planned to shift the CPC slightly toward the moderate centre on the assumption that the party’s traditionally lopsided wins in western Canada meant that it could lose a little on the right to flip some close seats in the east. This didn’t work. The Tories did shed support on the right, which might explain some measure of the PPC’s rise, but the CPC didn’t make up enough ground in eastern ridings to flip seats.

However, the election-night results are somewhat deceiving. O’Toole’s strategy was more effective than the final outcome suggests. In Ontario, in particular, the Conservatives materially cut into the Liberals’ advantage in the popular vote, effectively halving it, relative to 2019. This meant that the Liberals were extremely reliant on vote efficiency: a one-per cent swing of voters from the LPC to the CPC could have flipped dozens of seats, setting up a scenario where O’Toole could have been prime minister today. (These flips would not have come from the Greater Toronto Area, interestingly, where the Liberals continue to run up some lopsided victories of their own, but from other parts of Ontario and random seats all across the country. The election was closer than people realize.)

But back to the PPC. Did giving them room to grow on the right end up costing the CPC seats? If so, while that wouldn’t necessarily discredit the notion of moving the CPC toward the centre, it absolutely complicates it. If the Conservatives can’t take their right flank for granted, their lives get a lot more difficult. In a recent feature in the Toronto Star, Althia Raj, who apparently spoke to every insider on the planet, wrote that a preliminary Conservative estimate is that the PPC rise cost them between four and nine seats.

That sounds about right, and it doesn’t sound like much. Indeed, if anything, there’s reason to believe that that is overly generous to the PPC.

[…]

In aggregate terms, the author found that while you could conclude that a handful of ridings were possibly but not certainly lost due to a PPC surge, you couldn’t definitively conclude that any were lost because the Conservatives gave up ground on the right. This gets us to the low-end figure cited by Raj, but looking at this report, I don’t know where the rest could possibly have come from.

Every additional seat would have been good news for O’Toole. And the rise in the PPC vote share is worth studying on its own merits — The Line continues to work with John Wright to firm up our understanding of the PPC, both as a political and social movement.

But as an electoral force that hurt O’Toole in the last election, while we can certainly say it didn’t help, it also didn’t seem to hurt much.

Having met dozens of eager PPC supporters over the last two election campaigns, I have to believe that at most one third of them are former Tory voters … a lot of the people I met were not habitual voters for any party before the PPC came along. At one meeting I attended in 2019, there were more former Libertarian voters than Conservative voters around the table, but neither group was a majority. A lot of them were fans of Maxime Bernier personally — and note that this meeting was literally in the heart of Erin O’Toole’s own riding, a couple of blocks away from his constituency office.

October 7, 2021

Alberta’s pantomime election to nominate a Senate candidate that Trudeau can ignore with great relish

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh discusses the apparently ongoing non-binding election for Alberta’s next Senate seat:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S. Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

The prestige of Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments must be maintained at all hazards, which is why the Prime Minister’s Office undertook, a little surprisingly, to provide our Ryan Tumilty with an official response to Alberta’s Senate election. The board, says the voice of the PMO, “evaluates candidates based on public, merit-based criteria”; it was not deemed necessary to finish the sentence with “… unlike the demented, bloodthirsty populace of Alberta, who will presumably just vote for the candidate who can devour the most tar sand at a COVID party.”

For our part, NP Platformed has always been a tad frustrated that smaller political groupings don’t welcome Alberta Senate elections as a chance for a low-stakes, low-cost electoral push toward the limelight. Now that federal and provincial Conservative parties are united, for the moment, 2021’s Senate election has not been accompanied even by the quiet campaigning or the minuscule media attention that the first four elections involved. It is probably to be expected that the three Conservative Party of Canada candidates on the Senate ballot will accumulate enough semi-automatic votes to be nominated.

The Liberals and New Democrats, on an official level, stayed further away from the Senate election process than ever. Duncan Kinney, a totally-independent-from-the-NDP left-wing journalist and fellow of the Broadbent Institute, is appearing on the ballot as part of a sort of none-of-the-above campaign. His entire platform is “this Senate election is illegitimate and stupid, but wouldn’t it be amusing if I won anyhow?” (We’ll take the bait: yes, it would!)

And the People’s party has taken the opportunity to pick three official nominees. If you ask us, the Mad Max party absolutely ought to have hung onto some of what it spent on the federal election and devoted the funds to making a big splash in this one. The TV networks and newspapers would ululate with helpful rage if some PPC creature topped the Senate ballot. Heck, Maxime Bernier has always been able to personally attract big crowds in Alberta. If he had planned ahead and squatted here for six months to meet the residency requirement, he could have run in the Senate election himself.

His proxies probably won’t get anywhere, but we’ll see. There really is an opportunity for a bit of chaos here, since anyone who can break into the top three on this ballot would become an Alberta “senator-in-waiting”. Some of the independent candidates, including former Slave Lake mayor Karina Pillay and former Alberta finance minister Doug Horner, have name recognition that could count for a lot in a low-turnout vote.

September 19, 2021

Erin O’Toole suddenly scrambling to try to win back votes from Maxime Bernier’s PPC

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John Paul Tasker reports for the CBC on Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s last minute appeal to wavering supporters (that is, people who would prefer actual conservative or even libertarian policies to what O’Toole’s “Conservatives” have on offer):

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said today that conservative-minded voters sick of the Liberal government should park their votes with the Tories rather than turn to the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in this election.

Speaking to reporters at a campaign stop in London, Ont., O’Toole said his party is the only one in a position to replace the Liberal government and a right-wing vote split could lead to four more years of Justin Trudeau.

“There are actually millions of Canadians who are very frustrated with Mr. Trudeau. If they allow that frustration to do anything other than vote Conservative, they’re voting for Mr. Trudeau,” O’Toole said.

“There are five parties and there are two choices. More of the same with Mr. Trudeau or real change and ethical government with Canada’s Conservatives.”

O’Toole said Trudeau wants Conservative voters to “vote for smaller parties” rather than unify behind O’Toole’s candidacy.

CBC’s poll tracker has the PPC at 6.2% support, which is nearly four times what it was in the last election. Other trackers have the PPC at least a few points more than that, and it might be noteworthy that PPC-leaning voters are probably not be as interested in sharing their preferences with pollsters as supporters of more left-wing parties like the Liberals and Conservatives.

After the last election campaign, a CBC News analysis showed that — even with its rather dismal level of support — the PPC likely cost the Conservatives seven seats in the House of Commons by splitting the vote (six seats went to the Liberals, one to the NDP).

With polls suggesting PPC support is now well above its 2019 level, the party’s impact could be even greater in 2021.

While polls suggest some PPC support is coming from first-time or infrequent voters, there’s no question the PPC is drawing at least some support from former Conservative voters.

[…]

“The Conservative Party is not conservative anymore,” Bernier said today in response to a question about O’Toole’s warnings about a vote split.

“O’Toole has flip-flopped and adopted the Liberal program on the few remaining issues where there were still difference between the two parties, such as the carbon tax, gun bans and COVID passports,” Bernier said in an emailed statement. “Mr. O’Toole will have to live with the consequences of his failing strategy.”

Some of Bernier’s recent momentum is driven by his opposition to pandemic measures. The PPC leader has slammed the proposed federal vaccine mandate as a “draconian” and “immoral” measure.

September 16, 2021

Who is the typical PPC supporter?

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney grapples with inadequate polling data to determine what the “average” supporter of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada believes and who they are compared to typical Canadians:

Poll after poll has shown that the People’s Party of Canada, led by former Conservative Maxime Bernier, is surging in popular support. The party, which captured only 1.6 per cent of the vote in 2019, electing zero candidates, is now polling at closer to five or six per cent, or higher. These gains have not come at any obvious loss to any major party (the hapless Green party may be an exception, but there were only so many Green voters in the first place). While there is no doubt that some voters are bolting to the PPC from traditional parties, it seems certain — and polling suggests — that they are also drawing support from the nine million Canadians who were eligible to vote in 2019 but did not.

This is, to put it very mildly, worth watching. In a recent column here, drawing on polling information provided by John Wright, the executive vice president of Maru Public Opinion, we tried to establish what we could about a PPC supporter. They are not particularly remarkable; as noted last week, a typical PPC voter is a typical Canadian. They are fairly evenly distributed across all demographic segments and found in generally similar numbers in the various provinces. The earlier numbers were based on a fairly small sample size — the PPC’s low support on a national level has limited their numbers in any typical national-level poll. Last week, I said that more polling was necessary, to firm up the profile of who a PPC voter is and where they live. Wright has been doing that polling — the sample sizes are still modest, but a representative profile is beginning to emerge … not just of who a PPC voter is, but what they believe.

There is a degree of background context that must be established before we can move onto the numbers. When he presented me with his latest results on Tuesday, Wright noted that polling PPC voters is a particular challenge for his industry. The very concept of “the typical PPC voter” is rapidly shifting. The PPC base of even five weeks ago was a small fringe of grumpy people loosely assembled around a handful of vaguely libertarian policies, some anti-immigration blather and a disillusionment with the political status quo. (A typical PPC billboard encapsulates this unfocused dissatisfaction: “The Other Options Suck.”) Many polling companies track the attitudes of partisans of various affiliations by creating a panel of those partisans and then polling them over and over. Polling companies trying to track the PPC’s sudden rise, if they rely on such an identified panel of PPC voters that will be repeatedly surveyed, are capturing the PPC as it existed before the mid-August influx of new supporters. This is undoubtedly skewing our understanding of what the PPC voter, as they exist right now, believes. Wright has done four waves of polling in the last 10 days to update, as best as possible, our understanding of what the PPC voter believes today. He will continue to poll several times a week for the foreseeable future.

As to that August surge, as discussed in my column here last week, the best way to explain it is to look for something that recently changed — and something has: there are millions of Canadians who are adamantly anti-vax and anti-vaccine mandate/passport. The PPC surge began at the precise moment that vaccine mandates became a major issue in the federal campaign, and provinces began discussing their plans for certificates to verify vaccination status for domestic purposes. Pollsters needed a few weeks to notice the surge and verify it was real.

[…]

Roughly a third of Canadians (35 per cent) agree that the government is stripping away personal liberties; with Conservative and Green voters answering in the affirmative more often than NDP and Liberals. By comparison, 89 per cent of PPC voters believe the government is stripping away their liberty. Almost 90 per cent of PPC voters further agree that their governments are creating “tyranny” over the population. To put that in context, only about 40 per cent of Conservatives feel that way, with the other major parties way behind.

Oh, and here’s a cheerful one to chew over: Wright asked Canadians if they’d agree that “we are on the verge of a revolution in our society to take our freedom back from governments who are limiting it.” That question received 32 per cent support nationally — but an incredible 84 per cent from PPC supporters.

This sounds like the kind of thing we maybe ought to be paying attention to, eh?

I find it fascinating that the PPC appears to be motivating lots of people who haven’t been interested in voting by providing an option for them that isn’t just a red or blue coloured version of pretty much exactly the same policies and goals. I don’t expect the PPC to “break through” in this election, but if they can continue drawing the interest of those Canadians who feel disenfranchised by the Liberals and Conservatives, they can be a significant force for change in our political future.

September 10, 2021

By Gandhi’s reckoning, the PPC is entering stage three (“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, …”)

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney says that the dying media will have to start taking Maxime Bernier and the PPC much more seriously if the recent “blips” in the polls turn out to be accurate:

To riff off the old song, there’s something happening here, though what it is ain’t exactly clear. Like it or not, we’re going to have to start paying attention to the People’s Party of Canada and its leader, Maxime Bernier. If polls are to be believed, they’re having a great election.

The PPC hasn’t warranted much attention before. It has largely served as a vanity vehicle for Bernier, who probably can’t believe he’s been able to keep himself out of an ordinary job this long. The party is a mixture of populist outreach and pie-in-the-sky pseudo-libertarianism. It has proposed a smattering of policies, but none of them are much more than a talking point or meme. They are often summed up as a “far-right” party — or at least further right than the Conservative Party of Canada — but it feels overly generous to place them firmly anywhere in particular on the political spectrum. Their organizing principle has seemed to be anger with the status quo, and a feeling of alienation from the majority consensus on most political views.

The PPC took just under 300,000 votes in the 2019 election, or 1.6 per cent of ballots cast. It was a rounding error on a fringe, and seemed set to stay that way. This, combined with a history of dogwhistle racism, is why journalists and political analysts paid it little attention (and that includes yours truly).

Something seems to be happening, though. The party has climbed in the polls, with some showing they’ve climbed by a lot. There are important caveats: Some of this can be written off as within-the-margins-of-error blips in the numbers. Perhaps there is some methodological quirk that is causing polling companies to overestimate the PPC’s standing. Maybe frustrated people are parking their vote there for a time but will come back to one of the traditional parties when actually making their x on a ballot.

So yeah. There’s all kinds of ways to rationalize this into a nothingburger, if you’re so inclined, but the fact remains there is a trend, consistent across different polls, from different companies, and over an extended period of time. It really does seem as though the party is set to double, triple or maybe even quadruple its support, relative to the last election. The latest Ekos poll has them at nine per cent. That’s an outlier on the high side, but if they came even close to that, the PPC would eclipse the Green Party of Canada’s best-ever showing. By a lot.

My friend John Wright is a pollster with decades of experience, and the executive vice president at Maru Public Opinion. He called me this weekend to tell me that something was up with the PPC’s numbers — I’d already realized the same, at least on an intuitive level, but he had the numbers to back it up. His numbers are broadly similar to what’s showing up in other polls. I asked him what he could tell me about the typical PPC voter, and he said there isn’t a ton of information about them, but pulled what data he could find.

The typical PPC supporter, based on polls as recent as last month, is … pretty normal, actually, at least demographically. They are fairly evenly distributed across every segment of Canadian society. No province has a wildly high or low number of PPC supporters (Alberta was a bit higher than the others, but only a very small bit, and with an overall small sample size). They are found fairly consistently across all age groups and economic and educational classes. The only really notable divergence in Wright’s numbers was on gender lines — men are twice as likely to support the PPC as women.

August 26, 2021

Rigging the rules to exclude Maxime Bernier from the leaders’ debate

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jamie Clinton asks why Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier’s People’s Party is being excluded at the same time as the self-destructing Green Party is included by the Leaders’ Debate Commission:

However, before the commission came out with their announcement, the People’s Party had polled at or above four per cent in 13 out of 20 polls. It has only looked worse for the commission since the decision was made. The PPC has averaged five per cent in the six polls done since then. Including one poll that had them at 6.6 per cent, exactly double the floundering Green Party’s numbers.

It is very likely that if the Leaders’ Debates Commission had made their decision a few days later they would have allowed Maxime Bernier to be at the debates. Or, at least, they would have using the criteria they ultimately settled on.

For reference, in the 2008 federal election, Elizabeth May, then leader of the Green party, was allowed to participate in the debates even though her party did not have a seat. And yes, this time the rules are different. But it’s not as if MP’s voted on the debates’ rules or anything. The rules are completely arbitrary decisions that change every election cycle based on the whims of the Leaders’ Debates Commission.

In the 2019 federal election, with a different set of rules, the commission gave Bernier the benefit of the doubt and allowed him to participate in the debates. This time around, that is no longer needed.

Even if the PPC is technically under the four per cent threshold, the fact that they are outpolling both the Green party and Bloc Québécois in an increasing number of polls should be enough. Or at should at least raise the question as to whether or not the Greens and Bloc should remain in the debates.

The Bloc’s position is unique, on the basis of their geographically efficient vote. The Greens are another matter. Often, when an election rolls around, the media and Debates’ Commission go out of their way to distinguish the Green party as a major party. This has been true even when the GPC is polling at and receives under four per cent of the national vote. This happened in 2011 and 2015.

By this consideration, the People’s Party should definitely be allowed at the debates. It seems there are two different sets of rules, one concerning the Greens and the other for the PPC.

August 10, 2021

Elections not for changing things but merely for “sending messages”?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jay Currie on the election that Justin Trudeau clearly itches to call at any moment:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Apparently Justin Trudeau thinks that the best use of the nation’s time as we head into a Delta driven 4th wave of COVID is to have an election. Okay, I never thought he had any judgement and an election call at the moment would confirm that but here we are.

There are huge issues facing Canada. Unfettered immigration, useless but expensive carbon taxes, deficits to 2070, price inflation, real estate markets which have put housing in the luxury goods category, a stalled First Nations reconciliation process, the collapse of any number of energy projects, increased homelessness, opioid deaths, a health care system which seems incapable of dealing with even a fairly mild pandemic, senior care in a shambles where our elderly died in droves as much from neglect as COVID and on and on.

Judging from the Liberals activities in the run up to the election, while those issues get the occasional nod, the strategy seems to be to spend lots of money in seats the Libs either hold or would like to win. As to substance, the Libs seem very committed to “doing something” about climate change, keeping immigration levels up over 400,000 per year and not being racist. Unfortunately, this is also pretty much the substantive position of the Conservative Party. The CPC’s big selling point is getting rid of Justin and his gender balanced Cabinet of flakes.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole (who also happens to be my local MP) seems to believe the only way he’s going to topple Trudeau and the liberals is by offering exactly the same policies but wrapped in false Tory blue instead of Liberal red. As far as I can tell, he’s the reddest of Red Tories to lead the party in decades (disclaimer: I’ve met O’Toole a few times and chatted about non-political topics … he seems a decent sort and he’s probably a good neighbour and an upstanding citizen in his private life). He’s certainly no Stephen Harper — and I wasn’t much of a Harper fan, but I’d strongly prefer Harper to O’Toole as Tory leader. I certainly don’t plan on voting for him, and unless the Libertarians scare up a candidate in my riding I’ll be voting PPC this time around:

You will notice I do not mention Max Bernier or the Peoples’ Party. I don’t because the PPC plays outside the consensus. The PPC and its supporters think that significant change is absolutely required and that issues like the deficit, immigration, economic development, First Nations policy, housing and health care need new thinking. […] In terms of seats and outcomes, while I would be delighted to see the PPC win a few seats, the real target for the PPC is the national and regional popular vote. Yes, I do know that does not matter electorally. After all, the CPC won the popular vote in the last federal election. (My own sense is that the Maverick Party has some chance of winning seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan which will be discussed in that subsequent post.)

Max and the PPC need to crack the 5% barrier this time out. If they can do that and Max can win in Beauce, they will have sent a huge message to the CPC. That message is important. Now, if Max and the PPC manage to cut through and beat the Greens – not an unrealistic goal – the message that there are real problems which need real solutions will go mainstream whether the gatekeepers like it or not.

There are really two elections coming up: the Tweedledum and Tweedledee, paid for media, horse race and a vote on whether Canada is a serious country.

December 30, 2019

The federal Conservative Party’s dilemma

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadians currently have two left-of-centre federal parties (three if we count the Greens), but only one party on the right (Maxime Bernier’s PPC), leaving the right-of-left-of-centre to the hapless, leaderless, useless, spineless, craven Conservative Party. “Conservative” in name only, of course, for those of you who don’t follow Canadian politics (and neither blame nor shame to you if you fall into that happy group). Bernier’s been labouring under an almost complete media blackout except where engineered drama can be used to demonize him or members of his party, so the roughly one-third of Canadian voters who would prefer an actual conservative alternative don’t really have anyone to vote for.

Jay Currie offers his analysis of the Conservative dilemma (but he’s also a known PPC sympathizer, so good Canadians must pay no attention to what he says):

Frank Graves and Michael Valpy ask the question, “What if the Conservatives had a ‘centrist’ leader?” like Rona Ambrose or Peter MacKay. To their credit Graves and Valpy recognize that while a centrist Conservative party would appeal to the media and various elites in Canada it would effectively maroon the 30% of Canadians who might loosely be described as “populist”.

A billboard in Toronto, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

I think Graves and Valpy are right and I can’t wait for that exact outcome.

Scheer managed to hoodwink a lot of natural populists with a combination of Liberal-lite policies and some goofy socon gestures (I am not sure Pride Parade non-attendance really counts for much with the serious socons.)

Graves and Valpy maintain that this was enough to avoid “orphaning the party’s biggest lump, and he more or less cut off oxygen to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada (PPC).” It might have been last election but if the CPC goes centrist with its next leader, the lump will be looking elsewhere.

I am fairly certain that the CPC will go for a centrist leader if only because there are really no populist candidates available to it. Pierre Poilievre might fill the bill but it is not obvious that the CPC will be willing to support an MP who is as “direct” as Poilievre.

Which will leave “the lump” looking for a home. Graves and Valpy give a rundown of the lump’s core issues,

    Like the United States, the United Kingdom and sizeable chunks of Western Europe, Canada has a significant portion of citizens — about 30 per cent — who are attracted to the current psychographic and demographic binge of ordered populism. They are profoundly economically pessimistic and mistrustful of science and the elites. They have no interest in climate change, they don’t really see an active role for public institutions and believe there are too many immigrants. Of those immigrants coming to Canada, they think that too many are not white.

Other than the dig about thinking “too many are not white”, that is a pretty good summary. (On the “not white” thing, I suspect it is more nuanced than that: more along the lines of the current Quebec government’s desire to preserve its culture in the face of immigration.)

December 10, 2019

Warren Kinsella, the PPC, and “Operation Cactus”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kate at SDA linked to this interesting article by James Di Fiore on the Conservative Party’s contract with Warren Kinsella to smear Maxime Bernier and the PPC in the run-up to the Fall election:

If you were new to this country, or part of our sect of apathetic voters, there was a good chance you walked away from the election believing Bernier and his party were nothing but a bunch of racists who thought they finally found a home. From there, being branded the racist party in Canada, all the media had to do was either ignore the PPC, or only run negative stories, not wanting to be seen as an outlet giving positive coverage to what was deemed as obvious bigotry.

Enter Warren Kinsella.

I sometimes wonder how well-known Kinsella really is. Everyone in the Ottawa and Toronto bubble knows him. The media and party members know him. But he’s not exactly a household name, until now maybe. Kinsella, a throwback operative going back to the Chretien years, still manages to convince people to hire him, despite having a reputation of being hopelessly unsavoury, where the ends always justifies the means as long as you remind everyone along the way how great of a person you are.

Kinsella was hired by the Conservative Party of Canada to execute a campaign painting The People’s Party of Canada as a haven for bigotry and white nationalism. Secretly recorded by an employee, Kinsella was heard giving his team a pep talk on how to effectively destroy Bernier. He even tried to reinforce his motivational speech by bragging about falsely smearing three prominent politicians as racists when he knew they were not. He tries to catch himself by saying how easy it is to smear Bernier as a racist because, as Kinsella put it, “this guy actually is a racist.”

When a strong federal party hires a notoriously unethical operative to smear a new party as a gang of racists and bigots, it can be difficult to define your own brand. I asked Bernier if he thought there was a reason some racists did seem drawn to his party’s platform.

“It happened when Preston Manning started the Reform Party more than 25 years ago. People were saying that party was a racist party. The Conservative Party and Kinsella tried to do the same thing with us. That’s why I am looking at all my options to look at the legal procedures that we can do.”

Bernier might have a very strong case, especially now that Kinsella’s mask has been taken off by his own hand.

“The Conservative Party of Canada is morally and intellectually corrupt, and they proved that with their contract with Kinsella.”

It is still unknown how much the CPC and Kinsella impacted Bernier’s party, but it is reasonable to believe Kinsella was ultimately successful. On September 29th, at an event in Hamilton, several protestors accosted event attendees as they tried to get into the building at Mohawk College. The aggressiveness of the demonstrators was palpable as they screamed at seniors, calling them Nazis and preventing them from entering the building. Instances like this make Kinsella’s contract all the more mysterious. After all, his job, according to his own admission, was to activate Canadians against Bernier by stoking the flames of racial intolerance.

There are questions as to whether Kinsella’s fingerprints are on several other party missteps and controversies, including a rash of resignations earlier this year when former loyalists mysteriously began trashing the party publicly.

Operatives normally do not get caught bragging about having a track history of how their lies about other people’s bigotry have been successfully used to disrupt campaigns. In Bernier’s case, Kinsella, a self-proclaimed, lifelong fighter for racial justice, actually spent a career monetizing racial divisions he helped to stoke. When his shtick was exposed through his own accidental confessions, the hindsight view of Maxime Bernier became less blurry.

December 2, 2019

Andrew Scheer’s Daisy connection

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jay Currie on the lingering stench of the spoiled Milk Dud’s campaign:

Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

The sheer lack of ethics and paranoia hiring the Jackal demonstrates pretty much proves that Scheer is not fit to lead the CPC or to be Prime Minister. A fact which is dawning on the CPC itself as it struggles to figure out what to do with their present leader. Before Kinsellagate it was possible to say that Scheer was a decent, if uninspiring, leader. Now? It is indecent to hire a political mobster to beat up your opponents. Which leaves Scheer as merely uninspiring. I would be astonished if he survives a leadership review.

The revelation of Kinsella’s filth may sink Scheer but it burnishes Bernier’s reputation. Virtually all the accusations of “racism” levelled against the PPC and Max personally either were manufactured by Kinsella or occurred in a climate of hate created by the Jackal. I have never seen a credible accusation and now we have a pretty good idea why.

The PPC, even with Kinsella’s disinformation campaign, secured over 300,000 votes from a standing start a year before the election. If the CPC tears itself apart with a red/blue fight, a lot of thoughtful, conservative, people will give the PPC a second look. Conservative MPs looking for an alternative to the nastiness and vindictiveness of the Scheer people might well be tempted to join the PPC. Max had a lot of caucus support for his CPC leadership run. He was careful not to unfairly attack conservative positions, rather, during the campaign, he attacked CPC positions which were, in fact, Liberal-lite positions.

Political pundits, as they do after every election in which the Conservatives fail to win government, solemnly inform us that it was because the Conservatives failed to move towards the middle. The fact that only 30-35% of Canadians are even a bit right-leaning is trotted out to show how impossible it is for the Conservatives to win government unless they move left. I think this analysis is entirely incorrect. A solid, right of center party which had libertarian social views would hold that 30-35%. From there it is simply a matter of finding 3-5% in carefully targetted ridings. To do that a party would have to come up with policies which, while conservative, do not alienate middle-class voters, immigrant communities and women.

I don’t think there is a chance the CPC will manage that simply because they are too tied to establishment politics in Canada. Yeah multi-culti, boo climate change only echos the Liberal Party’s bland formula for success.

October 21, 2019

“On Monday Canadians will have a choice between five left-of-centre social-democratic parties”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Except for Maxime Bernier’s invisible-to-the-mainstream-media PPC, the other parties contesting today’s election are all remarkably similar except for the colour of their signs and the mediocrity of their leaders:

As Mrs Thatcher used to say, first you win the argument, then you win the vote. So not engaging in any serious argument has certain consequences. John Robson puts it this way:

    As Canada’s worst election ever staggers toward the finish line, a theme has finally emerged. Despite the best efforts of the party leaders to say nothing coherent or true at any point, we know what it’s about. Everyone is running against the Tories. Including the Tories. Makes you wonder what they’re so afraid of.

On Monday Canadians will have a choice between five left-of-centre social-democratic parties: the crony left (Liberals), the hard left (NDP), the eco-left (Greens), the secessionist left (Bloc) and the squish left (Conservatives). The only alternative to the crony-hard-eco-secessionist-squish social-justice statism on offer is a disaffected Tory, Maxime Bernier. John Robson again:

    Bernier may be an imperfect human being and a flawed politician. It happens. But whatever his blemishes, his party exists because the Tories abandoned their beliefs and their base long before 2017 on every important conservative issue from free markets to traditional social values to strong national defence.

A billboard in Toronto, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

M Bernier would like to rethink immigration policy, but that makes him a racist so he shouldn’t be allowed in the debates because, per John Tory, while he’s free to rent the Scotiabank Arena, public buildings such as the CBC studios have a “higher responsibility”.

It’s a good thing for the other guys that Bernier was snuck in to a couple of debates because otherwise they’d be running against an entirely mythical beast — a red-meat conservative behemoth stomping the land for which there’s less corroborating evidence than of Justin in blackface but which is nevertheless mysteriously threatening to steamroller your social-justice utopia into the asphalt. Ah, if only that were true: I hope voters in the Beauce will return Max, and I hope our small band of readers in Longueuil-Saint Hubert will persuade their neighbours to turn out for our pal Ellen Comeau; but this is not shaping up as a breakthrough night for the People’s Party.

Nevertheless, sans Max, what’s left? Virtue-Dancing With The Stars: Elizabeth May says Trudeau wants to eliminate CO2 completely, but not until 2030! Justin Trudeau says that Scheer didn’t believe in gay marriage before 2005! Jagmeet Singh says that May’s selling out to the billionaires by promising to balance the budget by 2047, whereas he won’t balance the budget ever! Yves-François Blanchet says Singh’s ten-point plan to eliminate bovine flatulence by last Tuesday is too little too late compared to the Bloc’s plan to reduce Canada’s carbon footprint by declaring Quebec independent … oh, wait, sorry, that was almost an intrusion of something real: I meant “by declaring Quebec fully sovereign when it comes to jurisdiction over selecting its own pronouns for the door of the transgender bathroom: je, moi, mon …”

And at that point in the debate Lisa LaFlamme moves on to the next urgent concern of Canadian voters: Are politicians’ aboriginal land acknowledgments too perfunctory? Should they take up more time at the beginning of each debate? Say, the first hour or two?

John Robson argues that all five candidates are running against proposals that no one’s proposing because deep down inside they know that lurking somewhere out there is not a mythical right-wing Bigfoot but mere prosaic Reality, which sooner or later will assert itself. I’m not so sure. I think it’s more an enforcing of the ground rules, a true land acknowledgment that public debate can only take place within the bounds of this ever shriveling bit of barren sod. Those who want to fight on broader turf – such as M Bernier – cannot be permitted to do so.

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