{"id":36590,"date":"2016-12-09T02:00:39","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T07:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36590"},"modified":"2016-12-08T10:20:04","modified_gmt":"2016-12-08T15:20:04","slug":"the-trudeau-governments-bad-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/09\/the-trudeau-governments-bad-times\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trudeau government&#8217;s bad times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalpost.com\/full-comment\/full-pundit-liberals-melt-down-over-electoral-reform\" target=\"_blank\">Chris Selley<\/a> on the (largely self-inflicted) hard times of Justin Trudeau&#8217;s government recently:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It has been one hell of a couple of weeks for the Liberal Party of Canada: first Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s bizarre encomium to dearly departed Fidel; then the approval of two pipelines projects, dashing the oil-free dreams of people who hadn\u2019t been paying attention and producing thousands of barrels of fake outrage; and then, the inevitable collapse of the government\u2019s electoral reform agenda.<\/p>\n<p>It was always going to look bad. The Liberals were always going to break their promise to make 2015 the last first-past-the-post election. Perhaps they had even contemplated their members on the electoral reform committee recommending they break it, by adopting a go-slower approach. But no one, surely, anticipated Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef accusing the committee as a whole of not doing the job she had set out for them, which they had; mocking the Gallagher Index, an easily explicable formula for measuring proportionality in election results; and justifying herself with shameless bafflegab that would make Paul Calandra blush.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Monsef later apologized for accusing committee members of slacking, Manon Cornellier notes in <em>Le Devoir<\/em>, but not for misrepresenting their mandate, mocking mathematics \u2014 as an emissary of the party of \u201cevidence-based policy,\u201d no less \u2014 and generally behaving like a buffoon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c(Monsef\u2019s) beef with the Gallagher Index isn\u2019t that it only measures proportionality. Her beef with the Gallagher Index is that it\u2019s math, with its sums of squares and square roots and symbols that are literally Greek,\u201d Fine fumes. It\u2019s a worrying outburst of idiocy, she argues. Monsef and her ilk talk constantly of \u201cengagement,\u201d but that\u2019s a very difficult thing to measure. \u201cAt the intersection of \u2018affinity for engagement\u2019 and \u2018contempt for metrics\u2019 is fertile breeding ground for leaders who wish to make up their own rules,\u201d Fine trenchantly observes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Selley on the (largely self-inflicted) hard times of Justin Trudeau&#8217;s government recently: It has been one hell of a couple of weeks for the Liberal Party of Canada: first Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s bizarre encomium to dearly departed Fidel; then the approval of two pipelines projects, dashing the oil-free dreams of people who hadn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28,53],"tags":[188,156,887,778],"class_list":["post-36590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-media","category-politics","tag-electionwatch","tag-fail","tag-justintrudeau","tag-mathematics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9wa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36591,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36590\/revisions\/36591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}