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New Canadian Politics Thread

MindzEye said:
Yeah, count me in the group that figures a guy who didn't realize that hanging out and supporting deeply unpopular events with swastika flags out in the open was a bad idea, is going to struggle to not dog whistle his way to multiple own goals to maintain the PPC voter support that is literally the only difference between him and the last 2 chumps in current polling.
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Yeah the Liberals will milk this for all to worth. They would be stupid not to. Of course they won’t mention that there was one flag and it was in the crowd behind him and was visible for a very short time before some of the protest leaders got the it shut down.

Far be it for me to support anything involving the two or three different factions of the protester groups, they made my life a living hell. They (including supporters from all parties and yes there where Liberal supporters who where part of the protest) had a right to protest but no right to shutdown the city for three weeks.
 
manny said:
Also PP was running for Conservative party leader when he blew on those particular dog whistles. It’s possible he knew very well what he was doing at the time and is counting on the average voter to forget or not care anymore come election time. Can the Liberals milk “he shook hands with a nazi” until 2025?
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Depends...can he maintain the support of the hard right without blowing on the whistle some more? If he can hang on to them while drifting towards the centre, yeah he's a problem. But there's a bag full of good reasons that those voters moved away from the CPC in the first place.
manny said:
My main concern is that people have underestimated PP’s political savvy and continue to do so.
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Maybe I'm struggling to see the savvy in a guy who is a lightweight on basically every subject he opens his mouth on. I don't think that plays with the spotlight on him long term. What happens when #Justinflation levels go back to normal? The guy is a crypto bro. I struggle to believe that anyone with his paper thin grasp of subjects he's so publicly passionate about is going to be able to live in this spotlight without saying some incredibly stupid shit.
 
CH1 said:
JT fatigue is real tho

and PP ain’t great but he’s still better than JT’s last two opponents
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JT fatigue is definitely real. It's a big reason that he cut a deal with the NDP that is supposed to last until 2025. He's going to need some big wins between now and then to fight off further malaise.
 
anne25 said:
Of course they won’t mention that there was one flag and it was in the crowd behind him and was visible for a very short time before some of the protest leaders got the it shut down.
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They shouldn't have to mention it. The important fact is that it was there, and nobody said shit until the organizers realized how bad it was going to look on the news.

Also of note, there was maybe only one swastika flag...but apparently various iterations of the confederate flag was fine, just fine. Also multiple Canadian flags with Swastika's drawn on them...fine, just fine.
 
MindzEye said:
I think you're listening to too many doomsayers mate.

Canadian economy has shown itself to be durable in the face of rate hikes and as I showed a few days ago, the inflationary event is more or less over. Any additional rate hikes will be reversed quickly if unemployment takes a hit (which they've already started to, but going from historically low rates to abnormally low rates isn't setting off alarm bells).

As for energy prices, in the Canadian context we're really only talking about natgas for winter heating. Current forecasts I've seen doesn't have the unit price getting higher than we've already seen it. We're also a net exporter, so there's all sorts of levers we can pull if it does become a problem.

And the political reality is that one of the Liberals or NDP would have to break an agreement that forms a majority coalition until 2025...why? NDP polling is flat, and if Pierre is half of what you're guys are concerned about him being, any liberal support lost is going to bleed to the CPC, not the NDP. I don't see how an election at any time in the next year benefits anyone other than Pierre.
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wait a second, did our resident board conservative just like your post shitting on the conservatives? intriguing.
 
MindzEye said:
Depends...can he maintain the support of the hard right without blowing on the whistle some more? If he can hang on to them while drifting towards the centre, yeah he's a problem. But there's a bag full of good reasons that those voters moved away from the CPC in the first place.


Maybe I'm struggling to see the savvy in a guy who is a lightweight on basically every subject he opens his mouth on. I don't think that plays with the spotlight on him long term. What happens when #Justinflation levels go back to normal? The guy is a crypto bro. I struggle to believe that anyone with his paper thin grasp of subjects he's so publicly passionate about is going to be able to live in this spotlight without saying some incredibly stupid shit.
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I think your mistake is in assuming that voters can discern and actually care whether PP does in fact have a "paper thin grasp of subjects".

If we have learned anything from our neighbours to the South recently, it is that policy positions are increasingly irrelevant to politics. I don't think this is the black mark on him that you think it is as most voters are not sophisticated enough to appreciate this.

He is a populist, that is his appeal. His policy positions are for the most part irrelevant so long as he can find the right anti-elite, populist chord to strike, cause there is a significant segment of the electorate that is so "fuck Trudeau" that they just need to find a reasonable flag carrier for that movement to line up behind, and I think PP is it.
 
I'll sum this all up...you guys are worried over nothing for multiple reasons


- CPC leaders always get a media and voter honeymoon. Always. Wasted in 2022/early 2023.
- Pierre's "appeal" is the 5% bump he's gotten from the PPC (recent Ipsos). Bernier will attack any necessary drift to the centre in an attempt to regain that 5%.
- That 5% is largely the same inefficient as fuck votes they already own in the prairies. Winning Lethbridge with 92% instead of 87% is a big fat meh
- Liberal/NDP majority coalition agreement is in effect until Summer 2025 and neither side has any reason to reneg any time soon. Liberals enjoy the benefits of a majority without going to the polls with only minor concessions, and the NDP maintains a far better working partnership with the Liberals than they would ever have with the CPC. We can talk about how much the NDP dislikes the Liberals, but Jagmeet is on record stating his near hatred of PP

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- Shit isn't as bad as the news is saying, and is unlikely to get as bad as the news is predicting
- 2025 is a long ass time away. If Pierre is able to tame his nutters, and get them to heel to the Harperites (the main tranche of his support) while at the same time Justin scuffles along for 2.5 years...well fair fucking play to him.
 
Wayward DP said:
I think your mistake is in assuming that voters can discern and actually care whether PP does in fact have a "paper thin grasp of subjects".
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I think that temporarily, you can hide it. But Pierre is already trying to make this issues based. What happens the first time he mentioned blockchainm and crypto in a serious setting? This is what I'm saying...honeymoons are easy. You get to shake your fist at the government who doesn't care about the people and set voters to imagining that there might actually be a better option. Doing it for years without showing who and what you are though...fucking hard.
Wayward DP said:
If we have learned anything from our neighbours to the South recently, it is that policy positions are increasingly irrelevant to politics. I don't think this is the black mark on him that you think it is as most voters are not sophisticated enough to appreciate this.
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Aren't we learning that this isn't entirely true though? Is there a bigger political story this year in the US than the reaction to Dobbs? Yes, Trump is sucking up all of the oxygen in the media, but for voter intent going forward, Dobbs is supreme.

All it takes is a politician saying the wrong goofy shit to turn the tide against him. Especially in modern Canadian politics where the difference between leader of the opposition and prime minister is ~15 seats in Ontario.
Wayward DP said:
He is a populist, that is his appeal.
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If populists were that appealing, they would be running every country on the planet. To be a politician in a western democracy is to be a defacto populist. If you can't appeal to the middle class, you lose. People make way too much of this label and it's appeal with voters imo. Some are more capable than others to make someone else to seem like the "elite".

The term you're looking for is a "Right Wing Populist". Yes he is. I'm not convinced at all that one of those plays here without absolutely inept competition (Hi Ontario!)
 
Your assumptions put a lot of stock in the appeal of the PPC to the radical fringe. Maybe they’d be more viable if their leader was another good old Alberta boy instead of an absolute gong show like Bernier. IMO most of their vote last time around was Con voters who didn’t think O’Toole was dogmatic enough and didn’t think he could win anyway. Problem solved with PP.

Ultimately, I don’t see holding together the coalition of reluctant PPC voters and traditional Con voters as much of a challenge for PP in the near term. One dog whistle per year should be enough to keep the freaks, and not enough to drive away the stalwarts. That lets them form the government already. If JT fatigue drives a couple percent from Liberal to NDP, we’re in Conservative majority territory. He’s going to pick up a certain amount of anti-establishment populist voters as well. And he doesn’t have to go all-in on something like crypto to do it, he just has to appear open to the idea. That’s modern populism, and that’s why it often crosses political boundaries. Then, at high-cost closed-door fundraisers, PP will assure Bay Street that it’s all a show.

One thing Anne’s post shows is that a regular conservative voter (non-white-supremacist version) is already essentially 100% dismissive of PP’s truckertantrum dog whistles. Imagine what 2 years will do to that group, and the general population.
 
MindzEye said:
I'm not surprised. It took having a once in a political generation conservative iron fisted taskmaster to keep all of the morons in the clown car together. It's the dirty truth behind the western conservative movement. It's way more extreme than anyone outside of the west really gets and they need to balance between keeping their western base happy with red meat and not scaring the shit out of the far more centrist conservatives in the rest of the country. Go too far to the centre and the new Reform party breaks off and cripples right wing politics for a generation, too far right and the Liberals dominate for a political generation. Harper was fantastic at managing the moving pieces, Scheer is a soft bitch in comparison and will have a hard time faking his way through a single election cycle.
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Dug this up from 2019. Still holds true imo. Conservatives tried to drift centre and the PPC happened. Is PP the guy who can manage the balancing act? There's more head wind into the attempt now than when Harper pulled it off imo. Social media and the rise of alt/far right wing politics around the world makes it harder to keep the nutters in check.
 
manny said:
Your assumptions put a lot of stock in the appeal of the PPC to the radical fringe. Maybe they’d be more viable if their leader was another good old Alberta boy instead of an absolute gong show like Bernier. IMO most of their vote last time around was Con voters who didn’t think O’Toole was dogmatic enough and didn’t think he could win anyway. Problem solved with PP.
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I still think this ignores the issue with considering the problem to be solved just because of PP. This isn't a base that wanted CPC politics as usual. They wanted and got a more extreme brand of right wing politics, and if they're not getting fed by the CPC, they'll bolt again. If Bernier isn't their guy, a new guy will show up. I've lived and worked with these guys man, they're simply not conservatives the way that we're used to in eastern canada. They're cold texans with single payer health care. There was a presser from the Alberta government yesterday to rile up voters about liberal gun ownership laws ffs. We're talking about the hardest right wing edge of that presser's target audience here.

This is not a demo that is going to be placated with table scraps man. This is just a bad read on who they are and what they want. But they are at the moment (according to recent polling) the only difference between PP and Scheer/Otoole in appeal to voters. It took Scheer a full campaign to arrive at his 55% disapproval rating and O'toole barely cracked 40% disapproval with likely voters. PP is starting the game at 52-53% disapproval.
 
CH1 said:
Without even focussing on PP’s political acumen (or lack thereof), I think voters will be hungry to say bye bye to JT.

Can JT paint the other side as “too scary” yet again. History says no.
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He definitely needs some wins over the next 2 years. The fatigue is real.
 
2025 will be about 10 years for JT. The fatigue will be hard to overcome. Even in good conditions he is nearing the end.

PP probably doesn’t need the lunatic right. Just play it down the middle. it always flips back to blue eventually.

Libs may need JT to bow out.
 
leafman101 said:
2025 will be about 10 years for JT. The fatigue will be hard to overcome. Even in good conditions he is nearing the end.

PP probably doesn’t need the lunatic right. Just play it down the middle. it always flips back to blue eventually.

Libs may need JT to bow out.
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I forgot what thread this was and I honestly thought you were talking about Tavares and the leafs' PP.

Lunatic right confused me but I thought it might mean Marner.
 
I read that as Tavares himself getting fatigued.

And I actually read it as the PP not needing the lunatic "right now", and that they should just be hammering down the middle. Wasn't sure if he thought the puck being "always flipped back to the blue" line was a good thing or a bad thing tho.
 
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