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New Canadian Politics Thread

BeLeafer said:
Oh, he absolutely should be.

He's currently being tortured in a British prison for exposing the crimes of the establishment.
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He was never interested in reporting the news. He's an activist who used his position and the cache of wikileaks to advance his own political agenda.

I don't condone what's being done to him but he acted a hell of a lot more like an intelligence operative than he did a journalist.
 
Altair said:
by what standard?

By a Canadian Standard, they are left, if ever so slightly.

By a US Standard, they are way to the left, practically commies.

Western European maybe on the right, if ever so slightly. Eastern Europe, left.

I don't know how you can characterize the liberals as being on the right.
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this international website has been around since 2001. you can go through all their charts to compare different countries in different years and see if you agree with their methodology.

Here's their current chart for Canada in 2019:

The Political Compass

The Political Compass: a 2-dimensional typology of political opinions
www.politicalcompass.org www.politicalcompass.org
 
BeLeafer said:
The reason a lot of people are not defending him is because he was successfully smeared by the people he exposed. The claim that he worked with the Russians is the latest of those smears.
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It's easy to smear people when they did something worth being smeared over. I mean, there are literal receipts of him working with the Russians. He was a paid presenter on RT, literally a Kremlin mouthpiece PR machine.
 
Wayward DP said:
So Justin's liberals have done the following things in office:
- increase income tax on the wealthiest
- universal child care benefit
- all the mortgage rules to cool the market (stress tests, etc)
- made an effort to bring in, proportionally, a ton of Syrian refugees (vs other countries)
- laughed off the idea of balanced budgets, and likely entered us into a structural deficit (granted, right wingers do this too, but not usually intentionally)
- federal carbon tax

I have a hard time characterizing this government as being 'well to the right'. Chretien or Martin Liberals you can probably make a more convincing argument. But less sure about Justin.
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The only "right-wing" thing they've done is buy the pipeline, which is kind of funny to think of since nationalizing the oil industry tends to be a common theme in more socialist regimes...

But yeah, while the Libs do bring in some of the centre-right people on the spectrum, and while they probably governed to the right of where they campaigned from in the last election, they're pretty firmly centre-left.

They have brought in some tax cuts for the middle class, which is one thing that doesn't make them a far-lefty party. But honestly I think you'd see more people who are centre-right be upset that the Libs have veered too far to the left rather than seeing lefties upset that they're veering too far to the right.
 
UWHabs said:
The only "right-wing" thing they've done is buy the pipeline, which is kind of funny to think of since nationalizing the oil industry tends to be a common theme in more socialist regimes...

But yeah, while the Libs do bring in some of the centre-right people on the spectrum, and while they probably governed to the right of where they campaigned from in the last election, they're pretty firmly centre-left.

They have brought in some tax cuts for the middle class, which is one thing that doesn't make them a far-lefty party. But honestly I think you'd see more people who are centre-right be upset that the Libs have veered too far to the left rather than seeing lefties upset that they're veering too far to the right.
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Generally I agree with you but I'm less sure about the bolded.

I know a lot of younger people were/are really put off by his broken promise on electoral reform and lack of substantive environmental action. I think Trudeau won the majority by rallying progressive voters to the Libs (prog voters have to be over 50% of the electorate now). And I think he's going to lose a whole bunch of them to the Greens. But I'm just spitballing here. This is in no small part of reflection of my FB feed, where I feel like a big freakin rightie.

The Libs have definitely mastered the campaign on the left and govern in the centre/right trick though.
 
Without really digging in to the right/left Liberal thing too much, I will say this....the Overton window has shifted hard in the last 30 years. What was slightly left of centre even 20 years ago has become somewhat far left by today's measure. The philosophical and political right have done an excellent job (with the aid of the corporate media and some of their horseshit "fairness" policies) of shifting the terms of public discourse in their favour. As the American Overton window has migrated, it's gravity has pulled ours with it.
 
zeke said:
Here's their current chart for Canada in 2019:

The Political Compass

The Political Compass: a 2-dimensional typology of political opinions
www.politicalcompass.org www.politicalcompass.org
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Cool site, took the quiz. Ended up slightly left on the economic scale - maybe a bit of a surprise, but I expected to be near center. And ended up significantly on the libertarian side of the social scale, which is what I expected.
 
Not sure about how they are ranking Canada's parties on that scale though, unless the scale is adjusted to Canadian politics. Otherwise, they have the cons above Thatcher and just slightly below Hitler on the social authoritarian scale - which while hilarious, seems a bit unbelievable.
 
yeah that site and CBC's vote compass gave me pretty dramatically different results. also positioned the Canadian parties quite differently too.
 
BeLeafer said:
That's because he's a publisher and why he partnered with news outlets like NYT and Guardian.
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Except when he didn't.

He's admitted to withholding material until a time where it was most politically damaging to his political enemies, an act that runs contrary to the heart of journalism. Yet you still run blind cover fire for him whenever he comes up as a topic of discussion. "But Hillary" is not a valid defence for the crime of pissing all over journalistic integrity.
 
zeke said:
yeah, but why is he interfering in elections to sabotage her in favor of this trumpified gop? where is the gain in press freedom from that?
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I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "interfering in elections" but I don't think it had nothing to do with helping Donald Trump. Assange is to the left of me. I don't necessarily agree with this but I'm pretty sure he saw Clinton and Trump as much the same from his pov (a pov focused on foreign policy). What motivated the release, I'm quite sure, was what was contained in the documents -- something that was very newsworthy (that the Clinton campaign conspired with the DNC to screw over Bernie Sanders) and continues to be get buried under the Clinton-instigated Russia hysteria.

My own view on all of this is that Clinton was an obviously compromised and disliked nominee and it was foolish to nominate someone who was so vulnerable to the kind of information Assange published.
 
MindzEye said:
Except when he didn't.

He's admitted to withholding material until a time where it was most politically damaging to his political enemies, an act that runs contrary to the heart of journalism. Yet you still run blind cover fire for him whenever he comes up as a topic of discussion. "But Hillary" is not a valid defence for the crime of pissing all over journalistic integrity.
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If you say so.

The heart of journalism is shinning light on darkness -- creating transparency where there's secrecy.

Here's the interview that the NYT report was based on:



I don't think he was particularly concerned with gaming the US election. He says nothing about the timing of it, really.
 
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And if he were trying to do that, I think it's about what he says in this interview -- that Clinton helped push for his prosecution and would continue to do so as President.
 
To be honest, I stopped paying attention to the 2016 election when it was clear they were screwing Bernie out of the nomination. The timing is interesting and it's nothing like ME suggested. The emails were released on the eve of the Democractic convention. If he was trying to help anyone, it was Bernie Sanders, not Donald Trump.

Here's the interview where the NYT said he admitted to trying to cause damage to Clinton (he doesn't really say anything of the sort though):

www.democracynow.org

EXCLUSIVE: WikiLeaksâ Julian Assange on Releasing DNC Emails That Ousted Debbie Wasserman Schultz

WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange joins us from London about their release of nearly 20,000 emails revealing how the Democratic Party favored Hillary Clinton and worked behind the scenes to discredit and defeat Bernie Sanders. This comes as the Democratic National Convention...
www.democracynow.org

This is, of course, where all the stuff about the Russians started.
 
I always figured he was only good for a term and half as it was. But I think the knives will come out quickly. There are some ambitious people waiting in the wings and it is a remorseless party.
 
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