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New Canadian Politics Thread

LeafGm said:
If you’re a PP supporter though, wouldn’t you be extra motivated to vote the Liberals out after 10 years of being in power and vote the Liberals in? Kind of like the big turn out in 2015 to get rid of Harper.
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Yeah you’d definitely think so.

But i know a bunch of men around 35ish who just didn’t bother to vote in the last couple elections.
 
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The problem (among many, many problems) for Poilievre is that the only way to get more voters is to tack toward the center more. But whenever he moves just slightly to the left of Attila The Hun, the fringe lunatics start accusing him of selling out, talk about the "uniparty", that he's a globalist like all the rest, etc. and then those same people start reminding everyone that the "real" conservatives are the PPC.

So even if he decided to stop being a complete shitbag for 5 minutes, Poilievre can't keep his shit together because too much of his base is unhinged to start with and very quick to turn on him.
 
There’s a picture of Carney at what is clearly a Canadian event with a couple of Chinese people, and a caption on WeChat that says those people are from the Canadian Jiangsu Chamber of Commerce. How is this a story at all?

(It isn’t, Cons are grasping for anything)

Pitch perfect responses by Carney anyway.
 
Pretty wild view from inside one of the recent big Alberta rallies PP has been crowing about.

www.nationalobserver.com

Poilievre is backed into a Trump-shaped corner

At Poilievre’s largest rally yet, his greatest strength reveals his greatest weakness. While the campaign is trying to distance him from Donald Trump, who is wildly unpopular in Canada, many of his supporters feel differently. “I like what Trump’s doing,” one attendee said. “I actually wish he’d...
www.nationalobserver.com www.nationalobserver.com

As we waited for things to get going, I struck up conversations on the margins of the crowd.
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“Polls are bought and paid for,” said Dawn from Leduc, a lean forty-something woman with short hair and a steady gaze.

“What drew you here tonight?” I asked.

“This country is circling the drain,” she said. Health care, education, housing, all in shambles. Immigration was largely to blame, she said. The only remedy was a Conservative victory. She was crisp and confident, almost serene. Look around — how could they lose?

I asked her about the concern some Canadians have that Poilievre is too much like Trump. “I like Trump,” she said, unabashed.
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Randa from Edmonton, with two little maple leaf flags tucked in her hair, agreed. “The polls are delusional,” she declared. Randa wasn’t into politics until the pandemic, and she wasn’t into Twitter until Elon turned it into X. I asked her, too, about the Liberal argument that Poilievre is a Trump understudy. “I like what Trump’s doing,” she replied with a shrug. “He’s smashing the bureaucracy. I want Poilievre to do that, too. I actually wish he’d go harder.”
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Two couples in their fifties asked me to take their photo. I obliged, then told them I’m a journalist and asked if we could chat. Their faces hardened but they obliged. They’ve voted Conservative all their lives. They’d like Poilievre to be more aggressive like Trump. Stop trying to hide it. Get tougher on immigration, protect our borders. Tariffs? Who cares about tariffs? There have always been tariffs.
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Brock was a tall psychology student at the University of Alberta, 19 years old and psyched for his first chance to vote. He wore a blazer over his Conservative-branded t-shirt. When I asked him about Trudeau, he surprised me: he gave Trudeau credit for trying to represent the country. Not that Brock liked the guy. Brock likes Trump, and doesn’t think Poilievre should worry about being compared to him.

Every person I spoke with said some version of this. Everyone liked Trump and didn’t think Poilievre should shy away from the comparison. Nobody believed the polls that put Carney in the lead. When I compared notes with a reporter from the Edmonton Journal later on, he’d had the same conversations.
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Finally, around 8:30, Poilievre took the stage. Twenty-four thousand hands smashed together. “This has got to be the biggest political rally of the twenty-first century!” he exclaimed, visibly moved.

…

“I love you!” bellowed a fellow just behind me.

“I love you, too,” Poilievre replied.

What he may not have loved was the way the applause kept dying down whenever he invoked some aspect of the American threat. For Poilievre did sprinkle counter-Trump measures throughout his hour-long speech, as he always does now. He knows he has to; knows that if the polling is to be believed,a majority of the Canadians not inside this warehouse will no longer vote for someone who reminds them of Canada’s new enemy. But every time Poilievre stops talking like Trump, the applause becomes … dutiful.

The cheering doesn’t disappear entirely, of course. The audience knows it, too, has a part to play. Cameras are everywhere. So they clap. But it’s not until Poilievre reverts to form and talks about restoring Canada to its former glory — that is, not until he speaks like Trump — that everyone goes bonkers. And in those moments, when everyone’s on their feet with their hands in the air, what you see in Poilievre’s face is that same look of victory beaming forth from those 12,000 believers in the crowd.
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manny said:
There’s a picture of Carney at what is clearly a Canadian event with a couple of Chinese people, and a caption on WeChat that says those people are from the Canadian Jiangsu Chamber of Commerce. How is this a story at all?

(It isn’t, Cons are grasping for anything)

Pitch perfect responses by Carney anyway.
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Expect a LOT more of this between now and election day.

The Poilievres and Jenni Byrne are convinced that their path to victory is to keep being as Trumpy as possible, while pulling out all of stops and every dirty trick possible (with assistance from their foreign allies) to assassinate Carney’s character and denigrate his resume.

Don’t think it’s a coincidence either that they’re trying to tie Carney to China, which is currently Trump & MAGA’s #1 bugbear.
 
Leafyblue said:
What are we supposed to make of this? True? Lie? Fake? Does it matter? 🤷‍♂️
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There's some words and phrases doing some really heavy lifting in these allegations:

"Relations"
"Meeting"

But without anything really substantial asserted in the reporting. I mean, what we know is that 2 chinese guys who are members of the JCCC took a photo with Carney at a political event. There's currently no reporting on there being anything resembling a "meeting" and until that can be substantiated I'd be prone to call it election cycle nonsense (especially given Pierre's weakness on similar topics).

The Yuen situation is less opaque imo but it comes down to dude having had speaking engagements at various chinese assoc in the city during his time as Deputy Chief of TPS.

This passage is kind of indicative of what's going on with this reporting though:

1744318706648.png

Yeah, we shouldn't trust China as far as we can throw them. But attending a few consolate events in official capacity where photos of places he's never seen (he was born in Hong Kong, not mainland China) were on display....what's the story here?
 
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LeafGm said:
Pretty wild view from inside one of the recent big Alberta rallies PP has been crowing about.

www.nationalobserver.com

Poilievre is backed into a Trump-shaped corner

At Poilievre’s largest rally yet, his greatest strength reveals his greatest weakness. While the campaign is trying to distance him from Donald Trump, who is wildly unpopular in Canada, many of his supporters feel differently. “I like what Trump’s doing,” one attendee said. “I actually wish he’d...
www.nationalobserver.com www.nationalobserver.com
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This just goes to show how batshit even so-called "regular" Conservatives are out here. In Alberta, sucking up to Trump the way Danielle Smith does is a feature, not a bug. They like the fascism.
 
MindzEye said:
and it's mostly made up...

- The dollar is trading in the same range as it historically does and it's being in the lower range of that is definitely influenced by Trump's trade war
- Calling our healthcare "broken" is a stretch....also, that's a provincial scope and the two provinces leading the "breaking" are run by Conservatives.
- 4 million refugees? What in the racist bullshit is this? This is a made up number. For example, in 2024 the total amount of claimants (not approved refugees...just total amount of people who showed up at our border and claimed asylum) was 171K. In 2023, we only approved 37K asylum claims, the rest of the claimants are either deported from the country or become illegals. The current estimate is that we have between 300-600K undocumented immigrants in the country fwiw....not 4 fucking million.
- What hard drugs were legalized? Did someone declare a good time and not invite me? Are we talking about weed?
- Doubled our national debt: It's not quite double, but sure it's gone up. Lemme see if we can spot exactly when and why it went up though...
View attachment 25763

Something must have happened between 2020-22...might need to look into that.
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Wanted to check back in on a couple of discussion points, as well as those noted above. I mentioned a week or so ago talking with a pro-PP family member about some of the issues facing Canada. One was Europe "begging" us for oil at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion. I guess I misunderstood, because this argument is about natural gas, not oil. Apparently it was a "no-brainer" to sell them natural gas to (a) help reduce Europe's dependence on Russian oil and gas, and (b) make money. Trudeau said no and they looked elsewhere, and as we know some countries had to continue buying from Russia until recently, which obviously involved giving them money which they can use in the war effort. Any thoughts on this?

One argument is that countries like China and India are ramping up coal production to meet their energy needs. We should be selling them liquified natural gas which would be much better for the environment by comparison. Of course the only reason why this hasn't happened is "Trudeau", I'm sure it's way more complicated than that. Any knowledge on this topic, is this something that is seriously considered and if not, why not?

The right hates environmental protections getting in the way of using our natural resources (oil, gas, minerals, etc.) to increase GDP. Of course there is always going to be a ying-yang on protecting the environment and getting away from fossil fuels in the long-term, compared to what we could or should be doing in the short-term. Their argument is that the Libs are too militant on the environment stuff (and Carney will be "no different"). He understands the need for much of it, just that we go too far.

This ties into the idea about the low value of the dollar, more oil, gas and natural resource production will strengthen the economy.

Immigration is one of their big issues, the "4 million refugees" number they mention in the post is obviously bullshit as you noted but they probably meant the total number of immigrants. Ie. the Liberals let in far too many people over the last decade which is a major contributing factor to both housing and healthcare breaking down. Too many people overwhelming the system. He's aware that this is an oversimplification, but still a big part of the problem.

Lastly on their point about "hard drugs", he thought they might be talking about oxymorphone which I guess the Liberals tried to bring in as an alternative to opioids at some point, but it didn't work out.
 
axlsalinger said:
Wanted to check back in on a couple of discussion points, as well as those noted above. I mentioned a week or so ago talking with a pro-PP family member about some of the issues facing Canada. One was Europe "begging" us for oil at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion. I guess I misunderstood, because this argument is about natural gas, not oil. Apparently it was a "no-brainer" to sell them natural gas to (a) help reduce Europe's dependence on Russian oil and gas, and (b) make money. Trudeau said no and they looked elsewhere, and as we know some countries had to continue buying from Russia until recently, which obviously involved giving them money which they can use in the war effort. Any thoughts on this?

One argument is that countries like China and India are ramping up coal production to meet their energy needs. We should be selling them liquified natural gas which would be much better for the environment by comparison. Of course the only reason why this hasn't happened is "Trudeau", I'm sure it's way more complicated than that. Any knowledge on this topic, is this something that is seriously considered and if not, why not?

The right hates environmental protections getting in the way of using our natural resources (oil, gas, minerals, etc.) to increase GDP. Of course there is always going to be a ying-yang on protecting the environment and getting away from fossil fuels in the long-term, compared to what we could or should be doing in the short-term. Their argument is that the Libs are too militant on the environment stuff (and Carney will be "no different"). He understands the need for much of it, just that we go too far.

This ties into the idea about the low value of the dollar, more oil, gas and natural resource production will strengthen the economy.

Immigration is one of their big issues, the "4 million refugees" number they mention in the post is obviously bullshit as you noted but they probably meant the total number of immigrants. Ie. the Liberals let in far too many people over the last decade which is a major contributing factor to both housing and healthcare breaking down. Too many people overwhelming the system. He's aware that this is an oversimplification, but still a big part of the problem.

Lastly on their point about "hard drugs", he thought they might be talking about oxymorphone which I guess the Liberals tried to bring in as an alternative to opioids at some point, but it didn't work out.
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Just to clarify, he's talking about hydromorphone here, like he takes issue with a safe supply/harm reduction approach?
 
hockeylover said:
Just to clarify, he's talking about hydromorphone here, like he takes issue with a safe supply/harm reduction approach?
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I thought he said oxy, but it would make more sense that it was hydromorphone, yeah. He basically said he doesn't blame the Liberals too much on this one, just that it was a good idea but it wasn't well implemented, and didn't work for several reasons, some of which weren't their fault. I don't remember the specifics. He also said it was just a guess, as it really isn't a "hard drug" and may not even be what they were talking about in that post.
 
axlsalinger said:
Wanted to check back in on a couple of discussion points, as well as those noted above. I mentioned a week or so ago talking with a pro-PP family member about some of the issues facing Canada. One was Europe "begging" us for oil at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion. I guess I misunderstood, because this argument is about natural gas, not oil. Apparently it was a "no-brainer" to sell them natural gas to (a) help reduce Europe's dependence on Russian oil and gas, and (b) make money. Trudeau said no and they looked elsewhere, and as we know some countries had to continue buying from Russia until recently, which obviously involved giving them money which they can use in the war effort. Any thoughts on this?
Click to expand...

Okay, there's a fair bit to unpack here. The first is the most obvious, the reason we said no is that we don't have the pipeline capacity for it. We do have a cross country LNG pipeline that is entirely on Canadian soil (unlike oil) but we don't have an export terminal in Quebec (where the line ends) and building the line across to the LNG export terminal we have on the east coast would take years to plan and build.

The second is the need for it. We produce about 18 billion cubic meters a day and use about 11 billion of those. The rest has been exported to the US historically for the same reason everything else does. Now...this had already started to change, but like everything else in O&G it costs a fuckton (so requires a functioning business case today, not a maybe sometime in the future business case) and takes years to build. Kitimat was approved in 2018 (I think....that was under Trudeau. Weird Alberta energy getting another infrastructure project approved under Trudeau...) and opens this year I think.

There was never a business case to spend ~40B on export to Europe before 2023. Something that you need to remind people is that governments don't build these things (nationalized oil companies excepted). There has to be a functioning business case to spend 10's of billions of dollars of investors money in one of these projects to solve a long term energy market need.

The other thing is scale. We have a production overhang of 7 Billion cubes a day. Europe uses about 135 Billion per day. It would have been nice to be able to help them out and all, and they would have taken whatever we could give them, but it's a drop in the bucket of what they needed.

So yeah, it would have been a "no brainer" to sell them LNG if we had dropped 40B in taxpayer money on a LNG export terminal (lol, in Quebec...could you imagine the fucking screeching from Alberta conservatives if we spent 40B of taxpayer money as a gift to Quebec industry?) to service what was a saturated market at the time. If only we had known about this demand for it in 2014-15 when we could have done something about it in time for 2023.
 
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axlsalinger said:
One argument is that countries like China and India are ramping up coal production to meet their energy needs. We should be selling them liquified natural gas which would be much better for the environment by comparison. Of course the only reason why this hasn't happened is "Trudeau", I'm sure it's way more complicated than that. Any knowledge on this topic, is this something that is seriously considered and if not, why not?
Click to expand...

As mentioned, this was already approved in 2018 and is almost done construction.

www.lngcanada.ca

LNG Canada | Unlocking Canada’s LNG Opportunity

LNG Canada provides low-carbon, reliable Canadian LNG to support the global energy transition. Learn more about the LNG Canada project.
www.lngcanada.ca www.lngcanada.ca
 
LeafGm said:
Pretty wild view from inside one of the recent big Alberta rallies PP has been crowing about.

www.nationalobserver.com

Poilievre is backed into a Trump-shaped corner

At Poilievre’s largest rally yet, his greatest strength reveals his greatest weakness. While the campaign is trying to distance him from Donald Trump, who is wildly unpopular in Canada, many of his supporters feel differently. “I like what Trump’s doing,” one attendee said. “I actually wish he’d...
www.nationalobserver.com www.nationalobserver.com
Click to expand...

How can they lose? Do they know how many people live in the Extended GTA and Greater Montreal?

That’s some wicked hard cope.
 
axlsalinger said:
I thought he said oxy, but it would make more sense that it was hydromorphone, yeah. He basically said he doesn't blame the Liberals too much on this one, just that it was a good idea but it wasn't well implemented, and didn't work for several reasons, some of which weren't their fault. I don't remember the specifics. He also said it was just a guess, as it really isn't a "hard drug" and may not even be what they were talking about in that post.
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Hm. I’d be curious to dig in more on with someone in person on what they mean by didn’t work.
 
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