Oh, Canada — can the Liberals win again?

Today is Canadian election day. For Merikkkans who think Canada is a junior brother of the US, well, not exactly, and definitely on elections. 

This piece is a mix of a primer on Canadian governance for Americans who don't understand it, a look at the state of Canada's political parties at the federal level, and some thoughts and guesses about how the election might turn out.

First, Canada is a parliamentary government, technically a parliamentary monarchy, being part of the British Empire Commonwealth, currently ruled over by the King Charles Spaniel via a governor general. 

The parliamentary is the key difference. As in other parliamentary governments, whether constitutional monarchies or parliamentary republics, parliament is king, so to speak. The prime minister and members of their cabinet sit in the lower house, in this case, the Canadian Commons, named after its British progenitor.

The Canadian Senate does exist, and has more power than the British Lords, but far less than the US Senate. And, His Majesty's ministers don't sit there. (At least not by convention, I think, like in the British Lords.)

So, the party winning the Commons — or, as is often the case, forming a winning coalition government — controls the executive. Or they form a minority government, with the governor general's blessing, or the president's blessing in parliamentary republics, when deemed necessary.

In other ways, though, there are broad similarities.

As a "Westminster" government, like the U.S. is, indirectly, parliamentary members are elected from single-member districts in first past the post elections. That is just like general elections in the US (with the exception of Georgia on Senate races that I know of). A plurality is all you need in a three-party race. This is unlike, say, Germany, where the Bundestag has single-member districts but also has what are known as "overhang" seats, so the composition of the body matches, approximately, the nationwide vote for each party. It's totally unlike Israel's Knesset, where members are elected on proportional representation, and with 120 members for that little bitty country.

Back to the Westminster angle of the above, and plurality wins.

Canada has three parties — well, in a way it does. Let's look.

The Liberals, currently in power under prime minister Justin Trudeau. The Canadian equivalent of U.S. Democrats, other than Canada having national health care, brought by the Liberals eons ago. That's one party.

The Conservatives, the equivalent of U.S. Republicans. Like on this side of the border, they've become more and more MAGAt-ified, especially post-COVID. That's a second.

The New Democratic Party.  Picture the Democratic Socialists of America "Roseys" being a separate party, rather than an interest group within Democrats. That's these people. They're half a party, not a full party. Untimely deaths and weak leaders have led to them imploding more than once.

Bloc Québécois. Picture something like a Confederate States of America party, but instead, wanting either greater autonomy for, or independence for, Quebec. The party is internally split on which is acceptable, and tries to figure out how to align this with the Parti Québécois. For Americans, or Canadians for that matter, or others, for that matter? Perhaps a good comp is the relationship of the BJP and RSS in India? This is also the best illustration of how loose the connection is between federal and provincial parties, which itself is a bug, not a feature, Canadians. They're one-third of a party.

Greens. More powerful, relatively, than U.S. Greens. Two current members in the Commons. Riven factionally in the past few years over Zionism, unlike U.S. Greens. They're one-sixth of a party.

That gets us to three.

(I'll interject at this point. As of Saturday, polls showed the Liberals 4 percentage points ahead of Conservatives. That said, Conservatives outpolled Liberals nationally the last two elections but were still the second party because of the consolidated nature of their support.)

There's also Canadian Libertarians, with a shadow of the interest of what the U.S. version gets. Two different Communist parties. And other smaller flotsam.

That's my mildly snarky translation.

Hugely snarky, and more cynical than I am, from within his own country? Substack, Goodreads and Shitter (unless he killed his account, which he may have) friend Adam McPhee.

And, yes, his "Whoever Wins, We Lose," is far more snarky. And, it hacked multiple Canadian Facebook friends when I posted and tagged them.

Here's the non-snarky opening grafs:

I meant to join 7.3 million of my fellow Canadians this past weekend and vote in the advanced polls for the upcoming federal election, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I still intend to vote on election day, but man, things are looking bleak. I guess if I have any issues, they are: 1) Canada must not be complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and must actively work to put pressure on Israel to stop it, and 2) Canada must return to building socialized housing, which is the only surefire, longterm method of bringing the cost of living down for the working class.

There really aren’t a whole lot of good options. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the parties.

And, the snark comes after. I won't reference it all, but the Liberals need it. This, the last graf, is his nutgraf on the election:

The polls have been telling us that the Liberals are on track to win the election, and the only question is if they’ll cross the two hundred seat threshold, but I’m starting to think this is a Kamala Harris situation: a last minute switch-out and an utter refusal to do politics that leaves someone odious and unwanted in power. But if the first-past-the-post system blesses the Liberals one more time, I suspect we’ll be looking at more of a Kier Starmer situation: immediate unpopularity as a direct result of a refusal to do anything that might help the working class.

Indeed. Candidate and current premier Mark Carney has been a governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England. Neoliberalism and globalism personified! Before Trump turned the race topsy-turvy, Carney would have been a liability, which leads one to ponder just how thin the Liberal "bench" is, perhaps in part because Trudeau chased enough off.

The first of my Canadian friends to get bent out of shape? A Nova Scotian who claims to lean NDP and even be sympathetic to Greens, but is doing strategery lesser evilism voting for Librulz. She also decried Adam for not listing enough corruption by Conservatives, and indicated he is uninformed. No, he's not, and that's not the focus of his piece.

Besides, he said this which sums up today's Conservatives:

Obviously I don’t really feel bad for the Conservatives. Seeing them eat shit is the one good thing I can imagine happening in this election, and if it happens I will happily take a few days to gloat. But unless the infighting to replace Poilievre gets particularly nasty, their party won’t break, and the problem they present will only grow worse because opposition benches are actually a better place for the Conservatives to do what they now do best: farming internet grievances and turning them into cash donations, either directly to the party or to one of their many allied social media operations.

Bingo, I do believe.

(Per Adam's intro, he claims to want to address housing, but nobody believes him. Of the parties that add up to three? I know Liberals and Conservatives are Zionist. Greens overall support Palestinians, but had a big fight over that a few years ago that led to their leader resigning, and an old leader of 13 years' tenure, Elizabeth May, coming back, NDP generally supports Palestinians, and the Bloc Québécois is a bunch of weasels. Beyond Adam, Greens are as good as U.S. Greens on the environment, NDP is squishes and everybody else is crap. On Russia-Ukraine? All of them, including Greens, are squishes from this leftist's point of view who knows the score there since the Maidan in 2014. Indeed, all global Green parties outside the U.S., I think, are toadies of the US and NATO on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. See this piece from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for more on all parties; per Adam, you can ignore the People's Party.) 

Let us continue to the snarking. Next, it's the Bloc.

I won’t be voting for the Bloc Quebecois because for some reason they refuse to run a candidate in my non-Quebec riding.

How many times do I have to say this? You can’t win the pennant playing nothing but home games. The BQ should be running candidates in the rest of Canada, not so much uniting distant minority Francophone communities, but rather threatening to do Bill 101-style legislation to Calgary and Saskatoon. I mean, the Conservatives are basically the Bloc Albertois, they don’t pretend they’re going to help anyone in the Maritimes, but people in Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton still love pretending they’re on the team. Why can’t the BQ do the same?

If you're wondering what Bill 101 is? This is it. Maybe, if this DID happen, you could recruit Metis in Alberta and Saskatchewan to actually support something like that? And, I guess Adam can't be troubled to do French diacritical marks?

NDP? A mix of snark and serious issues. Kind of like me with U.S. Greens:

I probably won’t be voting for the NDP this time around.

I was a member of the party once in the past, to vote in a leadership election. Jagmeet Singh was never my candidate, but he beat the candidate I voted for by a wide margin so I thought I’d give him a chance. But now his time is up, and he’s gotta go. ...

Canada needs a party of the left, and there’s a chance that the NDP will someday be that party. But right now they need to wake up, and the only for that to happen is for members of their traditional base to withhold their vote. So be it.

Side note for Merikkkans. In most parliamentary systems, because you don't have primaries for Congressmen, presidents, governors, etc., "being a member of a party" is something beyond what Merikkkans mean when they say "I'm a Democrat/Republican." It usually is an actual membership, like Freemasonry or something, with dues, etc.

Back to the main thread.

I understand. In modern times, from my knowledge of Up North, the NDP went in the tank when Jack Layton died and Tom Mulcair was elected to succeed him. And, contra anybody on Facebook who thinks he's either less than totally informed, or else biased toward Conservatives, the fact that McPhee once was involved enough with NDP politics to vote in a leadership election refudiates that.

One other thing that I would hold against the NDP? When in "confidence and supply" with the Liberals from 2021-24, they failed to ever hold Pretty Boy Trudeau to his 2015 promise to get rid of FPTP.

Greens? Even more scathing than the two full parties and the Bloc:

I will not be voting for the Green Party because I despise them. They do absolutely nothing and somehow collect six percent of the vote as if it’s rent. There is a longstanding misperception that because they all come off as hippies that they are part of the left. The Greens have never had a bigger presence in parliament, but climate change and the environment have never been less talked about than they are now.

I will say that Elizabeth May has grown on me, somewhat. She’s clearly having fun running her personality cult, and I’d certainly take hers over the wave of fringe beliefs that have been washing up on our shores in recent years. I’m tempted to give her credit as the only politician who has stood up to zionist bullying and survived, but honestly that whole affair over the Green Party leadership is so byzantine that I might be misremembering it. And anyway the stakes were so small that they count for literally nothing.

Ouch.

From where I stand, I know of the leadership tussle and how it related to Zionism. I didn't know anything about May allegedly having a "cult of personality," but I do know she led the party for 13 years, stepped down, then came back over Annamie Paul shitting the party bed with Zionism. I did not know she was born here in Merikkka. She bounced around to three ridings, in Ontario, then Nova Scotia, before being elected in British Columbia. (In Westminster systems in general, including the U.S. House of Representatives, you don't have to actually live in the district or riding you represent.) That said, Adam may be right; looking at her page, she, like Jill Stein, believes WiFi causes cancer. She also supports homeopathy. And other things. And, the Green Party is more factionalized than U.S. Greens, or so it seems — hard as that seems to be possible.

There's also the question over whether the Greens had a cheating by withdrawal strategery of sorts this year. 

I also wonder if May has other "secrets," like an investment problem like Stein has here.

Anyway, for my Edmonton Green friend on Facebook who was butt-hurt over this? Given the size of Canadian ridings and that Greens, Liberals and NDP all engage in strategic voting deals, yeah, why haven't they gotten past the two-riding mark?

Ignore the People's Party. Adam does snark on it, the Canadian Libertarians and both Communist parties. 

The Canadian Senate? Almost as non-democratic as the British Lords. Like the U.S. Senate, not proportional to population. Arguably the German Bundesrat is even more undemocratic. Members are appointed on a Land by Land basis by the government of each Land, and must vote in a bloc. The apportionment by Länder is not as unequal population-wise as the U.S. Senate, but it's at least as much so as Canada. The French Senate, though not as much as the U.S., has a rural-departments bias, and, unlike Canada's, or Germany's Bundesrat, has thoroughgoing powers. It, too, though, is elected indirectly. That's why I love it when people elsewhere lecture Merikkka. Tis true that we have that nutty electoral college. But, definitely at the time, we weren't the only place.

Anyway, my final personal angle? 

If I lived in Canada and were eligible to vote?

If I were in a riding that had a Green candidate, I'd probably one-third hold my nose and vote Green. If the Green candidate were totally non-viable, but the NDP had a viable candidate in that riding, I'd probably two-thirds hold my nose and vote NDP, maybe three-quarters.

If I were in a riding with no Green but an NDP? I'd do just as above.

No Green nor NDP? I'd spoil the ballot, like Adam. In a parliamentary system with an unelected upper house, that's all you can do. You can't undervote the particular race because your riding is the only vote there is. So, if NOTA is your desire, then you have to spoil your ballot to send a signal.

Now, all of this assumes I'm not in a riding where one or another of the two Canadian Commie parties are. If they're available in a district that has neither Green nor NDP, I'll pull that lever, rather than spoil the ballot.

==

As for the result? As noted above, Liberals have a lead in polls, but that doesn't mean a lot, per recent Canadian election history. In addition, Poliviere, per a US News piece, may be closing the gap again. I will make a couple of predictions, thought.

Whether Conservatives or Liberals win, it will be a minority government.

And, the NDP will fall to 20 (or fewer) seats.

Bye, Pretty Boy Trudeau

Well, Justin did it on his own terms. His resignation is official, along with a request to the governor-general to prorogue Parliament until just before a service-and-supply vote in late March.

So, he chased Freeland off, has no other clear successor, and wants the Crown's representative to give him 2 1/2 months of grace for that? Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives cannot submit a no-confidence vote during the prorogation period, per CBC. More weasellyness from Trudeau.

They can be submitted after that time. Trudeau seems to expect them, which means he's hoping that he can defeat them and stall out the next election until its scheduled October date.

Will that happen?

Depends on if Jagmeet Singh as NDP head thinks it's beneficial to his party or not, which in turn depends on how much or how little he has his shit together. I'm not hugely holding my breath.

That said, NDP leadership will probably see their party's performance as a referendum on Singh. The party did gain one seat in 2021, but is still far from its glory days.

Trudeau's resignation is effective as of his replacement as party leader, and not immediate. The first link notes the search normally takes four-five months, but of course will be expedited even without a formal no-confidence vote, whether a successful one or not.

Other than that? CNN's live streaming updates have lies by Pretty Boy, including that his one big regret was not getting ranked choice voting in Canada, though he doesn't use that word. Dood. When the NDP was in formal coalition, you never tried to get proportional representation, and never even discussed RCV.

Check Wiki's page or elsewhere on updates for when the 2025 election date is set.

World news roundup: Irian Jaya, Syria, Canada

Irian Jaya, or West Papua, per Counterpunch, continues to descend further in its own, Tolstoyean-specific, misery and hell. For the unfamiliar, the western half of the island of the New Guinea was, during Dutch colonial rule, administered separately from the Dutch East Indies. And, it held on to it after Indonesian independence in 1949, leading to the West New Guinea dispute in the early 1960s. Sukarno turned up the heat on the Dutch, pushed the US, and got Soviet weapons for a possible invasion. The Dutch turned the territory over to the UN. It almost immediately handed it to Indonesia, with Sukarno promising some degree of autonomy. Six years later, under Suharto, a rigged plebiscite fully annexed it to Indonesia.

Also per Counterpunch, with or without Irian Jaya/West Papua, but very much with it, it's a product of the Cold War. JFK leaned on the Dutch precisely because Sukarno cozied up to the USSR. In 1975, Ford ignored Indonesia's overrunning East Timor, abandoned to its fate by Portugal after the Salazar dictatorship was overthrown in Lisbon, because of fears/claims/worries East Timor would go Commie.

==

Another good piece from Counterpunch here is about the "forgotten Palestinians." These are the ones who are refugees in Syria, and have become entangled in Syrian civil war issues of the past decade-plus. Richard Falk notes the Assad government viewed them suspiciously after the start of the civil war, for a variety of reasons. Falk adds that the anti-anti-Assad angle of the "hard left," as he calls it, and if we're talking people like Aaron Maté, pseudoleftists is more what I call them, increases the problem.

==

Pretty Boy Trudeau is in serious trouble in the Great White North. As things stand now, he and his Liberals are going to get barbecued in the next Canadian federal election; fortunately, it's 18 months away. The Walrus has a longform, including longform fact-checking, about Trudeau's past promises vs performance and many other things, with segments from a longform interview sliced in between.

Near the end of the piece, Canadian housing prices (which are a LOT worse than most US big cities in Canada's main metro areas) get discussion. If Pretty Boy can't "get" this issue, he's sunk. 

After that, the Walrus piece notes that Trudeau will almost certainly go negative and heavily so to try to win.

Of further note, per Wiki? Almost all the Commons incumbents who are not running again are Liberals.

Two questions on my mind are:

A. Can the LDP get enough of their shit together to pass the Liberals, and, somewhat related

B. Could we see a coalition if the two block the Conservatives from a majority, but finish second and third, in whichever order?  

I assume if that happens, even if the LDP remains in No. 3, that the price of coalition is the Liberals turf Trudeau as party leader.

Winners and losers in Canada's elections

By parties, there's two clear losers and three clear winners.

The Liberals and NDP lost.

Greens, getting up to three seats, the Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives won.

Other losers?

Justin Trudeau individually, and also NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.

Now, Singh's defenders will surely argue that he was campaigning on a very limited budget. I'll argue back that he's been party leader for four years; whose fault is it that NDP finances are so bad?

Another loser?

Once again, Canadian polls seem not as accurate as American or British ones, as an alleged late NDP "surge" proves to be not even close.

Possible winner?

The Canadian public, especially if the NDP price of a full coalition includes electoral reform. But, pre-election, it did not.

Possible winner? The reality of Canada more aligning with the American myth of Canada, given how Singh faced down some ethnic-religious animosity.

In the air to a degree? The future of the NDP. Yes, it dodged minor party status. Yes, Singh raised some new platform issues. But, what all does a social democratic party stand for in a post-industrial country?

Canadian election thoughts on the #NDP from #JoeyBats

Yes, this message comes to your from Jose Bautista! In driving in Ryan Goins and Josh Donaldson with his mighty three-run homer to win the Division Series for the Blue Jays over the Texas Rangers,  he hit the most important homer in Toronto history since Joe Carter and his 1993 World Series-ending walk-off against Mitch Williams.

So, Joey Bats earns the right to be a Photoshopped spokesman for Canada's New Democratic Party.

That said, let's get to our seriousness, which starts with the latest polling.

How the HELL did the NDP fall from first, with a lead of almost 7 percentage points less than two months ago, to third, 6.5 points behind the second-place Conservatives?

First, the Conservatives were in second then, and their polling has traveled in a narrow band.

So, while some Canadian friends say that this is fallout from the Alberta election and Conservative scaremongering over Rachel Notley's provincial win, I disagree.

This is clearly a Liberal-Conservative issue. And, it's perhaps an issue of Americanization of Canadian politics.

As I see it, the surge is primarily due to pretty boy Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, who's got about one-quarter of his dad's depth and sells about as much snake oil as his American semi-namesake, quack Kevin Trudeau.

But, it's also about the NDP. Whether NDP leader Thomas Mulcair was running not to lose, or too focused on Conservatives, or what, after that late August lead, he's the party leader, and he's the one whose more responsible than anybody, even in a parliamentary system, for fumbling that lead away.

Maybe Mulcair can pull it out. Even though he's struggling to hold his own riding, primarily over the bigotry of the Bloc Québécois over the niqab issue.

Jack Layton is surely missed. But his valedictory letter is now four years old, and it looks like the NDP will likely squander victory.

Unless progressive-minded Canadians, like some of my friends, follow Joey Bats' advice. And Bautista gets to replace Jonathan Goldsmith as The Most Interesting Man in the World.

A seismic political shift in Canada?

A month ago, after Liberals and New Democrats in Ottawa combined to give Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper a backdoor no-confidence vote, I predicted Conservatives would win an absolute majority, mainly because Liberals looked weak and ineffectual.

Well, they still do.

But not the suddenly surging New Democrats.

A new Angus Reid poll done in partnership with the Toronto Star and La Presse puts Stephen Harper’s Conservatives at 35 per cent, the NDP close behind at 30 per cent, the Liberals at 22 per cent, the Bloc Québécois at 7 per cent and the Green Party at 5 per cent.

In Ontario, the Conservatives lead at 37 per cent, the Liberals are at 30 per cent and the NDP are just three points back at 27 per cent. In Quebec, the NDP are at 38 per cent, replacing the traditional front-runners, the Bloc Québécois. The Bloc are second with 29 per cent, the Liberals at 16 per cent and Conservatives at 14 per cent.

NDP leader Jack Layton campaigns./Photo Montreal Gazette.

Off the top of my head, that makes it look like the election could come down to British Columbia.

Unfortunately, in provincial elections there last year, the NDP for narrow political reasons opposed some renewable energy provisions supported by the Conservatives, who went on to win. Whether the NDP can recover or not, I don't know.

More on polling volatility from NOW Toronto:

(O)ne poll is indicating the Conservative will win only 133 seats; another goes as high as 162 (155 is a majority) for the Conservatives even though it projects 86 seats for the NDP.

In either case, the NDP looks like it will at least finish a solid second.

It also looks like Harper's Conservatives have learned another trick from the GOP: vote caging.

That said, I'll venture a new prediction: if the Liberals finish third, no matter who is first or who is second, Michael Ignatieff is out as party leader.

Speaking of, he's worried enough about the apparent NDP surge to attack NDP leader Jack Layton.

Canadian contempt for Harper is likely to fizzle

Doorknob, I love parliamentary governments.

Including the one to the north of the U.S., in Ottawa.

The Canadian Parliament, in a historic move, has made a parliamentary finding of contempt against Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The vote also is, in essence, a no-confidence vote, triggering parliamentary elections.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper faces Parliament.

However, Canada's economy is growing faster than the U.S.'s (whose isn't, these days?) and Harper will surely run on that.

The opposition used the maneuver to avoid voting against Harper's budget, another sign that it doesn't want to campaign on the economy, but rather Harper's personal style as prime minister.

And, how strong is that economy? Per Bloomberg's story on the vote, the Canadian dollar is trading at parity with the U.S. greenback.

Canada is in its seventh year of minority government, namely because the opposition parties can't get their collective acts together.

And, early on, I'll give 50-50 odds that Harper survives again, whether with a minority or not. All he has to do is gain seats, even if not a majority, and watch the tripartate opposition of Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, and New Democratic Party flail away at each other.

This is the same opposition that had opportunities to hold formal no-confidence votes more than a year ago and always shied away from that, after all.

And, the gun-shy attitude was lead by current Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who didn't sound incredibly inspiring in discussing opposition issues after the vote. The NDP's Layton is ill and I don't know how well other top NDP folks can carry that party's banner should he be forced to stand down for most of the campaign.

As for Harper? For American readers, I liken him to a cross between Reagan and Bush II. He has W's sometimes "challenged," often blunt straight-talking political attitude, but a bit of Reaganesque Teflon. Like both, he's lucky in his opponents, so far at least.

Carbon tax alive and well

Of course, the one place it’s alive and well is north of the U.S. border, but, it IS alive and well in British Columbia.

The Liberal Party (Canada’s rough equivalent of U.S. neolib Democrats) and Premier Gordon Campbell proposed a carbon tax in March 2008. Despite the strongly liberal New Democratic Party making a cheap recession-based election ploy of running AGAINST the tax as too regressive, the Liberals not only stayed in power, but in elections May 12, expanded their provincial power by six seats.

Most Canadian enviro groups came out strongly against the NDP, if not in explicit favor of the Liberals, easily seeing through NDP grandstanding.

That said, it’s surely true the amount of the tax is too low. But, it’s a start, and it’s still in place.

We’ll see if Team Obama’s generally timid environmental team takes note.