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Election 2015

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Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen, is an article explaining how Big Labour plans to mobilize the anti-Harper vote on 19 Oct:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/labour+unions+across+canada+preparing+launch+major+anti+harper/11344856/story.html
Ottawa-Citizen-Logo-160x90.jpg

Labour unions across Canada preparing to launch major anti-Harper offensive

GIUSEPPE VALIANTE, THE CANADIAN PRESS, MONTREAL GAZETTE

09.05.2015

Canada’s largest unions say if enough of their members vote strategically in key ridings across the country, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives will not get a fourth term in office.

The anti-Harper strategy requires a highly organized communications attack that will give the union-selected candidate in a targeted riding the ability to use scarce election resources more freely.

Workers say their assault will begin shortly after Labour Day and will be the culmination of months of preparation.

Union heads have been training workers across the country on election campaign basics while collecting data through polling and focus groups on which ridings to target and what messages resonate most with voters.

Two main organized labour groups leading the charge are the Quebec Federation of Labour, which will focus on French Canada, while Unifor will be a major player in Ontario and in the rest of the country.

QFL secretary Serge Cadieux said the plan starts with the union calculating how many members it has in key ridings where the Conservatives won in 2011 or could win this time around.

“For example, take the riding of Denis Lebel,” Cadieux said, referring to Harper’s former infrastructure minister who represents the Lac Saint-Jean region north of Quebec City.

“Let’s say we have 9,000 members in that riding and our research shows that the Bloc Quebecois candidate has the best chance of beating Lebel. I’ll meet with the candidate and tell them we will visit every single one of our 9,000 members in the riding to get out their vote and the candidate can concentrate on the other voters.”

The number of union votes in certain ridings can be significant: the QFL boasts a membership of 600,000 people in Quebec while Unifor claims to be the country’s largest private-sector union with a membership role of 305,000 people.

Offering to contact thousands of people in a riding on behalf of a candidate is a precious time-saver, Cadieux explained, and allows the lucky party to concentrate limited resources elsewhere.

Cadieux said the federation will support any party — be it the Liberals, NDP, Bloc — which has the best shot at winning the riding, in order to keep the Tories out.

Unifor President Jerry Dias said his union’s strategy outside Quebec is similar. However, his people will be supporting all the incumbent NDP candidates.

Dias said his union will focus on ridings with a “critical mass” of unionized voters, and will be encouraging strategic voting in ridings without NDP incumbents.

“We don’t believe we can just tell our members how to vote,” he said. “We are going to be very active — very active — on getting out Harper’s record. Our whole strategy is engaging our members so that they’ll participate in the democracy of our country.”

Dias said unions used polling companies to collect data on voters who chose the Conservatives in 2011 by relatively small margins and could swing to the Liberals or the NDP this time around.

Part of that data was collected by Engage Canada, an anti-Harper organization known as a third party. Third parties are not affiliated to political parties but can campaign for certain issues by collecting donations. Third parties face strict limits on advertising spending during election campaigns but can spend virtually unlimited amounts of money before Parliament is dissolved.

Two well-placed sources with ties to the union movement said Engage Canada spent — at least — several million dollars on anti-Harper ad-buys on radio and television targeting voters considered as soft Tory supporters.

Much of Engage’s money came from unions, sources said, which was neither confirmed nor denied by the organization.

“Engage Canada received donations from across the country … We did approach the unions and are very grateful for their generous support of our campaign,” a spokesperson responded by email.

Dias said Unifor was “a major supporter of Engage — we played a significant role. There is no question there was significant money raised but I won’t get into it.”

The research conducted by Engage will be used by unions in the targeted ridings, Dias said.

“Engage was incredibly effective,” Dias said, at convincing former Tory supporters to reconsider their prior choice.

The research (Engage conducted) “was about identifying the issues that Harper is weak on. He’s vulnerable on health care. He’s very vulnerable on the economy,” Dias said.

Unifor and the QFL’s invective towards Harper hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Conservatives.

Lebel, in a message to Conservative supporters, said the QFL has “secretive plans to target and defeat Conservatives. Even worse, they are working with other union groups to defeat Conservatives in 60 ridings across Canada. This is a clear attempt to return to the days when big money and secretive third parties influenced Canadian democracy.”

Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, said he is convinced this strategy will work — if members vote.

“The reality is we represent 3.3 million workers and if you add one family member to that equation, you’re looking at potentially 6 million votes,” he said. “If they go out and vote and bring their family along … there is no question we’re going to change the outcome.”

Dias said the messaging to Unifor members will focus on what he said were the Conservatives’ attacks on unions, the government’s scaling back of health care funding and what he said was the poor performance of the Canadian economy.

“There are no restrictions on us communicating directly with our members,” he said. “We know which ridings they’re in, we know which ridings we’re targeting and we are very organized when it comes to our communications strategy.”


 
MCG said:
I find Mr Trudeau comes across as an orange Liberal ... he may even be better fit for the NDP but ended up in the family party because of his name.  On the other hand, Mr Mulcair is a red to blue NDPer, and I have read a few commentaries about some of the party's base not being happy about it.  It is like the two parties stole each other’s leader.

Lysiane Gagnon, writing in the Globe and Mail, agrees, at least in so far as the left wing parties are concerned, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/parties-are-losing-their-sense-of-identity/article26227041/
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Parties are losing their sense of identity

LYSIANE GAGNON
Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Sep. 07, 2015

As the election campaign enters its sixth week, our political parties look like they are bursting with energy. But this is somewhat deceptive: behind the current scene, political parties in Canada are in decline as independent, thriving organizations.

Between elections, they’re losing their vitality and sense of identity. Their membership has drastically declined. And, for most bright and ambitious young people, politics is no longer a prestigious career choice. They’d rather spend their lives in front of a computer or on the noisy floor of a stock exchange than devote themselves to serving their fellow citizens, with the risk of being eventually booted out of their job for no good reason.

This evolution is not simply a sign of the times – it was precipitated by a number of reforms that all resulted in the devitalization of the political parties.

The first one is the drastic limits imposed on personal contributions, which have transformed the mainstream parties into creatures of the state. With the exception of the Conservative Party, which is still supported by a huge number of small donations from its core sympathizers, parties now basically live on public subsidies based on their past performances. The activists don’t feel pressured to contribute and don’t feel responsible for the future of the party, and the party brass doesn’t need to keep close contact with the party base.

This trend was especially striking in the recent evolution of the Parti Québécois and the NDP, two parties that used to have strong ideological commitments. With practically no objections from the rank and file, the authorities of the previously “social democratic” Parti Québécois embraced Pierre Karl Péladeau, a ruthless businessman who embodied everything that the PQ had been fighting against.

And NDP leader Thomas Mulcair managed to remove the word “socialist” from the party constitution, as well as severing its ties with labour unions with surprisingly few grumbles heard from the base. This was arguably a wise political move, but where were the militants who used to pride themselves on the party’s socialist tradition?

The parties also lost a great deal of their driving force by extending to all card-carrying members the right to choose the leader. Party activists are no angels, and they need incentives to devote a portion of their free time to the gruelling chore of grassroots organizing. The era when political parties rewarded their faithful with a job in the public sector is fortunately gone but, until recently, there was still a small incentive left for hard-working militants: the privilege of chiosing the leader by being elected as a delegate to the national convention. But this small honour is gone now that anybody, even those who never raised a finger to help the party, can vote for the leader.

The primary system represents a huge step further in this direction. In the United States, many primaries are open to anyone who wishes to cast a vote in the nomination for the president. In France, the process of choosing the candidate who will represent the Républicains (formally the UMP) in the 2017 presidential election will be extended to any outsider willing to sign a pledge honouring the broad goals of the party. The current president, François Hollande, was chosen in the same kind of socialist primary.

This system will probably come to Canada, because political parties believe that enlisting mere sympathizers (or onlookers for that matter) will broaden their appeal, and because, at first sight, primaries look more “democratic” than the traditional system. But is it really? Isn’t democracy best served with active, lively political parties?


I remember when there were social value issues that defined the three parties:

    1. The CCF was a semi-socialist party born out of the prairie co-op movement;

    2. The NDP, which displaced the CCF when the Canadian Labour Congress took over, was somewhat more socialist ~ nationalize the banks, etc;

    3. The Progressive Conservatives were the party of the small town/main street ~ a bad place to be, politically, when the country was urbanizing at a very rapid rate;

    4. The Liberals were the "big tent" party that embraced the Big Banks, Big Labour, Big Business and the Big State.

The only party that has remained fairly true to some of its roots is the CPC: but only, I suspect, because the NDP and LPC already had a lock on the big cities. Brian Mulroney tried to move the PC Party into Liberal territory and, ultimately, failed; he couldn't be as Liberal as the Liberals, themselves. Stephen Harper has, essentially, abandoned the vibrant, young, polyglot, progressive urban centres and has focused on the stable, middle aged, middle class, conservative suburbs and small cities (in addition to his rural/small town base).

All three major parties are courting the "middle:" the middle aged, middle class, moderate or centrist voter. Big is no longer beautiful; socialism is stale; the one area where Canada differs, markedly, from America is in socio-religious attitudes: we don't have a powerful religious right. In Canada we prove Yeats wrong: the centre cannot just "hold," it can grow and prosper and politicians must court it, abandoning principles as they do.
 
E.R. Campbell said:
All three major parties are courting the "middle:" the middle aged, middle class, moderate or centrist voter. Big is no longer beautiful; socialism is stale; the one area where Canada differs, markedly, from America is in socio-religious attitudes: we don't have a powerful religious right. In Canada we prove Yeats wrong: the centre cannot just "hold," it can grow and prosper and politicians must court it, abandoning principles as they do.

Thank God!

It means we don't have to worry either about jailing officials for refusing to carry out their duties because its against their "religion".

But otherwise, I also agree with Ms Gagnon that the parties are losing the battle where engagement of volunteers is concerned, but I am not certain it is a result of disengagement from politics. I have a strange feeling that many who would have been volunteers in the past have moved their engagement into cyberspace, as it is unregulated (as yet) by the Election Act, and these younger people think they can convince more people directly of their political ideas by engaging them one on one.
 
Unifor was largely responsible for Wynne carrying Ontario. A cautionary tale if there ever was one.
 
George Wallace said:
Agreed.  I have little faith in the Canadian voter making truly informed decisions.  Some here are very enlightened and informed, but I feel that it will boil down to last minute 'gut feelings' when the majority of Canadians mark their "X" on their ballot.  Only the 'diehards' will vote along their Party lines.

Believe me, others will say the same about your mark, whatever it is.

I have flip flopped since springtime, and could again - because I consider myself informed.

And I would tread very carefully labeling others as not being so.
 
David Akin reports that, "The Conservative Party of Canada - Parti conservateur du Canada just lost another candidate: Tim Dutaud is out. Apparently he is YouTube's "Unicaller" (Watch below). Dutaud was running against NDP incumbent Craig Scott in Toronto-Danforth, a riding he had no hope of winning. He's the second candidate the Conservatives lost today. The other guy out is Jerry Bance, caught on a CBC program a couple of years ago peeing into a mug ... Well, scroll down to have this one explained. Bance, too, was running in a riding the Conservatives were almost certain to lose."

More on Tim Dutaud, here, and on Jerry Bance, here.

                                                                                   
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I'm waiting for some of the usual voices to start their apologia - Ezra Levant pointing out that Gandhi is reputed to have drunk his own urine, and that therefore Bance should be forgiven...


This does not speak highly of the internal candidate reviews that most parties conduct; were I in the Tory war room, my question now would be "Of the 336 we didn't fire over the long weekend, how many more bozo eruptions will we have?"
 
Thucydides said:
I tend to doubt anything being posted by any individual polling company, and have even more doubt about polls commissioned by sources such as the Toronto Star.

I wonder if the Red Star isn't polling its subscribers.  Lately it has had the Conservatives way lower than all the other polls.
 
E.R. Campbell said:
The science (mostly mathematics) behind polling, market research, is solid and reliable. Companies and organizations as diverse as Apple and the Zillow Group (a multi-billion dollar US real estate/housing company) use it, almost daily, to figure out what you want and need. Ditto e.g. the Government of Canada and Greenpeace or the Liberal Party and Loblaws. Figuring out what you want (and need) by way of a career or wearable technology or pizza is a lot less complicated than figuring out what you want in areas like vision and leadership or what will inspire fear or hope in your heart.

One problem with polling is that it alters its own results. If there are enough polls indicating that e.g. the NDP are trending "up," then it is very likely that many Canadians will decide that they, too, "like" the NDP ... until something else, new and shiny, comes along.

Good market research is time consuming, painstaking and expensive. The results are, very often, not what anyone expects or ~ and this really matters in politics ~ wants. A good polling firm using innovative techniques might well be fired if its (very accurate) results run counter to what the party or campaign leadership wants (needs?) to hear.
I would imagine a polling company would lose all credibility and therefore future customers if they published results that their client "wanted" to hear and we're totally off. Polling companies got a lot of flak for screwing up the alberta(2011) and BC elections and a lot of people questioned their competency. They also took a lot of flak for not giving enough weight to the federal NDP surge.

They've turned things around as of late in large part because of these swing and a miss polling where they were laughingstocks. I don't think any one polling firm will want to be risking their reputation again, and in the case of 308.com, I doubt all the polling firms will want to risk their reputations. 308.com has been pretty spot on for a while now, I think their methodology can be trusted in regards to polling numbers.
 
Credibility?  The Red Star in 2 polls since August 24 has the Conservatives at 23.5 %.  The others in 8 polls since August 24 has the Conservatives at 29.175 %.  Does anyone think the Red Star is the slightest bit concerned about credibility?  They're too busy selling their agenda.

http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/poll-tracker/2015/index.html
 
E.R. Campbell said:
David Akin reports that, "The Conservative Party of Canada - Parti conservateur du Canada just lost another candidate: Tim Dutaud is out. Apparently he is YouTube's "Unicaller" (Watch below). Dutaud was running against NDP incumbent Craig Scott in Toronto-Danforth, a riding he had no hope of winning. He's the second candidate the Conservatives lost today. The other guy out is Jerry Bance, caught on a CBC program a couple of years ago peeing into a mug ... Well, scroll down to have this one explained. Bance, too, was running in a riding the Conservatives were almost certain to lose."

More on Tim Dutaud, here, and on Jerry Bance, here.

:facepalm:

Wow. Just wow.

Kinda appears to me that the team captain picking the CPC side is "just not ready"
 
Rocky Mountains said:
Credibility?  The Red Star in 2 polls since August 24 has the Conservatives at 23.5 %.  The others in 8 polls since August 24 has the Conservatives at 29.175 %.  Does anyone think the Red Star is the slightest bit concerned about credibility?  They're too busy selling their agenda.

http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/poll-tracker/2015/index.html
minus them then?

An outlier or two won't effect the methodology of three hundred and eight too much in the long run.
 
I have and have started reading John Ibbitson's new book, Stephen Harper. It is, I think, a good portrait ... very "warts and all."

Gerald Caplan, long time NDP insider, has read it, too, and in this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, he gives us his, unflattering, analysis of "what drives" Prime Minister Harper:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/what-drives-harper/article26243659/
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What drives Harper?

GERALD CAPLAN
Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Sep. 07, 2015

Gerald Caplan is an Africa scholar, a former NDP national director and a regular panelist on CBC’s Power & Politics.

Stephen Harper is a driven man, all agree, consumed by searing resentment and anger against Eastern Canada. So everyone knows what he is. But no one knows why he is that.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. In his new book, called definitively Stephen Harper, journalist John Ibbitson writes: “The government is autocratic and secretive because it reflects the personality and world view of the Prime Minister.” And again: “The government is autocratic and secretive because it reflects the personality and world view of the Prime Minister.”

So it’s perfectly reasonable to say that what drives our Prime Minister is much less important than the fact that he is driven, and in a direction that’s largely bad for the country. When you read the recent memoirs of Messrs. Mulcair and Trudeau, as I’ve reported in recent weeks, one learns disappointingly little about Justin Trudeau and quite a bit about Tom Mulcair. From Mr. Ibbitson’s book, you learn that even conservative-minded writers find much that is either mystifying or unpalatable about our Prime Minister, or both. And that includes both his personality and his works.

Still, curious people inevitably like to know why people believe and act as they do. We believe in cause and effect. As everyone knows who’s read any of the many books written about the Prime Minister, he was raised in placid, privileged suburban Toronto by doting comfortable parents. How he emerged as a mean-spirited, paranoid Albertan, deeply angry at the elites of Eastern Canada but yet perfectly at home with their powerful Albertan tar-sands counterparts, still remains inexplicable.

But those who expected that Mr. Ibbitson would present a much-needed tribute to Stephen Harper, there will be serious disappointment. In fact, Mr. Harper’s opponents could spend millions in their advertising just repeating the harsh assessments of close former Harper colleagues like Tom Flanagan and conservative writers like Mr. Ibbitson.

Here’s Mr. Flanagan on working with Mr. Harper: “He can be suspicious, secretive and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia. … I feared, as I still do, that he might some day bring himself down Nixon-style by pushing too hard against the network of rules constraining authority in a constitutional government. … [Like Richard Nixon, he] believes in playing politics right up to the edge of the rules, which inevitably means some team members will step across ethical or legal lines in their desire to win for the Boss.”

To which Mr. Ibbitson adds: “There are disagreeable aspects to Stephen Harper’s personality …He can fly off the handle … He is suspicious of others … this closed, repressed personality is capable of lashing out from time to time … his legendary temper. He can descend into rages, sometimes over trivial things. … His personality also comes out in the tactics that the Conservative Party uses against enemies – which are, in a word, ruthless.”

There is, of course, a debate among the political class about whether Mr. Harper has seriously dismantled the architecture and institutions of Canadian democracy. A considerable amount of literature – from many books to several well-documented reports from civil society groups –documents what seems to me a very strong case for the affirmative. No, Canada is not Mussolini’s Italy. But our democracy has taken many strong hits by the Harper government in the past decade.

The “no” side concedes that there have been some dubious actions by the government but that it’s a vast partisan exaggeration to claim democracy itself has been undermined.

Mr. Ibbitson works awfully hard to be judicious on the subject. He insists the anti-democratic claims are “nonsense.” But if I were on the hustings in the next few weeks, I’d have great fun hoisting Mr. Harper with John ibbitson’s petard. After all, he cites many (though by no means all) of the reasons Mr. Harper’s critics claim that he has undermined Canadian democracy. Indeed, Mr. Ibbitson himself questions whether the Harper government has been “autocratic, secretive and cruel,” and answers: “Yes, sometimes,” giving as an example that “The omnibus bills were bad bills. They abused the parliamentary process.”

Then I’d share with my audience Mr. Ibbitson’s outrage at Mr. Harper for: one, his government’s decision to deep-six the long-form census, a decision he attributes to the Prime Minister alone; and two, the PM’s gratuitous attack on the integrity of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Any opposition audience would be on their feet cheering when hearing Mr. Ibbitson’s conclusion that in his criticism of Beverley McLachlin “the Prime Minister had set a dangerous precedent, undermining the separation of executive and judiciary powers on which the whole democratic system of government is based.”

So this latest election-time book may well end up finding a more prominent place in the actual campaign than either of the memoirs of the leaders of the opposition. With his legendary terrible temper, Mr. Harper will not be amused.


There are many echoes of Mr Ibbitson's recent book (with Darrell Bricker), Thge Big Shift, in fact, Mr Ibbittson concludes with an assessment that the Harper years have fundamentally altered Canada, made it more conservative and less likely, ever again, to be driven, from the top down, from Toronto and Montreal.

Take Mr Caplan with a grain of salt: he really, really doesn't like the prime minister; but do not disbelieve all that he says. Stephen Harper is neither Louis St Laurent, a real, honest gentleman, nor Brian Mulroney, all "hail fellow, well met." If he is like any prime minister in my lifetime it would be Pierre Trudeau: private, introspective, and even studious, but given to snap, black and white judgments on complex, nuanced issues and to bursts of emotion.
 
E.R. Campbell said:
The science (mostly mathematics) behind polling, market research, is solid and reliable. Companies and organizations as diverse as Apple and the Zillow Group (a multi-billion dollar US real estate/housing company) use it, almost daily, to figure out what you want and need. Ditto e.g. the Government of Canada and Greenpeace or the Liberal Party and Loblaws. Figuring out what you want (and need) by way of a career or wearable technology or pizza is a lot less complicated than figuring out what you want in areas like vision and leadership or what will inspire fear or hope in your heart.

One problem with polling is that it alters its own results. If there are enough polls indicating that e.g. the NDP are trending "up," then it is very likely that many Canadians will decide that they, too, "like" the NDP ... until something else, new and shiny, comes along.

Good market research is time consuming, painstaking and expensive. The results are, very often, not what anyone expects or ~ and this really matters in politics ~ wants. A good polling firm using innovative techniques might well be fired if its (very accurate) results run counter to what the party or campaign leadership wants (needs?) to hear.

As Mitt Romney's campaign found out in 2012.
 
>There is, of course, a debate among the political class about whether Mr. Harper has seriously dismantled the architecture and institutions of Canadian democracy.

Maybe a good place to start is defining what each of the participants has in his mind as a meaning for "democracy".  The word has ceased to have any meaningful use when it is just thrown out without identifying which framework or institution has been altered.  A shopping list of special interests, for example, is not what I have in mind as "democratic institutions".
 
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/support-for-conservatives-dips-on-response-to-migrant-crisis-poll-shows/article26246364/?service=mobile


New  poll conducted by nanos for the globe and ctv has,

NDP 33

LPC 31

CPC 26

I'm beginning to spot a trend. Possible sources of the CPC drop is the response to the refugee crisis. Which has been to say continue bombing,  take in 2500 refugees from syria yearly for the next 4 years.

Which looks terrible compared to the NDP 49000 and the LPC 25000.

A week is a long time in politics and that picture of a little Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach with a small Canadian connection has made this long time a bad one for the CPC.

Also mulcair is now the preferred prime minister if you believe the poll at 30 percent, trudeau at 28 and harper a dismal 25.

A most interesting election.
 
More on that pol in a report in the Globe and Mail which says that, "The Nanos survey conducted for The Globe and Mail and CTV News suggests many Canadians switched their voting intentions in recent days. The three-day sample puts support for the NDP at 32.7 per cent nationally (up 2.3 percentage points from a week ago), followed by the Liberals at 30.8 per cent (up 0.6 percentage points). Support for the Conservatives has slipped to 26.2 per cent (a 2.3-percentage-point drop) ... [and] ... With six weeks remaining until the Oct. 19 vote, Labour Day marked the start of heightened campaigning by political parties. Long weekends are considered to be key moments during election campaigns because friends and family come together to discuss politics, which can influence voting intentions."

The Globe and Mail article goes on to report that Nick Nanos suggests that, just half way through a very, very long campaign (six weeks to go) this could mean a two way race: Liberals vs the NDP. Maybe, but ... don't forget two remarks from long dead British prime ministers:

    "Events, dear boy, events"
                  Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, 1894 – 1986

    "A week is a long time in politics."
                  Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, 1916 – 1995

The ongoing Syrian refugee crisis is one of those pesky "events" about which "Super Mac" mused, and it can, indeed, bring down the CPC, but in the several "long times" between now and 19 Oct it can be overtaken by more, different "events" whcih can have very different impacts on all the parties' and leaders' fortunes.


Edit: corrected quote
 
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