Election 2015

[Ostrozac]

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/06/12/ontario-election-2014-results-a-live-riding-by-riding-breakdown-of-the-vote/

Correct me if I'm wrong but it looks as if the Liberals held Liberal Ontario (ie Toronto and any other place with a university) while the Conservatives held Conservative Ontario (agricultural Ontario - 519 and 705). 

Another way to look at it is those that provide funds to provincial coffers and those that suck funds from them (and indirectly from my Albertan pockets).

Given the scale of agricultural subsidies in Ontario, I'm not even sure that rural areas of the province actually do provide funds to provincial coffers. Quite frankly, the economy of Ontario is a mess; rural and urban alike.

 

[Edward Campbell]

There's an interesting piece in the Ottawa Citizen in which some CPC MPs reflect upon the defeat of their Ontario PC cousins. One of they key points is made by Erin O’Toole, the MP for Durham, who says that "Ontario’s election financing laws also played a significant role ... millions of dollars of union money was thrown into attack ads against Hudak and the PCs that benefitted the provincial Liberals." While it is unlikely that Premier Wynne will follow the federal lead and ban such donations, they will not be a factor in the 2015 federal election.

 

[Edward Campbell]

In this report, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, Campbell Clark sees Ontario as being more competitive:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/globe-politics-insider/parties-take-note-the-path-to-parliament-goes-through-ontario/article19175948/#dashboard/follows/

But I think there is another complicating issue for the Liberals and NDP: Quebec. It seems to me that the first battleground for the Liberals and the NDP is in Quebec and they, but not the Conservatives, are engaged in a three way race (a potentially renewed BQ is also in play) there. I think that the issues that matter in Quebec and the issues which the Liberals and NDP will have to embrace are antithetical to suburban Ontario. I will give the Liberals and NDP urban Totonro, Ottawa, Hamilton and Windsor, and I think we need to concede most (not all) of rural Ontario to the CPC (the NDP has some pockets of support, especially in the North-West) so it is the suburbs, some large like Mississauga and Brampton, some small like Port Colborne and Woodstock, where the seats are still up for grabs. It seems to me that the advantage is with the CPC: it can craft a platform aimed, squarely at suburban Ontario and they can be confident it will also appeal in most of the West (but likely not in urban Vancouver).

If they, the CPC, can hang on to many/most of the 18 seats they hold East of the Ottawa River then that can compete in enough of the 228 seats West of the Ottawa River to win about 160 (70%of the available seats (they won 73% of the seats West of the Ottawa Riven in 2011)) and give them, with say, 170 to 175 seats, a majority in 2015.

In an article in the Globe and Mail Lysiane Gagnon suggests that I am wrong to think that a "potentially renewed BQ" will be a factor in 2015. In fact, she says, the new BQ leader Mario Beaulieu means that the Bloc "will be marginalized, even scorned, by many mainstream sovereigntists" and "the road is wide open for [Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau] ... the Bloc will only get, at best, the support of the dwindling group of diehard sovereigntists."

 

[a_majoor]

In an article in the Globe and Mail Lysiane Gagnon suggests that I am wrong to think that a "potentially renewed BQ" will be a factor in 2015. In fact, she says, the new BQ leader Mario Beaulieu means that the Bloc "will be marginalized, even scorned, by many mainstream sovereigntists" and "the road is wide open for [Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau] ... the Bloc will only get, at best, the support of the dwindling group of diehard sovereigntists."

If the BQ runs a careful spoiler campaign, they should be able to siphon enough votes from the Liberals to keep many of the NDP seats in Quebec. Culturally Quebec is a Stateist polity (as Edward has mentioned quite often) and a Social Democratic NDP is the next best thing to a National Socialist BQ so far as most policy initiatives outside of sovereignty go. Given Tom Mulcair has suggested that 50% +1 is enough to declare sovereignty and independence, it would not be too much of a stretch to think the BQ and NDP could work together in a marriage of convenience.

 

[Remius]

If the BQ runs a careful spoiler campaign, they should be able to siphon enough votes from the Liberals to keep many of the NDP seats in Quebec. Culturally Quebec is a Stateist polity (as Edward has mentioned quite often) and a Social Democratic NDP is the next best thing to a National Socialist BQ so far as most policy initiatives outside of sovereignty go. Given Tom Mulcair has suggested that 50% +1 is enough to declare sovereignty and independence, it would not be too much of a stretch to think the BQ and NDP could work together in a marriage of convenience.

I see it as a vote split.  The NDP stands to lose out more than the Liberals will.  BQ and NDP splitting the vote with the the Liberals coming up the middle.  And JTs message of change and hope will resonate in La Belle Province, as empty as that might be.  But this is assuming the BQ gets its act together and with this new leader we see that it is as split and messed up as ever.  If you want to keep Liberals from getting seats in Quebec you don't want a resurgeant BQ.

 

[Edward Campbell]

It is very, very late ... mid 2014, but I wonder: will someone like François Legault or Françoise David be willing to jump from provincial to federal politics and lead some variant of either Coalition Avenir Québec or Québec solidaire in the 2015 federal election as an alternative to the BQ?

 

[jpjohnsn]

Have the most recent provincial elections across our country taught us nothing?  Prognosticating on what voters will do in 2015 based on polling, theories on vote splitting, or anything else, has become about as effective as reading entrails or casting chicken bones. 

 

 

[GAP]

Hey!! Don't disparage the chickens, the gave their lives for your prognostication abilities!!




;D

 

[Remius]

It is very, very late ... mid 2014, but I wonder: will someone like François Legault or Françoise David be willing to jump from provincial to federal politics and lead some variant of either Coalition Avenir Québec or Québec solidaire in the 2015 federal election as an alternative to the BQ?

Agreed.  Very late.  No, I see them trying to pick up the remnants of the PQ and solidifying their positions.  Legault will court the right wing and liberal sovereignists, Davis will try and pick up the left wing side of the PQ, Unions and what not.  I doubt both will jump to the federal side.

 

[Edward Campbell]

The Conservatives are, according to Andrew Coyne in this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen, clearing one issue off the decks for the 2015 election. In so doing, he suggests, they are making bad policy in the interests of good politics:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/national/Coyne+Reforms+temporary+foreign+workers+program+good+policy/9960515/story.html

Reforms to temporary foreign workers program not good policy

ANDREW COYNE, POSTMEDIA NEWS

06.19.2014

The unveiling of Jason Kenney’s reforms to the temporary foreign workers program was a sight to behold: a technical briefing, followed by an exhaustive ministerial press conference, accompanied by reams of supporting documentation, plus an op-ed piece by Kenney himself. Every minister should be so available, and so prepared.

And the reforms themselves? They will be widely praised, and should succeed in moving the controversial program off the front pages, adding to Kenney’s reputation as the safest pair of hands in cabinet. Unfortunately, that does not make them good policy.

Consider an employer in the manufacturing sector, who finds himself unable to attract enough workers for certain kinds of unskilled labour, at least at the going wage. He is entirely at liberty to outsource the work to a company overseas, paying a fraction of the wages he would have had to pay his Canadian employees. He can move the whole plant offshore if he likes, laying off every one of its current employees, and import the product he sells rather than make it here.
No government agency will forbid him to do so, or demand that he explain his decision to its satisfaction, showing what efforts he made to employ Canadians, and how many Canadians applied, and why they were not hired. No minister of the Crown will lecture him on what wages he should pay, or limit the number of overseas workers he can employ, or for how long. His name will not be published on some departmental website, as if in scarlet letters, for easier hounding by the media.

He can do this regardless of what industry he is in, or whether he lives in an area of high unemployment or low: without permission, without hindrance, and without paying a fee — in sum, without any of the long list of conditions, restrictions and caveats he would now encounter should he bring the workers over here. Why might he do that? If they were the sorts of jobs that cannot be done overseas, but are location-specific: service jobs, typically, which involve a certain person performing a certain task in a certain place, instead of making things that can be sent all over the world.

This is the crime of which these employers, whom Kenney vows to harass and punish with $100,000 fines, are guilty: operating a business while in the service sector. They “cost” no more jobs than their manufacturing counterparts. It’s just that the hard-working, low-wage foreigners they employ are in our midst, and visible to us, not toiling away in some sweatshop overseas we never see.

It was hard enough hiring foreign workers already. Anyone who imagines employers can simply pick people up off the street somewhere in Thailand has not begun to think of the logistical difficulties, not to say additional costs, this presents: It is highly unlikely many employers would do so to replace existing staff. But the legal and bureaucratic obstacles the minister — of employment, ironically enough — has now placed in the way will make it nigh on impossible. Indeed, the department calculates the number of low-skilled workers in the program will be cut in half, from an already minuscule 31,000 to just over 16,000 — fewer than one out of every 1,000 persons employed in Canada.

It is gratifying that the restaurant industry, in particular, will no longer be under the absolute ban the minister slapped on in April, when the headlines were hottest. But it will still find itself arbitrarily denied access to the program in areas of the country where unemployment is higher than six per cent. There is no particular logic to this: It is quite possible for high levels of unemployment (accepting six per cent, which is less than the rate prevailing in most provinces at most times in the last 40 years, as “high”) to co-exist with shortages of certain types of labour.

But wait. Why should we want to make it easier for employers to hire overseas? Shouldn’t we insist they hire Canadians first? No, for the same reason we should not when it comes to outsourcing. If others can do a job better or cheaper than we can, it makes sense to let them do it and focus on the things we do best. Lower prices in the traded sectors leave consumers with more to spend creating employment in other areas. There’s no shortage of useful work to do.

The minister contends he is removing a “distortion” in the labour market, when in fact he is introducing one. By restricting the supply of unskilled labour, he hopes to drive up wages. But ultimately what underpins rising wages is not these sorts of artificial efforts to shoehorn people into low-wage employment, but rising productivity — for which the recipe is more education and higher rates of capital formation, not preventing willing employers from hiring willing employees.

It certainly won’t help the foreign workers themselves, who will now be subject, as a support group, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, put it, to a kind of “mass deportation order.” Many had hoped to convert their demonstrable fitness for life in Canada into permanent residency, and ultimately citizenship. Those hopes will now be dashed.

Yet if any reform were needed, that remains the more promising route. If temporary foreign workers were not temporary, they would no longer be foreign. They would not be “taking jobs” from Canadians. They would be Canadians.

Coyne is right: this is bad horrible public policy; it stinks to high heaven; it is nearly criminally irresponsible. But: it appeals to an important part of the Conservative electorate: unionized workers in the suburbs around Toronto/Hamilton and Vancouver and they count for more seats than Alberta and Saskatchewan combined. Who else are people going to vote for in Alberta? Thomas Mulcair? Justin Trudeau? Most prairies seats are safely Conservative, even after this bit of policy vandalism.

Why is this bad policy? Because it stifles productivity by shackling management and making innovation illegal.

It is a demonstrable, unarguable fact that Canadian workers are lazy ... they are human, after all and they want to work less and be paid more. That, less input (work)/more output (gain, food on the table), is what productivity is, really, all about: getting more for less. That's it at the macro level, but, at the micro level, at, say, a local, suburban McDonalds, the situation is that the available labour pool will not (not cannot) work the hours/shifts that the employer needs to operate in a cost effective manner for the salary that the work is worth. The workers want some combination of better quality work (more shifts, fewer night shifts, etc) or more money ... who can blame them? I always wanted a bigger staff, a nicer office and a pay raise; it's normal; it's human nature. But an efficient and effective market needs balance and allowing, indeed, in my opinion, encouraging some low skill/low wage foreign workers provided an important safety valve: employers could pay the wages that a job is worth, not the level to which demand drives those wages.

But: this issue resonated with a constituency that the CPC needs, and, like Liberals and the NDP, the Conservatives will institute bad public policies in the service of good politics.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I think, bad policy or not, that it might work if they dovetail this with the new rules for Unemployment benefits.

i.e. - If you're on UI, you will take any job, that's available, within a 30 mile radius or you lose your UI benefits.

It'd be tough on people like laid off auto workers, who expect they only have to take another job with full benefits and $30\ hr, instead of a service industry job for less, but them's the brakes.

It is not the responsibility of the taxpayer, to support people in their pipe dreams. The unemployed need to face the hard reality that those, unskilled, high paying jobs are a thing of the past and sitting around waiting is not going to change things.

We, all the taxpayers, also have to break the culture of generational welfare where children follow in their parents footsteps and their children do the same ad infinitum. We should adopt a culture of workfare. No work? No cheque. There is plenty of parks and highways to clean and a myriad of other mundane jobs for them to do.

:2c:

 

[Edward Campbell]

I think, bad policy or not, that it might work if they dovetail this with the new rules for Unemployment benefits.

i.e. - If you're on UI, you will take any job, that's available, within a 30 mile radius or you lose your UI benefits.

It'd be tough on people like laid off auto workers, who expect they only have to take another job with full benefits and $30\ hr, instead of a service industry job for less, but them's the brakes.

It is not the responsibility of the taxpayer, to support people in their pipe dreams. The unemployed need to face the hard reality that those, unskilled, high paying jobs are a thing of the past and sitting around waiting is not going to change things.

We, all the taxpayers, also have to break the culture of generational welfare where children follow in their parents footsteps and their children do the same ad infinitum. We should adopt a culture of workfare. No work? No cheque. There is plenty of parks and highways to clean and a myriad of other mundane jobs for them to do.

:2c:

:goodpost: ... and those thoughts are good value, recceguy; I hope some people consider them.

 

[Brad Sallows]

You can probably hire TFWs to do almost any job that doesn't have a high credential threshold (eg. medicine, law).  The assumption that each Canadian citizen displaced from employment by a foreign worker (paying - hopefully - Canadian income taxes on a lower wage or salary) will necessarily find re-employment is unsupportable, particularly in the face of recent employment trends in low- and medium-skilled jobs.

I recognize the economic (productivity) argument.  I also recognize that unemployed Canadian citizens have entitlements and voting rights.  Obviously we will never reach the absurd end state in which an army of foreign workers pays taxes to support a fully idle Canadian citizenry.  But how far along that path can we go before the wheels start to fall off?

There is more at stake than simple macroeconomic academic theory.

 

[George Wallace]

Unemployed Canadians pay little or no taxes.
Foreign workers pay no taxes.

No taxes means no income for government to spend on projects and wages.

Over simplified, but.....

 

[Edward Campbell]

Unemployed Canadians pay little or no taxes. ✔ True ... but they do pay e.g. HST/GST on consumption
Foreign workers pay no taxes. ✘ Errant nonsense. Every legal foreign worker pays the full panoply of taxes, deducted at source by the employer. What they don't do is consume social services, like EI, even though they pay for it, unless or until they become landed immigrants.

No taxes means no income for government to spend on projects and wages.

Over simplified, but.....

 

[stealthylizard]

Unemployed people on EI should take any FULL TIME job available to them, completely agree. Then make it so that the minimum wage is more than what a person gets collecting EI.  This is accomplished either by raising minimum wage to compete with the maximum EI benefit - back when I collected it was about $1500/month, net, in 2007 for BC. Or, reducing EI, so that the current minimum wage is more than what one would collect while unemployed.

EI is subject to income tax, as it is considered as income, and must be claimed on the tax return as income.

There is a need for the TFW program for specialized skills, even in the service industry, such as sushi chefs.  But it should be demonstrated that there is a specific need for using the TFW program.  For trades jobs, sure bring them in, with the understanding that the foreign worker has to take on a Canadian apprentice for the duration of apprenticeship program (4 years).

edited for spelling error

 

[ballz]

Just privatize income insurance already and let private companies work out the all the flaws in our system on their own dime.

 

[Rocky Mountains]

What bothers me about the temporary foreign workers program is that there are employers who staffed their restaurants just fine until they hired some foreign workers and haven't hired a Canadian since despite hundreds of applications from Canadians.  Foreign workers are less likely to quit, be hung over, talk back etc.  A lot of these business owners should be in jail for fraud because they have clearly been lying to the government.  In oil country it is hard for kids to get the crucial first jobs because foreigners are doing them.  In a lot of cases it's hire the Filippino instead of the native Indian.

 

[a_majoor]

What bothers me about the temporary foreign workers program is that there are employers who staffed their restaurants just fine until they hired some foreign workers and haven't hired a Canadian since despite hundreds of applications from Canadians.  Foreign workers are less likely to quit, be hung over, talk back etc.  A lot of these business owners should be in jail for fraud because they have clearly been lying to the government.  In oil country it is hard for kids to get the crucial first jobs because foreigners are doing them.  In a lot of cases it's hire the Filippino instead of the native Indian.

Do you think there might be a connection there? Canadians are often their own worst enemies (on all fronts).

 

[Edward Campbell]

In this video Globe and Mail journalists discuss the Trudeau effect and how the CPC might counter it.

In my opinion the CPC needs to shift its focus: don't attack M. Trudeau, per se, rather:

    1. Emphasize that the CPC has a sound economic plan ... ask the Liberals for their plan;

    2. Emphasize Stephen Harper the economic strategist ... don't try and make him nice, make him competent, don't attack M. Trudeau, he's too nice, ask him for policies; and

    3. Emphasize CPC results in Canada vs Liberal results in Ontario.

The NDP has a different problem, they might have to adopt a distinct anti-Trudeau strategy, especially in Quebec, emphasizing Trudeau's support for e.g. oil sands development and so on. As I have said before, M. Trudeau has a problem: the route to 24 Sussex Drive is through Quebec ... he must displace the NDP in Quebec and to do that he needs to run a campaign that will be less than popular in Ontario, where he must (another must) displace the CPC. It's not as easy as it looks.