Election 2015

[Oldgateboatdriver]

But he did change elections funding, undercut the liberal power bases in immigrant communities and the middle class, took advantage of liberal blunders and internal party factions, crippled the Bloc by exposing their hypocracy which allowed the NDP space.  He's very shrewd and clever.  He knows the liberals better than they know themselves.  In retrospect it's obvious that the liberals would turn too celebrity.  They still dream about the original Trudeau days.  Dion was a surprise but no plan survives contact with the enemy.

What's a hypocracy, a country led by horses? Or asses?  ;D

If you actually meant to say that about the Bloc 

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

But he did change elections funding, undercut the liberal power bases in immigrant communities and the middle class, took advantage of liberal blunders and internal party factions, crippled the Bloc by exposing their hypocracy which allowed the NDP space.  He's very shrewd and clever.  He knows the liberals better than they know themselves.  In retrospect it's obvious that the liberals would turn too celebrity.  They still dream about the original Trudeau days.  Dion was a surprise but no plan survives contact with the enemy.

So, the conservatives are better at getting their message out, raising money, and taking advantages of stupid things their opponents do? Time for the Liberal party to "Cowboy up", get serious, and raise votes through getting their message (or evening just having a message) out than just blaming the conservatives and being sore losers. The Liberals, in the 50s, 60s, and 70s did all these things to the conservatives so I dont really see a difference. In 1992 the conservatives weren't even a recognized party in parliament. So, Liberals, get serious and quit whining about your entitlement to be the government.

Blaming the conservatives, again, is to look away from the key problems that plague the liberal party. Namely, why were they not the natural party to lead quebec instead of the NDP (who have zero influence in provincial politics). How did they lose the votes in Toronto that they held for decades? Why do they lack the mental fortitude and courage to not elect leaders who have REAL policy and make REAL changes to their beliefs? Sure, it may involve them going to say, 2 seats a la conservatives in 1992, but politics is a marathon that the liberals treat as a sprint.

 

[a_majoor]

But he did change elections funding, undercut the liberal power bases in immigrant communities and the middle class, took advantage of liberal blunders and internal party factions, crippled the Bloc by exposing their hypocracy which allowed the NDP space.  He's very shrewd and clever.  He knows the liberals better than they know themselves.  In retrospect it's obvious that the liberals would turn too celebrity.  They still dream about the original Trudeau days.  Dion was a surprise but no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Changing election funding was done by that great conservative leader  Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien (and this was done in a fit of pique against his political arch enemy who had undercut his position as leader of the LPC; Paul Martin Jr.) If other parties took advantage of this, then they were more agile, flexible and adaptable.

The LPC took their "power base" in immigrant communities for granted, but also failed to consider that the values of many of these immigrant communities on social issues is almost diametrically opposed to the sorts of social values the LPC was promoting. Once again, the CPC did not take these voters "for granted" and went for the opening provided.

The Bloc essentially made themselves irrelevant, and Quebec voters were much quicker than I expected to realize that they risked being "shut out" of the corridors of power once it became possible to reach a majority without a majority in Quebec. The basic attitudes of Quebecers hasn't changed much, they traded a National Socialist party for a Social Democratic party.

To criticize PM Harper, Jack Layton or Thomas Mulcair for being a sound "generals" and taking advantage of the changing social, economic, demographic and political landscapes to achieve their ends is silly. The problem is the overall Liberal Party leadership (including the power brokers in the back rooms) failed to see the changes or failed to adapt their actions to exploit or mitigate them. Until the leadership of the LPC is purged, they are fated to remain in decline (the same thing happened to the PCPO, I noticed many of the people who surrounded John Tory also surrounded Tim Hudek, much to the detriment of Mr Hudek, the Party and Ontario in general).

 

[Underway]

What's a hypocracy, a country led by horses? Or asses?  ;D

If you actually meant to say that about the Bloc 

Lol no I didn't, I just failed to spell check as I was typing that on my phone.  I wish I was that clever.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Don't put words into my mouth.  I said political organizations.

Okay, I see where you are coming from. Thanks for the clarification.

 

[dapaterson]

Still more evidence of poor judgement by the PM in his senate nominations.  Fake "Doctor" and Senator Don Meredith, 50, apparently spent two years grooming a sixteen year old girl, then finally having intercourse with her earlier this year after she turned eighteen.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/06/17/teen-alleges-two-year-affair-with-senator-don-meredith.html

 

[Brad Sallows]

The most important thing Harper did was unify conservatives, just in time to take advantage of the Chretien/Martin civil war.

Every major party must deal with internal factionalism.  (Yes, even the NDP - think old-school CCF vs urban dilettante socialists.  The NDP has not really been the party of the proletariat for some time.  An opportunity exists for the Liberals or Conservatives to carve out more "average Canadians", if the latter can be shown - without convoluted discussions - that their interests are secondary to whatever is fashionable among the highly-educated and -monied set which controls Team Orange.)

 

[Underway]

Changing election funding was done by that great conservative leader  Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien.....

And Harper changed it twice more, once to reduce the individual amount some more, and another time to remove/reduce the amount of money parties got for a certain percentage of the vote from the federal gov't.  That second one has hurt the Greens and the Bloc most of all, as Bloc don't do their own fundraising and let the PQ take all the money. 

But yes Jean started the whole thing not realizing it would cripple his party who became really lazy in party organization.  Actually this might have been one of the main reasons the Liberals have had such a hard time in recent elections. 

They just don't have an ability to raise funds like the parties with the "fanatics" in them on both ends of the spectrum.  Liberals have been improving but its hard to compete with hard core conservatives and socialists in party donations.

 

[Remius]

So now James Moore will not be running.  http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/james-moore-conservative-cabinet-minister-leaving-federal-politics-1.3120148

I realise that every election some MPs will not run again.  I suppose that this is exasperated by the new pension eligibility requirements that has been put in place but I'm starting to think that CPC is going to have an incumbent problem.

Generally (not always) elections favour the incumbents.  But it seems that with so many leaving, and not just unknown MPs but also high ranking several solid ministers, that Stephen harper will be facing an uphill battle going into this election.

 

[Pencil Tech]

So now James Moore will not be running.  http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/james-moore-conservative-cabinet-minister-leaving-federal-politics-1.3120148

I realise that every election some MPs will not run again.  I suppose that this is exasperated by the new pension eligibility requirements that has been put in place but I'm starting to think that CPC is going to have an incumbent problem.

Generally (not always) elections favour the incumbents.  But it seems that with so many leaving, and not just unknown MPs but also high ranking several solid ministers, that Stephen harper will be facing an uphill battle going into this election.

They're leaving because they don't think their party can win the election.

 

[Remius]

They're leaving because they don't think their party can win the election.

And you know this because?

 

[Edward Campbell]

This poll, from EKOS, is interesting because it shows that the NDP have regained everything they had in 2011, but I think, they have peaked/are peaking too soon:

M Mulcair must, now, not just sustain, he must improve upon this momentum for another four months .... that's a really, seriously looooooong time in politics.

The Liberals are in a not bad place: they peaked way too early, a year too early, but there is still plenty of time time for  a bounce back.

The CPC are in a sweet spot ... they appear to have hit bottom last fall, now they are holding steady and they can try to help provoke and then exploit an real Liberal vs NDP battle royal.

It seems to me that the CPC's desired results are:

CPC:      37.5%
Libs:      22.5%
NDP:      25%
Others:  15%

That means, essentially, that the CPC must regain some ground, principally from the NDP.

Edit: spelling  :-[

 

[Underway]

....................
I realise that every election some MPs will not run again.  I suppose that this is exasperated by the new pension eligibility requirements that has been put in place but I'm starting to think that CPC is going to have an incumbent problem.

................

Pension eligibility issues and also some of these warhorses have been in Haper's gov't for a long time.  Average time in a job in Canada is 7 years.  Sometimes you get tired of the job and want to move on.

 

[dapaterson]

So now James Moore will not be running.  http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/james-moore-conservative-cabinet-minister-leaving-federal-politics-1.3120148

I realise that every election some MPs will not run again.  I suppose that this is exasperated by the new pension eligibility requirements that has been put in place but I'm starting to think that CPC is going to have an incumbent problem.

Generally (not always) elections favour the incumbents.  But it seems that with so many leaving, and not just unknown MPs but also high ranking several solid ministers, that Stephen harper will be facing an uphill battle going into this election.

While the media are unwilling to pick it up, #RideMeWilfred is trending on twitter.  This retirement may not be due to pension issues, but due to a family values problem.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>Jean started the whole thing not realizing

The concensus of the commentariat I recollect is that Jean started the whole thing under advice and wanting to turn attention away from shadier Liberal funding practices, but well aware that it would be a hardship upon those who so nicely were turning him out.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Well, who would have thought? Perhaps hell is freezing over: I agree with the Good Grey Globe's Jeffrey Simpson on two points ~ bot only on two points, I hasten to add ~ in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/with-liberal-plan-voters-have-real-options-for-change/article25039604/

With Liberal plan, voters have real options for change

JEFFREY SIMPSON
The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jun. 19, 2015

If the Oct. 19 federal election were to turn on the state of Canadian democracy, the Harper Conservatives would be thumped.

They have been caught offending electoral laws, repeatedly disrespected parliamentary oversight, tried to ram through changes to the elections law, stymied legitimate requests for information, grossly and systematically used taxpayer funds to promote partisan causes through television and radio advertisements, muzzled civil servants and turned ministers into human talking points and various other offences – all of this in the context of a fierce partisanship epitomized by, but not exclusive to, such ministers past and present as Pierre Poilievre and John Baird. And of course, the tone of this was set by a prime minister.

Do Canadians fret about what has happened? Clearly many citizens do, but are they numerous enough and do they feel sufficiently passionate about their concerns to vote in massive numbers against the government? Or are we talking about a relatively small number of voters who, because they follow politics somewhat closely, are genuinely upset but who do not represent more than a minority of the electorate?

Put another way: Is the state of democracy something for Ottawa insiders, media folks, political groupies and for the “elites” whom the Conservatives delight in deriding? “Hard-working” Canadians, Conservatives might feel, care little for this sort of blather about the democratic system and instead prefer issues that count in their lives such as taxes, jobs and families. They might be right in this assessment.

If so, then what the Liberals and New Democrats are offering by way of changing laws, institutions and attitudes surrounding Canada’s democracy will matter a little but not much in determining the electoral outcome. After all, these parties have been complaining about the Conservatives’ attitudes and disrespect for a long time, without their criticisms proving to be electorally decisive.

Remember former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff? He went on and on about the state of democracy, but didn’t find much traction. NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair spent political capital for a while going cross-country demanding Senate abolition (an impossibility in the real world) without much evidence that most Canadians care.

Perhaps, on the other hand, the debilitated state of democracy is now more salient after almost four years of a majority Conservative government. Perhaps Canadians have had more time to watch what’s been happening and to get sufficiently angry that more of them will vote on this set of issues.

The Liberals obviously hope so, since this week they delivered a blockbuster set of ideas, some of which rightly unwind bad Conservative ideas and practices, while others strike out in new directions.

As election planks go, this is a sturdy piece of work. Some of the ideas overlap with those presented by New Democrats; others are the Liberals’ alone. These parties together or singly in a new parliament – if given the chance to exercise power – could change for the better many aspects of our battered democracy.

There is a grab-bag sense about the Liberal ideas – everything from restoring home mail delivery (price tag, please!) to requiring Supreme Court judges to be bilingual, to a 50-50 gender quota for cabinet which, when mixed with regional and ethnic considerations, will make forming one even more complicated.

But there are some big-ticket ideas, the most striking of which is not fully formed. The next election will be the last under the first-past-the-post existing system, the Liberals declare, before promising a study of alternatives by a parliamentary committee and a decision on a replacement within 18 months.

This is a very hurried timetable for something so basic that it ought to be put to the people in a referendum. In addition, a parliamentary committee is likely to be consumed with partisan wrangling and fail to reach a consensus. A commission would be better, reporting recommendations to Parliament and the country.

Opening up the government is a basic thrust of the Liberal approach. If even half of these proposals and good intentions were implemented, democracy would be better off. Remember, however, that opposition parties usually denounce the practices of their adversaries in office, only to discover upon taking power that some of those practices come in rather handy.

Still, the Liberals deserve kudos for their thinking about these issues – as do New Democrats. Time will winnow out dubious ideas since the world always seems simpler in opposition; reality will destroy or modify others. But many of these ideas are doable, helpful and even urgent.

The two points on which Jeffrey Simpson and I agree are:

    1. "... the Liberals deserve kudos for their thinking about these issues – as do New Democrats;" but

    2. If recent history is our guide, we must agree that we are "without much evidence that most Canadians care."

And that's the problem: the Conservative have, I agree, played fast and loose with many of our institutional democratic values ~ but so did the Liberals when they were in power and so have NDP provincial governments. I do applaud "Team Trudeau" for bringing forth these ideas; I don't think they will mean much on voting day.

 

[Old Sweat]

In the two elections that led to the collapse of the Paul Martin government, the Liberals had tried to make major issues of (a) a claim that the Conservatives should agree to never use the Notwithstanding clause, and (b) an assertion that Stephen Harper did not love Canada. In the latter case PM Martin demanded that the media ask of Mr Harper if he loved Canada and then began to chant in a loud voice "I love Canada, I love Canada . . ."

Both items bombed horribly, although they probably were popular issues in Political Science seminars. Is the Liberal Party fixated on major policy issues that aren't?

 

[a_majoor]

And don't forget "Soldiers with guns. In our cities. In Canada"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMsqEph7a8I

I always preferred this one instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rEkFG5MNTk

 

[Brad Sallows]

And I agree with Mr. Simpson on this point:

"Remember, however, that opposition parties usually denounce the practices of their adversaries in office, only to discover upon taking power that some of those practices come in rather handy."

Hence most of what the NDP and LPC are currently saying goes into my bit bucket.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Andrew Coyne, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, says this is the most interesting election in modern times, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that newspaper:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/national/Andrew+Coyne+federal+election+unlike+seen+before/11152111/story.html

A federal election unlike any we’ve seen before

ANDREW COYNE

06.19.2015

There has never been an election campaign like the one on which we are now embarked. There’s a weird fin-de-siècle glow in the air, a sense of things coming unstuck, old certainties uprooted. Policies, parties, institutions, everything is in flux, to a degree I cannot recall any precedent for.

The 1988 election was an important one, but it was in most respects a conventional campaign, fought by conventional means, with the Liberals and the Conservatives duking it out as they always had. The 1984 and 1993 elections, dramatic as they were in result, were likewise conventional in every other respect; neither proved to be quite the realignments expected. Within a few years of their supposed extinctions, both the Liberals and the Conservatives were back in contention. I suppose one of the things we will find out this fall is whether 2011 was the realignment it was declared to be.

Why do I say this campaign is unique? Consider three factors. One is the sheer length of the campaign, the first to be held under the fixed election date law, or rather the first to adhere to it. Leave aside the formal writ period, itself potentially of unusual length (there are rumours of a mid-August call, meaning a campaign of more than 60 days — the first of such length since the 1970s). The real campaign, it is widely acknowledged, is already under way, and has been since at least the start of the year.

As I’ve written before, the fruits of this are already evident, in the form of a sustained run of serious policy proposals from all three major parties, with more presumably to follow, all to be subjected to much lengthier scrutiny and debate than would be possible in any previous campaign, with the notable exception of 1988, which was more or less a referendum on free trade. This will be the policy campaign to beat all policy campaigns.

If that were not already true, a second factor assures it: the debates. In the four decades after their first appearance, these followed roughly the same script, with minor variations. A consortium of television networks organized and broadcast them. There were typically one in each official language, with all the leaders present and a variety of topics covered. Millions of people watched, sometimes with decisive results.

This time, all those precepts have been overturned. With the Conservative decision to pull out of the consortium process, and the wild scramble that followed, the debates have multiplied and mutated. At this point no one quite knows quite how many there will be, or which leaders will turn up: it will depend, one presumes, on where they are at in the polls. But based on commitments made to date, it appears there will be at least five, with whole debates given over to the economy and foreign policy. This, too, is unprecedented – though whether the debates will prove the same draw, without guaranteed all-network coverage, is another unknown.

Last, there is the matter of the nature of the race. No one can tell, of course, where the parties will be in in the polls four months from now. But as things stand, with all three of the main national parties level at roughly 30 per cent in popular support, give or take a couple of percentage points, it is shaping up to be, at least at the start, a genuinely three-way race. It is literally impossible to rule out any one of the three parties — or a combination — forming a government. We’ve never seen that before, either. (No, not even in 1988 — the New Democratic Party’s brief run atop the polls had ended months before.)

Campaigns matter, especially campaigns of this length, and we can expect at least a couple more waves, like the one that carried the NDP to its recent lead in the polls, between now and election day. Such volatility is not new — it’s been building for some decades — but there’s reason to think there may be a particularly high degree of movement this time, at least between the NDP and the Liberals, as anti-Conservative voters try to decide which party is best placed to defeat them.

The danger of a bandwagon effect forming means that each party will have to be prepared to make dramatic pitches for support, should they find themselves falling behind: witness, for example, the democratic reform package the Liberals released this week. So the kind of cautious incrementalism we might have expected from previous campaigns seems unlikely this time. Moreover, with all three parties fighting, to some extent, on two fronts (yes, there are voters who switch between the Conservatives and the NDP), whole new playbooks will have to be written.

Of course, to call it a three-way race conceals yet another unusual aspect of this campaign. Outside of recessions, majority governments do not often lose elections. The last time a government in possession of a majority was driven from office when unemployment was below seven per cent was in 1957. Yet here the Conservatives are, bumping along at 30 per cent or less in the polls, as they have been for most of the last two years. Worse, just five per cent of voters rate the Conservatives as their second choice, meaning the Tories’ universe of available voters is just 35 per cent, versus 45 to 50 per cent for their two rivals.

And if they lose? If they win anything less than a majority? Then one or both of the other two form a government, both pledged for the first time to fundamental changes in the electoral system that could conceivably make the Tories unelectable — or at the least, lead to wholesale changes in the political landscape. There’s never been another election like it. There may never be another like it afterward.

National Post

I don't agree with everything Mr Coyne says, but he's correct in that:

    1. The nature of campaigning has changed, and I suspect it will never change back;

    2. IF either the Liberals or the NDP can (or want to) follow through on promises for electoral reform then it will be bad news for the conservative movement in Canada; and

    3. The Conservatives appear, for now, to have a firm hold on 30% of the vote. That's actually amazing after, say, 1993 when they were reduced to only two seats in the HoC, albeit with 16% of the popular vote.

As Mr Coyne points out, we're still four months away from the only poll that matters, but, for the moment, it's a dead heat between the Conservatives and the NDP with the Liberals in 3rd place by a statistically significant measure. I'll repeat:

    1. The NDP has, probably, peaked too early ... it will be hard to sustain their current support for four months, much less improve upon it in Oct;

    2. The Liberals are playing "catch up," e.g. by releasing policies earlier than they wanted, because M Trudeau's charisma has worn too thin; and

    3. The CPC is in a "sweet spot" IF it can shift enough of the the "Manley Liberal" and "undecided" votes into its version of the centre.