Trudeau Popularity - or not (various polling, etc.)

[Halifax Tar]

Watch for more hiring by Public Safety in the months before the "assault style firearms" ban takes effect (October 30, 2025). Every organization the Liberal GoC has approached to collect ands store these guns has said "no". Canada Post was the latest. Some provinces have said they will not allow Trudeau to divert their scarce police resources to chasing lawful gun owners instead of criminals. Watch for a new sub-ministry of Public Safety to pop up in order to deal with this mess.

Its nice to see some provinces just saying no this, I wish mine was one of them.

 

[Rifleman62]

I really can not stand/sit listen to Trudeau.

What impact is the budget having on polls? | Power Play with Vassy Kapelos​

 

[Good2Golf]

What a word salad…and the end of his clip said it all: “Starting right now!” Perhaps fairness should have started 1/11 of a CENTURY ago?

 

[Quirky]

No one is buying his shit anymore.

 

[ModlrMike]

Watch for more hiring by Public Safety in the months before the "assault style firearms" ban takes effect (October 30, 2025). Every organization the Liberal GoC has approached to collect ands store these guns has said "no". Canada Post was the latest. Some provinces have said they will not allow Trudeau to divert their scarce police resources to chasing lawful gun owners instead of criminals. Watch for a new sub-ministry of Public Safety to pop up in order to deal with this mess.

It's also interesting to see that Canada Post wants nothing to do with this fiasco.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/guns-firearms-buyback-canada-post-1.7181080

 

[Kirkhill]

Hope from Downunder.

 

[Kirkhill]

There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. Plenty of "elites" behave like they favour super-national government.

Tom Mulcair on Trudeau's budget

In the interview he references Mark Carney as being an alternative and how he is raising his profile. One platform that Tom mentions is an outfit called Canada 2020. This mob was referenced in Macleans some years back.

Inside the 'progressive' think tank that really runs Canada - Macleans.ca

How a small think tank called Canada 2020 gave rise to Justin Trudeau and became the country’s new nexus of power

macleans.ca

Here is Canada 2020 and its associates

Canada 2020

Canada's leading, independent, progressive think-tank

canada2020.ca

Homepage - The Progress Network

The Progress Network is building an idea movement that speaks to a better future in a world dominated by voices that suggest a worse one.

theprogressnetwork.org

Home

www.americanprogress.org

Known by the company you keep.

Justin
Barack Obama
Hilary Clinton
Tom Podesta
Keith Starmer
Tony Blair
Mark Carney

Not conspiracy....just shared beliefs.

 

[CBH99]

I really can not stand/sit listen to Trudeau.

What impact is the budget having on polls? | Power Play with Vassy Kapelos​

Who's worse to listen to tho...Trudeau or Freeland?

 

[rmc_wannabe]

Who's worse to listen to tho...Trudeau or Freeland?

Given the option between the two:

A possum with it's foot caught in a garbage disposal

 

[CBH99]

Given the option between the two:

A possum with it's foot caught in a garbage disposal

I concur. Nails getting dragged across a chalk board is a close second place...

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Hope from Downunder.

I watch Rita almost daily. Her program is a hoot.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Who's worse to listen to tho...Trudeau or Freeland?

I'll go with the bobble headed, twitchy mini me. Trudeau gets a mute button. Freeland rates a complete channel change.

 

[OldSolduer]

Who's worse to listen to tho...Trudeau or Freeland?

I am glad I don't have bricks available when Dear Leaders speaks. I would go through too many TVs.

 

[Kirkhill]

Further to "The Company You Keep"

David Frost on Tony Blair's Meritocracy.

Blair offers a terrifying glimpse into our future

We should pay attention to his messianic technocrats’ charter, given his evident influence on Keir Starmer

www.telegraph.co.uk

I don’t generally wish to send traffic to The Telegraph’s competitors, but if you can bear it, I urge you to have a look at The Times’s interview last weekend with Sir Tony Blair. Then contrast his approach to politics with the sadly departed Frank Field’s. Two Labour Party figures, two Christians – and yet how different their worldviews.

Frank Field came from a Christian socialist tradition that has almost died out in the Labour Party – more’s the pity, as it was the source of most of what is good in that party’s philosophy. Field wrote in his final book last year of Michael Oakeshott’s “emphasis on the danger of rationalism in politics”, of the need to recognise the limits inherent in human nature, the importance of “a sense of self-interested altruism”.

Blair runs a global governance organisation. Not surprisingly, his philosophy is quite different – and we must take it seriously given his obvious influence on Keir Starmer. He sees government in entirely instrumental terms. “The problem with countries that aren’t democracies is they’re fine if you happen to have really smart people running them, but if you don’t, there’s a problem.” Here, competence is the only test for good government: the important thing is not the system, but having “smart” people in charge.

Look around the world, though, and neither democracies nor authoritarian states seem to be particularly good at giving political power to smart or competent people. The system doesn’t select for that. The odd exception, like Singapore or maybe the UAE, about both of which Blair speaks approvingly, doesn’t disprove the general point.

But in any case, competence and smartness are not the most valuable qualities for leadership. Able and intelligent people can become prey to intellectual fads just as easily as anyone else – maybe more so – and take the most terrible decisions. Consider the poll tax, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, net zero, or the Covid lockdowns, if you doubt me.

Blair seems blind to this. Indeed he goes on to claim that “politics works when policy comes first and politics comes second. When you ask what’s the right answer to a problem and then you shape the politics around that.”

He isn’t, of course, unique in thinking this. This centrist dad worldview, the idea that men and women of good will from all parties can get together and find the indisputably right answer to our difficulties, is widely shared across the so-called centre ground of politics, from the Blairite Left to the supposedly “One Nation” Right.

It’s still wrong. There aren’t unambiguous “right answers” to problems in politics. Everything depends on the value system you bring to them.

Suppose you are trying to reform the benefits system, as Frank Field spent much of his life trying to do. If your priority is to encourage work, aspiration, and individual freedom, then you will arrive at one set of solutions. You’ll come to quite different ones if your primary aim is to reduce inequality and make sure absolutely no one can slip through the net.

Or: if democracy, national cohesion, and immigration control are your top priorities, then you probably supported leaving the EU. If you favour diversity, migration, and being part of a bigger power bloc, then you probably didn’t. It depends what you think is more important. The value system, the politics, comes first.

This is why competent administration, the capable managerialism that so many seem to wish for, simply isn’t enough on its own. In the end, however well done, it must fail. It’s no good being good at doing things if you don’t know why you want to do them. There has to be a value system that visibly drives actions.

And you have to win the arguments in public for that value system. That’s how to bring people with you. If instead you take the view that there are self-evidently “right” policies supported by all sensible people, and then reduce politics to the task of shaping public opinion so it supports them, that squeezes out political choice and turns politics into a technocracy. Blair says the country has had too much politics: I say it hasn’t had enough.

Yet that isn’t even the worst consequence of this way of thinking. It’s: where do you stop? If you think every problem can be solved by clever people, then why not try to solve every problem?

But there will never be an end to problems – which means there is no limit in principle to what the government can do. The only constraint is a practical one, and AI, digital currencies, restrictions on speech, or China’s emerging social credit system show that the limits to social control are weakening all the time.

So that’s the politics I fear if Labour wins the election: that of the moral improvers, the politicians who think they know best, and will not give up trying to make us live as they think we should. Give me the Frank Field’s any day. I’d much rather be governed by normal capable human beings who may have flaws but who understand human nature, than by relentless high-achieving busybodies with noble goals. Those people will never leave us alone until they have achieved perfection – and they never will.

You have to convince the 10,000 that your answer is not only the right answer but that it will be beneficial to most of them most of the time.

If you can't convince the 10,000 then you will be a lone voice in the wilderness. If you can, those that agree with you will call you a saviour while those that disagree will call you a demagogue.

....


Military version - don't give an order you don't expect to be followed.

 

[Lumber]

Further to "The Company You Keep"

David Frost on Tony Blair's Meritocracy.

Blair offers a terrifying glimpse into our future

We should pay attention to his messianic technocrats’ charter, given his evident influence on Keir Starmer

www.telegraph.co.uk

You have to convince the 10,000 that your answer is not only the right answer but that it will be beneficial to most of them most of the time.

If you can't convince the 10,000 then you will be a lone voice in the wilderness. If you can, those that agree with you will call you a saviour while those that disagree will call you a demagogue.

....


Military version - don't give an order you don't expect to be followed.

I don't necessarily disagree with the take in this article, however, using the UAE and Singapore were good to use as examples of successfully "giving political power to smart or competent people", because the smart competent people in power there weren't really "given" to the state, they create and really were the state.

The article seems to imply that there are only two extremes, and these two extremes are the ones I've mentioned many times on this site: elitism (Blair), and populism (Frost). The reality is you need pluralism; find the overarching goal you want (and what value system you want to achieve/live by), which should be a popular opinion, but leverage your experts to make it happen, because often times the smart and the stupid want the same thing, but stupid people want it done now and it ineffective ways.

 

[Kirkhill]

I don't necessarily disagree with the take in this article, however, using the UAE and Singapore were good to use as examples of successfully "giving political power to smart or competent people", because the smart competent people in power there weren't really "given" to the state, they create and really were the state.

The article seems to imply that there are only two extremes, and these two extremes are the ones I've mentioned many times on this site: elitism (Blair), and populism (Frost). The reality is you need pluralism; find the overarching goal you want (and what value system you want to achieve/live by), which should be a popular opinion, but leverage your experts to make it happen, because often times the smart and the stupid want the same thing, but stupid people want it done now and it ineffective ways.

Are people that disagree with us necessarily stupid?

Or do they just have different priorities? Do they value things differently?

Perhaps their kid's birthday cake is a higher priority than reducing the temperature at some point in the future.

 

[dimsum]

Are people that disagree with us necessarily stupid?

Or do they just have different priorities? Do they value things differently?

Perhaps their kid's birthday cake is a higher priority than reducing the temperature at some point in the future.

It’s too reductive to say that “disagree = stupid”. I disagree with some work colleagues’ political positions all the time but I acknowledge that they are not dumb people.

What I see is the difference between what I would say “short term” and “long term” thinking (and priorities), assuming that all the info people getting is correct and unbiased. If people don’t baseline that info and assume that something is the same, then this whole conversation is pointless if “climate change is fake news”.

That and “well we (Canada) can’t do enough so why bother?” Sort of related, but again - I think it essentially breaks down to whether the info is believed to be correct or not. Let’s say it is correct - then anything we do towards it would be a small step in the right direction, right? Sort of like combatting global child trafficking - there is no way one country can change it by itself, but it doesn’t mean that it should just throw its hands up in the air and say “oh well, we can’t change what [country X] does anyway, so what’s the point…”.

 

[Halifax Tar]

It’s too reductive to say that “disagree = stupid”. I disagree with some work colleagues’ political positions all the time but I acknowledge that they are not dumb people.

What I see is the difference between what I would say “short term” and “long term” thinking (and priorities), assuming that all the info people getting is correct and unbiased. If people don’t baseline that info and assume that something is the same, then this whole conversation is pointless if “climate change is fake news”.

That and “well we (Canada) can’t do enough so why bother?” Sort of related, but again - I think it essentially breaks down to whether the info is believed to be correct or not. Let’s say it is correct - then anything we do towards it would be a small step in the right direction, right? Sort of like combatting global child trafficking - there is no way one country can change it by itself, but it doesn’t mean that it should just throw its hands up in the air and say “oh well, we can’t change what [country X] does anyway, so what’s the point…”.

Let me know when you find that source of information.

 

[Lumber]

Are people that disagree with us necessarily stupid?

Or do they just have different priorities? Do they value things differently?

Perhaps their kid's birthday cake is a higher priority than reducing the temperature at some point in the future.

I'm not referring to people that disagree with us on the overall objective, but who may disagree on the best way to achieve that policy.

Look at Brexit. Now, I'm being hypothetical here because I don't know what is/would have been the best solution. But lets say the popular opinion was that they needed to tackle immigration and jobs lost to low-income immigrants. Ok, find, we accept that the objective of the state is to correct that with the over arching "value" that we want a country with low unemployment and jobs that are both fulfilling and pay enough to allow a decent standard of living. However, the populist strategy was "This is all the EU's fault, so we need to leave the EU!", but the expert strategy (meaning something studied and developed by people with years of experience dealing with labour and international relations) might be staying in the EU but developing some nuance, well funded, well supported plan (I don't know what it would be, but something).

So, to realize a "pluralistic" approach, you accept the populist view (fix immigration and the labour market) with the expert view (smart people figuring out how to achieve that). The populist approach would be just to do whatever the people are screaming to do (in this case, quit the EU).

A person isn't stupid, people are.

 

[Fabius]

I don't necessarily disagree with the take in this article, however, using the UAE and Singapore were good to use as examples of successfully "giving political power to smart or competent people", because the smart competent people in power there weren't really "given" to the state, they create and really were the state.

The article seems to imply that there are only two extremes, and these two extremes are the ones I've mentioned many times on this site: elitism (Blair), and populism (Frost). The reality is you need pluralism; find the overarching goal you want (and what value system you want to achieve/live by), which should be a popular opinion, but leverage your experts to make it happen, because often times the smart and the stupid want the same thing, but stupid people want it done now and it ineffective ways.

What defines a “popular opinion” ? How do value systems interact with “popular opinion “?

Edited to add: I don’t think the initial article and your depiction of a “value” are the same.