Forty days after Justin Trudeau dropped the writ on Wednesday, September 11th, tomorrow — Monday, October 21st — will see the conclusion of the 43rd Canadian federal general election, as terrible, dispiriting, unfocused, frought and ugly an election as doleful Canadians have ever been privy to.
The graphic above represents VanRamblings’ prediction as to the outcome of tomorrow’s general election. We base our judgement on: Éric Grenier’s meticulous work on the CBC Poll Tracker website; a careful listen to the prediction made by respected political pundits Scott Reid and David Herle (and what Conservative party apparatchik Jenni Byrne refused to say during that podcast) on the most recent episode of Mr. Herle’s must listen to political podcast, The Herle Burly; and from in-depth discussions with senior party strategists in the four main political parties offering candidates in the election: the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and the Greens.
In what Jenni Byrne has called a shit election, only the New Democrats and the Bloc have run anything closely resembling an energized and winning political campaign, confounding the pundits, performing significantly better on the campaign trail and during the debates than anyone had predicted.
In addition to predicting the outcome of tomorrow’s Canadian federal election, today we’re going to weigh in on the various party campaigns.
The Conservative Party of Canada ran the second worst campaign in the 2019 Canadian federal general election, failing to move the needle at all (their poll numbers were mired at 32% throughout the entire campaign).
The Conservative message: affordability.
The response of Canadian voters, not to mention the Liberal party and the New Democrats: affordability at whose and what cost?
Cutting $54 billion in spending over the next four years would mean: no spending on public transit (or bridges) in Canada’s major metropolitan centres, from Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver, through to Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and all the capitals of the Maritime provinces — not to mention defeating any hope that work would occur to respond to our current pan-Canadian affordable housing crisis.
No Tory plan to address climate change, while committing to a $100 billion national energy corridor that was opposed by all but the Conservative premiers of Canada, a national energy plan that would be wrapped up in the courts for years and, like Trump’s wall, would never, ever be built.
Although VanRamblings is assured by our friends who are members of the Conservative party that Andrew Scheer is a “nice guy”, loves his kids and loves his wife, Andrew Scheer on the campaign trail displayed all the charisma of a kumquat, and a not particularly ripe, tasty kumquat at that.
Throughout the campaign the media caught Andrew Scheer in one lie after another (a Liberal / NDP coalition would raise the GST to 7% … uh no), caught him lying on his résumé (he was not a licensed insurance broker before getting into politics), he’s a dual Canadian-American citizen — although he was front and centre attacking former governor general Michaëlle Jean for her dual French and Canadian citizenship when she was named to the post in 2005, not to mention his hypocrisy in attacking former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and former NDP leader Tom Mulcair, accusing them of having divided loyalties as both had dual Canadian and French citizenship while holding public office. Glass houses and all that …
The icing on the cake to finish off Andrew Scheer’s woebegone campaign for office came only yesterday, on Saturday, October 19th (just two days before the election), when he and the Conservative party were caught out as having hired political consultant Warren Kinsella to run a vicious social media attack against People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier. And, oh yeah, at a rally in Ontario last night, the largest yet crowd at a Conservative party campaign rally began a chant of “Lock him up, lock him up” — referring to our current Prime Minister. Sound at all familiar to you?
Perhaps the biggest mistake of the ‘gang the couldn’t shoot straight’ Conservative party campaign was having Andrew Scheer insisting at every campaign event that he and the Conservatives would win a majority government come the evening of Monday, October 21st, and that their first order of business would be to cancel the carbon tax.
Why was this talk of a majority a major campaign faux pas?
Insisting that the Conservative party would win a majority government would have likely elicited two responses from voters: non-evangelical Conservative party supporters would be more likely to stay home if they believed a majority Conservative party government was a fait accompli — thereby depressing the Conservative supporter turnout — and … if low information voters who didn’t necessarily support the Conservative party, and those voters who had been unlikely to turn up at the polls (think voters age 18 – 34), also thought an undesired Conservative party government was in the offing, the potential for these voters (and their friends) turning up at the polls to do their part to thwart the potential for a Trump-like Andrew Scheer government would serve only to exponentially increase the turnout of this voting group. Tch, tch, Conservative party campaign.
VanRamblings believes that Justin Trudeau is, at his core, a shy introvert, given to a somewhat naïve (if generous) view of the world, who throughout his life has depended on the support of his friends and those close to him — particularly the women in his life, because as every good man knows, it is women who are more generally the smarter, more emotionally centred, and more authentic of the two genders — to keep him centred emotionally.
In the early part of Mr. Trudeau’s first term, when he and his lovely wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, were traipsing across the globe introducing themselves to world leaders, to let the world community know that Canada was back on the world stage, and that 10 years of a mean-spirited, right-of-centre Stephen Harper administration was now but a sorrowful feature of Canada’s past, Mr. Trudeau was in his element: a Liberal caucus who were 50% women, new funding of programmes for women and women’s centres, front page photos in Vogue magazine of he and his wife, and large portions of the U.S. electorate exclaiming, “Why can’t Justin Trudeau be our President? We don’t want Donald Trump. We want Justin!” Life was good.
And then the Jody Wilson-Raybould non-scandal happened, with Mr. Trudeau’s polling numbers plummeting, and the Prime Minister all but withdrawing from the public eye, the talk of sunny ways (certainly not reflected in Mr. Trudeau’s demeanour) long gone. VanRamblings believes Mr. Trudeau found the disloyalty of Ms. Wilson-Raybould to be personally devastating, so devastating it has resulted in a listless, near funereal campaign by the Liberal leader all these months later (although that, fortuitously for all of us, seems to have changed somewhat this past week).
That the Liberal campaign didn’t trumpet it’s many successes (e.g. no talk about their kept promise to lift CPP / OAS / GIS dependent seniors out of poverty) served only to exacerbate the failure of the Liberal campaign. Still, it looks as if Trudeau may soon manage a workable minority government, while gearing up to implement both a national pharmacare and dental care programme (thank you Jagmeet Singh, thank you NDP), so that’s good.
With almost no money, and no on the ground riding infrastructure, the NDP has run a near faultless, upbeat and positive textbook campaign that saw the leader, Jagmeet Singh, moving across the country to assure the Canadian people that hope and generosity of spirit, kindness and compassion still exists in the political realm — which it certainly did for Mr. Singh both on the campaign trail, and the NDP fortune enhancing prospects coming out of the two campaign debates with the other party leaders.
Only 2 months ago talk was about replacing Mr. Singh as leader. No more.
In 2017, 124,000 NDP members made it clear that they wanted the party to return to the values of Tommy Douglas, David Lewis and Ed Broadbent, and in Jagmeet Singh they found the leader who would represent what the NDP (and its predecessor, the CCF) have always stood for: compassion for working people, change for the better for working people, and ensuring the wealthy and corporations would pay their fair share. Welcome back NDP!
Those who stand for nothing, will fall for anything
The self-inflicted wound that became the Green Party campaign
Elizabeth May (a lovely person) and the Green Party of Canada, in 2019, ran the worst, most inept campaign in recent Canadian political history, the consequence of which will be dire for the Green movement across Canada, at the municipal and provincial level. A one issue party that stood for nothing other than fighting climate change (“Yes, folks, we’ve cornered the market on addressing our current climate emergency,” Ms. May might well have said. “The rest of the party leaders are just lying ne’er-do-wells — so that means you’ve got to vote for us, or vote for no one at all.”).
Canadians may reasonably expect that Ms. May will step down as Green Party leader of Canada at some point over the course of the next year, having done irreparable damage to the reputation of the Green movement.
So, let’s get a bit of history out of the way: in Europe, the Green movement arose out of the work of the far left Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s, who gave up violent direct action — industrial sabotage, blowing up buildings and infrastructure, and other forms of political violence — in favour of creating a Green movement that would enter government and fight against restrictions on immigration, advocating for women’s reproductive rights, supporting the legalization of marijuana, fighting for LGBTQ rights, having the state draft “anti-authoritarian” concepts of education and child-rearing, fighting against the dual threats of air pollution in the cities and the acid rain then destroying forests across Europe, fighting for civil rights, fighting against military incursions into developing states, and against state-sanctioned imperialism — well, you get the idea. The European Green movement is a progressive, far left-of-centre, multi-faceted civil rights and environmental movement — was in the 1980s, and remains so to this day.
The Green parties of Europe have held the balance of power, and more often than not sat in government for near 40 years, realizing substantive change as an activist movement well able to articulate the conditions necessary to create a fair and just state to serve the interests of all.
Not so in Canada. The Green movement at the federal level was founded by Jim Harris, formerly a far right member of the Conservative party, who was found to be so extremist that he was kicked out of the party, only to emerge as leader of the Green Party of Canada. Following charges of corruption, Mr. Harris stepped down as Green Party leader, and was replaced by Elizabeth May at the party’s convention held in August 2006.
Since her investiture as leader, Ms. May has focused her leadership, almost exclusively, on the environment and fighting climate change, on May 2nd, 2011 becoming the first elected Green Party MP to sit in the House of Commons, as the member for the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.
The Green Party has drawn candidates and support from two groups: the well-intentioned but politically naïve (with a surfeit of young, apolitical members), and those who are disenchanted with the old line parties (or parties that have an infrastructure, a broad and all encompassing raison d’être, and are committed to Canada as a diverse, inclusive nation).
Ms. May, personally, represents the best of the federal Green party movement. As a leader promoting the interests of women’s reproductive rights, diversity and inclusion within her own party, and issues other than the environment, not so much. Quite honestly, the Green Party of Canada doesn’t stand for much, which became all too clear during the course of the current Canadian federal election, during which the electorate discovered:
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Only 12% of Green candidates are visible minorities;
- Although Ms. May herself is a strong proponent of women’s reproductive rights, when it was brought to her attention that one of her (non-diverse, male) candidates was running on a strident anti-abortion message, she replied, “In the Green Party we have a diversity of opinion, and given that a core value of our party is that we don’t whip our candidates, and although I disagree with this candidate on women’s access to reproductive services, there is nothing that I can do to impact on his candidacy;”
- When Pierre Nantel, formerly an NDP member of Parliament who was kicked out of the party and recruited by Ms. May as a Green candidate in the Québec riding of Longueuil-Saint-Hubert, said in an interview that he is a Québec separatist, and as a Green party member of Parliament he would work towards separation, when asked for comment, Ms. May gave the same yada yada reply;
- The Green Party’s confused, errant position on cannabis;
- The Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa issued a “Fiscal Credibility Assessment”, giving the Green Party a failing grade respecting the party’s economic assumptions, responsible fiscal management, and transparency.
Kevin Page, the former parliamentary budget officer who heads the institute, says the Green Party costing is riddled with errors — for example the numbers in the detailed tables don’t match the overview totals. And it all appears to be based on outdated, 2018 fiscal projections. “To us, it looked like it was put together in a very hurried fashion,” says Page. “Somebody made a mistake.”
- And, oh yeah: at campaign outset, when 7 “senior” members / upcoming federal and former candidates of the New Brunswick NDP defected to join the Greens, Ms. May was all smiles. Up until it was reported that the number of defections was not the 15 she originally announced to much foofaraw, but only 7 — only one of whom was a senior party member. Not to mention, when the defectors who left the NDP were asked why they did so, almost in unison they said, “We come from rural ridings. No one we know would vote for a party whose leader wears a turban.” Ms. May remained silent when hearing of this bit of hurtful racism.
Well, the travails of a botched Green Party of Canada campaign goes on and on — that’s what happens when the media shines a spotlight on an ill-thought out policy platform, and an unfocused, disingenuous campaign, that serves only to reinforce the notion that the Green Party is, at its very essence, as is often said about them, “Conservatives who ride bicycles”.
The man pictured above is Yves François Blanchet, the leader of the Bloc Québécois — a year ago a moribund separatist party that had little prospect of winning any seats in the current federal election. How times change.
As little as two months ago, polls showed Justin Trudeau and the Liberals at 43% intended vote and running the board in la belle province, and winning as many as 60 out of the 80 seats that were up for grabs. No more.
With Mr. Blanchet running on a “Quebec for Quebeckers” and “ain’t no damn dirty Canadians gonna tell us what we can do with Bill 21″ — we mean business, and that means no turban-wearing miscreants in Québec. We don’t wawn ’em,” the Bloc Québécois could win as many as 50 seats tomorrow, giving the majority of Canadians the worst possible election outcome: an Andrew Scheer-led minority government — giving away the farm to Québec separatist Mr. Blanchet in exchange for his support (which Mr. Blanchet has said he would willingly give).
Even though Québeckers are at the forefront of the fight against climate change, and only 7% of Québeckers will cast a ballot for Mr. Scheer, why it is that Mr. Blanchet would agree to participate in an Andrew Scheer-led Conservative party government, for this reporter, beggars belief.
Monday night, when you tune in after 7pm to see the election results back east, if the people of the Maritimes have voted in only 20 Liberal members of Parliament, and if Yves François Blanchet has secured 45 seats or more for his party, the 2019 election will be over for Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party — at which point, you should prepare yourself for a far right-of-centre, Trumpian Andrew Scheer as Canada’s 24th Prime Minister.
