US Politics |OT|

[Jumpin]

Jumpin said:

From what I understand, the Canadian liberal party (led by Trudeau) was more or less looking for an excuse to tighten border security against the US anyway.
Second, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario (and brother to the Crack Mayor who died a few years ago) has threatened to cut off energy from Ontario to the US in retaliation against Trump.

In Canada, it's fair to note that the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario are more like a neoliberal party, or like a Reagan era Republican party, while the Canadian Liberals are a social Democratic Party, similar, but further to the left than the Democratic Party. They aren't the same as the Conservative Party of Canada, which (from what I understand) lean more on the reactionary side of the spectrum, and are more about rhetoric, slogans, and culture wars than enacting good policy or good governance. But someone who has lived in the country longer than me can probably elaborate more.

As a note, there is still a lot of anti-immigration stuff, even among the Eastern Canadian Progressive Conservatives voters, but I'm unsure if there is much of a racial component to it from the voters - I work for a very conservative guy and he hires and socializes a lot with people of a variety of ethnicities (particularly Sikhs, Lebanese, and Brazilians). Don't get me wrong, there are racist communities here, but most of the anti-immigration stuff has to do with the perceived housing market crisis (which, IMO is fairly mild in Canada... well, relative to other places. It's comparatively cheap to live here, but if you are young, starter homes are almost non-existent - IMO, that's the crisis. You basically need to start at 300K CAD, but, those 300 CAD houses are fairly big with big properties - depending on where you live - I don't live in Toronto or Vancouver, which are notoriously expensive.

Well! That post got off track!

When I posted this two and a half months ago, the Liberal party of Canada trailed the Conservatives by 29%.

In the time since, the Conservative movement has collapsed, and the Liberals now lead by 2%

An update from Canada: 

Three years of Conservative dominance of the opinion polls collapses in two months. A few things led to this happening.

1. Conservatives have no solutions for people while shilling for the deeply unpopular oil industry.

2. Bombarding Canadians with irritating "verb the noun" style political ad spam with little depth and are quite grating to Canadians during a time of rising Canadian patriotism.

3. Much of that political ad spam does Trump style bashing of Canada, which in turn shows the Conservative government fund paying to associate themselves with the most unpopular elements of the US government.

4. General shift away from being swayed by pessimism and cynicism, Liberals = optimists, Conservatives = cynical pessimists.

5. The general incompetency of the Conservative Party's strategy. Their political messaging is really missing the mark, about as effective as very transparent strawmen or red herrings. In other words, they're not tackling anything real because they don't have much of a case. They're just making stuff up and hoping it sticks... and for anyone who's paying attention and has half a brain, it's not.

As a note, the political ideology of federal Canadian parties are as follows: Liberals (Center to left of center), Conservatives (Right of center to right) and NDP (Left of center to left), Bloc (Regionalism left of center), Greens (Green politics), PPC (Alternative für Kanada).

There's another story here, many NDP voters are also shifting to support Liberals in response to the Conservative attacks. Many of them for the first time.

At least when it comes time for me to swear allegiance to that fucking King, I won't feel so dirty doing so this time (yes, even if you swore allegiance to the crown in another country, you still have to swear again in Canada because technically, it's a different crown, just the same head).