- [2017] Declaring 2015 to be the last FPTP election and axing it because a non-partisan committee didn't choose the reform system Trudeau wanted
- [2018] Assaulting a reporter in 2000 and brushing it off: “I’m sorry,” the editorial alleged Trudeau to have said. “If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward.” and “There’s a lot of uncertainties around this. In terms of my recollection there was no untoward or inappropriate action but she was in a professional context. Who knows where her mind was and I fully respect her ability to experience something differently.”
- [2019] Wearing black/brown face as a 29 year old in the 90s and early 2000s on at least 3 occasions and not being able to admit how many times he's done it because he can't remember
If someone fell for his self proclaimed "feminist" label and didn't realize he's a hypocritical scumbag in 2018 I don't know what he can do to convince that person he's a scumbag today. All the evidence of his wrongdoings is out there in the open.
He hasn't been caught on camera saying women let him grab them by the pussy but that isn't evidence he doesn't think it.
What's the statue of limitations on this stuff?
W Bush got away with things most people wouldn't have as well (booger sugar) at the time.
That was one of the biggest issues I was rooting for, and they claimed "it wouldnt have benefit the system", which I mark as bullshit on the theory [1]
So I was always curious about the inside baseball of why it failed
[1] I did my Msc. thesis on game theory - not on public choice stuff but still I'd consider myself versed in the matter
And the multiparty committee that was struck to look at the issue refused to accept that, and recommended a mixed-member proportional system. Ranked ballots would effectively mean, in the context of Canadian politics, a strong bias towards the Liberals -- because in a Venn Diagram of voter preferences in Canada the Liberals almost always end up in the centre. So ranked ballots would effectively end the NDP and other third/fourth parties as an electoral force, or so NDP & Bloc & Greens analysts etc thought.
It's notable that Australia's ranked ballot system also seems to have narrowed choices there to a two party system and they have no left wing party equivalent to the NDP anymore.
The NDP favours a proportional or mixed-member proportional system and has since its founding in the 60s & the Conservatives don't want any reform at all.
So Trudeau killed the committee, gimped the minister in charge of it, and lied and said "the committee couldn't come to an agreement" -- which really meant: they wouldn't adopt the policy he demanded.
And that was the closing of that very briefly open window.
If Canada ever gets electoral reform federally it will be because the NDP wins power, by some freak accident. Except Singh has basically sunk the party.
> It's notable that Australia's ranked ballot system also seems to have narrowed choices there to a two party system and they have no left wing party equivalent to the NDP anymore.
It's been a while since I studied the topic, but that's a bad way to frame it. You have a set of policy ideas, which get aggregated in member constituents (congress in the US, parliament in Canada, etc.) and those get aggregated into parties.
Changing the voting system changes the voting power of policies against each other. Ranked voting for instance diminishes the electability of policies that people *hate* (so a lot of right wing culture war stuff for instance get reduced by ranked choice)
> because in a Venn Diagram of voter preferences in Canada the Liberals almost always end up in the centre
That was a very short term way of thinking on their end (no surprise from politicians tbh). The change in voting system would change what policies the parties are about over the medium-long run.
Even though the name of the parties might remain the same -- the actual discussion and policies being proposed change in response.
> The NDP favours a proportional or mixed-member proportional system
I'd be fine with that. I also like cardinal voting a lot tbh.
> the Conservatives don't want any reform at all.
No surprise there, they're coasting on the hilarious overrepresentation of suburbs and exurbs + FPTP being a broken piece of crap.
> If Canada ever gets electoral reform federally it will be because the NDP wins power, by some freak accident.
Canadian liberals will sink themselves like they did in Quebec IMO.
The sad truth is that it'll get us some wacko culture war right winger for a decade rather than a healthier center-left wing party.
Things looked fantastic for the NDP, and not good for the Liberals and their new young and inexperienced leader, Justin Trudeau, who seemed to only have his name and good looks going for him.
Until the latter half of the campaign, when three things happened: 1) Mulcair took a principled stand during the debate about Islamaphobia (anti-veil laws) in Quebec... while Trudeau waffled. 2) Canadian capitalism got freaked out about the idea of an NDP government... and ... most importantly ... 3) The Liberal pivoted on policy on two popular issues: Marijuana legalization and Electoral Reform... both things they had always been opposed to, and which were NDP policy planks since its founding.
They stole the policy items from the NDP, insisted that this would be the last FPTP election, and in the last few weeks of the election the polls shifted dramatically and the NDP have never recovered.
We did get cannabis legalization, but electoral reform never happened. It never will because any party that has enough power to enact would have too much to lose from actually enacting it.
The Liberals have "died" a couple times in the last couple decades and always re-emerge. Because Canadian capitalism will never ever let the other "left" party -- the NDP -- get elected federally. When it happened provincially in Ontario, Bay Street finance shit their pants and went on a capital strike and no how moderate they attempted to govern, they were railroaded and destroyed. Similar thing in Alberta, down to death threats and harassment, etc.
I prefer IRV ranked choice to FPTP. I prefer proportional if possible. I tend to really like cardinal systems [1].
I think the fact that ranked sometime leads to deadlocked systems is more of an issue of how representative voting is made (rather than the public voting system itself). You talk about mixed representation, which is a good idea for instance.
My main issue is that we don't change the voting system all that much, when it could yield massive societal benefits. I'd much prefer a ranked system to a FPTP system we currently have.
"Justin Trudeau also admitted to wearing blackface makeup to sing the Jamaican folk song "Day O" in high school for a talent show."
Source: https://time.com/5680759/justin-trudeau-brownface-photo/
> Jimmy Kimmel donned black paint over his body and used an exaggerated, accented voice to portray NBA player Karl Malone on The Man Show in 2003.
> In 2007, Sarah Silverman performed in blackface for a skit from The Sarah Silverman Program.
I don't think many people really realized blackface was problematic until sometime after 2007. Twitter started in 2006, so I imagine awareness improved in part due to twitter.
I think this happened to France early on. What they did was to force Google to pay no matter what. Optically, it looks like extortion and protectionist laws for incumbents too big to fail.
I’m not sure Canada can go that route though since they probably care about their relationship with the US unlike France.
After Google decided to block all news, the French government accused them of "not operating in good faith."
Nationalism is the sugar water they use to sweeten the deal to make it palatable to Canadians. People have a gut reflex to swallow this stuff because they are rightly or wrongly attuned to the threat of dominance from the US.
When Harper was prime minister, it was all about fossil fuel companies, defunding and silencing climate scientists, shoveling money into projects in the west and energy sector, etc. With Trudeau it's just a different pile of bullshit.
I'm sick of the dysfunction. It's a corrupt state, with corrupt, colonial foundations.
Canada is also in the midst of the biggest housing affordability crisis we’ve ever had. We’re in 3rd place in the world behind Luxembourg and Portugal for the most unaffordable housing, relative to income.
The U.S. may have some serious affordability issues in the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York, but large swaths of the rest of the country aren’t so bad. Most Canadians are crowded into a few extremely unaffordable cities.
But sometimes I talk to (born) Canadians - I’m an immigrant here - and they think of these issues as overwhelming, unsolvable crises that fundamentally undermine the viability of Canada as a nation.
And I think this isn’t a good problem-solving mindset, and isn’t the correct perspective either.
Or maybe I totally overinterpret their level of exasperation.
But that doesn't change the fact that Canadian democracy is under a lot of pressure with polarization and influence by wealthy special interests. We would be a lot better off if we had a better electoral system and were able to move toward more Scandinavian-style social systems.
First-past-the-post - FPTP - and wealthy interests have been here for a long time now. The system as it exists today works insanely great. This came to pass in spite of FPTP and the wealthy interest (hell, maybe even in part because of them).
Because the problems here are minor, the changes to the system should be mild, not radical. You don't give a complicated mechanism a big kick hoping to take it from 99% to 100% efficiency. You fine-tune it very carefully. Big kicks are for going from 0% to 50%.
I'm 50 next year, and have been politically conscious since I was a teen.. so have seen a half a century of it.
In particular the decimation of the health care system has just been slow and terrible to watch. Destruction of green spaces, sprawl, and difficulty of living in the GTA. Destruction of farmland, garbage on the beaches, overcrowding in almost every tourist or recreational area near Toronto. Nasty political polarization and viciousness. Racism and bigotry on the rise. And worst of all, that housing has become inconceivably expensive for working class people.
I wouldn't call the problems -- especially the trend line of them -- minor.
The expectation for previous generations was improvement of quality of life over generations. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.
Again, I blame both major political parties. Liberals just happen to be wearing the hat right now federally.
This system can take care of every problem you mention with a couple of tweaks. Now "tweak" doesn't mean it's easy or will work instantly; it might take decades and consume entire political careers. But there's no need for a total re-imagining, or a doom-and-gloom outlook.
Most bad things I've noticed in my time here (GTA + Calgary) can be fixed by cheap housing. This is a matter of political will - there's a ton of space and a ton of capital ready to triple our housing stock in a year if they're allowed to build. Toronto doesn't have to be the Center of the Universe. Even if we insist on putting every tourist and immigrant in this one city, there's so much space around it, it could in principle be one of the biggest on the planet.
I'm not arguing for complacency. I'm saying let's not throw our hands up in the air.
The irony is the government says their intent was to “protect Canadian media by getting big tech to pay their fair share” and it is backfiring spectacularly. Having the opposite effect where there is less traffic going to these media sites, and will have a big impact on their bottom line from their innability to run ads on their own domains and make revenue that way.
Of course, this will just lead to another media bailout making them even more reliant on government subsidy - which the Liberal party will use as a wedge issue come election time because the opposition (which is leading and gaining in the polls right now) will want to defund them. Wether this would be successful as an election issue is yet to be seen, but there’s one thing that the Liberal party is good at is demonizing the opposition and if their gravy train is on the line I’m sure e media corps will gladly indulge him.
It’s absolutely sinister what Justin Trudeau’s government is doing. I used to think they were just stupid but it’s scandal after scandal after scandal with him. At some point you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.