October 21, to be precise.
It's actually been pretty obvious that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was going to call an election from some time and his opponents have been campaigning for awhile. None the less, this is calling the election early and some observers feel that Trudeau is in trouble.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Following Canadian elections is exceedingly difficult, and not just because the US news doesn't give them much press nor because they have a parliamentary system and we do not. British elections or Irish elections are easier to follow. Canadian elections are hard to follow in part because post 1970 Canadian culture has made them that way.
Post 1970s Canada has developed a consensus culture in which reaching a consensus and not being confrontational has taken in a premium. Some would say that the premium has reached the level where it's actually detrimental. It tends to mean that issues become highly obscure and even if Canadians grasp what they are, those on the outside cannot as you have to be on the inside to know them. It also emphasizes the political left in peculiar ways as Canadians who hold opposite views to many of the platforms of the left tend to hold them simply internally as to not offer offense. There are signs, however, that this is ending.
Be that as it may, this definitely had a role in the last election as many Canadians were irate at Stephen Harper, but determining over what was nearly impossible. I directly asked several Canadians I knew who were highly politically informed and never received a real answer. You'd receive comments that he'd done things that were improper and maybe immoral, politically, but nobody was willing to ever say what they were. This contrasts remarkably with American politics in which people feel perfectly free to simply make stuff up.
So far this has been true, in spite of a bit of a shift in the wind that may possibly lead to windier weather. Very few Canadians on the political inside who oppose Trudeau have come out so strongly against him that you really know, from here, what the issues are. What is clear is that on the poltical right he's regarded to some degree as a cultural offense, and given his left leaning social nature, that position is fairly easy to discern. There are accusations as well that he hasn't lived up to his political promises and that he's been involved in political scandal, but again really knowing what the political scandal is, is really hard to discern outside Canada.
The front runner against him is Andrew Scheer of the Canadian Conservative Party. As the name would indicate, Scheer is a political conservative. He's 40 years old, making him younger that Trudeau. They are Catholic co-religious but it's likely that Scheer holds more traditional and observant views than Trudeau. Canadian conservationism has tended to focus on economic conservatism, but rumblings about Trudeau suggest that a conservative lead government would actually be moderately conservative, as opposed to Trudeau's left leaning government.
The same age as Scheer is candidate Jagmeet Singh, a lawyer from Ontario and a member of the Sikh religion who may be the coolest looking politician of all time. Wearing the traditional Sikh turban and sometimes a bicycle lapel pin, he can't be ignored. He's from the New Democratic Party, a Canadian social democrat party to the left of Trudeau's Liberal Party.
The Canadian Green Party is also contending for seats, lead by Elizabeth May (age 65). They're not going to take leadership, but they are trying to break out politically and they stand a fair chance of doing so, in my view.
This matters as in parliamentary systems the leadership is consolidated in the majority. The Greens won't take the majority, but the Conservatives need to worry about them as if the NDP, Greens and the Liberals are all returned in numbers smaller than the Conservatives, they can still form a government by way of a coalition "minority" government. It's something that occurs fairly frequently in parliamentary systems.
For that same reason the Bloc Quebecois, lead by Yves-Francois Blanchet (age 54) also matters. It'll be fighting for position against the Quebec Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP. It will never form a majority for the purposes of running Canadian and indeed its implicit position prevents that from every occurring, but it can be a swing vote that really matters in forming a government.
Indeed, right now the Conservatives and the Liberals are neck and neck, and the election is clearly too close to call. That this is the case should worry Trudeau as he's on his first term and it shows that the bloom fell of the Liberal rose under his leadership pretty quickly. Indeed, from the outside its hard to determine what the attraction ever was for the Trudeau in the first place, and a lot of it seems to be Harper fatigue combined with his personal appearance. Having said that, because it is a parliamentary system, the election truly will be decided at the local level.
Both the Liberals and the Conservatives are polling aright about 33%. The NDP is at about 13% which means that both parties better be thinking of things to pitch to the social democrat part, something that will be a lot easier for the Liberals to do than the Conservatives. The Greens are at about 10%, however, which means that if this holds the Liberals can take the government with the Greens and the Bloc Quebecois.
It'll be an interesting ride. The suspicion is that the Liberals will prevail but that the Conservatives will give them a run for the money. I suspect that if that's the case, that run will be a lot closer than even the pollsters, who think it will be close, suspect. I don't think a Conservative government is likely, but it's not impossible.
Unlike the American one, it'll be mercifully short.
It'll also be a lot more youthful. May, the Green candidate, is by far the oldest but would be youthful in the American context, being a good 11 years younger than the American Presidential front runner, Joe Biden. All of three of the candidates that are the front runners are in their 40s with Trudeau the oldest at 45. The Bloc Quebecois seems like an "old" party if you will, rooted in the Quebec of the 1970s, but its leader is 54, something that would be regarded as youthful in the American context. This is all remarkable as Canadians of all political stripes seem to have moved beyond the Baby Boomer generation in their politics, while the US is strongly sticking with it.
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September 19, 2019
In one of the weird scandals of a certain type that has been in the news the past couple of years, Time magazine has released a photograph of Prime Minister Trudeau in "brown face".
According to Trudeau, the photograph, was taken at the time he was a teacher at a private school and he was dressed as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights themed event.
Trudeau issued an apology that has been well received but the episode has been used as an item to criticize Trudeau by all of his his opponents. Trudeau has a made a point of being culturally sensitive and the 2001 photograph doesn't help that image.
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September 20, 2019
Well over the course of a day, the one incident became three, and now Prime Minister Trudeau has three incidents of racial makeup use to contend with, apparently one as a teacher, addressed above, one as a college student, and one as a high school student. The high school one was at a high school talent show. I don't have the details on the college one.
There's really no telling how these incidents will impact the Canadian election, if at all. They are racially insensitive and given Trudeau's age, these fit in the category of things which anyone should have been aware would be offensive at the time they were done.
But as recent events have shown, apparently in some places even fairly recently that wasn't the case. And with Trudeau there's certainly no evidence at all that he's racist.
So what this does is suggest that he's really superficial and more appearance than substance, something his critics have held all along.
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October 21, 2019
Well today's the big day.
As usual with things Canadian, there's been little news on the Canadian election down here, and hence I haven't reported on it for a month.
There's some recent speculation however that Scheer will pull ahead and replace Trudeau.
One thing that did rise up in the campaign late was some left wing panic regarding what appears to be rising conservatism, including cultural conservatism, in a country's whose post war emphasis on politeness had reduced discourse on cultural issues to the point of muzzling them. It became apparent very late in the campaign that suddenly Canadian conservatives were unwilling to continue down that path and they starting speaking on these issues in public for this first time in years, or rather decades. In turn, the left has tried to brand several, including Scheer, as religious extremist, by which they mean they're simply observant of their faiths.
Interestingly, this has resurfaced in an open way the old anti Catholic prejudice that exists in most English speaking countries in some form. Scheer is Catholic and observant and the left, in branding him an extremist, basically is simply noting that he's open about his seriousness in regard to his faith, in comparison to Trudeau who is also Catholic but who meets their approval by not linking in his faith with his political views in any discernible fashion. The new generation of younger Canadian conservatives (and all the Canadian candidates are much younger than the U.S. ones) can hardly be described as theocrats, but panic over the fact that they're suddenly willing to speak and be open about their views is causing the Canadian left to have heart palpitations in the same fashion that a conservative U.S. Supreme Court tends to in the United States.
At any rate, it should be an interesting day up north.
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October 22, 2019
And the result is. . . uncertain.
So uncertain, in fact, that the figures have changed as the final tallies come in.
But a result can seem to be predicted anyhow.
There are 338 seats in the Canadian House of Commons. As of 4 this morning NPR was reporting that Trudeau's Liberal Party had captured 157 of those seats, less than the 170 need to form a government on its own, while Reuters, more recently, was reporting that he'd taken 110 seats, which would be an electoral disaster for Trudeau.
We'll go with the Canadian National Post . . . for now, which noted:
Canadians headed to the polls on Monday to vote in the 2019 federal election. Justin Trudeau‘s Liberals will form a minority government despite the fact that Andrew Scheer‘s Conservatives won the popular vote. Jagmeet Singh’s NDP is expected to hold the balance of power. Elizabeth May‘s Greens didn’t do as well as expected, but the Bloc Quebecois had a strong night. Maxime Bernier‘s People’s Party of Canada didn’t win a single seat — including Bernier’s.The Post also puts the Liberals at 157.
So, like several recent American elections, the country's chief executive finds himself out polled by his primary opponent. In Trudeau's case, moreover, his party lost not only the popular vote, but majority control of parliament.
Because it is a parliament, however, that also means that he can still form a government and in this case the balance of power lies with a party to the left of his own, so Trudeau will go on to remain Prime Minister but Canada's already leftward government will be more so. And while the Conservatives dramatically increased the number of seats they held, the Bloc Quebecois did as well, reprising the history of Trudeau's father in which as he became more unpopular the Parti Quebecois became more so.
So the results are as follows.
The Liberal Party, which had held 177 seats in Parliament now holds 157, a twenty seat decline.
The Conservative Party, which had held 95 seats, now holds 21, a 26 seat increase.
Bloc Quebecois, which had held 10 seats, now holds 32., a 22 seat increase.
The New Democratic Party, which had hoped to do well and which is to the left of the Liberal Party, did badly, but ends up as kingmaker. It held 39 seats and now holds 24, a loss of 15 seats.
The Green Party, which pulled in 2 seats in the 2015 election, now has 3, an increase of one.
In terms of popular vote, country wide (which isn't how parliaments work, we'd note, in seating a government) the Liberals polled 5,915,950 votes while the Conservatives polled 6,155,662. While that means that the Conservatives out polled the Liberals, as it has also been with some recent American elections, in real terms the two parties basically tied for the popular vote. The New Democrats polled a respectable 2,849,214 votes and the Greens polled 1,162,360. If we consider that the regional Bloc Quebecois polled 1,376, 135, the Green vote is put in a new light.
Indeed, if we consider the popular losing party argument made in the United States that small states unfairly have too much sway due to the way the power is electoral distributed, that argument is even more valid in Canada (and I"m not saying its valid), where the Greens get only 3 seats while the BC gets 32, with the difference between what they polled being inconsequential. The National Post might be correct that the Bloc Quebecois had a strong night, and the Greens didn't, but their vote tally is pretty much the same.
Vote distribution wise, the spread is really telling:
Canadian votes by region and riding, by VulcanTrekkie45 from Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
As can be seen, the Liberals did well in strongly urban areas, Newfoundland and PEI, New Brunswick and the Canadian far north. The Conservatives did well in the west. The New Democrats did well in the Canadian center, basically, and Pacific coast and also in the Canadian north. And not too surprisingly the BC did well the only place it runs and cares about, Quebec.
Breaking down bit cities, Victoria British Columbia pulled to the far left and gave some seats to the Greens while liberal Toronto went solidly for the Liberals. Other big cities went the way you'd expect, more or less, except that in at least Vancouver the Conservatives did better than I'd suppose.
Also looking at this, and while Canadians hate the analogy, their elections are starting to look more and more like American ones. Basically the west is solidly conservative whereas the left depends on big cities, certain ethnicities, and the Pacific coast. British Columbia, in that analogy, comes out as the California of the north, which it is becoming in more ways than one. The Atlantic maritime provinces look a lot like New England, not as left as it may seem but not comfortable with the Conservatives quite yet, but starting to get that way. The prairie provinces and the Rocky Mountain region vote just like the prairie states and the American upper Western ones.
These are just preliminary results and can change, but it's unlikely. Therefore, what seems like to occur is that the Liberals, who lost 20 seats, and the New Democrats, who lost 15, will join together to allow Trudeau to be seated as a minority Prime Minister. So two parties that saw their support decline in the election still have sufficient seats, together, to form a government. And in fairness, the Conservatives are the only conservative party in Canada and have nowhere else to go. So there's no combination of seats that puts them in power.
So, Trudeau will keep his chair as Prime Minister, although he's obviously one in trouble. All of the Canadian liberal parties except the Bloc Quebecois, which is really a regional party concerned with only one area, did badly. When the left loses support in Canada, the votes go to the Conservatives except in Quebec, where they go to the Bloc Quebecois. So while Trudeau remains, he'll remain less effective and tainted by the fact that in order to remain in power, two declining parties needed to band together. Having said that, the Canadian left remains the home for most Canadian voters.
