Roundup: Incendiary headlines and endorsements

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There were a couple of items on the campaign trail that I wanted to mention. One is that a reporter asked Justin Trudeau about electoral reform today, for the first time since the election began, apparently, and he said that if there was consensus he’d consider re-opening it, but he remained in favour of ranked ballots. This was put under a headline of “Trudeau says he remains ‘open’ to electoral reform if Liberals re-elected,” and Twitter had a gods damned field day over it, and lo, the issue was re-litigated yet again, even though that headline didn’t really reflect his comments. (The CBC headline for the same Canadian Press wire story was more reflective of his comments). But writing up what he said isn’t incendiary and won’t make it look like he made a promise that he really didn’t make wouldn’t drive clicks now, would it?

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1439267428786221066

The other item of note was that two former military figures endorsed Erin O’Toole yesterday – retired Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, and retired General Rick Hillier. In both cases, it’s a bit icky because we generally don’t like to have the practice of military endorsements in Canada because our Forces are a far less partisan organisation, as well they should be. There are a couple of additional wrinkles here. With Norman, it has the ability of looking petty and score-settling because of the blame to go around the investigation that led to the charges of breach-of-trust with Norman (that were ultimately stayed). Hillier is also fairly dubious – not only because he is now tainted goods after the gong show of a vaccine rollout that he was in charge of in Ontario, but as a former Chief of Defence Staff, he should remain far more scrupulous in wading into partisan politics. This is not a trend that we want to encourage.

On the campaign trail:

  • Justin Trudeau was in Aurora, Ontario, to reiterate the choice at hand in the election.
  • Erin O’Toole was in Dundas, Ontario, to call the election “un-Canadian” and to decry its price tag of $600 million. (So, cancel all future elections to save money?)
  • Jagmeet Singh was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to insist he has a better plan for prairie families, and then met with some Indigenous youth near Regina.
  • The Star checks in with the Trudeau, O’Toole and Singh campaigns for the final weekend push.
  • The Liberals have now dropped candidate Kevin Vuong, and if he still wins he won’t sit in caucus.
  • With two days to go before the vote, the Greens released a partial costing of their platform promises – because they’re a serious party.

Good reads:

  • Stephanie Carvin and Thomas Juneau put some more context around the AUKUS agreement, and Canada’s exclusion from that pact.
  • My weekend column points to history as to why we can’t be assured that the NDP will hold the Conservatives to account in a hung parliament.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Incendiary headlines and endorsements”

  1. I’m super skeptical of this Erin O’Toole running away from the press stuff. His campaign admitted they are all about shitposting and the only way to get a story pop with the press and online crowd in to make it look dumb yet the underlying message still gets traction i.e. the Willy Wonka ad that set the narrative for the entire election despite no public health official saying this election was unsafe.

    Erin O’Toole wants left of centre voters to think he isn’t going to win so they split the votes and this ‘O’Toole running scared’ will get more traction then him leading in public polling and his supporters won’t care about answering or not answering reporters questions and the PPC eating single digits into ridings where the CPC usually win with 80-something percent of the vote isn’t the same as the usual vote split on the left of centre.

    The PM is running around ridings his party already holds.

    These are very good signs for the CPC.

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