Tag Archives: Election 2019

Roundup: The big endorsement

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All three leaders were in Quebec yesterday, being one of the most important battleground provinces when it comes to getting out the vote. Justin Trudeau started off his day in Montreal to again make the pitch that voters need a progressive government and not a progressive opposition, and saying that this was the “dirtiest” campaign ever because of things like disinformation. From there, he made several stops on the way to Sherbrooke. The big news in the afternoon, however, was a tweet from Barack Obama, giving an endorsement for Trudeau’s re-election, citing the need for a progressive voice on the world stage (and taking some of the wind out of the sails of the Conservative claim that Trudeau has been some kind of “embarrassment” on the world stage).

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Andrew Scheer started his day in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, then headed to Essex, where he promised higher penalties for ethics violations (possibly flirting with constitutional challenges of what constitutes an administrative monetary penalty versus a criminal sanction), and headed into Ontario, eventually making it to Hamilton, where he was in the riding of the Liberal incumbent who was at her mother’s funeral that day – to which Scheer insisted it was okay because he made a charitable donation. (We also found out that he switched the location he planned to make the stop, and the pub owner of the first location was brassed off because he spent $700 preparing food for the stop and putting more workers on staff).

As part of his Quebec tour, Jagmeet Singh was in Hudson, Quebec, the birthplace of Jack Layton, to make his pitch of trying to claim Layton’s legacy. Throughout the day, he started making more untenable promises, like reopening an emergency room in Winnipeg – something that is explicitly provincial jurisdiction, while hand-waving about “levers” he can use, which he actually has none – particularly not in the Canada Health Act. But hey, he wants people to “dream big,” and never mind the Constitution or the clear division of powers therein.

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Roundup: Warnings, theatre, and lunacy

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Justin Trudeau began his day in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and after the usual warnings to those who are thinking of voting NDP and Green about a Conservative government, promised that if re-elected he would ensure that the province’s sole private abortion clinic would remain open by way of applying the Canada Health Act (though he didn’t specify how), before spending the day stopping in various communities on the way to Halifax, where he ended the day.

Andrew Scheer began his day in Quebec City where he promised to hold a first ministers’ meeting on January 6thwhere he would totally solve the intractable problem of interprovincial trade barriers…apparently through sheer force of his personality. (I previously wrote about this sort of cheap theatre here). He then toured a few other Quebec communities, finishing his day in La Prairie.

Jagmeet Singh began his day in Toronto, where he claimed that abolishing the Senate would somehow better represent Canadians, which is so much horseshit that I can barely breathe. Aside from the fact that it would require a constitutional amendment with the unanimous support of the provinces – something PEI and the rest of Atlantic Canada would not countenance as the Senate was one of the conditions by which they joined Confederation, but it would cut their representation in half, and the whole counter-balancing effect that the Senate’s structure has against the representation-by-population nature of the Commons would be out the window. It’s the most ignorant statement Singh could possibly make, but hey, applause lines.

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Roundup: Negotiation and bad timing

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On Thanksgiving Monday, Justin Trudeau headed to Windsor to boost the local candidates there (given it’s a seat they think they can take from the NDP), and he spoke about the New NAFTA and how the NDP wanted to re-open it and attempt to negotiate with Donald Trump, while also casting the Conservatives of being incapable of doing so either. Trudeau also refused to make any comments regarding a possible coalition, before he toured other smaller communities in the area and ended the day in Hamilton.

Andrew Scheer went to Winnipeg, which is currently under a state of emergency given the massive snowstorm that has downed power lines across the province. While Indigenous evacuees at the hotel where Scheer was making his announcement denounced his being there to campaign, Scheer went ahead nevertheless, made a confusing statement about making a personal donation to the Red Cross for those evacuees (which he then couldn’t give a straight answer about as to how much and when he donated), before he outlined a promise for a fiscal update within 45 days of the election, before raising the spectre of how terrible a Liberal-NDP-Green coalition would be.

Jagmeet Singh was on Granville Island in Vancouver to rally more supporters, where he started prevaricating about his coalition talk a day earlier, because maybe it was a bad idea to make such strong statements about it.

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Roundup: Voting and dreaming big

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Despite it being the Thanksgiving weekend, most of the campaigns were in full swing. Andrew Scheer took the day off, but Justin Trudeau was undaunted by the security issue of the previous evening, and went to York to pack Thanksgiving hampers along with the coach of the Toronto Raptors and got his endorsement. During the media availability, Trudeau insisted that the security scare would not change the way he campaigns – even though the whole bulletproof vest was unprecedented in Canadian politics. Trudeau then went to Newmarket where the crowds were so thick they closed the streets, and ended the day in Richmond Hill.

Jagmeet Singh was in Surrey, BC, where he held a rally and told the crowd that strategic voting prevents people from dreaming big. (Counterpoint: Dreaming big is all well and good but implementation matters). Singh also said he’d be willing to enter into a coalition with the Liberals in order to stop the Conservatives, which seems premature at this point in the game.

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Roundup: A security incident?

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While Jagmeet Singh went to Toronto and Brampton to hold “get out the vote” parties with the advance polls open, and promising to find new jobs for oilsands workers, Andrew Scheer was similarly in Burnaby where he outlined his priorities for his first 100 days in office – should he win the election – and named the co-chairs of the committee he plans to use to cut corporate welfare (which seems a bit presumptuous).

Justin Trudeau held a rally in Mississauga, which wound up starting 90 minutes late and when it did happen, Trudeau was surrounded by visible security and was wearing a bulletproof vest – and his wife was not on stage with him as had been planned. The party later did say that there was a security issue, but everyone was fairly vague about the whole thing, which is not unsurprising, but still alarming, particularly given that we have yet to see clear denunciations of threats of violence against the prime minister from those federal and provincial leaders who have been stirring up a great deal of anger for political gain, and who have put forward this notion that Trudeau is deliberately destroying the country.

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Roundup: Costed platforms away

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As we head into the Thanksgiving long weekend, Justin Trudeau kicked off the day in Ottawa with a rally about International Day of the Girl, before heading to Surrey BC to savage the Conservative platform release (more on that in a moment).

Jagmeet Singh was in Ottawa to unveil his platform’s costing (finally), and it was tepidly received in terms of grades from Kevin Page’s Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy. Much of it relies on new revenues that are highly uncertain, and some of their assumptions don’t really test the effect they would have on the broader economy, which could be a problem.

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Andrew Scheer headed out to Delta BC to release his party’s full platform and costing, and hoo boy is it chock full of cuts – though not the ones the Liberals are darkly warning about. That said, pushing back infrastructure spending loses momentum that was starting after funds allowed provinces and municipalities to do longer-term planning, and their talk of keeping the public service from growing and cutting via attrition while simultaneously pledging not to use outside contractors means that work clearly isn’t going to get done, and that will be a problem that they can’t just hand-wave away. Also, some of those cuts are basically a black box, and it would seem to play right into Trudeau’s hands when he can point to Doug Ford promising “efficiencies” in Ontario and promises not to fire anyone, and well, we’ve seen the opposite happen.

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Roundup: Pre-negotiation and a better debate

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In advance of the debate, Justin Trudeau held a photo-op with one of his sons in a pumpkin patch in nearby Manotick, while Jagmeet Singh was at a bistro near Parliament Hill to outline his party’s priorities were they in need of negotiating in a hung parliament, and conveniently, they were all planks of his party platform. Of those six enumerated, four were wholly or in part provincial jurisdiction, one involves building an entirely new tax system, and the final would drive out competition in the mobile phone sector, and then they also decided that electoral reform should be in there as well. (Look for my column on this coming later today). So there’s that. Andrew Scheer had no events, but his party did say that their full platform will be released today, now that the debates are over.

And then the final French debate, which was a far cry better than the hot, hot mess that was the English debate. Possibly learning from the experience, the format changed up considerably, so that there were better questions, more direct engagement, and far less cross-talk (though that did start to creep in during the second hour, when Scheer was trying to go after Yves-François Blanchet). Scheer and May were noticeably weaker in French, while Scheer and Singh in particular kept up their focus on getting their canned one-liners delivered, even if it was tortured to get them in. Nevertheless, while we once again didn’t learn too many new things, it was a far and above better performance for all involved than the English disaster. (Here’s Paul Wells’ take on the night).

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Roundup: Hand-waving through a plan doomed to fail

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It’s the final debate day of the election, so expect a couple of brief photo-ops, then a quiet day as the leaders do their final prep. Yesterday, Andrew Scheer went to the Roxham Road irregular border crossing in Quebec to pledge that he would end said border crossings – and then hand-waved through just how he planned to do so, given that the Safe Third Country Agreement is a treaty with the Americans and we can’t do anything without negotiating with them, and they are not exactly big on taking in asylum claimants right now and would be happy to see them wind up in Canada. And their “other options,” such as trying to declare the entire border an “official point of entry” for the purposes of the agreement won’t work, and will simply drive more asylum seekers to more remote crossing points where there are fewer controls, and more likelihood of death or injury. In other words, he was misleading about his plans to address the issue, and more than that, he invoked the spectre of MS-13 (which is an American border issue, not a Canadian one), gave the false notion that these crossings somehow let migrants “jump the queue” unfairly (there is no queue for refugees, and they don’t impact those we are bringing in from refugee camps), made the ludicrous promise to move more citizenship judges to the border to process claims faster (proximity has nothing to do with it, and trying to speed up claims has failed in the past because we still need to have procedural fairness and adherence to Charter rights). Immigration and refugee experts have thus proclaimed that Scheer’s pledge today is doomed to failure. On a related note, Scheer keeps saying his full platform will be out in “plenty of time” for people to make an informed decision, but advance polls have already opened on university campuses, and for everyone else tomorrow, so that’s not exactly time for people to start making informed decisions – and leaving Scheer open to the criticism that he plans to replicate the Doug Ford tactic of not releasing a platform and preferring to coast in on anger instead. And while we’re on the subject of Scheer’s dishonesty, he claimed that Elections Canada gave the okay for his campaign director, Hamish Marshall’s ad company to also be producing election ads for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers – but Elections Canada said that’s not true. So chalk that up to yet another lie on the tally.

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Justin Trudeau was in Markham, promising that the first thing he would do if re-elected would be to cut taxes for the middle class, which was essentially just a reannouncement of their basic personal amount cut. When answering questions, he offered some clarity to the situation around the spat between the Canadian Forces and provincial healthcare systems, which stems from the Canadian Forces being billed for higher rates than they would be normally for those services.

Jagmeet Singh, meanwhile, was in Montreal to address CUPE convention, with promise to fight privatization, in the hopes of winning back the labour vote.

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Roundup: Hypothetical subways and more traffic

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It was a quieter day, post-debate, but the leaders were all back on the road, mindful that there is still another debate later in the week. Andrew Scheer in Markham to promise funds for two Toronto subway projects – while lying about the Liberal record on said funding (the funds haven’t been released because there isn’t an actual plan for those lines yet) – and to further promise that he would fund any infrastructure project designed to ease congestion. Erm, except that this is a promise to induce demand because all of the data show that if you build more traffic infrastructure, that traffic just grows to fill it. It doesn’t actually relieve congestion – it just contributes to making it worse.

Jagmeet Singh was in Toronto to talk student loans, and when pressed about Bill 21 by the media, he said that if it made it to the Supreme Court of Canada that the federal government would “have to” take a look at it then – which isn’t really true, and they could put arguments forward at any court case along the way. This makes Singh’s position to basically punt the problem down the road for a few years, for apparently little electoral gain.

Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, went to Iqaluit in Nunavut, where he spoke about the North being on the “front lines” of climate change, and to meet with elders in that community. It also lets Trudeau make the claim that he’s the only leader to have visited the North during the campaign, for a few hours in any case.

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Roundup: Get away from that hot, hot mess of a debate

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The morning wasn’t quite as uneventful as one might have hoped – Justin Trudeau want to a school in Ottawa to talk about provincial cuts and how teachers feared federal ones, while Andrew Scheer announced that the Conservatives would make national museum admission free (which doesn’t really help with affordability, especially as most of these museums are in Ottawa), and that the RCMP Heritage site in Regina would be turned into another national museum. That said, he also took swipes about “political correctness” supposedly “erasing history,” which is false when there is a move to expand the historical record to include effaced minorities like Indigenous people. A few hours later, the Liberals held a press conference to point out that the Conservatives were planning a stunt during the debate to point to a website that would again recirculate the lie about a supposed “capital gains tax” on selling houses, which I will reiterate, is a lie. There is no such plan. That didn’t stop the Conservatives from sounding all-hands-on-deck over social media to circulate this lie over the remainder of the afternoon, and they even had a doctored version of the original recovered Liberal discussion document on their site to eliminate context (which they later had to remove to put the original up once they were called out on it).

And then came the Leaders Debate (not “Leaders’”), at a time slot too early for anyone west of Ontario to really get to watch it (likely so that the private networks didn’t have to unduly inconvenience their American programming). It was a gong show, where in order to accommodate six leaders, all of the exchanges were too short and the questions inconsistent, so most of the time the leaders focused on getting their canned lines out, to hell with the substance of it. And they all said misleading things. Maxime Bernier sucked up too much oxygen for someone who shouldn’t have been on the stage at all but was simply there to act as a spoiler. The whole way this was done, trying to please everyone, pleased absolutely no one, and we are all the poorer for it.

 

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