Tag Archives: Erin O’Toole

Roundup: Did Paul hit a glass cliff?

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Not unexpectedly, Green Party leader Annamie Paul announced her resignation yesterday morning, citing that she didn’t have the heart to go through the restarted leadership review process, and saying that she didn’t expect when she smashed the glass ceiling, that the shards would rain down on her and that she’d have to walk over them. Without denying that some of her problems related to racism, misogyny and antisemitism, I find myself somewhat conflicted about the notion that she is a case of a glass cliff.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442538999579561984

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442541082126913547

Why I’m unsure this is necessarily applicable is because the party wasn’t in a great deal of a mess when Elizabeth May decided she no longer wanted to be leader, and it was certainly doing well electorally (they had just won two additional seats for the first time ever federally), and they had some provincial successes that they were counting on. Unlike most “glass cliff” scenarios, it wasn’t like a woman or minority was brought in to clean up a mess or was outright set up to fail. But part of what happened is a problem that is getting more common in Canadian politics, which is that we have so utterly bastardised our party leadership selection processes and fetishised “outsiders” coming into parties to lead them that we have set up the expectation for someone like Paul, who had no political experience, to come in and lead a party as though it were an entry-level job. When Mike Moffatt talks about the pipeline of talent to replace a leader, that’s not unique to the Greens either – the federal Conservatives also suffer from that problem, in part because Stephen Harper actively killed the ambitions of anyone else in the party and surrounded himself with yes-men, so it’s no wonder that his successors have largely proven themselves to be duds (and Rona Ambrose was never intended to be a permanent leader, so any course-corrections she made to the party were largely undone by Scheer and O’Toole). Did Paul get mentorship and training to succeed? Erm, was there anyone in the party that could give it to her? Aside from Elizabeth May – which may be the problem. This is also a problem when you choose leaders who don’t have seats, and who lack the political judgment about how to go about seeking one as soon as possible (and when your sitting MPs refuse to give up their seat to the leader). There are a lot of points of failure here, including structural ones in how leadership contests are conducted – but I fear that simply calling this a glass cliff may be absolving Paul a little too much of her own culpability in her political demise.

Where the party goes from here we’ll have to see. May said she had no interest in being interim leader, though I suppose she will be back to being “parliamentary leader” for the party, though I suspect she may also want to make a run for Speaker as she has previously expressed a desire to do (which she will lose). But the party is going to find itself dealing with fairly existential questions pretty shortly.

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Roundup: Return of the two Michaels

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Friday was very much an exercise in life coming at one fast, as Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with American authorities, and hours later, the extradition order she was under was dropped and she was free to return to China. A few hours after that, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were on their way back to Canada, the fig leaf that their arrests were not hostage diplomacy in retaliation for Meng’s arrest completely gone, and they arrived on Canadian soil in the early hours of Saturday morning, with prime minister Justin Trudeau and foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau greeting them on the tarmac in Calgary. Spavor debarked there, Kovrig then continued onto Toronto, where he was met by his estranged wife and his sister.

With all of this in mind, there are questions as to where our relationship with China goes next. Garneau says that they are “eyes wide open,” and that they are now following a four-fold approach to China: “coexist,” “compete,” “co-operate,” and “challenge” – which seems to be a more articulate policy direction than the “tough but smart” that Garneau’s predecessor, François-Philippe Champagne stated several months ago. This certainly came up during the election, but the Liberals didn’t articulate much of a foreign policy in their platform, and we got very little in the way of debate on the subject. It is not insignificant, however, that Canada did lead a group of Western allies in a pact against the use of hostage diplomacy, whether practice by China or others (and there are others), so it’s not like the government sat on their hands the whole time either. It will also be exceedingly difficult to disentangle our trade from China – particularly in our agricultural sector – so it will be very interesting to see what this process looks like going forward over the next couple of years.

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Roundup: Knives out for O’Toole?

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Erin O’Toole’s future is under discussion, as a number of vocal MPs are coming out to support his continued leadership, and former Ontario premier Mike Harris is adding his voice to the call. But this is as other MPs are phoning up journalists, on a not-for-attribution basis, absolutely savaging O’Toole and the fact that he is a lying liar and an opportunist of the highest order, and that ultimately undermined their case during the election. (Threads here and here).

This is going to start resolving itself at the first caucus meeting, whenever that takes place, because it’s when the party is going to have to vote on which provisions of the (garbage) Reform Act they are going to adopt for the 44th parliament, including the provision about having the caucus hold a vote to start a leadership review process. Why this is important is one of the reasons that makes the Act garbage in the first place – it actually makes it harder for caucus to push out a leader because it establishes a threshold of 20 percent of the caucus needing to demand a vote before it can be held. That exposes his critics at a time when he is deciding on critic portfolios and things like committee chairs for opposition-chaired committees, and he can use that fear-or-favour system to punish his critics if they fail to meet that 20 percent threshold. If they didn’t have this threshold or this framework, we’ve seen leaders read the writing on the wall with far fewer MPs/MLAs going public, and resigning as a result. The (garbage) Reform Act provides protection for those leaders where it’s supposed to be putting the fear of caucus into them, and it’s just such a dark irony that once again, attempts to improve the system only make it worse.

And while there are a bunch of voices (especially over on the CBC) who seem to think that Andrew Scheer was pushed out for his loss, they have all apparently forgotten that he resigned, particularly after his use of party funds came to light. Whether that was an excuse is not really the point – it wasn’t simply because he lost the election.

Programming note: I am taking the weekend off of blogging entirely because I am exhausted from the election and need to catch up on some sleep. See you next week.

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Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

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Roundup: Stripping the riding associations

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In the wake of the election, we are starting to see a few post-mortem thoughts bubbling up, and this one caught my eye over the Twitter Machine on what went on in the NDP campaign:

https://twitter.com/JessaMcLeanNDP/status/1440366348341694465

This is troubling in several respects – it gives some context as to why the NDP couldn’t get the ground game in ridings where they thought they had a chance to pick up seats, and it explains why their campaign spent as much as it did. This shouldn’t be a surprise for the party however – they are a very centralised organisation, and 2011 was ample demonstration that they have very few grassroots organisations in whole swaths of the county. That’s why when the “Orange Wave” happened, you had a tonne of candidates who had never even visited their ridings – the riding organisations were pretty much just on paper, much like the candidates. A proper riding organisation would have held a nomination race for someone from the area, not a McGill student who signed up on a form and spent the race working Mulcair’s riding in Montreal. They didn’t nurture those grassroots, as shallow as they were, and lo, they lost most of their Quebec seats in 2015, and all but one of them in 2019, nor did they regain any in this election.

Ground game matters, especially in an election where getting out the vote is crucial. Grassroots organisations matter. They may have them in a few of their stronghold ridings, but it really doesn’t look like they have it very well developed in large parts of the country, especially in places where they think they have a chance at winning. But if they’re simply stripping their riding associations of resources – and from the sounds of it, carrying on with the centralised nominations – then that’s a sign of an unhealthy political culture, and not a surprise that they aren’t getting the traction that they’re hoping for.

Good reads:

  • Several of the tight races may not have definitive conclusions until the end of the week. In one of them, ousted Liberal candidate Kevin Vuong remains in the lead.
  • The defeat of fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan has both sides of the Indigenous fishing dispute saying that this points to the need for a resolution to the situation.
  • The Star profiles ten of the new MPs that won races on Monday.
  • Here are a few thoughts from Liberals and academics as to where Trudeau goes now that he’s returned another hung parliament.
  • George Chahal has won a riding in Calgary, which essentially makes him a shoo-in for a Cabinet position.
  • It sounds like Erin O’Toole will encourage caucus to vote for the (garbage) Reform Act provisions that allow a leadership review to be triggered.
  • O’Toole has also triggered a campaign review to see where they went wrong.
  • Jagmeet Singh thinks his leadership is secure, and wants to press Trudeau on wealth taxes in exchange for his support.
  • François Legault doesn’t regret his endorsements in the federal election, even though they amounted to little change.
  • Kevin Carmichaels gets some economic reaction to the election results, and posits that there is now more political certainty for the markets to react to.
  • Chantal Hébert makes her observations about the election results, including that Trudeau will start entering the “legacy phase” of his time in office.
  • Robert Hiltz remains unimpressed by what was on offer in the election, and in the results.
  • My column looks at why the election was not an unnecessary effort, and what some of the underlying narratives that didn’t get explored were.

Odds and ends:

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Roundup: Shifts on the ground

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So, that was the election – the overall seat count doesn’t look like it’s change much, but on the ground it shifted quite a lot in plenty of places, with Conservatives making more breakthroughs in Atlantic Canada, and the Liberals making a comeback in Alberta. Two sitting ministers lost their seats – Bernadette Jordan and Maryam Monsef, and Deb Schulte was trailing around the time I posted this and went to bed. Those shifts to count for something, and they will mean a different make-up in the House once it returns, probably in late October.

While you’ll hear a lot of talk about how this election was “useless” given the result, I’ve got a column coming out later today that addresses those concerns, but I also wanted to make note about the question of timing – Trudeau pretty much had to go when he did because any later would have run into the municipal elections in Quebec and Alberta, which would spread their volunteer pool too thin, and going after that would mean an election close to Christmas, which everyone would bitch about (and Trudeau would want to avoid something like what happened in 2006). Meanwhile, going later would have meant more weeks of deadlocked bills in the Commons, for little added benefit.

As for the speeches:

  • Annamie Paul was up first, after placing a distant fourth in her riding (which was in no way a surprise). She gave some thanks to her volunteers, staff and family, but gave no indication of what her future plans are as leader, given the fact that the loss of another Green seat (while gaining one new one) won’t help her case as staying on as leader.
  • Erin O’Toole did not really give a concession speech, did not congratulate Trudeau on his win, but essentially made a promise to keep campaigning while falsely claiming that Trudeau had previously threatened another election in the next 18 months (whereas Trudeau simply warned that another hung parliament would likely wind up with another election in that time). O’Toole also made a few more false statements before calling it a night, essentially daring his party to keep him on as leader.
  • Yves-François Blanchet was also fairly bullish, but did concede that they needed to be more cooperative and said that the Bloc would participate in said cooperation, because they are still in a pandemic. That could mean Blanchet is the willing partner for the first few months of Trudeau’s agenda.
  • Jagmeet Singh was more gracious than the others in congratulating the PM on his victory, but then proceeded to take credit for the pandemic supports, and insisting that he will continue to push for things like dental care and his wealth tax which will be extraordinarily difficult to implement.
  • Trudeau was last, declaring that Canadians were sending his party back to work with a “clear mandate” – and *sigh* no, we don’t have mandates in our system of government. He also noted that voters have “Given this parliament and this government a clear direction.” Trudeau was the most gracious of all of the leaders in his victory, thanking the other leaders and their families, the Elections Canada staff and volunteers, and started quoting Laurier in talking about looking to the future that they hope to build together.

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Roundup: Conditions and fact-check reflections

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After 36 days, we are at the finish line of this interminable election, and I am so very tired. On the final day, with the potential for another hung parliament in the works, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh says that he plans to make his cooperation in said parliament contingent on the implementation of his wealth tax – you know, the one that is going to be extraordinarily difficult to implement because it is foreign to how our tax system operates currently, and would require an inordinate amount of work to even start defining the basic concepts at the heart of it. Or as Jennifer Robson puts it, the one item that is so difficult to achieve that any party could agree to it and spend the next two years saying that they’re “working on it,” while Singh has surrendered his leverage. Such smart politics! (Reminder, you can watch Robson explain why this will be extraordinarily difficult to implement here).

Meanwhile, the Star’s election fact-checker has written up her reflections on the work she did, and I can honestly say that I’m underwhelmed. I don’t doubt that she worked hard, and that she dealt with an enormous amount of information…but her format sucked, and she’s a newsletter producer in Toronto and doesn’t have any federal politics experience. The format – checking one leader’s statements per week – isn’t really providing a useful fact-checking exercise, because it’s letting them get away with saying blatantly untrue things, and it might show up in her report a week later, if it was that leader’s week. As for her inexperience on the federal scene, there is a boatload of context to some of these statements that she was unable to qualify as true or false, and that comes with experience and exposure. There are things that she was fact-checking that I’ve had to do entire stories about because of the way it was being both-sidesed by media and came to different conclusions because of the complexity of the file (the court challenge around First Nations children in care) and because the both-sidesing didn’t address the actual issue at hand – just competing talking points, with a lot of time being given to one side in the case with none to the other. But her read on it was facile, and so she marked it as such, which doesn’t help anyone.

Most of all, this was largely an exercise in comparing our leaders to Trump, which is the most dismaying part of all because it serves no useful purpose to Canadian politics (“Hey, our leaders don’t lie as much!” is quite the takeaway), and is just more of the kind of comparative political bullshit that lets our leaders get away with so much (“Hey, I’m not as bad as Trump!”) because it’s divorced from our reality. It’s failing the Canadian public by trying to put us in an American frame of reference when we’re not America. We need our outlets to do a better job.

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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.

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Roundup: The stakes on Monday may be bigger than we think

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There were a couple of columns on The Line yesterday that are food for thought as we head into the final days of the election. The first was from Matt Gurney, who states in no uncertain terms that if the Conservatives can’t pull out a strong enough showing, that they will start a death spiral as a party to the forces of right-wing populism that have consumed the Republican Party south of the border. Gurney’s thesis is essentially that if O’Toole can manage to get enough results to hold onto power, he might have enough time to get the party’s shit together to save it, but it’s going to mean hard choices and dumping the shitposters in his office and the loonies in his caucus like Cheryl Gallant, and have a firm enough hand to be the necessary bulwark. But I have my doubts that O’Toole is strong enough to do this – he’s spent his leadership winking and nodding to this crowd, given a free pass to Gallant and to Pierre Poilievre, and has basically lied his way through his entire leadership, while utterly debasing himself and his party in order to secure the favour of François Legault. I’m not confident that O’Toole is the person capable of doing the hard work of steering the ship away from Charybdis that lies ahead of it. I think Gurney is right that we need a coherent right-of-centre party for the sake of the country (and hell, we need a capable opposition party regardless of stripe to do the work of accountability), but I have less faith in O’Toole than Gurney does, and I think the party needs a complete generation change if it’s going to be truly successful in pushing back against the very populists that they’ve nurtured and coddled this whole time.

With all of this in mind, Jen Gerson lambastes the entire election as a collection of shiny talking points, with the Liberals basically a shell of a personality cult versus O’Toole amorphousness that is certainly not ready for power – and that there may be a problem with conservatism as an ideology when it comes to dealing with issues like a pandemic, as Alberta is demonstrating. Most of her points are legitimate, but I also think that if anyone thinks this election is about nothing then they’re not paying attention. I don’t disagree that the Liberals are largely a personality cult around Trudeau, but at the same time, they are the only party that has put in the homework, whether it’s on their plans for early learning and child care, inclusive growth, the environment, housing, LGBT issues – they have actual feasible plans behind them and aren’t just handwavey platitudes, or fig leaves that are designed to look like they have a plan but they really don’t. That counts for something, and Trudeau won’t be there for much longer. The cult of personality will reform as it always does, but there will be still be the actual work they’ve put in, and it has been a lot of work, even if it doesn’t look like it from the outside (and that’s partially the Liberals’ fault for not properly communicating their own successes).

And with that in mind, I am baffled by the fact that O’Toole is making his final pitch to voters that Trudeau called an “unnecessary” election – omitting the months of procedural warfare that O’Toole’s side was orchestrating, and that Trudeau needed to break that logjam one way or another. There is a lot at stake in this election, and it would be great if we could keep our eyes on some of what that actually is.

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Roundup: Bracing for election night

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With voting day just days away, we’re starting to see a few “reminder” stories about how our system works, so that we can have some reasonable expectations about what the outcomes might look like on Monday, and why it will mean things like the current government staying in place and having the first chance to test the confidence of the new Chamber once it’s been summoned. There is an interview with Emmett Macfarlane here about how any decision will unfold on Monday night and why Trudeau will remain prime minister until he chooses to resign, which is good. There is also a piece from the Canadian Press which maps out different scenarios about how the evening may play out and what these scenarios might mean.

The problem, of course, is that television news in this country is abysmal, and we’ll spend the night listening to inane banter that pretends that there is no sitting government (exacerbated by the fact that they are currently observing a convention that refers to the prime minister as the “Liberal leader” in order to have an exaggerated sense of “fairness” around his incumbent status), and they will throw around terms like “prime minister-elect” even though we don’t elect prime minister (it’s an appointed position) and the fact that if it is the incumbent – which it’s likely to be – he’s already the prime minister and won’t require an “-elect” or “-designate” title to go along with it. We’ll also no doubt hear talk about him getting a “mandate” even though that kind of thing is utterly incompatible with our system of government. And no matter how much people like me will call it out over social media, nobody will care, and they will continue to completely misinform people about our basic civics without any care in the world, because that’s the state of media in this country right now.

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