I voted last weekend. I would have gone for the NDP except the candidate in our riding was/is polling way behind, so went with Jody Wilson Raybould (running as an independent) to keep the lib candidate out.
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I will say the NDP candidate is probably too young (to be clear: not that it’s in any way valid reasoning to hold that against her) to ever have a chance with some older voters who’d only be all too prone to dismiss on the basis of “inexperience” or whatever the fuck. Because at this point all “experienced” sounds like is not having to live with the more severe consequences of your decisions on climate.
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I’m about 2 months away from being able to apply for citizenship. Following all of this knowing that I’m not able to vote,
Well, with the way things have been in the polls, you may get a chance to vote in a federal election in a couple of years.
I am curious how Vancouver Granville will turn out. I’m in the district just north. It’s my first election in this district. While I like the neighbourhood, I’m sad to have left a district which has been strongly NDP for a very long time to a district which has been Liberal for ages.
It is kind of cool that Fry is the longest-serving female MP, but I still have no interest in voting Liberal. Incidentally, she was preceded by Canada’s first female PM (though there is no way I would have voted Conservative were I eligible at the time).
My folks are in Quadra where Joyce Murray has been serving for more than a decade which, barring a scandal or something, doesn’t look set to change unless she wants to call it quits. My folks would probably go lib anyways even if it mattered/were close, which it doesn’t look like it is.
I guess being in ridings where the fight is against libs rather than conservatives is relatively speaking a better problem to have? But Trudeau sure has been doing his best to make it not feel like it.
CBC is calling it for the liberals already? The polls feel pretty early for that. Probably a minority, which I think is a good thing.
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and so goes my hope for a Lib/NDP coalition
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Yay JWR won.
Not sure if the table will display, but a rough discrepancy between seats actually won in relation to popular vote. While I wouldn’t suggest the most suitable voting system needs to perfectly match popular vote, we have yet another election result which is too far off. NDP and Green supporters clearly get hosed.
What is funny to me is some fear proportional representation because they can only envision systems where they lose regional representation. Yet at the same time, they complain how the current system Over represents Ontario and Quebec while ignoring the middle of the country (I don’t agree, but it seems the current system doesn’t actually leave many Canadians feeling they are well represented regionally anyway).
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Not to mention people like me who would prefer NDP, but don’t want to split the vote in a contested riding.
I was braced for the worst possible outcome, and I’m glad it’s not that.
Also glad the People’s Party won no seats. That is at least one unequivocally positive result.
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The subtitle for Canadian politics should be: “Well… that wasn’t the worst possible outcome”
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“It could be worse” really does encapsulate a lot about our politics… which sometimes worries me because that kind of thinking is a vicious cycle that placates a lot of progressive action and keeps leading us back to the perpetual lib-con tug of war, and also keeps us from confronting the myriad “white neoliberal”-flavored problems that define us.
I’m from Quebec and I see little to rejoice about since all our NDP seats but one have gone back to the Bloc. Many here feel that this is trading apples for apples (sigh) but I think there’s a very obvious, ugly, and frustratingly ubiquitous undercurrent that explains this shift. This has been a bleak election as far as I’m concerned, folks.
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Honestly, I think we’re overdue for the “Big One”, but instead of an earthquake, it’s a massive far right shift in federal politics
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Structurally, I’m not sure how that could happen. Unlike the US, land isn’t represented, so political power rests in urban cores which are mostly diverse. Unless the far right sheds their racism (doubtful), I don’t know how they would establish a coalition to get a governing share of parliament.
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What we DO have here, that is similar to the US, is the critical mass of centrist, relatively privileged voters who are blind on social issues and thus pretty likely to facilitate a far-right shift on those issues if it ever came with economic policies that cater to them.
What we DON’T have is the critical mass of deeply entrenched church wealth that drives this movement in the US. So my feeling as a highly erudite political analyst (/s) is that we’d be very vulnerable to this type of phenomenon, but we’re not exactly on the doorstep of one.
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Because Harper stopped appointing Senators at some point Trudeau has been able to appoint almost the majority of Senators currently sitting. Almost certainly the majority of the Senate will be Trudeau appointees by the end of his new term.
For all it’s faults the Senate should prevent any sudden dramatic shifts happening. A far right government would have to hold onto power long enough to wait for enough Senators to age out until they’ve appointed enough Senators to control the Senate, and that could be decades.
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The issue is that the largest chunk of those voters live in the GTA, which has acted as the centrist fulcrum that has given majorities to the Liberals and Tories for at least the past two decades. Those voters are majority immigrant and non-white. Unless there’s a major demographics change or structural change to how votes are counted, far right policies (which cluster around immigration) are going to be a complete non-starter there. That doesn’t mean that the GTA doesn’t love Tory tax bullshit like raising TFSA limits or whatnot, but as it stands I don’t see how you pair low taxes with hardline immigration rhetoric and come out ahead with these voters.
As far as I know a coalition government has never actually been a thing in Canada except one time during WW2. Instead the Liberals will seek the support of at least one of the CPC, NDP or BQ to pass votes, on a vote-by-vote basis.
