jsburbidge | Entries tagged with politics

In journalism, the use of the passive voice, usually discouraged elsewhere stylistically, seems to be endemic in headlines.

The problem is that the impact of the headline becomes very different when the agent is omitted. The CBC has a headline: "Carney attacked for wanting 'free ride,' 'hiding' from public amid latest campaign break". It would leave a different impression if it said "Leaders of the CPC and Bloc attack Carney for wanting 'free ride,' 'hiding' from public amid latest campaign break", which is in fact what the article is about.

This may be the most remarkable election since 1968. Certainly it is by the current numbers. (I vaguely remember the 1968 Liberal convention coverage. I certainly remember Trudeaumania.)

Two weeks and a bit into a campaign, before the debates, feels like being early to call a result. But it may be worthwhile, cautiously, to point out certain things:

1) That Liberal majority in the polls does not (much) result from a Red Tory Carney picking up votes from the left edge of the CPC (non-ML). It seems to be what happens when a majority of normally NDP voters decide that blocking Poilièvre at all costs is preferable to the alternative. (The fact that Jagmeet Singh is not necessarily popular with true progressives doesn't hurt either.) This means that there's little chance of the Conservative campaign changing many minds: the CPC is generally holding its core voters but cratering nevertheless. (By the same token, the ability to get large rallies out of CPC supporters will benefit them nothing, other than perhaps revving up the canvassers they need (Jenni Byrne is supposed to be good at managing "the ground game"), as it doesn't expand their support. If anything, by being Trumpy in style, it might reduce their potential support.)

It helps the Liberals that when Carney can go all Prime Ministerial, i.e. when he has to "break from campaigning" to deal with Trump he sounds genuine, serious, and positive. Some commentators are throwing around words like "Churchillian", though that may be going a bit far.

2) The fact that Carney is visibly uncomfortable with campaigning may actually be to his advantage among people who are tired of "politicians" but just want decent government.

3) The split between the Ontario (and Maritime: let us not forget Peter MacKay and his legacy) and Western wings emerging into the daylight is in no way good for the CPC. It sort of makes the election start to look like the latter parts of the fight between King Arthur and the Black Knight. ("Only a flesh wound").

4) In theory, the Liberals could still slip up badly, especially in the debates. But given the underlying dynamics, it would take a really impressive disaster to make a lot of the people who have indicated they support the Liberals in this election to stay at home and risk a win by Poilievre.

The debates are likely to be a stark contrast: on one side, an experienced attack dog whose key election lines are all negative[1] and in the other a very much not-a-politician whose core messages all fall ino the two buckets of "positive" and "bracing". I suspect that viewers will largely take away what they came with.

[1]Aside from a lot of tax cuts. When faced with a crisis, what else can small-government conservatives do?

5) Finally, there's the loose cannon of Danielle Smith. She plays to her supporters; her local support is strengthened by being seen as anti-Ottawa and relatively pro-American. But in the key areas of Ontario and Quebec it just puts most people's backs up, including a fair number of PC voters. (There's a swathe of Doug Ford supporters who dislike Smith, rather like Carney, and don't mind the idea of a Liberal PM with extensive financial and business experience. They might not vote for Carney, but if they don't they are liable to stay home.) And Poilievre will not, possibly cannot, condemn her univocally and strongly. Her behaviour may not shift many votes, but it is certainly likely to confirm anti-CPC voters in their views.

So one can be somewhat hopeful that at least, with the whole world going to rack and ruin, we may get our best shot to minimize the damage here at home.

Freeland is painful, Carney awkward, Gould sounded as though she could actually survive on the streets of a French city (she did her B.A. at McGill), and Baylis sounded as though he has (he better have, as he was born in Montreal, even if he is an Anglo), although he was not displaying full formal facility with formal eloquent standard French, being rather more colloquial. I think that we deserve an Anglophone leader who speaks French as well as Lucien Bouchard spoke English.

In the run-up to the Civil War, Charles I levied money via a mechanism involving taxation to support the building and outfitting of ships. It required no parliamentary consent, and was challenged in court; Charles won.

The parliamentary party claimed that the levy violated a principle that the Crown required the consent of Parliament to levy taxes. If you read Coke, or the Whig writers who follow him, you will gather that this is correct, and that there were ancient liberties going back to very early days of which this was one. By this argument, the parliament of the Petition of Right and the Long Parliament were merely defending an ancient constitution which the Crown was assaulting.

With better scholarship and more disinterested scholars, it's now fairly clear that Coke and the parliamentarians were wrong all along the way. It would be more accurate to say that Parliament had begun to take the bit between its teeth and extend its powers under Elizabeth (partly driven by economic, partly by religious changes) but that the Tudors in general had the personal prestige needed to keep these trends in check. With the accession of the Stuarts to the throne, these tensions became public, and the slide toward what would become the Civil War began.

The question of the legality of Charles' levies is now a dead issue: for all of the pretences of continuity, England has had two revolutionary resets to the fundamental principles governing the relation of Crown and Parliament (1642-1660, 1688, finally settled for good in 1745) and appeals to anything before the Restoration are pure antiquarianism.

The founders of the United States were mainly Whigs - a very few figures with more traditionslist views were among them, but most such colonists were Tories/Loyalists in the Revolution. They took as gospel the principle that the legislature alone had the power to levy taxes, and wrote it into their constitutions.

There has been some erosion of this over the centuries (both in the US and elsewhere) by the growth of "secondary legislation" (i.e. regulations) where the legislature provides a framework but the executive can set details by direct regulation. This the legislature can, for example, establish a tax but allow the executive to set the rates. The same applies to measures which have a secondary effect of bringing money into the fisc (e.g. fines) but which are not primarily motivated by that goal.

The ability of the executive to set tariffs in an emergency is one such exception. It allows action to protect a national interest from economic threat without going through a lengthy process of legislation.

The tariffs levied by Trump claim to be allowed by this exception. However, given both the facts on the ground - it's hard to argue that any such emergency exists - and Trump's own statements elsewhere, it's clear that Trump wants tariffs because they raise money[1]. That is, he is performing an end run around the principle that revenues are to be raised only by the legislature using the declared "emergency" as a fig leaf to cover the real reasons

[1]In his view, from foreign countries; more realistically, from domestic importers and consumers.

This is actually, from an American perspective, a more serious issue than that of the economic dislocation caused by the tariffs. Like the attack on birthright citizenship, or the attempts to impound funding flows authorized by Congress, or the attempt to buy out federal workers en masse without authorization for the expenses or to remove Inspectors General with no notice or reasons being provided, this is an attempt to arrogate to the Executive Branch powers granted neither by the Constitution nor by explicit acts of Congress[2]. The US is now in the middle of a constitutional crisis of a scale not seen since the American Civil War.

[2]The tariffs are levied under an Act of Congress, but the claim that an emergency may be declared arbitrarily and with no evidence to trigger the condition goes well beyond the legislation. I expect that when this is challenged in court the Administration will claim that the determination is not subject to review by the courts.

I was in an LCBO yesterday afternoon and was browsing beers when I saw an employee busy stocking shelves with an American beer - possibly Michelob or Old Milwaukee. My first thought was "that's not going to last long" but then I realized that almost all the beer by the American big brewers sold in Ontario are brewed and bottled in Ontario. The US beers that would be affected by Ford pulling US products from LCBO shelves would mainly be craft brews, or craft adjacent. (Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada are imported, but Budweiser and Coors are Ontario made. (Goose Island is from Quebec.)) Vice-versa, Molson is Molson-Coors these days, and the headquarters is in the US, so Molson beers are in the same category. (Labatt's is technically Belgian, as part of AB InBev.) (Their product is crap as well, but for now I'm avoiding talking about quality.)

Which raises a question. There are plenty of "American" products produced in Canada by wholly-owned subsidiaries. Sometimes this dates back to pre-NAFTA times and has merely continued and in some cases it involves simply being easier to manage fairly large volumes by regional production. (Heinz Ketchup took out advertisements a week or so ago to point out that their Canadian ketchup is made in Canada. So is Coca-Cola.)

If the aim of avoiding purchasing American in favour of Canadian products is based on immediate flows of money, the purchase of Coke or Heinz or, for that matter, Molson Canadian is sending much of the money to Canadian workers and Canadian suppliers to those companies[1], but there is still a flow of profits to the US parent. A real "buy Canadian" campaign aimed at pressuring American business interests means buying local, and typically from smaller producers. (And more expensive ones, typically: cheap cat food comes from American sources like Purina, and the Canadian brands like Acana/Orijen are among a higher-priced set of products.)

[1]Inputs are another matter. Craft beers, for example, are made with a wide variety of hops, some of which have a single source - so even though they are usually guaranteed to be fermented, bottled, and sold locally they usually have by definition an international aspect.

Sometimes you can't tell where something comes from. Many products made for Loblaws or other grocers' in-store brands merely say "made for" and gives the grocer's name but not the place of manufacture, or who did the manufacturing. Blue Label Peanut Butter says"Processed in Canada" but that leaves open the possibility that the raw materials could come from anywhere. Their Water Crackers have no source - it just gives Loblaws' address, not the manufacturer's.

This is not specific to own brand labels: neither PC nor Classico sauces have a "Made in" statement. But it it a reasonable though not certain inference that a product from a Canadian manufacturer is likely to be sourced in Canada, but no such inference can be drawn from a brand of a retailer, which sells products from all over the world.

If you want to buy Canadian, your best bet aside from really diligent research is to buy from smaller specialist stores, more likely to be locally owned; to buy not only "Canadian" but local (sometimes from non-local chains: Whole Foods has a policy of sourcing from and highlighting local products[2]); and to be ready to pay more than a baseline amount for the products in question, except for agricultural goods in season, where local will tend to be cheaper.

[2]There's a small dilemma: Whole Foods is better along a whole set of axes (labour, ethical sourcing) than Loblaws or some of its other competitors[3], but it is emphatically US-based.

[3]The local Whole Foods is close to a Longo's: this is a local chain which started as an Italian immigrant grocery store and grew. It is partly-owned by the founding family and partly by the chain which owns Sobeys; it's essentially a competitor in Loblaws' space, i.e. neither discount nor luxury. There are a number of brand-name products carried by both Longo's and Whole Foods. It is my experience that these are almost always cheaper at Whole Foods. They have a reputation of being expensive because they don't carry cheap food, but their markups do nut seem to be exceptionally high.

The perspective changes if we shift to "boycott US" instead. Then we can look at goods from elsewhere - which is arguably what we should be doing: strengthening ties with non-US trading partners. For the next four years, we're all in this together.

-----

On the political front, it's clear that Trump wants tariffs simply because he likes tariffs, and that his pointing to the (small, apparently) traffic in fentanyl across the border is a veil over his dislike of the US trade deficit with Canada. The main check on Trump (other than the real but not certain possibility that his action will be found to be illegal - there are several reasons that this is arguably ultra vires) is that the markets, which had previously been treating the tariff threat as a negotiating tactic, will react badly enough that Trump pulls back. He does pay attention to the stock markets.

On our side of the border, the current headlines talking of a "possible trade war" understate it: my estimate is that a leader who did not retaliate in what was perceived to be a strong manner would be severely punished in public opinion, at the metaphorical level of being strung up on a lamppost - and there are elections coming up. Neither Ford nor Trudeau can be seen as neglecting to hit back.

... which Trump couldn't reverse:

Pardon everybody Trump has mentioned going after for personal or partisan reasons. (His relatives, Harris, Cheney, etc.).

There's precedent for broad pardons for "anything done under the term of ..." (more monarchical than Presidential, but there's continuity there).

Mist things a president can do by executive order can be reversed by another executive order. Pardons are not in that category.

I see headlines talking about risks to democracy after the election of a far-right party in Italy. I do not see headlines suggesting that that election shows the weaknesses of democracy in action.

Populist leaders tend not to be antidemocratic, at least by inclination. Many of the distinctive policies of the right-wing populist parties have heavy popular support - though they are policies which tend not to be supported by the major parties, and are frequently policies which run directly into constitutional limits in countries which have such limits (sorry, UK).

A simple example is the death penalty for murder. In Canada, for years if not decades after the death penalty was abolished, it had broad general support in the population. None of the major political parties supported it (partly because it's very hard to find lawyers who support it - they are too much aware of the possibilities of miscarriages of justice) and so it remained off the agenda of Parliament.

The policies of the current Quebec government under Legault regarding dress and religious symbols, and restricting language choice, have broad support in the province as a whole - so much so that the various federal parties are unwilling to oppose them publicly - but would run directly into Charter challenges were it not for the use of the Notwithstanding clause.

Anti-immigrant policies play well with general populations almost everywhere. Opposition tends to come from an odd alliance of progressives and business groups (who need the labour pool).

The recent experience of COVID, and the current rush back by a majority of the population to "normalcy", including not wearing masks in public (which is, when you consider it, a pretty minimal-cost step) isn't just driven by oligarchic leaders (however much they want people back in the office [1]) but comes up from the grassroots. It does lead to a lack of confidence in the judgement if the people asawhole on other issues.

Populations in general are covering their ears regarding appropriate steps to take on climate change. Acceptance of anthropogenic causes has become general, but willingness to take steps with any immediate cost is present in only a tiny segment of the population.

Much general discourse treats democracy as an end in itself. It isn't. To begin with, "representative democracy" is not, at least as practiced, democracy; it's a way of selecting between governments generally made up of representatives of much smaller slices of the population, generally in the top quintile of income. This is further tempered in many jurisdictions by permanent civil services (ENArques in France, at an extreme) who represent a broad professional consensus of what policies are acceptable.

Secondly, most jurisdictions constrain political rulemaking by constitutional bills of rights. These provisions regularly get applied. In some cases (the US Second Amendment, for example) there may be serious issues around the nature of the constraints, but most such rights are unambiguously "good" in principle. Consider the regular striking down of things like minimum sentencing provisions under the Charter, or rulings providing immigrants with some rights of review of immigration board decisions.

Democracies have typically worked better than other choices because they impose more constraints on arbitrary exercise of power. These constraints are intermittent - Liz Truss is essentially an unelected dictator until the next general election (unless she falls to internal party revolt) but they do exist.

I, at least, do not as such want a democratic government so much as I want a just, prescient, and wise government. Unfortunately, nobody has ever devised a method to select for justice, prescience, and wisdom in the rulers.

Churchill's aphorism applied to this. The ideal government may very well be a truly enlightened despot, but it's difficult to find good monarchs, let alone genuinely enlightened ones.[2] Democracy has been the leat bad model we have.

Democracies seem to have worked at their best when rising tides are lifting all boats. But if one current factor in the failure of governments generally to confront issues such as climate change is the failure to counter the pressure of money in politics, a more fundamental failure is the visible strong tendency of populations as a whole, when insecure, to prefer easy but obviously wrong nostrums peddled by populists to realistic but more challenging fixes.

So we have figures like Johnson and Truss, in England, or Poilievre and Smith, in Canada, or Trump and De Santis in the US, or Meloni in Italy, who peddle long-term poison not despite, but because of, the broad wishes of the population.

The problem, as always, is finding a better solution. There is no obvious practical one - i.e. one reachable from here - on the horizon. And any path which could reach a different structural model would likely have to wade through a fair amount of blood to get there.

[1] Going by the messaging of my own employer's higher echelons, I think that they would be happy to see the offices full of employees all wearing masks, especially as the latter reduces the incidence of sick leave. Instead what they are getting sparse attendance, but almost everyone who shows up is not wearing a mask.

[2]Most monarchs historically were not unconstrained despots; they did a careful balancing act between competing groups of nobles. If the nobility as a whole turned against you, you were gone, or at least in deep trouble (John, Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, at least, in England).

... will Justin have the guts to follow his old man and say "Just watch me."?

1) On checking my spam folder, I see that I have received two invitations to join the Illuminati, one in Italian.

If the AISB is going to contact anyone it will not be by cleartext e-mails. They will use proper tradecraft.

2) It is remarkable just how awful protesters' historical education is. The position of the Prime Minister has always, since the time of Walpole, been determined by the House of Commons. The Crown has no power to dismiss the PM and only very limited powers to prorogue Parliament (essentially, when the PM has lost the confidence of the house, or at the request of the PM). This was firmly established in 1649 and 1688, with tweaks in the 18th Century as the office of the Prime Minister developed.

3) I am getting tired of public health officials who are reported in the media as talking about masks and vaccines as though they were purely about individual risk rather than looking at the impact in populations of general adoption/dropping of particular activities. A 30 year old with two doses of vaccine who goes out without a mask is at a low risk of contracting symptomatic Covid and at very low risk of serious disease. But if 30-year olds in general do that, there will be a calculable increase in the spread of COVID to other parts of the population. Wearing a mask or being vaccinated is not principally about personal risk, in many cases; it is about being a responsible member of the body politic and of society.

4) Seen in real code, names slightly adjusted:

class XKey

{

public:

XKey(const int inIdA, const int inIdB, const std::string& inName):

m_idA(inIdA), m_idB(inIdB), m_name(inName)

{ }

bool operator<(const XKey& inOther) const

{

return (m_idA < other.m_IdA) &&

(m_idB < other.m_idB) &&

(m_name < other.m_name);

}

private:

const int m_idA;

const int m_idB;

const std::string m_name;

};

Surprising things will happen when you try to use a map with that as a key.

Don't do this.

This surely does not need saying: the provincial plan for removing Covid restrictions is both insane and driven by politics. It is no coincidence that on this fanciful roadmap of the Ontario PCs everyone becomes entirely free to do as they will a couple of months before the provincial election.

In what fit of absence of mind they concluded that Covid would be so completely gone in another six months that they can plan on pulling back vaccine mandates, it is hard to imagine. The opening stages - allowing more density in places with vaccine mandates - is not prudent, but it is somewhat understandible. To assume that magically Covid will go away by March is pure wishful thinking. (Even if by some miracle Ontario could wrestle it to the ground, there would still be extensive reservoirs elsewhere.)

This is the extreme form of the government's complete failure to take the one critical step that is necessary: to say, clearly, that there will be no "return", no ability to resume the life of 2019. Even if the government were to drop its vaccine mandates entirely, all the employers and other fora will continue to worry about insurance and liability and are unlikely to drop their restrictions. Many people will, rationally, continue to avoid places where they are crowded together; although evidence from other jurisdictions suggests that fewer people are rational than one might hope. Masks will continue to be an important public health tool. Many people will continue to work from home, affecting the life in urban centres.

The one genuinely bright spot on the horizon is the (likely) very near approval of Covid vaccines for children and the (equally likely) of such vaccines being made mandatory (as many other vaccines are) for attendance at school.

It is, frankly, the task of the government, the parens patriae, to tell everyone the truth: life has changed, irreversibly (like one of those catastrophe theory transitions on a folded manifold).

I normally have a good sense of where an election will end up a few days before it actually takes place. This one was more difficult: two days before the election I would have called the most likely result a reduced minority for the Liberals. In the end, the needle barely moved on numbers.

Last election I was already noting that the Liberals would do well to get rid of Trudeau, though that was before Covid, which pushed up his stock somewhat. I would reiterate the comment; he is clearly a drag on his party, but his retention of office without a significant loss of seats probably leaves him with enough power to avoid being pushed out.

What the Conservatives need to do, to deflect their usual problems next time round, is take the relatively moderate platform O'Toole ran on and maintain it up to the next election. As I gather that there are members who already want to depose O'Toole, I doubt they will manage it.

(The best grounds for attack on O'Toole the Liberals had, they wasted: pointing out the drift between his run for the leadership and his run for PM and suggesting that he is a weathervane seems to me like the obvious weak point. By next election he will be gone or his platform will have some stability. I doubt he can reinvent himself yet again.)

But the map shows the kind of current electoral trap Canada is in. There are two broad areas of solid blue: the west (for all practical purposes: the NDP has a few new seats there), and rural Ontario. (That these are the areas with the biggest Covid problems is not coincidental: in addition to Alberta and Saskatchewan, about which little needs to be said, it is the rural caucus in Ontario which by all accounts has been most opposed to reasonable anti-Covid measures.) In Ontario the whole GTA with a couple of exceptions went Liberal, and of those exceptions only one - Thornhill - went Conservative.Other urban areas voted Liberal, except where they were weighed down by large rural components of a single riding (such as Peterborough).

There are two big blockers to any majority government. First, the Bloc essentially prevents the Liberals from gaining a majority; their only other normal way there is a thoroughgoing collapse in the Conservative vote. (Both Bloc and Conservatives have been weak before; the Reform/PC split gave the Liberals under Chretien a long time in majority office, taking all, or nearly all the ridings in Ontario to make up for the Bloc in Quebec, and the Bloc was weak in 2015.)

The Conservatives, on the other hand, have tended to win only when dislike or distrust of the Liberals - Chretien's cronyism, Trudeau's / Turner's patronage appointments, distrust of Dion and Ignatieff - drives the electorate in the swing ridings of Ontario to abandon the Liberals for the Conservatives. Although the Tory base certainly feels that way about Trudeau, his weaknesses among the general population - seen as naive, self-centred, not terribly bright - have not, to date produced that result. So the Conservative road to a majority runs through the suburbs of Ontario. The past several elections have been marked by a significant number of voters voting, not for the Liberals as such, but against the Conservatives when there is a risk of them winning, and younger voters in central Canada are even less likely to vote Conservative. To make things worse, the Covid crisis has made government with an activist and intrusive bent more generally attractive, which means that the Harperite/libertarian block making up the core of the parliamentary party is even more out of step than they might otherwise be.

The geographical split encourages the parties to vanish into the event horizons of their own bases, which decreases the likelihood of a breakthrough.

The NDP lacks a base which could realistically allow it to come within shouting distance of power, except of the sort they have right now as the key to the continued governance of the Liberals. The Greens essentially disintegrated.

All that being said, it would be unwise to claim, as I've seen some commentators do, that Canada is locked into a permanent minority situation, or - a closely related claim - that the Canadian people chose a minority. Over half of active voters almost certainly belong to the bases of the two major parties. Presumably they wanted a majority. (The NDP base might welcome a minority, but I doubt they voted for one.) An average of people's choices, filtered through FPTP, cannot be given a notional will or mind, any more than the players of Prisoners Dilemma want the probable outcome.

More critically, a lot turns on immediate personal reactions. The voters of Ontario elected Doug Ford because they were fed up with the Liberals, despite the chaos of the Conservatives and the very real doubts about Ford's suitability to govern. If the Liberals do something stupid, not necessarily more stupid than the various kerfuffles which marked, but did not end, Trudeau, O'Toole or an equivalent could walk into government. If the PPC or an equivalent splits the CPC vote more heavily and along structural fault lines, we could be in for another King-St.Laurent reign.

Or at another level, if post-Covid remote work sends more urbanites out into semi-rural Ontario, that block of rural Ontario CPC ridings could become far less certain. If the Alberta NDP becomes the government again and the post-Kenney PCs became a hissing in the dark, that solid blue block could splinter. Or if the dislocations of climate change throw most people's lives into uncertainty, the resulting resentment may drive some voters towards the right while driving others towards "a safe pair of hands". The current social and economic context is the opposite of stable.

The Toronto Star had a front-page article with the title "Why is Everyone So Angry?" (well, third page with a massive banner on the front page). Unfortunately, its diagnosis was facile.

It was clearly prompted by the phenomenon of Justin Trudeau being regularly assailed viciously, and in such numbers, that in one case he had to cancel an appearance (as the protestors outnumbered the police).

(As a specific phenomenon this is a little odd. After all, when you think of it, Trudeau is in many ways the Jim Hacker of Canadian politics: appeal to the public, not very bright, steered by his advisors. You may be assured that anything he backs will have come from either the party or the civil service or (most likely) both, without being so extreme to be able to be called "courageous".

Although the Conservative Party condemns the behaviour, it feeds it by running so emphatically against Trudeau, as though the government's policies all sprang from his forehead. The PMO may be at least as dictatorial as it was under Harper - there has been no return to Cabinet government[1] - but it is hardly a hotbed of flourishing originality and exciting ideas.)

But the anti-vax, anti-mask movement in particular is pretty well frothing at the lips. Why?

The article points all of its fingers at pandemic fatigue. It omits noting that Brexit, and the Trump election, and for that matter the Tea Party formation around 2008, were all driven by a similar type of anger. Covid-19 has provided a couple of new presenting issues, and pandemic fatigue is undoubtedly an aggravating factor, but it's hardly the most important one.

(If it were pure pandemic fatigue you'd expect a cadre of vaccinated people who are fed up with the risks posed by unvaccinated people and heckle candidates who are "soft" on vaccine mandates balancing out the anti-vaxxers protesting the Liberals; and you'd expect protestors in the anti-vax, anti-mask camps to protest the federal Conservatives as well, as they have moved to avoid having any significant space between the Liberals and themselves on this issue.)

My interpretation is that it's an effect of cognitive dissonance with transferred anger. People don't want to acknowledge that things will never revert to where they were in (choose one based on your issue) 2019, 2000, 1989, 1981, 1966, or 1958.[2]

If that's something you won't acknowledge, to the level of cognitive dissonance, then displacing the anger at life moving away from where you are convinced it ought to be is a direct effect. (This is also tied up with confronting, or avoiding confronting, the fact that your idea of "rights" does not line up with that of the law.)

Also, naturally, even people with a much milder degree of denial will be attracted to an appeal of return. The natural heirs are parties of the right, as their natural platforms involve either minimizing or denying the necessity of significant change.

All of this feeds into the election dynamic. The Liberals suffer from both kinds of reaction; the CPC benefits. Maxime Bernier's party is showing a small uptick.

A secondary effect is that although climate is a potential wedge issue - the potential wedge issue - between the CPC and the Liberals, it's not being used as such, because to run a campaign on that basis amounts to repeatedly telling people that they haven't seen real disruptive change yet, and that they need to get ready for it and support it. In the current context that is probably not a way to win middle-of-the-road voters, who are the key group in this election.

It is still possible for the CPCs to end up failing to form a government, especially if (as Singh advertised in the spring) the NDP refuses to support the CPC in a minority government. Unless things improve greatly for the Liberals, though, it is probably time to write Trudeau's political obituary, given both the drop in support and the fact that it was ultimately Trudeau's decision to call this particular election in the first place.

[1]I remember Gordon, LaMarsh, Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand.

[2] Pre-Covid, pre-9/11, before the fall of the Soviet block, pre-IBM PC, pre-New Left, before the shine came off the suburbs.

The structure of our current government (and that of our cousins in Westminster) practically requires that leaders in a minority situation ("hung Parliament") call elections when they are riding high. At least in a majority government elections are, at worst, even-handed: you might be up or down when you run out of time. In a minority, you know that after enough time has passed since the last election the opposition parties will be eager to bring down the government if and when it is unpopular. So minority governments end early, either when the opposition sees a chance to do better than it did last time, or when governments see a chance to forestall that risk. (Campaigns make a difference. If you handle it wrong, you end up like Theresa May.)

(This does, of course, assume that a government is "about" power rather than achieving ends, and in practice our current structure in which permanent parties form governments pretty well guarantees that that will be the case. You get power first, if necessary by watering down promises to be as little objectionable to middle of the road voters, then govern by introducing measures which will not upset the group's who elected you.

There's a story about that, at least in Canada... In the very early seventies, PET did a media interview in which he expressed the view (uncontroversial to a political scientist, which is what he had been, or to an historian of the Westminster style political systems) that governments were elected on the basis that the representatives would use their best judgement in determining what to legislate, and that democratic feedback comes at the next election cycle. In particular, a government should be guided by good policy rather than immediate popularity of its policies. This was wildly unpopular. Many voters, though living in a representative democracy, want the benefits of direct democracy - immediate feedback. (They usually don't want the drawback of a functional direct democracy, which is that everyone has to take considerable effort in educating themselves on at least the important issues, going well beyond reading the news occasionally.) That's why recall mechanisms are popular with populist platforms, such as that backed by the original Reform Party.

The Liberal Party was reduced to a minority government in the following election, partly as a result of that response. Since then it's been pretty clear that in practice coherent policy will tend to take a back seat to tailoring initiatives to what will not be too unpopular, at least with the Liberals.)

I expect this to be, generally, an election where the Liberals use a front-runner campaign: heavy in accomplishments, with a relatively anodyne platform designed not to drive anyone off who might already be considering voting Liberal. I could be wrong, though. One of the big advantages of the Liberals is that the Conservatives are both divided and, as a whole, unlikely to unite around policies which might appeal to swing voters. O'Toole seems to be trying to move somewhat in that direction, but he has to deal with social Conservatives, libertarians who object to sensible public health measures, and Harperites who want to nail their colours to the mast of Big Oil in the middle of the hottest year on record. (Not that the Liberals are immune on that last point. A recent headline had them saying they needed pipeline revenue to fight climate change, which is really just bonkers.) The NDP has a lukewarm platform - aiming at middle of the road voters - and a personally popular leader, at least compared to Trudeau. (Trudeau retains personal charisma; but he now has a significant block of electors among potential swing voters who wish he'd inherited his father's intelligence as well.)

It's just possible that the Liberals could campaign on a big platform designed to exacerbate the weaknesses of the other two parties - pushing for sweeping new changes to address disparities the pandemic revealed and to take aggressive action on climate change. This would have two advantages: it would heavily differentiate them from the CPC, and it might put them far enough left to weaken the NDP. It has one big disadvantage: medium voters who just want to get back to normal who would reject such a platform in favour of a business as usual approach, which would be O'Toole's platform.

I do expect the Liberals to make strategic announcements designed to both distinguish themselves from the PCs and make the PC response likely to include embarassing reactions from some if the PC candidates. I certainly expect them to talk a lot about climate change, given recent heatwaves, wildfires, and the IPCC report (as well as the upcoming climate conference in Scotland). But I expect those to be secondary elements in what will otherwise be a front-runners race. (Also, if they were inclined to run on a big change platform, the obvious thing to do would be to reconvene Parliament, put the platform in the Speech from the Throne, and then either call an election on its failure or govern aggressively based on its passage, and the passage of all the implementing bills, which would all be votes of confidence... they are not doing this.)

I expect the Conservatives to campaign as though the Liberals had such a platform but were keeping it secret. About the only thing their disparate combination of factions can unite behind is a return to the status quo ante, and they will depict the Liberals as disturbers of that status quo, and as untrustworthy on other grounds (the current fight with the Speaker, the MeToWe controversy, etc.).

I expect the NDP to campaign (as they have recently) as Mackenzie King's "Liberals in a hurry" in an attempt to expand their centrist vote. As recent experience has indicated a hard ceiling on the NDP vote in critical areas I do not think that this will succeed; they might pull some votes away from the Liberals but probably not as many as last election.

The Greens ... what can be said about the Greens other than that they are showing themselves to be at least as good as the Conservatives at stabbing themselves in the foot? Maybe that they are also a reminder of the old fights between splintering factions in the left throughout the Twentieth Century. This is good for the NDP and accordingly a bit of a negative for the Liberals.

On Covid ... there's certainly an argument to be made that given our current vaccination levels we are little more at risk (or less at risk) than we will be at any time in the next two years. (Risk could easily increase if a variant more problematic than Delta arises.) I don't expect anyone to make that argument, because it's part of the unpopular position (based on incontrovertible fact! I see Ontario is backtracking on several opening-up promises, as is Alberta) that there will be no return to the status quo ante. The Liberals and NDP may tacitly rely on that, but they're not going to trumpet it or its implications. There is certainly an argument that voting by mail should not only have resources allocated for a heavier vote than usual but encouraged, and that campaign tours should be curtailed or abolished.

Recent coverage has shown that the mad, panicked response of last Friday by the Ontario PCs to the increasing COVID numbers was not an aversion to more deaths, nor a belated reaction to the (ignored) advice from their advisory panel, nor even (as I thought) a response to the ICU crisis. It was a reaction to increasing general public negative reaction to the weak response of the government to the third wave of the pandemic and, as such, pure classical politics.

It may become a classic example of the problems of "Something must be done; this is something; therefore it must be done" thinking, and likewise of the risks of confusing a demand for more action with a demand for effective action. Though they did not have "something" to hand; they had to make it up.

The Ford PCs continue to show the same traits which made them so beloved before the pandemic: action before thought, and singing from the same songsheet to a degree which leads one to imagine that DoFo has perfected brainwashing. These are not the traits of an enduring political dynasty.

Though political they most assuredly are: they respond as politicians, to public opinion, and not, as a government, to public need.

Pitt, or Peel, or even Gladstone, thought of politics as something which had to be dealt with to get around to one's real aim, which was that of governing. Our current leaders never get far enough away from politics to govern.

We can at least be glad we do not live in Alberta. At last report, Kenney, who is even more resolute than Ford in his unwillingness to sacrifice the interests of the rich^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H corporations to the public need, is facing an internal party revolt by those who feel that he has unduly restricted their freedoms.

The US now has a moderately sane leader confronting a gridlocked legislature and a set of state governments which range between the effective and the batshit crazy. The UK has a clever buffoon with no principles and no stability as a leader facing a crumbling Union.

"Politics", in the sense that the word has had since some time in the early 20th Century (at least), has failed: not only on COVID, but on the climate crisis, and even on such simple matters as security for the majority of citizens. Churchill's dictum may still apply - authoritarian regimes may have dealt with COVID better but are not otherwise much more competent, and even their range of effectiveness in the pandemic is so great that I at least am inclined to link the success of many East Asian regimes to their cultures rather than their governments. If authoritarian traits aligned with effectiveness in dealing with crises, Russia would be in much better shape. But some sort of third option looks increasingly necessary.

A sane electorate would never have elected Ford, or Johnson, or Trump, or Bolsonaro. It may almost be time to consider the actual utility, under a transformation, of Brecht's ironic suggestion:

Wäre es da

Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung

Löste das Volk auf und

Wählte ein anderes?

If "political" thought is creating a breakdown, perhaps we need to think, instead of political response, of a social, artistic, and literary response. Human nature is malleable (though maybe not as malleable as Leary and Wilson thought): addressing how people think may, in the end, be our best response to the crisis of government which confronts us. We need another population, not simply a set of changes of government.

After hearing the Mayor of Ottawa describe the relative chaos created by the police stops on the Ottawa-Gatineau crossings, I realized that we should refer to the most major one among them as "Checkpoint Dougie".

The surprising thing, on first glance, is not that the province is back in (semi-)lockdown, but that it took so much time to get here, and that so many feathers were unnecessarily ruffled along the way.

I will bypass (for the moment) the issues around vaccine strategy, or the curious absence of strong measures targetted at warehouses, meat-packing plants, and other large areas of potential and actual spread, and pick up another thread from the tapestry.

Why did this come as a surprise?

The papers were filled with complaints from restauranteurs who were, essentially, pulled into a false position by the government encouraging them to open patios a week or two before shutting them down. The government went from talking about allowing barbers to open to imposing a new grey zone on all of Ontario within about 48 hours. The follow-up of a stay-at-home order has taken less than a week.

But none of this was, in fact, sudden. The numbers have been speaking for weeks to anyone who can do any sort of extrapolation.

There is, in fact, a really straightforward, obvious, and more effective way of doing all this. It's to sit down with epidemiologists and work out a model where this sort of R1 factor generates that protective reaction as an immediate response, and then publish the schedule in the Ont. Regs. as actual law.

The rules might need tweaking occasionally as new evidence came to light (e.g. of specific activities being more or less risky). But essentially, they wouldn't suffer from the sort of foot-dragging we've just seen (which translates into lives) or whiplash-inducing reversals, which are bad politics and cost money to people (sometimes, to the government itself).

So why don't we see it? It's not just Ontario; the same sort of see-sawing back and forth is visible elsewhere.

Part of it, no doubt, is classic politics, in the sense of being the product of reacting to varying pressures and trying to find compromise. But I think that far more of it is leaders trying to preserve the illusion, to themselves as much as to anyone else, that they have power. By reserving decisions, by making the changes on rules those of sudden emergency orders-in-council, it draws a veil over the fact that their leeway for decision is very small.

That doesn't mean that they don't have power. The continuing refusal of the provincial government to enact paid sick leave has shortened many peoples' lives. (It had shortened lives before the pandemic as well, but less visibly.) It is always possible to affect the course of events by doing a bad job, or an exceptionally good one. But within the way this has been framed, even though they may delay or fudge, the final decisions are being driven by the virus, and, particularly, by the capacity of the hospitals. (The new status, I am convinced, derives not from the number of people who are ill, but by the ICUs approaching capacity.)

Apparently about 45% of Republicans do not object to the storming of the Capitol. Although appalling, this is not really new news. 45% of about 48% is approximately the crazification factor of the early 21st Century (actually a little lower). Things have not shifted much.

Although the immediate focus on security up to and through the inauguration in Washington is certainly important (critical), the bigger concern is longer term and more broadly spread.

This has been a worry since at least 2008: that if even a small but significant fraction of the American population refuses to accept the legitimacy of the government, and a proportion of those are inclined actively to resist the government, then the mechanisms of government fail or need to be heavily reworked.

For all that we think of democracy as being about majority rule, it is even more firmly based on the idea of general acceptance throughout the entire population. Without that acceptance, those in power have little option but to exert such a high degree of direct power as to have a negative impact on experienced freedom of choice, or alternatively to withdraw from areas particularly affected by the levels of disaffection (e.g. Stephenson's Ameristan), or both. (This is the basis of the strategy of '60s radicals such as the Weathermen: force the government into ever more repressive behaviours by acts of violence, so that the population would reject the government as a whole for its repression.)

Even now, prosecuting everyone who trespassed on the Capitol or continued to be present after a riot had been declared would overwhelm the courts for many months to come. That means either dropping all but the most serious charges or dispensing with important procedural safeguards.

If every non-urban county seat in the US becomes potentially hostage to a cadre of Trump's base who are ready to express their views using violence, there is a potential massive failure of governance just waiting in the wings.

Secondly, the reaction of those conservative voters who are not so inclined - already visible - is likely to destroy the viability of the Republicans as a national party. (Trump lost; a weaker pseudo-Trump would lose worse; a "moderate Republican" would be rejected by the Trumpists.) Internal fighting will hobble the party in any case.

The Republican Party, since 1980, has not been a beneficial power, but its viability has at least meant that there has been an actual choice at the polls. If it ceases, for a generation, to be viable, then one of the important parts of a representative democratic system with parties goes away: the ability to keep the current ruling party in check with the implicit threat of rejection at the polls. (There are other ways to get this effect. If one eliminates parties altogether and reverts to the Elizabethan model where all choices are local and based on character and reputation (and local alliances) of individuals, that works as well, especially if there is a general acceptance of the importance of unanimity, not merely majority support, in choosing a member, things can also work, though it does not scale easily. It does reflect the wishes of the US founders. It's not going to happen.) And that electoral weakness would further inflame the right.

This has been building for a long time and there is no obvious fix, especially as the underlying factors driving the domestic disaffection continue to be there: the retreat from imperial power, the economic dislocations from the information economy, and the impact of climate change. I'm not sure there's any obvious way out of this, save some extraordinary run of good luck over an extended period of time.

There is an article at the Guardian noting that Trump's vote seems to have gone up between 2016 and 2020 with minorities and women and to have gone down with white men, in contrast to the usual narrative about Republican and Democratic support.

The implication is not new, however. I have argued before that the underlying dynamic behind the rise of Trump and Johnson et al. is an increasing number of those who want to bring down the current system (or at least throw sand (or culottes) in the gears) because it does not work for them. One of the effects of Trump's ineptitude and rhetoric is that after four years of being at the helm of an emphatically establishment party he is still seen as an outsider. So those who suffer under the current regime - ethnic minorities as well as rural or proletarian whites - may be inclined to vote for Trump as the best available "champion" against the establishment, the "elites", the knowledge workers. An increasing shift in the workplace towards elimination of jobs which can be automated just adds to the ranks. Basically,vthecraw materials of Trump's base are the disaffected, and although many may not be attracted by Trumpism, many are.

There's nothing intrinsic in the current pressures which would give rise to right-wing populism rather than left-wing populism; but you'll note that in the USAn context Sanders did not take off and Trump did (or even the Tea Party prior to Trump); the progressive eat-the-rich alternative was effectively defanged by the New Deal and hadn't been a significant factor in American politics since.

Trump has been a John the Baptist, showing to the next competent right wing authoritarian populist how easily the system can be pushed over - that the supposed checks and balances generally fail badly in the context of a polarized two-party factional system.

The thing to worry about is not that Trump will run again in 2024 - at his current rate of decline[1] and factoring in his likely conflicts with various authorities that would be a long shot - nor that his children will (no charisma, no skill for demogoguery), but that somebody not yet noticeable on the scene will emerge from the shadows with a better grasp of the game and a longer game plan, and more charisma than the current bunch of Republican alternatives have to offer. For further analyses of these risks see here.

[1]There's a fair amount of (anecdotal, not verified data) l evidence that Trump's capacities have been declining markedly in the last few years, and his observed capacities at present are not high.

There is a just-so-story about our pre-proto-Indo-European, pre-Yamnaya (pre-choose-whatever-nomadic-group-you-think-is-in-your-ancestral-tree) tribal ancestors: that there were two centres of power in the social patterns of our ancestors, the war-leader/hunter (strong, tough, aggressive, not-very-bright) and the shaman (clever, capable with language, might or might not be a good fighter).

(It's not a terribly great just-so-story as these things go: we have access to only traces of PIE culture, and no evidence of that sort of organization at that time, and there are lots of other patterns to choose from (priest-kings, for example, who combine the two roles).)

Regardless of its status it's certainly an old trope. Going by elements in his portrayal (that archaic shield) Telamonian Ajax, who pretty much embodies the stupid aggressive warrior type, may inhabit one of the earliest strata of the Greek epic tradition, and his fight with Odysseus over Achilles' armor stands at the head of our cultural tradition. (Shakespeare is still getting comedy from the opposition in Troilus and Cressida, over two thousand years later.) It may be worth pointing out that from our perspective Achilles, "best of the Achaeans", looks much like Ajax (and neither looks much like much-contriving Odysseus).

The trope reflects a reality: that a sizeable part of the population respond to "big, aggressive, and frankly stupid" as positive traits. This is the macho stereotype, of the hood as leader. (There's also the reality that a lot of people are also put off by it.)

Some of the splits in the US vote suggest that this has been a factor in Trump's relatively strong support; men (mainly men) from macho subcultures voting for him because they respond to him as a leader, especially if they are socially conservative and see as enemies the targets of his rhetoric.

This is also not just about now: the US has been here before. The American version of the standoff between Ajax and Odysseus was that between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Adams, like Odysseus, took the prize from the assigned judges, followed by great recrimination by the loser (though Jackson ended up winning in a rematch, four years later, with greater public support, and went on to ride roughshod over the fiscal well-being and constitutional norms of the republic, as well as putting a boot on the backs of inconvenient ethnic minorities). Biden is no Adams, but the Democratic demographic he stands for represents the Odyssean side over against Trump's cur Ajax.

Whether he wins or loses in the Electoral College, Biden has a sizeable majority of the popular vote; but the number of people who voted for Trump - against national self-interest, against economic self-interest, against any rational evaluation - is a reminder not only of the effect of the alternate reality presented by and inhabited by the modern conservative movement but of the continuing influence of the tough leader trope, millenia after Homer signalled a movement away from a simple macho leadership approach.

From 1066 until 1558 the territories of the English Crown included some land in the continent; this ended only with the loss of Calais to the French. Until the Nineteenth Century, the monarchy laid claim, officially, to the title of King (or Queen) of France.

England remained tightly involved in Europe's shifting politics, to the point of going to war with the Dutch under Charles II; being ruled by a Dutch king from 1688 until William of Orange's death; fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession; getting a set of German monarchs whom it still has not left behind - Victoria grew up more German than English. England was involved in the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Crimean War, all as a result of a combination of interest in the other side of the channel and involvement in continental alliances. That's not even beginning to deal with the 20th Century.

England, and Britain as a whole, have never been in any meaningful sense independent of Europe. (The Scots were linked to the French and the Low Countries when they were a separate country.) Even Caesar's invasion was a response to Brittanic support for the Gauls.Brexit is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of English history, just as it is based on a further misunderstanding of economic and technical history: the brief pre-eminence of Britain economically between the mid-Eighteenth Century and the early Twentieth was a one-off chance produced by a relatively open and unified society (which provided fertile conditions for the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions) and enhanced by the equally accidental presence of major reserves of coal and iron. Well before the First World War it was being overtaken in both productivity and innovation by the Germans and the Americans. (These days, by GDP, Britain and France are tied almost neck-and-neck and both are well behind Germany; its economy is one-eighth the size of the EU.) Britain no longer really "punches above its weight", if it ever really did - at least since Suez.

It has had its chance to decline gracefully, trading power for tourism by retaining its trappings. It has now rejected that chance, choosing instead to hold onto the threadbare rags of an imperial illusion. Where it will be by this time next year is anybody's guess.

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Entries tagged with politics

Active and Passive

Election

French Language Liberal Leadership Debates

Ship Money

Trade Wars

One thing Biden could do...

Failure of the Demos

So the question is...

Various short observations

Yet Again

Election Thoughts

Anger and The Canadian Election

On a Probable Election

Politics

First as tragedy, then as farce

The Illusion of Choice

Sedition, Conspiracy, and Rebellion

The Disaffected

Leadership

Brexit