It’s great that Pierre lost and he probably lost to someone better, but were there better candidates for the common people on the ballot? How are liberals as a whole for Canada? Would another party have been better - greens for example?
I’ve seen a community about better vote counting system, so it seems Canada is still a first past the post country?
Obviously it depends on what you consider “better”. Yes we’re first past the post, and yes it sucks. The only party who wants to try to change it is the NDP. We’ll see if they get a chance to.
The leader of the Liberals, Mark Carney and the new Prime Minister of Canada, has been described as “wicked smart”. He has a PhD in economics from Oxford. He led the Bank of Canada through the 2008 financial crisis, a crisis in which Canada fared better than almost all the rest of the world, then he ran the Bank of England (first non-UK person to ever do so I believe) during Brexit, and that probably was also not as catastrophic as it could/should have been for the UK economy. He is an economist and central banker, not a career politician per se. This appears to have appealed to Canadians. He said all the right things, in my view, now we get to see if he can deliver on any of them, especially being limited to another minority government as it looks like at the moment.
Liberals are supposedly centrist, and although the previous government under Trudeau leaned left, and were pulled further left by the fact that they were stuck in an NDP-propped minority, that was the previous government. However under the new leader Mark Carney, most people agree he swings more to the right, although they’re still more centrist than the Conservatives, and it still looks like they will probably be propped up by the NDP in a very slim minority.
The Conservatives (formerly Progressive Conservatives, who dropped the Progressive part when they merged with a far-right party called the Reform party) that have a big tent they’ve continued stretching further and further right over the decades, to bring in some very undesirable people and attitudes, including most recently the antivax convoy protest supporters and the “Maple MAGA” people who want us to become the 51st state. They now also seem to have consumed the People’s Party (another far-right splinter group).
I’m biased, but yes I think the Liberals are better than the Conservatives. Canadian political views have been twisted by relentless shifting of the overton window so it’s really hard to tell where the political “center” actually is anymore. If you consider what the center was 20-30 years ago, I think the today’s NDP (considered both then and now a far-left, working class party) is now pretty close to that.
The Greens are a pretty dysfunctional party kept afloat by a few locally popular, genuine, idealistic candidates with strong integrity, only one of whom appears to have survived the strategic voting purge this election. I don’t consider them particularly relevant in Canadian politics at this point. Obviously, they are focused on environmental goals and climate change, which are issues I support although not to the exclusion and detriment of all else. Their proposed plans for actually addressing it tend to be, in my estimation, relatively incoherent, ranging from weak to naive to implausible.
Thank you. That’s a good overview.
I did hear that Trudeau became unliked and had to step down. Was it just because he was around too long?
I agree with the other two commenters. Also in my opinion, Trudeau had some good policy but terrible PR around it. The “carbon tax” should never had been called a tax from the beginning…most people got more money back, but everyone thought they were paying the tax. And Trudeau grew up in politics on the public stage. He took advantage of his privelige at times and wasn’t always careful with the optics of his actions. Too many opportunities for his opposition to criticize him and turn public favour against him.
It wasn’t officially called a carbon tax. The people who called it that were the ones attacking it (pretty much exclusively the Conservatives)
It was mostly just bad timing, the inflation and cost of living issues got blamed on him despite it being a worldwide issue. He was an easy scapegoat, and the Conservatives just attacked him constantly until he resigned. It was supposed to help them win, but as you can see from the results, it didn’t end up working out for them.
When Trudeau came in, it was after a few governments led by Stephen Haper and the conservatives. It was a bleak time for Canada. When Justin Trudeau came, he was a huge ray of hope, plus he carries the Trudeau name. He was gong to be a progressive prime minister and leader of the Liberal party and promised a lot of changes that would make the middle class life so much easier.
But many problems started to grow in Canada and blew out of porportion. Like the housing crisis, or well established alomost monopolistic companies gouging Canadians on essential services and goods like telecom and groceries. This became worst after the pandemic. And people felt Trudeau’s Liberals did too little, too late.
The middle class suffered a lot while richer Canadians and Canadian corporations thrived by keeping their gouging practices.
That’s what I heard too: the Liberals did nothing or not much. So, effectively it’ll be another… 4 years of liberal rule? Is everybody banking on this new dude, Mark Carney to be different?
i expect him to be moderately different. Hes already made some changes (some of which i disagree with, such as removing the carbon tax.)
Hopefully he seeks to distinguish himself, and gets rid of FPTP.
If he actually gets rid of FPTP Mark would, in my opinion, go down in history as the most significant PM since John A. Macdonald.
Since Tommy Douglas maybe? Universal Healthcare? That one time we had an NDP government?
This sounds earily similar to other countries. The one time a real left-leaning government comes into power for a term, they make some good, long-lasting changes for the benefit of the common man, and are promptly voted out.
I know there’s a lot of folks you could list there that did great things for our country, but in my personal opinion changing how we elect our representatives is so fundamental to the functioning of the country not even universal health care compares.
Not saying I’d trade PR for healthcare though, in case someone were to propose that Faustian deal.
Well I think he’s certainly better than freakin’ John A. MacDonald in my opinion.
Personally, I don’t think so. Justin had the right ideas and the right attitude when he was first elected. But the Liberals made him fit in their mold (mould? As in cake?) and he basically stepped in line with what the lobbies told him.
I doubt very much that Carney will change any of that. He’s going to focus on the economy as usual and leave the middle class to fend for themselves.
That’s why I voted NDP.
Carney also brings with him an environmental focus. Though, as a lifelong economist, his preferred tools for getting to net zero are the tools he is most comfortable using - economic and policy pressure on the market.
I see him using the still existing industrial carbon pricing system to incentivize industry to green up it’s act.
In his book he also suggested that corporate bonuses should be shifted to punish/reward executives personally on factors including the level of negative externalities their decisions cause.
Yeah we’ll see. I’m fairly pessimistic.
There was also a dose of homophobia regarding Trudeau that has to be acknowledged. He’s a self described feminist, he is LGBT positive and has shown up for all the Pride parades and even Canada’s Drag Race, and has been photographed with drag queens, etc etc. He has practiced yoga. He also comes off as sort of foolish at times. So the nastier conservative faction who hate any sense of a man being perceived as effeminate call him homophobic slurs and that’s probably a LOT of the reason many of them didn’t like him. He’s also super good looking, and I think that makes them resentful.
This was the first part I felt strongly that I disagreed with. Did you read the platforms the parties prepared? Liberals was lackluster with few concrete numbers or stats. I couldn’t even find a solid platform on the NDPs website, just links to their various proposed initiatives, though at least they provided a costed estimate for their plans, unlike the other two main ones. The conservative ‘platform’ was a ridiculous mix of ‘blank the blank’ slogans and attacks against the liberals with very very few ideas and even fewer concrete steps for how to achieve it.
The green platform was the only one I read that had concrete numbers (ie proposed wealth tax of X% for Xmillion, y% for Ymillion, etc) and explained their goals without restorting to attack ads. I get its probably not something 90% of voters look at, but fuck people, come on. Their posted platform should be the thing they are held to and asked about, and the less people look at them, the easier it is for parties to avoid posting them or posting bland, non-concrete things they can then weasel out of later.