Mike From Nowhere asks: I have my ballot for the Liberal Party election and I’m still making up my mind. Thoughts on the candidates?
And Mitchell Hundred asks: Justin Trudeau is going to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (let’s be realistic here). Is this a good thing?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, because Trudeau is a smart, capable politician who nonetheless comes across as human – which many politicians do not. His “gaffe” about saying that Quebecers are better at running Canada than Albertans isn’t a big deal to anybody normal because Quebecers agree, Albertans weren’t going to vote Liberal anyway and everybody else doesn’t really care, but it reminded everybody that Trudeau is a for-real guy who occasionally says something a bit ill-advised, but everybody does that. All it did was remind people of his father (who was a famous mouth and which is a net plus for Justin). But getting back to the main point, Trudeau knows what he’s doing and will re-invigorate the Liberal party. His support for fossil fuel extraction is probably just cynical campaign noise so that he can be competitive in the west more than anything else.
No, because Trudeau has ruled out cooperation with the NDP, which (although this may only be a campaign tactic and he may change his mind once he is in power) means Trudeau has refused to deal with the central problem in Canadian politics, which is that the electoral national landscape is composed of one right-wing conservative party and three centre-left parties, which is why the fucking Tories keep winning fucking elections even though they will most likely never again get a majority of the popular vote. Until Canada’s other parties decide to engage with this fact they’re going to continue to be at a disadvantage, and it probably does not matter how smart and capable Trudeau is because if he never gets in power then who cares. Stephane Dion was ten times smarter and more capable than Trudeau is (seriously, Dion is like a friggin’ wizard) and he never got to be PM either.
For that reason and that reason alone, I would recommend voting for Joyce Murray over Trudeau, since Murray has openly campaigned for inter-party cooperation with the NDP and Greens and because she actually stands a (very small) chance at beating him. I don’t think she will, but if it takes Trudeau more than one or two ballots to win, hopefully he realizes the demand for actual, you know, victory for the left in Canada and changes his position.
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In hindsight, my initial question came across as a bit too cynical. Your take seems on point. I agree that voting against the grain can be a useful way to send a message in a situation like this.
You know, I have a lot of bad things to say about the American political system. It’s hideously malapportioned, especially at the Senatorial level. It vests too much power in the Executive. Our grand experiment in federalism seems to have basically proven that we require huge supermajorities in order to achieve social, political, and economic chain that the rest of the world beats us to by years if not decades.
But one thing I do think we have the Westminster democracies beat on is how we choose our candidates. We don’t charge membership fees in political parties; anyone who wants to be a Democrat or a Republican or anything can just fill out a form. And ALL of those party members, every single one of them, collectively choose all their candidates in every single election, right before the election.
It seems baffling to me that the Liberals are picking a standard bearer literally… what, three years? Four? Before the next election. And that only a tiny slice of the people who self-identify as Liberals will be allowed to pick him, and they had to pay money in order to do so.
The Leaders of the Parties tend to be chosen well away from an election – both to allow the public to connect the party with the mouthpiece /politico in charge and to get them worked into the news cycle as a household quantity. It also helps to humanize and familiarize them.
Which is why we have people who believe Stephen Harper is not a soulless demon-robot cast adrift in the voids of time to come into the past and feed the coming of the dark gods of the nether realms to consume the potential of humanity.
Well, that’s unacceptable.
Oh, as an additional comment, it’s not just the centre-left parties that need to deal with the fact that Canada is a parliamentary democracy, it’s actually the Canadian public as a whole.
I remember a few years back when the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc realized “Hey! There are MORE OF US than there are Tories! We could form our own government, with hookers! And blackjack!”
And everyone freaked the fuck out like it was some kind of coup attempt, and Harper got away with what I still feel was a grossly illegal prorogue with nary a peep.
Remember Murc part of the prorogue problem was that our governor general was a push over. The senate should have raised bloody hell and made itself useful as well.
Murc, the Liberals actually took a major step and did open up this vote to anyone who wanted to sign up for it with the free supporter category. That’s why 300,000 people signed up as supporters, and 129,000 of them took a second step of registering to vote.
Also, MGK, the problem is that Mulcair himself said he would never do co-operation with the Liberals. So, this is not just the Liberals at fault, but the NDP. And may I point out in 2008 the Liberals under Dion did try to havve co-operation with the Greens (Which the NDP never did) which ending up backfiring.
Mulcair has already said no to cooperation, so it makes no sense for the Liberals to elect a “cooperation” candidate. As Trudeau observed, that’s basically just saying people should vote for the NDP.
I imagine that if, after the next election, the Liberals and the New Democrats outnumber the Tories, even if the Tories are the single-largest party, they will try something, but they’re not going to say anything beforehand. Which is the smart thing, both for the individual parties’ prospects, and because (as also observed by Trudeau) it’s not really accurate that you can just merge all the parties’ voters into a “not Conservative” banner, and the Liberals would be more likely to suffer in that regard.
@Murc: In my state we have open primaries and open precinct caucuses, so the form isn’t even necessary. You just have to show up.
The open primary I am less enthused about, as these days its an excuse for people from other parties to show up and try to fuck with you.
I think that’s an advantage of it though. If your primary candidates are scary enough that I go vote in your primary even though I wouldn’t vote for either of them in the general, then what the hell are those jerks doing in your primary? If people are regularly crossing party lines to vote, then it’s because that party is extremely powerful and scary to the people who do so.