It really is remarkable how little coverage Canadian politics gets in the US press. If I hadn’t been out with a friend who knows more about Canadian politics than I do about our American idiots, I wouldn’t have learned that Stephen Harper’s government fell yesterday. What’s interesting about yesterday’s no-confidence vote is that Harper’s Conservative government was also found in contempt of Parliament, the first time that’s happened in the history of Canada.
For those of you who don’t eat poutine, this timeline shows that the reason the Harper government fell was that it didn’t disclose the details of the cost of major crime and tax revenue bills, and they also lied about the cost of procuring new F-35 fighters. Here’s a Globe and Mail backgrounder on the two major party candidates.
ErinSiobhan
Well played by the opposition to bring down the government on the contempt charge and not the budget. That’s got to annoy the Conservatives.
Harper is still likely to win a minority but the potential for a coalition is interesting.
MikeJ
Going prorogue.
Rick Massimo
That’s a joke, right? In the States, conservatives do that before breakfast. And, as often as not, brag about it in speeches.
burnspbesq
Time to start reading Maclean’s. Pass the poutine, s’il vous plait.
Nathan
As someone who is openly Canadian, I can say with confidence we’ll probably be in the exact same spot, or likely worse, at the end of this.
Part of me want things to go really wrong so the Liberals can once again go into panic mode and dump their leader. Michael Ignatieff, being a scholar and an author and a friend of Salman Rushdie and all that, may seem attractive, but he’s useless as a politician. And he’s no progressive: in the past, he has repeatedly made the case that the US has had to bad things like torture people because, you know, the REAL bad guys do worse. And he supported extending our Afghanistan mission, which is a nice way to spend a few billion dollars a year while everything else gets cut.
polyorchnid octopunch
I personally hope that something happens during the campaign that causes the CPoC to tank big time. Bunch of fucking Harris retreads… they sucked when they ran Ontario and they really suck now.
Southern Beale
I knew Steven Harper’s conservative government fell yesterday from Teh Twittahz. However, the story I read also said that the move has spawned elections which will most likely see the conservatives win.
So I really don’t understand parliamentary systems at all. How can your government fall and then return to power in the next election?
polyorchnid octopunch
@Nathan: Yeah, I agree. I think that it’s time to give the dippers a turn… which just goes to show you how bad it’s gotten.
Nathan
burnspbesq – Mark Steyn is one of Macleans’ featured writers. It’s like Newsweek with less intellectual heft.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Southern Beale: One’s about the confidence of parliament, the other’s about the confidence of the Canadian people.
That said, if the Canadian people hand him a majority, they’re twits. The hopeful sign is that the people have lost a lot of faith in the Conservative’s competence, according to one recent poll.
For me, I have the misfortune of having known Baird at Queen’s; we went to school there at the same time. He was an asshole then and is an asshole now.
Superluminar
Maybe the fall of the government will mean the evil Canadians will end their baby-killing, imperialistic little “intervention” in Libya.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Rick Massimo: Hey dude… welcome to the Real World. We actually expect competence.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Nathan:
Yeah, that’s sadly what I’m hearing from folks in Canada that I know as well: the Conservatives are still probably going to be leading or even have total power, because people hate/fear the Liberals enough to deny them a coalition.
I understand that the Liberal party in Canada is hardly analogous to our liberals, but Christ, the world really has fucking turned anything Liberal into a fucking plague to them, hasn’t it? :/
Murc
The left in Canada is between a rock and a hard place. The Liberals have a giant fucking ball and chain named Michael Ignatieff dragging them down (and the article linked at The Star, by the way, mastermix, is total bullshit; the Liberals didn’t lose in 2008 because of Stephane Dion, they lost because of incumbent weariness. It was peddled as Dion’s fault in order to justify Ignatieff being taken seriously) and don’t have the stones to rid themselves of him.
Meanwhile Jack Layton can’t get taken seriously despite having the most heft of any major party leader in the whole country.
soonergrunt
@Nathan:
How is this possible? Newsweak is a collection of people with pretensions to intellectualism who really aren’t intellectual. If Macleans is even less intellectual, doesn’t that cause a singularity of non-intellectualism, with the entire world being sucked in and destroyed and no force, including light able to escape?
Alex
The current government is a minority government. The Conservatives are the biggest party in Parliament, but they don’t have an outright majority. It took all three opposition parties working together to bring down the government, but there’s no way, politically, that they could form a permanent coalition (since one of the three is the separatist Bloc Quebecois).
If the balance in Parliament doesn’t shift significantly (early polls hint that it won’t), then we’ll be right back to a minority Conservative government again.
leftwinger
I hope my fellow Canadians get it together enough to dump the band of neocon fascists that have been running things for the past 5 years. I’ve never seen a political party as evil as the CPC.
ps MacLeans isn’t worth lining your birdcage with.
polyorchnid octopunch
@leftwinger: I’m with you. They are fucked. How do the people in Whitby keep re-electing that lying fucker Flaherty?
As a reference; when Flaherty was finance minister in Ontario he closed out his career there by flat out lying about the state of the books in his last provincial election there.
Flat. Out. Lying. Caught red-handed after the election that he lost when it came out that his ministry told him the truth but he lied to the public about it. The electorate in Whitby must be brain-damaged.
polyorchnid octopunch
@soonergrunt: I’m sure this is all pie to you, but believe me, it’s possible.
JGabriel
@Murc:
Why not? Not rhetorical, I really want to know.
.
polyorchnid octopunch
@JGabriel: It’s because he’s NDP. Been their fate since they were founded; in many ways, they exist for the Liberals to ideologically plunder for their good ideas.
It’s because they’re new; they weren’t around at Confederation.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@polyorchnid octopunch:
And yet we have Rick Scott in charge of whether a state gets Medicare funding or not, and how it’s used.
In other words, the neoconification/wingnuttification has pretty much engulfed the whole ‘Western’ world. So…enjoy. :/
keestadoll
As if we needed another reason to read press from outside this country.
rikyrah
Rachel Maddow had a nice explanation on what happened.
polyorchnid octopunch
@rikyrah: Got link? I’d like to check it out… see if she got it right. Most of the time, when reading other countries’ press, they just don’t.
burnspbesq
@Nathan:
Steyn is an issue, to be sure, but their news coverage is better than any weekly this side of The Economist. And, in case no one told you, you do have the option of skipping the pages that Steyn is on.
mem from somerville
It pisses me off to no end that I can get Spanish and Portuguese sports and soap operas but I can’t get a single Canuck channel. I would love CBC.
And it’s bizarre. The first cable we had in the 70s where I grew up in Lowell had a French Canadian station which I did watch at the time. (I saw The Omen in French–so I wasn’t keen on the politics at the time). But that was a long time ago now.
burnspbesq
@leftwinger:
“I’ve never seen a political party as evil as the CPC.”
Really?Allow us to introduce you to the Republican Party. And here’s its cute Irish cousin, Fianna Fail.
Murc
@JGabriel:
Short answer? Layton is the leader of the NDP, which means he’s treated as sort of like the cute kid who has to be indulged because those people who don’t vote for the two ‘serious’ parties keep giving his faction enough political power it can’t be outright ignored.
Canadian politics are different from American ones, of course, but there have been ongoing and somewhat successful efforts to tar anyone to the left of establishment Liberal figures as fundamentally unserious people who shouldn’t be regarded as REAL leaders.
Janet
When Bush was re-elected, I moved to Canada. I’m very happy; it was the right decision; I’ll end my days here.
But even after 6 years of living with Canadians, I still feel a surreal kind of culture shock. The Canadians I know, my neighbors and friends, seem to be just like Americans, but they aren’t.
In Canada, unions and the labor movement are strong, there’s no drama about abortion (even though Canada has its share of religious zealots), the banking system is considered the soundest in the world (there was no banking or mortgage crisis here.) Life expectancy is higher than in the US. There are handgun laws and socialism. My (essentially red-neck but very nice) neighbors accept all this as the norm, there doesn’t seem to be a “27%” here.
There are Canadian politicians who would love to adopt the corrupt ways of the American political system. Harper loved Bush, even when he was being snubbed. It’ll be interesting to see how the current challenge plays itself out. But it’ll happen quickly — in a couple of months — without assassination attempts, talk-show hysteria, etc.
ppcli
@burnspbesq:
No comment on Macleans as far as political coverage, etc. is concerned, though I don’t think they’re as bad as some people here appear to. But I do want to give them credit for the idea of devoting the final page of each issue to a full-page, revealing and warmly, sometimes almost lovingly written obituary of some “person on the street” who passed away in the preceding weeks. I love those things – never miss one.
Schad
Our Conservative Party is an odd bunch. As a raving pinko, I was scared silly when Harper and his bunch of Perot-wannabees swept into kinda-power five years ago, but my biggest complaint now isn’t that they’ve been enacting all manner of crazed right-wing policies, it’s that they’ve spent that time doing absolutely nothing, which has been just as detrimental.
It’s rather remarkable; they haven’t instituted a single signature program, or really done anything even mildly of note…they’ve sat with their thumbs up their asses, passing the occasional tax break, engaging in all manner of idiotic and petty (but inconsequential in the grand scheme) ethics violations, safe in the knowledge that the left — which gets close to two-thirds of the votes in most elections — will split enough votes to allow them another minority government, so long as they don’t piss anyone off by actually trying to govern.
Meanwhile, the debt — which the Liberals finally got under control during the late nineties/early aughts — continues creeping up, with not a bloody thing to show for it. I’m glad that they haven’t been able to foist many of the policies they touted while in opposition upon the country, but when the best thing one can say of a half-decade of governance is that your inaction hasn’t fucked things up as badly as action might have, it’s about time to move on.
Granted, it’s a state of affairs that I’m sure many Americans would gladly take over the rise of the Teatards.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
so what does this have to do with the price of a half-quarter in oshawa
Maude
@mem from somerville:
I read Canadian news online. Austrailian also, too.
schrodinger's cat
@burnspbesq: Have you been following the cricket world cup?
mem from somerville
@Maude: Thanks Maude. I am familiar with the internet. But there is this other device in my house–an antique, I know–but it somehow obtains programming all day from the air. I think it can also be used for watching stories and reports that are not available on the internet, and in a larger size.
RedKitten
Honestly, I’d just be happy if a few things happened:
1. If the Bloc was no longer considered eligible for federal office. They don’t even make a pretense of having any other province’s interests in mind, and yet their leader is eligible to be PM? That galls me to no end.
2. If the other parties cleaned house and got new leaders. As a bonus, they can also get rid of Peter “Why the long face?” MacKay. I don’t trust Harper as far as I can throw him — not since the Atlantic Accord fiasco. Honestly, I’d like to see the parties look somewhere besides Ontario, Alberta and Quebec for their leadership for a change.
3. I’d ALSO like to be able to vote for our Prime Minister separately from my Member of Parliament. For the longest time, I was in a real spot of difficulty, because our local Conservative guy was AWESOME. Just an all-around good guy with good ethics who got shit done for his constituents. But voting for him meant voting for Harper, and that always stuck in my craw. I was actually kind of happy when he was booted out of caucus (for voting against his own party’s budget) and I could vote for him as an independent.
Unfortunately, here in Canada, we seem to have a real history of keeping a party in power until we’re so fucking sick of them that we can’t even look at them anymore. So we vote the other party in, lather, rinse, repeat.
Pongo
@leftwinger: You are familiar with American Republicans, right?
Anya
This is the fourth time in less than seven years the Canucks are having a federal election. Talk about election fatigue! This non-confidence motion is not surprising because Harper has been egging on the opposition. I really I am disappointed with the Canadian electorate though, they seem to be giving Harper’s goons a pass. The Liberals were destroyed because of the sponsorship scanda. What made it worse was the infighting between the Paul Martin faction and Jean Chretien faction and the party never recovered from that. It’s amazing how little of the ongoing Conservative Party’s scandals stick. I don’t know if its apathy or if it’s the quality of the opposition, but it’s disappointing. The government fell because they were found to be in contempt of Parliament, for hiding the true cost of bills. There’s also the document tampering, withholding access to information, denying funding to non-for-profits based politics, and so on. Yet, there’s a chance they might even get a majority government. More and more they resemble their American cousins, IOKIAC.
Maude
@mem from somerville:
I don’t have one of them new fangled thingies with the big screen. I read news only. I do listen to radio news. I am a lot calmer than when I had cable. It is disguting that we can’t get news through other countires from all over the world. Cable can do that, but no, they do stupid programming.
It is a shame that people in this country are so ill informed with all of the available technology. I’d like to see the MSM go down in flames. Thanks for bring up this subject.
EDIT: Dear Maude, plz learn to spell.
ruemara
@Anya:
I think they just aren’t as evil as our brand of American Conservative®, down he’yah. If we sent a few of the evils your way, you might see a different reaction from the rather sensible Canadians. At least, the ones I know.
Also, Rachel M brought this story up. All I could think is how lovely if we could do this in certain states.
ppcli
@Schad: I’m worried that they’ve been biding their time until they get a majority government. They seem to have been reading from the same playbook as the American Republicans. One rule of thumb seems to be never to reveal what you actually have in mind until you can force it through quickly. (Walker in Wisconsin was a major miscalculation in that regard – they failed to anticipate the procedural obstacle of the quorum, plus the recall possibilities, and that gave a foothold and breathing space for an opposition movement to form.) Give Harper a majority for 5 years, and a free hand with the CRTC, and Fox News North will be broadcasting in Canada before you know it. That is, there will be a broadcast propaganda arm of the Conservatives just as there is one for the Republicans down here. Given the effect of Fox down here, I don’t want to see what it would do to the Canadian political scene.
Anya
@ruemara: No one can be as evil as our brand of conservatives (at least in a democracy), but the Canadian conservatives are modeling themselves after them. They are an aspiring teabaggers. One of Harper’s greatest skill is that he’s been masterful in keeping the crazy under wraps. I mean the Canadian public or media will not tolerate a Parliamentarian who admits that he does not believe in evolution or wants to make abortion illegal, or dismantle the Canadian Health Care system. His caucus is full of crazies, yet they’ve been very disciplined and mostly keep their craziness to themselves.
PIGL
@RedKitten: It seems you want republic, which we are not.
There is nothing inconsistent with the Bloq being a separatist Party. If they ran candidates in other provinces and a big enough majority of seats, why on earth should the leader of the Bloq NOT become Prime Minister.
Under the actual circumstances, althout technically speaking he could be asked be asked by GG to form a government, there is no danger of his able a command a majority the House, so it can’t happen. I think it frankly silly to get bent out of shape about something like this. The voters in a Riding may elect who they wish to represent them, and those reps have the right to be seated in Parliament and to organise themselves as a Party.
Schad
@ppcli:
That’s my fear as well, though I wonder whether they’ve long since come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t get reelected if they actually did stuff. It would be five years in power followed by a return to the wilderness, and could potentially trigger what they fear the most: a reconciliation between the Liberals and the NDP which would keep them out of office for the foreseeable future given the ideological leanings of everything east of Alberta.
A good portion of Harper’s caucus is indeed batshit insane, but as Anya notes their leadership seems perfectly content to keep the crazy under wraps and muddle through if it means staying in office. It might be a harder sell to the base with a majority, but Harper strikes me as the sort who’s more than happy to put aside principle in favour of the high threadcount sheets of 24 Sussex.
OzoneR
@Southern Beale:
people vote you back in
Svensker
The thing G&M neglected to mention was that Iggie is an Israel firster.
PIGL
@Svensker: That is something they would fail to mention, as it is pretty much true of the G&M itself, and of an implortant part of its public. Understandable from history, but unfortunate in my opinion.
MaryRC
One of the crazies who escaped was Bev Oda, Ministry of International Co-operation, who changed an already-signed memo from CIDA (Canadian equivalent of USAID) by inserting the word “not” into it. And then lying about it. And Harper stood by her.
Comrade Mary
@RedKitten:
IIRC, a lot of us were looking to McKenna, but he wasn’t interested.
Brachiator
The Economist take on Canadian politics:
I would appreciate learning Canadian posters’ take on this.
By the way, a 2010 Economist article made the assertion that “Stephen Harper is counting on Canadians’ complacency as he rewrites the rules of his country’s politics to weaken legislative scrutiny.” Not a positive take on what was happening.
Jason In the Peg
For the me the most worrisome thing about the last 5 years is what has been done to the ministries. Appointing conservative lackey’s and stacking the bureaucracy with hacks and idealogue. The chaos at the top of the RCMP, CIDA, Rights and Democracy and who knows what else, but Judge Dewar was a patronage appointment so throw the courts into the mix as well.
Should we be so luck as to get rid of the Harper government I’m afraid it will be years before we get a full accounting of the damage done.
PeakVT
@polyorchnid octopunch: That ‘stache doesn’t help. It’s not bad, but people just don’t seem to elect leaders with mustaches these days.
Peter
@Brachiator:
I really hope that the opposition parties are right. They have a ton of mud they can sling at the Tories, but for some reason none of it’s sticking. Meanwhile, Harper’s been flooding the airwaves with ridiculous attack ads against Ignatieff for over two years now. They all have the same theme – that he spent a long time in the States, only came back to Canada to try and become Prime Minister for his own personal gain. It’s blatant smearing, and it makes me sick to my stomach, frankly. I expect this sort of thing out of US politics, not Canada’s.
Hopefully, once election season starts, the opposition parties will be able to get the public to engage more on these sorts of scandals. Harper’s done a lot of nasty stuff during his time as Prime Minister, and if ‘He used to live in the United States’ is honestly the best Harper can come up with, he’s definitely going to be outmatched in the mud war. The only question is whether the Canadian public will give a shit.
PeakVT
I just looked at the provincial legislative makeup, and it looks very conservative (the BC and QB Liberals are to the right of the national party), and with more regionalism than I expected. The NDP holds only two legislatures.
Yutsano
@Peter: I just read a few details on CBC.ca, and Layton sounds like he’s chomping at the bit to try and increase his standing in Parliament. And if he really was running second to Conservatives in certain ridings, he may just have a point. It always seems like no matter what BC gets screwed in national elections (I only care because A) they’re neighbours to the north of me and B) my ex lives there) so I hope they go all-out NDP in May. Either way break out the popcorn, I bet this one gets ugly.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@RedKitten: what gives me hope is that even with the Liberals picking complete idiots as leaders (at least politically – I liked what Dion had to say, but he was pretty tone deaf in terms of how he said things, and Iggy is clearly no moron), Harper was never able to cobble together a majority. Now that Ignatieff seems to have developed a semblance of a spine, and the Conservatives giving a big “FUCK YOU” to the country on everything from the G20 to the various scandals, there’s at least a reason to be optimistic that he has worn out his welcome quicker that Mulroney and Chretien did. Harper doesn’t do himself any favours by being so smug and arrogant
Let the farcical aquatic ceremony begin!
Mike G
@Jason In the Peg:
For the me the most worrisome thing about the last 5 years is what has been done to the ministries. Appointing conservative lackey’s and stacking the bureaucracy with hacks and idealogue.
Harper sounds a lot like the Bush Administration. Standard conservative ideology I guess — since government “isn’t good for anything”, they don’t care about it performing any important functions with competence, so turn it into a tool of the ruling party and its cronies.
Martin
So, lying to your legislative body is illegal in Canada? Huh. What a cool idea. We should try that.
Yutsano
@Martin: It’ll never catch on. Lying seems to be the raison d’etre of the Republican Party.
Jason In the Peg
@Mike G: He seems to be very much like Bush right down to his fundie beliefs and folksy interest in the national sport. He never owned a team but he’s been promising us a book about hockey since his first national campaign.
Peter
@Mike G: Yeah, he’s pretty much the Bush of the North, right down to the attacks on science (by killing the long-form census and putting a tight leash on government scientists). I reaaaaally hope we can get rid of him this election.
burnspbesq
Only in Canada could some idiot provincial human rights bureaucrat turn Mark Steyn into the poster boy for free speech.
Tyrone Slothrop
The Bloc do present a challenge to the formation of a majority government. With neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals suffering from serious internal divisions or diminution exacted as payback directed towards an unpopular Prime Minister (Hi, Brian!), it will be very difficult for either to achieve a majority with the Bloc preventing Québec from significantly playing a role in it. With that said, IMO a Harper majority looks more likely to be the result than an Ignatieff minority.
Malovich
@Brachiator: “By the way, a 2010 Economist article made the assertion that “Stephen Harper is counting on Canadians’ complacency as he rewrites the rules of his country’s politics to weaken legislative scrutiny.” Not a positive take on what was happening.”
It’s more or less true and mostly the fault of the media as far as I can tell. The Sun is definitely right-wing and as close to Fox News as we get around here; everything they report in has a strong right-leaning slant. However, the rest of the news has been mostly mum on the Harper gov’t…
…until about a month ago. In one week I heard more about what our government has been doing than I have in any given year of Harper’s time in office. The F-35 debacle, the defunding of public research and attempts to raid the public worker’s pension system, the Ova and oversight ombudsman debacle and a series of very small exercises of the PMO’s power to shift the balance of power into Harper’s favour.
This may have an impact as it settles in. We’ll see as the month goes on.
Fox News is taking a crack at Canadian audiences. However, they may run into a snag as soon as their channel hits the airwaves…
“Quebecor [Fox News North corp, the people who run the Sun News media empire up here] should be required to … adhere to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Code of Ethics for balanced news coverage and programming. The CRTC’s November 26 approval specifically included requirements that Sun News would adhere to the RTNDA Code of Journalistic Ethics and the Journalistic Independence Code as a member of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.”
I suspect we’ll see them fail rather quickly.
dhd
It’s a shame that the NDP are still, for no good reason that I can tell, considered “unserious”. Layton is the only national party leader who is actually popular in Quebec, and he is personally very popular here, even if the NDP has few viable candidates outside of Montreal… I’m hoping they win Gatineau this time around too.