#NDP LEADER IS PLAYING AMONG US?????? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ceasarslegion · 4 years

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I always find it so ironic how being anti-public healthcare in canada is political suicide even among the conservatives

You can NOT be pro-private healthcare in canadian politics you just can’t without being publicly burned at the stake and that’s a good thing! I’m not saying it’s a bad thing! At least we know that’s one thing the cons can’t take from us without a nationwide riot!

Nah, it’s mostly the history of public healthcare in canada when contrasted with party beefs that make it SO ironic.

For those out of the know, we have 3 major political parties: the conservatives who are getting increasingly alt-right and it’s frankly scary, the liberals who are Enlightened CentristsTM, and the NDP who actually care about changing this place for the better. The NDP don’t usually have a lot of hold on federal government as that’s typically a lib vs con battleground, but on provincial and riding levels, they really shine and make the country better. The libs and cons dont like each other, but they do NOT like the NDP, because they’re a threat to both the institutions and the unfairly disproportionate first past the post electoral system that keeps them both in power they’re scawy extweme-weft sociawists!! Deadass I’ve heard a liberal MPP use the phrase “extremism from both the conservatives and the NDP” in person at an event I was volunteering for and i lost 10 years of my life. People hate the NDP. the other parties hate the NDP. I’m Albertan! If you utter the phrase “New Democratic” in Alberta you will not finish that title because 3 people are already kicking the shit out of you. “I thought they did a good job with what they had when they ran the province and I definitely prefer them to the UCP” would get me HANGED.

And yet, Tommy Douglas is a legendary political figure in this country. There was a national poll for most influential Canadian a while ago, and he WON! Not Terry Fox, or John A. MacDonald, Tommy freaking Douglas. The guy who ran through a political minefield of opposition to give Saskatchewan universal health care when he was premiere, and eventually gave it to the rest of the country. Guess what, y’all? He was NDP party leader. Canada’s favourite bragging point was given to them by the NDP. y’all played yourselves while Tommy Douglas was out here pulling what’s called a pro-gamer move.

Conservatives be like “the NDP are dangerous far-left extremists” to the ER doctor who’s pulling the lightbulb they shoved up their ass out for free

#bfvdnkjbjdcn this has been a RantTM #cdnpoli #canadian politics #tommy douglas #ndp #shut up dames

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akaroot · 3 years

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the leader of the NDP party is playing?? Among Us???

#lmaaoo this trend is hilarious #and he's playing with aoc too ahahah #plus we've got Alanah streaming and it's just everything good

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panicinthestudio · 5 years

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There’s a disturbing trend of the right-wing and conservatives in Canada and the States trying to connect with the broad political demands including democratic and electoral reform, universal suffrage, the right to protest including amnesty for arrested demonstrators, and independent investigation into accountability for police brutality in Hong Kong. While the record-breaking demonstrations, creativity, and on-going violence has received a lot of media attention, there hasn’t been as much with regard to nativist, localist, and populist elements within the movement that are--for the moment--in solidarity with local pro-democratic leftists and progressives. Meanwhile, more traditional economic and social conservatives are allied and aligned with pro-Beijing and establishment politics.

All of them have begun to show their influence in the usually politically apathetic (read: low voter turnout) but conservative and centrist-leaning Chinese diaspora communities, our media, and social networks. It’s reopening tensions between three major generations of immigrants: the aging and established generation of primarily Southern Chinese and Chinese diaspora, many who migrated early on or escaped war, civil unrest, and changing post-colonial sovereignty, often through places like Hong Kong; the recent decades of increasing mainland Chinese migrants; and their descendants who are born and/or raised in countries like Canada while retaining familial, professional relationships, even citizenship or residency abroad.

Owing to the protesters’ need for international support and solidarity, there is a significant amount of attention being placed on upcoming elections in places with large diaspora communities. As the SCMP article states, there are an estimated 300,000 Canadians (expats not necessarily of Chinese or Hong Kong origin) living in Hong Kong whose adult population are able to vote as of this year, another 500,000 people of Hong Kong descent in Canada, as well as 650,000 first generation mainland Chinese eligible to vote. The 2016 Census indicates there were 1,769,195 Canadians identifying themselves as having singular or partial Chinese ethnic origin, making it one of, if not the, largest non-native and non-European ethnic minorities in Canada, discounting a more specific breakdown of various direct origins and reasons for migrating. Many of these constituents are focused in the metropolitan areas of Ontario, BC, and to a lesser extent Alberta and Quebec, the four provinces comprising a significant majority of the seats allocated in the House of Commons, making them a sizeable target for exploiting the current protests for domestic political gain.

This isn’t new either, I distinctly remember in previous federal and provincial elections the Conservative Parties putting out different and often misleading ads targeting Cantonese and Taiwanese separate from mainland Mandarin Chinese, using disinformation and using gross racist or xenophobic narratives; the degrees of written and spoken unintelligibility between different Chinese languages; and statements that escaped media attention having not been directly translated into English or French. A particularly odious example was Jason Kenney in his role as Harper’s multicultural minister during the 2015 campaign trying to make political hay of prominent NDP members’ interracial relationships with Chinese Canadians, some of whom are notable politicians in their own right like Olivia Chow; as well as the Liberals’ economic and political past with China in the Pierre Trudeau and post-Trudeau Liberal years.

Now social media like Facebook and the Chinese-owned and surveilled WeChat, are being mobilized with Chinese-language advertising and smear tactic platforms in a manner inconsistent with Canadian law, with limited to no oversight on the side of the companies and lacking accountability in their use, particularly in Scheer’s Conservative Party disinformation campaign. Just last month, China and India, among other countries, were identified as having efforts to influence Canadian parties, candidates, and voters this election.

Thus far Andrew Scheer is the only party leader to make a statement in support of the pro-democracy Hong Kong protests, or at least in opposition to Beijing. Meanwhile, Trudeau is being projected as relatively weak in his stance on China or the protesters and their demands, especially in light of the ongoing extradition and security controversy around Huawei and CFO Meng Wanzhou, the detention of two Canadian citizens, recent socio-political reverberations due to trade disputes with China, and changing demographics within the diaspora communities themselves.

The NDP and Green Party have made limited statements at various points during the summer’s protests, with Jenny Kwan NDP MP for Vancouver East being notably outspoken. Organizations bridging the expat and diaspora communities have also formed, such as the officially unaffiliated Canadian Conservatives in Hong Kong having hosted a voter registration drive, and the Canadian Friends of Hong Kong (formerly Vancouver Friends of Hong Kong) aimed at highlighting modern Chinese government influence and its separation from the broader Chinese Canadian community, in addition to other solidarity groups and protests in the past few months.

***

I haven’t posted much about the current election cycle--not because of apathy--but the ballooning complexity of the situation in Hong Kong. I’ve dedicated a significant amount of my time here to covering it regularly, as the English-language coverage is often limited in scope and comes from a rather small circle of tumblrs. Things remain high-strung, it puts a strain on my community and extended family, and increasingly how it plays into larger international, federal, and broader identity conflicts and tensions.

As second-generation Chinese Canadian myself, I’m not terribly torn about my own political opinions and allegiances or on the issues that matter to me, domestic or otherwise. People with even stronger ties to the mainland and Hong Kong are another matter with growing issues of nationalism, sovereignty, as well as conflicting political and personal interests. I do find it worrying that in the diversifying of domestic political opinion and intentions, that the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong are being used as political instruments here and elsewhere.

Just noticed the length, it’s possibly longer than the original linked article itself. Apparently, I had a lot more to say on the matter than I thought.

@abpoli, @allthecanadianpolitics, @onpoli, @pnwpol, @politicsofcanada, @torontopoli

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vampyrefay · 3 years

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The leader of the ndp played among us with jackspeticeye and aoc....wtf

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news-ase · 4 years

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asoenews · 4 years

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canadianabroadvery · 4 years

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Canada's Conservatives are “completely clued out” about the unpopularity of hard-right social policies and are essentially “campaigning against themselves,” two leading political commentators argued in an online panel discussion last Monday.

Answering questions from Canada's National Observer editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood, columnists Bruce Livesey and Sandy Garossino spent an hour tackling wide-ranging questions about why today's Canadian conservative movement has moved so far to the right, its hopes for retaking power in the face of an increasingly progressive populace, and how evangelical Christians and Big Oil got a stranglehold on the right.

“The social conservative base is enormously powerful,” Livesey told Solomon Wood and the audience of 100 participants on the Zoom webinar, part of Conversations, sponsored by Canada's National Observer. “The reason (leadership rivals) Peter MacKay and Erin O'Toole have taken the positions they're doing — which are ludicrous in terms of ever trying to get elected — is because the base has this enormous social conservative element. In order to win the leadership, you've got to pander to them.”

But that's precisely what has lost them repeated elections, and will only worsen their chances over time, he said.

Livesey — an award-winning investigative journalist with experience on CBC's flagship shows The Fifth Estate and The National, Global News' 16×9, and PBS's Frontline — most recently did an analysis on the state of the Conservatives for the National Observer entitled, How Stephen Harper is destroying the Conservative party.

He said he interviewed between 25 and 30 sources for his story, and other than a couple political scientists as experts, focused almost entirely on hearing from Conservative members past and present.

“I tried to basically interview just Conservatives … people within the party, both from when they used to be called the PC (Progressive Conservative) party all the way up to the current generation,” Livesey said. “There's a lot of people who wouldn't talk to me … It was a big challenge; given that I was going to talk to them about Stephen Harper, there seemed to be a bit of a concern.”

But some did want to talk, and could be broadly lumped into two camps: the long-ousted progressive wing of the party, once nicknamed “Red Tories”; and the more recent alumni and strategists of the Harper era.

“If you talked to the sort of Red Tories — the 'liberal' wing of the party — there was no surprise there that they think the party's stuck in a ditch,” Livesey said. “The more interesting thing was finding the younger generation who were around Harper in some capacity, who are beginning to realize — having lost two back-to-back elections — that something was wrong.”

What exactly is wrong, however, he found divisive amongst loyalists. Some expressed hope to find a better leader than Andrew Scheer to save their flagging fortunes. But others, Livesey said, had started to see problems in the party's offerings to voters altogether.

“That's the contradiction the party's in at the moment,” Livesey, author of the book Thieves of Bay Street, said. “The base just thinks, 'We just need the next Stephen Harper to lead us back into power.'

“Abortion and gay marriage — those are the two issues that get social conservatives all agitated, and they want to have something done about them. Harper was brilliant at keeping that element under a lock and key. Scheer was not … nobody trusted him on those issues. The social conservative base is an enormous problem for that party.”

Whoever wins the leadership of the party, Livesey predicted, must “basically ignore what the base is” if they want to win enough seats outside Alberta, the Prairies and rural Ontario.

Hard Right

Garossino, meanwhile, agreed that infighting over who can be the most hardline on divisive issues such as LGBTQ rights and abortion is only hurting the party more with each utterance and campaign plank.

The popular longtime columnist with Canada's National Observer spent years previously as a Crown prosecutor and trial lawyer and Vancouver community advocate. She is also a keen observer of Canadian and American political trends, admitting Monday she's a big nerd for electoral data and crunching riding numbers. While she and Livesey admitted few Tories are likely paying heed to this publication, they ought to at least pay attention to the dismal electoral data.

When it comes to hard-right social issues, the numbers don't lie.

“They're actually campaigning against themselves the more they play to that,” Garossino said. “It doesn't play in any of the areas that the federal Conservatives need to take power. They have got to get into the 905 — the (Greater Toronto Area) — and they've got to get into Quebec.”

According to the most recent polls, the Conservatives are indeed trailing behind the Liberals — despite Scheer's repeated attempts to portray Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a reckless spendthrift, contemptuous of accountability and the rule of law.

A new poll released June 28 by respected pollster Léger Marketing placed Liberals at 40 per cent support, double-digits ahead of Conservatives in voter intentions compared to the Tories' 28 per cent. (The survey of 1,524 Canadians gave the NDP 17 per cent support, the Bloc Québecois seven per cent, and Greens one point behind; the online poll's margin of error could be considered equivalent to 2.5 per cent.) The results mirrored another opinion survey last week.

But yet another poll by Ekos Research found an even starker divide when it comes to gender last week, with Liberals leading among women with a staggering 24 per cent lead over the Tories, which held a slight lead over the Grits among men.

Multi-poll aggregator 338Canada, meanwhile, ran 250,000 statistical election simulations using recent polls and predicted a 189-seat Liberal seat majority if an election were held now, with the Tories trailing at 94 seats (a party needs a minimum 170 seats to win a majority government).

But both Livesey and Garossino reminded participants in the Zoom event that key to electoral victory in Canada is commanding broad support across the most vote-rich, densely populated urban centres — particularly the Greater Toronto Area suburbs, Montreal, and B.C.'s Lower Mainland. It was a lesson former Prime Minister Stephen Harper understood despite his past social-conservative, Reform Party roots.

That's something Livesey believes the Conservatives have lost sight of completely. He has little hope the once-moderate stalwarts of the party will regain control any time soon because of the need to survive the hard-right base that serves as a gauntlet for would-be leaders.

“They're not taking into consideration the electoral math that plays into this,” he explained. “The Tories' base gets them about 30 per cent of the vote, but to win a minority, you need around 35, a majority around 40.

“That means you've got to convince ... the very seat-rich urban hubs like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal … that you represent their interests. That is the programmatic problem with the party now. They have completely clued out to the fact that those voters don't want to vote for that particular platform.”

Stuck on Harper

In his June 25 analysis, Livesey argued former prime minister Stephen Harper remains the most powerful force in today's party, but may be, in fact, undermining “the very thing he created” as his successor Scheer steers the party sharply towards the far right on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights.

It's something Tory supporters should be extremely wary of, particularly as the far-right administration in the pandemic-gutted United States faces “potential devastation of unbelievable proportions because of the failure of this one man,” Garossino said. But the roots of the crisis go back decades to Reagan-era right-wing neoliberal movements, she and Livesey agreed, as billionaires and corporations were effectively handed the keys to power in the U.S.

Today, with tens of millions of unemployed losing their private health benefits, the chickens are now coming home to roost in that country.

“If you look at the trajectory, this is the sum result of a program that began in the '70s and '80s to, in effect, ensure the state did nothing for the average American citizen,” Livesey said. “(It marked) the end of the so-called welfare state — the New Deal type of government — and the capture of the state by largely the billionaire class.”

But although the Tea Party hasn't taken hold to the same extent north of the 49th parallel, similar hardline right movements have found sympathy in many parts of Canada.

Canadians, and particularly those loyal to the Conservative party, ought to worry about similar political movements here gaining any more foothold than they have. But it was actually Canada's Reagan-era Conservative leader who garnered some positive attention in Monday's online discussion.

Faced with a stark ideological choice today, Tories might look for inspiration — and success — to former PM Brian Mulroney.

“The PCs recognized they had to be a centre party to win power. The person most genius at figuring that out was Mulroney, he won two solid majorities … and destroyed the Liberals in Quebec. They had the 'big tent' approach, that social conservatives, Red Tories, environmentalists, people from all walks of life, fiscal conservatives, could all be under the same umbrella." Livesey said.

“It worked until it didn't work.”

Mulroney was also considered a leader on environmental issues, and even stalwart Conservative architect Tom Flanagan told Livesey he hoped for some critical Tory reflection on their climate change and carbon pricing policies.

“There is increasing awareness they have to be better on that front,” Livesey said, “even if it is in a very cynical way.”

But it's not just the evangelicals trying to steer the Tory ship. Another powerful force in the country has leveraged influence extremely effectively. Livesey and Garossino said other than the Tories' social conservative base, the party also has been held “hostage” by the oil industry lobby and some of Harper's former entourage, such as Jason Kenney, now Alberta premier.

Garossino has frequently commented on the state of Canada's Conservatives, most recently in her May 27 column, Stephen Harper's power dissolves, in which she argued that Harper continues to “control his chastened party” from the sidelines, but as “the right’s energy and narrative has been seized by Trumpian ideologues,” the Canadian electoral as moved on and is no longer interested.

Canada's Conservatives ought to ponder those trends carefully before selecting their next leader, Garossino said, but she's not hopeful.

“To get to be a contender nationally, you have to get past the base, which is far more conservative than the Canadian public,” she said. “They're almost fighting against themselves.”

Could the Red Tories stage a Mulroney-inspired comeback — and retake the reins from today's increasingly unpalatable oil and religious party wings? That remains to be seen.

#canpoli #consernative party of canada

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dr-nidasheikh · 5 years

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Canadians vote in a general election Monday with polling predicting a minority government as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau´s Liberal Party risks losing its majority or even being kicked out of office.

The Liberals and the Conservatives, led by Andrew Scheer, could be set for a near dead heat with pundits calling it one of the nation´s closest elections ever.

But neither of the two parties that have led Canada since Confederation in 1867 is forecast to win enough support to secure an absolute majority of seats in parliament.

At final campaign stops in waesternmost British Columbia on Sunday, former golden boy Trudeau made an emotional appeal to voters to enable him to build on the achievements of his first term.

He warned against Scheer´s pledged roll-back of environmental protections including a federal carbon tax that discourages the use of large amounts of fossil fuels.

"We need a strong, progressive government that will unite Canadians and fight climate change -- not a progressive opposition," Trudeau told a rally in a suburb of Vancouver after whistle-stops in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.

"We need to unite as citizens. We need to unite as a planet."

After winning in a 2015 landslide -- in a repeat of the wave of support that in 1968 carried his late father Pierre to power -- Trudeau´s star has dimmed while in office.

His image has been tainted by ethics lapses in the handling of the bribery prosecution of an engineering giant, while his campaign was rocked by the emergence of old photographs of him in blackface make-up.

Surging social democrats and resuscitated Quebec separatists have also chipped away at Liberal support.

Main parties both struggle

If Trudeau hangs on, it will be because Scheer has struggled to win over Canadians with his bland minivan-driving dad persona and a throwback to the thrifty policies of past Tory administrations.

Canadians "cannot afford" a Liberal government propped up by the third-place New Democratic Party (NDP), Scheer said at the end of a marathon last push from the Atlantic to Pacific oceans.

"We can only imagine what the NDP´s price would be to keep Justin Trudeau in power," he said.

Also read: Canadian PM Trudeau admits to racist 'brownface' makeup

"Whatever it is, we know Trudeau would pay any price to stay in power and he´d use your money to do it."

The first polling stations open at 0830 am (1100 GMT) in Newfoundland, Canada´s most easterly province.

The 40-day campaign, described by Trudeau as "one of the dirtiest, nastiest" in Canadian history, has been "a desert from a public-policy point of view," according to pollster Nik Nanos of Nanos Research.

Attack ads sometimes skirted the truth with accusations that Liberals would legalize hard drugs and the Tories would allow the proliferation of assault weapons.

At one rally, Trudeau was forced to wear a bulletproof vest.

The nation´s top bureaucrat earlier this year warned that public discourse had fallen to such a low level that he "worried that somebody is going to be shot... during the political campaign."

Also read: Canada's golden boy Trudeau sinks in polls as scandal takes toll

Along the bruising way, Trudeau and Scheer traded barbs.

Trudeau evoked the boogeymen of past and current Tory parties fostering "politics of fear and division" and Scheer called the prime minister a "compulsive liar," "a phoney and a fraud."

Trudeau defends record

Trudeau defended his record: a strong economy and low unemployment, legal cannabis, the resettlement of 60,000 Syrian refugees, doctor-assisted deaths, a public inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, and free trade deals with Europe, Pacific nations and North American neighbors.

Former US president Barack Obama chimed in with an endorsement, calling Trudeau an "effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change."

"The world needs his progressive leadership now," Obama said in a tweet.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, have stood alone among all of the parties in pledging austerity measures to return to a balanced budget within five years.

Scheer found himself on the back foot late in the campaign over revelations of his American dual citizenship and allegations that his party hired a communications firm to "destroy" the upstart People´s Party, led by former Conservative foreign minister Maxime Bernier.

The party has situated itself to the right of the Conservatives and could draw votes away.

On the left, the Bloc has come back from a ruinous 2015 election result, tapping into lingering Quebec nationalism to challenge the Liberals´ dominance in the province.

The Bloc and NDP have said they would not prop up the Tories if they secure a minority.

Preliminary results across six time zones are expected shortly after 7:00 pm Ottawa time (2300 GMT).

But with many moving parts in play, who will govern may still be up in the air for several weeks during tricky alliance negotiations that could keep Trudeau in office even if his party loses.

#World News #Sports News #Business News #Entertainment News #Health News #Showbiz News #Science News

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atlanticcanada · 5 years

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Politicians address challenge of making N.L. feel like home for newcomers

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. -- The need to make aging, cash-strapped Newfoundland and Labrador into an appealing place for young people has been a recurring theme among politicians campaigning for the May 16 provincial election.

The topic has been raised in debates and talking points by all four party leaders, and Premier Dwight Ball made the message clear in his remarks when the writ was dropped last month.

"It's important to me that our young people feel confident that they can pursue their goals in the province that we all love," he said at the Confederation Building April 17.

But newcomers to the province say there's still a lot of work to be done to convince people to set down permanent roots.

Kerri Neil, who ran for the NDP in a provincial byelection last fall, researches sociology and immigration at Memorial University.

She said the poor economy and high unemployment are key factors driving people away. "Both Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and immigrants, they don't stay here because there aren't many jobs," Neil said by phone.

These issues have been around for a while, with many from the province historically heading west for work, but Neil said the problem has been compounded by the looming threat of rising power rates, high taxes and stagnant wages.

It's all happening at a time when the province is in desperate need of new residents.

A report by the Conference Board of Canada released this month found the number of people entering the Canadian workforce over the coming decades will be insufficient to replace those retiring, making new immigrants essential to fill workforce gaps and keep Canada's growth on track.

The dynamic of an aging population and steady outmigration of young people is especially pronounced in the Atlantic region. The need to attract and retain immigrants has been a talking point of Ball's before and during the election campaign.

But once people arrive, it can be difficult for them to adjust to the place and make a permanent home.

Filmmakers Conor McCann and Rodrigo Iniguez documented those struggles in their film titled "Home," featuring interviews with people across the province about the challenges of settling in.

Iniguez and McCann said the struggle to find meaningful work was a recurring theme among the people they met, as was the hardship of watching friends who speak their language and share their culture move away.

Iniguez said the conversation around immigration focuses on bringing people to the province, but stops when it comes to the challenges of daily life for recent arrivals.

And it's especially hard to convince people to stay in the small outport towns that need young people the most.

Amira Ibrahim of St. John's was featured in the documentary. After a screening of the film, she spoke about the difficult first few years after moving to Placentia, N.L.

Trained as a lawyer in her home country of Egypt, Ibrahim said she struggled with boredom and found it hard to keep her young son occupied in the small town of about 1,500 people.

He was desperate for activities and outside play, but without a car and no public transit, Ibrahim found it nearly impossible to keep him entertained. She said he would sometimes ask to go to the grocery store just so he could walk around.

"It's very tough staying there, very tough," Ibrahim said.

Now living in St. John's where her husband runs a successful business, Ibrahim said her two children are busier, and she's happy to have more people around for company, but she's still seeking meaningful work for herself.

"This is very important for us. If you keep people busy with (jobs), and give them a good salary for a good life, they will stay here," she said.

For the filmmaking team behind "Home," who both moved to the province for university, questions of future work also factor into their plans to stay or go.

Iniguez said building his career in Newfoundland and Labrador has pros and cons. He said arts funding can be hard to come by, but the relatively small size of the film industry means there are opportunities to be sought out. For example, he and McCann produced "Home" with the Association for New Canadians.

"It's a hard industry, but (in) Newfoundland ... the size is good enough for there to be room for you," Iniguez said. "There are opportunities and not enough people filling them yet."

McCann said that while he loves the place, he foresees heading elsewhere for his career.

"Despite the fact that I will come back here ... I think a lot of the meaningful, major work we will end up doing will happen outside the province," he said.

Neil, originally from Spaniard's Bay, N.L., said she's been considering the opposite by looking into opportunities to move to a smaller community and build something like the worker-owned co-operative that contributed to the successful revitalization of Fogo Island.

"I think there's so much potential in this place, and I don't think it's necessarily been realized," she said. "It's a beautiful place that I really want to see prosper."

from CTV News - Atlantic http://bit.ly/30fxn6m

#new brunswick #prince edward island #nova scotia #news #politics #canada #CTVAtlantic

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