It's An Election Year!

The smell of desperation is in the air, money that didn't exist before sprouted from the ground and non-issues are relevant for some reason:

Federal Liberal ministers and MPs continued their cross-country spending announcement tour last week, making 330 spending commitments on everything from fixing up bus stops in London, Ont., to building new dressing rooms at a hockey rink in western P.E.I., to funding a youth exchange program to be run by Tides Canada.

Those 330 spending commitments made from Aug. 19 to Aug. 25 total $2.85 billion.

For the week before that — Aug. 11-18 — Liberal MPs and ministers made 595 spending commitments worth a total of $4.9 billion.

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Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, said the edited video shared on Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale‘s Twitter likely won’t have any impact on the Oct. 21 vote.
A speech Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer delivered in opposition to same-sex marriage 14 years ago is back in the spotlight courtesy of the Liberals, but some political observers have questioned the strategy and whether it will resonate with voters.

Liberals, however, argue Canadians should have information about a leader’s values before casting their ballots this fall.
“People that are outraged about this are people that were intending to vote Liberal or NDP in the first place,” Wiseman told the Bill Kelly Show.

How embarrassing for the Liberals. Now they're going to have to run on real issues instead of attacking people.

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The Canadian political commentariat has spent the past few months engaged in a series of conversations debating the merits of Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s presumed villainy as pushed by Liberal spin doctors.

First there were the attempts to argue that Scheer was somehow affiliated with an alleged rise in neo-Nazi sentiment. Then there was the bizarre episode where Scheer was randomly put on the defensive as to whether or not he would criminalize abortion.

Then, just last week, we were shown a 14 year-old video of Scheer voicing his opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage, a position that his office clarified he no longer holds (while also pointing out that a number of currently sitting Liberal MPs also held those same views back then).

These attacks all come together to craft a sort of Flight 93 argument for Trudeau fans, who – as Warren Kinsella has written many times – are beginning to resemble a sort of cult. The idea is that if anyone other than Trudeau is elected there will be total calamity, that we’re “on a trajectory towards something very bad”.

A snowboard instructor with a love for the communist government of China and has failed at every turn of governance can't be worse than a milquetoast.

Any Canadian who listens to bogey-men stories deserves the government he or she votes for - a criminal organisation whose puppet leader has twice been charged with ethics violations, makes overtures to favourite dictatorships at the expense of Canadian businesses and jobs and who promises to buy votes instead of removing obstacles like taxes and monopolies (like the ones that prevent people from having great cell phone service) that make things easier for people and businesses.

Enjoy the poverty. You've earned it.


Also - Canadians would not feel so glum about their political systems if they got off of their @$$es and made their MPs so worried for their pensions that they hung on every word that their constituents said:

While the change in Canadians’ temperature on democracy can be interpreted as encouraging, the poll also revealed a number of alarm bells. For example, 44 per cent of people appear unconvinced that voting matters when it comes to how the country is being run. A majority of Canadians — 56 per cent — think there’s not much that can be done to influence government, even if an effort is made. And 68 per cent of Canadians believe that elected officials don’t really care what people like them think.

Indeed, the government is quite reliant on its ineffectual population and is willing to weather any proletariat storm:

Would you go to work tomorrow, if it meant losing 50 per cent of your income to taxes? 

What if you were losing 80 per cent of your wages?

These sorts of calculations are a real consideration for low-income families in Canada, according to a research paper published by the C.D. Howe Institute. 

And ironically, it’s government programs aimed at redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor that leads to perverse incentives, where low-income parents have little incentive to work harder and earn more money.

(Sidebar: quelle surprise.)

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Canada risks a populist backlash if politicians fail to focus on the most economically vulnerable people, a new report says, as rosy economic data continues to overshadow the plight of many rural and non-educated workers.

A report by Sean Speer of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, released Tuesday, argues that politicians across the political spectrum have broadly ignored pockets of working class Canadians who have failed to thrive in an increasingly globalized and technological economy. Resentments among those people, if left unchecked, could feed the same sort of reprisal that led to the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, Speer says.

Unvetted migrants (none of whom appear to engineers or doctors) are currently sleeping on the streets but why let facts get in the way of a billboard that says it all?:

Whatever you think of the phrase used in the ad, “Say No to Mass Immigration,” shouldn’t we be able to debate the issue openly?

I come from an immigrant family, and I don’t mean that in the “we’re all immigrants” kind of way. Tracing my family tree in Canada consists of calling my mother.

And fundamentally, I disagree with Bernier.

I think we should secure our border against the illegal border crossers that make a mockery of our system, but I’d say 150,000 new permanent residents per year is too low to satisfy the needs of our economy.

Is 350,000 the right number?

I don’t know, but as a country we should be able to debate this issue in a real way.

Taking down those billboards based on a mob mentality isn’t real debate and Canada deserves better.