Which is more or less my point. To an old Montrealer’s eyes, Toronto has a certain homogeneity.
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Well, from this far out, so does Montreal.
One thing I learned living away from here for 12 years is that there’s places people go because they live there, and places people go because they’re visiting. People tend to visit the homogenous places.
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Our choices:
- Guy who did racist things and regrets them now that he’s caught.
- Guy whose friends just constantly keep turning out to be racists. Like all of them.
- Guy who is openly racist.
- Guy whose party only got out of perennial 3rd place when one of the two major parties imploded, and a lot of people are reluctant about – a lot of them for racist reasons.
- Woman whose party can’t even reliably get an invite to the debates and honestly doesn’t stand a chance in Hell. Or Hull, even.
And USAians think they have no good choices.
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Hey, give Jack Layton a bit of credit there.
Of course, Jagmeet Singh is no Jack Layton.
And don’t forget:
6. Guy who literally can’t win because only one province in the country has the choice to vote for him.
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I give Layton credit, he pulled off what no one else did or has since, but I don’t think he would have succeeded if the PCs had stayed strong.
Part of Canada’s problem is that we forget that we are a Parliamentary system with multiple parties and start playing USA-style team sports and that we really are voting for PM directly. If people really considered (I mean really, seriously considered) just voting for who is best for their riding, I think the makeup of the government would be much different and more diverse. I mean, look what happened with Chuck Cadman – Surrey pretty much had a chance to run the entire country for a bit because everybody needed his vote. Instead, we play the stupid party game like there’s only two players.
Sure, diverse parliaments can fail and turn into shitshows, but it’s still better than a strict A or B option.
Yup. And not all the criticism I have heard is racist. However, I can’t deny hearing more than a few people who “just can’t put a finger” on what they don’t like, and it’s the same tone as all their other “I am not a racist but…” statements they make about Indians (especially Sikhs).
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I know exactly when I have up on Singh – when he sided with the Cons over SNC-Lavalin and offered to work with them.
In the 70s or 80s that would have been odd but okay. But not now, not with the Con’s open racism.
I saw he posted a video of how hurtful Trudeau’s brownface was, and all I could think about was how a few short months ago he was willing to work with the yellow vest crowd. All he seems to care about is making political hay over whatever is the latest storm, but it never works because he never seems to stand for anything.
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There’s murmuring that this was a deliberate attack by the Conservatives, but I’m having a hard time buying it.
First, we have Scheer, who has already pretty much inoculated Trudeau against attacks for this sort of thing…
“I accept the fact that people make mistakes in the past and can own up to that and accept that,” he said. “I believe many Canadians, most Canadians, recognize that people can say things in the past, when they’re younger, at a different time in their life, that they would not say today.”
Scheer can’t attack Trudeau too much without looking like a ginormous hypocrite.
Second, the timing is all wrong. There’s another month to go before the election; the news cycle will have moved on before then. Unless there’s another, more potent attack waiting in the wings, you’d expect this to drop in the last week or two of the campaign.
Now, that’s not to say that the person who dropped this didn’t do so out of a desire to see the Conservatives win, but I don’t think this was a coordinated attack by the Conservatives. It doesn’t have quite the right kind of stink to it.
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Agreed, but it’s definitely a ratfucking attempt.
Also interesting that it dropped in Time instead of, say, Maclean’s.
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Which is perfectly valid criticism. I have heard both the valid and the less-than-valid, because they don’t care about his actions – who he is, is enough.
Put both groups together and he’s not going to get anywhere near what Layton pulled off, even with Justin’s own goals on just about everything.
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Don’t rule out Bernier and the rule of projection. Plus, this plays perfectly for them. “You think we’re racist, look at your guy.”
Which is not an excuse for Justin. He absolutely should have known better. He absolutely should take responsibility for his actions and he hasn’t. I lost patience with him long before this.
I really mean it when I say we have no good options.
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Agreed. Basically we’re stuck with “vote for the guy who at least isn’t an outright fascist and has a shot at winning”.
In that way it reminds me a lot of H. Clinton vs Trump. And that’s pretty much why I’m worried.
There’s way too many people who aren’t thinking about just how awful Harper was, and that he’s still very much on the scene. They’re just thinking about how much they don’t like J. Trudeau. Kind of like the Ontario election.
I have also noticed that all my pro-Con supporters start political conversations with “They’re all the same!”, starting with when Ford won. Too many for it to be random.
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Let’s just say that this is not doing good things for my anxiety and depression.
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I was almost-certainly never going to vote Liberal this election anyway, so this isn’t going to change much.
Not that it matters, in my riding. 338Canada shows my riding as having a >99% chance of staying red. The only reason I’m even set on bothering to vote is to add to the national popular-vote tallies for whichever party I choose.
That’d’ve been about the only thing that would have convinced me to vote Lib: if I were in a riding with a close race between LPC and CPC. As it stands today (although, rest assured, I will be keeping my eye on things), that’s not the case.
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More than enough times, I would guess.
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Using a true activist’s name to sell their half-baked, half-assed plans.
I wonder if the Rhinos are running in my riding…
Edit: It appears not, but we do have a Communist Party candidate and a None of the Above Party candidate.
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…on-brand announcement.
I know the above is satire and not true, but it disturbs me how plausible it is.
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This, THIS is why every time I see there’s an update to this thread, I think, “fucken eh, NOW what?”
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