Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/07/national-stain.html
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And breaking his promise to eliminate “first past the post electoral system”. Which may be his downfall.
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The hardest thing for politicians to do is to, you know, actually do stuff. Inertia is easy, and doing stuff may make things worse, and so on.
Which gets me to thinking: I would like a sort of Scrum system in government where the cabinet does things in sprints, with actual updates every two weeks to us stakeholders as to what tasks are being done, and why this high priority ticket isn’t being done.
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I find it hard to understand how Trudeau can be blamed for the results of the Ontario election. Doug Ford certainly is an asshole, but he isn’t a liberal and Justin didn’t support him.
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I’m guessing that 100% of Canada’s defense industry disagrees.
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It’s bizarre how Trudeau’s name gets dragged through the mud over an arms deal made by the conservative government, and which your own cited poll shows is most supported by the conservatives. They were well aware of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record at the time: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-defending-military-deal-with-saudi-arabia/article26550145/
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It’s always one of the opposition parties that wants to eliminate “first past the post" and as soon as they get into power based on “first past the post", their reasons for getting rid of it magically vanish.
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Oh you Canadians, how I love thee.
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Did my bit: a comment at the National Post story that begged them to add a $50 line item to every tax return for the next 4 years, so we could all pay off the lost money together. That I wanted a regressive tax so that rich people couldn’t hog the glory of screwing MbS.
No reply yet. Oddly, no other volunteers to chip in, either. Virtue is always easy when somebody else is paying.
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In part, the problem was that once he got all the people who wanted reform in a room together, none of them could agree on what kind of reform they wanted.
(I know that I’d be dead set against just about any kind of proportional representation. Where do I find the riding office for the MP for my portion?)
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the Ontario election of a virulent hate-monger authoritarian whose gerrymandering might doom the province to a decades-long interregnum of hate, stagnation and ignorance.
Doug Ford is an ignorant bullying clown of the highest order (similar to his moron brother, but somehow more of an asshole), but this is a pretty weird statement. I know I have to take any BoingBoing political reporting with a truckload of salt, but given that provincial (and federal) riding boundaries are set by independent commissions in all of Canada, I have no idea what Cory is talking about here.
Dougie did make a petty and spiteful last-minute change to the Toronto municipal wards in the middle of the city election, nominally to align them with provincial boundaries, but 1) that’s already some distance away from real gerrymandering; and 2) how changing the makeup of the Toronto city council dooms the entire province to that horrifically hyperbolic fate, I can’t quite say.
Also not sure how it’s Trudeau’s fault that the Ontario PCs (who were virtually guaranteed a win before Doug even showed up on the scene) were so shambolic that they allowed this dolt to win their leadership race…
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The federal Liberals also just gave a ton of money to organizations combating climate change in Ontario instead of giving it to Ford’s PC party to distribute.
When the city of Toronto was looking at changing it’s wards, they considered lining up the wards with the 25 federal and provincial wards but found the population imbalance between ridings was too high. So it was right away discounted and instead they considered a 26 ward system where it matched up with the federal and provincial wards but then split up a couple of them as they added one more ward to downtown Toronto.
The provincial wards were based off of the federal wards which were already out of date from the quickly growing Toronto population. They were made based off a old census data (2006?) while the city of Toronto was looking forward at not just the current population but the projected population (2020?) since it’s such a moving target with so many new condos and so much growth.
The federal wards are set to be revised after the upcoming 2019 election based on the new population.
So basically not quite the gerrymandering we see in the US, but certainly the system that Doug Ford forced in takes away power from more liberal downtown Toronto and gives more power to the more conservative suburbs.
That said, I agree with the rest of your points that Trudeau is not responsible for the rise of Doug Ford. Basically that is the fault of Ontario Liberals and Kathleen Wynne. Wynne should have realized that her disapproval rating was too low and stepped down for another leader to take over the party.
Also what the Ontario Liberals were not expecting was the rise of the Ontario NDP party as an alternative to the Liberals. That really split the center and left-wing vote which allowed the PC party to win so many seats with just 40% of the support.
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