Carney has accomplished nothing, not even a budget. C5 is simply an opportunity for corruption. But Canadians are still in the "give him a chance" mindset. So the Conservatives have little to go on.
Aggressive criticism now will simply cause people to dig in on the Liberals when the absolute and obvious folly of having supported them becomes too difficult to accept psychologically.
In this country the Liberals have all the advantages at all times. It doesn't matter what they do. Their policies are always the right policies, even if they change 180 degrees overnight. Their scandals no matter how egregious are mere misunderstandings to be forgotten with the next morning sunrise, while their opponents' are fodder to be screamed for the next 20 years no matter how minor. All the major media outlets are on board and have decided that any opposition is mean and nasty and that other parties shouldn't really exist if they don't support the Liberals.
Running against them sometimes seems as futile as playing slots and trying to beat the casino, and for similar reasons. The game is rigged and the house always wins.
Buying the media truly was a political masterstroke. What Poilievre doesn't seem to get is that the way to win is to attack the blob in its entirety: stirring up anger, and even hate, against the loooters, and destroying the legitimacy of all our corrupted institutions, is the best answer.
Buying the media is pretty accurate. Everything that's happened in this country after about 2018 is a propaganda-driven public mind-fuck in my opinion.
Canadians look at people who live in totalitarian states and shake their heads at how people could believe such outlandish things, support such obviously corrupt, self-serving, and evil leaders. But most of them also believe that the current government is the only one that can ever be allowed to govern Canada, no matter what happens or what they do or how bad things get, as they watch the CBC and read the Globe and Mail and have that idea subtly reinforced 100 times a day.
No idea how Poilievre stirs that up when any such attempts are dismissed and ridiculed by scores of identical MSM bobbleheads as 'concerning and inappropriate, desperate embrace of American-style far-right populism'.
Legacy media has to be demonized as part of the looting group: "you're simply lying because your paycheque comes from Ottawa". Go full apple on these people.
He was sort of doing a limited version of that somewhat successfully until the whole Trump / Tariffs / pseudo-patriotic moral panic / Lib leadership switcheroo / polling disaster happened and derailed it. We came so close to having an election where the media could be told to go eff themselves and had no response.
Unfortunately, Poilievre lost his nerve. The "elbows up" stuff was so obviously dumb that it offered him a chance for even more attacks on the media, but he chickened out
The advantage of being a centrist party without established principles other than winning power is you can adopt or steal whatever positions you need to win the next election. It's a natural advantage whether the political winds blow left or right, and they've been pretty good at playing the game. Their vulnerability has been arrogance, which leads to corruption and incompetence.
You also need a voter base with either no principles or zero capacity for independent thought, and compliant media unwilling to call you out on any inconsistent positions.
Lack of both factors are why Erin O'Toole got cooked for switching positions on the Carbon Tax and Mark Carney got a complete pass.
After listening to Matt and John Wright speak for about 15 minutes I was thinking of skipping ahead, but then I decided to listen to understand more about how boomer/near boomer Liberal apologists view issues. From this lens, this discussion was fascinating. Even after Matt commented on how while Carney is saying things that sound good, he hasn’t actually done much, John Wright proceeded to then list off things he’s said or pronouncements he’s made and characterize them as accomplishments. He even looks on tabling a budget as “doing something “, when in reality it is the execution of a budget that actually does something. I could go on about his statements on Trump as if Canada was doing great until Trump came along. Truly fascinating to hear these takes from someone who doesn’t really seem to want to talk about real issues and problems the country has.
The whole point of Carney over Trudeau is to worry less about the woke stuff and get back to plain old stealing, the way Liberals are supposed to. The trans and climate stuff are maybe a bit of an exception.
Back in the day, people got upset about Gomery and a few million. Now the bar is more than 100 times higher.
Enjoyed the podcast and didn't miss the petulant, childish "Fuck America" segment.
There was no existential threat in January that didn't already exist, and still does. We cannot function economically without trading with Mr. Carney's "Great Satan". What other countries will want the industrial products produced by Ontario and Quebec? Time to get over ourselves. Bit player.
Did Mr. Eby do and about face, or was he always two-faced? Will the gweenies let him continue to hold government if he supports the Alberta pipeline?
Granny needs medications to treat symptoms associated with her terminal illness. Experts (no COI statement - all physicians are industry whores) say it works but the government says it is too expensive and will deprive the rest of the citizens of health care access. So, Granny gets... a MAID application.
The child's condition is tragic, and I would be happy to contribute to a Go-Fund-Me to help pay for the medications, but the government's job is to make tough decisions.
I like Carney’s tone so far but as hinted, the hard decisions haven’t been made yet and will directly affect his base. Government debt is a massive problem and that’s the really unpopular part. First , reducing and improving the output of the civil service isn’t going to be easy and it is far more likely services deteriorate as the civil service is going to take their frustrations out on the general public. Second, you can’t substantially raise taxes on people who are working without substantial OAS and other program reform. That hits the boomers directly and they are the ones that voted Liberal. If the Liberals decide to take the easy way out and cater to the boomers, in 5 to 10 years, they’ll be finished as a party because the young people won’t forget.
The polls mean nothing until a hard choice has been made.
I would really really really like for the young people to not forget. It is Trump who gave the easy win to Carney. Carney's tone means absolutely nothing, it is just a lullaby for those easily impressed.
Agree. And to be fair, most people want Carney to be successful as that would be best for the country. Unfortunately I am not impressed by his first 90 days. He has a massive amount of public support, premiers willing to try and work with him and an opposition that is still licking its wounds a little. Yes he’s done very little. Do you think the road ahead is going to get easier or harder for him as the months tick on by?
Carney aims to waste as much time as possible while talking about seeking "consesus". The road ahead is easy for him due to myopia of a large part of the Canadian electorate.
He has a LIST of projects to be built, and an even longer list of why they can’t ever be built. The consultation with the indigenous will start in 2030, and be completed around 2090. But fear not dear Canadians - our ferries are cheaper, and Melanie Joly is having “conversations” 🙄
The timing of the election has probably been a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it happened shortly before summer, which gave them breathing time to come up with a plan and budget before normal business resumes in the fall. A curse in that they *must* deliver on those things in the fall, and the summer is traditionally the political silly season where nothing much gets done.
Only in Canada do we think summer is an excuse not to get stuff done. It’s wild how the new government kind of counts on people thinking this way and it works. By my recollection, our government hit peak dysfunction in October 2024 and not much happened after that so it looks like we will have had about a year of government doing very little.
I think the diagnosis of the Conservative loss is correct: their polling was on a bit of a sugar high due to the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau, and that masked the unpopularity of a lot of the Conservative populist messaging. Conservatives won a historic vote share in the last election; they failed the ultimate test of winning a bigger vote share than the party that won the election. Right wing populists in the US struggled with the same phenomenon after the 2020 election: they couldn't grok how Trump could win a larger vote total in 2020 than he'd gotten in 2016 and still lose. The answer was simply that 74 million votes for Trump wasn't enough to Trump 83 million votes cast for Biden. Unfortunately, a lot of them turned to election conspiracy theories to rectify the cognitive dissonance.
Conservatives have *so far* avoided the same trap, but the Poilievre faction of the party looks more susceptible to the temptation. That temptation is only going to increase when the populist playbook becomes a more obvious burden for the party in the post-Trudeau era. The Ontario/Ford Conservatives are there to call BS on a potential pivot to a conspiracy-addled pity party, but I don't think the populists are going to relinquish control easily or quietly: Carney's probably going to get an easy ride from an opposition fighting an internal civil war.
It is notable that the only people who in Canada may be exclusively labelled as populists are the Conservatives. When the "Liberals" and/or NDP propose or conduct policies that are both openly and by definition populist, they are never labelled as such.
So what is the meaning of this word, "populus", anyway ?
Well, that is what I have been observing for a very long time. The comment of GS, while being informative and precise, is missing entirely a consideration of this aspect.
Populism is an anti-elite and anti-establishment sentiment that holds that the correct ideas are those of the "common people". The Conservatives are the party most strongly associated with that sentiment over the past decade or so. Jagmeet Singh made a run at it with his anti-grocery store jeremiad, but it tends to be undermined when his party simultaneously embraced all sorts of ivory tower dogmas regarding environmentalism and intersectionalism.
One problem with populists is they usually only speak for a minority of the public. but they'll insist that minority is the "true voice" of the people anyway. Support for the Trucker Convoy or anti-vaccination advocacy are good examples of that stuff - 80/20 issues where they're in the distinct minority. The other problem with populism is the hostility towards expertise: if somebody tells them they're wrong, it easily becomes a case of denigrating them as a hostile elite rather than acknowledging shortcomings and flaws in their understanding. For examples of this, see Jen Gerson's description of the reaction of populists to criticism of their claims regarding Alberta sovereignty.
How much failure does it take to call the expertise of "experts" into question? Are credentials enough to show expertise, or does it eventually need to accomplish something?
About the Conservatives calling the convoy sentence requests "political vengeance" and tying the Crown to a conspiracy involving the LPC.
I agree that's a crazy conspiracy theory...
But I wonder if @mattgurney47 would actually agree with the Conservatives if instead of "political vengeance", the Conservatives had called in "Laurentian vengeance".
In this version, there's no conspiracy, there's no smoke filled back room, no glasses of Scotch... there's just the usual people who all come from the same long connected families who because of who they are and *where* they are, wanted to punish the convoy in a way that they'd never consider punishing an equivalent that wasn't an affront to them specifically. e.g. A large anti-logging protest comes in from outside the province that sets up camp in resource communities in British Columbia with at least some funding from US environmental groups. Would the organizers of that get the same sentencing recommendation from the crown?
That's not a conspiracy theory... that's just recognizing that our elites for lack of a better word tend to look like each other, have the same interests, go to the same schools and know the same people.... and all people are more likely to be vindictive when something hurts **their** friends and family.
Conservatives don't seem to distinguish between that group and "liberals"... possibly because that group rather obviously personally prefers the LPC to the CPC. The media that admits the first group exists, generally tends to distinguish them.
That's not a good miscommunication for our social cohesion.
Good call re. "Laurentian vengeance", that's exactly what it is. Justice system o longer exists, it is a legal system only and is severely twisted. May I remind you that The Idiot King and his gang dismantled our social cohesion years ago.
Carney has accomplished nothing, not even a budget. C5 is simply an opportunity for corruption. But Canadians are still in the "give him a chance" mindset. So the Conservatives have little to go on.
Aggressive criticism now will simply cause people to dig in on the Liberals when the absolute and obvious folly of having supported them becomes too difficult to accept psychologically.
Better to let people climb down on their own.
As a friend once told me, people will forgive you for being wrong, never for being right.
In this country the Liberals have all the advantages at all times. It doesn't matter what they do. Their policies are always the right policies, even if they change 180 degrees overnight. Their scandals no matter how egregious are mere misunderstandings to be forgotten with the next morning sunrise, while their opponents' are fodder to be screamed for the next 20 years no matter how minor. All the major media outlets are on board and have decided that any opposition is mean and nasty and that other parties shouldn't really exist if they don't support the Liberals.
Running against them sometimes seems as futile as playing slots and trying to beat the casino, and for similar reasons. The game is rigged and the house always wins.
Buying the media truly was a political masterstroke. What Poilievre doesn't seem to get is that the way to win is to attack the blob in its entirety: stirring up anger, and even hate, against the loooters, and destroying the legitimacy of all our corrupted institutions, is the best answer.
Buying the media is pretty accurate. Everything that's happened in this country after about 2018 is a propaganda-driven public mind-fuck in my opinion.
Canadians look at people who live in totalitarian states and shake their heads at how people could believe such outlandish things, support such obviously corrupt, self-serving, and evil leaders. But most of them also believe that the current government is the only one that can ever be allowed to govern Canada, no matter what happens or what they do or how bad things get, as they watch the CBC and read the Globe and Mail and have that idea subtly reinforced 100 times a day.
No idea how Poilievre stirs that up when any such attempts are dismissed and ridiculed by scores of identical MSM bobbleheads as 'concerning and inappropriate, desperate embrace of American-style far-right populism'.
Legacy media has to be demonized as part of the looting group: "you're simply lying because your paycheque comes from Ottawa". Go full apple on these people.
He was sort of doing a limited version of that somewhat successfully until the whole Trump / Tariffs / pseudo-patriotic moral panic / Lib leadership switcheroo / polling disaster happened and derailed it. We came so close to having an election where the media could be told to go eff themselves and had no response.
Unfortunately, Poilievre lost his nerve. The "elbows up" stuff was so obviously dumb that it offered him a chance for even more attacks on the media, but he chickened out
The advantage of being a centrist party without established principles other than winning power is you can adopt or steal whatever positions you need to win the next election. It's a natural advantage whether the political winds blow left or right, and they've been pretty good at playing the game. Their vulnerability has been arrogance, which leads to corruption and incompetence.
You also need a voter base with either no principles or zero capacity for independent thought, and compliant media unwilling to call you out on any inconsistent positions.
Lack of both factors are why Erin O'Toole got cooked for switching positions on the Carbon Tax and Mark Carney got a complete pass.
It does not look like they are centrist anymore, otherwise spot on in few words.
After listening to Matt and John Wright speak for about 15 minutes I was thinking of skipping ahead, but then I decided to listen to understand more about how boomer/near boomer Liberal apologists view issues. From this lens, this discussion was fascinating. Even after Matt commented on how while Carney is saying things that sound good, he hasn’t actually done much, John Wright proceeded to then list off things he’s said or pronouncements he’s made and characterize them as accomplishments. He even looks on tabling a budget as “doing something “, when in reality it is the execution of a budget that actually does something. I could go on about his statements on Trump as if Canada was doing great until Trump came along. Truly fascinating to hear these takes from someone who doesn’t really seem to want to talk about real issues and problems the country has.
Fully agree. It was both hilarious and sad.
I also liked the argument for how "we" did something by recycling in blue boxes. Most of which actually ends up in a landfill.
Very fitting.
The whole point of Carney over Trudeau is to worry less about the woke stuff and get back to plain old stealing, the way Liberals are supposed to. The trans and climate stuff are maybe a bit of an exception.
Back in the day, people got upset about Gomery and a few million. Now the bar is more than 100 times higher.
Enjoyed the podcast and didn't miss the petulant, childish "Fuck America" segment.
There was no existential threat in January that didn't already exist, and still does. We cannot function economically without trading with Mr. Carney's "Great Satan". What other countries will want the industrial products produced by Ontario and Quebec? Time to get over ourselves. Bit player.
Did Mr. Eby do and about face, or was he always two-faced? Will the gweenies let him continue to hold government if he supports the Alberta pipeline?
Granny needs medications to treat symptoms associated with her terminal illness. Experts (no COI statement - all physicians are industry whores) say it works but the government says it is too expensive and will deprive the rest of the citizens of health care access. So, Granny gets... a MAID application.
The child's condition is tragic, and I would be happy to contribute to a Go-Fund-Me to help pay for the medications, but the government's job is to make tough decisions.
I like Carney’s tone so far but as hinted, the hard decisions haven’t been made yet and will directly affect his base. Government debt is a massive problem and that’s the really unpopular part. First , reducing and improving the output of the civil service isn’t going to be easy and it is far more likely services deteriorate as the civil service is going to take their frustrations out on the general public. Second, you can’t substantially raise taxes on people who are working without substantial OAS and other program reform. That hits the boomers directly and they are the ones that voted Liberal. If the Liberals decide to take the easy way out and cater to the boomers, in 5 to 10 years, they’ll be finished as a party because the young people won’t forget.
The polls mean nothing until a hard choice has been made.
In 5 years, there will be no more Canada - so who cares if the liberals are around or not?
I would really really really like for the young people to not forget. It is Trump who gave the easy win to Carney. Carney's tone means absolutely nothing, it is just a lullaby for those easily impressed.
Agree. And to be fair, most people want Carney to be successful as that would be best for the country. Unfortunately I am not impressed by his first 90 days. He has a massive amount of public support, premiers willing to try and work with him and an opposition that is still licking its wounds a little. Yes he’s done very little. Do you think the road ahead is going to get easier or harder for him as the months tick on by?
Carney aims to waste as much time as possible while talking about seeking "consesus". The road ahead is easy for him due to myopia of a large part of the Canadian electorate.
He has a LIST of projects to be built, and an even longer list of why they can’t ever be built. The consultation with the indigenous will start in 2030, and be completed around 2090. But fear not dear Canadians - our ferries are cheaper, and Melanie Joly is having “conversations” 🙄
The timing of the election has probably been a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it happened shortly before summer, which gave them breathing time to come up with a plan and budget before normal business resumes in the fall. A curse in that they *must* deliver on those things in the fall, and the summer is traditionally the political silly season where nothing much gets done.
Only in Canada do we think summer is an excuse not to get stuff done. It’s wild how the new government kind of counts on people thinking this way and it works. By my recollection, our government hit peak dysfunction in October 2024 and not much happened after that so it looks like we will have had about a year of government doing very little.
I think the diagnosis of the Conservative loss is correct: their polling was on a bit of a sugar high due to the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau, and that masked the unpopularity of a lot of the Conservative populist messaging. Conservatives won a historic vote share in the last election; they failed the ultimate test of winning a bigger vote share than the party that won the election. Right wing populists in the US struggled with the same phenomenon after the 2020 election: they couldn't grok how Trump could win a larger vote total in 2020 than he'd gotten in 2016 and still lose. The answer was simply that 74 million votes for Trump wasn't enough to Trump 83 million votes cast for Biden. Unfortunately, a lot of them turned to election conspiracy theories to rectify the cognitive dissonance.
Conservatives have *so far* avoided the same trap, but the Poilievre faction of the party looks more susceptible to the temptation. That temptation is only going to increase when the populist playbook becomes a more obvious burden for the party in the post-Trudeau era. The Ontario/Ford Conservatives are there to call BS on a potential pivot to a conspiracy-addled pity party, but I don't think the populists are going to relinquish control easily or quietly: Carney's probably going to get an easy ride from an opposition fighting an internal civil war.
It is notable that the only people who in Canada may be exclusively labelled as populists are the Conservatives. When the "Liberals" and/or NDP propose or conduct policies that are both openly and by definition populist, they are never labelled as such.
So what is the meaning of this word, "populus", anyway ?
Right wing, populism, hate speech, MAGA, conservative = anyone who expresses any opposition to the liberal dogma.
Well, that is what I have been observing for a very long time. The comment of GS, while being informative and precise, is missing entirely a consideration of this aspect.
Populism is an anti-elite and anti-establishment sentiment that holds that the correct ideas are those of the "common people". The Conservatives are the party most strongly associated with that sentiment over the past decade or so. Jagmeet Singh made a run at it with his anti-grocery store jeremiad, but it tends to be undermined when his party simultaneously embraced all sorts of ivory tower dogmas regarding environmentalism and intersectionalism.
One problem with populists is they usually only speak for a minority of the public. but they'll insist that minority is the "true voice" of the people anyway. Support for the Trucker Convoy or anti-vaccination advocacy are good examples of that stuff - 80/20 issues where they're in the distinct minority. The other problem with populism is the hostility towards expertise: if somebody tells them they're wrong, it easily becomes a case of denigrating them as a hostile elite rather than acknowledging shortcomings and flaws in their understanding. For examples of this, see Jen Gerson's description of the reaction of populists to criticism of their claims regarding Alberta sovereignty.
How much failure does it take to call the expertise of "experts" into question? Are credentials enough to show expertise, or does it eventually need to accomplish something?
Thank you for writing an informative comment that provides precision.
Nice to see you having Rob Shaw on....I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
I had to pause my listening after only a little of the Rob Shaw part but looking part to getting back to it tomorrow! Love a pod that’s an hour + …
About the Conservatives calling the convoy sentence requests "political vengeance" and tying the Crown to a conspiracy involving the LPC.
I agree that's a crazy conspiracy theory...
But I wonder if @mattgurney47 would actually agree with the Conservatives if instead of "political vengeance", the Conservatives had called in "Laurentian vengeance".
In this version, there's no conspiracy, there's no smoke filled back room, no glasses of Scotch... there's just the usual people who all come from the same long connected families who because of who they are and *where* they are, wanted to punish the convoy in a way that they'd never consider punishing an equivalent that wasn't an affront to them specifically. e.g. A large anti-logging protest comes in from outside the province that sets up camp in resource communities in British Columbia with at least some funding from US environmental groups. Would the organizers of that get the same sentencing recommendation from the crown?
That's not a conspiracy theory... that's just recognizing that our elites for lack of a better word tend to look like each other, have the same interests, go to the same schools and know the same people.... and all people are more likely to be vindictive when something hurts **their** friends and family.
Conservatives don't seem to distinguish between that group and "liberals"... possibly because that group rather obviously personally prefers the LPC to the CPC. The media that admits the first group exists, generally tends to distinguish them.
That's not a good miscommunication for our social cohesion.
Good call re. "Laurentian vengeance", that's exactly what it is. Justice system o longer exists, it is a legal system only and is severely twisted. May I remind you that The Idiot King and his gang dismantled our social cohesion years ago.