On big-time loser energy from the CPC. On Ontario and Alberta having some problems. And Jen floats a wild theory that Matt THINKS won't get her cancelled.
It's true that a Liberal PM can do things a Conservative PM couldn't without arousing suspicion. That's one of the benefits of electing Liberals.
It doesn't just apply to barely consequential rhetoric like calling Trump "transformational". Chretien could cut spending in ways Mulroney never could have. He could pass the Clarity Act, cracking down on Quebec separatists in ways Mulroney never could have. Mulroney still had accomplishments, like passing the free trade agreement, but it was Chretien's support for free trade that changed it from a partisan controversy to an established norm.
The electoral system, and Parliamentary rules, have to treat parties exactly alike. The political culture does not. There is nothing that requires Canadian voters to make it equally easy for Liberals and Conservatives to get elected. The people who matter most politically lean strongly Liberal. Conservatives win occasionally by offering a contrast and doing everything right while Liberals are unpopular (and there's another theory that they could win through the Joe Clark / Erin O'Toole approach of becoming the Emergency Backup Liberal Party and erasing as much contrast as possible, while hoping the Liberals fumble and lose).
But voters don't owe the Conservatives anything. There does not have to be some approach that leads to Conservatives winning 50% of federal elections, any more than there has to be some approach Pepsico could take that would get people to drink as much Pepsi as Coke.
But "elbows up" to "suck up" in a week get the benefit of the doubt? Carney didn't promise a subtle long-term process, he promised an attack. He didn't promise to sit there silently while Trump invented Canadian trade statistics that Carney should know, but doesn't. He didn't promise to sit there silently while Trump insulted a Canadian Minister (though Freeland does deserve it for her hapless handling of USMCA).
Whoever won the election was going to send a trade delegation. At least Poilievre would have had the self-respect and sense not to beg for a meeting with Trump.
Agree with all of this. These are all structural realities that favour the Liberals but whining about it won't do a thing other than give off loser energy.
Furthermore a focus on all these structural realities that favour the Liberals overlooks a pretty major structural reality that favours the Conservatives, namely that in most elections the NDP siphons off a lot of votes that would have otherwise gone to the Liberals (this election being an obvious exception to that rule). In a "typical" election that is a pretty big structural advantage to the Conservatives. And this is so baked in that you rarely hear it mentioned in a typical election. Sure, many are now saying, too bad for the Conservatives that the NDP vote collapsed 10 days ago. But if to win you need the *undeserved* advantage that is an also-ran party siphoning votes from your main rival you are on shaky ground to start. Whether this (usual) Conservative structural advantage offsets the Liberal advantages cited above is an interesting thought experiment. But perhaps if the Conservatives were grateful for that "unfairness" from which they benefit they would invest less energy in whining about the "unfair" headwinds they face and try to figure out a way to deal with them. And maybe they can't - Matt's boogeyman theory is compelling. But my word, the whining is so unappealing - where is your dignity?
He said, on Mar 31st, 2025: “The unjustified threats by President Trump further strengthen the arguments in favour of the Canada First agenda that I have been fighting for my whole life. And while we propose those solutions, we will not forget the single Mom who cannot afford food. We will not forget the seniors who are choosing between eating and heating. We will not forget that 36 year-old couple whose biological clock is running out faster than they can afford to buy a home and have kids. We will not forget the families terrorized by crime and drugs. So we will continue, despite calls to the contrary, to talk about those things even if I am the only leader in the country that offers any change.”
What did CBC get from these words? The headline was “Poilievre catches heat from opponents for talk of 'biological clocks'".
So many who say that he should have engaged more with the mainstream media assume that this would have gone well for him and not just given them ammunition. I don't think that is quite so clear.
I have to agree with Jen quite unreservedly on the “can the Conservatives ever be elected” debate. Matt, you do sound fatalistic, and YOU’RE giving off loser energy. Flat out. Come on. The Conservatives lost a winnable election. I voted Conservative, I did not love their campaign. Notable errors and omissions for me.
- failure to engage the MSM. Major fail. Remember your apple chomping clips went viral Pierre.
- failure to reach out to Doug Ford and Tim Houston in the months or years prior. Brutal and damning leadership decision.
- policy announcements were very underwhelming, largely off target, and not well covered due to point #1
- I agree with other posters, the ban on local candidate debates was a very poor look and a mistake
This was a campaign run by the greatest opposition leader in modern Canadian history (imo). He looked lost without Trudeau as a foil.
He did not make the pivot to, or look like “I want to be Prime Minister” well.
I like the idea of more local candidate debates. But if I were running the CPC campaign I wouldn't love it when candidate A shows up to one and ends up backed into supporting a third trimester abortion ban and candidate B responds to the public safety topic by singing the virtues of defending your home with an AR-15, and suddenly these issues are fires to be put out for the next week.
Another structural disadvantage when your party includes supporters of issues that have been pushed outside the tiny Overton window in Canada.
To be fair to Poilievre, his choice of a seat to run in a by-election was always going to be at mercy of whatever small pool of MPs would be loyal enough to him personally to make a significant short-term sacrifice. Any Conservative MP that deeply loyal to Poilievre was probably bound to be the kind of hardcore Conservative that only the safe seats produce.
One of the most indefensible forms of cowardice the Conservatives displayed in this election was systematically skipping out on local all-candidates' debates. Apparently the local TV stations, the local farmers' organizations, local chambers of commerce, and the local community centres are all too anti-conservative, even though the Peoples' Party candidates were accessible enough to show up!
One missed opportunity for Poilievre to humble and better himself would have been to stay on as party leader *without* a seat in the House of Commons. Poilievre has enough of a pension that he could afford to tour Canada until the next election and reach new Canadians with town halls. If there is any MP whose worldview has been distorted by over-exposure to caucus politics and an absence of outsider political experience, that MP's name is Pierre Poilievre.
I live in an orange-red Lower Mainland riding. I was thinking of going with the Conservative as a sort of protest vote even though he was unlikely to win. My local paper requested blurbs from each candidate for an election information page they were putting together. Only two candidates did not respond: the Green that later dropped out of the race, and the Conservative.
Really? If you can’t be assed to send 200 words of boilerplate about your top three priorities to the only remaining local news outlet in our city of 250,000, how could I ever reasonably expect any kind of responsiveness from you if I ever needed to contact your office with a complaint or request?
Anyway, I did not vote for the Conservative candidate. If he doesn’t want to work for me he doesn’t have to!
Thank you Jen for raising the role of religion as a social force. I find your theory that a greater percentage of Catholics helps explains the difference between Canada and the US quite insightful and may well be correct.
My experience has been as follows.
Growing up in Quebec in the 1950s as a child sermons supporting political parties and anti Jews and English Protestants were the norm at election time.
Canada is definitely less religious (24% say it’s very important) vs 48% in the USA. My Canada small town - 30K or so has maybe 12 churches and meeting locations. My US town -same size -had around 35. Plus people meet at each other’s homes to worship.
When you meet a new person in my USA home small town the third question - after name and where you’re from - is have you joined a church yet followed by an invitation to visit theirs. In Canada - same size town - people react as if you asked them what their taste in sexual activity was.
Jen seems to be right 30% of Canadian Christians are Catholic vs 20% in the US.
I found that if you need help people in the US are much more likely to stop and help vs driving on and dialing 911 in Canada. The Canadian police even seem to encourage this behavior. I’m convinced religiosity is a primary reason for the difference.
People seem to do fund raisers and prayer vigils much more than in Canada. Just subjective.
Finally when I was in Guatemala I asked why the Christian churches were growing so rapidly. The answer was the Christian churches were distributing rice and beans after the service while the Catholic Churches were distributing blessings.
Sure. At the time the church ran the French Catholic educational system. From the viewpoint of a 7 year old it was basically follow the doctrine and detailed rules or you would go to the hot place for all eternity. Fear was the motivator. I was beaten a few times for rebelliousness and having an English culture in a French school system. The books you could read or borrow at the public library were all church approved.
At the time the various religions and races all disliked each other. Carrying on religious wars from centuries earlier. (Same as the US colonies in the 1600s and 1700s BTW). The Irish Protestant (Orange Lodge) vs Papists (Knights of Columbus) were still fighting the Battle of the Boyne. The French and English were fighting the Plains of Abraham. After that battle and the UK seized New France most of the educated rulers fled leaving the Catholic Churches as the main administrators. If you could afford it you tithed it was encouraged.
Pope Pius VI put out restrictions on Jews in the 1770s. Since Quebec was church run administratively for 200 years ending 1960 it was not a great environment for Jews. Plus you had the French vs English cold civil wars.
Anyway that’s a family friendly taste. If you’re interested we could expand offline.
Two comments: the first is that Canada is composed of more than Ontario and Albert. Yes, I know thats where your eyes and ears are focused right now but could you for God's sake mention other Canadian provinces and territories and seek out stories from those areas. Secondly, I’ve just let my Conservative Party membership lapse principally as a result of their spectacularly idiotic campaign. I remain a conservative pending a damage control evaluation of both parties strategy.
“If 35% of the population does not see a democratic outlet for their feelings […] that’s a problem.”
There are quite literally more Conservative MPs per capita than Conservative voters. If the response of 35% of the population having their candidates win 40% of the seats is to claim that they do not have a democratic outlet, then 35% of the population does not understand how our democracy works.
What’s that David Frum line? “If conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”? We already see enough of this on the left up here, we don’t need to see it on the right too.
Working the refs and whining about uncontrolled outcomes is something for the Greens or the NDP. It’s beneath one of the two major parties to do it too.
As the kids like to say: sounds like a skill issue to me tbh
"There are quite literally more Conservative MPs per capita than Conservative voters". They got 41.3% of the vote and 41.7% of the seats. That's as far from a disproportionate result as you're ever going to get; even a PR system often isn't that close in the seat count to the vote count.
I would not say (and did not say) that the left has abandoned democracy writ large. That being said, I don’t think the Revolutionary Communist Party folks that I see out and about in Vancouver are exactly cool with the nature of our liberal democracy.
Of course, if you really want to get into it, it’s also pretty clearly a violation of the democratic will of the people when leftists ignore court orders and blockade resource project sites.
You said in your comment that "we already see enough of this on the left up here,", with specific reference to parties rejecting democracy because they couldn't win fairly in a democracy, so I don't think it was unreasonable to question you on that assertion. I appreciate your response, and that you weren't rude about it.
That said, invoking the spectre of the CGL blockades doesn't make for a compelling argument, first because you cannot credibly link those movements with a political party (although as a leftist myself, I will say that Indigenous displacement and martially-enforced fossil fuel development is pretty much as perfectly LPC and CPC as it gets). Also, it's spurious to claim that the courts are fully representative of the will of the people (as opposed to serving as the judicial arm, which are appointed, not elected, so there goes the democratic link), and it's ludicrous to claim that this is a phenomenon that is exclusive to the left.
Again, despite our probable differences of opinion, I appreciate you actually responding to my inquiry.
I think Matt's right about the bogeyman thing. The Liberals always run against a bogeyman. They've nailed that schtick. I don't think that will change. Heck, even Andrew Scheer was a bogeyman to them.
Taken together, "things Liberals can get away with" constitute a set of impressive size. When it comes to cultivating and exploiting a sense of self-entitlement, Canada's 'ruling party' routinely leads the league. If a trophy is ever awarded, it will probably be called 'The Trudeau.'
I want someone in media ever ask Mark Carney: "you're a regular churchgoer catholic and you said that the person you admire is Pope Francis. How can you have the government you lead keep paying for procedure that the person you admire said 'hiring an Assassin to kill your own children"? And not only you ban anyone not endorsing that policy to run for your party, but also demonize any politician or organization that dare to advocate against it?"
I noticed CBC and other MSMs making so many tributes to Pope Francis, and this belief (which is shared by the supposedly progressive successor) never mentioned it and only mention his progressive stances?
Also, this book relates to your discussion: "The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canadian". If I remember, the author finds that evangelicals in Canada don't have a political identity the way American Evangelicals do. So, I think it relates very well to your discussion on Tim Alberta's Book.
3. Nevertheless, I feel that growing up, we were very exposed to American Evangelicalism.
At the Christian camp the counsellors would play the coolest Christians bands, that sounded like punk or pop but had lyrics about Jesus. There was on CD in particular when the singer gives a speech about how American was founded as a Christian country. Meanwhile there were electric guitars in the background leading into a praise song. All emotional and manipulative. So as teenager's, we'd listen to this, and then go swimming in the muskokas. So many stories like, so many resources are written and made in the US.
Despite the American influence, I do believe we were uniquely Canadian. The American stuff was superfluous.
Also, for fun. Check out the 1985 Ontario election, and Bishop Garnsworthy's comments on public funded Roman Catholic School. Maybe your older readers will remember this. The newspaper eviscerated him. Church leaders have stayed in the shadows ever since.
Before we Monday morning quarterback the conservative campaign to death asking why they didn't do this and that pet thing we each think would have gone WAY better and overcome all the absurd and unique factors working against them this election cycle, how about we see how they perform in a normal election.
Remember those? Boring elections fought over policy and whether you were better off than you were 4 years previous? When they weren't timed to coincide with a (real or perceived) incumbent-friendly national crisis that overwhelmed all discussion of real issues? We haven't had one of those since 2019. I'm curious. Looking at the polling trajectory following that election I think Trudeau would have been out at the nearest opportunity if not for Coivd. Just as much as we would have seen that massive CPC majority if Trump hadn't won the 2024 US election - no matter if Carney, Trudeau, Freeland, or literal Jesus Christ was leading the Liberal Party, and no matter if Poilievre let journalists onto his damn plane or whatever.
We were visiting Scotland when my husband figured he should get a Scottish passport (He was born there). He filled out the forms, got a guarantor, took a trip to the passport office. Had a passport within an hour. An hour! I don't even think he paid a rush fee.
It's true that a Liberal PM can do things a Conservative PM couldn't without arousing suspicion. That's one of the benefits of electing Liberals.
It doesn't just apply to barely consequential rhetoric like calling Trump "transformational". Chretien could cut spending in ways Mulroney never could have. He could pass the Clarity Act, cracking down on Quebec separatists in ways Mulroney never could have. Mulroney still had accomplishments, like passing the free trade agreement, but it was Chretien's support for free trade that changed it from a partisan controversy to an established norm.
The electoral system, and Parliamentary rules, have to treat parties exactly alike. The political culture does not. There is nothing that requires Canadian voters to make it equally easy for Liberals and Conservatives to get elected. The people who matter most politically lean strongly Liberal. Conservatives win occasionally by offering a contrast and doing everything right while Liberals are unpopular (and there's another theory that they could win through the Joe Clark / Erin O'Toole approach of becoming the Emergency Backup Liberal Party and erasing as much contrast as possible, while hoping the Liberals fumble and lose).
But voters don't owe the Conservatives anything. There does not have to be some approach that leads to Conservatives winning 50% of federal elections, any more than there has to be some approach Pepsico could take that would get people to drink as much Pepsi as Coke.
I think this is exactly right. Nobody is owed the benefit of the doubt.
But "elbows up" to "suck up" in a week get the benefit of the doubt? Carney didn't promise a subtle long-term process, he promised an attack. He didn't promise to sit there silently while Trump invented Canadian trade statistics that Carney should know, but doesn't. He didn't promise to sit there silently while Trump insulted a Canadian Minister (though Freeland does deserve it for her hapless handling of USMCA).
Whoever won the election was going to send a trade delegation. At least Poilievre would have had the self-respect and sense not to beg for a meeting with Trump.
Agree with all of this. These are all structural realities that favour the Liberals but whining about it won't do a thing other than give off loser energy.
Furthermore a focus on all these structural realities that favour the Liberals overlooks a pretty major structural reality that favours the Conservatives, namely that in most elections the NDP siphons off a lot of votes that would have otherwise gone to the Liberals (this election being an obvious exception to that rule). In a "typical" election that is a pretty big structural advantage to the Conservatives. And this is so baked in that you rarely hear it mentioned in a typical election. Sure, many are now saying, too bad for the Conservatives that the NDP vote collapsed 10 days ago. But if to win you need the *undeserved* advantage that is an also-ran party siphoning votes from your main rival you are on shaky ground to start. Whether this (usual) Conservative structural advantage offsets the Liberal advantages cited above is an interesting thought experiment. But perhaps if the Conservatives were grateful for that "unfairness" from which they benefit they would invest less energy in whining about the "unfair" headwinds they face and try to figure out a way to deal with them. And maybe they can't - Matt's boogeyman theory is compelling. But my word, the whining is so unappealing - where is your dignity?
I'm 32 minutes in and so far my takeaway is that the Line needs a vacation. lol
Poilievre has every right to disdain the media.
He said, on Mar 31st, 2025: “The unjustified threats by President Trump further strengthen the arguments in favour of the Canada First agenda that I have been fighting for my whole life. And while we propose those solutions, we will not forget the single Mom who cannot afford food. We will not forget the seniors who are choosing between eating and heating. We will not forget that 36 year-old couple whose biological clock is running out faster than they can afford to buy a home and have kids. We will not forget the families terrorized by crime and drugs. So we will continue, despite calls to the contrary, to talk about those things even if I am the only leader in the country that offers any change.”
What did CBC get from these words? The headline was “Poilievre catches heat from opponents for talk of 'biological clocks'".
So many who say that he should have engaged more with the mainstream media assume that this would have gone well for him and not just given them ammunition. I don't think that is quite so clear.
How to defeat the boogie man? Joe did. Hillary and Kamala couldn’t. It can be done folks. Staying away from the pity parties helps… FWIW.
I have to agree with Jen quite unreservedly on the “can the Conservatives ever be elected” debate. Matt, you do sound fatalistic, and YOU’RE giving off loser energy. Flat out. Come on. The Conservatives lost a winnable election. I voted Conservative, I did not love their campaign. Notable errors and omissions for me.
- failure to engage the MSM. Major fail. Remember your apple chomping clips went viral Pierre.
- failure to reach out to Doug Ford and Tim Houston in the months or years prior. Brutal and damning leadership decision.
- policy announcements were very underwhelming, largely off target, and not well covered due to point #1
- I agree with other posters, the ban on local candidate debates was a very poor look and a mistake
This was a campaign run by the greatest opposition leader in modern Canadian history (imo). He looked lost without Trudeau as a foil.
He did not make the pivot to, or look like “I want to be Prime Minister” well.
I like the idea of more local candidate debates. But if I were running the CPC campaign I wouldn't love it when candidate A shows up to one and ends up backed into supporting a third trimester abortion ban and candidate B responds to the public safety topic by singing the virtues of defending your home with an AR-15, and suddenly these issues are fires to be put out for the next week.
Another structural disadvantage when your party includes supporters of issues that have been pushed outside the tiny Overton window in Canada.
To be fair to Poilievre, his choice of a seat to run in a by-election was always going to be at mercy of whatever small pool of MPs would be loyal enough to him personally to make a significant short-term sacrifice. Any Conservative MP that deeply loyal to Poilievre was probably bound to be the kind of hardcore Conservative that only the safe seats produce.
One of the most indefensible forms of cowardice the Conservatives displayed in this election was systematically skipping out on local all-candidates' debates. Apparently the local TV stations, the local farmers' organizations, local chambers of commerce, and the local community centres are all too anti-conservative, even though the Peoples' Party candidates were accessible enough to show up!
One missed opportunity for Poilievre to humble and better himself would have been to stay on as party leader *without* a seat in the House of Commons. Poilievre has enough of a pension that he could afford to tour Canada until the next election and reach new Canadians with town halls. If there is any MP whose worldview has been distorted by over-exposure to caucus politics and an absence of outsider political experience, that MP's name is Pierre Poilievre.
I live in an orange-red Lower Mainland riding. I was thinking of going with the Conservative as a sort of protest vote even though he was unlikely to win. My local paper requested blurbs from each candidate for an election information page they were putting together. Only two candidates did not respond: the Green that later dropped out of the race, and the Conservative.
Really? If you can’t be assed to send 200 words of boilerplate about your top three priorities to the only remaining local news outlet in our city of 250,000, how could I ever reasonably expect any kind of responsiveness from you if I ever needed to contact your office with a complaint or request?
Anyway, I did not vote for the Conservative candidate. If he doesn’t want to work for me he doesn’t have to!
Thank you Jen for raising the role of religion as a social force. I find your theory that a greater percentage of Catholics helps explains the difference between Canada and the US quite insightful and may well be correct.
My experience has been as follows.
Growing up in Quebec in the 1950s as a child sermons supporting political parties and anti Jews and English Protestants were the norm at election time.
Canada is definitely less religious (24% say it’s very important) vs 48% in the USA. My Canada small town - 30K or so has maybe 12 churches and meeting locations. My US town -same size -had around 35. Plus people meet at each other’s homes to worship.
When you meet a new person in my USA home small town the third question - after name and where you’re from - is have you joined a church yet followed by an invitation to visit theirs. In Canada - same size town - people react as if you asked them what their taste in sexual activity was.
Jen seems to be right 30% of Canadian Christians are Catholic vs 20% in the US.
I found that if you need help people in the US are much more likely to stop and help vs driving on and dialing 911 in Canada. The Canadian police even seem to encourage this behavior. I’m convinced religiosity is a primary reason for the difference.
People seem to do fund raisers and prayer vigils much more than in Canada. Just subjective.
Finally when I was in Guatemala I asked why the Christian churches were growing so rapidly. The answer was the Christian churches were distributing rice and beans after the service while the Catholic Churches were distributing blessings.
Hope this won’t get me banned from this forum.
That is valuable. Can you tell me more about your experience in the church in the '50s? JG
Sure. At the time the church ran the French Catholic educational system. From the viewpoint of a 7 year old it was basically follow the doctrine and detailed rules or you would go to the hot place for all eternity. Fear was the motivator. I was beaten a few times for rebelliousness and having an English culture in a French school system. The books you could read or borrow at the public library were all church approved.
At the time the various religions and races all disliked each other. Carrying on religious wars from centuries earlier. (Same as the US colonies in the 1600s and 1700s BTW). The Irish Protestant (Orange Lodge) vs Papists (Knights of Columbus) were still fighting the Battle of the Boyne. The French and English were fighting the Plains of Abraham. After that battle and the UK seized New France most of the educated rulers fled leaving the Catholic Churches as the main administrators. If you could afford it you tithed it was encouraged.
Pope Pius VI put out restrictions on Jews in the 1770s. Since Quebec was church run administratively for 200 years ending 1960 it was not a great environment for Jews. Plus you had the French vs English cold civil wars.
Anyway that’s a family friendly taste. If you’re interested we could expand offline.
Two comments: the first is that Canada is composed of more than Ontario and Albert. Yes, I know thats where your eyes and ears are focused right now but could you for God's sake mention other Canadian provinces and territories and seek out stories from those areas. Secondly, I’ve just let my Conservative Party membership lapse principally as a result of their spectacularly idiotic campaign. I remain a conservative pending a damage control evaluation of both parties strategy.
“If 35% of the population does not see a democratic outlet for their feelings […] that’s a problem.”
There are quite literally more Conservative MPs per capita than Conservative voters. If the response of 35% of the population having their candidates win 40% of the seats is to claim that they do not have a democratic outlet, then 35% of the population does not understand how our democracy works.
What’s that David Frum line? “If conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”? We already see enough of this on the left up here, we don’t need to see it on the right too.
Working the refs and whining about uncontrolled outcomes is something for the Greens or the NDP. It’s beneath one of the two major parties to do it too.
As the kids like to say: sounds like a skill issue to me tbh
"There are quite literally more Conservative MPs per capita than Conservative voters". They got 41.3% of the vote and 41.7% of the seats. That's as far from a disproportionate result as you're ever going to get; even a PR system often isn't that close in the seat count to the vote count.
The left has abandoned democracy here? Please elaborate.
I would not say (and did not say) that the left has abandoned democracy writ large. That being said, I don’t think the Revolutionary Communist Party folks that I see out and about in Vancouver are exactly cool with the nature of our liberal democracy.
Of course, if you really want to get into it, it’s also pretty clearly a violation of the democratic will of the people when leftists ignore court orders and blockade resource project sites.
You said in your comment that "we already see enough of this on the left up here,", with specific reference to parties rejecting democracy because they couldn't win fairly in a democracy, so I don't think it was unreasonable to question you on that assertion. I appreciate your response, and that you weren't rude about it.
That said, invoking the spectre of the CGL blockades doesn't make for a compelling argument, first because you cannot credibly link those movements with a political party (although as a leftist myself, I will say that Indigenous displacement and martially-enforced fossil fuel development is pretty much as perfectly LPC and CPC as it gets). Also, it's spurious to claim that the courts are fully representative of the will of the people (as opposed to serving as the judicial arm, which are appointed, not elected, so there goes the democratic link), and it's ludicrous to claim that this is a phenomenon that is exclusive to the left.
Again, despite our probable differences of opinion, I appreciate you actually responding to my inquiry.
I think Matt's right about the bogeyman thing. The Liberals always run against a bogeyman. They've nailed that schtick. I don't think that will change. Heck, even Andrew Scheer was a bogeyman to them.
It’s Battle River-Crowfoot riding. Essentially all of east central Alberta.
Yeah sorry I had a total brain farther there. JG
Taken together, "things Liberals can get away with" constitute a set of impressive size. When it comes to cultivating and exploiting a sense of self-entitlement, Canada's 'ruling party' routinely leads the league. If a trophy is ever awarded, it will probably be called 'The Trudeau.'
I want someone in media ever ask Mark Carney: "you're a regular churchgoer catholic and you said that the person you admire is Pope Francis. How can you have the government you lead keep paying for procedure that the person you admire said 'hiring an Assassin to kill your own children"? And not only you ban anyone not endorsing that policy to run for your party, but also demonize any politician or organization that dare to advocate against it?"
I noticed CBC and other MSMs making so many tributes to Pope Francis, and this belief (which is shared by the supposedly progressive successor) never mentioned it and only mention his progressive stances?
1. Jen has had various comments over the years on the religion. They only get better.
I will read this Tim Alberto book.
2. This report from the evangelical fellowship gets into the complexity of Evangelical voting patterns in Canada: https://files.evangelicalfellowship.ca/min/rc/cft/V02I03/Evangelical_Voting_Trends_1996-2008.pdf
Also, this book relates to your discussion: "The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canadian". If I remember, the author finds that evangelicals in Canada don't have a political identity the way American Evangelicals do. So, I think it relates very well to your discussion on Tim Alberta's Book.
3. Nevertheless, I feel that growing up, we were very exposed to American Evangelicalism.
At the Christian camp the counsellors would play the coolest Christians bands, that sounded like punk or pop but had lyrics about Jesus. There was on CD in particular when the singer gives a speech about how American was founded as a Christian country. Meanwhile there were electric guitars in the background leading into a praise song. All emotional and manipulative. So as teenager's, we'd listen to this, and then go swimming in the muskokas. So many stories like, so many resources are written and made in the US.
Despite the American influence, I do believe we were uniquely Canadian. The American stuff was superfluous.
Also, for fun. Check out the 1985 Ontario election, and Bishop Garnsworthy's comments on public funded Roman Catholic School. Maybe your older readers will remember this. The newspaper eviscerated him. Church leaders have stayed in the shadows ever since.
Before we Monday morning quarterback the conservative campaign to death asking why they didn't do this and that pet thing we each think would have gone WAY better and overcome all the absurd and unique factors working against them this election cycle, how about we see how they perform in a normal election.
Remember those? Boring elections fought over policy and whether you were better off than you were 4 years previous? When they weren't timed to coincide with a (real or perceived) incumbent-friendly national crisis that overwhelmed all discussion of real issues? We haven't had one of those since 2019. I'm curious. Looking at the polling trajectory following that election I think Trudeau would have been out at the nearest opportunity if not for Coivd. Just as much as we would have seen that massive CPC majority if Trump hadn't won the 2024 US election - no matter if Carney, Trudeau, Freeland, or literal Jesus Christ was leading the Liberal Party, and no matter if Poilievre let journalists onto his damn plane or whatever.
We were visiting Scotland when my husband figured he should get a Scottish passport (He was born there). He filled out the forms, got a guarantor, took a trip to the passport office. Had a passport within an hour. An hour! I don't even think he paid a rush fee.