On the "immigration hail mary" I'm not really sure what it could be. They'll certainly continue making announcements, but the problem is that those will feel more like just doing the bare minimum to show they haven't completely checked out than anything politically meaningful. A real Hail Mary would be if Trudeau starts quoting Donald Trump on immigration, but that's not happening. Two things about the whole immigration fiasco still surprise me:
First - it's been obvious for at least half a year that their changes were going badly sideways - Trudeau and Miller even admitted it - how are they only now getting around to doing the bare minimum of reversing their post-Covid changes?
Second - what exactly did they expect to happen? Basic economics would tell you two things were going to happen with a large influx of low-wage workers: it would suppress wages and it would inflate rents (given rent is a core part of cost-of-living, I don't even know if on balance the whole scheme reduced inflation). But that's also a double-whammy to many left-wing voters who experience the pain of inflation but not the corresponding benefits of higher wages - and are then faced with a bunch of new competition in the rental market to top it off. And then there's all the fraud and exploitation such a system inevitably enabled. I'm sure Trudeau would like to be remembered as the PM who brought in a gender-balanced cabinet, but instead he'll likely be remembered for enabling a system that exploited millions of poor minorities. The whole thing was so avoidable.
Two cents: basic economics is still undecided on the wage effects. See the decades long battle between Card and Borjas. I look forward to 5 years from now when StatsCan has the longitudinal data cleaned so this can be examined rigorously. The housing effects are pretty unambigously how you decribe them but, again, I look forward to some serious analysis.
Several years? I expect this could take more than a decade and I'm not confident those charged with the fixing will have the endurance to see it through. We can hope.
All the best to Jen. It was quite heroic of you to put in the effort that you did. Thank you.
I sure hope that Jen is wrong on the Liberals trying to make the Palestine question into a wedge issue. It is the one issue that has the potential to lead to violence. As well, it is not at all clear to me how the Canadian voters in general would come out on the issue.
On background checks for new citizens. I believe that the Liberal government is under pressure to waive checks for refugees from Gaza.
More generally on immigration, eight years ago Maxime Bernier was the only leader worried about the planned growth of the numbers, and was accused of xenophobia for his pains. On this issue, he seems to have been proved right. (There is also supply management, where Mr. Poilievre's stand shows that he is not truly a small-government conservative.) A pity that Mr. Bernier turned out to be too extreme on other issues, and prone to conspiracy theories.
Finally, a big win for Mr. Poilievre may turn out to be a poisoned chalice. I fear that the problems ahead are much too big to be even partly resolved in a single term. I predict that the 2029 election will be wide open, and that the Conservatives may be seen at that time to have failed. But then five years is probably too long a planning horizon for anyone in this country.
I admit that I favored Bernier in the post-Harper leadership race as the only candidate who actually seemed to follow any kind of coherent ideology. However, I had no idea how weirdly unbalanced he was, as revealed with his time leading the PPC. In hindsight, I realize that the lack of support for his leadership candidacy among other Conservative MPs was a huge tell: those people have worked with him and know who he is in a way that regular voters can’t hope to do. If a candidate’s colleagues don’t back them, it’s a huge red flag. They know something we don’t.
Yeh. Mea culpa. What motivated me most was making sure that Mr popinjay O'Leary didn't make it. Max was a huge disappointment. Ultimately Scheer was the best but fatally flawed candidate.
The same thing happened in the BC Liberal leadership race that elected Christy Clark. She was a cabinet minister, then left politics after a term or two, then came back to run in the leadership. Only one BC Liberal caucus member supported her. That was a red flag, but insta-members got her elected.
What I suspect Polievre will have going for him in 2029 is that the Liberal brand will still be extremely toxic. If he looks halfway competent, I suspect enough people will ignore that he failed to fix most of the problems (which they'll still be blaming on the Liberals). Maybe the NDP become formidable by then, but I doubt it. Ontario is sort of an example of how this can play out.
My worst fear with Notley having left AB NDP is that she runs after Singh resigns following a horrible election performance. She knows how to campaign and is well tapped in to how to use propaganda. Those who haven’t seen her propaganda in action before might be wooed. And that would be horrible. (Which is why I say it’s my worst nightmare in 2029)
I think Canada runs on 10 year cycles federally now … not always, but now.
However, Fixing the mess will require something we don’t have, which is a non partisan senate.
I think we are heading into a constitutional crisis unlike any we’ve seen before. I have zero faith that the 80% liberal senate will not play stupid games with legislation, (blocking or slow walking) despite the fact that the majority of Canadians will support the next government, with much greater numbers than this government ever enjoyed, even in their majority years.
I’m not sure we will survive as a county if this happens. Once we open the constitution, it’s a Pandora’s box. I’m old enough to remember Meech Lake, and the Charlottetown Accords.
This is a very real risk. And the fact that the Liberal senators are technically "independent" potentially makes things worse than normal. Normally after an electoral drubbing, the party that lost power has good political reasons not to start encumbering the new government. But now you have a bunch of left-leaning Senators who the Liberal leadership can't control and who will claim that they're voting for principled rather than partisan reasons. It could be a huge mess.
There is always the Mulroney solution to an intransigent Senate. Appointing more senators until you have enough to pass the legislation would shred the senate’s credibility with the public except there is nothing to shred.
I don’t know if there’s a limit on the number of times Prime Minister can appoint an additional eight senators, but I see nothing in the text to suggest that.
A prime minister savvy enough to do that for popular legislation rather than something unpopular might do very well.
Oh man… there’s so much more soap opera to tell in the BCU/BCLiberal/BCConservative story.
I could go into the history of the BC Liberals, but really all that matters is by the 80s they were basically a defunct party, until they rocketed to opposition in the 90s and were government from 2001 to 2017.
The BC Conservative Party has essentially been a protest party for several decades now. If they’ve elected any MLAs it has only been a handful.
Not long after, the BC Liberals decide they need a rebranding (partly because of how little support Trudeau has in BC and they don’t want voters thinking they are the same party). So they rename to BC United.
But then polls start coming out with BC United with significantly less support than they had as BC Liberals, because voters don’t know the new brand. At the same time, BC Conservatives are polling over 10%, which is higher than they’ve polled in decades. This might have been a Poilievre halo effect. Or a lot of BC Liberals were just taking Rustad’s side in the fight with Falcon.
And slowly BC Conservative numbers keep climbing, and BCU keeps falling. At one point Rustad reaches out to Falcon to merge, and Falcon tells him to buzz off. A few months later Falcon raises the idea of a merger, and Rustad returns the favour.
During this time it’s looking like with a split right that NDP could end up with an almost sweep this election.
But eventually we get to today, where a lot of BCU candidates have quit, or joined Conservative, and BCU support is so low that Falcon has to promise to leave politics to come to a deal with conservatives.
It’s really an incredible tale of Falcon authoring the demise of his own party and political career.
"It’s really an incredible tale of Falcon authoring the demise of his own party" -> I suspect history will remember it this way, but I'm not sure how true it is. While Falcon may have sped up its demise, I don't believe that party was ever going to shake their reputation for turning BC into a playground for the rich at the expense of locals, and the wider global trends towards more populist politics was probably the nail in the coffin for their style of boujee politics.
The BC Liberal/BC United was also always a coalition between pro-business Red Tory types and social conservatives. The social conservatives dominated the party outside of the Lower Mainland but were largely shut out of power. The BC Conservatives were a natural home for them. They were successfully fended off and the Liberals kept their coalition together in their last winning election campaign in 2013. Now the populist wave that’s been going through conservative politics everywhere has hit BC, and the dam broke. Instead of having to fight an insurgency and win control of an existing right of center party, the social conservatives and populists just flocked to a new one.
I think Falcon changed the name because, being a Young Socred at SFU battling Young Liberal Christy Clark, he chafed at being called a “Liberal” and wanted to stick it to Clark one last time. It didn’t seem to work though.
The BC Liberals greatly benefited from the collapse of the Social Credit party of BC. The Socred members simply swamped the Liberals by joining the Liberal party. Many actual Liberals left the party as a result and some joined the NDP.
They went on to defeat the Glen Clark NDP around the late 90s) I can’t remember exactly) and then Gordon Campbell, followed by Christie Clark held power for the Liberals for , I think, 17 years. Then came the NDP under the able and likeable, John Horgan, followed by NDP Davis Eby.
Just a reminder, the atlantic ocean does not start east of Quebec City. I can't be the only Atlantic Canadian subscriber that would love to see an article or two about the Atlantic provinces.
Agreed. Nor can I be the only subscriber in Saskatchewan. Reminder there are two provinces in between Alberta and Ontario that are never spoken of by our line editors
The argument that in any complex system, like an immigration system, is going to have outliers works in the abstract. The problem for Trudeau is that he massively increased the number of people coming to Canada. That means that, by definition and everything else being equal, you’re going to get more outliers.
I think the other problem is that the Liberals simply weren’t honest about the challenges of increased immigration, and tried to dismiss concerns as racism or just engage in gaslighting denial. You could see it previewed in the early push to admit a larger number of Syrian refugees in a short time period. They should’ve stuck to the line that Canada needed to do it because morally it was the right thing to do. Instead, they insisted that there wouldn’t be problems and pitched the line that Syrians were actually a relatively educated society that would be a net gain for Canada. Of course, there *were* problems. When admitting refugees, you’re not curating people in terms of their education, skills, social background, or even criminal records.
What’s strange is that having taken this approach as a political tactic to sell their policy, the Liberals seemed to assume it was true and behaved accordingly. That seems to characterize the Justin Trudeau era: you’re never quite sure where they simply don’t know what they’re doing, and where they’re engaging in some weird psychological equivalent of drinking their own bathwater.
I agree that given the volume of immigrants coming here, some questionable ones would be missed. But … Mr Eldidi allegedly was shown in a video from 2015 (I think) dismembering an ISIS prisoner. This, if true, would NOT be a minor indiscretion when it comes to his being allowed into our country or granted citizenship. Again I emphasize the ‘if true’ part. I don’t understand how accessible a video on the dark Web would be to our security groups, but one would think the dark Web is somewhere they should be searching. And I think our security groups did six reviews of Mr Eldidi over the years. To me, missing something of this level is a major failure … something that can’t be as dismissed with ‘we will miss some things’ or ‘that is how the system works’.
As a BC Resident, I think there is an interesting national angle. While the BC Liberal party was somewhat to the right of the federal party (ideologically I'd put then somewhere between Paul Martin and Joe Clark), they had that same glass-tower-elitist reputation now plaguing the federal Liberals. In particular, they were never able to shake being blamed for the housing crisis and their reputation for being the party of real-estate speculators. Some media is claiming the party's name change was a cause of their misfortunes this election, but I see it more as a symptom (they knew the BC Liberal brand was toxic). It's not surprising they have been made irrelevant by two parties with more populist approaches.
My slightly hot take is I think the same thing will happen to the federal Liberals and Trudeau may be the last Liberal prime minister. The Liberals have made choices the last few years that I suspect will make them completely toxic for anyone under the age of 40 and I don't see them shaking that reputation with a new leader. At some point, Jagmeet Singh will be replaced by someone with more political skills (possibly a former NDP premier?) and I expect them to overtake the Liberals on the left.
I think you’re right about the federal Liberals. That’s been a party in a long decline starting under Pierre Trudeau. They were always the party of power, attracting a lot of ambitious and talented people, but they’ve been experiencing a brain drain over time as right wing parties started to attract those people and Liberal infighting drove off others. Since Chretien left, they’ve been fixated on having a strong leader because there isn’t much strength left in the bench otherwise.
I think the NDP is eventually going to supplant them, but only when the Liberals have declined to the point that a new NDP leader can steer the party to the center. That’s basically what happened with Jack Layton in 2011, but a resurgence in the Liberals in 2015 undid the progress they’d made.
Still listening to this, but I have to clarify that Falcon did not quit out of the blue. There were rumblings for months on Twitter and elsewhere that the United and Conservatives should amalgamate in some fashion.
Since you guys admitted you weren’t up to speed, I’ll offer, gratis, this brief primer on modern BC politics, which is completely different from what is seen east of the Rock Pile.
Since the 1940's, the Liberals and Conservatives have formed a "free enterprise coalition" against the CCF/NDP "socialist horde". This stared as an actual Liberal-Conservative coalition. This lasted until 1952 when failed BCPC leadership candidate WAC Bennett became the leader of the BC Social Credit Party became premier. He and the Socreds led the province as a de facto Liberal-Conservative coalition until 1972. At that point, the Socreds became unpopular and the BC Liberals took a lot of votes from them, allowing Dave Barrett and the NDP to form government. It is important to note that in most elections in British Columbia, the NDP consistently get around + or - 40% of the vote.
By 1975, WAC's son Bill re-established the free enterprise coalition under the Socred banner and became premier until 1986, when he became unpopular during his "restraint" program of cutting government spending. Bill Vander Zalm became premier and defeated the NDP in the following election.
Soon into Vander Zalm's tenure, his social conservatism caused division within the Socred caucus and party as a whole. He left office in 1991 due to a conflict of interest scandal. The Socreds lost the subsequent election and the almost non-existent BC Liberal Party became official opposition. During the 1990's, the coalition was extremely fractured. The NDP maintained government throughout the 90's despite scandal bringing down Mike Harcourt in 1996. The BC Liberals won the popular vote, but because of a vote split in many seats with BC Reform, the NDP won the most seats.
In 2001, the free-enterprise coalition re-formed under the BC Liberal banner with Gordon Campbell as leader. Until now, the NDP still maintained their ~40% vote. But by this time, the NDP had worn out their stay and many NDP voters stayed home in 2001 or thought Campbell was a progressive, and the NDP was reduced to two seats. By the next election in 2005, NDP regained their ~40% vote share.
The BC Liberals maintained their coalition until 2017 when the NDP formed government with the Greens. The BC Liberals didn't fracture, but they did become tired with the stench of croney capitalism. In 2020, the NDP formed an outright majority government with almost 48% of the vote, which was unheard of. From what I can tell, the BC Liberal leader was not popular and did not connect with voters. For most voters, the NDP under John Horgan did not come across as doctrinaire socialist as their predecessors.
Since then, the BC Liberals chose former cabinet minister Kevin Falcon as their leader. Falcon comes from the "Socred Wing" of the party (Christy Clark came from the "Liberal Wing"). One of his signature moves was to rename the BC Liberals "BC United". He came from the part of the coalition that felt the name "Liberal" was toxic for many free-enterprise voters, and was hoping a rename would help party fortunes.
Fast forward to now and a formerly moribund "BC Conservative Party" has fired up in the polls. Former BC Liberal MLA John Rustad is the leader after getting punted from the BC Liberal caucus for suggesting carbon emissions were not contributing to climate change. Since then, Rustad has staked out positions to the right of BC United. This is ironic since Falcon came from the "right wing" of the BC Liberal coalition and changed the party's name to appeal to right-leaning voters.
One popular theory for United’s downturn suggests that BC United has done a terrible job informing the public that BC United = BC Liberal so when people respond to polls on whether they would vote for BC United or the BC Conservatives, people don't know who United is and see BC Conservatives = free-enterprise coalition = BC Liberal. BC United, when they were the BC Liberals under Gordon Campbell, did introduce the carbon tax. The BC NDP were against it, calling it "regressive". That is probably also hurting BC United now.
If your theory on Doug Ford is correct, this province and the country as a whole, are screwed.
I would prefer to actually fix and apply the Canada Health Act rather than following the US lead. It's only working for the rich there....is that what we want here?
I think the government should launch a study to readjust what they need to work on. Results in about 36 months. The federal government doesn't act....it studies.
I think we need to look at European models. It’s not the black and white Canada Health Act or the US system that keeps getting trotted out. The health care system in Canada is clearly and irreconcilably broken. It needs a major overhaul, and some more private participation does NOT mean 2 tier necessarily. I’m frankly sick of the fear-mongering over a “US style system” that the left keeps trotting out over and over. It gets in the way of meaningful and productive public discussion.
The annual intake of newcomers is now in the hundreds of thousands and they come from many different countries - including some where documentation is difficult to obtain or is inherently unreliable.
Moreover, each of these individuals has their own personal story to tell, even though it may be hard to confirm, so that “credibility” is critical.
And of course, among these many thousands, may be “surreptitious infiltrators”, or “sleepers”, or people who were “criminals” “back home” (like Khalistan separatists, “Tamil Tigers”, or just run-of-the-mill Mafiosi) - folks who nevertheless find a happy home in Canada.
Like the alleged mafia boss Vincenzo 'Jimmy' De Maria, whom Canada has tried, for years, to deport.
The reality, though, is that with such huge numbers, there will inevitably be mistakes and lots of undesirables can slip through.
The real question is whether Canada has the legal tools to rectify such problems once they are identified – not just the correction of errors, but also the timely, energetic, and (hopefully) cost-effective expulsion of the calculating liars and miscreants.
For as the Globe & Mail reported in May 2024: “most people living in Canada who have been sent deportation letters in the past eight years are still in the country”; and the fact is, it is quite hard to quantify how many have been removed, and how long it took, and how much it cost.
So the question is: has the process been so drowned in bureaucracy and layers of litigation, that it has become dysfunctional – as appears to be the case with migrants to the UK or on the US border?
It took 10 years to expel Mugesera – whose case shows how hard it is the establish the truth.
Richard, don't forget the Face Painter's immortal words, "A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian." Even where citizenship was obtained fraudulently? We will see. Maybe. It is my suspicion that they won't even try to revoke the citizenship of this latest goof.
The number of temporary immigrants means it's not as simple as the problem being baked-in for many years. They could reduce the total population if they reduced temporary immigration fast enough, although the options to do that are mostly unpalatable. Most significantly, students are here longer than other categories of temporary immigrants, and the current approach of cutting intake will take years to work its way through the pipeline. A 2-year college program means 5 years here for most: 2 years in college, 3 year post-grad work permit. Cutting work permits would be a fast solution... but only if you didn't grandfather in people currently studying. This has obvious problems, but it's still there.
None of the options to reduce population are great, but it's still a political problem that voters do know some degree of fast relief is possible at least in theory. The Liberals tried to hedge on the promised temporary resident reduction by making a promise over years without saying most of the reduction is likely to happen at the end of that period because of the composition of residents. The question is whether they're backed into a corner enough that more is on the table.
Agreed - in theory population growth can remain low, flat, or even negative while keeping reasonably high permanent resident targets. We can even bring in new folks (doctors, etc) from abroad without increasing population.
The problem is, in addition to preventing a new influx of temporary residents, it also means requiring most of the temporary residents to actually leave, and that's going to be a problem given most came here with the intention of getting permanent residency. We're basically left with four bad options:
1. Accept continued record population growth.
2. Convert the existing temporary residents to PRs over the next few years while limiting slots for people outside the country. The problem is, with a fixed PR cap, that means we end up using the limited PR slots for Tim Horton's cashiers instead of the types of "high human capital" folks Canada has previously bragged about prioritizing (doctors and engineers, etc).
3. Let the visas expire and force people to leave, possibly including draconian deportations for those who refuse. I don't know if Canadians have the stomach for this.
4. Let the visas expire and live with a large undocumented population, kicking the problem down the road indefinitely
Yeah. On the one hand, Canada does (yet) have the scale of undocumented work the US does, and it's not totally obvious how much lack of available work will disincentivize overstaying. On the other hand, many college students have debts they only have any hope of paying off if they're working in dollars (i.e., will be desperate) and if people think they have no hope of ever returning if they leave that gets rid of a big incentive to follow the rules too. Big mess.
On the "immigration hail mary" I'm not really sure what it could be. They'll certainly continue making announcements, but the problem is that those will feel more like just doing the bare minimum to show they haven't completely checked out than anything politically meaningful. A real Hail Mary would be if Trudeau starts quoting Donald Trump on immigration, but that's not happening. Two things about the whole immigration fiasco still surprise me:
First - it's been obvious for at least half a year that their changes were going badly sideways - Trudeau and Miller even admitted it - how are they only now getting around to doing the bare minimum of reversing their post-Covid changes?
Second - what exactly did they expect to happen? Basic economics would tell you two things were going to happen with a large influx of low-wage workers: it would suppress wages and it would inflate rents (given rent is a core part of cost-of-living, I don't even know if on balance the whole scheme reduced inflation). But that's also a double-whammy to many left-wing voters who experience the pain of inflation but not the corresponding benefits of higher wages - and are then faced with a bunch of new competition in the rental market to top it off. And then there's all the fraud and exploitation such a system inevitably enabled. I'm sure Trudeau would like to be remembered as the PM who brought in a gender-balanced cabinet, but instead he'll likely be remembered for enabling a system that exploited millions of poor minorities. The whole thing was so avoidable.
Graeme, I offer to you two perspectives:
1) "budgets balance themselves"
2) "you'll forgive me if I don't think about monetary policy"
both of which perspectives provide ample evidence of the Face Painter's understanding of economics.
Those two quotes will really live in forever.
Two cents: basic economics is still undecided on the wage effects. See the decades long battle between Card and Borjas. I look forward to 5 years from now when StatsCan has the longitudinal data cleaned so this can be examined rigorously. The housing effects are pretty unambigously how you decribe them but, again, I look forward to some serious analysis.
There is no Hail Mary that saves this government
1. It’s 10 years old, we’re tired of them
2. We can’t be gas lit on bills, and inflation
Most importantly
3. The effects of their policy will take several years to reverse.
Several years? I expect this could take more than a decade and I'm not confident those charged with the fixing will have the endurance to see it through. We can hope.
All the best to Jen. It was quite heroic of you to put in the effort that you did. Thank you.
I sure hope that Jen is wrong on the Liberals trying to make the Palestine question into a wedge issue. It is the one issue that has the potential to lead to violence. As well, it is not at all clear to me how the Canadian voters in general would come out on the issue.
On background checks for new citizens. I believe that the Liberal government is under pressure to waive checks for refugees from Gaza.
More generally on immigration, eight years ago Maxime Bernier was the only leader worried about the planned growth of the numbers, and was accused of xenophobia for his pains. On this issue, he seems to have been proved right. (There is also supply management, where Mr. Poilievre's stand shows that he is not truly a small-government conservative.) A pity that Mr. Bernier turned out to be too extreme on other issues, and prone to conspiracy theories.
Finally, a big win for Mr. Poilievre may turn out to be a poisoned chalice. I fear that the problems ahead are much too big to be even partly resolved in a single term. I predict that the 2029 election will be wide open, and that the Conservatives may be seen at that time to have failed. But then five years is probably too long a planning horizon for anyone in this country.
I admit that I favored Bernier in the post-Harper leadership race as the only candidate who actually seemed to follow any kind of coherent ideology. However, I had no idea how weirdly unbalanced he was, as revealed with his time leading the PPC. In hindsight, I realize that the lack of support for his leadership candidacy among other Conservative MPs was a huge tell: those people have worked with him and know who he is in a way that regular voters can’t hope to do. If a candidate’s colleagues don’t back them, it’s a huge red flag. They know something we don’t.
Yeh. Mea culpa. What motivated me most was making sure that Mr popinjay O'Leary didn't make it. Max was a huge disappointment. Ultimately Scheer was the best but fatally flawed candidate.
The same thing happened in the BC Liberal leadership race that elected Christy Clark. She was a cabinet minister, then left politics after a term or two, then came back to run in the leadership. Only one BC Liberal caucus member supported her. That was a red flag, but insta-members got her elected.
What I suspect Polievre will have going for him in 2029 is that the Liberal brand will still be extremely toxic. If he looks halfway competent, I suspect enough people will ignore that he failed to fix most of the problems (which they'll still be blaming on the Liberals). Maybe the NDP become formidable by then, but I doubt it. Ontario is sort of an example of how this can play out.
My worst fear with Notley having left AB NDP is that she runs after Singh resigns following a horrible election performance. She knows how to campaign and is well tapped in to how to use propaganda. Those who haven’t seen her propaganda in action before might be wooed. And that would be horrible. (Which is why I say it’s my worst nightmare in 2029)
I think Canada runs on 10 year cycles federally now … not always, but now.
However, Fixing the mess will require something we don’t have, which is a non partisan senate.
I think we are heading into a constitutional crisis unlike any we’ve seen before. I have zero faith that the 80% liberal senate will not play stupid games with legislation, (blocking or slow walking) despite the fact that the majority of Canadians will support the next government, with much greater numbers than this government ever enjoyed, even in their majority years.
I’m not sure we will survive as a county if this happens. Once we open the constitution, it’s a Pandora’s box. I’m old enough to remember Meech Lake, and the Charlottetown Accords.
This is a very real risk. And the fact that the Liberal senators are technically "independent" potentially makes things worse than normal. Normally after an electoral drubbing, the party that lost power has good political reasons not to start encumbering the new government. But now you have a bunch of left-leaning Senators who the Liberal leadership can't control and who will claim that they're voting for principled rather than partisan reasons. It could be a huge mess.
There is always the Mulroney solution to an intransigent Senate. Appointing more senators until you have enough to pass the legislation would shred the senate’s credibility with the public except there is nothing to shred.
I don’t know if there’s a limit on the number of times Prime Minister can appoint an additional eight senators, but I see nothing in the text to suggest that.
A prime minister savvy enough to do that for popular legislation rather than something unpopular might do very well.
Oh man… there’s so much more soap opera to tell in the BCU/BCLiberal/BCConservative story.
I could go into the history of the BC Liberals, but really all that matters is by the 80s they were basically a defunct party, until they rocketed to opposition in the 90s and were government from 2001 to 2017.
The BC Conservative Party has essentially been a protest party for several decades now. If they’ve elected any MLAs it has only been a handful.
But then in 2022, Falcon kicks Rustad out of the BC Liberal caucus, which ultimately leads to him joining the BC Conservatives and becoming the leader. https://x.com/kevinfalcon/status/1560378062385999877
Not long after, the BC Liberals decide they need a rebranding (partly because of how little support Trudeau has in BC and they don’t want voters thinking they are the same party). So they rename to BC United.
But then polls start coming out with BC United with significantly less support than they had as BC Liberals, because voters don’t know the new brand. At the same time, BC Conservatives are polling over 10%, which is higher than they’ve polled in decades. This might have been a Poilievre halo effect. Or a lot of BC Liberals were just taking Rustad’s side in the fight with Falcon.
And slowly BC Conservative numbers keep climbing, and BCU keeps falling. At one point Rustad reaches out to Falcon to merge, and Falcon tells him to buzz off. A few months later Falcon raises the idea of a merger, and Rustad returns the favour.
During this time it’s looking like with a split right that NDP could end up with an almost sweep this election.
But eventually we get to today, where a lot of BCU candidates have quit, or joined Conservative, and BCU support is so low that Falcon has to promise to leave politics to come to a deal with conservatives.
It’s really an incredible tale of Falcon authoring the demise of his own party and political career.
"It’s really an incredible tale of Falcon authoring the demise of his own party" -> I suspect history will remember it this way, but I'm not sure how true it is. While Falcon may have sped up its demise, I don't believe that party was ever going to shake their reputation for turning BC into a playground for the rich at the expense of locals, and the wider global trends towards more populist politics was probably the nail in the coffin for their style of boujee politics.
The BC Liberal/BC United was also always a coalition between pro-business Red Tory types and social conservatives. The social conservatives dominated the party outside of the Lower Mainland but were largely shut out of power. The BC Conservatives were a natural home for them. They were successfully fended off and the Liberals kept their coalition together in their last winning election campaign in 2013. Now the populist wave that’s been going through conservative politics everywhere has hit BC, and the dam broke. Instead of having to fight an insurgency and win control of an existing right of center party, the social conservatives and populists just flocked to a new one.
I think Falcon changed the name because, being a Young Socred at SFU battling Young Liberal Christy Clark, he chafed at being called a “Liberal” and wanted to stick it to Clark one last time. It didn’t seem to work though.
The BC Liberals greatly benefited from the collapse of the Social Credit party of BC. The Socred members simply swamped the Liberals by joining the Liberal party. Many actual Liberals left the party as a result and some joined the NDP.
They went on to defeat the Glen Clark NDP around the late 90s) I can’t remember exactly) and then Gordon Campbell, followed by Christie Clark held power for the Liberals for , I think, 17 years. Then came the NDP under the able and likeable, John Horgan, followed by NDP Davis Eby.
Just a reminder, the atlantic ocean does not start east of Quebec City. I can't be the only Atlantic Canadian subscriber that would love to see an article or two about the Atlantic provinces.
Agreed. Nor can I be the only subscriber in Saskatchewan. Reminder there are two provinces in between Alberta and Ontario that are never spoken of by our line editors
The argument that in any complex system, like an immigration system, is going to have outliers works in the abstract. The problem for Trudeau is that he massively increased the number of people coming to Canada. That means that, by definition and everything else being equal, you’re going to get more outliers.
I think the other problem is that the Liberals simply weren’t honest about the challenges of increased immigration, and tried to dismiss concerns as racism or just engage in gaslighting denial. You could see it previewed in the early push to admit a larger number of Syrian refugees in a short time period. They should’ve stuck to the line that Canada needed to do it because morally it was the right thing to do. Instead, they insisted that there wouldn’t be problems and pitched the line that Syrians were actually a relatively educated society that would be a net gain for Canada. Of course, there *were* problems. When admitting refugees, you’re not curating people in terms of their education, skills, social background, or even criminal records.
What’s strange is that having taken this approach as a political tactic to sell their policy, the Liberals seemed to assume it was true and behaved accordingly. That seems to characterize the Justin Trudeau era: you’re never quite sure where they simply don’t know what they’re doing, and where they’re engaging in some weird psychological equivalent of drinking their own bathwater.
That is exactly what I was going to come here to comment on.
Also, there's a difference in vetting someone coming from, say, Peru, vs. Egypt.
I guess Shining Path was before your time.
Fair. I guess we want to filter out the Communist Narco Terrorists, as well.
I agree that given the volume of immigrants coming here, some questionable ones would be missed. But … Mr Eldidi allegedly was shown in a video from 2015 (I think) dismembering an ISIS prisoner. This, if true, would NOT be a minor indiscretion when it comes to his being allowed into our country or granted citizenship. Again I emphasize the ‘if true’ part. I don’t understand how accessible a video on the dark Web would be to our security groups, but one would think the dark Web is somewhere they should be searching. And I think our security groups did six reviews of Mr Eldidi over the years. To me, missing something of this level is a major failure … something that can’t be as dismissed with ‘we will miss some things’ or ‘that is how the system works’.
As a BC Resident, I think there is an interesting national angle. While the BC Liberal party was somewhat to the right of the federal party (ideologically I'd put then somewhere between Paul Martin and Joe Clark), they had that same glass-tower-elitist reputation now plaguing the federal Liberals. In particular, they were never able to shake being blamed for the housing crisis and their reputation for being the party of real-estate speculators. Some media is claiming the party's name change was a cause of their misfortunes this election, but I see it more as a symptom (they knew the BC Liberal brand was toxic). It's not surprising they have been made irrelevant by two parties with more populist approaches.
My slightly hot take is I think the same thing will happen to the federal Liberals and Trudeau may be the last Liberal prime minister. The Liberals have made choices the last few years that I suspect will make them completely toxic for anyone under the age of 40 and I don't see them shaking that reputation with a new leader. At some point, Jagmeet Singh will be replaced by someone with more political skills (possibly a former NDP premier?) and I expect them to overtake the Liberals on the left.
I think you’re right about the federal Liberals. That’s been a party in a long decline starting under Pierre Trudeau. They were always the party of power, attracting a lot of ambitious and talented people, but they’ve been experiencing a brain drain over time as right wing parties started to attract those people and Liberal infighting drove off others. Since Chretien left, they’ve been fixated on having a strong leader because there isn’t much strength left in the bench otherwise.
I think the NDP is eventually going to supplant them, but only when the Liberals have declined to the point that a new NDP leader can steer the party to the center. That’s basically what happened with Jack Layton in 2011, but a resurgence in the Liberals in 2015 undid the progress they’d made.
Still listening to this, but I have to clarify that Falcon did not quit out of the blue. There were rumblings for months on Twitter and elsewhere that the United and Conservatives should amalgamate in some fashion.
Since you guys admitted you weren’t up to speed, I’ll offer, gratis, this brief primer on modern BC politics, which is completely different from what is seen east of the Rock Pile.
Since the 1940's, the Liberals and Conservatives have formed a "free enterprise coalition" against the CCF/NDP "socialist horde". This stared as an actual Liberal-Conservative coalition. This lasted until 1952 when failed BCPC leadership candidate WAC Bennett became the leader of the BC Social Credit Party became premier. He and the Socreds led the province as a de facto Liberal-Conservative coalition until 1972. At that point, the Socreds became unpopular and the BC Liberals took a lot of votes from them, allowing Dave Barrett and the NDP to form government. It is important to note that in most elections in British Columbia, the NDP consistently get around + or - 40% of the vote.
By 1975, WAC's son Bill re-established the free enterprise coalition under the Socred banner and became premier until 1986, when he became unpopular during his "restraint" program of cutting government spending. Bill Vander Zalm became premier and defeated the NDP in the following election.
Soon into Vander Zalm's tenure, his social conservatism caused division within the Socred caucus and party as a whole. He left office in 1991 due to a conflict of interest scandal. The Socreds lost the subsequent election and the almost non-existent BC Liberal Party became official opposition. During the 1990's, the coalition was extremely fractured. The NDP maintained government throughout the 90's despite scandal bringing down Mike Harcourt in 1996. The BC Liberals won the popular vote, but because of a vote split in many seats with BC Reform, the NDP won the most seats.
In 2001, the free-enterprise coalition re-formed under the BC Liberal banner with Gordon Campbell as leader. Until now, the NDP still maintained their ~40% vote. But by this time, the NDP had worn out their stay and many NDP voters stayed home in 2001 or thought Campbell was a progressive, and the NDP was reduced to two seats. By the next election in 2005, NDP regained their ~40% vote share.
The BC Liberals maintained their coalition until 2017 when the NDP formed government with the Greens. The BC Liberals didn't fracture, but they did become tired with the stench of croney capitalism. In 2020, the NDP formed an outright majority government with almost 48% of the vote, which was unheard of. From what I can tell, the BC Liberal leader was not popular and did not connect with voters. For most voters, the NDP under John Horgan did not come across as doctrinaire socialist as their predecessors.
Since then, the BC Liberals chose former cabinet minister Kevin Falcon as their leader. Falcon comes from the "Socred Wing" of the party (Christy Clark came from the "Liberal Wing"). One of his signature moves was to rename the BC Liberals "BC United". He came from the part of the coalition that felt the name "Liberal" was toxic for many free-enterprise voters, and was hoping a rename would help party fortunes.
Fast forward to now and a formerly moribund "BC Conservative Party" has fired up in the polls. Former BC Liberal MLA John Rustad is the leader after getting punted from the BC Liberal caucus for suggesting carbon emissions were not contributing to climate change. Since then, Rustad has staked out positions to the right of BC United. This is ironic since Falcon came from the "right wing" of the BC Liberal coalition and changed the party's name to appeal to right-leaning voters.
One popular theory for United’s downturn suggests that BC United has done a terrible job informing the public that BC United = BC Liberal so when people respond to polls on whether they would vote for BC United or the BC Conservatives, people don't know who United is and see BC Conservatives = free-enterprise coalition = BC Liberal. BC United, when they were the BC Liberals under Gordon Campbell, did introduce the carbon tax. The BC NDP were against it, calling it "regressive". That is probably also hurting BC United now.
Hope that helps!
I came here for this.
Nice summary!
If your theory on Doug Ford is correct, this province and the country as a whole, are screwed.
I would prefer to actually fix and apply the Canada Health Act rather than following the US lead. It's only working for the rich there....is that what we want here?
I think the government should launch a study to readjust what they need to work on. Results in about 36 months. The federal government doesn't act....it studies.
Get well, Jen.
I think we need to look at European models. It’s not the black and white Canada Health Act or the US system that keeps getting trotted out. The health care system in Canada is clearly and irreconcilably broken. It needs a major overhaul, and some more private participation does NOT mean 2 tier necessarily. I’m frankly sick of the fear-mongering over a “US style system” that the left keeps trotting out over and over. It gets in the way of meaningful and productive public discussion.
The annual intake of newcomers is now in the hundreds of thousands and they come from many different countries - including some where documentation is difficult to obtain or is inherently unreliable.
Moreover, each of these individuals has their own personal story to tell, even though it may be hard to confirm, so that “credibility” is critical.
And of course, among these many thousands, may be “surreptitious infiltrators”, or “sleepers”, or people who were “criminals” “back home” (like Khalistan separatists, “Tamil Tigers”, or just run-of-the-mill Mafiosi) - folks who nevertheless find a happy home in Canada.
Like the alleged mafia boss Vincenzo 'Jimmy' De Maria, whom Canada has tried, for years, to deport.
See: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/vincenzo-jimm-demaria-alleged-top-mafia-boss-immigration
Or consider Leon Mugesera, a purported “refugee” from Rwanda, who gave the Canadian courts a real run for their (and our!) money. See:
https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2005/2005scc40/2005scc40.html?resultIndex=1&resultId=ec21722155ac4fa8ba32f642572ad2ee&searchId=2024-08-28T21:27:21:624/1b2d33fedb3d4d5c8337b2556b6f518c&searchUrlHash=AAAAAQAIbXVnZXNlcmEAAAAAAQ
The reality, though, is that with such huge numbers, there will inevitably be mistakes and lots of undesirables can slip through.
The real question is whether Canada has the legal tools to rectify such problems once they are identified – not just the correction of errors, but also the timely, energetic, and (hopefully) cost-effective expulsion of the calculating liars and miscreants.
For as the Globe & Mail reported in May 2024: “most people living in Canada who have been sent deportation letters in the past eight years are still in the country”; and the fact is, it is quite hard to quantify how many have been removed, and how long it took, and how much it cost.
So the question is: has the process been so drowned in bureaucracy and layers of litigation, that it has become dysfunctional – as appears to be the case with migrants to the UK or on the US border?
It took 10 years to expel Mugesera – whose case shows how hard it is the establish the truth.
Richard, don't forget the Face Painter's immortal words, "A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian." Even where citizenship was obtained fraudulently? We will see. Maybe. It is my suspicion that they won't even try to revoke the citizenship of this latest goof.
I sympathise with Jen, I took some time off work because my summer cold kept me from sleeping more than two hours at a time for two weeks
This govt. has been so much about virtue signalling and so little about getting much done, few people believe anything they say.
All image & no substance.
The number of temporary immigrants means it's not as simple as the problem being baked-in for many years. They could reduce the total population if they reduced temporary immigration fast enough, although the options to do that are mostly unpalatable. Most significantly, students are here longer than other categories of temporary immigrants, and the current approach of cutting intake will take years to work its way through the pipeline. A 2-year college program means 5 years here for most: 2 years in college, 3 year post-grad work permit. Cutting work permits would be a fast solution... but only if you didn't grandfather in people currently studying. This has obvious problems, but it's still there.
None of the options to reduce population are great, but it's still a political problem that voters do know some degree of fast relief is possible at least in theory. The Liberals tried to hedge on the promised temporary resident reduction by making a promise over years without saying most of the reduction is likely to happen at the end of that period because of the composition of residents. The question is whether they're backed into a corner enough that more is on the table.
Agreed - in theory population growth can remain low, flat, or even negative while keeping reasonably high permanent resident targets. We can even bring in new folks (doctors, etc) from abroad without increasing population.
The problem is, in addition to preventing a new influx of temporary residents, it also means requiring most of the temporary residents to actually leave, and that's going to be a problem given most came here with the intention of getting permanent residency. We're basically left with four bad options:
1. Accept continued record population growth.
2. Convert the existing temporary residents to PRs over the next few years while limiting slots for people outside the country. The problem is, with a fixed PR cap, that means we end up using the limited PR slots for Tim Horton's cashiers instead of the types of "high human capital" folks Canada has previously bragged about prioritizing (doctors and engineers, etc).
3. Let the visas expire and force people to leave, possibly including draconian deportations for those who refuse. I don't know if Canadians have the stomach for this.
4. Let the visas expire and live with a large undocumented population, kicking the problem down the road indefinitely
Yeah. On the one hand, Canada does (yet) have the scale of undocumented work the US does, and it's not totally obvious how much lack of available work will disincentivize overstaying. On the other hand, many college students have debts they only have any hope of paying off if they're working in dollars (i.e., will be desperate) and if people think they have no hope of ever returning if they leave that gets rid of a big incentive to follow the rules too. Big mess.
Jen should test for Covid.