Segacs’s World I Know

John Oliver is one of my favourite comedian-slash-pundits. Last night, he took on the topic of the Canadian federal election, as only he could:

Now, it’s true that this is a bit of a lighthearted treatment of the topic, with plenty of room for moose jokes and Canadian stereotypes. But remember that Oliver is addressing an American audience and trying to condense a lot into a 15-minute segment.

Point is, it’s nice to get some support. Appreciate the sentiment, John.

Well, it’s been a really long slog of a campaign. But either way, it all ends tomorrow. So I’ll just leave you with this plea: Please get out and vote — it CAN and WILL make a difference.

If you’re not sure where or when to vote, visit www.elections.ca.

If you aren’t sure who to vote for, check out:

• Party platform and campaign promise summaries by CBC
• CBC’s VoteCompass
• I Side With

If you’re looking for strategic voting resources, here are some (though I always recommend taking them with a grain of salt, because polls can be wrong):

• ThreeHundredEight.com’s riding-by-riding poll projections
• Leadnow’s Vote Together
• Strategic Voting for Progressive Voters

Here’s to a brighter future as of tomorrow. Canada, let’s do this thing.

Thoughts heading into the weekend before the election: ‪

• Polls showing a Liberal surge are going to help Trudeau‪‬, as anti-Harper voters get off the fence and hop on the bandwagon of the party they perceive as most likely to beat the Tories.
• Having said that, recent polls don’t reflect the Dan Gagnier resignation over the Energy East affair. It remains to be seen whether this will put a damper on the Liberals’ results on Monday.
• Meanwhile, Mulcair continues to take a beating in the Quebec press on the niqab issue. The NDP can expect to lose seats in Quebec on Monday, and hasn’t really shown a strong gain elsewhere in the country.
• The Bloc may pick up a few more seats, but probably not enough to buoy it out of irrelevance.
• Elizabeth May will probably win her seat, and no others.
• The Liberal vote is more inefficient than the Tory vote based on riding distribution, and thanks to recent gerrymandering.
• We also probably haven’t seen the last of the Tories’ dirty tricks, as it’s likely they’re holding onto some cards to try to sway results on Monday.

Realistic prediction: Liberals will win the popular vote, but Tories will win a narrow minority government. The government will be highly unstable with no opposition parties willing to prop it up but nobody wanting another election anytime soon. Chaos will ensue.

Hopeful prediction: Liberal government, with strong NDP representation to hold the balance of power and force an informal coalition.

Don’t look now, but the Habs are off to a hot start, going 5-0 for the first time in franchise history:

“Despite powerhouse Canadiens teams that won a record 24 Stanley Cups in their 106-year history, the previous club record for wins to start a season was only four, last accomplished in 1977-78.”

It’s early days yet. But a 25th Stanley Cup would sure look nice in the city come spring. S’all I’m saying.

The Guardian has published a damning, point by point account of how the Harper‬ government has cheated, lied, blustered and outright steamrolled over democracy on their way to three consecutive election victories.

 

An unkind cartoon this summer showed the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, kneeling before the statue of another politician, asking: “What now, O Great One?” That in itself would not be unkind. The punchline is that the statue is clearly labelled as that of Richard Nixon, famed above all for his attempts to corrupt democracy.

As Harper tries for a fourth term in office at the Canadian federal election next week, he is trailed by an extraordinarily long list of allegations. In the Watergate scandal, all the president’s men were accused primarily of breaking the law to get Nixon a second term in the White House. In Canada, some of the prime minister’s men and women have been accused not simply of cheating to win elections but of conspiring to jam the machinery of democratic government.

The article goes on from there to discuss the government spending and robocall scandals, the Mike Duffy affair, the use of a data bank to manipulate “wedge” politics, torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, the F-35 fighter jet scandal, proroguing Parliament and being found in contempt, omnibus bills, and so on and so forth.

Each one of these scandals on its own should have been enough for voters to throw out the Tories in anger. Taken together, though, they’ve led to a certain amount of depressed resignation, along the lines of “oh, just one more scandal”. We’ve lost our ability to be shocked or angered by any of this, it seems. We just appear to take it for granted that our government will do this sort of thing — and get away with it.

1. Stephen Harper is an idiot for refusing to do this interview. They lobbed softballs for the most part, and he might have even scored some points with young Canadians. His silence speaks volumes about how little he cares about anyone under the age of 35. Then again, we already knew that.
2. Holy crap, I’m not part of the “under 35” cohort anymore. I feel old. Yikes.
3. Justin Trudeau isn’t as practiced a public speaker as Tom Mulcair is. It was evident in the debates and evident in these town hall interviews. I appreciate that his answers are less scripted, but his rushed speaking style makes him seem nervous and younger than he is.
4. On the other hand, Mulcair’s habit of using a pre-scripted soundbyte to answer each question reminded me uncomfortably of the “10 Word Answer” episode of the West Wing. Mulcair did sound a little more off the cuff and unrehearsed in French than he did in English, it’s worth noting.
5. Trudeau mostly dodged the big questions, turning them all around to point a finger at Harper rather than propose his own concrete solutions.
6. Mulcair did his share of finger-pointing too — at both Harper and Trudeau — but at least he backed his answers up with more solid information and policy proposals.
7. Trudeau’s strongest moment was his finish, when he urged people to vote because “Harper doesn’t want you to”. That part *did* feel scripted. But he’s still right.
8. Mulcair’s strongest moment was when he categorically denounced the politics of fear and scapegoating of Muslims with the niqab issue. “Weapon of mass distraction” is a great catchphrase. Ironically, this stance is unfortunately what’s costing him support in Quebec among the racist cohort.
9. Policy-wise, Trudeau was most vulnerable on questions about Bill C51, security and human rights. Mulcair was unequivocal here — a luxury he had since the NDP voted the bill down, while Trudeau had to scramble to explain why he’d vote for a bill and then criticize it.
10. Mulcair was IMHO most vulnerable on the Israeli/Palestinian question. A “balanced approach” in this context creates a false moral equivalency, and giving any credence to the crazed anti-Israel resolutions by the UN shows a shocking lack of perspective. The NDP’s track record on Israel is pretty terrible, and even though Mulcair has been trying to clean house from his party’s fringe element, I won’t deny that this makes me very uncomfortable.
11. Of course, nobody asked Trudeau the question, so he didn’t get a chance to respond, though he has stated his strong support for Israel in other interviews, and the Liberals have a good track record there.
12. The NDP wants to bring in a tax credit for microbreweries. Nice!
13. After watching both interviews, I’m leaning somewhat more towards the NDP than I was before. Mulcair came across as more informed and more decisive policy-wise on important issues. Having said that, there were a number of important issues that neither interview addressed. And I would never decide who to vote for just based on one interview. But it’s given me lots to mull over.

By the way, here are links to both interviews:

Justin Trudeau: http://en.daily.vice.com/page/vice-meets-justin-trudeau

Thomas Mulcair: http://en.daily.vice.com/page/vice-meets-tom-mulcair

Two weeks ago, like Jewish people around the world, I went to my local synagogue on Yom Kippur for Kol Nidre prayers. I saw a giant “Shana Tova” campaign poster just outside my shul in Westmount proclaiming the Conservatives as the only party that will stand by Israel “through fire and water”.

It wasn’t just our shul. People across the country reported seeing these campaign posters put up outside their synagogues just in time for the High Holidays.

Our rabbi was angry. So were a number of members of the community. So was I. As we stood in the lobby waiting for Kol Nidre services to start, the discussions in hushed whispers were adamant among the (largely Liberal-leaning) members of the congregation.

After all, it’s one thing for political candidates to send a new year’s greeting. That’s nice, and more or less expected. It’s quite another for them to campaign, without permission I might add, opportunistically on a religious holiday, slamming opposition parties in the process.

Of all the things that offend me about the Conservatives — and there are many — the blatant way that Stephen Harper has tried to paint himself as the pro-Israel candidate to win Jewish votes might be the worst.

This goes beyond the pale: The Tories have announced that they want to create an RCMP Hotline to report “barbaric cultural practices”:

The new pledge follows a string of opinion polls showing that the incumbent party’s hard line against Muslim headwear – refusing to permit a new immigrant the right to wear a veil during a ceremony affirming their citizenship – has helped lift it from third to first place in the drawn-out election campaign.

“We need to stand up for our values,” said immigration minister Chris Alexander, as he announced the new initiative on Friday. “We need to do that in citizenship ceremonies. We need to do that to protect women and girls from forced marriage and other barbaric practices.”

If this sounds disturbingly like McCarthyism, that’s because it is. As Neil Macdonald explains, it is what happens when politicians descend into the lowest form of politics: Scapegoating and using xenophobia for votes:

Just out of curiosity, I called the RCMP’s media relations department to ask about this new task force and what sort of barbaric cultural practices would merit a call to the Mounties.

The officer who answered said that if, say, an honour killing is taking place next door, it’d be best to dial 911 and tell the local police.

Otherwise, the force said in an email about 20 minutes later: “It would be inappropriate for the RCMP to comment on a political announcement.”

“A political announcement.” What a dry, refreshing description.

Playing politics with people’s rights to freedom of religion and freedom of expression is a dangerous game. You don’t have to wear a niqab to understand this. You don’t even have to approve of those who do. But you do have to recognize that there’s a difference between your freedom to disapprove of something, and passing a law banning it. This is the same discussion we had in Quebec around the Charter of Values, and for the same reason: What it comes down to is that some people are fearful of the “other” — and politicians have figured out they can play up this fear for votes.

We already have laws against domestic violence, torture, coercion, assault and murder. The RCMP, as well as local and provincial police forces, already have a mandate to investigate in those cases.

But a tip line to report on your neighbours for practices that you may find strange or distasteful? That’s not my Canada.

In case you needed another reason to vote out Stephen Harper, Canada under the stewardship of the Tories has fallen to dead last in environmental protection, in a ranking of 27 wealthy countries by the Washington-based Center for Global Development:

Canada dropped from 12th place last year and did far worse in the environmental protection category, where it ranked 27th. Every other country made progress in this area except Canada, the centre said in a report on the rankings.

Canada “has the dubious honor of being the only CDI country with an environment score which has gone down since we first calculated the CDI [in 2003],” the report said. “This reflects rising fossil fuel production and its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only treaty governing the emissions of heat-trapping gasses. Canada has dropped below the U.S. into bottom place on the environment component.”

‘Cause, who needs the environment anyway, right? After all, once we destroy this planet, we can always just move to Mars. Or something.