Hit the road, eh!

Rufus F.

Rufus is a likeable curmudgeon. He has a PhD in History, sang for a decade in a punk band, and recently moved to NYC after nearly two decades in Canada. He wrote the book "The Paris Bureau" from Dio Press (2021).

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44 Responses

  1. North says:

    It certainly is significant, agreed, it’ll be interesting to see whether this is a one time Liberal resurgence due to Harpers unpopularity or whether they have regained their mojo as Canada’s natural leadership party. After all, the left side of the electorate remains split between them and the NDP while the right is undivided.
    Also interesting, this means that the administrations that led the big anti AGW duo (Australia and Canada) on the international scene are both out on their asses.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to North says:

      That’s a good point. I wonder how big a part that played in his ouster. In the States, there’s more of a debate about AGW, but here it feels more like the consensus is that yes it exists, yes it’s a real problem, but we’re making a mint on oil right now so we don’t care.Report

      • North in reply to Rufus F. says:

        It probably intensified the resentment on the left but wasn’t a major factor for the majority of the voters.Report

        • Rufus F. in reply to North says:

          Yeah, my feeling is that the “barbaric cultural practices” stuff wound up costing him more votes than it won him.Report

          • Kolohe in reply to Rufus F. says:

            The Conservative in my old nana’s riding (South Shore-St Margaret) found himself facing a vote splitting independent opponent on his right when he came out in favor of same sex marriage before the 2011 elections. He still won, and retired this term, and the Liberal obliterated the competition this go around.Report

          • KatherineMW in reply to Rufus F. says:

            The Conservatives lost seats in pretty much every major metropolitan area, and were completely wiped out in Toronto (which accounts for over 50 of the country’s 338 Parliamentary seats, so nothing to sneeze at). Toronto is also, coincidentally, very much a city of immigrants. Playing the xenophobia card was not a smart move for the Conservatives, especially not after they spent the 2008 and 2011 campaigns deliberately courting ethnic minorities communities and made some gains from it.

            In contrast, pretty much anyone the xenophobia pitch would have appealed to was already voting Conservative.Report

            • North in reply to KatherineMW says:

              I don’t why I’m so gleeful about their complete wipe out in Atlantic Canada but it tickles the heck out of me.Report

              • KatherineMW in reply to North says:

                I’m mostly bummed that we lost some very good, strong NDP seats in and around Halifax.

                It’s pretty stunning to see one region of the country go 100% for a single party, though. As soon as I saw that it was clear something was up, although I still wasn’t convinced the Liberals would get a majority until the results from Ontario and Québec came in.

                We just elected a schoolteacher who crowdsourced his platform. Interesting to see how it turns out.Report

              • North in reply to KatherineMW says:

                I’m waiting to speak to my mum to find out what the mood was. I know that Atlantic Canadians hate-hate-HATED Harper.Report

    • dragonfrog in reply to North says:

      If the Liberals keep their campaign promise of electoral reform (which I really really hope they do) then the very concept of a “natural governing party” will probably become obsolete.

      Precisely because the right is united but only about 30-40% of the electorate, and each of the centrish/leftish parties have about a 20% immovable support base, PR will basically never produce single-party majorities.

      My personal hope is that the whole schtick of deliberately undermining minority governments in the hopes that the mass disenfranchisement of first-past-the-post will this time work out in your favour, will rapidly become part of “the bad old days”, and parties will be forced to actually compromise and persuade and work with more than the bare minimum of respect for colleagues across the aisle.Report

    • KatherineMW in reply to North says:

      The Liberals promised electoral reform if they won – their website says outright, “We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system”. If they actually followed through, it would end the problem of the left splitting the vote. (Personally, I favour a simple ranked ballot, aka Alternative Vote or AV. It’s the easiest method to understand and to implement, and it encourages candidates to be less hostile to each other in order to be the second choice of voters in other parties.)

      However, I highly doubt Liberals – ever the party of the establishment – are going to choose to overhaul a system that just handed them a majority with 39% of the vote.

      I’m disappointed about the NDP defeat, but that it what happens when a leftist party moves so far to the centre that it can’t be easily distinguished from its competition. And I have to admit that charisma is not one of Thomas Mulcair’s qualities.

      On a utterly frivolous note – for the first time since 2008, our head of government is prettier than yours! Take that, America! 😀Report

  2. Burt Likko says:

    Rufus can you give us a rundown of what issues were in play? When you say “Bush-style politics,” are you referring to foreign military adventures, deficit-expanding fiscal policies, religion-driven social agenda, arrogance in leadership style, or… what was it about Harper that Canadians rejected?Report

    • Tod Kelly in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Wait, what?

      Do Canadian politics not count?Report

    • dragonfrog in reply to Burt Likko says:

      My view of it was the specifically Bush-esque highlights were
      – arrogance in leadership (even the cabinet ministers were becoming reduced to yes-men who didn’t even really run their nominal portfolios, but just spouted whatever the PMO told them)
      – extreme aversion to knowledge (scrapping the census, defunding any kind of science that might have informed policy)
      – populist dog-whistle xenophobiaReport

      • Rufus F. in reply to dragonfrog says:

        All that and more. What I mean in specific is that when the race looked close for a brief time, Harper tried a lot of culture war fear mongering: suddenly taking a “stand” against women wearing Islamic head coverings while working public service jobs or taking the citizenship oath, passing a law against “barbaric cultural practices” that were already illegal, referring to his voters as “old stock Canadians”, trying to make the race about terrorism, and so forth that were intended to peel off some votes in Quebec and bolster his support in the prairies, but which happened to coincide with his numbers dropping like a stone.Report

        • North in reply to Rufus F. says:

          In fairness, Harper did seriously damage the NDP in Quebec. The Quebecois are quite jittery about culture questions. The lost voters, though, went to the Libs which was exactly what Harper needed not to happen. Also it hurt him badly outside of Quebec.Report

          • Rufus F. in reply to North says:

            I knew people here too who will usually vote NDP and voted Liberal “just this time” and just to be on the safe side in terms of getting rid of Harper.Report

            • North in reply to Rufus F. says:

              And I know people who vote Liberal who swore that they’d vote NDP if necessary to get rid of Harper. I think it was a lot about perceptions/momentum. If the Grits had been declining and the NDP was on top immediately before the election we might have seen the same thing just for the NDP instead.Report

              • S Cooper in reply to North says:

                There is pretty good evidence that there is currently a block of 15-25% of the Canadian electorate that is broadly centre-left but not particularly partisan, and will align with either of the Liberals or NDP according to circumstances.

                In 2011 defections from this block from the Liberals to NDP in the last weeks of the election went a long way towards Igantiff getting slaughtered and Layton having the best week in federal NDP history.

                Another big factor though was how good the Liberal GOTV was this time around. If you look at the numbers compared to last time around the big difference isn’t that the Conservatives lost that many votes, its that the Liberals seemed to have found a way to get a whole bunch of new people to vote for them. That’s probably what brought this from a Liberal win to a Liberal majority.Report

              • North in reply to S Cooper says:

                That is really interesting, thank you very much for the insight S Cooper.Report

              • KatherineMW in reply to S Cooper says:

                I’ve been looking for exit polls and failing to find any. I want to know 1) what turnout was like among different age groups; and 2) how young people voted. Just anecdotally, I’m getting the sense that a lot of young voters turned out for Trudeau.Report

  3. Maribou says:

    The Canadians I know are jubilant and relieved. The *most* negative thing I’ve seen in my FB feed is the adjective “bittersweet” (and yes, that was in relationship to the falling stock of the NDP).

    I was actually surprised by how straightforwardly pleased and even hopeful my social circles are with the victory of a party they regularly snarked about a year ago.

    I think I underestimated HOW much most people were sick of Harper. Turns out they felt just as strongly as my mom did.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Maribou says:

      That’s good. It probably doesn’t help that I’m in Hamilton/Toronto most of the time where my conversations have been like:
      Canadian friends on Sunday: I hope Stephen Harper doesn’t win. I’ll be so sad if he does…
      News on Monday: Stephen Harper loses! Liberals win!
      Canadian friends today: I’m so sad the NDP didn’t do better…

      It’s like hanging out with Eeyore!Report

  4. Saul Degraw says:

    My Canadian friends are also overjoyed by the liberal sweep.

    It seems like a lot of Canadians did strategic voting to get Harper out and the Liberals in. The most interesting thing is how the Liberals went from collapse to being a majority party.Report

  5. nevermoor says:

    I just hope Jon Oliver gets to keep his $5,000.Report

  6. S Cooper says:

    nevermoor:
    I just hope Jon Oliver gets to keep his $5,000.

    He will. That law never meant you couldn’t express an opinion to a Canadian about an election about who to vote for. “Induce” in the this case means things like give money or favours in return for effecting an election.Report

  7. Zac says:

    You know, speaking as someone who lives less than 150 miles from the Canadian border, I feel like I know shockingly little about our closest neighbor. I would love to see one of the Canadian OT’ers do a post that’s a sort of a Canadian political primer — something like an explanation of how Canadian government works combined with a broad-strokes overview of the post-WWII political history of the country (if that’s a good starting point, maybe it’s not).Report