What’s going on in Canadian politics today? Here is an opinion of a young and, I’d say, very smart guy, who will explain everything from the POV of a local. J.J. McCullough is a Canadian cartoonist, writer, and journalist. He will tell us, who has a chance to become the next Prime Minister of Canada? What scandals and dirty laundry are there in Canadian politics’ lives? And some more curious info.
Hello, everyone. My name is J.J. and it is time for another Canadian Politics News Update. So, there is a lot going on in the Canadian political scene at the moment, so let us start at the national level.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been getting a lot of bad press lately and his numbers are way down. A recent poll had his disapproval rating at a whopping 58% which is even worse than Donald Trump's (53%). Why is Trudeau so unpopular right now? Well, I guess everyone has their own reasons. A lot of people certainly seem to be thinking that his whole political correctness shtick is getting very old very fast:
Journalist: The future of mankind… So, we'd like you to…
Justin Trudeau: We like to say peoplekind.
One thing the polls consistently show is that he is a lot more unpopular with men than women, which might have something to do with all the feminism stuff. He is also increasingly seen as really corking up the Canadian oil industry, which has led to massive disapproval in the western provinces as well. But in any case, with the big Canadian election little more than a year away, Trudeau almost certainly has to be heading to certain defeat with numbers like these. Right?
Well, maybe not, because Canada has this very entrenched 3-party system. A prime ministers capacity to lose office depends a lot on what the other two parties are up to and how they play off each other. So, Trudeau's two rivals are Andrew Scheer of the Conservative Party and Jagmeet Singh of the NDP.
Now, my initial thinking was that Jagmeet Singh was going to be really popular and cut into some of Trudeau's support on the Left. I thought that Jagmeet Singh was going to be this really galvanizing figure among progressive voters because he's a cooler guy than Justin Trudeau, who is more aggressively left-wing, and has better identity politics cred. Unfortunately, that is not actually seeming to be the case in practice though. In the months since he became head of the NDP, it is becoming apparent that Jagmeet Singh is actually not a very good leader or a good candidate. He is not actually very charismatic or cool and does not seem to be offering compelling progressive ideas about much of anything. Sometimes, he can barely even remember what his own party stands for.
Journalist: Can you tell us whether or not your caucus is behind you in supporting this bill?
Jagmeet Singh: At this point, that's… I'm… you know, it’s just… I need a moment to clarify. So yes, right now our caucus is in support of this bill.
It seems that this is partially because Jagmeet Singh has never taken left-wing politics as seriously as many people seem to expect. What we have learned he does take very seriously however is the fringe cause of Sikh separatism in the Indian province of Punjab. The idea that Punjab should leave India and become a new country just for Sikhs is a very radical idea that is not very popular among people that actually live there. But it is fairly popular among Sikh immigrants in Canada and America. In 1985, Sikh separatists in Canada even blew up a plane killing 329 people. It was the worst terrorist attack in North America before 9/11.
Since he became boss of the NDP, it has come out that Jagmeet Singh is kind of supportive of these kind of people or, at the very least, uncomfortable in being too judgmental of them. Footage was recently revealed of him speaking at a radical Sikh separatist rally in San Francisco in 2015. And there was this infamous interview on the CBC where he sounded like a bit of a truther talking about the 1985 attacks.
Singh has condemned the Air India bombing – the worst mass murder in Canadian history, but he's refused to condemn Talwinder Parmar, the acknowledged mastermind of the attack.
Jagmeet Singh: I don't know who was responsible but I think we need to find out who's truly responsible…
So, anyway, this did a lot of damage to Singh's political brand and made him come off as this kind of bizarre fringy kind of guy. His poll numbers are way down and Trudeau is probably resting easy about any threats from the left.
And what about threats from the right? Well, the Conservative Party candidate is still Andrew Scheer, a man 40% of Canadians apparently don't even know. Scheer has had an incredibly low profile and, it seems, a lot of that is just due to his very mild-mannered personality.
Andrew Scheer: Justin Trudeau is letting Canadians down. He promised families he would help them when he was running for Prime Minister. But he's failed to deliver any real relief.
Even though right-wingers in Canada hate Justin Trudeau with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, Scheer can only seem to muster the heat of one of those 7-eleven hotdog lamps. History teaches that it is very rare for a Canadian Prime Minister to lose a bid for re-election, particularly after only one term. Canadians can be a pretty passive people and, it seems, we have a real tendency to give another shot to whoever is currently in power, even if that guy isn't particularly beloved.
My sense is that for an incumbent Prime Minister to lose, he would either have to a) have really strong, really compelling opponents, or b) be really, really, really unpopular. For the time being, Justin Trudeau's opponents don't seem like much of a threat, which leaves his approval rating. Let's see where his numbers are in a few months.
The other big thing happening in Canadian politics right now is the Big Ontario Election, set for next month. I already talked about this election a little bit in a previous video but let me just bring everyone up to speed with what has happened since. After much scandal and delay, the Conservatives finally settled on their candidate, who wound up being Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who is quite infamous, I would say, in his own right as well.
The Ford brothers were sort of Trump before Trump, and everyone makes this comparison all the time. Particularly, Ford's opponent in the election incumbent Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne. Wynne is extremely, extremely unpopular and, barring some sort of Eleventh Hour Miracle, she will almost certainly lose to Ford. So she is leaning really hard into the Trump analogies, hoping that reflected disgust at the US president will be enough to weaken Ford and hobble her across the finish line.
But the problem is that, even though Ford is obviously a lot like Trump in terms of how he looks, and how he talks, and the fact that – I want to put this as delicately as possible – a lot of people think he is too stupid to do the job, he doesn't really have any policy ideas that Wynne can point to and be like, “aha, that's racist! or that’s sexist!”. Premier Wynne did this big Twitter rant recently, going on about how much Ford was like Trump, then adding, “But I'm not Hillary Clinton”.
But she actually is a lot like Hillary Clinton in the sense that most voters just really dislike and distrust her on some deep fundamental level. They see her as a symbol of the crooked political establishment that has turned Ontario into Canada's most basket-case province, crippled by enormous debt and constant scandal. Ford might have enormous problems of his own but, if the election simply becomes a referendum on draining the swamp, it's hard to see how he loses.
So, anyway, that's what's going on in Canadian politics right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kns1XjPPgQI
