Justin Trudeau is looking for someone willing to do a very tough job. Susan Delacourt writes:
A new job has opened up. Wanted: someone who can restore people’s faith in democracy against a surge of partisan cynicism rarely seen before in this country.
Justin Trudeau has handed out hard tasks before, but whatever person answers the call for a “special rapporteur” on foreign election interference could well find it to be mission impossible.
And we’re not talking here of the entertaining kind of mission impossible from spy movies, but rather the hard, grinding work of keeping Canada’s democracy spy-free.
So who might volunteer for the job?
[John] Manley’s name is not among those in the mix, as far as I’ve heard. Former governor-general David Johnston, who was also asked to oversee election debates, is one person that seems to be on all kinds of informal wish lists this week. Some names of old, Brian Mulroney-era Conservatives were also floating about, but Poilievre made clear during his leadership bid against Jean Charest what he thinks of most of them. (Hint: they’re really Liberal.)
Pierre Poilievre responded to the proposition in typical Poilievre fashion:
Poilievre said in the Commons during question period, the word dripping with sarcasm. “Does it come with a costume? Maybe a cape and a sword? Is the best that they can come up with — a fake position doing fake work?”
He really is a vile little man.
Image: The Toronto Star
10 comments:
Petey tacitly admits that he knows of no conservative with the ability to do the job. Sad PP but true.
He wants a big political show trial with no rules. His desire for confidential police files and top secret security documents to be made public would give China a bunch of stuff Canadians do not want them to have. Only an enemy agent or a traitor would want to send these documents to Peking.
My candidate is Tom Mulcair. He has the right training and experience and would not be intimidated by tory character assassination and bullying.
I'd like to see the rapporteur's remit expanded to include foreign-controlled corporations and lobbyists, such as CAPP. Prior to the 2019 election, CAPP met in secret with Con party officials to plot how to defeat the Trudeau Libs. According to James Laxer in the Star, "Of the 48 corporations on CAPP’s 2020 board, 30 were fully or majority foreign-owned. Seven more were very likely majority foreign-owned. That makes 37 of the 48 (77 per cent) CAPP’s board members wholly or majority foreign-owned and influenced. CAPP gets approximately 97 per cent of its revenue from them."
According to the election spending rules, lobby groups, including foreign-controlled ones like CAPP, are allowed to spend up to $1.5 million to influence the outcome of an election. If you want to get rid of foreign influence in our elections, start with the players who are doing it right in the open because our lax laws allow it.
Mulcair strikes me as a good suggestion, rumley.
A good point, Cap. It's not just about a country's cyber reach. It's about where the money comes from.
I hate to keep pivoting on the point of Trudeau's big promise break on Electoral reform but I can't help thinking that the "Partisan cynicism" can almost always be described as"mistrust". We are just swimming around in a quagmire of his creation. If we end up going down the old destructive road of change for the sake of change and elect the "Pissant" we are doomed to more "Harper like" ineffectual years in the swamp. I know where I can place blame. Colour me cynical.
Trudeau's broken promise will follow him to his grave, zoombats.
History: 1952 - British Columbia
The governing coalition of Lib and Con was falling apart and the media was all about a CCF government being elected.
So, for the first time, a new voting system was implemented: ranked ballot which meant you could vote for 4 candidates but ranking them in order of preference. Okay... this was intended to keep the CCF out of power, and like most folks and without any formal interpretation of these "rules" most people went into the ballot box thinking if they didn't put an "x" beside 4 different parties, their ballot would be disqualified. Hint: there was no information available that implicitly said you could vote for 1 name or 2 names but not any more.
After the voting hours closed, and votes were tabulated (by the 4 choices made by voters) it turned out a relatively unknown political party from Alberta would end up the winner! except, of course all those transplanted Albertans who had been voting Social Credit into power for years. You get the picture - and for over 50 years, the Social Credit under the Bennett family ran our province. With ranking by 4 candidates, it was easy to predict the outcome (and it was never going to be the CCF). Because the Social Credit were the old Conservative Party, you can guess how the "ranking" settled the result. At that time, the Social Credit didn't even have a leader, so wily old WAC from Kelowna volunteered for the job and the rest is history.
This is what Campbell was trying to resurrect when he decided (after much ado about our voting system here in BC) that he wanted a ranked ballot system of voting and is why I voted against that proposal, having had a good understand of BC's political history.
You've given us a cautionary tale, Lulymay. Ranked voting may create a political dynasty.
How can the public faith in democracy be restored without first restoring democracy itself? In a system where one of two parties can form government, even a majority government, with less than two votes in five, it takes a very benevolent winner to uphold democracy. The two rivals each have about 20 to 25 per cent of the voters who back them because that's what their family has done for generations. Then you get a mix of those who give their vote for the sake of stopping the other rival party and top that up with those eager to swallow your lies about electoral reform, climate change and First Nations reconciliation (Parizeau's "lobsters in the pot") and out of that emerges "democracy"? What a farce. You have to provide a functioning democracy before you can restore public faith in it. That's not on the table. Not now, not for the foreseeable future. Politics used to be about governance. Parties looked to the future of Canada and helped shape it. That ended with Lester Pearson and then Pierre Trudeau. Since then politics has transitioned from governance to a struggle for power. One seeks to cling to power, the other seeks to win power. From there it's an exercise in electoral cycles. What must we do to win in four years? What will it take to get that 36 to 40% in the next election? Short-term thinking. You're looking down and that means you're not looking up and out to the horizon. Once this thinking takes hold it puts the major parties in direct conflict with the public interest and we get what we have today. MoS
Politics is now about self-service, Mound. Public Service? What's that?
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