A Wild Ride

From now until the election, not just Americans -- but all of us -- are in for a wild ride. Michael Harris writes:

The traditional cliché is that all politics is local. For now, no politics is local. What happens over the next four months in the United States will affect everyone, which is why the eyes of the world are on Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.  

NATO, China, Europe, Canada, and Ukraine, and an array of others all have a massive stake in the outcome. Will Americans choose the former prosecutor, or the convicted felon; the first Black, female commander-in-chief, or the 78-year-old twice impeached ex-president who talked about shooting migrants in the legs at the border, and deporting millions of them now living in the United States. 

Two very interested bystanders in this most unusual presidential election are the Canadian federal leaders who may soon be squaring off against each other to decide who will be prime minister: Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre.  

What happens in the United States may foreshadow what happens here:

In the end, not even the president of the United States could suspend—let alone repeal—the laws of the great game. You can’t play poker without chips, and you can’t run a campaign without money.

Although Trudeau is not encroaching on his dotage, there is still a lesson here for him. Biden couldn’t ultimately ignore inconvenient polls, and neither can Trudeau. 

For months and months now, Trudeau has been several postal codes behind Poilievre and the Conservatives in the polls. A majority of Canadians don’t want him leading the Liberal Party into the next election expected in 2025.  

Trudeau’s answer so far has been to double down on his insistence that he will contest the next election as head of the party. He assures his nervous caucus that things will gradually get better by the time Canadians choose their next prime minister: interest rates, inflation, and lower housing costs.  

And they will, incrementally. The Bank of Canada, for example, just dropped the interest rate to 4.5 per cent.  

The problem with that approach is that it didn’t much matter in Biden’s case. The U.S. has had a robust economic recovery from COVID. It also brought down the inflation rate significantly, and is gradually lowering interest rates. But none of that had any affect because that’s not how voters were experiencing it. They aren’t grateful for a reduction in the rate at which their expenses are increasing. They are remembering what groceries used to cost in pre-COVID days.

There is another problem with the PM ignoring polls showing his deep unpopularity, and a massive and consistent Conservative lead as the party of choice. If that doesn’t bother the PM, you can bet it bothers every Liberal MP looking to stay in his or her job.

A restless caucus could easily become a rebellious one if the leader and the polls remain in the ditch. If the conviction sets in that Trudeau is about to lead the party lemming-like over the cliff in 2025, his own team may turn on him as the Democrats did on Biden.

That’s because the Liberal caucus has seen in the U.S. the power of down-ballot candidates to remove an unpopular leader when he becomes a drag on their own reelection prospects. For now, it is up to Trudeau to decide whether it’s “damn the polls, and full speed ahead,” or the Biden option. But it may not be up to him much longer.

Stay tuned.

Image: 

Kamala Harris And The Liberals

Justin Trudeau needs to pay attention to Kamala Harris. Robin Sears writes:

It is rare that one event can upend an entire political landscape overnight. But it happened at 1:45 on a Sunday afternoon in Delaware.

Mindful that every campaign exaggerates its wins and discounts its failures, consider these statistics about U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who become the Democratic frontrunner on Sunday to replace President Joe Biden on this year’s Democratic ticket.

 She has raised more than $100 million in 48 hours. A sum never before seen.

She has won more than 2,000 delegates endorsement, guaranteeing her nomination at the Democratic Convention in three weeks time. She had won 20,000 new volunteers overnight.

There's a lesson in Harris' rise and in Canadian polls:

Respected pollster Nik Nanos cautioned not to take as secure his “who’s on top” numbers. They tell him that a large chunk of Conservative support is made up of Trudeau deserters, not Poilievre lovers. He warns all those saying the political stage is set for a Tory landslide to be careful. A single serious mistake could wound Poilievre badly. Where his potential deserters would then go is unknown. But it is a flashing yellow light for Conservative strategists.

This appears to be what is happening to the Trump campaign already. Having predicated their entire strategy on mocking Joe Biden, who finally relented to pressure and decided to not run for re-election this fall. The Republicans are in a bit of a pickle using the same tactics on the immigrant child of Indian and Jamaican parents who fought her way to the top on merit.

Replacing one wounded leader with a fresher face at the last minute rarely works in Canadian politics, ask Kim Campbell. Still, worried Liberals may be watching the Harris juggernaut quickly build speed and scale and wonder. Apropos Nick Nanos observation, maybe even a non-superstar new Liberal leader could successfully woo a large slice of Trudeau deserters back. Harris seems to have wooed many worried Democrats back in days.

We don't repeat American history in this country. But this is an era of rapid change. Canadians are caught up in that change as much as the Americans are.

Image: CTV News Montreal

Wow

That was interesting. Joe Biden flipped the script. Dana Milbanks writes:

On Sunday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that President Biden absolutely, positively had to run for another four years as president.

“It’s not possible to simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the democratic, small-d democratic process,” he told ABC News’s “This Week.”

Biden's response was "Wanna bet?" As Milbanks continues:

[The Republicans] wanted desperately to campaign against Biden this fall, and their party’s nominee, Donald Trump, had built his entire campaign around beating an opponent he could portray as old and feebleminded. But Biden upended everything Sunday with these words: “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and my country for me to stand down.”

His opponents seemed not to know what to do. The Republican response was confused and weak. They accused Democrats of a coup and a conspiracy to hide Biden’s “dementia.” They called for invoking the 25th Amendment and teed up legal challenges. But mostly they responded, in what was clearly a coordinated if illogical plan, by insisting that Biden resign immediately. “If Joe Biden can’t run for re-election,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) wrote in a typical formulation, “he is not capable of serving as president for the next six months and needs to resign NOW!

Politics is a cruel business. It's not about governing. It's about winning. And to win, you need to put on a good show. Biden -- wise though he is -- is no showman. Kamala Harris is no showwoman. But, as a former prosecutor, she knows how to prosecute the case against Trump.

Let's hope she succeeds.

Image: CNN

A Tough Row To Hoe

Progressives in the United States and Canada have a leadership crisis on their hands. Michael Harris writes:

In both countries, the progressive parties are in a crisis of leadership. For very different reasons, the parties themselves are deeply conflicted about their incumbents: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau here, and President Joe Biden in the United States.   

The polling and approval ratings for both leaders are abysmal. They are so bad, in fact, that even though they are incumbent leaders of governments, they have each been invited by members of their own party to step down.  

After nine years in power, the Liberals are dealing with the public’s “Trudeau fatigue.” The Democrats in the United States are saddled with a wobbly president deemed to be too old for a second term by two-thirds of Americans. 

Another similarity? Both beleaguered leaders have not only refused to resign, but insist they will carry the party banner into the next election.

Grit or denialism?

That depends on your point of view -- and timing:

Those who support the president—including the panicked staff in the White House, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, and much of the Democratic leadership—talk about colds, jet-lag, and all the wonderful things that Biden has done over his long career. They are on the loyalty train, possibly of the misguided variety.

Then there are those who “love” the president, but think he is too old and diminished for the job, include a growing chorus of elected representatives, pundits, and celebrities. Actor and Democratic fundraiser George Clooney made that case in a guest essay in The New York Times on July 10.  

Trudeau is another matter:

Trudeau is not Biden. He is mentally sharp, still youthful, and formidable on the campaign trail. But there is no pretending that the Liberal Party in Canada does not have a major leadership issue to resolve.  

Based on how the Democrats have fractured their party by ignoring Biden’s age and competency issues until that became impossible; based on the fact that this has happened just months away from what might be the most consequential election in U.S. history; the Liberals should resolve their leadership issues now.

There is word today that Trudeau is bringing Mark Carney into the Liberal caucus.

Stay tuned.

Image: The Hill

Good Businessmen?

A decade ago, the government of Ontario replaced our LCBO with a much bigger building. It does a roaring business, particularly in the summer. These days, there's a long picket line outside the building. Almost a decade ago, Doug Ford rode to power, promising a "buck a beer" and wider access to booze. He also made it clear that he was convinced that profit made the world go around.

That's what makes what's going on so strange. The LCBO is very profitable. Linda McQuaig writes:

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), a crown corporation, has been doing a fine job selling alcohol — not exactly a risky enterprise requiring a lot of innovation — through its 677 outlets across the province.

And since it is publicly owned, its healthy annual profit — $2.5 billion in 2023 — goes into the public treasury, where it pays for things like health care and education.

Those profits have been invested in healthcare and education.  But Ford has been cutting off revenue streams to the province's treasury. Ontarians no longer pay to renew their license plates. And Ford wants to cancel the contract with Ontario's Beer Stores at a cost of 225 million dollars:

Like so much this premier does, the basic animating force appears to be a zealous desire to privatize, to hand over ever more of our province to private interests, to further cannibalize Ontario’s strong tradition of public services and public enterprises that have served the province well.

Ford is following the path of former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris, whose needless privatizations produced some disasters for Ontario.

Harris’ privatization of Highway 407 has cost us billions, his water-testing privatization was a factor in seven water-contamination deaths in Walkerton, and his privatization of long-term care homes worsened the COVID crisis, with death rates four times higher in private homes than in public ones.

Both men claimed to be good businessmen. Right.

Image: Niagara At Large

Get Real

Americans are tearing themselves apart over Joe Biden. Nobody's talking about Donald Trump. Dana Milbank writes they're focusing on the wrong guy:

The heavy-handed attempt to force Biden to quit the race after his disastrous debate has, predictably, backfired. Biden has dug in, pitting “elites” against the people. Democrats are fighting among themselves. George Clooney is diagnosing Biden’s mental competence (he played Dr. Doug Ross on “ER,” after all). And Republicans can hardly believe their good fortune, as they portray Biden as a zombie — with no good answer to their attacks.

Trump’s Doral rally was full of endless variations on the “Weekend at Bernie’s” theme. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now in the final round of auditions to become Trump’s running mate, warmed up the crowd by identifying a “conspiracy” to hide Biden’s mental condition. He went on: “We know he’s not calling the shots. … Look, the guy’s a figurehead for a shadow government of leftists that are propping him up.”

Then came Donald Trump Jr. “We’re running against a party that wants to take away your AR-15, but they gave a vegetable the nuclear codes,” he began. He tried another: “If Joe Biden showed up to pick you up in an Uber, would you get in the car? … Would you let your worst enemy get in that car? Maybe. Maybe. Dumb ways to die, right folks?”

Trump lawyer Alina Habba sampled a line on the crowd: “He cannot spell ‘Bob’ backwards.”

And Trump himself made Biden’s purported feeblemindedness — always an element of his stump speech — the dominant theme. He mockingly challenged Biden to another debate. Pretending to be Biden struggling with a golf club, he also challenged the president to an 18-hole match, offering Biden a 20-stroke lead. “They all knew this guy was grossly incompetent, and every Democrat in the House and the Senate was in on it,” he alleged. “It was a scam. The American people can never trust this group of liars ever again. They put our country at great risk and danger.”

Trump joked about Biden taking naps and struggling to lift a beach chair. He floated the idea that “Hunter is in the White House running government right now, they say.” Seizing on an Axios report that Biden is only “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., Trump claimed: “He can’t work because he’s mentally no good. He’s shot.”

This is nuts. The moron is in plain sight. And it's not Joe Biden.

On another note, some comments have been disappearing from this blog after they have been published. Apparently, this is a long-standing problem with Blogger. I have not found a way to recover them. I apologize.

Image: New York Daily News

Don't Buy The Image

Pierre Poilievre claims he's a man of the people. Linda McQuaig isn't buying it. She writes:

Poilievre has managed to pass himself off as anti-elitist and populist largely because Canadians have heard little about all the time he spends — when the cameras aren’t rolling — courting the country’s business elite.

Even as Poilievre has attacked corporate lobbyists — vowing they won’t be able to shape policy under his Conservative government as they have under the Liberals — he’s been consorting with a wide range of corporate lobbyists at about 50 extravagant private fundraising events across the country since being chosen party leader almost two years ago.

Details of these interactions have come to light due to investigative work by the online outlet The Breach, which has documented the presence of more than a hundred active or recent corporate lobbyists at Poilievre fundraising galas held at private mansions and swanky clubs, by carefully combing through the records in Elections Canada’s registry.

For instance, Poilievre was the central attraction at a lavish Regina fundraiser last November hosted by Saskatchewan’s wealthiest family, the Semples, owners of the Brandt Group of Companies, with major holdings in real estate, mining, construction, agriculture and pipeline equipment.

It didn’t seem to bother Poilievre that the Semples have a reputation for being anti-worker. In addition to serious health and safety violations, one of their companies was reprimanded by a labour tribunal for trying to impose its own collective agreement, which eliminated more than 50 pages from the existing agreement and added “unreasonable clauses” that gave the company extra powers.

Not exactly the friend of the working man:

But Poilievre has constructed a whole political persona for himself around the notion that he’s different, claiming recently that he’s visited 110 shop floors and five union halls while largely avoiding speaking to business groups.

Indeed, he’s warned business that they shouldn’t expect a warm welcome from government under his watch, that he plans to revamp the cosy relationship the Liberals have had with business.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Poilievre seems receptive to the corporate crowd.

As The Breach noted in an earlier investigation, the corporate set is heavily represented on the Conservative national council, which includes lobbyists representing major oil, pharmaceutical and real estate companies, as well as retail giants and others opposed to unions and minimum wage hikes.

None of the members of this 20-member Conservative council appears to represent workers.

Just a small heads up.

Image: The Walrus

King Donald

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court declared that the American President -- and they were writing about Donald Trump -- is King. Jennifer Rubin writes:

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. held: “We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office.” He continued: “At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient.”

They are preparing the way for King Donald:

The notion that any illegal action could be draped in the cloak of “official conduct” should alarm all Americans. As the dissent points out, if as commander in chief Trump were to order Seal Team 6 to assassinate political opponents, what is to stop him? Given that the next president could be an already convicted felon, the prospect of an imperial president with a get-out-of-jail card should be terrifying. And to make matters worse, the court may not inquire into the president’s motive to determine if he was acting in an official capacity.

That's the key: the president's motives can't be questioned. What kind of court excludes motive in the commission of a crime? Two of the six justices have connections to the insurrection Trump staged. The last time he ran, he had no platform. This time he has a nine-hundred-page tome, declaring what he will do. His intention is to declare himself king.

Clearly, the highest court in the land is on Trump's side. Only American voters can save themselves.

Image: Salon.com

Canada Day 2024

We're grumpy these days. Mr. Poilievre tells us that "Canada is broken." It's Poilievre boilerplate -- over the top and mean. There is much to fix and improve. But there is much to celebrate.

Happy Canada Day.

Image: Britannica