Friday, September 10, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #19: That was a debate???

Twitter is concluding that the Leaders Debate Thursday evening was possibly the worst moderated debate ever seen in the history of the nation. 
And that's really too bad -- Trudeau needed some momentum from a positive and upbeat debate performance and he's likely not going to get any. Then again, neither will O'Toole or Singh.  
The moderator, Shachi Kurl from Angus Reid, appeared to be under the impression that she was running for office too. She acted like Canadians had tuned in to watch her as she interrupted and stopped leaders from answering questions, while she preened.
The only leader who came out of this looking OK was Green leader Annamie Paul and who cares, because Paul isn't even going to win her own seat much less give help to any other Green candidates so in the end it doesn't matter what Canadians thought of her. 
Blanchet did OK too - and again, who cares, because it doesn't matter to him or to anyone else what Canadians outside Quebec think of him. Though of course it might affect Liberal performance in Quebec, if anyone there was watching,.
The only real question I had about Blanchette or Singh is how they would decide whether to endorse a minority Liberal or Conservative outcome.  Nobody bothered to ask.


And let the pollster wars begin: And this is the way the media summed up the debate:
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Thursday, September 09, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #18: I am a Quebecois

Wednesday night was the French leaders debate: The vitriol is jarring - Singh, in particular, appears to have such a personal dislike for Trudeau, even though in terms of policy directions I think there should be much that Liberals and NDP would be able to agree on. I was surprised at the lack of attention paid to Indigenous issues, except for glancing comments about boil-water advisories and Indigenous languages. Though more than 100 boil-water advisories have been lifted under the Liberal government, there are still 32 communities with boil-water advisories in place, and COVID limited the amount of work that could be done in 2020 And this is from the post-debate media discussion: I think the Conservative consensus was that O'Toole didn't do as well as they wanted him to: The restaurant coupon idea that the CPC announced earlier today isn't going to create any voting momentum either: The elephant in the room, tonight and tomorrow, is the surging People's Party of Canada. Mainly I think, they are attracting anti-vaxxers from the CPC, but maybe some are also coming from the other parties as well. 
I thought this was an interesting observation too: And an update on today's polling news:
Today's funny:
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Wednesday, September 08, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #17: today's update

As we wait for the Leaders Debates Wednesday and Thursday, here's a few interesting tweets for tonight: The Conservatives can't get away from the guns issue, because O'Toole can't give an answer that Canadians will believe: The issues of gun safety and anti-vaxxers are starting to merge, and the merger isn't positive for the Conservatives: The #FlipFlopMan narrative framing is now getting used on other issues too: And non-answers are getting noticed: Here's discussion about the Conservatives lying that the Liberals supposedly are planning to tax capital gains on principle residences: Another non-issue: Here's an important discussion from Dale Smith about why the Liberals ended up abandoning electoral reform and maintaining the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system: Finally, here's a great tweet about voting:
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Tuesday, September 07, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #16: some fun now

Ain't we havin' some fun now?
   

 Actually, of course, the increasing violence we are seeing now from the anti-vaxxers and the PPC supporters is not funny at all. 
Two weeks to go.
And I think maybe its becoming clearer why it is important that we hold this election now - Trudeau is right; Canadians need to make a choice about which direction they really want to take, either Forward with the Liberals, or backward with the CPC. 
Today saw more violence from the anti-vaxxers and their allies: Even when anti-vaxxers were screaming, Trudeau kept his cool: Another day of coverage on O'Toole's assault rifle flip flop, too: And here's a couple of tweets in honor of Labour Day: Today's wierdest: And this will make you feel good!
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Monday, September 06, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #15: Flip Flop Man

Editing note: I had to delete a couple of the earlier Follies and Funnies posts because something in them was messing up my blog formatting and I am not sufficiently expert in html to figure out what went wrong. Hopefully that won't happen again, but it looks like I can't use photos or cartoons unless they are in tweets, I don't know why. 

Anyway, getting to today's events, there's several things going on.
First, O'Toole is flip-flopping on his idea of overturning Trudeau's assault weapons ban -- O'Toole really a terrible politician, isn't he, he can't seem to get out of his own way when he is trying to deal with an actual controversial issue. 
So yesterday he said one thing about guns and today the other. 
We know, of course, that he actually WOULD overturn Trudeau's ban regardless of what he says now. He promised his base many times that he would, and guns are a core Conservative value. But when the Canadian media reacted negatively to his fumbling on Saturday, his first impulse seems to be to lie to Canada about what his real intentions are.  And not to worry, the gun lobby saw O'Toole's flip flop for the nudge-nudge-wink-wink it really is, and they agreed not to panic and embarrass him

Second, the NDP and the Conservatives are now both finally on board with increasing vaccination rates - though they seem to think that all we have to do is ask REALLY REALLY nicely because mandates are so divisive.  But the Trudeau government is already ahead of them: And third tonight, it seems that PPC and Conservative protestors are more focused now on trying to derail Trudeau's campaign than on supporting their own candidates. 
I don't think Canadians are going to be very happy if we see much more of the screaming and swearing and catcalling that went on in Newmarket Ontario today:
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Sunday, September 05, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #14:

New Liberal campaign ad: Here's some good news for today: I think O'Toole is going to find himself in trouble as voters start thinking more seriously about what he is saying and whose interests he is actually representing. Here he sounds really caring, but what he is actually doing is throwing Indigenous people under the bus by implying they are the anti-vaxxers who distrust the health care system: Here some takes on Canadian election issues: 
Housing - Climate change - Vaccinations - Abortion rights - Banning assault weapons -- Daycare -- Now here's an endorsement I didn't expect: And here's another bizarre story - the Conservative candidate for the Northwest Territories doesn't live there, has never been there, and isn't doing any campaigning there. And somehow, O'Toole thinks this is all Trudeau's fault? Finally today, this:
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Friday, September 03, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #13:

Here's the link to tonight's Leaders Debate in translation: https://www.cpac.ca/episode?id=f9809cea-1e07-47cd-a94d-2ddd3e1351db# 
And here are several of tweets I saw about the debate: Annamie Paul has now endorsed the Liberals: A few campaign factoids: Those rallies at hospitals are going to doom the Conservative campaign.
I believe that over the last two weeks, Canadians were starting to think hey, maybe this O'Toole guy might be OK, at least he's sorta friendly, he's not like Harper, so maybe those Conservatives might be worth considering. 
But these hospital rallies are going to kill any positive feelings Canadians might have had toward the the Conservative party leader who can't even convince his own caucus to get vaccinated and certainly doesn't seem to be able to deal with nutty protestors:
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Sunday, August 29, 2021

Election Follies and Funnies #10

This may well be the weekend remembered for Jagmeet Singh losing the thread. 
He sent out a bizarre tweet on Saturday which lied about Trudeau profiting from billions of dollars in student loan interest. 
Now actually, during the pandemic, the Trudeau government did some great things for student loans - they paused student loan repayments for 6 months, and also waived the interest until 2023. 
But what Singh now apparently promises to do is to hop into a time machine and go back to 2015 and revise the entire student loan program to forgive some portion of student debt, and then not charge any interest at all on the rest. And if the Liberals had actually made those changes 6 years ago, then students might have saved $4 billion in interest. Or something like that, I guess, because numbers, who can ever explain them and why should the NDP even try....
But Singh made it sound like Trudeau had personally absconded with the money, and then he didn't retract or explain. Sorry, but this is just a real asshole move:
The anti-vax protestors were a feature at Trudeau's campaign stops this weekend, and neither the Conservatives or their supportive media could figure out a way to downplay or ignore their hysteria. 
Conservatives attempted to normalize it by equating it to the protests about NAFTA that Mulroney dealt with in 1988.
But this controversial and chilling tweet demonstrates there is no real comparison:
There was also a nutty media effort to imply that the anti-vax hysteria was really just Trudeau's own fault because he is too pro-vax or something Other issues: Now for the funny: And I think this may well be the gamechanger we've been looking for:
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