LP_468x60
ontario news watch
on-the-record-468x60-white
and-another-thing-468x60

63 Canadians dead in the fireball that consumed Ukraine International Airlines Flight 572, and thankfully someone thought to ask our PM (and his new beard) whether he's angry about it or not.  Luckily for this anxious world, he responded in "non-Trump-style-fashion", although not everyone was happy that the question was asked.  (The beard could not be reached for comment.)

And guess what?  I can't be mad at Trudeau for insisting that Iran take full responsibility for blowing up a civilian airliner and promise never to do it again.  For once, he's doing all that can be expected of him, because in case you didn't know, nobody cares about Canada, even when our citizens are murdered.  What is he supposed to do?  Push for sanctions?  Declare war?

Turns out that there's a downside to being a bunch of quirky peace-loving frozen weirdos that apparently need a couple of British ex(?)-royals to move here in order to "inject" some "razzle-dazzle" and make things "giddy" in our "bone-chillingly cold country"!  And let's hope that Meghan and Harry do move here, or else we'll be madder than we were when 63 Canadians were blown up on a commercial flight.  Hey, remember when that was a thing?  No you don't, because nobody cares about Canada.

Oh, hey, here's a fun story!  Some hilarity ensued at the Pickering nuclear power plant and we got a couple of emergency notifications telling us that there wasn't an emergency and that we should all go back to bed!  Time to bust out the Homer Simpson at the power plant .gifs and go absolutely bananas to celebrate not being obliterated in a mushroom cloud.  But even if Pickering was reduced to looking like the setting of the latest Fallout game, who cares???  It's Pickering, for crying out loud!  A nuke could only improve things!  Think we'll ever get an explanation for what happened here, or actually punish someone for wrongdoing?  Come onnnn!  Some poor goof was probably just a little hungover on a Sunday morning, that's all.

It's time to take Laurier's face off the 5 dollar bill!  They want a truly "bankable" person, because it's not like one of our most consequential PM's is bankable in Canada in 2019.  Nothing he did matters!  Nobody cares!  Maybe we should replace him with Eve Dubois, a person who went viral on Family Feud Canada and was promptly offered $10K worth of fried chicken from Popeye's.  Or perhaps we should try Jacob here, who wanted a Toronto Maple Leafs cake and got a cake with the Maple Leaf Foods logo instead, and then got free Leafs tickets and presumably Maple Leaf Food food products for life!

If the nihilism that pervades Canadian culture bothers you, and if the fact that Canada's commentariat trade royalist fantasies and moral equivalencies between the USA and Iran amongst themselves bothers you, well, tough Timbits (now available in breakfast cereal format!) because guess what nobody cares about any of this.  Just try to explain any of the above stories to your American friends without their brains leaking out of their ears.  Actually, don't waste an American's time with that, because they have consequential things to worry about.

The left likes to complain about how in our profit driven society, people come last.  But they never complain about how nobody cares about Canada (because they're actively trying to undermine the very idea of Canada) so why should anyone care about people?  And if you're on the right, how do you get people to care about the deficit, about taxes, about the supposed rights of the unborn or the family when nobody cares about Canada?

So long as Canada is this silly place where we can't remember the words to the anthem, don't know our own history, and have to subsidize our own culture through tax credits, there's absolutely no point in wasting our time with anything else, or getting upset about anything else.  Priority #1 should be getting Canadians first, and the world second, to care about us.  But this is what we bought when we allowed a guy who thinks our nation is some post-national anomaly to rule over us.

And until we get someone to run for office that makes Canadians feel proud to be Canadian again, we will remain trapped in this comedy of errors.

Photo Credit: Maclean's

 

Written by Josh Lieblein

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


The British Conservative Party won a resounding majority victory in the United Kingdom's recent national election and in the process it also provided a good lesson in electoral tactics.

So what was this lesson, you ask?

Well, simply put it's this: to win an election, it really helps when a conservative party can find and then properly exploit an issue that cuts.

And when I say an issue that "cuts", I mean an issue that galvanizes a conservative party's base, while simultaneously splitting the opposing party's base.

Such a divide and conquer tactic is necessary because, as a general rule, right-leaning political parties have bases that are smaller than their major left-leaning counterparts; there are more Democrats than Republicans, more Liberals/New Democrats than Conservatives.

So if a conservative party can't increase its base, the next best objective is to degrade the other side's base.

In the case of the British election, the issue that cut so well for the Conservatives was Brexit.

Brexit was a cause that just about the entire the British Conservative base fervently supported, but more importantly it was also supported by many voters who typically voted for the left-wing Labour Party.

Knowing this, British Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson did the smart thing; he took a clear and tough pro-Brexit stance: there would be no more debates, no more referendums, he would get Britain out of the European Union.

It was a concise, easy-to-understand message that also resonated on an emotional level beyond the Conservative Party's traditional base.

By contrast, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was ambiguous on Brexit, stating he was "neutral" on the issue and that he would allow a second referendum to decide Britain's fate when it came to leaving the EU.

Essentially then, Corbyn put himself on the wrong side of a cutting issue and consequently his base got split and his Labour party got crushed.

Interestingly, the Labour leader did much better in the 2017 British election, when he reduced the Conservative government to a minority, and his success was likely because in that contest he had faced off against a Tory leader, Prime Minister Theresa May, who, unlike Johnson, was much more wishy-washy on Brexit.

In short, May failed to cut.

Of course, it's not as if Johnson and his British Conservative Party invented the "cutting" trick; in fact, it's a tactic that's as old as the hills.

Certainly, Canadian conservatives have successfully cut their opponents in the past.

For instance, way back in 1988 the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada won an election mainly because it found a good issue that cut: Freer trade with the United States.

By making freer trade the main issue of the election, the PCs, then led by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, not only mobilized their own pro-free trade base and they not only split the Liberal base, since many Liberals supported free trade, but as an added bonus they also undermined the conservative-leaning Reform Party, since many conservative voters abandoned the then fledgling party to help get free trade enacted.

In other words, by pushing free trade with the USA as an election issue, Mulroney managed to cut two opponents at once an ultimate stroke of tactical genius.

The Conservative Party under Stephen Harper also played the cutting game in the 2011 federal election, when it made the competence of then Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff an issue.

Conservatives did this through a tough media campaign which suggested Ignatieff, a former Oxford professor, was an ivory tower intellectual who was not ready for prime time, a message that resonated strongly with conservative voters, and that also demoralized many Liberal voters who decided to stay home on Election Day.

At any rate, the point I'm making here is that whoever becomes the next leader of Canada's Conservative Party leader has to, like Johnson and Mulroney and Harper, find an issue that cuts.

How do you find such an issue?

Well, that's why you pay pollsters the big bucks.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.