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New Canadian Politics Thread

anne25 said:
Does Twitter really sway a persons vote? That is one of the last places I would consult when trying to decide who to vote for or against.
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To be fair dear, I don't think you're their target demographic.

Where this becomes a problem though is when someone with a maybe a few fringey ideas starts to have them heavily reinforced by seeing dozens to hundreds of replies to tweets that they kind of agree with but it's an idea that might be socially unacceptable (for whatever reason, racism, sexism, etc). This confirms the relevance of the idea in the head of this very real person and with enough exposure to this online, they will start to believe that the idea (however repugnant it might be) has more public support than it really does. Do enough of this with enough somewhat codependent thoughts/ideologies and you can absolutely sway the opinions of very large groups of people. Think of it as old school propaganda, but instead of paying actors 10 bucks each to show up at your political rally, you can pay 10 bucks for 10,000 fake people to support you online, attack your opponents with memes, etc. It's just old school manipulation upgraded to use modern tools.
 
MindzEye said:
Okay, but "firearms offenses" are a pretty broad category that doesn't require a violent crime to have occurred. Possession of an unregistered is a firearms offense. With that aside, you said that Toronto's gun crime rate was more indicative of an American city than a Canadian one and it just isn't true.

Per 100,000:

Toronto - 15.4
Ottawa - 10.89
Surrey - 9.87
Saskatoon - 8.27

So Toronto seems high, absolutely. But if you think that's closer to what the US looks like that what the rest of Canada looks like, you're just wrong. Let's take the safest reasonably populated (who really cares about what's going on in Idaho...) state in the union, Massachussets as our example.

So yeah, Toronto has 15.4 firearms offences per 100,000. Mass has 3.4 firearms deaths per 100,000. They had 89 firearm homicides in 2017 alone. Throw in 28 firearms robberies per 100,000 and 33 firearms assaults per 100,000 and you start to get a good look for what good US gun statistics look like.

Toronto is having a rough year, I wouldn't argue otherwise. But it's having a rough year by Canadian standards, it's nowhere near as bad as even the best state in the union for gun crime.
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I went with firearm offenses because not every shooting ends in a death and not ever violent crime is committed with a gun.

But yes, early having a bad year, mostly to do with what I'm guessing is a gang war, but yeah, not as bad as america.

I guess I'm not used to hearing about so much in terms of brazen violence that's beginning to involve innocent people going about their day.
 
I see. I guess that makes sense. I'm surprised that there would be enough people following that reasoning to make a very big difference in the outcome of an election. Guess I give people in general too much credit.
 
anne25 said:
I see. I guess that makes sense. I'm surprised that there would be enough people following that reasoning to make a very big difference in the outcome of an election. Guess I give people in general too much credit.
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Probably.

How many people does it really take to change the course of an election though? The US election was swung by a well placed ~85,000 votes. A well placed 40-50K worth of votes in the recent Ontario election would have been the difference between a large majority and a weak minority.

The outcome of democratic elections are more maleable and fragile than we've grown up believing. When we're dealing in large numbers (like entire domestic populations), even just swinging the beliefs if 2-3% is a massive, massive difference maker. A 1% swing keep Britain in the EU. I think we're giving people way too much credit if we don't believe that parties with less than honourable intentions can sway a couple percentage points of the population into believing/voting in such a way that benefits said party.
 
JT's approval ratings rise to 55%, and ganja isn't even legal yet

https://globalnews.ca/news/4342222/liberals-polls-canadians-trudeau-trump/

As the weather gets warmer, Canadians are also warming back up to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals — with their approval rating jumping by five points this month.

According to an exclusive Ipsos poll for Global News, 55 per cent of Canadian respondents approve of Justin Trudeau’s government, up from 50 per cent in June.
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Yeah, the Trudeau government hasn't been scandal or mistake-free by any stretch, but to this point I can't really think of anything that's going to stick to them in the long term.

Hopefully, anyway.

With the Rebel/Breitbart-style messaging Scheer's had the Conservative Party deploying as of late, I'd really like to see them go down in flames in the next election.
 
They need to figure out this whole Carbon tax thing. They get that right and they will be alright.

I say just implement it right away, and start giving rebates to Canadians before the next election.

Canadians aren't going to grumble about extra cash in their pockets.
 
Altair said:
They need to figure out this whole Carbon tax thing. They get that right and they will be alright.

I say just implement it right away, and start giving rebates to Canadians before the next election.

Canadians aren't going to grumble about extra cash in their pockets.
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Yep. Double bonus of being pro-environment but giving money right back to people. Reminds all the left wing folk that if you care about the environment, you can't afford to have a Conservative government in Ottawa with right-wing governments in nearly all the provinces. It's actually really good for the Liberals to have the PCs win in Ontario and the other provinces, moreso if the NDP keep struggling with messaging and don't quite get it together with Singh.
 
UWHabs said:
Yep. Double bonus of being pro-environment but giving money right back to people. Reminds all the left wing folk that if you care about the environment, you can't afford to have a Conservative government in Ottawa with right-wing governments in nearly all the provinces. It's actually really good for the Liberals to have the PCs win in Ontario and the other provinces, moreso if the NDP keep struggling with messaging and don't quite get it together with Singh.
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In Ontario particularly.

For Trudeau, there was really nothing good about the Federal Trudeau Liberals sharing their party name with their deeply unpopular Wynne/McGuinty Provincial cousins. Now that association can be pushed to be back of peoples' minds, while Doug Ford will probably bumble-fück his way through plenty of scandal & mismanagement between now and the next Federal Election.

I mean, Ford's government is already to a great start in that respect by folding the anti-racism portfolio into the same ministry that handles prisons in Ontario, and by having said minister visit a predominantly black neighbourhood in Toronto, and unapologetically announce afterwards that he wore a bullet-proof vest for the whole visit.
 
Altair said:
They need to figure out this whole Carbon tax thing. They get that right and they will be alright.

I say just implement it right away, and start giving rebates to Canadians before the next election.

Canadians aren't going to grumble about extra cash in their pockets.
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Yup. If the rebate is high enough, I can be bought.
 
anne25 said:
Yup. If the rebate is high enough, I can be bought.
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The rebate's going to have to be pretty high, too, or people might complain about it. "You're destroying the economy with a carbon tax and all I got was tree-fiddy?"
 
If they do get it right why would need to "really take it to Ford"?
Getting it right should be good enough to help sway voters in the next election.
 
anne25 said:
If they do get it right why would need to "really take it to Ford"?
Getting it right should be good enough to help sway voters in the next election.
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Well, they are going to need to take it to ford, seeing as how ford and others are going to try to rally their opposition to it.
 
Ottawa has 23 councillors, with less than half of the population of toronto, yet ford says he has no plans to change the number of councillors in ottawa.

Very much a settling of scores by a scorned politician.
 
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