5 ms·

Maybe it's just where I live, but I don't really see any of what's described in that article from average people. I see the usual election signs out, haven't he

Maybe it's just where I live, but I don't really see any of what's described in that article from average people. I see the usual election signs out, haven't heard anyone really saying anything either way or even had any conversations about the elections with anyone. The media's been playing it up pretty bad and I've heard some pretty ridiculous campaign ads from all the parties but that's about it. Haven't heard a lot of white power fascist sentiment either. Sometime last year though I remember they had a rally planned, but there wasn't actually enough of them to have a rally so nobody showed up. It really bugs me the media's trying to get Canadians to play the same stupid political games as America. Our election system doesn't even work the same here. You don't vote for the prime minister. You vote for the party representitive in your area. This bullshit started back when Trudeau was first running and it's just gotten worse. The political parties here haven't changed. A vote for NDP, liberal or conservative is still the same vote it would have been last election cycle. Their policies are all the same as they've ever been.

afterburner 7y ago
> It really bugs me the media's trying to get Canadians to play the same stupid political games as America. That's not quite right; the Conservative party is copying Republican tactics wholesale, the media didn't make them do that. Canada isn't broken, but the Conservative party definitely is.
- core-questions 7y ago
  The Conservative Party is just the Liberal Party's policies delayed by 10-20 years combined with fake kowtowing to voting blocks with suggestions that they'll do what the block wants (and then virtually never executing on that). So yes, it's broken. True conservatives in Canada long for a real party to represent us without looking stupid / evil, but every time one is tried it's beset by problems and waylaid early in the game. The People's Party is the latest incarnation of that, assassinated by the CPC punching right, castigated to look racist when it's not, and so forth. It will probably die after one more election with no results, and then we'll all have to wait for some new hope, which _at best_ will have policies lining up with what the CPC professes now, while they'll have moved on to what the Liberals profess now, in the ever-moving march leftwards.
slededit 7y ago
> You don't vote for the prime minister. You vote for the party representative in your area. The MPP in my riding gave that line when she came by. We got Ford, and this particular MPP is the least responsive in the entire provincial parliament. Whatever sympathy I had for that line of reasoning is now lost, the fact is your MP or MPP has very little individual power. Much less than a representative has in the USA.
- kevin_nisbet 7y ago
  Yea, and on the federal level, I can find virtually no information on most of the candidates in my riding. I think there was a riding debate, but AFAICT it hasn't been published so I can't watch it, although I'm planning to do another search today. Last federal election cycle, the riding debate had less than 500 views IIRC. So while the original statement is factually true, I agree with slededit, my impression is we're currently in the state where most people vote for the leader, and the parties are set up in a way to pressure voting along party lines, or get kicked out.
CamJN 7y ago
Maybe what you've seen is due to where you are, as it certainly doesn't match what I've seen. Where I live in Alberta, people have been swinging hard to the right. They've already shown they'd rather elect a highschool flunky and send their carbon taxes to Ottawa than treat people with dignity or consider alternate career paths. Even people who were fairly reasonable before the last provincial election just lost their minds and starting parroting incoherent bullshit they heard from the radio. And it has only gotten worse with the federal election looming.
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  Did you only just move to Alberta? It's literally always voted right-wing except our very brief NDP government. The PCs (Progressive Conservatives, remember them?) literally ruled our province for 44 years. The OG populist right-wing party originated here (Reform Party). Remember Ralph Klein? The original high school flunkie Premier. Alberta's always been like this.
  - CamJN 7y ago
    I've lived in Alberta for a few days less than 29 years, and I'm aware that people have elected conservatives for the majority of that time. Perhaps it was due to the respite offered by the NDP gov, but I honestly feel that the stupid has gotten way worse than it was before we had the brief NDP intermission.
- core-questions 7y ago
  > Where I live in Alberta, people have been swinging hard to the right. They've already shown they'd rather elect a highschool flunky and send their carbon taxes to Ottawa than treat people with dignity or consider alternate career paths. Like many, you're confusing the map for the territory. What they've shown is that they want to vote for someone who has a realistic plan that will actually improve their day to day lives, by doing what they collectively believe is necessary to bring economic success back to the province. Maybe you think they're wrong about the economic success; that's something that can and will be tested. Maybe you think there's a better way to get there; if so, that's a message that needs to be packaged and disseminated in a way that doesn't villainize the normal families in Alberta who simply want to be able to have good employment and purchasing power for the hard work they're willing to put in. Maybe you think they're wrong because of the long-term environmental impact. You may be right, but it's very difficult to get people to act against their short-term interests in favour of their supposed long-term interests, especially when they disagree with you about the latter. The only path forward on this front if you strongly believe in the environmental aspects is to actually strategize a way forward economically that provides the same level of economic prosperity to people as oil did. I get that this is an extremely tall order, but when you're telling people that the only way forward is for them to get used to the idea that they're all going to be living in government housing and eating maggotburgers, don't be surprised when they reject your vision of the future in favour of someone else who promises something more appealing. What if - gasp - someone started a right-wing green party? What if we capitalized on the sentiment of the right (rejecting communism, state-enforced equity / egalitarianism, being self-made and self-sufficient, etc) but channeled some of that into new, green projects that people can actually make money off of, like nuclear power? Environmentalism has basically made itself into a left-only political idea, and this is a critical weakness which might doom us all.
bko 7y ago
I think it has to do with framing. Consider this from the article: > But just how widespread is this xenophobia? A relatively encouraging picture emerges from longitudinal studies by nonprofit research groups or universities. A 2018 global study from the Pew Research Center found 74 percent of Canadians support taking in refugees—a result that seems to fit with the stories of Canadians who banded together in 2015 and 2016 to sponsor Syrian refugee families To measure xenophobia, the author sites a study on people's attitudes towards taking in more refugees. I'm sure xenophobes would almost certainly answer that the country should not allow more refugees, but it seems many mainstream media publications completely wrote off any legitimate reasons someone may have about migrants coming in from war torn countries. It seems like a very broad brush and doesn't help the situation.
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  This. Immigration is an economic issue. Framing it as xenophobia is insulting. Not to mention, Canada is one of the most diverse countries on earth and certainly the most welcoming to newcomers.
core-questions 7y ago
> Haven't heard a lot of white power fascist sentiment either. That's because it's a manufactured problem. The media doesn't care to distinguish between a few classes of people, labelling them all white-supremacist facist nazi scum, when most of them really just have views that would have been totally acceptable to discuss in public or have as a part of an official party platform only a decade or so ago. In reality, what we have are European-extraction nth-generation "old stock" Canadians who believe that they have, in fact, formed a new culture here in Canada that derives from a fusion of European cultures blended with the experiences of pioneering a new land. A few hundred years of working on this, even before Canada itself was a nation spanning the continent, resulted in a people who were starting to define themselves, ideally without resorting to comparison to the USA. This group of people has a latent belief that they deserve a chance to be a culture of shared values and heritage and should not necessarily just be overrun with immigrants who bring their own culture with them. There's no implication here of "supremacy" or "fascism". I've never met someone who wanted a "fascist" government; 99% of people can't even differentiate between actual Italofascism (i.e. Mussolini's government) and some vague hand-waving idea about totalitarianism, anyhow. Nobody wants to have a government that controls all of our actions, where we can work, what businesses we can run, etc. which are all critical aspects of totalitarian regimes. Labelling people facist is just confusing; the idea that someone who supports the RCMP in their efforts to fight crime is a bootlicking fascist nut is just so absurd an idea to most Canadians that we can't even conceive of the idea that the Extremely Online folks out here are actually pushing this idea (look up "ACAB", "All Cops Are Bastards", for a disturbing look into a growing sentiment in the online left). There's no implication here of "white power", either; the implication is actually "controlled immigration". We don't want illegal immigration, we don't want people skipping the process and bypassing the good compliant folks who are trying to come in properly. We don't want uncontrolled resettlement of refugees in ways that have demonstrable caused social unrest in European cities. This doesn't mean "only bring in white people" or "don't bring in anyone at all" - even the People's Party only wants to reduce immigration numbers by about a third. It's a function of carrying capacity more than anything else; it's clear to anyone that's being honest that there's some maximum rate you can bring new people in at before they dilute the host country's culture too much for it to be able to continue in any cohesive fashion. That is, if you consider culture to be more than mass media and chain restaurants. The problem we face is that any attempt to elucidate the above is immediately met with people decrying one as racist, fascist, prejudiced, or as a white nationalist, which is largely an American phenomenon. The American media and online discourse spills over into Canada, and people act as though their problems are our problems, when in fact we face an entirely different set of issues, and have always had a more restrictive immigration policy anyhow. Attempts to come up with Canadian solutions to our problems, like the moderate immigration policy reforms of the Harper government or the reduction in numbers Bernier is proposing, end up being conflated with Trump's border wall and immigration bans, and the average Canadian conservative ends up being placed in the position to defend that sort of thing, rather than the entirely moderate sorts of solutions that are actually being proposed here.

afterburner 7y ago

> It really bugs me the media's trying to get Canadians to play the same stupid political games as America. That's not quite right; the Conservative party is copying Republican tactics wholesale, the media didn't make them do that. Canada isn't broken, but the Conservative party definitely is.

core-questions 7y ago
The Conservative Party is just the Liberal Party's policies delayed by 10-20 years combined with fake kowtowing to voting blocks with suggestions that they'll do what the block wants (and then virtually never executing on that). So yes, it's broken. True conservatives in Canada long for a real party to represent us without looking stupid / evil, but every time one is tried it's beset by problems and waylaid early in the game. The People's Party is the latest incarnation of that, assassinated by the CPC punching right, castigated to look racist when it's not, and so forth. It will probably die after one more election with no results, and then we'll all have to wait for some new hope, which _at best_ will have policies lining up with what the CPC professes now, while they'll have moved on to what the Liberals profess now, in the ever-moving march leftwards.

slededit 7y ago

> You don't vote for the prime minister. You vote for the party representative in your area. The MPP in my riding gave that line when she came by. We got Ford, and this particular MPP is the least responsive in the entire provincial parliament. Whatever sympathy I had for that line of reasoning is now lost, the fact is your MP or MPP has very little individual power. Much less than a representative has in the USA.

kevin_nisbet 7y ago
Yea, and on the federal level, I can find virtually no information on most of the candidates in my riding. I think there was a riding debate, but AFAICT it hasn't been published so I can't watch it, although I'm planning to do another search today. Last federal election cycle, the riding debate had less than 500 views IIRC. So while the original statement is factually true, I agree with slededit, my impression is we're currently in the state where most people vote for the leader, and the parties are set up in a way to pressure voting along party lines, or get kicked out.

CamJN 7y ago

Maybe what you've seen is due to where you are, as it certainly doesn't match what I've seen. Where I live in Alberta, people have been swinging hard to the right. They've already shown they'd rather elect a highschool flunky and send their carbon taxes to Ottawa than treat people with dignity or consider alternate career paths. Even people who were fairly reasonable before the last provincial election just lost their minds and starting parroting incoherent bullshit they heard from the radio. And it has only gotten worse with the federal election looming.

Mikeb85 7y ago
Did you only just move to Alberta? It's literally always voted right-wing except our very brief NDP government. The PCs (Progressive Conservatives, remember them?) literally ruled our province for 44 years. The OG populist right-wing party originated here (Reform Party). Remember Ralph Klein? The original high school flunkie Premier. Alberta's always been like this.
- CamJN 7y ago
  I've lived in Alberta for a few days less than 29 years, and I'm aware that people have elected conservatives for the majority of that time. Perhaps it was due to the respite offered by the NDP gov, but I honestly feel that the stupid has gotten way worse than it was before we had the brief NDP intermission.
core-questions 7y ago
> Where I live in Alberta, people have been swinging hard to the right. They've already shown they'd rather elect a highschool flunky and send their carbon taxes to Ottawa than treat people with dignity or consider alternate career paths. Like many, you're confusing the map for the territory. What they've shown is that they want to vote for someone who has a realistic plan that will actually improve their day to day lives, by doing what they collectively believe is necessary to bring economic success back to the province. Maybe you think they're wrong about the economic success; that's something that can and will be tested. Maybe you think there's a better way to get there; if so, that's a message that needs to be packaged and disseminated in a way that doesn't villainize the normal families in Alberta who simply want to be able to have good employment and purchasing power for the hard work they're willing to put in. Maybe you think they're wrong because of the long-term environmental impact. You may be right, but it's very difficult to get people to act against their short-term interests in favour of their supposed long-term interests, especially when they disagree with you about the latter. The only path forward on this front if you strongly believe in the environmental aspects is to actually strategize a way forward economically that provides the same level of economic prosperity to people as oil did. I get that this is an extremely tall order, but when you're telling people that the only way forward is for them to get used to the idea that they're all going to be living in government housing and eating maggotburgers, don't be surprised when they reject your vision of the future in favour of someone else who promises something more appealing. What if - gasp - someone started a right-wing green party? What if we capitalized on the sentiment of the right (rejecting communism, state-enforced equity / egalitarianism, being self-made and self-sufficient, etc) but channeled some of that into new, green projects that people can actually make money off of, like nuclear power? Environmentalism has basically made itself into a left-only political idea, and this is a critical weakness which might doom us all.

bko 7y ago

I think it has to do with framing. Consider this from the article: > But just how widespread is this xenophobia? A relatively encouraging picture emerges from longitudinal studies by nonprofit research groups or universities. A 2018 global study from the Pew Research Center found 74 percent of Canadians support taking in refugees—a result that seems to fit with the stories of Canadians who banded together in 2015 and 2016 to sponsor Syrian refugee families To measure xenophobia, the author sites a study on people's attitudes towards taking in more refugees. I'm sure xenophobes would almost certainly answer that the country should not allow more refugees, but it seems many mainstream media publications completely wrote off any legitimate reasons someone may have about migrants coming in from war torn countries. It seems like a very broad brush and doesn't help the situation.

Mikeb85 7y ago
This. Immigration is an economic issue. Framing it as xenophobia is insulting. Not to mention, Canada is one of the most diverse countries on earth and certainly the most welcoming to newcomers.

core-questions 7y ago

> Haven't heard a lot of white power fascist sentiment either. That's because it's a manufactured problem. The media doesn't care to distinguish between a few classes of people, labelling them all white-supremacist facist nazi scum, when most of them really just have views that would have been totally acceptable to discuss in public or have as a part of an official party platform only a decade or so ago. In reality, what we have are European-extraction nth-generation "old stock" Canadians who believe that they have, in fact, formed a new culture here in Canada that derives from a fusion of European cultures blended with the experiences of pioneering a new land. A few hundred years of working on this, even before Canada itself was a nation spanning the continent, resulted in a people who were starting to define themselves, ideally without resorting to comparison to the USA. This group of people has a latent belief that they deserve a chance to be a culture of shared values and heritage and should not necessarily just be overrun with immigrants who bring their own culture with them. There's no implication here of "supremacy" or "fascism". I've never met someone who wanted a "fascist" government; 99% of people can't even differentiate between actual Italofascism (i.e. Mussolini's government) and some vague hand-waving idea about totalitarianism, anyhow. Nobody wants to have a government that controls all of our actions, where we can work, what businesses we can run, etc. which are all critical aspects of totalitarian regimes. Labelling people facist is just confusing; the idea that someone who supports the RCMP in their efforts to fight crime is a bootlicking fascist nut is just so absurd an idea to most Canadians that we can't even conceive of the idea that the Extremely Online folks out here are actually pushing this idea (look up "ACAB", "All Cops Are Bastards", for a disturbing look into a growing sentiment in the online left). There's no implication here of "white power", either; the implication is actually "controlled immigration". We don't want illegal immigration, we don't want people skipping the process and bypassing the good compliant folks who are trying to come in properly. We don't want uncontrolled resettlement of refugees in ways that have demonstrable caused social unrest in European cities. This doesn't mean "only bring in white people" or "don't bring in anyone at all" - even the People's Party only wants to reduce immigration numbers by about a third. It's a function of carrying capacity more than anything else; it's clear to anyone that's being honest that there's some maximum rate you can bring new people in at before they dilute the host country's culture too much for it to be able to continue in any cohesive fashion. That is, if you consider culture to be more than mass media and chain restaurants. The problem we face is that any attempt to elucidate the above is immediately met with people decrying one as racist, fascist, prejudiced, or as a white nationalist, which is largely an American phenomenon. The American media and online discourse spills over into Canada, and people act as though their problems are our problems, when in fact we face an entirely different set of issues, and have always had a more restrictive immigration policy anyhow. Attempts to come up with Canadian solutions to our problems, like the moderate immigration policy reforms of the Harper government or the reduction in numbers Bernier is proposing, end up being conflated with Trump's border wall and immigration bans, and the average Canadian conservative ends up being placed in the position to defend that sort of thing, rather than the entirely moderate sorts of solutions that are actually being proposed here.