Life, Writing, Weirdness

People uninterested in politics, particularly Canadian politics, should pass this one by. I’m not going to get too detailed or bogged down into my understanding of how things work, but there are some opinions here.

According to the Federal election results, on 28 April 2025, Canadians elected a Liberal Minority government. The words minority and Liberal are both important, because that’s not what we got.

I’ll deal with the word Liberal first. That’s just the name of the party. Taking a look at the policies the party currently holds, and the honestly pathetic amount of legislative work it’s managed to get done since the election, I’m not convinced anyone would notice if the Liberals suddenly changed their name to the Progressive Conservative Party and we slid back to the Mulroney era of the 1980s and 90s but with better tech and more angry rhetoric. Since the campaign for that election started, and maybe even from the moment the new leader was chosen after the old one stepped down, the Liberals have essentially been engaged in outright theft of the closer-to-reasonable policies of the current Conservative party. But the new leader of the Liberal party is a banker and senior corporate manager, so I don’t know why anyone thought it would turn out to be even a small-L liberal government. I think the general belief was just that he’d better than the primary alternative.

Minority, in a parliamentary system, means one party has more seats than any other party but still less than 50% of the total number of seats. Ordinarily that means the governing party needs to actually talk to the other parties and work out compromises and support to work out and work through its legislative agenda. The Liberals under CEO Carney are governing as if they had a majority, though, ignoring the best historical example of what happens when you do that (anyone remember how long Joe Clark was Prime Minister for?). The government hasn’t fallen yet because everyone seems to recognize that we’d probably just wind up where we are right now after spending all that money for another election. Still, one more floor crossing from the Conservatives and the Liberals will have that majority, though I don’t know if that would mean they’ll get much more done than they have been so far.

So, we don’t really have a liberal government and the government we do have doesn’t think of itself as having to adjust to the reality of being a minority government.

Did we have an alternative, though? If Trudeau the younger had hung on, the results of the election would have been different. Poilievre would have been Prime Minister and possibly with a majority (as in more than 50% of the seats) government able to do what he pleased. More than enough people were sick of Trudeau and the general Liberal trend in believing that saying something is the same as doing something but if we wanted to actually get anything done then we had to keep electing them over and over. And that made it scarily possible that Canada was going to follow the US in a hard swing to the right.

Instead, we got a much smaller but still very clear shuffle to the right. Trudeau finally figured things out and didn’t hang on, and Carney is a very different guiding hand. Banker and CEO, but somehow he’s leading the Liberals? Well, he still has to be better than the nutjob somehow holding the Conservatives together, doesn’t he? Poilievre has just enough of the base locked down that it doesn’t matter if the rest of the country doesn’t like him (or outright hates him). But he doesn’t seem to see that if he wants the general electorate to look at him as something other than an attack dog who can’t shift targets he’s going to have to offer up some actual options and alternatives rather than just criticizing everything the government says or wants to do. He’s long since gone from being Opposition to merely obstruction. From a personal perspective, the sound of his voice has passed into the zone of whiny and grating for me, much like the last several Conservative leaders, although Poilievre is in a different part of that zone. Enough so that I could be happy never hearing that voice again.

Is Carney a better option than Poilievre? That remains to be seen. He isn’t as far to the right and he doesn’t seem to be as crazy, but he’s certainly working more for corporations and people in the highest wealth brackets than he is for the rest of us. Not that he’s getting much done.

I don’t think there is a viable option for left-leaning voters in Canada anymore. The Conservatives are farther to the right than most of the country is comfortable with, the Liberals are Centre-Right and tacking further, the NDP want to be on the left but can’t seem to hold enough interest or propose enough bold measures to pull out of the centre, the Bloc isn’t particularly relevant outside of Québec even on the rare occasions when they manage to drag the debate somewhere that means something to a broader audience, and none of the minor parties can ever scrape enough support together to even have a voice in things.

Yes, our electoral system is broken. That’s been obvious for several decades. But anyone who manages to get into power has done so by working that broken system to their advantage. Why would any of them actually want to change it? Voting strategically mostly winds up being a wash, and I happen to live in a riding that’s elected not-a-Conservative exactly once in the last eight elections and by a very slim margin. We rebounded against that slim margin the very next election by electing a far-right lunatic.

Anyway, enough bitching out loud about the Canadian political situation. It’s a sorry state of affairs, but there are plenty of bigger fish trying to tear down the planet and those need worrying about, too. I do have a couple of letters to write to certain MPs, though.

Be well, everyone.