A Sewer Socialists update

What a month! And we’re only half-way through. November, eh?

Late next week, I have some minor medical stuff to which I must attend (all very simple and nothing at all to be worried about), but it will put me out of commission for a little while. There will be one more edition on November 23, but no new edition on November 30. I’m planning two more newsletters on December 7 and December 14 before I break for the holiday season. Then I’ll return once more, Solstice-ified, in early January of 2024.

We all know how good I am at keeping to schedule (writing a newsletter while on vacation like a dork), but that’s the plan at the moment.

On with the show!

We need to talk about Justin

The Last of Us, Part II: The Pierre Fungus

On Sunday, November 5, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre held a “meet and greet” for the Chinese Canadian community in Richmond Hill. From the Thornhill Room of the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel & Suites, Poilievre spoke to a modest crowd about what he sees as the problems with the current government.

Video from the event was sent to the Western Standard, a conservative media outlet. They posted a clip on their website with the headline “WATCH: Poilievre condemns radical gender ideology”.

In the video, Poilievre is standing beside the Godwin Chan, the Deputy Mayor of Richmond Hill. Speaking to the crowd, Poilievre says: “Justin Trudeau does not have a right to impose his radical gender ideology on our kids and on our schools.”1 The crowd, including Chan, erupts with applause.

When asked by the Western Standard for a comment after the fact, a spokesperson for Poilievre simply stated “The video stands on its own.” Following the publication of the video, groups like Egale have condemned Poilievre’s comments, but there hasn’t been much on it from official Conservative Party sources. And the Canadian media has been noticeably absent in covering this little bit of transphobia. The best coverage has come from The Beaverton, the satirical news site which ran a “story” with the headline: “Media promise to start covering Pierre Poilievre’s transphobic comments as soon as they finish 50th story on how Liberals are unpopular”.

It should be noted that Chan, who has served in local office in Richmond Hill since 2006 and started giving big money to the Tories this year, has offered a half-hearted apology, saying he recognizes his actions may have been “hurtful to anyone, including Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Two-Spirit, Intersex, Asexual, and other identities that fall outside of cisgender and heterosexual paradigms,” but that “My reaction was based on reflecting on my own belief that minor children would need parental consent for undergoing surgical procedures for gender changes.”2 Not quite what he was applauding, since there usually aren’t surgical procedures performed by the Prime Minister in schools, but whatever.

“Gender ideology” is, of course, a nonsense term. It doesn’t mean anything and, therefore, means whatever you want it to mean. “Making mashed potatoes out of vodka, tuna, and radishes is gender ideology” is a perfectly fine sentence because it has about as much grounding in reality as “Justin Trudeau is imposing gender ideology on our kids.” Groups like Human Rights Watch note that “gender ideology”, a term with roots in the Catholic Church of all places:

But it is important to remember that Poilievre wasn’t trying to say anything of substance. If pressed (by a competent reporter this time), he would likely not be able to point to anything Justin Trudeau has done in the realm of education that would constitute anything remotely close to “gender” or “ideology”. That’s in part because education is the purview of provincial governments and in part because it genuinely doesn’t matter.

Poilievre wasn’t talking about anything that’s happened in reality. He was just saying things he knows will earn him votes or keep the voters who have already flocked to the Conservative Party either because he’s rolled out the welcome mat for those who deserted to the now increasingly irrelevant PPC or because of frustration with the current government.

Most Poilievre speeches now are little more than a word salad of platitudes and viral phrases, scraped from the muskiest corners of the internet that have, cordyceps-like, infested the social media feeds of those even a hair right of centre, piloting the online actions of some now zombified users. Right-wing influencers and meme accounts recycle half-baked talking points from equally right-wing think-tanks, memeifying them and posting them to their accounts to drive engagement (and ad revenue), which the deeply online Poilievre spits back at people like he’s reciting lines from a show to a gathering of the most dedicated members of that show’s fandom. He’s giving them what they want, even if what they want is a meaningless and hollow platitude rather than an actual policy that will make their lives better. A great example came last week when journalist Rachel Gilmour reported that Poilievre’s own wife and some of his top advisors follow accounts like “Libs of TikTok”, the enthusiastically fascist account that encourages its followers to target children, schools, and hospitals with threats of violence. Chaya Raichik, who runs the Libs of TikTok account, is one of the preeminent right-wing influencers of this moment. The whole Poilievre team is just gobbling up all the juicy talking points, which can then be repeated on a loop to the media, during speeches, and in the House of Commons.

Politics (like much of contemporary life) appears to be running on a variation of Whose Line Is It Anyway? rules: a game where the rules are made up and nothing really matters.

In the first episode of Season 8 of the Simpsons (Treehouse of Horror VII), the alien Kang, who has inhabited a skinsuit of 1996 United States Presidential candidate Bob Dole, placates an angry crowd by promising “abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!” It is a nonsense line meant to show that politicians can earn the votes of people with dumb trinkets and unfulfilling slogans rather than actually deal with important issues.

That’s where we are in Canadian politics. Nothing our federal leaders say actually matters. Poilievre can talk about “gender ideology” and our “woke government” and munch on an apple with the shiteatingest grin because he knows the bus is on autopilot, driving him straight to the semi-abandoned ruins of 24 Sussex Drive.

Columnist Althia Raj had a piece published in Star-affiliated papers on November 4 that has since been given a new headline online. The new headline is direct but banal: “Why are our political leaders failing to meet the moment?” The original headline, which is still available on NexisUni (the online database of old newspaper articles) was: “Canada feels like it's falling apart and our political leaders are missing in action. What's going on?”

The article is brutal in its presentation, graphically recounting events from the initial attack that sparked the present conflict in Israel and Gaza. And, realistically, the new headline better fits the tone and content of the article. But the first headline better suits the spirit of the moment.

Canada feels like it’s falling apart.

Poilievre has tried to harness that spirit. The theme of the first bit of his leadership was “Everything is broken”. It doesn’t matter if he has no plans to fix what’s broken or that his track record in government (remember he was Minister of Employment and Social Development AND Minister of Democratic Reform under Harper) indicates he’ll do little more than break things further. He’s trying to bottle the moment and sell it back to us as he tells us he “feels our pain”.

This sales pitch appears to be working. Poilievre was able to draw a crowd of 2,000 to a rally on Vancouver Island this week. The Conservatives don’t hold a single seat on the island, but, if the polls are any indication, they’ll win all but Elizabeth May’s Saanich—Gulf Islands and two NDP-held ridings in the Victoria-area.

The polls actually show more than just that. 338Canada is projecting that, if an election were held today, the Tories would win 205 seats. That means they’d control 60.7% of the seats in Parliament. That doesn’t beat the blowout 1984 Election, when Brian Mulroney’s PCs won over 75% of the seats in Parliament, but would be better than Mulroney’s 1988 performance, when they only managed to scoop up 57.3% of the seats.

Keep in mind that our federal ridings are changing, but, if an election were held today, the result would look like this:

That’s a lot of blue. In our weird little corner of the world, Hamilton Centre would be a lone NDP outpost in a sea of Tory blue. The Liberals would be pushed back to Toronto and some suburban ridings while the NDP and Greens would hold on to a couple of tiny spots (and, apparently, pick up in Davenport).

Justin time

So why, then, do we need to talk about Justin Trudeau?

Earlier in November, a Senator for PEI, Percy Downe, became one of the first high-profile former Liberals to call on the Prime Minister to step down. Downe, it should be noted, was appointed to the Senate as a Liberal under Jean Chrétien, whom he had served as Chief of Staff. When Trudeau moved to create a semi-independent Senate, Downe, with all the other Liberal senators, were removed from the Senate Liberal Caucus. While most former Liberals eventually created the “Progressive Senate Group”, Downe went off and joined the “Canadian Senators Group”, a group of former Conservative and independent senators. So he already wasn’t super into Trudeau’s leadership.

Recent polls indicate that around 2/3 of Canadians are dissatisfied with Justin Trudeau’s performance as Prime Minister. This includes 1/5 of Canadians who said they were “just tired of him.” Oooof. Other polls show that, among former Liberal voters, 91% of them say they oppose Trudeau because he’s “inauthentic”. Double oooof.

Trudeau’s slide is much of the reason Pierre Poilievre is riding high in the polls. Poilievre is a deeply unlikeable person, giving off big “Campus Tory heckling speakers at a peace march” vibes. A career politician (literally, the man has done nothing but work in politics), Poilievre has sharpened his performance, but has remained as ideologically rigid as possible, bringing a kind of internet-grievance-based focus to the contemporary Conservative Party that, when presented to the Canadian people in the form of a policy document, would likely raise some eyebrows.

Though polls also indicate that 52% of Canadians still wouldn’t vote Liberal, even if Trudeau was replaced by another leader.

So what’s going on here?

Canadian politics is increasingly adopting the American model of “leader-centricity”. The branding of the Liberals and NDP (for the latter, even at the provincial level) over the past couple of elections has really highlighted this.

Leaders names in big font, sometimes eclipsing the party’s logo, declaring that a local candidate is on “Team LEADER”.

While this works when your leader is popular, the association tends to stick even when the leader loses some of that shine. The Liberals were, in essence, rebuilt by “Team Trudeau” in the lead-up to 2015 and the decision to link him and the party was strategic. Harper was unpopular, Mulcair wasn’t really inspiring the Canadian people, and JT seemed like a breath of fresh air. But we’re 8 years on from that point, having gone through a global pandemic, a number of financial crises, and the slow-motion collapse of a global order that is really starting to impact the daily lives of Canadians.

Importantly, though, because Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are inexorably linked and the Liberals have been in power for 8 years, every problem that Canadians face is tied back to the Prime Minister, regardless of his connection to it.

People are discussing gender more openly? JT’s fault. The economy isn’t doing well because a global pandemic fried our fragile supply chains? JT’s fault. I’m behind on my mortgage and my employer won’t pay me more despite his buying a new yacht last year? JT’s fault.

In 2010, just two years into Obama’s presidency, the Republicans ran on a campaign that blamed the Democratic president for everything that was wrong with the country. “Thanks Obama” became a hashtag, a rallying cry, and a meme as the Republicans cruised to victory in mid-term elections that handed them control of the United States House of Representatives and multiple governorships.

Obama was handed a financial crisis that happened because of years of deregulation under successive Republican and Democratic administrations, aided by members of Congress from both parties, and pushed by advocates for the financial services industry and other wealthy interests. The crisis made life hard for people, who turned to Obama in an effort to solve some of the problem.

But Obama was beholden to the same economic system that caused the crisis. He was a very typical centre/centre-right politician who made slight adjustments to the way things worked in an effort to maintain the policies and structures that benefited some people while soothing some of the pain caused by the failure. But he wasn’t aiming for massive structural changes. And, even if he was, they wouldn’t have been evident within two years.

The same is true of Trudeau. He was never going to upend the system because that was never his goal. The Liberals are a party of steady moderation, ensuring the ship of government doesn’t crash into the ship of the economy. It might slide up beside it sometimes, nudging it along the way, but they’re mostly two separate ships in the night, charting their own distinct courses.

The Canadian people are angry because life is hard right now. The structures on which we have relied for such a long time have failed us, leaving so many people in a bad way. People look to their leaders, who have centralized power and control in a single office, to help them. But when help doesn’t come or is too slow to arrive, the people get mad and turn against those leaders. Rather than see a viable alternative presently in government, the people can’t see past the leader, whose star shines so bright, none of the other possible alternatives get any attention. So they turn to a different leader, who will inevitably act the same way, make the same mistakes, and have the people turn against them in 5 to 10 years.

And so the great treadmill of Canadian politics keeps looping around and around and around. Tory, Liberal, Tory, Liberal, Tory, Liberal. Paul Martin sucks, Stop Harper, F*ck Trudeau, Piss Off Pierre, Take a Hike Freeland, See Ya Later Lantsman.

But here’s the problem with that: while all that’s happening, while Canadians are pissed about a couple extra cents on their gas bill or extra taxes on home sales or government mismanagement of a file, people are actually getting hurt. Poilievre might just be spouting off talking points to excite a base eager for change, but those talking points are dehumanizing people. Opposing trans rights hurts people. Allowing the most violent fringe of his movement as much leeway as possible to placate them and ensure he has a smooth ride to power will cause harm. The policies of the contemporary Conservative party will cause harm. Actual, real harm.

Canada feels like it’s falling apart.

For some, that means a breakdown of an order they’re comfortable with. For some, that means their very humanity is targeted.

Canada feels like it’s falling apart.

And too few people feel like there’s a lasting alternative. Poilievre won’t fix it. He’ll just break it in new and terrifying ways. Only we can fix it. By decentralizing power and rejecting the hero worship our parties are forcing on us. The Liberals aren’t just Justin Trudeau, the NDP isn’t just Jagmeet Singh, the Greens aren’t just…well…okay, they’re pretty much just Elizabeth May right now.

But we have to restore independence and decency to the Commons, allow local leaders a chance to shine in their own parties, and ensure those leaders create reasonable succession plans. We need a media to ask tough questions instead of accepting talking points and spin from leaders. We need a strong civil society that can advocate for those who find themselves in the crosshairs of desperate and cynical politicians. And we need immediate electoral reform so that a party that can’t even consistently crack 40% support doesn’t control 2/3 of Parliament.

Canada feels like it’s falling apart.

And it is only us - you, me, and the people around us - who can fix it. Not JT, not Pierre, not any strong man or wonder woman. Us, together, in our communities, as one. Canada may feel like it’s falling apart, but it’ll only come undone if we let it.

A good tweet

Trustee time!

In an increasingly-regular feature, it’s time to look at the world of school trustee politics! Yay!

The HWDSB and Israel

Ward 2 HWDSB trustee Sabreina Dahab is under a Code of Conduct investigation. On Tuesday, Trustee Dahab announced that her fellow trustees launched an externally-overseen investigation into her social media activity, particularly the political positions she has maintained during the current conflict in Israel and Gaza.

This investigation was evidently initiated because of a complaint from one of Trustee Dahab’s fellow board members. In a statement, the Ward 2 representative said:

If this is indeed the case, this Code of Conduct investigation is getting into some murky territory. Trustees have a responsibility to not harm, mock, or dehumanize people, but to assume Sabreina’s politics does so would be a dangerous conflation of opposition to Israeli government policy and anti-Semitism. Calling for peace cannot be compared to calling for harm to be done to anyone in the region, as we know there isn’t simply one way to “deal” with Hamas. While the Likud-led government of Benjamin Netanyahu may assert the only approach can be one of violence, our democratic system allows us to have a fact-based disagreement about such government policies. It is not unreasonable to assume that a peace-based approach that values the lives of Israeli and Palestinian people can help to address the conflict in the region.

And, regardless, like…why is this something the HWDSB is dealing with? Who thinks that a review of a trustee’s social media posts about the current conflict will make anyone safer? When York’s Catholic board looked into Theresa McNichol, it was because she had been accused of targeted discrimination against Italian Canadian trustees. When Durham trustee Linda Stone was investigated, it was because she used her office to advance dehumanizing narratives about trans people and use board resources to peddle anti-trans conspiracy theories. But Trustee Dahab has made statements in support of Palestinians while opposing Israeli government policy. No matter your opinion on the conflict, if the HWDSB can’t see a difference, there’s a big problem.

The book bans come north

Well, it has finally happened. The trustees of the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB) have effectively banned four books with queer themes. The WCDSB has decided that four books - “Salma Writes a Book” by Danny Ramadan, “The Mystery of the Painted Fan” by Linda Trinh, “Princess Pru and the Ogre on the Hill” by Maureen Fergus, and “Jude Saves the World” by Ronnie Riley - are too “mature” for students and their use in schools is restricted to the “professional” shelves in libraries.

The publishers of these books call the move a “shadow ban”. The books are technically available, but students will have to ask a teacher to access them and that teacher must provide the student with the “Catholic context” for the book. I assume this would be much like the “Catholic context” I got in school, which was that homosexuality was a sin against God and that it wasn’t me that God hated, just the dirty, sinful little thoughts I had that, if I acted upon, would be a violation of God’s will. Formative.

The authors of the books, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the Association of Canadian Publishers have all come out against the WCDSB book ban. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the board will be changing the policy any time soon. What’s even more frightening is that this will likely encourage other boards, Catholic and Public, to pursue bans of their own, further limiting what students can learn and restricting access to materials that might be life-changing for those questioning their own identity at an important time in their lives.

The Alberta Party for Exceptional, Smart, Helpful, Inspiring Things

Way back in 1932, a whole bunch of little labour, farmer, socialist, progressive, and leftist groups got together to discuss forming a new political party that would combine their strength and more effectively advocate for regular people. They decided to meet in Calgary, a city that was the central hub for thousands of farmers and workers who had been at the forefront of the co-operative and community-focused movement for decades. The goal of that party was articulated some 11 years later by two of its founders, David Lewis and Frank Scott, who wrote that the party would:

That party, as we know, became the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner to today’s NDP.

The Alberta NDP won that province’s 2015 election, finally taking power in the province where they were formed. Alberta’s fractious right had split the vote and the NDP offered a strong alternative at a time when the province was struggling. By 2019, the right had regrouped, the NDP hadn’t solved all the province’s problems (four years is more than enough time to solve a financial crisis created by decades of poor planning, centralization of economic power in one industry, and populist economics /s), and the party was booted from office.

This past May, Albertans once again went to the polls in an election the NDP had a good shot at winning. Early polls had Rachel Notley’s NDP leading, sometimes by 10 points, but, by election day, a collapse in the separatist vote and the flagging fortunes of the centrist Alberta Party and Alberta Liberals saw Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party win a second majority.

Fast forward to yesterday. Former NDP cabinet minister and MLA for Calgary-Currie, Brian Malkinson, announced the creation of a new group called Alberta's Progressive Future (APF). The goal of the APF is to get a progressive government elected in that province and they believe the major thing standing in their way is the name of the NDP. Using polling data, the APF argues that Albertans see the Alberta NDP and immediately think of Jagmeet Singh, assuming the federal party (which is a little less pro-pipeline than the provincial party) calls the shots. According to Malkinson and the AFP folks, a re-named progressive party in Alberta could scoop up up to 24% more of the vote in the next provincial election.

Any provincial party aiming to change their name should be weary, though, especially considering how well that worked for the British Columbia Liberals. After governing the province on-and-off for 44 years (nearly 30% of BC’s existence), the party, which had been becoming more right-wing over the years, decided to rebrand to BC United this past April. Two months later, the newly re-named party bombed in two by-elections and the party’s leader told the media: “we knew that it would take time for voters to learn who we were and that we’d likely pay a price for having a relatively unknown brand.”6

Polls conducted after BC’s last election but before the BC Liberal/BC United re-brand had the party averaging 30% support. Now, they average 25%, with some polls having them as low as 19%. Support for the far-right BC Conservatives (they’re opposed to vaccines, “gender ideology”, and are super pro-non-consensual-rehab-for-addicts) has jumped from an average of 8% to 19%, with some polls even indicating they might form the Official Opposition.

Starting a new party is hard. It takes time for people to become familiar with a party’s aims, ideology, and campaign style. Re-branding a party up-ends a familiar entity, which can confuse voters if you don’t do a good enough job of creating hype and getting people engaged.

Case in point: The Netherlands is going to the polls next Wednesday. One of the leading parties that has a serious shot at being the largest in their next parliament (they use a system of PR and have 16 parties represented in their parliament) is the radical centrist group Nieuw Sociaal Contract or “New Social Contract” (but, like, did I need to translate that? Like, read the Dutch spelling out loud and tell me I needed to translate that). That party was formed 2 months ago, but it was based on a book/manifesto by an already-popular Dutch politician, Pieter Omtzigt, who has been in the House of Representatives for pretty much 20 years. Since forming the party, the media has been all over Omtzigt, hailing him as the “Dutch Macron” or an exciting “centrist outsider”. Contrast that with the re-branded GroenLinks–PvdA, an electoral alliance between the Dutch Green and Labour parties. Their fancy new party is on track to win the exact same number of seats both parties won combined in their last election.

All that said, should the Alberta NDP re-brand? The Canadian precedent indicates it could backfire, but each province has a different political culture. It could be the spark that re-ignites the Alberta NDP’s engine. Or, it could ruin the work they’ve done to build a reputation with the voters out west and allow a different party to swoop in and steal their thunder (heavy on the idioms this week, sorry). All I know is that we’re a long ways away from the ambitious goals of the CCF and a lot more mixed up in our politics. Ultimately, changing the name of a party might not be enough to stop our persistent slide away from that “full democratic society” those CCFers hoped for back in Calgary in 1932.

Cool facts for cool people

• The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) strike is, apparently, almost over. Thousands of Hamiltonian commuters were stranded for days while both sides tried to hammer out a deal. Not helping the matter early on was Ken Wilson, the International Vice President of the ATU. Wilson took to X/Twitter last week to blast Mayor Andrea Horwath about “bringing in scab labour” for the upcoming Grey Cup that’ll be held at Tim Horton’s Field. “Did you forget that your gold plated provincial pension was awarded to you by labour’s support you relied on for over 25 years[?]”, Wilson tweeted on November 10 along with a screenshot of information about how to get to Grey Cup events. A few slight problems: 1) Wilson posted a screenshot of a GO Transit notice. GO drivers are represented by ATU Local 1587 while HSR drivers are represented by ATU Local 107. Local 1587 is not on strike, nor are GO drivers presently acting as scabs. I would assume the International Vice President of that union would know that, but I guess not. 2) MPPs do not get pensions. That was something scrapped by the Harris government about…25 years ago. After labour abandoned the NDP under Bob Rae, Harris was able to win a massive majority and scrap pensions for elected officials. Someone get the ATU a PR firm!

• The Breach did a really great job highlighting the dangerous double standard at CTV in their coverage of the conflict between Israel and Gaza. In a report released last week, they found that many Palestinians shown on screen were not even named, allowed current Israeli government officials to advance their narrative without critique, and even had one of their anchors use the word “savage” to describe the conflict. Ignoring the countless Israeli and Palestinian voices that are crying out for peace while allowing far-right voices from Israeli parties like Likud, Otzma Yehudit, and HaTzionut HaDatit dominate the conversation does little to provide the context necessary for Canadian viewers to fully understand the conflict. Instead, CTV is content to advance the Revisionist, nationalist, and culturally exclusionary rhetoric of far-right politicians who have only enflamed tensions further. While Canada is still a democracy, we should be having balanced and historically-informed conversations about major international issues.