SpankyMcFarland

He has to inspire trust on the Trump file. That’s what he’s missing I think.

The US still runs a large trade surplus with us on dairy products and a truly YUGE one on agricultural products overall. How do they manage that despite all our nasty, unfair trade practices? Might it have anything to do with the large subsidies paid to farmers down there or the army of illegal workers who do the milking and picking? I didn’t hear much talk from Trump about all that in yesterday’s deranged borefest.

He’s had this daft idea most of his life.

It would extremely odd to agree with everything a party proposes or did.

Poilievre doesn’t have to mention Carney and the Liberals every time he talks about Trump. It’s mixing domestic and foreign policy in an awkward way. He’s already seen as too divisive, partisan and extreme by many in the centrist target group he needs to win over and not a committed Team Canada player. Let people draw their own conclusions about how he measures up to Carney on the Trump file. By contrast, he can talk about affordability and the Liberals as much as he likes. That’s a regular election issue where he has credibility across a wide swathe of the political spectrum. Just my opinion.

The Falkland Islanders better mend their ways, all three thousand of them: And those nasty-radical-left penguins on the Heard and McDonald Islands are asking for it. No more will they mock us:

I didn’t like the way Trudeau wanted to deal with the capital gains tax issue, including for medical corporations. I’ve never had a corporation myself and I’m agnostic as to whether medical professionals should be considered as small businesses, given that the business risks they run are much, much smaller than your average guy opening a restaurant or store who faces the prospect of customers disappearing on a daily basis, but once you set up up tax rates that people make long-term decisions on, then arbitrarily increasing them by a large amount seems like a bad idea to me. Anyway, Carney says such changes will not happen which I think is a wise move.

Let’s not be too tough on the pollsters. They are in a fiendishly difficult line of work. It’s like watching a soccer game at field level behind one set of goalposts - you just see people chaotically running about most of the time. Some pundits are saying what you’re saying and I think some of them are pollsters too, so in the event of a Tory win they’ll explain that they weren’t all that wrong. We all know the Liberal rise is new and what rises so fast can fall again just as rapidly. Mark McQueen’s recent piece in the Toronto Star points out that affordability polls as a substantially bigger issue than Trump in one poll. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/the-conservatives-have-a-plan-but-the-liberals-have-something-you-cant-plan-for/article_5b4b9f9d-d3ac-43e4-84ee-22ade456b562.html

At least we’re not alone now. Trump has made the fateful decision to take on the rest of the world and for the moment we’re all singing from the same songbook. The US tech industry must be worried. In most markets, they’ve wiped out advertisers and local media while providing very little local work or income and have accentuated polarization and alienation among young people. What’s not to dislike for foreign governments? Many of them must be thinking about digital services taxes at the moment, if only to pay for the damage these arrogant, unaccountable foreigners are wreaking.

Of course there are people out there who imagine Chinese influence is confined to the Liberals, bless their hearts. And you think Smith has been helping the Tory campaign? Would you like to give her a bigger role?

Poilievre doesn’t seem to understand that you can compete with somebody without even mentioning them. When it comes to Trump he should talk just about that absurd balloon and not bring Carney into it at all. Voters are bright enough to draw their own conclusions, thank you very much.

I would say I’m a Blue Grit politically but the smallness of Newfoundland blurs the partisan lines. Provincially, I can go either way as there’s no difference in the two main parties on anything really. Federally, I’ve generally voted Liberal although I donated to the campaign of a friend of mine who ran for the Conservatives. I had to break it to him afterwards that I wasn’t a true member of his tribe. It has also happened that I wasn’t a big fan of the candidate whose party I’d like to vote for, one of FPTP’s many, many failings. You can get to know people close and personal down here, sometimes too much so. Beyond policy, I think I liked Erin O’Toole the most of the recent federal leaders. He had an almost anti-charismatic feeling about him, no theatrics.

It’s such an odd campaign, dominated by the whims of a delinquent foreign octogenarian. Many of the new Liberal supporters have misgivings about the party and its troubled stewardship of the country this last decade. Carney is definitely striking a more centrist tone on policy and ducking a debate shows he also has insight into his limitations. He’s a very old dog to be learning new tricks at this stage.

Danielle Smith is clearly a Chinese-made robot working for the Liberals.

So you think Mexican levels of drugs could be coming over and the Americans would be too stupid to know that? That’s your position?

It’s not meaningless at all. It’s a measure of the amount getting through and the amount is being grossly overstated. You think the Americans wouldn’t notice if Mexican levels of fentanyl were coming across their northern border?

Bloody hell, the amount of fentanyl seized by the US last year that is definitely attributable to Canada may be less than one pound! Did you get that, Republicans? One frigging pound. We’ll use your weirdly anachronistic system of weights so as not to confuse you. Great work by the Globe here. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-new-fentanyl-data-undercuts-white-houses-portrayal-of-canadas-role-in/

What matters in general elections is who wins. What usually matters more in special elections, or by-elections, is the swing. America is one of the few democracies with only two big parties. This is problematic for many reasons but at least makes swing assessments between them easy. And the swing in these Florida elections was significant. Any Republican politician who won by less than 15 points will be taking interest and wondering quietly whether Trump’s real agenda of tariff taxes, chainsaw cuts to government and antagonizing every friendly country on earth is really for them.

Another politically clueless press conference by Danielle Smith. In the event of a Grit win she should pen a memoir along these lines: Pierre Poilievre My Part in His Downfall.

This remains my favourite deselection story which may say more about me than I care to think about: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jerry-bance-marketplace-1.3217797

I don’t think it would be a headline issue discussed by governments in trade talks. Look at recreational drugs like N-bomb. They bring tragedy to families across the world, including Canada, but the numbers are too small to merit wider discussion.

The vetting of candidates is going to become challenging as more of their lives are documented than ever before. We’re dealing with people who are passionate about politics already and who may have held extreme views in the past. The Conservatives dealt with this disturbed person swiftly: https://www.ctvnews.ca/federal-election-2025/article/conservative-candidate-gets-boot-after-ctv-news-uncovers-audio-of-him-supporting-public-hangings-joked-trudeau-should-receive-death-penalty/ I’d say all parties are just praying they don’t have to drop people later in the campaign.

They are also saying he is part of the ‘elite’, very weird for a part of the political spectrum that used to celebrate success. I don’t know anybody who is saying that ‘Canadian conservatives are identical to 'maga'’ but there is an overlap which is quite different. It is undeniable that some Tory voters approve of Trump. I meet Canadians like that all the time. Generally speaking, they have no big problem with Trump’s grotesque history of outright fraud.

If all the fentanyl used in the US last year was the amount smuggled in from Canada, nobody would be talking about it. It wouldn’t be a significant problem.

Anyway, thank goodness he is gone. I hope no more like him lurk among the candidates of any party.