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The Next Canadian Government

So, Coyne does his job ... he provokes discussion. Here, in Army.ca and in other similar fora, someone expresses an opinion and one or two people either nod or say, "I call BS," but thousands of people read Coyne and many nod, in agreement, and many others disagree but think a bit. It's why newspapers like the Good Grey Globe have Opinion columnists.

Remember (1998) when Conrad Black bought the small Financial Post and converted it into the National Post? He intended, and everyone understood his intention, to have a quality newspaper that stood a bit to the principled right of the Globe and Mail. So, who was one of his first hires as a columnist for his Opinion pages? It was loony lefty Linda McQuaig!

Black and his editors understood that a good newspaper presents a range of opinions and aims to provoke informed discussion.

My apologies, I am just tiring of the panicked fear mongering that continues to get published, and promoted on this forum, about PP.

I will write him off when/if he is a shit PM. Not before.
 
My apologies, I am just tiring of the panicked fear mongering that continues to get published, and promoted on this forum, about PP.

I will write him off when/if he is a shit PM. Not before.
No need to apologize, my friend, I post Opinion pieces because I think we all need to think more and react less.
 
Konrad Yakabuski, writing in today's Globe and Mail, joins the worry about Pierre Poilievre winning without Québec ...
... ho hum, I reply:

----------

Why Pierre Poilievre can’t crack the Quebec code​


KONRAD YAKABUSKI
MONTREAL
PUBLISHED 9 HOURS AGO

Quebec Premier François Legault denied he was endorsing the federal Conservative Party when he last month called on the Bloc Québécois to vote for a Tory confidence motion to bring down Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.

No one in the Quebec media seemed to believe him.

After all, Mr. Legault had tried to put his thumb on the scales during the 2021 federal election campaign by rejecting the Liberals and New Democrats as “too centralizing,” and all but explicitly backing Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives. The paternalistically inclined Premier seemed last week to be once again telling Quebeckers how to vote at the federal level – just like his idol Maurice Duplessis did in the 1950s.

Despite being at the height of his popularity in 2021, Mr. Legault could not persuade Quebec voters to get behind the Tories. And with his personal poll numbers now tanking, his powers of political persuasion have likely only grown weaker.

This may go some way toward explaining why current Tory Leader Pierre Poilievrehas so far proved only marginally more successful than Mr. O’Toole at winning over Quebeckers. The Tories may be crushing the competition in the rest of Canada, but they remain stuck in third place in Quebec. An Abacus Data poll this week pegged Bloc support at 37 per cent, with the Liberals at 28 per cent. The Tories were stuck at just 22 per cent – up only slightly from the 18.6 per cent the party won in 2021.

Beyond their Quebec City-area strongholds, the Conservatives are a non-factor in most of the province’s 78 ridings. The party came in a distant fourth in the recent by-election in the Lasalle-Émard-Verdun riding, with only 11.5 per cent of the vote.

The Tories’ persistent failure to launch in Quebec might seem curious given Mr. Poilievre’s concerted efforts to woo voters in the province by emphasizing the same pocketbook issues that have boosted Tory fortunes in the rest of the country.

He has made repeated trips to targeted Quebec ridings. While he denigrates public and private mainstream media in English Canada, and largely boycotts them, Mr. Poilievre has granted regular interviews to Radio-Canada and TVA and adopted a far less abrasive style in his interactions with journalists in the province.

While the Alberta-bred Mr. Poilievre speaks accented French – despite his French-sounding name, his first language is English – he is vastly more comfortable in the language of Molière than Mr. O’Toole or Andrew Scheer, who struggled to string together sentences in French, or even Stephen Harper, who spoke decipherable French. Mr. Poilievre’s Venezuelan-born and Quebec-raised wife, Anaida Poilievre, speaks flawless French with a Québécois accent and is featured in Tory ads that have been saturating the Quebec airwaves in recent weeks.

So what gives?

Le Journal de Montréal columnist Philippe Léger recently came up with five reasons Mr. Poilievre has failed to seduce Quebeckers. The first relates to Quebeckers’ refusal to import English Canada’s “more polarized and grotesque” political culture. “The Bloc Québécois translates this refusal and plays the adult in the room.”

Please. Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet is no choir boy and punches below the belt, too. In justifying the Bloc’s move to vote against the first Tory confidence motion last month, effectively propping up the Liberals, he said: “The Conservatives are bad for Quebec. I would not replace a viper with a tarantula or vice versa.”

Mr. Léger is closer to the mark in identifying Mr. Poilievre’s opposition to Quebec’s secularism law, known as Bill 21, which bans the wearing of religious symbols by some public employees. Mr. Trudeau is even more stridently opposed to the law and has said Ottawa would intervene before the Supreme Court to have it struck down. But the Liberal base in anglophone and allophone Quebec is solidly against Bill 21.

Mr. Léger is also correct in underscoring the strong consensus in Quebec in favour of medical assistance in dying, abortion rights, gun control and the environment. Those issues derailed the Quebec campaigns of Mr. O’Toole and Mr. Scheer. And Mr. Poilievre appears to be no more successful in shaking these monkeys off his back.

Still, perhaps the main reason Mr. Poilievre has failed to crack the “Quebec code” is that he is a non-Quebecker. Mr. Léger did not mention that one. But the reality is that no non-Quebecker has become prime minister and won a majority of the province’s seats since Lester Pearson in 1965. The last non-Quebec-born Tory leader to sweep the province was John Diefenbaker in 1958, and that was thanks to Mr. Duplessis.

Francophone Quebeckers seem to prefer to vote for a party whose leader is one of them. There is not much Mr. Poilievre can do about it. That aspect of the Quebec code may simply be uncrackable.

----------

OK, Mr Yakubuski is probably right:
  • The "Québec code" maybe be uncrackable for M Poilievre or anyone who is not a native son (or daughter); and
  • M Poilievre cannot pull off a Diefenbaker (1957) or Mulroney (1984) level of victory without carrying Québec; but
it is quite possible to win a tub-thumping majority (200+ seats) and reduce the Liberals to 3rd party status, nationally, while carrying only a handful (less than 10) of Québec's 78 seats.

Equally, it is quite possible to govern Canada well without Québec - NOT against Québec, just without either much in the way of popular or political support in la belle province.
 
I've raised this issue before, it's a provincial and local matter but there is, very likely, an enabling role for the national government and fiscal support will certainly be needed:

----------

My Toronto transit ride shows why it’s not wrong to consider involuntary care for the mentally ill​

MARCUS GEE
TORONTO
PUBLISHED 1 HOUR AGO

Should authorities detain people who refuse to get treatment for severe mental illness and addiction? That question has moved to the front burner in many Canadian cities. My ride to work on a Toronto streetcar this week showed why.

When I got on, a guy was lying passed out or asleep on the long bench at the back, taking up all the seats. A barefoot man in dirty clothes was walking up and down the aisle. At Yonge Street, just in front of the Eaton Centre, he got off and meandered unsteadily through the midday crowd.

Three others got on. One was a big guy in sweats and a hoodie. He took a seat, talking incoherently to no one in particular. Every few words was a curse. Another was a skinny guy with tangled hair who was dragging a beat-up rolling suitcase and muttering to himself in Spanish. The third was a middle-aged woman in jean shorts and red slippers in the shape of rabbits. She was playing music on a portable speaker, turned up high, and shouting at some invisible enemy.

In another age, a cop might have carted them all off to a jail cell or a dank asylum. The mentally ill were society’s ultimate outcasts, locked away and forgotten. Those days are thankfully over.

But that it was wrong to pen them up doesn’t make it right to leave them to wander the streets in such a state. Scenes like the one on my streetcar, and often far worse, have become common in our cities as Canada suffers through a triple epidemic of mental illness, addiction and homelessness.

It’s heartbreaking to see these lost souls lying on the sidewalks or riding the subway, alone and unaided. Though the vast majority pose no threat to anyone, a rare few can be violent. The case last month in which one man was killed and another left with a severed hand in downtown Vancouver stands out. Authorities said the suspect in the attacks had a long record of interactions with police related to his mental condition.

Governments are promising to take action. In British Columbia, NDP Premier David Eby says that if his government is re-elected on Oct. 19 it will develop a system to compel those with severe addictions, mental illnesses or brain injuries to get treatment. Alberta’s United Conservative Party government is working on something similar.

Mayors have been especially vocal. This week Brampton’s Patrick Brown became the latest to call for more involuntary care. He said that, since 2022, regional police have taken more than 30,000 calls related to mental health and addictions.

Some advocates for the mentally ill say it is all part of a vicious backlash that would criminalize and stigmatize society’s most vulnerable members. That is a simplification. Most people are not demanding change because they are bigots. They are reacting to what they see all around them. And what they see is not good. Whatever systems exist to care for the unfortunate people who live on our streets are visibly failing.

For those who are not willing or able to accept help, perhaps because they have stopped taking their medications and have lost the ability to make sensible decisions, some measure of compulsion – with all the right checks and balances – seems reasonable.

As British Columbia’s Mr. Eby put it, “this is a group of people that need intensive interventionist support.” They are “incapable, by definition, of asking for the care that they need.”

Remember that he is a former head of the province’s civil liberties association, and so well aware of the importance of limiting the state’s power to hold citizens against their will. Yet, like many of us, he can see that something is not working.

Under the current rules in many jurisdictions, people can be detained for more than 72 hours only if they pose a danger to themselves or others. In practice that often means that unless they are demonstrably suicidal or violent, they are given minimal attention then released to roam the streets again. Their families are left powerless to help them and they descend into the miserable condition in which the rest of us so often see them.

In the name of respecting the rights of the mentally ill, we have essentially abandoned them to their fate. And what a fate. Today’s streets carry many dangers. They can be stripped of their belongings in an instant. They can become the victim of a sexual assault. They can get addicted to drugs and succumb to a deadly dose of fentanyl.

The mood on my midday streetcar ride was tense. My fellow commuters exchanged nervous glances or stared blankly out the windows, trying to pretend nothing was happening. The streetcar rolled on.

----------
We, 🇨🇦 society at large, decided, back in the late 1960s, that:
  • It was wrong to "warehouse" the mentally ill; and
  • They should be cared for in the community.
The big problem was that we declined to give "communities" (our own towns and cities) the resources need for the tasks - the plural maters a lot.

The problem Marcus Gee sees on one Toronto streetcar is equally visible on city streets from Victoria to St Johns. It's a national problem and the national government must play a leadership role in solving it.
 
I've raised this issue before, it's a provincial and local matter but there is, very likely, an enabling role for the national government and fiscal support will certainly be needed:

----------

My Toronto transit ride shows why it’s not wrong to consider involuntary care for the mentally ill​

MARCUS GEE
TORONTO
PUBLISHED 1 HOUR AGO

Should authorities detain people who refuse to get treatment for severe mental illness and addiction? That question has moved to the front burner in many Canadian cities. My ride to work on a Toronto streetcar this week showed why.

When I got on, a guy was lying passed out or asleep on the long bench at the back, taking up all the seats. A barefoot man in dirty clothes was walking up and down the aisle. At Yonge Street, just in front of the Eaton Centre, he got off and meandered unsteadily through the midday crowd.

Three others got on. One was a big guy in sweats and a hoodie. He took a seat, talking incoherently to no one in particular. Every few words was a curse. Another was a skinny guy with tangled hair who was dragging a beat-up rolling suitcase and muttering to himself in Spanish. The third was a middle-aged woman in jean shorts and red slippers in the shape of rabbits. She was playing music on a portable speaker, turned up high, and shouting at some invisible enemy.

In another age, a cop might have carted them all off to a jail cell or a dank asylum. The mentally ill were society’s ultimate outcasts, locked away and forgotten. Those days are thankfully over.

But that it was wrong to pen them up doesn’t make it right to leave them to wander the streets in such a state. Scenes like the one on my streetcar, and often far worse, have become common in our cities as Canada suffers through a triple epidemic of mental illness, addiction and homelessness.

It’s heartbreaking to see these lost souls lying on the sidewalks or riding the subway, alone and unaided. Though the vast majority pose no threat to anyone, a rare few can be violent. The case last month in which one man was killed and another left with a severed hand in downtown Vancouver stands out. Authorities said the suspect in the attacks had a long record of interactions with police related to his mental condition.

Governments are promising to take action. In British Columbia, NDP Premier David Eby says that if his government is re-elected on Oct. 19 it will develop a system to compel those with severe addictions, mental illnesses or brain injuries to get treatment. Alberta’s United Conservative Party government is working on something similar.

Mayors have been especially vocal. This week Brampton’s Patrick Brown became the latest to call for more involuntary care. He said that, since 2022, regional police have taken more than 30,000 calls related to mental health and addictions.

Some advocates for the mentally ill say it is all part of a vicious backlash that would criminalize and stigmatize society’s most vulnerable members. That is a simplification. Most people are not demanding change because they are bigots. They are reacting to what they see all around them. And what they see is not good. Whatever systems exist to care for the unfortunate people who live on our streets are visibly failing.

For those who are not willing or able to accept help, perhaps because they have stopped taking their medications and have lost the ability to make sensible decisions, some measure of compulsion – with all the right checks and balances – seems reasonable.

As British Columbia’s Mr. Eby put it, “this is a group of people that need intensive interventionist support.” They are “incapable, by definition, of asking for the care that they need.”

Remember that he is a former head of the province’s civil liberties association, and so well aware of the importance of limiting the state’s power to hold citizens against their will. Yet, like many of us, he can see that something is not working.

Under the current rules in many jurisdictions, people can be detained for more than 72 hours only if they pose a danger to themselves or others. In practice that often means that unless they are demonstrably suicidal or violent, they are given minimal attention then released to roam the streets again. Their families are left powerless to help them and they descend into the miserable condition in which the rest of us so often see them.

In the name of respecting the rights of the mentally ill, we have essentially abandoned them to their fate. And what a fate. Today’s streets carry many dangers. They can be stripped of their belongings in an instant. They can become the victim of a sexual assault. They can get addicted to drugs and succumb to a deadly dose of fentanyl.

The mood on my midday streetcar ride was tense. My fellow commuters exchanged nervous glances or stared blankly out the windows, trying to pretend nothing was happening. The streetcar rolled on.

----------
We, 🇨🇦 society at large, decided, back in the late 1960s, that:
  • It was wrong to "warehouse" the mentally ill; and
  • They should be cared for in the community.
The big problem was that we declined to give "communities" (our own towns and cities) the resources need for the tasks - the plural maters a lot.

The problem Marcus Gee sees on one Toronto streetcar is equally visible on city streets from Victoria to St Johns. It's a national problem and the national government must play a leadership role in solving it.
Mr C I made a podcast dealing with MH and agree with the premise of a secure MH facility - for those that cannot be trusted because of MH conditions.
 
Mr C I made a podcast dealing with MH and agree with the premise of a secure MH facility - for those that cannot be trusted because of MH conditions.
100%

We need the ability to treat those who need it, even if they don't want to/can't recognize that they need the treatment.

Also, for civil society to work, we can't have mentally unstable people running amok. Civil society is predicated on all/most people following the rules. When we introduce a large enough number of people who can't/won't follow those rules, things start unravelling.
 
The case last month in which one man was killed and another left with a severed hand in downtown Vancouver stands out.
We were in Vancouver when that happened. My wife had an accident was in St Paul's Hospital for a week. I was outside the hotel, approx. 0740, and saw all the police vehicles half a block away (where the second person was murdered). Vancouver streets are filled with people trying to fly, screaming, scavenging. Around St Paul's it is really bad.
 
We were in Vancouver when that happened. My wife had an accident was in St Paul's Hospital for a week. I was outside the hotel, approx. 0740, and saw all the police vehicles half a block away (where the second person was murdered). Vancouver streets are filled with people trying to fly, screaming, scavenging. Around St Paul's it is really bad.

Dc Comics Joker GIF by Max
 
I want to believe that there are very few individuals who the only reasonable solution is a secure mental health facility. I would argue that the majority of individuals who have MH issues (excluding drug addiction) could function on their own as long as they can have access to the medications they need. Group homes, or assisted living facilities where the staff provides assistance in getting them employment, increasing their life skills, and keeping them on their meds. But there will always be some who are beyond this help, or who actively want nothing to do with their meds.

I speak on this from personal experience. I have a nephew who has some developmental issues and a physical impairment and has had them since birth. They have both limited his ability to obtain adequate schooling that will allow him to gain anything more than minimum wage employment when he graduates this year. He has two issues that will the largest impediments to him being self sufficient. First, he has anger issues that lead to violence. Some of it is linked to his MH, but some of it is a learned behavior from what he saw growing up. Because of his size, he knows if he gets violent, he eventually gets what he wants from his mother or those around him. He then takes his meds, calms down, and is usually apologetic for his behavior. The second issue is his mother wants to keep him dependent on her. It keeps the checks rolling in. He is smart enough to get himself around town on his bike, use money and buy things without supervision. He is relatively electronically savvy. He can look after himself, including laundry, cleaning and basic cooking. He could easily handle employment stocking Walmart shelves or other non-public facing employment. I have argued with that side of the family they should be trying to find him a placement somewhere in an assisted living/group home so he can be more self sufficient. But they refuse to listen. So, when his mother is gone, he'll likely be one of those individuals who needs to be locked in a secure facility.
 
We were in Vancouver when that happened. My wife had an accident was in St Paul's Hospital for a week. I was outside the hotel, approx. 0740, and saw all the police vehicles half a block away (where the second person was murdered). Vancouver streets are filled with people trying to fly, screaming, scavenging. Around St Paul's it is really bad.
The Province does not want to put them into long term care/detention facilities, because then they hold the bill. They much prefer the municipalities to deal with the issue with their budget. that was one of the reasons for closing the institutions in the first place.
 
Just got back, a little late to the party.

If Quebec wants another referendum, it should have to detail what it'll cost Canada and what it intentions/ expectations are from the rest of the country, after it leaves.

Then make it a country wide referendum to remove Quebec's sword over Canada's head. Do we keep them or do we finally cut them loose. This is an issue that affects the whole of the country, the whole of the country needs a say.
 
The Province does not want to put them into long term care/detention facilities, because then they hold the bill. They much prefer the municipalities to deal with the issue with their budget. that was one of the reasons for closing the institutions in the first place.
If memory serves, there were a number of experts who chimed in stating that living in the community was a much healthier choice. I think they closed the schools for the handicapped at the same time. One size fits all with no thought given to the ones who needed that extra bit of help.
 
If memory serves, there were a number of experts who chimed in stating that living in the community was a much healthier choice. I think they closed the schools for the handicapped at the same time. One size fits all with no thought given to the ones who needed that extra bit of help.
That was the public line, but the driving force at the time was to reduce the budget and the politicians jumped on this as a way to get two birds from a bush.
 
Meanwhile, Canada leads in the bottom half - a bit better than I expected actually but not super awesome of course:

1728342082564.png
 
If memory serves, there were a number of experts who chimed in stating that living in the community was a much healthier choice. I think they closed the schools for the handicapped at the same time. One size fits all with no thought given to the ones who needed that extra bit of help.
When the earth had cooled I was in Grade 1 and my bus seat friend was in Gr 11 or 12. He went to work at the “Training School” for the developmentally delayed. Flash forward a few decades and those schools were seen as cruel. So they closed them all. And now they are in the mainstream schools. Pretty much each grade has a developmental issue kid and some of them aren’t pleasant.
 
Ducking back into this thread with an observation: a few weeks back we were musing Constitutional amendment to change the Senate, and the difficulty of getting the 7 provinces with 50% of population lines up to support that or any other Constitutional change. I’d say the NDP election in BC, and last night’s Liberal victory in New Brunswick over Blaine Higgs had spiked the guns on lining up enough Conservative provincial legislatures any time soon.
 
If there is one truism in Confederation, it is that an NB Government is always for sale….
 
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