No mention of the NDP. If only that was the “something different” people were willing to try.

  • People are mad, I don’t blame them for being mad. I blame them for being stupid enough to think the Conservatives will make anything better.

    We spent 11 years under Harper watching housing prices skyrocket too, even with the global housing collapse in the middle he still left prices 40% higher than when they started.

    The conservatives are going to get 4 years, and they’re going to spend the entire time blaming the fact that things are still getting worse on the Liberals. They may even get a second 4 years before people realize that the Conservatives also can’t(or won’t) fix the affordability problems.

    • My favorite part comes in 6 years when the Conservatives have lost again and they’re campaigning on all the problems they caused in heir tenure while blaming said problems on the Liberals.

    • People are blaming the federal government for things that their elected premiers have caused. Just look at the provincial landscape, nearly all conservative premiers.

      And premiers are the ones who affect our daily lives.

      Yes, people are stupid. If more of them spent less time thinking about fucking Trudeau, maybe they’d see who’s actually causing their hardships.

    • It’s frustrating seeing conservative followers claim the the current government is lying to them based only on the lies they are hearing from conservative leaders.

      Is no one capable of fact checking what they hear? It’s exhausting hearing the same bogus statements over and over and over.

        • Listening to anyone doesn’t mean you’re getting all the facts. We have to do our own legwork here instead of allowing ourselves to simply agree with what our confirmation bias dictates and some politician says.

          That’s what our opinions should be based on instead … facts alone.

    • Harper implemented the points system for immigration. This caused house prices to skyrocket because only the wealthy were allowed into Canada and they can pay it. Then they buy up a bunch of houses and rent each room out to students to pay the mortgage and not have to work.

      • Comments like this make it clear you have no idea how bad it is in the poorest states, and delusional if you think a system designed to extract the maximum value from each consumer means health care is going to cost you less. I can only assume from you’re statement that you aren’t making 6 figures or more, so you likely will see worse healthcare under a private rather than better. Poverty is twice as high in America, and three times as high in Mississippi, the poorest state.

        Housing is also a serious issue, and is affecting far too many people, but the indications are it is just as bad in America.

        I don’t think adopting their policies are going to improve our state.

        • I do. I lived down south frequently. Even the Globe and Mail was decrying Ontario bring poorer than Mississippi and Alabama recently. Only person here doesn’t know what goes on is you. I’m not patriotic and am tired of people who are to the point of wilful blindness. You assume a lot trying to blather a response. Our healthcare is shit and costs people who make under a hundred a year more in tax than insurance would, despite all the horror stories our media loves to push, that are nothing but (very effective) propaganda.

          • Having lived in several different countries with both public and private healthcare, I can say with confidence that privatization is the death of a healthcare system.

            Health for profit makes everyone’s care worse except for the really rich, who still end up paying more under that system than they otherwise would have.

            Even something like government reimbursemrnt for privatized healthcare means public health care suffers, as public institutions now have to compete with higher salaries paid by private hospitals, slowly eroding the system from the inside out.

            There’s no such thing as cheap healthcare, but public systems are a hell of a lot better at keeping it affordable and accessible.

          • Dude, there’s areas down there where they have open sewer canals filled with shit between houses and there’s like one whole doctor in a county. Yeah, a rich white person in Mississippi is probably better off than a poor Canadian. Most Mississippians aren’t rich.

            Our healthcare is shit and costs people who make under a hundred a year more in tax than insurance would

            Canada spends less per-capita on healthcare than America by a good margin. I’m not sure where you got this, all that comes up are political think-tanks, but that suggests the per-capita payment would be lower even before the private insurers take a cut.

            that are nothing but (very effective) propaganda.

            For who? Nobody makes big money off of public hospitals. Doctors and nurses make just enough to keep them there, administrators at least where I live are few and far between, and all are under-resourced and overworked.

  • Well, I partly blame the NDP too. They are not actually putting forth bold social-democratic policy proposals. Nothing to actually you know, inspire people to vote for them. Just peddling little adjustments here and there, terrified of being called socialists.

      • That’s exactly what I’m calling tinkering at the edges.

        We need plans for housing, for transit, for healthcare, for research and innovation, for the green transition, for climate adaptation, etc etc. The Conservatives are a disaster on all those fronts and the Liberals’ plan is to have no plan and let things sort themselves out. The NDP? Where are the big ideas, the bold plans, the radical breaks with the unsustainable status quo? Pharmacare isn’t it…

        There was a few years ago something called the Leap Manifesto, which was in scope similar to the left US Democrats’ “green new deal”. A bold vision for the big changes we need to make. Not nitpicky details about this or that side issue that we are going to convince the big kids to kindly provide, but a Big Story why people should vote us in government. That’s what I’m talking about.

    • I think you hit the nail on the head: the leadership of the NDP is terrified of being called socialists. A lot of them are Rae-era veterans and remember very clearly the utter ratfucking they took from the establishment, and they’re desperately trying to appear “sensible” to appeal to our gatekeepers.

      The problem is that they’ll always be called socialists, no matter how much they try to appease the Very Serious People that run things. Floyd Laughren has a tale about this, where he & Rae met with the banks and larger businesses of Ontario with their fully-costed plans for the next four years, only to have the banks say “That’s nice, but we’re still going to destroy you”. Mulcair went right of Trudeau in 2015 and they were still calling him a radical left Marxist socialists. Hell, they call Trudeau a radical leftists despite his being more right-wing, economically, than Mulroney.

      Meanwhile, Conservatives can be as fundamentally unserious as they want, and are never held to account.

      The NDP needs to stop ducking punches, stand up, and make the wealthy explain why giving them more tax cuts will somehow make things better. Co-opt the “Make ____ Great Again” slogan, but make it about marginal tax rates and being able to see a doctor same-day. And they should do it knowing that the wealthy will have a hissy fit.

    • After the Reform party took over the Cons every party shifted one to the right

      If you thought people voting Reform would swap to voting for social policies then I don’t know what to tell you but more Canadians are in favour of privatizing healthcare than against it (if you include want to try it but worried it might not be better)

      • Trudeau’s government isn’t a far right as the Chretien Liberals, let alone the Mulroney PCs.

        People forget the cost cutting and devolution of healthcare and other programs that occurred under Chretien in the name of balancing the federal budget, a policy they kept right through the Chretien and Martin years.

        They actively avoided getting into social policy reform as much as possible. For example, weed legalization was absolutely shot down by that government. In this aspect they were largely a care-taker government.

        Trudeau has expanded public programs, legalized weed, prioritized diversity in cabinet, etc.

        • prioritized diversity in cabinet

          This doesn’t really mean anything, like his equal girls and boys shtick was just more right wing “wokeism” where they play around Gender having meaning and tokenism

          Naturally we would have a more diverse cabinet due to demographics shifts and education

          I will say anytime he has bad press he does come up with some left wing policy to change the narrative like his putting trans protections in the Charter. Even though they were already protected by it

  • Pierre Trudeau was written off for each of his last three elections. He ended up in power from 1968 until 1984, broken only by the 7 months of minority PC government under Clark.

    The Liberals aren’t campaigning, while PP has been burning cash in election mode for months. Once the writ is dropped, it’s a completely different ball game. The Liberals were in third place behind the CPC and NDP when the writ was dropped in 2015. Campaigns matter.