There was a time when Canadians with different points of view could sit around a table and have a spirited but respectful debate. Why have we allowed this polarization to happen? It is okay not to agree on everything, in fact critical for a successful team to bring individual perspectives to the table. (with the exception of hate speech) It is up to each and everyone one of us to not buy into the hate and disrespect that passes as politics these days. We need a Prime Minister who can stoically work to weave the tapestry that is our country into something we can all be proud of. Unfortunately, I do not know where that person is. The politics of today tend to spit those people out of the system and nurture the opposite
Really, more divided than 1995, when 35% of the country came within a few thousand votes of splitting off, and Mr. Harper was talking about how we'd have to break up Quebec if they did, only let them take the districts that were over 50%? (Which I agreed with, most Indigenous districts were 95% against, and so I voted Harper the next time he ran.)
Well, I thought The Line rejected bullshit.
The country is much less divided than America, in polling terms (wide agreement on abortion across provinces, for instance). But. It has had an actual separatiste party at one end, for nearly 50 years; they still explicitly champion the idea. And we Albertans have a nutty little one at the other end, that changes name every decade (Reform/Wild Rose/Wexit/Maverick) but never their hiliarious political orientation, that a landlocked province should split off.
An orientation responsible for my Facebook friends that endlessly post, not mild expressions of annoyance and disapproval, but red-faced accusations of: treasonous fake pandemic, treasonous real pandemic developed with Masters in China, treasonous sabotage of the vital oil industry. (Sabotaged it with a $4.5B gift, I guess. I should have such enemies.)
Yes, all politicians have to take that rhetoric, but Trudeau's literally on his second generation of it, and it is the "alt-right" have have become much more loud and harsh with their claims of conspiracy and treason for, oh, the last five years, for some reason, and ramped up more since 2020. Canada invented "The Proud Boys", but not the Trudeau family. When do liberals do "divisive" like The Proud Boys?
Speaking of "divisive", the big change this election is a whole new political party, one that, umm, DIVIDES the Right into the Regular Andrew Potter Right, and the "alt-right". And those alt-righters shade over into gravel-throwing (extremely divisive) treason-accusers. I'm sure Mr. O'Toole thinks of Mr. Bernier as MUCH more divisive than he thinks Mr. Trudeau is; Bernier is more likely to cost him seats. (Why did nobody do the old joke this election of "What would O'Toole do with a gun with two bullets, in an elevator with Kim Jong-Un and Bernier?" Shoot Bernier twice to be sure, of course.)
If you want to rail against "divisive", Mr. Potter, champion the end of first-past-the-post, and beat on JT for not doing it.
Jen, me thinks this is a candidate for the bullshit bulletin. The headline "our leaders are weaponizing our national divisions" then devolves into an indictment of one leader. Be honest about it in the headline.
"And this is why the “all of the parties are divisive” line won’t wash. Even if there is plenty of blame to go around, the prime minister has a special role to play in all of this, a special set of responsibilities, precisely because he is the prime minister."
Frankly there is a pox on all their houses! The internet has spawned the age of outrage by creating a virtual town square where all voices and typically those who yell the most with least reason to be heard are in fact the most often heard. There are examples of this division being stoked by all leaders.
I see that Trudeau channeled the frustration and anger at antivaxxers and hospital targeted demonstrations as much as the Jib Jab like video channeled the Anti-Trudeau derangement syndrome. A syndrome transferred from Harper to Trudeau.
Simply, this was an election about your preferred leader by the leader who at the time had the poll-preference. That is on Trudeau. As such this election is petty and small like the leaders with a complete absence of a vision from any them. At the same time there is no discernable bench strength for any of the parties. As a result, I suspect we as an electorate are voting less for something and more against an individual.
Want to end this, then agitate to amend the fixed election date to enshrine the fall of a minority government based solely on the defeat of legislations or non-confidence. I am not a PMJT cult follower and see the man for what he has shown himself to be. As they all have through their demonstrable records.
Again, I call bullshit on the content versus the lead, especially on election day.
Wow, I'm sure a lot of people who just want to point at Trudeau as the cause of everything are going to love this article. Hey, lets get this out of the way, Trudeau, a Liberal politician is not going to do things that Right Wing Conservatives will support the same way O'Toole and his predecessors aren't going to appeal to progressives. No controversy here.
Where I do take issue is that while Trudeau may be a genuinely dislikeable politician to some, (even some of those voting for his party), the opposition and division surrounding him on the right has been in play when he was still the "Drama teacher leading the 3rd place party in the house". The Conservatives tried to use the same divisive rhetoric they used against previous Liberal Leaders (Michael "Just Visiting" Ignatieff and Stephane Dion). Sun News Network set up around the same time and at some points it was negative attacks on Trudeau nearly 24-7. While the network may be gone, the architects are still alive and well in the Conservative Party running campaigns and organizing.
It conveniently ignores outlets like The Rebel that spends all its time sowing discord with liberals and with progressives. It ignores Ontario/Canada Proud founder Jeff Ballingall, who created his empire on nasty personal divisive attacks is part of Erin O'Toole's team.
There has been all this time money and effort to create a demon out of a relatively average Prime Minister whose only crime seems to be he shares the last name of a more influential Liberal PM who has lived rent free in the heads of a lot of conservatives even 20 years after his death.
So yeah, lets talk about the negative tone of this campaign and the way Trudeau abandoned sunny ways and got his elbows up, but lets not ignore the machine behind the right that have worked non stop to make it seem like Trudeau is an evil force.
Seriously, this whole idea that Trudeau is to be blamed for the 'divisions' in our country simply by being elected in a Centre-Left country where more citizens relate to his policies (or want him to go further left) is just silly.
Andrew Potter is correct when he writes "this is just the way federal politics has evolved under our electoral system, which encourages regional concentrations of a party’s voter base at the expense of a more broad national coalition."
Under First-Past-the-Post (the electoral system Justin Trudeau falsely promised to rid us of in 2015), stoking divisions is good politics. It's bad for public policy, bad for national unity, but it's good politics.
The reason is in the three dozen or so electoral districts that decide Canadian elections a shift of just a few votes can decide who wins and who loses, and which party forms government.
As long as our self-serving politicians 'screw' citizens by retaining First-Past-the-Post, because it's the easiest electoral system to game, rig, corrupt, and manipulate, Canadians will be plagued by inferior legislators and poor public policy.
Trudeau has divided this country since he was elected in 2015. If you disagree with his new progressive Post National State and the ideological left you shall be demonized, demeaned, and cancelled. It’s the Progressive way, as is massive spending, taxing, and destroying capitalist nations. The postmodern /Marxist indoctrination of students in our Universities has been vomiting these regressive’s into our society for decades and they now run for political office. Hence we are made to endure the hatred they spread so they can proceed with their division and tyranny. Until the voters are educated in what the Trudeau progressives and the main steam media stand for, we are in grave danger of losing or freedoms, rights, and everything we hold dear. Until then, Canadian’s will remain their own worst enemy.
The author seems to betray his conservative biases by not commenting on the Conservative party and this election, but instead falling for hate all things Justin angle.
Why not comment on a party more than ready for the election. The Conservatives had lined up all the premiers in Canada do go on a 5 week vacation during the campaign. They cynically ran a Red Tory strategy even though their leader was clearly elected head of the party by not being a Red Tory. Why did the writer neglect to place some balance in his thoughts instead of same old bash Justine theme?
Good article, as usual from Andrew Potter, but I am a bit disappointed that he didn't explicitly mention the fact that Trudeau's campaign relies on very obvious demonization and hate-mongering against the unvaccinated because they chose to exercise their right of control over their bodies. Maybe not mentioning this was a subtle way to draw attention to it?
No. What a load of nonsense this entire piece is - and not because I am a fan of Trudeau, I am not. The behaviour of all of the parties, not just during election time but in the HoC is reprehensible. Pinning this solely on one man is garbage.
Interesting. A story about Trudeau's divisiveness this election and no mention of his "those people" statements in Sudbury on August 31?
I mean, I agree he seemed to have gone full "us vs them" tribal of late, which is a real psychological phenomenon that drives a lot of people. Full hatred and all.
But his statement about "those people" putting their kids at risk and *our* kids at risk is the classic call of the demagogue. Many have pointed out the obvious blatant lie this is, given the total number of people aged 0-19 who died in Canada from COVID is a total of 15, and that is over more than 18 months, most of it where nobody was vaccinated. By way over comparison, 50-60 die each year by drowning and several hundred die each year in car accidents, in that age range. If by "those people" he mean people who drive cars, he'd at least sound a little bit credible. (Let's also not forget that the unvaccinated include a lot of post-COVID immune people, and of course children under 12.)
But, ignoring that lie, is there nothing more divisible that telling people that some group of people is a threat to their kids? I mean, that's about as low as a demagogue can get. It's as raw an emotional driver can be to create loathing hatred for people, reminiscent of the worst of the hate-filled leaders.
For me, just that statement alone is so filled with empty tribal bigotry and hatred is enough to warrant a need for him to resign. No leader should get away with saying that about a group of people he is responsible to govern. I just don't know who to be more appalled at; Trudeau for saying it or the press and voters for letting him get away with it. Even in this article, not a mention.
Even if you set aside your reasoning faculties and buy into "woke" sub-reasoning of tribal processing, "those people" he is referring to are disproportionately visible minorities and indigenous people, and referring to them as "those people" is probably historically familiar to many of them, just not from somebody who has long portrayed himself to be a woke "ally".
While we're at it, whatever happened to being inclusive of other ways of knowing and the oppressiveness of Western medicine and science? It was not that long ago that this was become respected. Now you are suddenly vilified if you don't accept what Trudeau says about what the Western science says (poor statistical reasoning aside).
It's just all so ... surreal. There are elements of Milgram, ingroup/outgroup psychology, demagoguery, motivated reasoning, moral panic, and of the psychological classics for how leaders and societies go so wrong. We're doin' it live.
Canada is a deeply dysfunctional country but that doesn't mean Canadians have the gumption to fix the situation. Instead we will avoid confronting our demons as per usual while we slip behind peer nations in everything from economic and scientific output to GDP per capita to even health care.
Yeah, I'm still wishing we would have been able to discuss and debate the need for an alternative to our first-past-the-post electoral system. Is there any likelihood that we will ever have this discussion? Or any discussion about other serious issues related to securing Canada's future?
The electoral reform discussion might have led to some serious soul-searching with a resultant change to proportionally allotted seats in parliament increasing the power of each vote. Now I get it; the electoral reform discussion was dropped for that very reason. If my memory serves me correctly, both sides of Parliament had no problem with setting the issue aside. Too much of a hot potato, and too much for the politicians to lose!
Is it really true that every political party leader is clueless and devoid of ability or commitment to deal with this and similarly complex national issues?
Hmmm, is divisive, over-the-top rhetoric flowing off someone's pen?
Yet, sounds strangely familiar. Maybe somewhere in the annals of history...let's see politicians engaging in divisive tactics to win over voters? But nothing to be found pre-True D'Oh?
'Voters would rather have a drunken John Eh than a sober George Bee.'
Now, was that Singh slyly sniping at Paul? Or are the credits rolling by too fast to tell?
There was a time when Canadians with different points of view could sit around a table and have a spirited but respectful debate. Why have we allowed this polarization to happen? It is okay not to agree on everything, in fact critical for a successful team to bring individual perspectives to the table. (with the exception of hate speech) It is up to each and everyone one of us to not buy into the hate and disrespect that passes as politics these days. We need a Prime Minister who can stoically work to weave the tapestry that is our country into something we can all be proud of. Unfortunately, I do not know where that person is. The politics of today tend to spit those people out of the system and nurture the opposite
Really, more divided than 1995, when 35% of the country came within a few thousand votes of splitting off, and Mr. Harper was talking about how we'd have to break up Quebec if they did, only let them take the districts that were over 50%? (Which I agreed with, most Indigenous districts were 95% against, and so I voted Harper the next time he ran.)
Well, I thought The Line rejected bullshit.
The country is much less divided than America, in polling terms (wide agreement on abortion across provinces, for instance). But. It has had an actual separatiste party at one end, for nearly 50 years; they still explicitly champion the idea. And we Albertans have a nutty little one at the other end, that changes name every decade (Reform/Wild Rose/Wexit/Maverick) but never their hiliarious political orientation, that a landlocked province should split off.
An orientation responsible for my Facebook friends that endlessly post, not mild expressions of annoyance and disapproval, but red-faced accusations of: treasonous fake pandemic, treasonous real pandemic developed with Masters in China, treasonous sabotage of the vital oil industry. (Sabotaged it with a $4.5B gift, I guess. I should have such enemies.)
Yes, all politicians have to take that rhetoric, but Trudeau's literally on his second generation of it, and it is the "alt-right" have have become much more loud and harsh with their claims of conspiracy and treason for, oh, the last five years, for some reason, and ramped up more since 2020. Canada invented "The Proud Boys", but not the Trudeau family. When do liberals do "divisive" like The Proud Boys?
Speaking of "divisive", the big change this election is a whole new political party, one that, umm, DIVIDES the Right into the Regular Andrew Potter Right, and the "alt-right". And those alt-righters shade over into gravel-throwing (extremely divisive) treason-accusers. I'm sure Mr. O'Toole thinks of Mr. Bernier as MUCH more divisive than he thinks Mr. Trudeau is; Bernier is more likely to cost him seats. (Why did nobody do the old joke this election of "What would O'Toole do with a gun with two bullets, in an elevator with Kim Jong-Un and Bernier?" Shoot Bernier twice to be sure, of course.)
If you want to rail against "divisive", Mr. Potter, champion the end of first-past-the-post, and beat on JT for not doing it.
Jen, me thinks this is a candidate for the bullshit bulletin. The headline "our leaders are weaponizing our national divisions" then devolves into an indictment of one leader. Be honest about it in the headline.
"And this is why the “all of the parties are divisive” line won’t wash. Even if there is plenty of blame to go around, the prime minister has a special role to play in all of this, a special set of responsibilities, precisely because he is the prime minister."
Frankly there is a pox on all their houses! The internet has spawned the age of outrage by creating a virtual town square where all voices and typically those who yell the most with least reason to be heard are in fact the most often heard. There are examples of this division being stoked by all leaders.
I see that Trudeau channeled the frustration and anger at antivaxxers and hospital targeted demonstrations as much as the Jib Jab like video channeled the Anti-Trudeau derangement syndrome. A syndrome transferred from Harper to Trudeau.
Simply, this was an election about your preferred leader by the leader who at the time had the poll-preference. That is on Trudeau. As such this election is petty and small like the leaders with a complete absence of a vision from any them. At the same time there is no discernable bench strength for any of the parties. As a result, I suspect we as an electorate are voting less for something and more against an individual.
Want to end this, then agitate to amend the fixed election date to enshrine the fall of a minority government based solely on the defeat of legislations or non-confidence. I am not a PMJT cult follower and see the man for what he has shown himself to be. As they all have through their demonstrable records.
Again, I call bullshit on the content versus the lead, especially on election day.
The Line keeps hitting it out of the park.
Wow, I'm sure a lot of people who just want to point at Trudeau as the cause of everything are going to love this article. Hey, lets get this out of the way, Trudeau, a Liberal politician is not going to do things that Right Wing Conservatives will support the same way O'Toole and his predecessors aren't going to appeal to progressives. No controversy here.
Where I do take issue is that while Trudeau may be a genuinely dislikeable politician to some, (even some of those voting for his party), the opposition and division surrounding him on the right has been in play when he was still the "Drama teacher leading the 3rd place party in the house". The Conservatives tried to use the same divisive rhetoric they used against previous Liberal Leaders (Michael "Just Visiting" Ignatieff and Stephane Dion). Sun News Network set up around the same time and at some points it was negative attacks on Trudeau nearly 24-7. While the network may be gone, the architects are still alive and well in the Conservative Party running campaigns and organizing.
It conveniently ignores outlets like The Rebel that spends all its time sowing discord with liberals and with progressives. It ignores Ontario/Canada Proud founder Jeff Ballingall, who created his empire on nasty personal divisive attacks is part of Erin O'Toole's team.
There has been all this time money and effort to create a demon out of a relatively average Prime Minister whose only crime seems to be he shares the last name of a more influential Liberal PM who has lived rent free in the heads of a lot of conservatives even 20 years after his death.
So yeah, lets talk about the negative tone of this campaign and the way Trudeau abandoned sunny ways and got his elbows up, but lets not ignore the machine behind the right that have worked non stop to make it seem like Trudeau is an evil force.
Seriously, this whole idea that Trudeau is to be blamed for the 'divisions' in our country simply by being elected in a Centre-Left country where more citizens relate to his policies (or want him to go further left) is just silly.
Andrew Potter is correct when he writes "this is just the way federal politics has evolved under our electoral system, which encourages regional concentrations of a party’s voter base at the expense of a more broad national coalition."
Under First-Past-the-Post (the electoral system Justin Trudeau falsely promised to rid us of in 2015), stoking divisions is good politics. It's bad for public policy, bad for national unity, but it's good politics.
The reason is in the three dozen or so electoral districts that decide Canadian elections a shift of just a few votes can decide who wins and who loses, and which party forms government.
As long as our self-serving politicians 'screw' citizens by retaining First-Past-the-Post, because it's the easiest electoral system to game, rig, corrupt, and manipulate, Canadians will be plagued by inferior legislators and poor public policy.
Trudeau has divided this country since he was elected in 2015. If you disagree with his new progressive Post National State and the ideological left you shall be demonized, demeaned, and cancelled. It’s the Progressive way, as is massive spending, taxing, and destroying capitalist nations. The postmodern /Marxist indoctrination of students in our Universities has been vomiting these regressive’s into our society for decades and they now run for political office. Hence we are made to endure the hatred they spread so they can proceed with their division and tyranny. Until the voters are educated in what the Trudeau progressives and the main steam media stand for, we are in grave danger of losing or freedoms, rights, and everything we hold dear. Until then, Canadian’s will remain their own worst enemy.
Best piece in a long time!
The author seems to betray his conservative biases by not commenting on the Conservative party and this election, but instead falling for hate all things Justin angle.
Why not comment on a party more than ready for the election. The Conservatives had lined up all the premiers in Canada do go on a 5 week vacation during the campaign. They cynically ran a Red Tory strategy even though their leader was clearly elected head of the party by not being a Red Tory. Why did the writer neglect to place some balance in his thoughts instead of same old bash Justine theme?
Good article, as usual from Andrew Potter, but I am a bit disappointed that he didn't explicitly mention the fact that Trudeau's campaign relies on very obvious demonization and hate-mongering against the unvaccinated because they chose to exercise their right of control over their bodies. Maybe not mentioning this was a subtle way to draw attention to it?
No. What a load of nonsense this entire piece is - and not because I am a fan of Trudeau, I am not. The behaviour of all of the parties, not just during election time but in the HoC is reprehensible. Pinning this solely on one man is garbage.
Interesting. A story about Trudeau's divisiveness this election and no mention of his "those people" statements in Sudbury on August 31?
I mean, I agree he seemed to have gone full "us vs them" tribal of late, which is a real psychological phenomenon that drives a lot of people. Full hatred and all.
But his statement about "those people" putting their kids at risk and *our* kids at risk is the classic call of the demagogue. Many have pointed out the obvious blatant lie this is, given the total number of people aged 0-19 who died in Canada from COVID is a total of 15, and that is over more than 18 months, most of it where nobody was vaccinated. By way over comparison, 50-60 die each year by drowning and several hundred die each year in car accidents, in that age range. If by "those people" he mean people who drive cars, he'd at least sound a little bit credible. (Let's also not forget that the unvaccinated include a lot of post-COVID immune people, and of course children under 12.)
But, ignoring that lie, is there nothing more divisible that telling people that some group of people is a threat to their kids? I mean, that's about as low as a demagogue can get. It's as raw an emotional driver can be to create loathing hatred for people, reminiscent of the worst of the hate-filled leaders.
For me, just that statement alone is so filled with empty tribal bigotry and hatred is enough to warrant a need for him to resign. No leader should get away with saying that about a group of people he is responsible to govern. I just don't know who to be more appalled at; Trudeau for saying it or the press and voters for letting him get away with it. Even in this article, not a mention.
Even if you set aside your reasoning faculties and buy into "woke" sub-reasoning of tribal processing, "those people" he is referring to are disproportionately visible minorities and indigenous people, and referring to them as "those people" is probably historically familiar to many of them, just not from somebody who has long portrayed himself to be a woke "ally".
While we're at it, whatever happened to being inclusive of other ways of knowing and the oppressiveness of Western medicine and science? It was not that long ago that this was become respected. Now you are suddenly vilified if you don't accept what Trudeau says about what the Western science says (poor statistical reasoning aside).
It's just all so ... surreal. There are elements of Milgram, ingroup/outgroup psychology, demagoguery, motivated reasoning, moral panic, and of the psychological classics for how leaders and societies go so wrong. We're doin' it live.
Canada is a deeply dysfunctional country but that doesn't mean Canadians have the gumption to fix the situation. Instead we will avoid confronting our demons as per usual while we slip behind peer nations in everything from economic and scientific output to GDP per capita to even health care.
I wish the Governor General declined the dissolution of Parliament...
Yeah, I'm still wishing we would have been able to discuss and debate the need for an alternative to our first-past-the-post electoral system. Is there any likelihood that we will ever have this discussion? Or any discussion about other serious issues related to securing Canada's future?
The electoral reform discussion might have led to some serious soul-searching with a resultant change to proportionally allotted seats in parliament increasing the power of each vote. Now I get it; the electoral reform discussion was dropped for that very reason. If my memory serves me correctly, both sides of Parliament had no problem with setting the issue aside. Too much of a hot potato, and too much for the politicians to lose!
Is it really true that every political party leader is clueless and devoid of ability or commitment to deal with this and similarly complex national issues?
Hmmm, is divisive, over-the-top rhetoric flowing off someone's pen?
Yet, sounds strangely familiar. Maybe somewhere in the annals of history...let's see politicians engaging in divisive tactics to win over voters? But nothing to be found pre-True D'Oh?
'Voters would rather have a drunken John Eh than a sober George Bee.'
Now, was that Singh slyly sniping at Paul? Or are the credits rolling by too fast to tell?