This feels like an overly simplistic analysis.
The conservatives successfully poisoned public perception of carbon pricing via willful lies, framing the (real) inflationary pressures felt around the world as being a locally Canadian issue and specially blamed on “the carbon tax”. This was aided by Trudeau’s lack of focus and his failing to ensure that the policy was a success, but PP and his legion of brain rotted influencers are the primary culprits.
Without ending the “carbon tax”, it was almost certainly inevitable that the CPC would win this election. It sucks, but it’s extremely difficult to paint a picture otherwise.
Carbon pricing is good policy. More than that, it’s the best “neoliberal” approach to controlling carbon emissions. Carney knows this as well as do, he argues for it quite persuasively in his book.
But it had to go, because letting PP win and sell the county to foreign oil extractors would be multiple orders of magnitude worse. And we will still get good carbon policy implemented by focusing on the industrial polluters with the stick and end consumers with the carrot. This doesn’t have the same market efficiency as carbon pricing, but it can be effective and will hopefully be more resilient against the attacks by the brain-rot peddlers.
I get it. May wants to pile on Carney because he’s winning and because there are scarce few voters who would be swayed from CPC to Green. But it sucks if these misleading messaging efforts take root — if they do, we all lose big.
What you’re describing is winning elections by letting the public dictate your position. This is not the same thing as leadership. To be fair though, genuine leadership is in short supply all over the world right now, so it’s easy to conflate cowardice with strategy.
Leadership is when someone steps away from the crowd, paints a picture of the world they want, and asks people to join them. Think: “I have a dream”, or “we choose to go to the moon”. Leaders are charismatic visionaries that take you with them rather than taking popular positions once the polling reports in.
Canada deserves the sort of leadership that understands the critical nature of the climate issue, and leaders who will convince us to come with them in building the world we want. May is criticising the other parties for their lack of conviction regarding the most important issue of our time, and she’s right to do it.
This feels like an overly simplistic analysis.
Of course. That’s what the Greens and NDP do. They use left-wing rhetoric to advance right-ring causes. It’s their entire reason for existing.
I disagree, I believe that both have well-intentioned people both amongst supporters and candidates. Many of these feel disenfranchised by the CPC and LPC, and have opposing interests and preferences which would otherwise go unheard.
But FPTP frames the voting process as a zero-sum game. In the current system they are incentivized to either abandon hope in an alternative to these or split the vote. They didn’t create the system to be how it is, and they both would very much prefer the system to be different.
So I reject the casual and dismissive nature of your reply here. May is using a cynical political calculus here to get what she wants — and it feels wrong to blame her for this in isolation when you can find the same types of behaviour from other leaders. Hell, even how Carney removed a carbon pricing policy that he assuredly still knew was the best policy — something I just endorsed in the parent comment — is the same sort of political calculus.
Do I wish that May wouldn’t be disengenous here for short-term political gains? Yes. Do I wish that Singh wouldn’t regurgitate CPC talking points he knows to be false? Again, yes. I hate that they are doing this, but it’s not because they are part of some conspiracy it’s because that’s what I assume they feel is the necessary evil to advance the causes they believe in.
TLDR can we just fucking kill FPTP please for just about anything else?
It’s just a matter of how bad it gets now at this point as I understand? Are we at the point where if we magically stop pollution today, the only habitable zones 300 years from now will be the north and south poles with 20’C weather year-round yet while the rest is Mad Max?
Idk actually, lemme know.
The gradient between no and yes determines how many billions die fighting for that limited space. We think political extremism is bad now…hoo boy.
Maybe if she spent more time defending it with the Liberals it wouldn’t have been torched by the Conservatives and turned into Political kryptonite.
May can speak when she presents a reasonable and costed platform for once in her career.
