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Trudeau Popularity - or not (various polling, etc.)

I think Mr. Campbell is referring to the eastern corporate oligarchs who the Liberals really represent. I don’t think the Desmarais, Irvings or bankers, CEOs,and blue chip law firms from the Golden Triangle would ever support an NDP or even a centre-right populist party. They might support a Tory party if it was led by “their kind of Tory” but not one led by Poillievre. And Poilievre would be best to stay away from their support unless he wants the CPC to become the LPC.
We could start a new party and call it "Progressive Conservatives"
 
Toronto has the largest capacity. The Quebec film industry is very vibrant. Lots of votes.
 
LPC and NDP should just merge at this point, they are the same party.
Absolutely no! Canadians do not need to emulate the caustic partisan train wreck from south of the border. Trudeau won leadership of the Liberal Party on family name, and he has been trying to outflank the NDP on their left ever since. He would have been a much better fit to lead the NDP.

… and because nobody was fighting for centre, CPC was safe to drift after the PPC’s base. At this point, CPC doesn’t need to do anything to win so long as the LPC continues its trajectory.

The Liberal Caucus needs to fire their leader (sending him out instead of allowing him to leave on his own will be a necessary part of the purification) and remember their roots. They need a new leader openly advocating a return to centre.
 
Absolutely no! Canadians do not need to emulate the caustic partisan train wreck from south of the border. Trudeau won leadership of the Liberal Party on family name, and he has been trying to outflank the NDP on their left ever since. He would have been a much better fit to lead the NDP.

… and because nobody was fighting for centre, CPC was safe to drift after the PPC’s base. At this point, CPC doesn’t need to do anything to win so long as the LPC continues its trajectory.

The Liberal Caucus needs to fire their leader (sending him out instead of allowing him to leave on his own will be a necessary part of the purification) and remember their roots. They need a new leader openly advocating a return to centre.

The LPC needs much more than just a new leader. Almost everyone currently in the LPC right now has championed and enabled this trainwreck. They need a wholesale house cleaning. The reset button needs a hard press.
 
If Trudeau wins his seat in the next election and refuses to step down as LPC leader, the question comes down to "does he have enough allies to survive the leadership review triggered by a LPC election loss?".
No. It’s all or nothing for him.
 
The Empire Strike back, accordion to a report in yesterday's Globe and Mail:

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Netflix pulls sponsorship of development programs across Canadian arts institutions in wake of C-11 measures​

BARRY HERTZ
PUBLISHED YESTERDAY UPDATED 8 HOURS AGO

The future of several professional development programs crucial to the health of the Canadian film and television industry is in jeopardy as Netflix Canada pulls sponsorship from a number of arts institutions in response to new investment measures laid out under the Online Streaming Act.

Various cultural organizations across the country learned last week that Netflix was pausing funding for a number of training and development initiatives. Since 2017, the year that the streaming giant established its Canadian production arm, Netflix has invested more than $25-million in such programs, helping further the careers of more than 1,200 Canadian writers, directors, producers and performers.

“This is extremely disappointing as Netflix was a significant and founding supporter of the Pacific Screenwriting Program, in line with their commitment to Canadian talent development,” said Camilla Tibbs, executive director of Vancouver’s PSP, whose flagship Scripted Series Lab has for the past six years launched the careers of emerging B.C. screenwriters, particularly diverse voices.

At Hot Docs, which is currently undergoing an organizational restructuring while facing a series of financial setbacks, organizers said that without Netflix’s support, they may have to discontinue three programs: Canadian Storytellers Project, CrossCurrents Doc Funds, and Incubator Labs, which have collectively supported hundreds of filmmakers’ careers.

And at the imagineNATIVE Institute, where Netflix has funded upward of 90 per cent of the organization’s year-round development programs, the streamer has indicated that any resources beyond 2025 are in doubt.

“I’ve been very grateful for their support, which since 2020 has been able to help more than 50 Indigenous professionals working in the screen media,” said Naomi Johnson, imagineNATIVE’s executive director. “All of us running not-for-profit arts organizations are contending with rising costs, so this now means more hustling in the private sector. And the pure volume of work in that kind of fundraising is exhausting.”

The shift comes as Netflix and other foreign-owned streaming services are being compelled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to contribute 5 per cent of their annual domestic revenues to support production in the Canadian screen sector as part of the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11). In July, the Motion Picture Association-Canada, which represents Netflix as well as such Hollywood studios as Disney and Paramount, launched dual legal challenges in Federal Court over the CRTC measures.

In an unsigned statement regarding the pause in program funding, representatives for Netflix Canada said that “despite our long-standing commitment, the government has chosen not to acknowledge our substantial support for the Canadian film and TV sector. Consequently, we will be unable to continue funding many of the programs that have come to rely on our backing, as we are now required to allocate resources to meet the CRTC’s new investment mandate.”

Charles Thibault-Béland, press secretary for Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, said in a statement that Netflix has known for the past five years that it would have to invest in Canadian content. “Netflix is unfortunately thumbing its nose at the Canadian cultural sector, instead of investing in a market that has benefitted them for a long time.”

In a November, 2023, CRTC public hearing, during which Netflix noted that it spends more in Canada on partnerships for the career advancement of creators than anywhere else in the world, Dean Garfield, vice-president of global public policy for the streamer, said that there needed to be flexibility in how the government recognizes its contributions to the local screen sector.

“If you develop a system that limits the areas or the funds to which those resources are directed, then in some respects you’re creating a zero-sum game where you may have to move away from the relationships, partnerships that we built over time, and we certainly don’t want to do that,” Garfield said.

Angela Heck, executive director of the Whistler Film Festival Society, whose producers and screenwriters labs are now at risk over Netflix’s decision, noted that the streamer has been a supportive partner since 2018, with its contributions in some years funding up to 50 per cent of its program costs.

“They’re just responding to the ambiguity of the current legislation,” said Heck. “I think it’s not clear under current guidelines whether or not something like training initiatives are eligible expenditures. Maybe we don’t do a good enough job tooting our own horn as to how important these programs actually are.”

Like other arts leaders, Heck is concerned about not only the future of her organization’s programs but also the longer-term consequences for an industry already under economic stress.

“I’m nervous about the knock-on effects,” she said. “I always talk about the training programs as being the farm team. You can give funding to producers all you want, but if you don’t train people and bring them up through the system, we won’t have people who can succeed.”

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Unintended consequences and all that.
More on how predictable the effects of the various online media bills were going to foul things up by a leading critic of these bills.

 
More on how predictable the effects of the various online media bills were going to foul things up by a leading critic of these bills.

When you're convinced that you're morally superior and smarter than the people questioning you, you're likely to ignore their advice.
 
Michael Den Tandt, as he admits right up front in an article in The Line, is a Liberal. But he, too, says that it is time change.

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Michael Den Tandt: Trudeau needs major change. He's choosing nostalgia​

Where’s the renewal, the new bums in seats, the fresh approaches, the re-inventions at the senior staff level?​

SEP 27, 2024

By: Michael Den Tandt

I don’t know Prime Minister Justin Trudeau well, but I do know him. As a journalist reporting on national politics in Canada I wrote about his political ascent. I later worked for him as a speechwriter. In 2019 I ran for parliament (and lost) on the Liberal ticket. I’ve had beers with the PM on a couple of occasions and spoken to him at length several times, in interviews, speech preparation and informally, though not recently.

What follows, therefore, is an educated guess — and I stress it’s a guess, not based on any insider knowledge. This is me advancing a theory, you could say, about why Trudeau appears so determined to ignore polls that show his party headed for a crushing electoral defeat next year, or possibly sooner — and why he has so far resisted, or ignored, the chorus of voices calling for him to step aside.

Much can be drawn from the prime minister’s recent chat with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, which my friend Matt Gurney has dissected, here. I agree with a lot of what Matt writes about this. My perspective is a bit different, though.

First, the points where we agree: Trudeau carried himself well in the interview with Colbert. He was at his gregarious best. It’s also true that Colbert threw him a lot of softballs. Trudeau is a political professional, an old hand at this point, and he swatted each and every one over the fence. Canada, land of the polite? Check. Maple syrup jokes? Done. Universal health care? Yes we have it, the Americans don’t and perhaps they should. There was even the old clip of the young Justin emerging with his dad from an Ottawa screening of Return of the Jedi in 1983, enthusing about the movie. Heartwarming stuff. Colbert’s studio audience of smart people — because, let’s face it Colbert is smart, and smart likes smart — ate it up.

Here's where the fault lines start to show. The chat had more than a hint of nostalgia about it, as though Trudeau himself was aware of, and enjoying, the sojourn back to the themes that won him a majority in 2015, and minorities in 2019 and 2021. The hits of yesteryear evidently play well with American liberals, such as Colbert, who don’t think often about Canada, aren’t familiar with our history and have missed the last decade of our national life, during which a full political cycle has dawned, waxed and waned.

Watching Colbert felt like travelling back in time. It’s interesting that a leader who has seen and managed so much — Trump 1.0, a railway blockade, COVID, the Convoy protest and the outbreak of war in Europe and the Middle East — could still express, with all evident sincerity, such sunny optimism about political life and his place within it.

Now, we get to the heart of it. For there is a pervasive sense in Canada in 2024 — Trudeau briefly acknowledged this with Colbert — that it’s time for change. Not only is there a natural cyclical desire for fresh faces, reflected in numerous polls showing the Liberals trailing the Conservatives by a wide margin; but there’s tangible frustration that so much that has been promised remains undone, or partially done; national pharmacare, dental and $10-a-day daycare top that list. To this we must add the piecemeal erosion of carbon pricing and Canada’s continuing failure to manage timely defence procurement and recruitment, at a time when both are increasingly vital.

Here's what Trudeau might have told Colbert about these files, and what Liberal staffers are probably telling themselves privately: We’re not perfect but at least we’re trying. Why aren’t these new social programs further along? Exhibit A would be Donald Trump, whose effort to shove Canada’s manufacturing economy into a ditch consumed all the government’s oxygen in its first term. Exhibit B would be COVID, which came along in March, 2020, obliterating all priorities and plans in its path. No Canadian government in our modern history, certainly not in the post-war period, has faced challenges of this magnitude, back to back. Dudes, we’re tired!

And that would be fair enough, except for this: The typical response to fatigue within a government is renewal. Where’s the renewal, the new bums in seats, the fresh approaches, the re-inventions at the senior staff level? There have been some, driven by the normal course of resignations and attrition, people moving on to other things. But Trudeau has never been the kind of leader who switches out his A-team, whether in cabinet or his office, to make a clean slate. In practice he adheres to Brian Mulroney’s old maxim: You dance with the ones that brung ya. In Trudeau’s case that means the group of political professionals and senior ministers who’ve been with him since the start and are still around. His old friend, also my friend, Gerald Butts, is the most notable exception. Butts left the government in 2019.

This brings us to what, in my view, may be his internal logic for sticking around, come what may. Trudeau must know, as do the people advising him, that his chances of hanging in for a fourth term are slender to nil, given the current electoral map. Acts of God or gods aside, the 10- year run is drawing to a close. It would not be out of character for Trudeau to insist on sticking around because he wants to be the one to wear the coming defeat, if anyone must. Likewise, his seeming insistence on avoiding major course corrections that might move the dial: We got this far sticking with our principles, I can hear him saying: We’re not changing course at the 11th hour just because of some really bad polls.

And here’s where that logic, in my humble opinion, falls down: Politics in Canada has always been about finding honourable compromise and adapting to circumstance. In the 1980s, Mulroney upended our polity by showing, for the first time since the government of Sir John A. Macdonald hanged Louis Riel, that a Conservative could win massively in Quebec, not once but twice. Jean Chrétien in the 1990s pulled off something similar, transforming himself, with the help of Paul Martin, from a free-spending traditional Liberal into a hawkish fiscal conservative, all in the span of a couple years.

The fascinating thing about the third and last Chrétien-Martin majority, which they won in 2000, was that they faced a cyclical malaise not unlike the current one. They’d been in power since 1993; Chrétien’s manner was wearing thin and the “unite the right” movement was at full throttle, coalescing around the editorial pages of Conrad Black’s National Post, where I worked at the time. After years of austerity, led by the deficit-smashing budget of 1995, and amid growing surpluses, the opposition was howling for tax cuts. So, in a full backwards flip worthy of Simone Biles, Chrétien-Martin offered a $100-billion tax cut. In effect they looted their opponents’ policy book and stole their oxygen. It worked.

The parallel today? The world has changed a lot since an ebullient Trudeau opened with “Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways!” on the night of his victory in October, 2015. If ever there were a moment for a big pivot, from sunny optimism and idealism to a more grimly voiced realpolitik, it was just after the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. Since then it has become ever clearer that Canada and our North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, led by the United States (unless, it would seem, Trump wins a second term) are in the early stages of a new Cold War against authoritarian rule — with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in the vanguard.

Among the least-recognized effects of the COVID era is that it gave the lie to the old excuse that Canada can’t afford to pay for its own defence. As it turns out we can afford just about anything if the need is great enough.

The full Russian assault on Ukraine was a moment, in other words, when Trudeau might have looted Brian Mulroney’s old policy manual on national security and thrown his government fully into the fight — not by going to war with Russia, but by much more actively preparing Canada for the new and more perilous world in which we now live, with immediate, massive investments in our military and security services. There have been noteworthy recent moves in this direction, as my colleague Aaron Shull and I observed in a recent piece for CIGIonline.org. But in the rapidly evolving geopolitical storm we now face, much bigger moves are warranted.

One could argue that Trudeau’s hands are tied in this regard because he needs the support of either the New Democrats, the Bloc Québecois or both, in order to retain power, and both those parties hew leftwards on national security and defence. Be that as it may, I can’t recall a significant engagement, on late-night TV or elsewhere, in which the prime minister spoke at length, in detail and with passion about the importance, for example, of rapidly rebuilding a deep-water navy that can assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. One is left to assume, based on outcomes, that defence isn’t an urgent priority. For reasons both political and practical, it really, really should be.

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One less job that Trudeau needn’t imagine moving in to…


Mark Rutte takes office as the new NATO Secretary General
 
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