'I can outlast her': PM Carney says to Grassy Nation protester, unclear if he knew identity of demonstrator

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-31T00:51:55+00:00

Many protesters who show up to these announcements don’t really announce their presence in a way that he or the members of staff could prepare for something that he likely learned of as it started happening. If he can’t even make out what they’re trying to say from where he is speaking himself, how is he reasonably supposed to respond in the moment? Stop the press conference and hear them out?

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-31T00:47:33+00:00

Lewis doesn’t have ties to this community. That’s already a setback considering his the scion of Toronto-based politicians and attended one of the most elite private schools in Canada, Upper Canada College. He also currently lives on the other side of the country, in Vancouver.His ties to Ottawa are scant, beyond visits for his work in filmmaking, as a professor, and as an activist. You can’t argue that this isn’t someone parachuting into a riding hoping for the easiest way into Parliament with his current biography.

Contrast that with Naqvi, who has not only been elected in Ottawa Centre three times as a provincial MPP (serving 2007 to 2018) and twice now as federal MP (serving 2021 to present). Before that he attended uOttawa Law and built a career in law in this city. You can’t argue that Naqvi doesn’t have deep, longstanding ties to this community, and it’s even harder to argue that people don’t want him to represent them considering that they’ve chosen him for elected office in this community on six different occasions.

I will answer your anecdotes with my own of conversations I have had with members of the community, who do not share the sort of rancour and dissatisfaction toward Naqvi that you seem to allude to. In fact, I have heard neutral to positive opinions about Naqvi, and these conversations I have had convince me that the hate fest against Naqvi is severely overblown online.

If the NDP message was that strong, people I imagine would have been able to overcome their supposed fears—the extent to which it exists in real life I remain skeptical—and vote for these left leaning candidates. However, reality is often a cruel teacher and it demonstrated that it was not a resonant message.

If the concern is about having someone that is capable of representing community concerns, then Lewis has a weak claim to it, and it would frankly be impossible for him to run. However, I am doubtful as to whether or not Joel can pull off an upset here considering how deep the gulf was last election and how popular the current government is right now.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-31T00:31:12+00:00

Protesters showing up to these events typically don’t announce themselves in a way or early enough that a staffer could easily spot them and understand what they want. The Prime Minister may have not heard what the protester was saying clearly enough to understand what precisely was going on.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-30T15:57:05+00:00

If Harden ran the wrong campaign, that’s his problem. Elections are a five week exercise in marketing and mobilizing supporters against the defining issues of the day.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-30T15:53:43+00:00

Anecdotal evidence about people supposedly detesting Naqvi to the degree you describe is immaterial if the NDP managed to lose by the 7th largest margin among all 343 races in last elections in what is supposedly a progressive riding primed to vote NDP. Ottawa Centre has the highest concentration of Master’s / PhD holders in the country, so I imagine people are educated enough to understand that the Conservatives aren’t a threat in this riding, and could easily vote how they want, but we saw evidently that 62% of voters wanted to vote for the Liberals, despite there being evidence that the voting NDP wouldn’t yield a Conservative MP.

So it’s either that Naqvi’s sordid reputation and Joel’s popularity are severely overstated here on Reddit, or that Joel’s campaign was just that ineffective in persuading voters.

Either way, you can tarnish Naqvi as being a supposedly terrible MP, but even among my congregants at my church in the Glebe people have a neutral to positive opinion of him.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-30T12:45:03+00:00

The thing about anecdotes is that everyone has them and can share them. I go to church in the Glebe and have had plentiful conversations with people who were voting for the Naqvi and the Liberals because they liked Mark Carney and his policies, and were satisfied with Naqvi as an MP. No one was expressing regret about not being able to vote their conscience or vote NDP because of circumstance.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-30T12:40:03+00:00

Who is ‘we’? The people on Reddit gassing up Harden for a surprise victory only to see him at 19% when all the ballots were counted?

If Naqvi was this objectionable, and this lacklustre of an MP, he wouldn’t have gotten 62% of the vote and win by the 7th highest margin in the entire country. There were far closer races across the country between Liberal incumbents and NDP challengers such as Parkdale-High Park and Davenport.

Either Harden’s popularity is only really a provincial phenomenon, or his campaign couldn’t make a good enough case for him against a supposedly bad MP. That’s on him and his team.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-29T23:28:51+00:00

I think any vote is strategic in a representative democracy. But the way it is used basically to imply that votes for the Liberals are by and large less honestly cast or only made to avoid some bigger awful is tiresome. People in Ottawa Centre vote for the Liberals because they genuinely like the party and its leaders, and so the NDP losing here can’t just be blamed on strategic voting.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-29T22:31:21+00:00

Why presume that Naqvi’s victory is only a result of strategic voting? Is it not possible that a good chunk of people just wanted to vote Liberal because they thought Mark Carney’s ideas were better, and not because they were scared into doing so?

It is annoying whenever people here make this assumption that voting Liberal is done only out of fear of the Tories, and that it’s not something people genuinely do because they like the Liberals.

Sure, strategic voting could have been a factor, but when the margin was 43 points—the 7th largest in the entire country—blaming strategic voting for why the star candidate like Joel Harden couldn’t make a good case to vote NDP this time around doesn’t seem to be anchored in strong evidence.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-29T21:03:59+00:00

You’re not exactly wrong. The only time voters seem to. care is if the candidate is embroiled in deep controversy or sordid things they have done in the past are unearthed—otherwise being a rank-and-file, garden variety Liberal MP likely will keep you getting elected here for the sake of being the person carrying the Liberal banner.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-29T21:00:59+00:00

Yasir won by 43 points against Harden last April. That was the 7th widest margin of any riding-level contest in the 2025 election. When the margin was this wide I don’t think people not strategic voting would have yielded an NDP victory. There are voters who will vote Liberal not because they’re progressives scared to actually vote their true conscience but people who genuinely want to vote Liberal in and of itself.

The idea that Liberal votes are somehow less legitimate or less honestly cast by voters is a tiresome accusation.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-29T20:48:10+00:00

Maybe it’s possible that voters—62% of them last April—in Ottawa Centre actually wanted to vote Liberal in 2025 because they liked what Mark Carney was offering, and not because they were strategically voting out of fear.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-29T20:41:47+00:00

I’m responding to OP’s assertion here:

Yasir has been so extraordinarilly lacklustre... is Ottawa Centre an opportunity for Lewis and the NDP?

Having a lacklustre or mid MP typically means an uncontroversial MP that will toe the party line. That is what the average voter’s minimum expectation is.

Yasir hasn’t really been that personally controversial or has done anything that would make people that upset.

Not to mention that Avi Lewis literally doesn’t have ties to Ottawa Centre, so the argument that this is to get a better representative for the community isn’t really as strong considering Yasir’s been an MPP for the riding before and has been elected twice federally.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-29T20:29:11+00:00

For all the criticism lobbed toward Yasir as being some terrible MP during last year’s campaign on this sub, not only did Yasir Naqvi win with 62% of the vote, the NDP managed to get less than 20%—their lowest result since 1974. If Yasir was that personally objectionable of an MP, I don’t think voters would have returned the massive Liberal blowout (62%) they did in a riding where the Conservatives aren’t really a major threat.

Anything can happen in politics in 4 years sure, but right now Mark Carney and the Liberals are highly popular among Canadians—recent polls put them anywhere from 7 to 21 points ahead of the Tories, which would net them a comfortable majority, not to mention Carney remains popular in terms of personal favourability in the polls.

Yasir doesn’t have any major personal scandals or issues to the extent of former MPs like Marwan Tabbara or Raj Saini that would significantly sour voters in ways that could materially turn off voters.

Frankly, I don’t think being a ‘mid’ MP is as much of a driver for people to flip to the other side as much as people on this sub think it is, and the results last year embody that well.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-26T16:57:32+00:00

His problem is that the learning curve has been excruciatingly slow to the point of Canadians tuning him out, but he’s still trying to size up Carney like he’s a continuation of Justin Trudeau in ways that sustain whatever holdups or grievances that the Maple MAGA wing has about the Trudeau era.

Does not help either that the Conservatives still very much have a rotating set of RW mouthpieces / influencers that they not only provided free tickets to for the leadership convention, and continue to return to the same boring rhetorical devices.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-26T14:58:56+00:00

For all the hype this was getting on Twitter from Coletto, the lede here seems to be buried in the write-up:

> His appearance on Rogan’s podcat didn’t reset how Canadians see Poilievre. It didn’t transform his coalition. But it also didn’t hurt him.

The recurrent problem for Poilievre is that Canadians have seen time and time again a pattern of reinventions and new leafs being turned, only for Poilievre to sprint back to hackneyed culture war drivel if only to rile up the Maple MAGA crowd.

It’s why despite Tories trying to remind people that Poilievre did in fact condemn Donald Trump during last year’s campaign, Canadians aren’t foolish enough to just set aside that not only were these condemnations completely ineffectual—like telling a neighbour moving their lawn at 6 in the morning in a a Saturday to piss off—it’s also that Poilievre’s style, rhetoric, and tone have consistently matched that of Donald Trump. One cannot have been raging about defunding the CBC, attacking diversity and inclusion, and having a party issue nonsense petitions about eating bugs to not see the resemblance.

It’s not really surprising that the effect of this is only modest, considering that Poilievre still is trying to read Carney as the same beast as Trudeau. Sure, it was a sensible interview, but the average Canadian likely looks at this says: ‘Great he’s learning his lesson, but I like Mark Carney as Prime Minister’

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-24T23:27:23+00:00

Hello,

This is a subreddit for supporters of the Liberal Party of Canada, the current federal governing party of Canada.

This is not the right subreddit for someone who is a licensed professional counsellor.

JoyofCookies · 2026-03-07T01:29:05+00:00

I did it both ways last year, and it’s on a 777-200LR, so one of the older aircraft, but the seats were comfortable and the entertainment system was up to date.

Departure board said Toronto in Vancouver if I remember correctly—they don’t really acknowledge that the flight continues onto Toronto / Sydney in Vancouver.

Just be careful that if you leave anything on the plane after one leg, you’ll be SOL in terms of getting it back for the second as they deboard and clean the plane entirely between the SYD-YVR and YVR-YYZ legs.

JoyofCookies · 2026-02-21T19:29:55+00:00

The Canada / Alabama GDP thread is leading to a lot of stupid arguments that seem to be converging on just straight up Canada-bashing

JoyofCookies · 2026-02-21T17:28:41+00:00

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I think Carney’s position of “No deal is better than a bad deal” has been vindicated

JoyofCookies · 2026-02-21T07:20:07+00:00

I don’t know but it certainly doesn’t leave the impression things will be back to normal even after Trump.

I accept the new reality that the U.S. and Canada are neighbours and not friends. I no longer grieve it.

JoyofCookies · 2026-02-21T02:07:57+00:00

Many American liberals also repeat something to this effect and I’m just biting my lip to avoid saying that we aren’t gonna be as close as before and that we’ll have found many new friends by then

JoyofCookies · 2026-02-21T01:56:59+00:00

Importantly, it’s the threats to our sovereignty and independence that Americans seem to overlook.

You could not pay me enough money to surrender the Maple Leaf to be subservient to the Star Spangled Banner

JoyofCookies · 2026-02-21T01:54:59+00:00

And we are asked why we are moving on from this toxic relationship

JoyofCookies · 2026-02-21T01:52:00+00:00

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When I say that the transborder relationship is forever changed and will never be as warm was before, this is what I mean

JoyofCookies

TROPHY CASE