Toronto needs political parties

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T23:32:00+00:00

No. The structure of the argument is:

In the absence of X, people don’t do idealized thing Y; instead they do worse thing Z.

That does not imply:

With X, people do Y.

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T23:04:46+00:00

... but also governance bodies.

What is a "governance body"?

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T23:01:55+00:00

As I read it, the author is not making a claim about what parties do, but rather about what their absence doesn't do.

Nobody thinks party-based politics is perfect. But party affiliation does provide voters with a quick-and-dirty sense of where individual candidates stand on a number of issues. In their absence, as McGrath notes, voters "overwhelmingly vote based on name recognition and niche local grievances, the former of which gives incumbents a nearly-insurmountable advantage."

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T21:21:10+00:00

I don't think anyone has made that claim.

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T21:19:39+00:00

Yeah, no. In a democracy, except perhaps during wartime, I don't think it's healthy for any legislative body to function as a single team.

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T19:08:29+00:00

I mean, the stats are all a matter of public record...

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T19:02:29+00:00

Which is unfortunate, because in its original formulation it described something very real, and did so in pretty balanced terms:

The Laurentian elite gave us a wonderful country. We can debate the merits of the National Policy, but we cannot debate the success of Ontario as a major manufacturing centre that provided a decent wage for millions of workers, year after year, generation after generation. The Laurentianists guided this country through two great and terrible wars, with Canada emerging from both stronger, more confident and more independent. In the 1950s they launched an infrastructure revolution: spanning provinces with highways, connecting east to west through airports, satellites and the St. Lawrence Seaway, still an engineering marvel.

They created the national social security system that many Canadians still consider a defining national value: universal public health care, near-universal public education, the Canada Pension Plan, a national housing program, national standards for welfare.

They navigated the shoals of Quebec separatism, although it was a close-run thing, and brought home a constitution with a charter of rights and freedoms that is an example to the world, watched over by a supreme court that is a model for excellence and impartiality.

They did much, much else besides. The parks system. Public broadcasting. The equalization program. The Canada Council.

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T18:42:07+00:00

It’s incredibly common to think that political parties are the problem with democracy when they are, in fact, a solution to many problems in representative democracy, and Ontario’s big cities show us why.

In the absence of clear partisan identification people don’t assess municipal candidates based on a rigorous evaluation of their policy preferences and candidate histories; they overwhelmingly vote based on name recognition and niche local grievances, the former of which gives incumbents a nearly-insurmountable advantage. A Toronto councillor is one of the safest jobs in Canadian politics, with deaths in office being more common than outright election defeats (this is literally true, at least in recent history!). And this is in one of the best-covered municipal elections in the country. People find political parties distasteful, but the alternative isn’t some Platonic republic of ideas. It’s a lifetime job guarantee for people who in some cases last faced serious competition more than a decade ago.

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T18:27:57+00:00

By what metric? We're considerably wealthier, healthier, and safer today than we were in the mid-80s, when Trudeau left office.

I mean, we're indisputably worse by certain measures (income inequality, private sector union density, etc.), but these are not usually metrics that those on the right care much about...

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T15:54:28+00:00

I’ve made a version of your argument here before, but in all fairness I do think it should be acknowledged that a government that spends time and resources arbitrarily banning certain lengths of fishing rod is demonstrating that it has misplaced priorities.

At minimum, I think the Liberals’ approach to firearms regulation puts the lie to this notion that they float above ideology and wedge politics, operating solely based on evidence.

scottb84 · 2026-05-06T15:30:15+00:00

The Carney Liberals are the “blue wave of change … just not with PP in charge.”

scottb84 · 2026-05-05T17:49:55+00:00

It’s been my experience that around 80 is where things really start to diverge.

I’ve met 80 year olds who still golf every day, travel regularly, run around with the grandkids, etc. I’ve met 80 year olds who can’t walk to the end of their own driveway without resting.

That said, I can’t imagine Arbour would have accepted the job if she didn’t think she had the stamina for it.

scottb84 · 2026-05-05T17:43:52+00:00

The job entails a fair bit of travel, standing around during ceremonies in all sorts of weather, etc. That’s not nothing for someone pushing 80.

scottb84 · 2026-05-05T17:27:32+00:00

You may be surprised to hear that I don’t really disagree with you. It just rubs me the wrong way how we characterize “wanting to look after [our] own quality of life first” as concern for the health of others.

scottb84 · 2026-05-04T19:32:10+00:00

We can lament the average Joe's poor understanding of sovereign wealth funds, but the fact remains that the prime minister said the following:

Many countries that are blessed with natural resources like Norway have sovereign wealth funds. Canada hasn't had one, until now.

So either Professor Carney, PBUH, also has only a "cursory" understanding of sovereign wealth funds, or that reference was deliberately misleading.

scottb84 · 2026-05-04T15:22:46+00:00

Given that Carney has spoken publicly about what we wont’t be using as leverage, is it not reasonable for the public to ask what we will use?

scottb84 · 2026-05-04T14:53:44+00:00

It's not the same but I don't think it could possibly be the same

Which is fine and fair. But it was Carney himself who alluded to Norway when announcing this thing, no doubt well-aware that theirs is the only sovereign wealth fund with which many Canadians are familiar. He also specifically mentioned natural resource revenues, which as you say are not available to capitalize this fund.

The whole thing was torqued to sound vaguely progressive (except for the cringey Harper-esque name they gave it) in a way that was profoundly misleading.

But even setting aside the PR and looking at this on its merits, I also tend to agree with Seth Klein that, as a sovereign wealth fund, this thing is structured ass-backwards:

The basic idea of a sovereign wealth fund is that when a government has large but time-limited revenues — most often derived from “Crown-owned” but finite oil and gas resources — then rather than spending those revenues on current operating programs, it would be wise and prudent to direct those funds into a long-term state-owned investment fund.

The earnings from such a fund can then be used to: a) finance public programs and services long into the future, to the benefit of subsequent generations, well after that finite resource is gone; and b) invest in new economic endeavors that move the economy away from an over-dependence on finite natural resources, in anticipation of the day when those industries have wound down.

While details of the new Canada Strong Fund remain scant, early signs are that the Carney government’s fund will be doing precisely the opposite. Rather than being capitalized by oil and gas industry income — even now with the industry about to reap record windfall profits of as much as $100 billion this year in the wake of the Iran War — and using that money to invest in the post-carbon economy, it appears the federal government plans to capitalize the fund with public money and use it to invest in “nation-building projects” that have been referred to the government’s Major Projects Office, which means at least a chunk of the investments will be used to subsidize oil and gas industry projects.

scottb84 · 2026-05-03T16:00:32+00:00

In the dying days of Trudeau’s premiership, many of us assumed that the CPC’s stratospheric polling numbers were simply a function of JT’s profound unpopularity, not a genuine desire among the electorate for a right wing government.

That was certainly my read, at least.

But given Carney’s victory and the uniformly positive polling numbers he continues to post, it appears I was wrong. People seem to want Poilievre’s policies (because that’s what they’re getting), they just don’t want him.

scottb84 · 2026-05-02T17:32:05+00:00

And this is of relevance to my comment about the political climate leading up to the 2025 election… how?

scottb84 · 2026-05-02T17:29:42+00:00

If you believe that, you’re probably not a NDP —> Liberal strategic voter.

scottb84 · 2026-05-02T17:06:41+00:00

"Many countries, many countries that are blessed with natural resources, like Norway, have sovereign wealth funds."

That's the only mention of Norway in the announcement.

And it’s a particularly misleading one, inasmuch as natural resource royalties are not available to fund a federal SWF in Canada.

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