Oh my Lord, this is awful.
The old Ontario Liberal logo was amazing – creative, eye-catching and full of meaning. It was also the product of a lot of consultation and research.
The new logo, dropped from on high, is terrible. Bland, boring, blecch. I sure don’t see candidates wanting to send in big cheques for new signs bearing this thing.
Anyone agree? I loved the old one, and hate the new one. You?
When I first saw this last night – in the midst of the Leafs’ loss, the re-entry of Chris Hadfield and other stuff – I thought it was a social media prank. You know, that the Conservatives were spinning the Liberal Party’s massive win in Labrador as a loss.
But it was true. To wit:
“Labradorians were able to see first-hand how Justin Trudeau is in over his head.”
The Cons have always been into the Big Lie theory of comms, but this one took the cake.
Free advice: when in a hole, fellas, stop digging.
I don’t watch her movies, but wow: Angelina Jolie has guts.
Tuesday is voting day in British Columbia. And, by provincial standards, it’s been a pretty staid affair.
For example, the Mounties didn’t raid the legislature — although, they did do that back in 2003, in a criminal probe of bribery and influence peddling involving senior B.C. Liberal staff.
Nor were there any fisticuffs between politicians — like “The Brawl in the Hall,” when Liberal Rick Thorpe threatened to beat up NDP Premier Glen Clark, who then instead chose discretion over valour.
Nor was there any sighting of oddly monikered politicians — such as (we kid you not) Amor de Cosmos, whose name meant “Lover of the Universe.”
Cosmos, born William Smith, was premier of B.C. and had been the leading advocate for joining Confederation.
(Later, however, there was Bill Vander Zalm, who was also premier, and ran a theme park called Fantasy Gardens — and made de Cosmos seem like Winston Churchill.)
This, and more, has long been the stuff of B.C. politics. Politically, it is a place that bears out one of my beloved mother’s favourite maxims: “All the nuts roll to the corners, dear.”
But this time, in B.C., it’s been a comparatively stolid affair. No police raids, no fistfights, no lunatics in the premier’s chair.
After a month of politicking, British Columbians head to polling stations Tuesday, and they are going to vote for an NDP government, led by a rather dry fellow named Adrian Dix. They are doing this for three reasons:
n Dix is — as noted — kind of unexciting. He is no socialist firebrand like his former boss, the aforementioned Glen Clark. He is a shy, well-read sort, one who quotes sports trivia and is adverse to class-war rhetoric. British Columbians have had quite enough excitement, thank you very much, and Dix’s strength is the very thing that B.C. Liberal strategists wrongly thought would be his weakness: He isn’t a showoff.
He isn’t a phony. He isn’t a performer. He’s the kind of guy who, if he lived next door to you, would mow your lawn while you were away, and without being asked.
n The second reason Adrian Dix and his new New Democrats are going to win, and deserve to, is because his main opponent is everything he isn’t: A phony, a show-offy performer, and one who is possibly one of the most inauthentic politicians to ever grace a podium in B.C. (and that’s saying something). Christy Clark has variously depicted herself as a Paul Martin Liberal and Stephen Harper/Preston Manning Conservative. She’s a chameleon, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
One of the most revealing insights into Clark’s ethos came when B.C. Liberals actually ran ads attacking Dix for riding the SkyTrain without a ticket. This, when Clark was caught running a red light with her son beside her. But where Clark ran ads about Dix’s lapse, Dix refused to say much about Clark’s far more serious mistake. That said much about him, and nothing that was good about her.
n The third reason why Clark’s Liberals will lose, however, is simple: Change. The B.C. Liberals have been in power since 2001, and most sensible British Columbians think it’s time to give the other bums a chance. They want change.
Tonight, they’re going to get it. And, as a former B.C. Liberal, I think it’s going to be a good thing.
I knew that little headline would get your attention!
And it’s true. Being the guy (currently) most likely to become Premier if (theoretically) there is an election, Hudak could have chosen the easy course. He could have chosen discretion over valour. He could have jumped on the popular and populist bandwagon, like Kathleen Wynne and countless others.
Tim Hudak (along with me, Gerald Butts, Alex Panetta and, er, that’s it) is not cheering for the Toronto Maple Leafs. He has always cheered for the Bruins, and continues to do so. Good for him. That takes balls.
Now, when I was a kid attending Our Lady of Lourdes in Kingston, I adored the Bruins, too. Lots of us did in Kingston. Cashman, Orr, Sanderson: those were our hockey heroes. Not the Maple Leafs.
Relocated to Calgary, I loved the Flames and the Habs (which were, at one level, the same organization). Once in Toronto, I did not waver. Why? The Leafs fans made it easy for me.
Not, I note, the Leafs themselves. They, like all hockey teams, are comprised of young men getting paid too much to play a kids’ game. It’s not their fault, per se. No, I did not hate them. I hated the Leafs fans.
Leafs fans are the most uncritical fans in the sports universe. You could dump a metric tonne of manure at centre ice, throw a Leafs jersey on it, and the assembled fans would cheer for it. In their multi-thousand-dollar corporate boxes, drinking shitty $20 beers. And then they’d go buy overpriced manure merch, and wear it on weekends to trips to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Leafs fans, who haven’t had a team that has won a cup since 1967, endlessly complain about how bad their team is. They kvetch and moan about it. BUT THEY STILL KEEP PAYING THOUSANDS TO SEE THE LEAFS PLAY.
And that is why the Leafs suck: even when they suck, Leafs fans keep buying tickets. You don’t see that sort of mass delusional psychosis happening in Montreal or Calgary or Vancouver. They’d stop coming. And at that point, team owners would be obliged to – surprise, surprise – put together teams who can win.
And that’s why I detest the Leafs – their fans. Their fans are the problem.
Oh, and Tim Hudak? Your resolve won’t hurt you with Toronto Leafs fans.
Deep down in their tiny black hearts, they suspect you are right.
He was no fan of yours truly – case in point – but what a career he had! He’d been there to see it all, first-hand.
Journalism really doesn’t produce men (or women) like him anymore. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: with Worthington’s passing, it’s the end of an era in Canadian journalism.
Sincere condolences to his family and many friends.
God is dead.
Or, at least, he’s irrelevant. So say a growing number of Canadians who, according to Statistics Canada’s just-released National Household Survey, are becoming less and less religious.
The numbers are drawn from the agency’s 2011 demographic study and they paint a picture that anticipates an increasingly secular Canada. Back in 1981, around 90% of Canadians were Christian and just over 7% had no religious affiliation at all.
Thirty years later, those self-identifying as Christians have plummeted to 67% — and the non-believers have surged to nearly one-quarter of the population.
Statistic Canada’s numbers show constant growth in the non-religious category, by about 5% every decade.
If that trend holds steady, a third of Canadians will be effectively godless by the end of this decade.
For students of politics — and conservative politics, in particular — there are other trends worth noting.
The survey also found that Jews are far less numerous than they once were, and are now in danger of slipping below 1% of the population.
Meanwhile, the number of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs are rising all the time. In 1981, for instance, less than one-half of 1% of Canadians was Muslim.
Now, they constitute more than 3% and are the second-largest religious group in Canada.
Any politician seeking to one day lead to the Conservative Party of Canada — or anyone hoping to win a Conservative nomination somewhere, and a seat in a federal or provincial legislative body — should scrutinize the Statistics Canada trend lines very, very carefully.
They strongly suggest the Conservatives have pursued a strategy that, ultimately, will see them marginalized in the way Republicans currently are in the U.S.
Going back a decade, Stephen Harper’s Conservative coalition had been partly made up of evangelicals, right-leaning Christians and Jews who were upset about Liberal party foreign policy.
At the same time, Harper’s party gave the cold shoulder to other faiths — going after the charitable status of left-leaning Christian causes, attacking the religious garb of Muslims and suggesting (as Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney famously did) that Sikhs were “overheated” and use “the race card.”
In the short term, it was nasty, but it was a strategy that worked. With a massive war chest — and with state-of-the-art electioneering techniques like psychographics and geo-demographic segmentation — the Conservatives cobbled together enough votes to win a majority in 2011.
But, if Statistics Canada is right, the Conservatives have also chosen a path that long-term will ultimately end in defeat. By championing Christian-right causes and demonizing Muslims, the Harper Cons are demographically putting themselves out of business.
(Personally, as a church-going Irish Catholic guy, the StatsCan data makes me sort of sad. I’m no missionary — I consider religion to be an entirely personal affair and detest those who are always lecturing and hectoring others about it — but I know I draw considerable comfort from my faith. It gives a measure of hope to me and, I believe, others. So how do the growing numbers of non-religious folks get by without hope? I’d find that pretty hard to do, but that’s just me.)
As citizens of the best country in the world, these statistics should make most of us pretty happy, however.
We are a peaceful, diverse society, and that’s helping to attract people from all over. We are the envy of the world, as Jean Chretien used to say, and that can only be a good thing.
But these statistics should fill future Conservatives with dread. They strongly suggest that Harper’s party — as conservatives so often do — is fighting the last war, and not preparing for the one that lies ahead.
God might have something to say about that, but at press time he could not be reached for comment.