The pandemic kind of wallpapered over it, but at the time we were looking down the tubes at a recession and a trade war, and Trump had by that point gotten rid of most of the competent cabinet that kept him in check.
If a 2008 crisis hit, it would have been bad.
People tend to forget how badly he fucked up the pandemic response. Imagine his cronies instead of Bush and Obama's people in '08. We'd be in a depression by now.
Ah, Usenet syndrome.
You'd said the problem was voters. That's an entirely wrong way to look at politics.
You can thank Mike Harris for that one.
Actually, if there's something that's broken in Ontario, you can almost always draw a line back to Harris about it. Drug epidemic? Harris' closing of mental health facilities. Housing? Harris downloading public housing onto cities. Environmental assessment wait times? Harris gutting the MOE. Transport? Harris' downloading again. Poor municipal road repair? You guessed it, Harris dumping provincial roads and services onto the cities then cutting their budgets.
It's tempting to blame Ford for stuff--and I'm sure the booze-in-C-stores will be a gift that keeps giving, both in terms of social costs and the FOUR BILLION DOLLARS it will cut from government revenues--but he's not done one-tenth the damage Harris did.
Pfft, of course not.
You're asking if the government that couldn't be asked to build housing while asking the feds for millions of immigrants to prop up the economy is planning when there's money involved? Please, this is the same guy who:
This is palm-greasing to the small-business douchebags that vote PC, and a sop to large donors that wanted this to buttress weakening foodservice sales. It's about doin' bidness.
"Former Langley MP" really buries the lede.
Maybe "protofascist grifter" would be more accurate?
Trudeau's moment, really, was when he didn't seem to think it was his job to do anything about housing or inflation.
I don't think you can pin the LPC's fall on that, but just coincidentally that's when the bottom fell out of their numbers and they scrambled off to a retreat to try and figure out how to get people to like them. Unfortunately, all of the solutions would require them to abandon neoliberalism.
I think they're really hoping for the kind of moment that got Keir Starmer in, or that saved Macron's bacon. Centrist and centre-left parties really, really want it to be the late 90s again, when you could lower taxes, be entertained by billionaires, play the sax on stage, fingerbang an intern and still be thought of as cool and progressive because you inhaled pot smoke one time.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, once you think the problem is that you have the wrong kind of people, you shouldn't be a leader
Ugh, no.
The problem is that the LPC has little or no bench strength. Freeland was probably the best option and she's been Hillary'ed by the CPC and the right-wing media over the last four years. After her, the bench is very thin: O'Reagan's similarly tained, Carney is a corporate tool, Leblanc isn't far behind. It gets pretty thin after that. I think they're looking at another Dion/Ignatieff-style wasteland as they try to figure out how to find a leader who's cool and popular without worrying about them doing anything.
The NDP has it worse. They really should have kept Mulcair or selected Angus. They'd be in a much better place now, if they had, though even then the media would just try hard not to cover them, like they're doing with Stiles in Ontario, who is very good but doesn't get any airplay.
“Duped” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.
I highly suggest you look at the history of medicine leading up to and into late 1800s and early 1900s
There’s a reason why we have regulations, and those reasons are horrifying.
Free speech absolutism. Sure.