Category Archives: Canada

British Columbia, Canada

How the British Columbia Liberals managed to pull off such a stunning upset victory over the NDP

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The incumbent British Columbia Liberal Party, under the leadership of premier Christy Clark in her first provincial-wide election, has held on to power for a fourth consecutive government, despite the fact that the British Columbia New Democratic Party was heavily favored throughout the campaign to win the election.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

This was definitely a surprise, given that the BC NDP was leading by nearly 20 points two months ago, and even though polls showed a narrowing race in Canada’s third-largest province, forecasters still believed the BC NDP a heavy favorite just a day ago that showed a narrowing race in Canada’s third-largest province.  No poll showed the BC Liberals leading this race, though polls showed Clark narrowing the gap against BC NDP opposition leader Adrian Dix.

As of around 1:15 am EST on Wednesday morning, the BC Liberals have been elected to 45 seats and were leading in 51 seats, while the BC NDP had been elected to 27 seats and leading in just 32.  Andrew Weaver was set to become the province’s first Green Party legislator, with one independent rounding out the membership of the 85-seat provincial assembly.  Given that the BC Liberals held 45 seats going into the election and the BC NDP held 36 seats, the BC NDP may well have lost seats on Tuesday.

In particular, former Vancouver mayor from 2005 to 2008, Sam Sullivan, was handily elected to a seat in the Vancouver-False Creek riding for the BC Liberals.  Clark was leading, just slightly, in her own constituency in Vancouver Point Grey against a strong challenge from the BC NDP’s David Eby (NB: if Clark doesn’t win, it’s expected that a colleague will step down to allow Clark to win a speedy by-election).

It’s, of course, really bad news for Dix, whose leadership should almost certainly come to an end with Tuesday’s disastrous result.  It’s really bad news for Thomas Mulcair, the opposition leader of Canada and federal NDP leader, who had embraced Dix and the provincial NDP in a way that federal Liberals had not embraced Clark and the BC Liberals.

It’s the second upset in as many years in western Canada — in Alberta in April 2012, nearly every pollster showed that another longtime incumbent party was set to lose power.  But Alison Redford, the beleaguered incumbent premier, led her Progressive Conservative Party to victory against a challenge from Wildrose, a new party that had run both to the social and fiscal right of Redford.

So how did the BC Liberals do it?  Here are four reasons that explain what happened Tuesday in British Columbia. Continue reading How the British Columbia Liberals managed to pull off such a stunning upset victory over the NDP →

British Columbia, Bulgaria, Canada, Pakistan, Philippines

Four world elections in four days: Pakistan, Bulgaria, the Philippines, and British Columbia

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It’s an incredibly busy weekend for world elections, with four key elections on three continents coming in the next four days.

Pakistan

First up, on Saturday, May 11, are national elections in Pakistan, where voters will determine the composition of the 342-member National Assembly, of which 272 seats will be determined by direct election in single-member constituencies on a first-past-the-post basis.Pakistan Flag Icon

With 180 million people and with nearly 60% of them under the age of 30, the elections in Pakistan will by far have the most global impact by implicating South Asia’s economy and not only regional, but global security with U.S. interests keen to mark a stable transition, especially after a particularly violent campaign season marked with attacks by the Pakistani Taliban.

The incumbent government led by the leftist Pakistan People’s Party, the party of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, is expected to falter.  Their expense is likely to come at the gain of the more conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who is a slight favorite to once again become Pakistan’s prime minister on the strength of support in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.  But the upstart nationalist, anti-corruption Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) is expected to make a strong challenge under the leadership of Imran Khan, the charismatic former cricket star.

Read all of Suffragio‘s coverage of Pakistan here.

Bulgaria

On Sunday, May 12, it’s Bulgaria’s turn, and voters will decide who controls the unicameral National Assembly .bulgaria flag

When the 2008 global financial crisis hit, the center-left Bulgarian Socialist Party was in office under prime minister Sergei Stanishev.  Voters promptly ejected Stanishev and the Socialists in the 2009 elections in exchange for a new conservative party, Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) under the wildly popular Boyko Borissov.  Since 2009, however, Borissov and GERB have become massively unpopular, and rising power costs and general economic malaise have made conditioned markedly worse.  The depressed economy and a wiretapping scandal have left the race essentially a tossup between the Socialists and GERB, though a number of small parties, including an far-right nationalist party and an ethnic Turkish party, are expected to win seats.

Of the 240 seats in the National Assembly, 209 will be determined by proportional representation (with a 4% threshold for entering parliament) and 31 will be determined in single-member districts.  With just 7.5 million people, Bulgaria is on the periphery of the European Union — if the result is close and no party wins a majority, it will cause some concern in Brussels, but because Bulgaria isn’t a member of the eurozone, that outcome wouldn’t necessarily cause any wider financial problems.

Read Suffragio‘s overview of the Bulgarian election here.

The Philippines

The action moves back to Asia on Monday, May 13, when the Philippines votes in midterm elections to determine one-half of the Senate’s 24 seats and all of the 222 seats in the Philippine House of Representatives.philippines

Although, with 94 million people, the Philippines has a population of just about half that of Pakistan, it’s a strategic country with an increasingly important economic, cultural and military alliance with the United States as U.S. policymakers ‘pivot’ to Asia.  It doesn’t hurt that the country’s economic growth rate in 2012 of 6.6% was the fastest in all of Asia, excepting the People’s Republic of China.

All of which means that the current president, Benigno ‘PNoy’ Aquino III, whose father was the opposition leader assassinated in 1983 and whose mother, Corazon Aquino, became Philippine president in 1986 after 21 years of rule by Ferdinand Marcos, is an incredibly popular head of state.  His electoral coalition, ‘Team PNoy,’ dominated by his own Liberal Party, is widely expected to make big gains, giving Aquino a little more help facing an unfriendly legislature.

Read all of Suffragio‘s coverage of The Philippines here.

British Columbia

Finally, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, voters in Canada’s third-most populous province, British Columbia, will vote for all 85 members of its legislative assembly on Tuesday, May 14.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

The British Columbia Liberal Party is seeking its fourth consecutive mandate since Gordon Campbell won elections in 2001, 2005 and 2009.  After stepping down in 2011, his successor Christy Clark finds herself waging an uphill battle to win over the hearts of an electorate jaded by scandal after scandal.  The frontrunner to become the next premier is Adrian Dix, the leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party, though his opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline and a feisty campaign by the Liberals have whittled a 20-point lead two months ago to just single digits.

Though British Columbia is home to just 4.4 million people, the result will have important implications for Canada’s energy industry as well as potential implications for the NDP’s national future — a high-profile loss for Dix will only spell further trouble for the national party.

Read Suffragio‘s overview of the British Columbia election here.

Canada

Video of the day: Mulcair knows the money’s in the banana stand

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It’s been a tough few weeks for the New Democratic Party in Canada, what with the surge of newly elected Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau pushing his once dominant party back into third place in polls.Canada Flag Icon

But NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, who as the head of the second-largest party in the House of Commons, is also the leader of the opposition, pulled out a reference to the television series Arrested Development today while questioning what happened to government funding under Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper:

[Mulcair] was wondering where $3.1 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism spending went when he uttered this gem:

“So the question is, is the money just in the wrong filing cabinet, is it hidden in the minister’s gazebo, is the money in the banana stand?”

Thanks to Giancarlo Di Pietro for the tip.

Canada

Trudeau overwhelmingly wins Liberal Party leadership

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Justin Trudeau, the son of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, has been elected the new leader of the Liberal Party in Canada.Canada Flag Icon

As expected, his victory was essentially a coronation — he won 80.1% of the vote to just 10.2% for British Columbia MP Joyce Murray and 5.7% for former Ontario MP Martha Hall Findlay.

Here’s what I wrote last month about the challenges Trudeau will now face in advance of the 2015 general election

Here’s what I wrote last week about Murray, and how she represents the future of Canadian politics in a couple of key ways.

Canada

Despite Trudeaumania, Joyce Murray personifies the future of Canada’s center-left

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It’s a safe prediction that Joyce Murray will not be the next leader of the Liberal Party.Canada Flag Icon

When the Liberal Party’s membership finishes voting and the winner is announced this Sunday, the winner is certainly going to be Justin Trudeau — and likely by a landslide margin.  His anticipated election is already pushing the Grits ahead in polls, and not only against the official opposition, the New Democratic Party under Thomas Mulcair, but into contention for first place against the Conservatives under Stephen Harper.

It seems equally likely that the Liberals will get an even larger boost in the polls in the ‘Trudeau honeymoon,’ as the presumptive Liberal leader ascends to lead a party that governed Canada during 69 years of the 20th century — and which has seen its share of the vote fall in each of the past five elections.

Murray, who served as minister of water, land and air protection in the Liberal government of British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell in the early 2000s, lost her provincial seat in 2005 and reemerged as a Liberal MP from Vancouver in the House of Commons in the 2008 election.  Since the withdrawal of MP Marc Garneau from the leadership race, however, Murray has been locked in a battle for second place with former Ontario MP Martha Hall Findlay.

The late momentum, however, lies with Murray, whose main campaign strategy has been a unite-the-left platform aimed at pulling together the Liberals, the New Democrats and the Greens together in an alliance for the next general election.  Murray certainly has raised more money than any of the non-Trudeau hopefuls.

The fundamental fact of Canadian politics is that the broad left — from the most moderate business-friendly Liberals to the most ardently progressive New Democrats — remains split between two credible alternatives to the Conservatives.  In many ways, it parallels the split between the old-guard Progressive Conservative Party and the upstart Reform Party / Canadian Alliance in the 1990s and early 2000s, which allowed Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin to govern without much of an opposition from 1993 to 2004.

In the same way, the logic that propelled the conservative merger in 2003 augurs for a similar center-left alliance in 2013.

And the logic is tantalizing — in a country where MPs are determined in 308 first-past-the-post single member ridings, the Tories won a majority government in 2011 with less than 40% of the vote.  A recent Léger poll shows the Conservatives with 31%, the Liberals ascending to 30%, the NDP with 24% and the Greens with 7%.  Taken together, Murray’s dream coalition would trounce the Tories on a vote of 61% to 31%.

The problem is that unlike the PCs, which never won more than 15 seats in the House of Commons after their decimation following the 1980s governments of Brian Mulroney, and unlike Reform/Alliance, which never managed to extend its reach beyond western Canada, both the NDP and the Trudeau-era Liberals are national parties with long, proud histories in Canada that stretch back far into the prior century.

Trudeau himself has argued to the incompatibility of the Liberal and NDP traditions:

But this debate is less about electoral calculations than about Trudeau’s assessment of congenital incompatibilities on the left of the Canadian political spectrum. In an interview last year with Maclean’s, he contrasted the unification of the right, as accomplished by Harper in 2003, and the notion of symmetrical coming together of Canadian progressives.

“The right didn’t unite so much as reunite,” Trudeau said. “I mean, Reform was very much a western movement breaking away from Brian Mulroney. But they broke away, then they came back together. The NDP and the Liberals come from very, very, very different traditions.”

But that overstates the case — keep in mind that the most successful leader the Liberals have had in the past decade, the current interim leader Bob Rae, is the former NDP premier of Ontario.  Mulcair, the current NDP leader, was a member of the Québec Liberal Party during his career in provincial politics.  Though it’s important to keep in mind that provincial parties aren’t affiliated with national parties, it’s fair to say that there’s a significant amount of cross-pollination between the two traditions.

Even beyond her controversial support for a broad center-left alliance, however, the center of gravity in Canada is moving in two directions — both westward in the geographic sense and toward a more globalized, diverse, immigrant-rich Canada in a demographic sense — and British Columbia (and Vancouver) is obviously at the heart of both of those trends.  Continue reading Despite Trudeaumania, Joyce Murray personifies the future of Canada’s center-left →

British Columbia, Canada

BC NDP holds overwhelming lead in advance of British Columbia elections

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With a month and a half before voters in Canada’s largest western province go to the polls, the New Democratic Party of British Columbia under opposition leader Adrian Dix seems set to take control of the provincial government after over a decade of rule by the British Columbia Liberal Party, though the official campaign has yet to begin.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

British Columbia is, in many ways, the future of Canada — oriented toward the Asia-Pacific rim, not toward the United Kingdom and the Atlantic.  The province’s welcoming approach to immigration, including a large wave of Cantonese-speaking Chinese from Hong Kong in advance of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong control from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, was a prologue to what’s now happening all over Canada.  As of a decade ago, while 75% of British Columbians spoke English only, just around 2% were exclusive French speakers, and nearly 25% spoke a number of languages other than English or French, and the province’s diversity has only grown in the past decade.

Nearly 10% of British Columbia’s population today is Chinese in origin, nearly 6% is Indian in origin.

The reality of British Columbia — and increasingly, the reality of Canada nationwide — is making nonsense of the eastern bilingual French/English divide that underlined the constitutional fights of the late 20th century.

With over 4.5 million people (around 13% of Canada’s population), it’s still less populous than Ontario or Québec, but it’s growing at a faster rate than either, with an economy split between a traditional dominance on forestry and tourism and the growing importance of mining — much like its neighbor to the east, Alberta.

Polls for the past year have shown a wide lead for the BC NDP in the elections scheduled for May 14 — a recent mid-March Angus Reid poll gives the BC NDP 48% support to just 28% support for the BC Liberals, and 11% each for the British Columbia Green Party and the British Columbia Conservative Party — the BC Conservatives take 17% in the province’s interior, while the Greens win 18% on Vancouver Island: Continue reading BC NDP holds overwhelming lead in advance of British Columbia elections →

Alberta, Canada

Longtime conservative Albertan premier Ralph Klein has died

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No one symbolized the conservatism of western Canada more than Ralph Klein, who died today at age 70.

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Elected Alberta’s premier in 1992, Klein served until 2006, championing the ‘Alberta Advantage,’ and presiding over what became Canada’s wealthiest province, the heartland of today’s Conservative Party.

Tory leader Stephen Harper has represented a Calgary riding in the House of Commons since 1993, and the Reform Party, later the Canadian Alliance, got its start among Calgarian conservatives like Harper and Preston Manning.  Harper engineered a merger with the then-decimated Progressive Conservative Party at the national level, resulting in the united center-right government he leads today.

Klein, who remained firmly planted in Albertan provincial politics, nonetheless became the ideological godfather of the more fiscally conservative, more Western, and more aggressive conservatism that came to Canadian federal politics in the early 2000s under Harper.

Despite his resignation (with a push from his Progressive Conservative colleagues) as premier in 2006, Klein’s legacy may also be one of the reasons that Albertan premier Alison Redford, despite slumping polls, held on to win a full term as premier in the April 2012 Albertan provincial election in the face of a more stridently populist and socially conservative challenge from the newer Wildrose Party.  The win continued a Progressive Conservative run of power that’s been uninterrupted since 1971.

As Don Braid of The Calgary Herald writes, much of Klein’s legacy is in his campaign to eliminate Alberta’s debt:

It’s deeply ironic that at the moment of his death, Ralph Klein’s legacy has been formally overturned, as a new wave of Alberta politicians revert to debt, borrowing and deficit as the chief tools of government. Klein banned those things. He paid off debt and then made it illegal. A man who knew how to squeeze a penny, he was the perfect leader to throw off the crushing debt Alberta faced when he took office in late 1992.

Read it all, but there’s much more from The Calgary Herald here, including this video and this timeline of his life.

Colby Cosh at MacLean’s notes his legacy on debt, but also on federalism and the assertion of Alberta’s growing regional power, despite Klein’s prickly attitude toward eastern Canada — he once termed eastern migrants to his province ‘creeps and bums’:

The ways in which Ralph Klein is misunderstood outside Alberta seem to mirror the ways in which Alberta itself is misunderstood; although attachment to religion is actually lower in Alberta than in Ontario and the Atlantic Provinces, it is Alberta that is thought of as an atavistic, “socially conservative” hate factory. The real difference between Alberta and other provinces is more structural than ideological or religious. Alberta has a strong lingering streak of laissez-faire utilitarianism because most of its citizens are no more than a generation removed from those who came here for jobs.

The Globe and Mail gathers some of Klein’s more memorable quotes here, including this quintessential quote from when he was Calgary’s mayor from 1980 to 1989:

“Everyone knows I have sins. I eat too much. I still drink. I gamble and, God forbid, I still see some of my old friends.” – In April, 1982, explaining how he hadn’t let being mayor completely alter his lifestyle.

The Toronto Star‘s Petti Fong considers Klein’s relationship with the Chinese community here, and Don Martin’s take at The National Post here.

Photo credit to John Ulan of the Canadian Press.

Canada, Quebec

Who is Philippe Couillard?

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As unbelievable as it seems, the Jean Charest era is firmly over in Québécois politics.Quebec Flag IconpngCanada Flag Icon

Philippe Couillard, his former minister of health and social services, is now the leader of Québec’s Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ), which narrowly lost its reelection campaign in September 2012 for what would have been a fourth consecutive term in government under Charest.

As expected, Couillard won on the first ballot with 58.5% of the vote — the convention lacked the drama of January’s Ontario Liberal Party convention that saw Kathleen Wynne win the leadership in Canada’s largest province, thereby paving the way for Wynne to succeed Dalton McGuinty as Ontario’s premier.

So who is Couillard and what does his elevation as Québec’s chief opposition leader mean for the province and for Canada?

A neurosurgeon by training, Couillard came to provincial government in 2003 as a member of the provincial legislature from Mont-Royal, a constituency in Montréal, though he stepped down in 2008 after a relatively successful stint as health minister, where he oversaw a ban on public smoking in the province.

During the leadership race, Couillard received criticism for his partnership with Arthur Porter, the former head of McGill University’s health center, who is living in the Bahamas and wanted on fraud charges in respect of a 2010 contract to build McGill’s new hospital — Couillard had partnered with Porter for a consulting venture in 2008 upon returning to the private sector.

Couillard must now win a seat in the Assemblée nationale du Québec, although he may well wait until the next election, and he’s said that winning a new seat is not a top priority for him — Jean-Marc Fournier, who served as the interim party leader, will continue for now as the PLQ floor leader in the provincial assembly.  Because the current sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ) holds only a minority government under premier Pauline Marois, Québec could return to the polls, perhaps even within the year.  So it’s fair that rebuilding and rebranding Québec’s Liberal Party is a more pressing task for Couillard in the months ahead.

Unlike Charest, who worked to keep a lid on the fraught constitutional politics that afflicted Québec in the 1970s and the 1990s, Couillard has wasted no time in calling on the province to become a signatory to Canada’s 1982 constitution by the year 2017 — a move that’s already generating controversy both inside Québec and outside:

“We need to be methodical in the way we are going to approach this,” said [Couillard]… “The first thing to do is within our party, to discuss this question of identity or the specific nature of Quebec and then have conversations with the other governments of Canada on how this could be approached.”

He proposed that a new round of constitutional talks could include other issues, such as prime minister Stephen Harper’s proposal to reform the Senate. “This could be one window of opportunity,” he said adding that another more “symbolic window” would be the 150th anniversary of Confederation.

That’s slightly perilous talk for any Canadian politician in light of the constitutional battles of the early 1990s — the 1990 Meech Lake accord failed and Canadians voted down the Charlottetown accord in a 1992 referendum, one of the reasons for the implosion of Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney’s government.  Three years later, Québec voted by only the narrowest of margins to remain within Canada in a referendum on its future status.

Charest, a federalist who led the Progressive Conservatives in the 1997 Canadian federal elections, left national politics for provincial politics in 1998, and his Québec premiership sought to downplay constitutional and sovereignty issues.

Couillard has also criticized Marois’s government for its proposed Bill 14, which would make Québec’s French language laws even stricter by revoking the ‘bilingual’ status of municipalities with less than 50% anglophone population, introduce a mandatory French proficiency test for Québécois students, and prevent small businesses (less than 25 employees) from using English in the workplace. Continue reading Who is Philippe Couillard? →

Canada

Trudeau now all but certain to become Liberal leader in Canada

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While everyone was watching to the Vatican City on Wednesday, another potential world leader took a step toward his own elevation — Justin Trudeau, whose chief rival for the Liberal Party leadership in Canada dropped out and endorsed him in advance of what’s now likely to be a mere formality on April 14. Canada Flag Icon

Like the new Pope Francis, Trudeau will assume control of a once-powerful organization that has had difficulty finding its purpose in a vastly changing world — the world of 21st century Canadian governance.  He’ll do so having risen to the leadership as the son of a beloved former prime minister on a campaign that’s little more substantive than rewarmed platitudes of what’s been orthodox Liberal policy of the past two decades and his airy good looks.

Right now, Canadians love him, though — they say that they would overwhelmingly support the Trudeau-led Liberals in the next election.  Today, however, with his election as leader all but certain, the Liberals remain mired in third place behind the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party.  So it’s worth taking caution in reading polls that seem to show a Trudeau landslide in the next election — those polls suggest to me the upper limit of what Trudeau might achieve in a best-case scenario in 2015, when the next federal election is likely to be held.

As the leadership race approaches, though, the central question of Canadian politics has now become whether, on the one hand, Trudeau’s rock-star quality and popularity will wear thin after his coronation (dooming the Liberals to what must certainly be oblivion) or, on the other hand, Trudeau will rise to the occasion by navigating the top echelons of federal politics sufficient to bring the Liberals back into power by following in the footsteps of his father.

The future of Canadian politics — and Canadian policy in the next decade — rests on the answer to that question.

His chief rival Marc Garneau exited the race on Wednesday after releasing a survey that showed he would win just 15% of Liberal voter support to 72% for Trudeau, who he also endorsed.

As the first Canadian in outer space, Garneau is somewhat the John Glenn of Canada — he served as the president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2006, and then moved into electoral politics, winning a seat in the 2008 election in the Québécois riding of Westmount in the Montréal area.  He’s thoughtful, articulate, and he hasn’t been unwilling to take on Trudeau — taking advantage of several debates to challenge Trudeau directly for running a campaign of ’empty words’ as an untested rookie.

Garneau, ironically, would have been a better candidate than any of the past three Liberal Party leaders — former prime minister Paul Martin, who lost the 2006 federal election to Stephen Harper’s ascendant Conservative Party; former environment minister Stéphane Dion, who won just 26% in the 2008 federal election; and former author and academic Michael Ignatieff, who won just 19% and 34 seats in the 2011 federal election, well behind the more progressive NDP that’s now Canada’s official opposition. He may well have even been a better Liberal leader than Bob Rae, who ruled out a run himself last year, despite receiving high marks for his performance as interim leader.

If Trudeau becomes prime minister in 2015, Garneau will obviously be at the top of the list to fill an important ministry.

But Trudeau fils has always been the frontrunner in the race, and it was never likely that anyone would be able to dislodge what the Liberals believe is their last shot at returning to electoral viability.  Sure, six additional candidate remain in the race — including former justice minister Martin Cauchon, former leadership contender Martha Hall Findlay and British Columbia MP Joyce Murray, who has called for center-left unity with both the NDP and Canada’s Green Party.

Nonetheless, it seems ever more likely that Trudeau will now overwhelmingly win the Liberal leadership and, sure, he probably seems like the best chance that Liberals have to retake power, even if they would need to quintuple their current 35 seats in the House of Ridings in order to win a majority.  We still don’t know if Trudeau’s breezy success in politics to date will continue after he wins the Liberal leadership, though even former prime minister Jean Chrétien, the last Liberal to have widespread electoral success, agrees that the race — and, implicitly, Trudeau’s energetic campaign — has boosted Liberal fortunes.

Either way, the Liberal Party in 2013 is a far cry from the Liberal Party that governed Canada for 69 years in the 20th century — a party dominated by elites from Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa — and personified by Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s.  Continue reading Trudeau now all but certain to become Liberal leader in Canada →

Canada, Ontario

Wynne set to become highest-ranking LGBT official in Canadian history

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Ontario MPP Kathleen Wynne last night upended former Ontario MPP Sandra Pupatello to become the next leader of the Ontario Liberal Party — and, accordingly, soon to become the next premier of the most populous Canadian province.ontarioCanada Flag Icon

Pupatello, who was a slight favorite headed into the party convention, led on the first two ballots before Wynne clinched the leadership on the third and final ballot, with the support of the race’s original frontrunner, Gerard Kennedy, and another candidate, Charles Sousa.

That support was enough to turn the tide and it gave the leadership to Wynne on a vote of 1,150 to 866.

It also means that Wynne will become Ontario’s next premier — incumbent Dalton McGuinty is stepping down after nearly a decade as premier and after leading the Ontario Liberals to three consecutive electoral victories, albeit with a minority government in his third term.  McGuinty has served as the leader of the Ontario Liberals since 1996.

Wynne defeated David Turnbull, then an incumbent Progressive Conservative minister of enterprise, in the 2003 provincial election in a municipal Toronto riding to enter the Ontario legislature a decade ago.  She served as minister of education (just as Kennedy and Pupatello once did, ironically) from 2006 to 2010 before becoming minister of transportation and then minister of municipal affairs and housing and aboriginal affairs.

Wynne directly addressed the question of whether a lesbian could proceed to win an election province-wide following her win:

I want to put something on the table: Is Ontario ready for a gay premier? You’ve heard that question. You’ve all heard that question, but let’s say what that actually means: Can a gay woman win? That’s what it means….

You know, there was a time, not that long ago, when most of us in this leadership race would not have been deemed suitable. We would have been deemed unsuitable. A Portuguese-Canadian, an Indo-Canadian, an Italian-Canadian, female, gay, Catholic. Most of us could not have hoped to stand on this stage. But the province has changed. Our party has changed.

It’s a strong statement, and with Wynne’s elevation, Canada joins the vanguard of countries in the world where gay men and women have reached the pinnacle of political power.  By contrast, even in relatively liberal California, the most populous U.S. state, it seems unlikely to think that voters would elect a gay governor less than a decade after former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger referred to lawmakers as ‘girly men’.

Wynne, who has three children with her former husband, came out at age 37, and has been with her current partner Jane Rounthwaite, since 1990.

So Wynne’s Saturday evening victory should be recognized for its historic importance.

But back in the world of day-to-day Ontario politics, the reality is that Wynne has a difficult task ahead of her in rejuvenating the Ontario Liberals after a decade in government if she doesn’t want to wind up as the Kim Campbell of Ontario politics.‡ Continue reading Wynne set to become highest-ranking LGBT official in Canadian history →

Canada, Ontario

Kennedy falters as Pupatello and Wynne lead race to become Ontario premier

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When Dalton McGuinty announced late last year that he would step down simultaneously as both leader of the Ontario Liberal Party and Ontario’s premier, it made this month’s Liberal leadership contest also a contest to become Ontario’s next premier.Canada Flag Iconontario

It’s not the best of times for McGuinty, who lost an opportunity to regain a majority government in Ontario’s unicameral legislative assembly after losing two by-elections last autumn.  The losses came after McGuinty passed — with the support of the opposition Progressive Conservative Party — a bill that froze wages for public teachers and denies the right to strike for the following two years.  The bill was seen as a massive betrayal by teachers’ unions that were key to McGuinty’s electoral victories since first becoming premier in 2003.

So his stepping down, after a decade in power, was seen as an opportunity for the Ontario Liberals to reboot before what’s likely to be an upcoming election (although the next election need not take place before October 2015) — and polls show his party in third place, behind both the Tories and the progressive New Democratic Party, and only leading by the narrowest of margins in the greater Toronto area, one of the last bastions of support for provincial and federal Liberals alike.

Originally, it seemed like the runner-up to McGuinty in the previous 1996 leadership race, Gerard Kennedy, was the frontrunner. But poor organization and his unpopularity among party insiders have pushed him to the background.

After delegates were selected over the weekend for the Ontario Liberal conference scheduled for January 25 to 27, two frontrunners have emerged — Sandra Pupatello (pictured above, bottom) and Kathleen Wynne (pictured above, top).

Pupatello won the greatest number of pledged delegates with 27%, followed closely by Wynne with 25%.  Kennedy fell far behind with just 14%, with Punjab-born MPP Harinder Takhar in a narrow fourth place with 13%.  Two remaining candidates — Charles Sousa (11%) and Eric Hoskins (6%) — followed far behind.

While there are independent and other ex officio delegates who will also be able to participate in the leadership vote, the pledged delegates clearly seem to indicate that the race will come down to Pupatello and Wynne who, like Kennedy, have all held the position of Ontario’s minister of education in the past decade.

Wynne, who would be Canada’s first openly-gay provincial premier, has been a member of the Ontario legislature since 2003, and she served as minister of education from 2006 to 2010; thereafter, she served as minister of transportation and then minister of municipal affairs and housing and aboriginal affairs.  Ideologically, she’s to the left of Pupatello, which could help her steal voters who might otherwise support the NDP in any future election.

Pupatello served in the Ontario legislature from 1995 to 2011, when she resigned to take a job as director of business and global markets at PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Aside from a stint as minister of education in 2006, she served as minister of economic development and innovation for much of the last five years of her legislative career.  She’s seen as more center-right than either Kennedy or Wynne, and she’s also perceived as the ‘establishment’ candidate as well.

Pupatello, 10 years younger than Wynne, is also seen as the more spirited campaigner, a quality that Liberal voters might like to see in a leader who will have to fight tooth-and-nail to retain power after the next provincial election.   Continue reading Kennedy falters as Pupatello and Wynne lead race to become Ontario premier →

Brazil, Canada, China, Ethiopia, European Union, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, United Kingdom

13 in ’13: Thirteen up-and-coming world politicians to watch in 2013

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Earlier today, Suffragio kicked off its 2013 coverage of world politics with a look at 13 key elections to watch in 2013.

While we’ll watch as new leaders, from Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi to French president François Hollande to South Korean president Park Geun-hye begin their first full years of power, we’ll also watch for comebacks by former presidents — former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will make a decision about running for a third term in the 2014 Brazilian presidential election and former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet is the odds-on frontrunner to win a new term in Chile’s December 2013 election.

In addition, however, here are 13 up-and-coming politicians and other public figures who will figure prominently in the next 12 months — either because they are likely to come to power themselves in 2013 or because this year will will likely be a make-or-break year for them to achieve power beyond 2013. Continue reading 13 in ’13: Thirteen up-and-coming world politicians to watch in 2013 →

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13 in ’13: Thirteen world elections to watch in 2013

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2013blue

Welcome back and a happy new year to all of Suffragio‘s readers.

With 2013 off and running, here are the 13 world elections that will undoubtedly make a difference to the course of world affairs this year — and a key number of them are coming very soon, too. Continue reading 13 in ’13: Thirteen world elections to watch in 2013 →

Canada

Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party

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For better or worse, Justin Trudeau is expected to announce next Tuesday that he will seek the leadership of the beleaguered Liberal Party in Canada.

Trudeau, the son of beloved former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is the last, perhaps best, hope of an endangered party.  As John Ibbitson noted in The Globe and Mail yesterday, Trudeau’s assets make him an almost prohibitive favorite.

At age 40, however, the Montréal-area MP has been a member of the House of Commons since just 2008, and he will face doubts that he’s seasoned enough to become prime minister.

If he wins the leadership, he’ll first face the task of winning back supporters from the New Democratic Party, who made such incredible inroads in the 2011 election under the late Jack Layton that they far eclipsed the Liberals to become the Official Opposition and the main alternative to prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party.

Currently, polls show the NDP, under new leader Thomas Mulcair, within striking distance of the Tories and Liberals trailing in distant third place.  But a National Post poll today shows that the Trudeau-led Liberals would win 39% to just 32% for Harper and 20% for the NDP.  Those numbers, I believe, represent a best-case scenario for Trudeau — when he really represents nothing more than nostalgia for his father and before he’s had to contend through a long leadership fight and go head-to-head against not only Harper, but Mulcair as well.  Trudeau will have to sideline the NDP (or otherwise engineer a merger or alliance with the NDP) and then win not only a sizeable number of ridings in Quebéc, but also in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.

There will be much more to say in the months leading up to the leadership race — it doesn’t start until November 14 and it won’t end until April 14, 2013.  Since the 2011 election that saw the Liberals reduced to just 34 seats, former (NDP) Ontario premier Bob Rae has served as interim leader.

There will a lot of rebuilding for whomever wins the leadership — and since Rae himself ruled out running for the leadership in a permanent capacity earlier in June, it’s seemed like the leadership is Trudeau’s for the taking, despite a number of candidates also expected to run — the most serious potential challengers to Trudeau include Dominic LeBlanc, a New Brunswick MP since 2000 and currently the party’s foreign affairs critic and, perhaps more intriguingly, Marc Garneau, a retired astronaut and former president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2006, who has served as an MP since 2008, also from Montréal, and is the current Liberal House Leader.  Each candidate will pay a $75,000 entry fee — it’s thought the steep price will limit the number of contenders to just serious challengers, and campaign spending will be capped at $950,000.

It’s difficult to fathom just how far the Liberals have fallen in just little over a decade.

Continue reading Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party →

Canada, Ontario

Ontario by-election loss leaves Liberals with minority government

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Attention on Canadian politics has been mostly on Québec over the past month, but it’s worth noting that Ontario held two by-elections last Thursday that may augur early provincial elections soon.

The Liberals needed to win both seats in order to win back a majority government for premier Dalton McGuinty (pictured above).  While they easily held the Vaughan constituency, they lost the Kitchener-Waterloo constituency to the New Democratic Party.  The loss is attributed to the unpopularity of McGuinty’s government fight to cut public-sector wages, and in particular, to cut the wages of public teachers.  McGuinty’s government, with the support of the Progressive Conservative Party, this week passed a bill that implements a wage freeze on public teachers and denies them the right to strike for the next two years, which has been seen as a betrayal of public unions that have consistently supported McGuinty’s Liberal government.  That 180-degree turn against teachers’ unions could well be a fatal strategic error for McGuinty, because it not only freed them to support the New Democratic Party (which shows signs that it could be as ascendant in Ontario politics as it has been federally) in the recent by-election, but potentially throughout the province in the next election.

So it’s a difficult loss for McGuinty, who became premier in 2003, and was reelected in 2007 and in 2011, albeit with a minority government, watching a 70-seat majority cut to just 53, with the Progressive Conservatives gaining 11 seats to hold 37 seats, and the New Democratic Party gaining seven seats to 17.  By and large, McGuinty has been seen as a moderate and business-friendly premier, but has always been supported by teachers — until recently.

The NDP won the longtime Tory stronghold in what was seen as a three-way toss up — Catherine Fife, who won the seat, won 39.8% to just 31.8% for the Tory candidate and 24% for the Liberals.

With the NDP’s win on Thursday, the Tories fall to 36 seats in Ontario’s unicameral legislative assembly, and the NDP rises to 18, but the Liberals remain, tantalizingly, just one short of a majority.

Ontario politics has, generally speaking, been a two-party affair, with a one-time NDP breakout — current federal Liberal interim leader Bob Rae was premier in Ontario under the NDP banner from 1990 to 1995 — but a resurgent NDP that’s now leading federal polls for the next Canadian general election is now a lethal threat at the Ontario provincial level once again.  The Tories generally dominated Ontario politics from 1995 to 2003 under the premiership of Mike Harris, who was often mentioned as a potential federal Tory leader.

The next Ontario election, which must take place before October 2015, are expected to occur much sooner upon the fall of McGuinty’s minority government — thus, the significance of last week’s by-election, which could have pushed those elections back out to 2015.

Current polls show that the Tories, under leader Tim Hudak, generally lead in advance of the next election, with the Liberals tied with the NDP.  Polls show that Hudak is the least popular of the three Ontario party leaders, with the NDP’s Andrea Horwath increasingly gaining favor among Ontario voters.