Had some Internet Trouble. But no worries! I wrote this beauty in - TopicsExpress

Had some Internet Trouble. But no worries! I wrote this beauty in the time I was waiting to fix it. Before I get to the Bourassa by-election, I wanted to point out something that Manitobans in both Provencher and Brandon-Souris may want to take into account on Justin Trudeau’s policy alternatives to Manitoba in the past. A friend pointed this out to me a long time ago, but I just remembered it now. If we recall the time shortly after the Liberals great defeat in the last Canadian General Election, one of the first priorities of the Conservative Government moving forward was to adjust the levels of representation in the House of Commons to be fairer to the provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. The NDP and the Liberals proposed their own plans to be alternatives, but few looked at them as deeply as the Conservative plan because of how unlikely it was that they would be accepted in a Conservative Majority. Lets take a closer look at the Liberal plan. But first, among the things I notice when comparing Justin Trudeau’s House speeches to that of other MPs, is he has spoken very few times in the House compared to what would be expected of a front-bench MP, let alone for a party leader. The Liberals for some reason don’t want him to speak very often. What reason could that be? Even rookie Liberal MP Sean Casey, whom has only been an MP since 2011, has 29 pages of speeches on Openparliament.ca compared to Justin Trudeau’s 31 pages for almost twice the time as an MP! Now compare that to Thomas Mulcair’s speeches, who has 118 pages on Openparliament.ca, its than very clear the reason for this. The Liberals don’t like to take the risk of having him in the House too often, when an MP may be expected to expand on their talking points, something that has never been good for Justin Trudeau. So he was never given a big enough critic role that he would be expected to withstand Conservative and NDP scrutiny in the House. So what do the Liberals not wanting Justin Trudeau to speak often in fear of him making a gaffe have to do with the redrawing of the electoral boundaries for Manitoba? Because the Liberals thought this was low enough on the national media’s radar that they could get him to speak in the House on this issue frequently, thus allowing their more experienced MPs to speak on the major hot button issues that required a careful hand. How frequently did Justin Trudeau speak on this issue compared to other issues? Well, according to Openparliament.ca, which keeps track of the most common word each MP uses in their speeches, while removing common words used by all such as “the” or “a”, Justin Trudeau’s favorite word is “Seats”, and his second favorite word is “Quebec”. Bare in mind, being a Quebec MP, it is expected that he often refers to the Province he is a representative from, however, when we look more closely at his House Speeches on the issue of Set Redistribution, which was one of his most common topics for speeches, it is easily seen that these two words being his favorite two words in the House is not a coincidence, and it is also not coincidental that “Ontario”, “British Columbia”, or “Alberta” are not anywhere to be found in his Openparliament word web, despite that the issue he was discussing was directly related to their representation. From December 6th to December 13th in 2011, Trudeau spoke frequently on the Fair Representation Act, and how he thought the Liberal plan was better than the Conservative plan. As the Liberal plan would only redistribute seats in the House compared to the Conservative plan adding 30 more seats to give to four of the provinces without taking any seats away from provinces, Ontario would than only get 4 new seats instead of the 15 it is now getting with the Conservative plan; British Columbia would only get 2 new seats, compared to the 6 it is getting now; and Alberta would only get 3 new seats compared to the 6 it is getting now. For the provinces that would have seats taken away, Quebec would be losing 3 seats instead of gaining 3 new seats, but this would be offset by how the Liberal plan still made Quebec over-represented to the national average by not adding any seats to the House, where as the gains to the west and Ontario would mean the 3 new seats in Quebec would only soften it being slightly under represented like Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. More concerning though, was whom the Liberals planned on taking seats from. The 3 seats in Quebec were intended to be part of Ontario’s additional 4 seats. The provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland would each lose one, making it so each Maritime province now has the minimum they are to be given according to our Constitution. So one of those two would go to Ontario, and one would go to the West. But Wait! The Liberal plan would still need to take 4 more seats from someone to account for the 4 seats being given to Alberta and British Columbia. Who did they plan on taking them from? Not Quebec, the Liberals were very clear they wanted Quebec to be more represented than the average even after redistribution, despite that over-representation is typically reserved for small provinces that are close to their constitutional minimum, and Quebec is Canada’s second most populous province Not from the Maritimes, under the Liberal plan, the four Maritime Provinces would already be at their constitutional minimums for federal representation, as the Constitution states a province cannot have fewer seats in the House than in the Senate. Not From Ontario or the two far westward most provinces, they are the ones in need of new seats. So who does that leave for the Liberals to take 4 seats from? Oh yes, Saskatchewan and Manitoba! Why should this get you worried in Manitoba? Because unlike the Maritimes, these two provinces had large increases in their population growths in 2011 according to the census, and is likely to continue as the west becomes more economically powerful. And now the Liberals wanted to take 4 seats from them where as they wanted to only take two from the maritimes?! Even more, this formula failed to represent the change in the demographic shift of the countries population having shifted west. The four western provinces, for the first time ever, now have more people than the four Maritime Provinces and Quebec combined. Yet, the West as a region would only get 1 net new seat according to the Liberal plan. The West would have 9 seats less than the 5 eastward most provinces combined, even though the west now has a greater population. The Conservative plan also has the east more represented, but the unequal representation gap between the west and the 5 eastern most provinces is shrunk from the current 15 seat difference to only 6 seats, not 9. On top of that, Ontario is much more represented under the Conservative plan, as the growth in population has been very substantial in Ontario over the past few decades. So what did Justin Trudeau have to say about the west being more under-represented under his party’s plan than under the Conservative plan? Well in the start of a lineup of gaffes, before he could start, a member from the New “Disorganized” Party of Canada had to point out to the Deputy Speaker that Justin Trudeau entered the House without wearing a tie… Male Representatives in the House are supposed to wear a tie as part of House of Commons Rules. So not a good start to Mr. Trudeau. Secondly, after apologizing for the mishap he said, “Every time I calculated the Quebec number of seats, 78, divided by 308, I actually got below the threshold of Quebecs actual population.”. Apparently Justin Trudeau doesn’t know how to use a calculator, because even with the new census data, which says Quebec’s population increased, it has less than 24% of the population of Canada, where as dividing 78 by 308, and times it by 100%, equals 25.32% rounded to two decimals. I don’t see how anyone who passed high school math could have screwed that up. So that’s strike two for Justin Trudeau in about 10 minutes in House Debates, especially since no ones plan gives Quebec 3 more seats in a 308 seat House, so I don’t know which party he was trying to attack. His party is the only one that wanted to keep the level of MPs at 308 seats and risk the legislative and possible court battle of taking seats away from provinces, so was he criticizing his own plan??? Moving on. Through out the rest of his speeches on the subject, I’m guessing whomever was next to him probably gave him more precise numbers, especially since Conservative MP Parm Gill offered to help Justin Trudeau with his math when he made the mistake and never addressed his mistake, and as he then started using more correct numbers to precise decimals. However, there were two themes that he was consistent in mentioning in the rest of his themes. The first one was the demand to give Quebec more representation than its proportional population. While the Conservative plan gave Quebec 3 new seats in a 338 seat house, amounting to 24.08% of the seats, its estimated population before the census count was 24.14%. (Census and statistics Canada estimates differ in their accounts). This made Trudeau extremely hostile to the Conservative plan, and he favored the Liberal plan greatly. Although the Liberal plan takes 3 seats from Quebec, it retains 72 seats in a 308 seat house, which gives Quebec 23.38% of the population. The difference of one seat of being over-represented or under represented was enough to convince Trudeau to go with a plan that the Liberals know disrespects legislation from 1985 on not taking seats away from provinces, and Trudeau admits this in his House speeches that this legislation would need to be removed to pass the Liberal plan. But why does he expect one more seat? We look at Quebec’s under-representation in the Senate, and Trudeau is silent, and contrary to popular belief, Quebec is actually under-represented in the Senate by 1 seat difference, just like it would be under the Conservative plan in the House, yet Trudeau consitantly refers to the Senate as “Quebec’s advantage. In fact, Quebec only has 22.86% of the seats in the Senate. That’s worse than in the House, but still better than Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta only. I’m not even referring to his remarks this May when I say that he consider the Senate Quebec’s advantage. On the Senate Reform Act, which he was debating only a few days later on December 11th, 2011, he said “The one place that Quebec is properly recognized historically is in the Senate, where 24 senators are guaranteed to be from Quebec. It is the place in our parliamentary system where regional interests get to speak most loudly.”. But how is this so if Quebec is under-represented by one seat in the future House just like in the Senate current Senate? Quebec has over twice the population of the combined maritimes, but it has the same seats as the maritime region in the Senate, and when you include Newfoundland & Labrador into the maritime region, which for some reason it isn’t, the 4 maritime provinces have 6 more seats than Quebec! Why does he view this as better? Well lets refer to what he did say this May: ““We have 24 senators from Quebec and there are just six from Alberta and six from B.C.… That benefits us,”, where as in the House, Alberta and BC will now have 76 seats to Quebec’s 78, where as the Liberal plan would have Alberta and BC having only have 69 seats to Quebec’s 72. A difference once again, of at least one seat to screw the west in comparison to his home province… And that seams to be all that matters to Trudeau. The second theme he mentions is how his plan intends to take seats away from some provinces to give to others. He points out that this has happened 22 times in Canadian History, but fails to mention how this has not happened since his father became Prime Minister or after his Father patriated the Constitution in the Constitution Act of 1982. Coincidence? Even more, where as he mentions Quebec frequently in his speeches on this subject, as well as occasionally mentioning the other provinces that gain seats, he never once mentions the provinces that are going to lose seats in these speeches on the Fair Representation Act. He does however say, “The important thing is to recognize Quebec’s real weight and make sure that Quebec’s voice is always heard loudly and clearly in this House, above and beyond its mathematical proportion.” Why the consistent special treatment for his home province in particular? Does he take the NDP approach that Quebec needs 24% of the seats because we recognized Quebecers as a Nation? Nope, Trudeau is actually the only member of the Liberal Caucus from Quebec who openly opposed that motion that was made in 2006, even though he wasn’t an MP. Is Quebec a small province that needs to be protected with better representation to ensure it is not dwarfed by the representation given to Alberta, BC, and Ontario? Nope, its Canada’s second most populous province, and its population actually grew as a share of the whole federations population greater than what was expected according to the 2011 Census, and is more represented than those three provinces no matter which plan we pick. He stated why… in 1999, when he said of how his father kept Quebec in Canada “ His philosophy, as he passed it on to us, has always been, Quebecers are better than the Rest of Canada because we’re Quebecers or Whatever.” Which he further elaborated what he meant by saying, “This idea that a lot more of us are bilingual, bicultural, there’s a lot more awareness of the rest and that’s a richness.”, and he completed by saying, “Who’s to say that we should need special protection or special deals or special allowances that make us protected?” Who needs special protection, so long as it is always a Quebecer calling the shots and is making sure the west is under-represented? I conclude that Justin Trudeau is only thinking of one province to be fair to should we ever be unlucky enough to have him as a future Prime Minister: His Home Province. And just because he bashes Alberta in particular, and occasionally B.C, don’t presume that he thinks you are an exception just because you might vote for him. So to Manitobans participating in these by-elections, remember that if you think of voting for a Trudeau Liberal, that same Trudeau Liberal just might vote to take some seats away from you, because Justin Trudeau truly does believe that Quebecers just are better than you and everyone else in the Rest of Canada. -Signed, Assistant Admin, Justin Tru-DOH!