Monthly Archives: May 2022

By and large, liberal politicians in the United Statesand the vast majority of Democratssupport the legalization of cannabis. Many have come to see the War on Drugs, especially cannabis, as a civil rights issue that has had devastating effects for African Americans. But the Democratic Governor of Delaware, John Carney, is not one of those. His veto of a cannabis-related criminal justice bill was a throwback to an earlier time.

During the current legislative session, the Delaware House and Senate voted on HB371. Unlike some of the legislation passed by liberal Democratic state legislatures in the past two years, this bill simply removed any penalty for individuals, aged 21 and older, found possessing or consuming one ounce of less of cannabis. The legislation allows the penalization, via a fine, for individuals possessing one ounce or less if those individuals are under the age of 21. The law also eliminates penalties on adults aged 21 and older who transfer or gift one ounce of cannabis or less.

The law does not set up the type of commercial cannabis operations seen in more than a dozen states that have legalized cannabis for adult-use. Nor does the law facilitate the possession or use of cannabis by minors. Instead, it restricts the ability of the state to make money off of adults who possess small amounts of cannabis for personal use or want to transfer small amounts of cannabis for adults who seek to do the same.

In his veto message, however, Governor Carney trots out the tried and true tropes of the drug war that are either based on a lazy misunderstanding of the legislation or that protects the interests of the precise apparatus that has used drug laws to enrich themselves and hobble communities of color. First, Gov. Carney notes, I do not believe that promoting or expanding the use of recreational marijuana is in the best interests of the state of Delaware, especially our young people. This legislation does nothing to promote or expand the use of recreational cannabis in that state. That argument could be used as a concern against a commercialized system with advertising that would promote use. This legislation deals only with criminal justice issues.

Whats more, Gov. Carney throws in the especially young people line that politicians who oppose cannabis reform vacantly use to justify their outdated position. This legislation specifically included an exception to the removal of penalties: minors. Minors still face fines for possession and use, and this legislation does not promote or expand use among that subpopulation.

Instead of framing his position with a lets save the children canard, Gov. Carney should be more honest with Delaware residents about what his position does promote. It promotes the police state. It promotes the power of police to penalize adults engaging in conduct that is perfectly legal in more than a third of American states. It promotes the continued racially biased drug war that have kept communities of color down for generations. This position does not save children; it promotes racism.

A later passage in Gov. Carneys veto statement clarifies this. He notes that serious law enforcement concerns remain unresolved. On that point, he is right. Law enforcement uses simple possession of cannabis as grounds for further searches and seizures. It also uses drug laws to bring in fines and court fees and to target communities of color. Law enforcement officials in many states oppose weakening cannabis laws because it cuts into their ability to use the power of the state to harm specific communities in specific ways.

While law enforcement concerns remain unresolved, Americans concerns about cannabis have broadly dissolved. The vast majority of Americans support cannabis legalization. And the vast majority of Delaware legislators supported HB371. The House passed the legislation 26-14; the Senate passed the legislation 13-7; each chamber had one member absent for the vote. But, rather than supporting the public will, the Governor of Delaware opted instead, to support the racially discriminatory War on Drugs. The failure to understand the consequences of those actions for a population that is nearly 40% Latino and/or non-white shows that many elected officials hold on to aged belief systems despite significant data and analysis to the contrary.

The governors veto comes on the heels of a racially-motivated incident involving a Delaware womens lacrosse team in Georgia in April. The team bus from Delaware State Universityan HBCUwas pulled over on a Georgia highway and police officers searched the entire bus, with one officer noting, theres probably some weed. The officers referenced marijuana multiple times during the stop.

Governor Carney responded to this incident angrily. He stated, Moments like these should be relegated to part of our countrys complicated history, but they continue to occur with sad regularity in communities across our country. Its especially hard when it impacts our own community. That day, Gov. Carney sided with the rights of individualsespecially Black individualsnot to be harassed by police using the foundation of our nations drug laws. Today, he sided with law enforcement and their ability to target people of color in precisely the same way the Delaware State womens lacrosse team was. The veto statement for HB371 speaks volumes louder than his defense of his own states college students.

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Delaware shows the War on Drugs lives on in liberal enclaves - Brookings Institution

Pandoras Box, 2021. Marcel Dzama. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Art: Marcel Dzama

On Wednesday, the Washington Posts Taylor Lorenz reported on the disastrous rollout of the Department of Homeland Securitys Disinformation Governance Board. Announced on April 27 with a hazy remit to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, the initiative generated immediate fierce backlash from conservative pundits and politicians who compared it to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwells 1984. The expert tapped to lead the board, Nina Jankowicz, faced a wave of ferocious, viral, and often personal attacks online as well as scrutiny over her past statements seeming to betray her partisan sympathies. Now, just three weeks later, the Disinformation Governance Board is no more, and Jankowicz has resigned.

According to Lorenz and her sources (other disinformation researchers, as well as staffers in DHS and on the Hill), Jankowicz was taken down by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating and was undermined by a flat-footed, timid response from the Biden White House. The campaign against Jankowicz and the board, Lorenz writes, was a prime example of how the right-wing internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. In other words, the Disinformation Governance Board was undone by a textbook disinformation campaign.

This version of the story is richly ironic and tragic. As one Hill staffer told Lorenz, Ninas role was to come up with strategies for the department to counter this type of campaign, and now theyve just succumbed to it themselves. But from another perspective, the rights campaign against the Disinformation Board resembled any other successful advocacy effort to halt a government initiative. As with most activist endeavors, some of the facts were fudged, innocuous statements were deprived of context and tendentiously interpreted, those in charge were depicted as cartoonish villains, and a more complex story was reduced to a fairy-tale struggle between the forces of good and evil not great, but when it comes to political messaging in our polarized age, par for the course. (I can recall quite a bit of Manichaean simplification happening during the Trump years.)

Obviously, I sympathize with Jankowicz. No doubt she faced an astronomical volume of right-wing nastiness, dishonest attacks on her reputation, and genuinely disturbing threats. Im sure the administration could have done more to insulate her from the backlash. But other than that, I dont see how a fully operational Disinformation Governance Board could have prevented this outcome except via the very means conservatives (mistakenly?) feared it would possess. If, as Lorenz is careful to note, neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech, then how would it have prevented right-wingers from tweeting terrible, dishonest things about Jankowicz? Lorenzs reporting seems to arrive at a Catch-22: The rights campaign to depict Jankowicz as a government censor amounts to disinformation only if she and the DHS were indeed helpless to stop it.

I know, Im being slightly glib. The truth is, I think its important for smart people to analyze the ways in which the architecture of social media facilitates and incentivizes witch hunts and the dissemination of hateful, dishonest content. And the government likely has a role to play in coercing tech platforms to prioritize the public interest over the profit motive in crafting their algorithms. But I dont think it requires any great leap of conspiratorial thinking to find fault with a disinformation board under the aegis of the DHS. Government officials whoever resides in the White House are professional liars. They lie haughtily in the interest of national security, sheepishly in the interest of saving face, and passionately when their jobs are on the line. Would Jankowiczs office have been empowered to counter disinformation coming from her own department? Or only from those criticizing it? And what would its remit have been under the next Republican presidency? As one conservative writer put it, Its not clear to me that Democrats have fully reckoned with the non-negligible possibility that Donald Trump is in charge of the new Disinformation Governance Board in 2 years.

But the other pernicious problem with liberals fixation on disinformation is that it allows them to lie to themselves.

Trumps ascendance in 2016 posed a painful psychic challenge to liberal elites. It suggested the possibility that many millions of Americans were motivated by deep, venomous dissatisfactions with the world they had helped create, that our cultural disagreements were profound, not superficial, and that our perspectives were practically irreconcilable inversions of each other. Political reality seemed to tilt on its axis. How could a man who appeared to them so transparently abhorrent and clownish be welcomed by others as a savior or at least as a tolerable alternative to the status quo?

Disinformation was the liberal Establishments traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection. It wasnt that the country was riven by profound antinomies and resentments born of material realities that would need to be navigated by new kinds of politics. No, the problem was that large swaths of the country had been duped, brainwashed by nefarious forces both foreign and domestic. And if only the best minds, the most credentialed experts, could be given new authority to regulate the flow of fake news, the scales would fall from the eyes of the people and they would re-embrace the old order they had been tricked into despising. This fantasy turned a political problem into a scientific one. The rise of Trump called not for new politics but new technocrats.

Like other pathological reactions to trauma, the disinformation neurosis tended to re-create the conditions that produced the affliction in the first place. (Freud called this repetition compulsion.) By doubling down on elite technocracy and condescension toward the uneducated rubes suffering from false consciousness liberals have tended to exacerbate the sources of populist hostility. As Joe Bernstein documented in Harpers last year, the antidisinformation industry has attracted massive investment from wealthy Democratic donors, the tech industry, and cash-rich foundations. Hundreds of millions of disinfo dollars are sloshing around the nonprofit world, funding institutes at universities and extravagant conventions across the world. Last months Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference was headlined by Barack Obama and featured Anne Applebaum, David Axelrod, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a lengthy list of other academic, journalistic, and political luminaries. Im sure very interesting ideas were discussed there. But gathering the leading lights of liberalism to an auditorium at the University of Chicago so that they together can decide which information is true and safe to be consumed by the rabble outside strikes me as a hollow exercise in self-soothing, more likely to aggravate the symptoms of our legitimacy crisis (distrust and cynicism) than resolve any of its impasses.

Dont get me wrong: There are obviously hard problems to be worked out regarding technology, speech, and democracy, and I have great respect for scholars working in that nettlesome nexus. But as Bernstein put it, the new class of disinformation experts, however well intentioned, dont have special access to the fabric of reality. If faith in our institutions is to be restored, I dont think it will be accomplished by stigmatizing doubt or obstructing the dissemination of falsehood. After all, faith is not a matter of fact and fiction.

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The Liberal Obsession With 'Disinformation' Is Not Helping - New York Magazine

Jeff Jacoby decries the medias liberal bias and predicts that the left will lament a Republican takeover of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections (Whos afraid of liberal media bias? Ideas, May 15). To my mind, the liberal media is fact-based and promotes inclusion, democracy, a free press, science, economic justice, a womans right to choose, and the US Constitution. Todays conservative media, like the GOP, promotes misinformation, white supremacy, insurrection, censorship, fossil fuels, oligarchy, religious extremism, and authoritarianism.

Those who favor conservative media have picked their side, and history will not look kindly upon them.

Stephane Acel-Green

Watertown

In Whos afraid of liberal media bias?, Jeff Jacoby writes, Our society would be healthier if Americans shared more common ground, or if journalists operating in the right- and left-wing echo chambers had more respect for those with a different worldview.

No, our society would be healthier if our media shared more common truth.

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Right-wing media have embraced the Big Lie and continue to amplify and spread it, along with all sorts of other bizarre conspiracy theories and outrageous fabrications of alternative facts. Theirs is not a worldview that deserves respect. Their irresponsible disregard for truth endangers our democracy and the nations national security.

Diana Kerry

Newburyport

Im still looking for a concrete example of the liberal media bias that right-wingers keep talking about.

Conservatives have been pretty successful at convincing the base that truth is, in reality, bias, so that anything they disagree with immediately becomes tainted by ideology, or liberal media bias in other words, untrue.

But Jeff Jacoby is correct that liberal media bias has no real impact these days, because the gullible and suggestible have been convinced, as Donald Trump says, that they can no longer trust what they see or hear or read.

Indeed, thats how Trump was elected in 2016, and its the only way that the current crop of GOP minions will get elected. Thats not liberal media bias thats the truth.

Rick Bevilacqua

Whitinsville

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It's not 'bias' liberal media are telling the truth, pointedly - The Boston Globe

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What will happen to the Liberal Party when that nostalgic generation isnt voting anymore?

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Despite stereotypes that old age turns progressives into ornery conservatives, the exact opposite seems true in Canada. Justin Trudeau won his 2015 majority thanks in large part to young people who voted for him, but those voters soon became disillusioned. Since then, many polls suggest baby boomers are Trudeaus most reliable demographic, whose loyalty might be based on his surname, not his policies. For many of the same people who still attend Elvis impersonator concerts, the first Trudeaumania never died.

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Trudeau Jr. had a coalition of age brackets behind him in 2015, but an EKOS poll last week showed a plurality of Canadians under 50 currently favour the Conservatives, while those 50 and older, especially those 65 and older, stubbornly prefer the Liberals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the senior citizen preference for the Liberals is the strongest in the Laurentian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Less than one in five Canadians aged 18-34 in the poll would vote Liberal in the next election. Considering most of those aged 50 and up grew up in a transformative era of Liberal political dominance, their disposition is somewhat understandable.

In C2C Journal last year, writer John Wesseinberger detailed how Liberal Prime Ministers Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau spearheaded the demise of British Canada in the 1960s, ushering in the modern, multicultural country that exists today. It was a partisan transition. The Progressive Conservatives opposed Pearsons replacement of the Red Ensign as Canadas flag. It was also Pearson who officially adopted O Canada as the national anthem over God Save the Queen.

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On the economic side, Pearson and Trudeau Sr. gleefully laid the foundations of the Liberal preference for a massive federal government. It conditioned a whole generation to reflexively equate budget deficits with virtuous governance. As that generation came to love the charismatic Trudeau Sr. in the 70s, some discovered and learned to love the internet in the 2000s, where today, they spread their obsolete political gospel. They are Canadas equivalent of conservative Americans of similar ages, who vote for any Republican that invokes the name Ronald Reagan.

A strange obsession of Trudeau supporters is the alleged Tory plot to privatize the health care system, legislated into existence by Pearson. During the near-decade of Stephen Harpers Conservative government, health care was never privatized, but the canard endured.

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The healthcare system they defend is among the worst performing in the civilized world. Family doctors are rare, and wait-times are nightmarish. If it continues to deteriorate, people wont want to keep it in 20 years. Much of this can ironically be blamed on Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who doubled-down on the Mulroney governments cuts to medical school enrolments in the 1990s. No other party did more to shrink Trudeau Sr.s vision of Canada than his own Liberals, who in the same decade, enacted the biggest budget cuts in Canadian history.

Nonetheless, many boomers remain devoted to the Liberal Party of their youth, though it one wonders whether it is driven more by cultish nostalgia than policy. Trudeau Jr. proudly admitted his candidacy was all about his father during his 2013 Liberal leadership campaign, a clear wink to those who remember his father fondly. Considering the narrow Liberal victories in the 2019 and 2021 elections, Trudeau Jr. might have lost both without the House of Trudeaus greying faithful.

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Those qualities remain a mystery to most people. Canada is not a better place than it was seven years ago. Health care is worse, housing is far worse, inflation is high, and many immigrants are considering leaving the country within a few years due to the increased difficulty of living here.

What will happen to the Liberal Party when that nostalgic generation isnt voting anymore? What will happen when someone named Trudeau doesnt lead it? It took 100 years for British Canada to be replaced by Liberal Canada in the 1960s. The country is due for a cultural and political shift. Some Trudeau boomers may just live long enough to discover that the version of Canada they cling to was not to last forever.

Geoff Russ is a Haida journalist and writer based in British Columbia.

National Post

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Geoff Russ: The Liberal Canada loved by the boomers keeping Trudeau in power won't last - National Post

That they no longer feel at home there demonstrates the extent to which populism has successfully laid siege to the old political philosophies.

Liberal voters who desire articulate, forward-thinking policies have been taken for granted by leaders who disregard their concerns as vacant middle-class musings leaders seemingly taking advice from commentators who, with absolutely no evidence, claim a mythical new base of the Liberal Party that rejects any type of climate action exists in the outer suburbs of our capital cities. These are commentators who assert themselves as the arbiters of ideological purity, yet whose understanding of the political philosophies they guard is so incoherent one would need a translator to make sense of it.

It is a de facto assumption in too many conservative circles that net zero is bad, coal is good, LGBTIQ is bad, religiously acceptable relationships are good. You support proactive climate policy and promote the individual freedoms of marginalised groups? You obviously arent a real Liberal.

Real Liberals supposedly dont support such policies as they are the remit of starry eyed eco-luvvies.

What rubbish. It is time real Liberals stopped listening to those bastardising their partys philosophy to shroud Luddite attitudes towards progress and veil naked bigotry towards people who make them uncomfortable.

Real Liberals as friends of the free market know that there is no movement more amenable to conservation and climate action than liberalism. They know we should be supporting the private sectors desire to speed up the exit of coal from the grid, rather than forcing energy companies to keep open loss-making, coal-fired power stations (a perfect example of government overreach if there ever was one).

They know that there is enormous economic opportunity in diversifying regional industry away from mining. They know that it is lunacy to allow good environmental policy to be the partisan property of the Greens. That, as Liberals, they resonate with Burkes view of society as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead and that the greatest thing they can do is to pass on a world to their children that is sustainable and unravaged by climate change.

Real Liberals as protectors of individual liberty know that governments must fearlessly support marginalised communities so they can live free from discrimination. They know that the unhinged views on the LGBTIQ community held by reactionary darlings (particularly in relation to how LGBTIQ school students should be treated) are far-left ideas with far-right sensibilities: deeply censorious, overtly invasive of individual privacy and monocultural.

Lessons must be learnt from this loss. Dave Sharma, Trent Zimmerman, Jason Falinski, Tim Wilson and Josh Frydenberg were the future of the party. They are genuine liberals who would have been huge assets to the 47th parliament and to the country. If the Liberal Party is serious about winning back these seats, it must come to the table with a policy platform consistent with the partys philosophy.

If it doesnt, the momentum towards independents will only increase as voters lose sight of what their leaders stand for.

David Cross is CEO of the Blueprint Institute.

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Abandoning classical liberalism turns the heartland teal - The Australian Financial Review

Senior Labor ministers say Peter Dutton becoming Opposition Leader would show the Coalition has not listened to the message sent by voters at the election.

Former home affairs minister Karen Andrews saidPeter Dutton wouldbe the next leader of the Liberal Party, confirming speculation he would run unopposed for the position.

Ms Andrews said Mr Dutton had widespread support in the party and it was a "very fair and very accurate assessment" that he would become the next leader.

"He will be standing, unopposed, to take on the leadership and that means there's no-one else putting their hand up," she said.

"So it will be Peter.

"His deputy is almost certain to be Sussan Ley. Together, they will bring a team to appoint people into the shadow ministry and to reshape the party for the future."

Catch up on all the news about the 2022 Australian federal election from May 25 in our blog

Ms Ley who is not aligned with the conservative or moderate factions is canvassing support among her colleagues, but she is seen by some as being tainted by the Morrison era.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Mr Dutton becoming leader "would show [the Coalition] have learned absolutely nothing from the drubbing they got on Saturday".

"Peter Dutton has all of the same characteristics that people didn't like, that they saw in Scott Morrison," he said.

"I think we're up for a very divided period when it comes to the Liberals and the Nationals."

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher said she did not think Mr Dutton would pose a threat to Labor getting re-elected in three years' time.

"It's sort of a last-man-standing situation isn't it?" she said.

"But also, if Peter Dutton is the answer, then it's not entirely clear that they heard the questions that were raised during this election campaign."

Ms Andrews said, given Mr Dutton was from Queensland, it was important the deputy be from another state,which had effectively ended any ambition she had to put her hand up to be deputy leader.Ms Ley is from New South Wales.

"While that is personally disappointing for me, the reality is that it was untenable to have a leader and a deputy leader from Queensland," she said.

"I understand that we need to rebuild across the country. Queensland took a hit, some of the other states took a significant hit and we need to go back to our values and look closely at this."

Before the election it was believed Josh Frydenberg or Mr Dutton would replace Scott Morrison in the event the Coalition lost, butwith Mr Frydenberg losing his seat to an independent, it left Mr Dutton as the frontrunner.

Ms Andrews said the new leadership team, as well as the rest of the party, needed to understand the election result and why the Coalition lost the votes of women.

"I don't think the answer is whether we tack right or tack left," she said.

"The reality is, that the people [voters] we lost in droves were predominantly women, educated women.

"They were women who were financially secure. They were unhappy with the Liberal Party and they chose to take their vote elsewhere."

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Posted8h ago8 hours agoTue 24 May 2022 at 11:35pm, updated1h ago1 hours agoWed 25 May 2022 at 6:53am

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Labor says Peter Dutton taking reins of Liberal Party shows Coalition 'learned absolutely nothing' from federal election - ABC News

Throughout a decade of leadership challenges and changes during his time in parliament, Frydenberg always backed the sitting leader, voting for Tony Abbott against Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 and Turnbull against Peter Dutton in 2018. He is loyal to a fault with leaders, a senior party figure said.

At the start of the election campaign, Liberal MPs in teal-targeted seats desperately tried to separate themselves from the unpopular triumvirate of Morrison, Barnaby Joyce and the Queensland LNP. Frydenbergs final pitch to the Kooyong electorate was Keep Josh but his campaign discussed printing polling days flyers with the message, Vote Ryan, Get Dutton. The flyers did not eventuate.

Monique Ryan celebrates her election win against Josh Frydenberg.Credit:Joe Armao

Internal party polling provided to The Age and Herald show the collapse of the Liberal vote in seats that turned teal was precipitated by four key events in the final months of the Morrison government; the return of Barnaby Joyce as Nationals leader, the Glasgow climate conference, the Christmas holiday chaos caused by the Omicron outbreak and the decision to push ahead with religious discrimination legislation.

Several MPs also said the governments handling of Brittany Higgins rape allegations and the broader response to the treatment of women in Parliament House damaged the Coalitions credibility.

Sussan Ley is a strong contender to replace Josh Frydenberg as deputy leader.Credit:AFR

Senior Liberals concede the party made a fatal mistake by not calling an election at the end of last year, rather than running full term. A 2021 poll would have starved the teal movement of time to build their community-based campaigns.

As vote counting continued on Tuesday, more Liberal MPs confirmed that Dutton was all but certain to lead the party, though a ballot will not be held until the count has concluded.

NSW Liberal MP Sussan Ley was firming for the deputys job. Victorian moderate senator Jane Hume and South Australian senator Anne Ruston were also being discussed. But Queensland MP Karen Andrews ruled herself out of the contest for the job late on Tuesday.

Angus Taylor and Stuart Robert are both likely to put their hand up for the shadow treasury portfolio.

The Liberal Partys internal track for Kooyong, a series of polls and qualitative research conducted by Crosby Textor, show that by September 2021, three months after Joyce returned to the leadership, Morrisons personal brand had turned toxic in the traditional Liberal seat with a net approval rating of -18.

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The same polling showed that Frydenberg still had a safe hold on his seat, with a 57-43 lead over Labor, a 59-41 lead over the Greens and a positive approval rating of 15. This challenges the notion that Frydenbergs interventions against the second-wave lockdown in Victoria were a decisive factor in the Kooyong result.

Monique Ryan, the pediatric neurologist who won the seat on Saturday, had not yet been announced as the teal candidate. At the time, Frydenberg was approached by fellow moderate MPs about challenging Morrison, he had no indication that his own political career was under threat.

That changed between November and December last year when, in quick succession, Morrison went to Glasgow with a tepid climate change commitment, the Omicron outbreak wreaked havoc on Australias re-opening and summer holiday plans and Ryan emerged as a serious, well-supported local challenger in Kooyong.

The Crosby Textor track shows that by March 2022, on the eve of the federal budget, Frydenberg was in serious trouble, along with other Liberals in progressive, inner-city seats. His primary vote had crashed to 41, Ryans had surged to 37 and the likely flow of preferences would tip Frydenberg out of parliament.

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The final poll taken at the start of the campaign showed the budget did nothing to stop the flight of Liberal voters to teal candidates.

It accurately predicted Saturdays result: a drubbing at the hands of Ryan.

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Liberals discussed dumping Morrison in Coalitions final months - Sydney Morning Herald

Is Jagmeet Singh a traitor? Two weeks ago, the federal New Democratic Party leader was visiting the campaign headquarters of a Peterborough NDP candidate running in the current Ontario provincial election. As he emerged from this building he was accosted by a group of very angry and very aggressive men and women who sought to block him from getting into his car.

They hurled verbal, racist abuse at him, screaming profanities in his face. CBC film of this altercation picked up protestors yelling Youre a fking piece of st, youre a traitor, I hope you die.

This counts as political discourse now in Canada, at least from some of those on the extreme right. Singh eventually made it to his car unhurt but local police warned that the behavior exhibited by these protestors bordered on the criminal.

And why was he called a traitor? Because these protestors were enraged at the Liberal-NDP supply and confidence agreement signed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Singh in March.

I wrote about this development in federal politics in a recent Political Insights column. As I noted then, these parties now will work together to improve federal policies in seven key areas including health care, climate change, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and election reform.

Both parties have also consented to maintain this arrangement until the summer of 2025, providing this Liberal minority government with political stability for the next three years.

Conservatives from Candice Bergen, interim leader of the Conservative Party, to Conservative Party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre, to the protestors confronting Singh, have slammed the deal as an NDP-Liberal attempt at government by blackmail. This deal is said to be undemocratic, unconstitutional, and the establishment of a socialist-liberal coalition of power.

None of this is true.

I dealt with the coalition issue in my earlier article. Here, its important for people to understand how and why minority parliaments, those when no single party has a majority of seats in the House of Commons, can arrive at such agreements between two or more parties to create the conditions whereby a minority government can survive for a set period of time, while developing policies and programs desired by these parties.

When people elect a minority parliament, as we did for the second time in a row last fall, its a sign that we voters, collectively, are unwilling to give one party a majority government. But its also a sign that many expect like-minded parties to make a minority government work for the interests of Canadians.

Hence such confidence and supply agreements. And this recent federal example is not unique in Canadian political history.

While such agreements are rare because minority governments are rare, they have been witnessed in various provinces. In 1985, in Ontario, a provincial election saw the governing Progressive Conservatives reduced to a minority government. Within weeks of this vote a Liberal-NDP Accord was struck whereby these parties would vote non-confidence in the Conservative government, leading to the creation of a new Liberal government committed to progressive social and economic policies. This agreement lasted for 24 months and was widely popular with Ontarians.

In 2017, in British Columbia, a similar development transpired after a provincial election resulted in a minority Liberal government. But here, the NDP and the Greens came together to establish an accord that would see the establishment of a New Democratic Party minority government rooted to support from the Greens. Again, this agreement, designed to last four years, witnessed the promotion of a host of progressive policies supported by a majority of British Columbians.

In all these cases, such political agreements are legal, constitutional, democratic, and fully in keeping with parliamentary government. Its very sad today when we see some ordinary Canadians, and certain political leaders who should know better, use misinformation and deliberate ignorance as political weapons in their quest for influence and power.

Dr. David Johnson, Ph.D., teaches political science at Cape Breton University. He can be reached at [emailprotected]

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DAVID JOHNSON: Treason and the Liberal-NDP agreement - Saltwire

While Labor's election victory has been celebrated in parts of the country, regional Queensland remains Coalition heartland.

Labor does not hold a single seat north of Blair, just south of Noosa, with the LNP retaining 70 per cent of federal seats in Queensland, leaving many in the agriculture and mining sectors worried the inner-city electorates' embrace of the Greens could deepen the regional divide between city and country.

George Scott is grazier on Thylungra Station in south-west Queensland and said support forthe Greens in the south-east was a surprise.

"It's certainly something that gives me concern in terms of where agriculture aligns itself and where we sit and the bigger picture," Mr Scott said.

"We certainly feel that at times we're taking an unfair level of responsibility for emissions in Australia, particularly cattle, but a lot of agriculture seems to be an easy whipping boy for climate change.

"A lot of that is undeserved and uneducated to an extent."

He said agricultural voters were mostly loyal to the LNP, but Labor's election win and changing attitudes in the south-east were reasons for him to self-reflect on his own beliefs and where they align.

"We're generally a very, very loyal voting bloc, therefore, one side takes us for granted, and the other side takes no interest because nothing much is going to change how we vote.

"So I think our rural seats and agriculture, in general, suffers from that.

"It's a time for us, and me personally to consider whether or not where we are becoming too disconnected.

"The majority of public opinion seems to be moving further away from us as participants in society we have to consider where we're sitting and why we're there and whether or not we actually do need to adapt."

Queensland Labor Senator Murray Watt said the partymade a real effort after the 2019 election to reconnect with regional Queensland, and believed swings away from the LNP this time were the result of that.

"We spent a lot of time out there listening to people, meeting with different groups to understand why people reacted so badly against us in 2019," he said.

"We put forward a lot of really strong policies about new industries, how we could create jobs, how we could maintain our traditional industries and importantly how we could continue to improve health serviceswhich is such a big issue in regional Queensland.

"I think it's a matter of continuing to engage really strongly, spending lots of time in our regions, making those connections, continuing to understand the issues that people confront."

Mr Watt said the election resultsshowedthecity-country divide was closing.

"We're coming more to the centre in Queensland than where we were three years ago.

"I think after the last election there was a really massive divide between the city and the bush in Queensland...but as I say this time those margins have come in a lot more.

He said although the Greens have been elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in Queensland at this election, "overall I think that the results are much more coming towards the middle".

"Even in Albo's victory speech on Saturday night he made a real point that he wanted to be a prime minster that brings people together.

"He's someone who will try and bridge any divides between the regions and the cities."

For Clermont pharmacist Grant Oswald, Labor's win made him nervous for the future of the mining town he serves.

He said he believedthe regional divide would deepen unless the new government made a conscious effort to work with regional communities.

"As much as I agree that we need to do something about climate change and everything like that, we also still need to protect our industries and our jobs, and our regional towns," Mr Oswald said.

He said people in cities needed to understand the needs oftowns like Clermont.

"Talking to a few people in the shop yesterday we wish we could get those people up here to the bush and actually see what we do up here, what the agriculture industry means to us and of course, what the mining industry does too and what they do for our little towns up this way.

"We really need to see them, get up here, get out in the bush and don't just forget that, that we're here."

Central Queensland farmer Richard Fairley was also concerned aboutthe new government's transition to renewables, which will include a 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, will be too fast and hurt regional Queensland.

"Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with caring for the environment, but drastic movement and getting away with it is going to hurt a lot of people," Mr Fairley said.

"I think I'll be one of them."

Mr Fairley's property near Biloela lies in the electorate of Flynn, which was narrowly won by the LNP's Colin Boyce after incumbent Ken O'Dowd retired from the party after 12 years.

Flynn is rich in agriculture and mining and is home to the coal-fired Callide Power Station, a major employer in Biloela.

"I'm glad we can still have our voice heard in parliament [through the local LNP member] and they will look after mining jobs, power station jobs as much as they can but I think unfortunately the green movement is going to do a lot of harm in the economy and general businesses."

Mr Fairley said Labor needed to do more to address industry needs like dam infrastructure, labour shortages as well as improving energy security.

CQ University political commentator Jacob Deem said there was the potential for the increase in progressive votes in the south-east to widen the city-country divide.

"In terms of these regional seats being held by Coalition members, I think that there will need to be greater engagement with the regions and in particular, as we transition to renewables," Dr Deem said.

"There isa lot of opportunity for these areas in central Queensland to take a leading role in that, but it's important that [Mr] Albanese takes a consultative approach moving forward."

Greenscandidate Penny Allman-Payne is likely to win a seat in Queensland's senate.

The Gladstone-based teacher said she will keep her office in the industrial port city.

"I travelled around Queensland, including north Queensland and central Queensland talking to people about our plan for the transition," Ms Allman-Payne said.

"I spoke to workers on pre-poll in Townsville and Gladstone and when they actually heard what our plan was to look after coal workers for the next decade, to make sure we are investing in green metals, manufacturing and other renewable energy industries and they actually really liked what they heard."

Posted9h ago9 hours agoTue 24 May 2022 at 10:37pm, updated7h ago7 hours agoWed 25 May 2022 at 12:30am

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Regional Queensland voted for the Liberal National Party. What do they make of the Labor government and 'greenslide'? - ABC News