For Newfoundlanders, it was politics as usual on Sunday, September 20th. Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau rolled into town for another campaign pitstop and the dozing electorate, used to watching politics play out on T.V., were shaken awake for just a brief brush with federal campaign politics.
Thursday’s Globe & Mail debate marked only the second time that a national political leaders’ debate was targeted primarily to online viewers. The elderly and digitally illiterate are finally relegated to CPAC where they belong.
“Erase from your minds, fellow Canadians, the past four weeks. They haven’t mattered at all.” That’s what the pundits say, at least. To them, I suppose, the month of August has merely been some sort of sadistic theatrical preamble, where dueling leftists, corrupt senators, dead refugees, and urinating handymen all vie for our attention like pathetic sideshows at some orgiastic circus.
Last Tuesday, pseudo-Trotskyites like myself got hammered the country over to celebrate the fall of Canada’s longest lived conservative dynasty. Rachel Notley’s NDP routed the governing PCs, and Albertans decided to change their governing party for the first time in 44 years.
But observers across the country have started making some hasty predictions about what this swing implies for Federal and other provincial races.
J.H. Burns outlines the shooting of Don Dunphy at the hands of Premier Paul Davis’ security outfit that took Newfoundland & Labrador by force two weeks ago, and tries to make some sense out of the mess of the information given to the public.