why are historical liberal voters - not hardcore dippers, but card-carrying liberals - so frustrated with trudeau right now?

well, i'll never join a party. i'm an anarchist. and, i can only speak for myself, although i've pointed out a number of concerns, concerns that the party seems to largely want to address by arguing that they're changing direction. when you go to the party and say "you're doing this wrong", and the party says "actually, that's just the way we do it now.", then they shouldn't be surprised when people get up and walk out. i can point to miscalculations and bad logic all day, but at the end of the process you have to look at the execution and make your choices. if they want to do things wrong, you can't stop them.

trudeau seems to personally have a fondness for ronald reagan; i don't, i think he was a monster. but, it was reagan that uttered the lines - i didn't leave the democratic party, the democratic party left me. and, so i say goodbye to the liberal party, if it insists on burying itself into oblivion.

but, why is it losing so much support to the greens, specifically?

again, i can only speak for myself, here, but it's less a question of the propaganda and more a question of the actual policy. if you flip through these pages, you'll see that i had no delusions about the liberals shutting down pipelines, even if actually buying one is a little over the top. i stated over and over again that the whole point of their argumentative thrust was to act as a pr wing of the oil industry, and that the end point was more pipelines, not less of them - and that because the ndp have essentially the same position, the only way to shut down the pipelines is to stop them in court. so, i took the issue out of the political arena and into the judicial arena, which i would argue is where it actually belongs. in a liberal capitalist society, the legal question around building pipelines largely reduces to one of property rights, which is for the courts to decide, and not for the legislature to use a tyranny of the majority to bully through. the idea of this being in the "public interest" is fundamentally wrong, in a society based around the concept of property.

so, i can only speak for myself, but it's not the pro-pipeline thing that's pissing me off. i fully expected that.

but, it was the other side of the apparent contradiction that i was hoping would be better developed, because i realized that, from the perspective of a bourgeois capitalist party, there really doesn't have to be a contradiction. see, the liberals are all about money; it's the party of bay street. they're supporting the pipelines because all they care about is the money, then they pay lip service to environmental concerns in a ploy to maximize profit - i am not confused about any of this. but, you can make a lot of money by selling environmentally friendly approaches, too, like big infrastructure projects. if this is the bankers' party, and all they care about is the money, and they're broadcasting that they want to invest in clean technology because all they care about is the money, then you're left with a clear lesser evil choice over these western yahoos that would declare independence tomorrow if they could get away with it.

so, i didn't expect the liberals to not support pipelines, but they were broadcasting that they would also support transition because it was profitable, and that's not a contradiction from their bourgeois perspective, even if it seems to be one from any other perspective.

it was the best (realistic) choice on the table.

four years later, they've carried through with their pro-pipeline position as was expected, but they've done nothing substantive on transitioning the economy, at all. rather, they've introduced a (poorly designed) redistributive tax that will have no meaningful effect on emissions, and done a lot of pointless photo shoots. the infrastructure bank that was supposed to fund large scale projects as a subsidiary of the bank of canada using public money has instead been converted into a neo-liberal conglomerate to push "public-private partnerships" for corporate gain, and has essentially nothing to show for itself.

so, if they had spent quickly and lavishly on transition, i would have less reason to be angry about the pro-pipeline position. but, as they've done nothing substantive to actually transition, all we're left with is the expansion of the petro-state. i can't continue to support that.

and, why can't they announce these public works projects? why can't they announce a manhatten project for the climate, switch things into high gear and get 'er done? because they're hamstrung by the ideology of neo-liberalism, by market discipline, by an insistence that government not interfere in the private sector, and by a series of international agreements that make action of this sort potentially expensive. but, this is new to the party - they weren't like that under chretien, and certainly weren't like that under the elder trudeau. really, they were at a crossroads: would they accept these international agreements that were (mostly) signed by the conservatives, or would they tear them up like they used to say they would? and, they've become conservative-lite in every possible way, by upholding the international system, even as it's falling apart in front of them.

if tackling climate change means tearing up nafta and pulling out of the wto, then you tear up nafta and pull out of the wto. but, they didn't - they just let the targets slip by.

and, we're going to have to let them slip by, in turn.