it's just another example of how ideologically right-wing this government is.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/02/16/israeli-stance-hinders-trudeaus-chances-of-getting-seat-on-un-security-council.html

but, hold on. what the fuck is actually happening, here? is this just madness, or is there something going on, here?

i was one of many people that was writing a eulogy for the liberal party in the summer of 2015. they seemed obsessed with trying to pry right-leaning voters away from the conservatives, despite the fact that the conservatives were polling at levels they hadn't polled at since the great depression and the ndp was pushing 40%. how could they be so fucking stupid as to fight for this phantom moderate conservative vote, when the country was on the brink of electing a nominally socialist party? what planet were they living on?

it seemed like they were planning a campaign around balanced budgets and national security. then, they expressed confusion when their poll numbers collapsed.

i don't know what it was that finally spun them around. we have to remember that mulcair very decidedly lost the election by repeating the same mistake of "moderating", right at the time that the liberal base was abandoning it because the liberals were "moderating", themselves. i've never seen a worse or more tone deaf campaign than the one mulcair ran - with the possible exception of the one clinton ran. the country was screaming that it wanted a hard shift to the left, and mulcair made the election about balancing the budget.

of course, this just confused everybody. why was the ndp running on fiscal conservatism, when voters were turning to them precisely because they didn't want fiscal conservatism? trudeau took advantage of this massive error by promising to run deficits. lots of stuff happened afterwards - including a late shift to the liberals to prevent vote splitting - but it was this rejection of balanced budgets that gave the liberals the momentum that eventually allowed them to win.

put bluntly, the liberals positioned themselves to the left of the left, and it worked - because the left made it clear that their party had been co-opted.

in all of this confusion, a lot of people forgot or perhaps never knew that the liberals had spent the last five years trying very hard to appeal to conservative voters. they seem to want to push the conservatives out of the mainstream, and become the dominant party on the right.

my reading of what's happening on a lot of these issues is that they are designed to target the conservative base. the liberals don't want to be conservative light, they want to be the party of the right altogether.

so, they're identifying issues that are either core right-wing concerns, or have been identified as issues where the conservatives disappointed their base. marijuana is probably the next promise to reverse, which seems insane: until you realize that a lot of conservatives were unhappy with stephen harper for allowing the state to sanction medicinal use.

this is a pattern we've seen in canada at the provincial level. in british columbia, and also in quebec, the liberals are the right-wing party in a largely two-party spectrum.

it's not that it wasn't clear that this was happening. it's that the ndp's swing to the hard right put everybody in a daze, and we lunged at the lesser evil on paper. i think we all knew we weren't going to get everything they presented. but, i don't think many people realized how cynical it really was.

they never meant to implement their platform. it was just a prop. instead, they're carrying through with the plan to try and take over the right that they broadcast before the election.

and, they're about to get destroyed, as punishment.