Week 2, 2025: Wards of Canada
Canada's less than ideal process for choosing a party leader, and the simpler explanation for Rotherham.
Earlier this week I went on Adelaide’s radio 5AA to discuss the resignation of Justin Trudeau. The burden I carry through this life is trying to convince people that Canada is utterly fascinating. As a result, I’m in a database somewhere as someone to turn to when something of note happens in Canada. Which is a role I’m more than happy to play.
Despite having a Westminster parliamentary system, Canada functions very differently to Australia when it comes to party leadership. In Australia you can “knife” – in the local parlance – a prime minister in the morning and have a new one in place by the afternoon. A party’s MPs simply pile into a room, rip their shirts off, slip on their knuckledusters and whomever emerges on top is the new party leader. Then off to the Governor-General to be sworn in as PM.
This is because the public does not directly vote for a PM in such a system. The will of the people is expressed through their local representatives, who are then entrusted to elect a party leader. Trudeau himself is merely the MP for Papineau and the local ballot paper is the only one he appears on.
Yet Canada – and the United Kingdom – have strayed from the Westminster ideal. Instead allowing party members – that is, people who pay to join a political party – select their leaders. Several years ago I wrote about why this is a terrible idea.
Wrestling With Westminster Leadership
So rather than have a new PM in place, Canada will now go through an extensive leadership contest within the Liberal Party – with the absolute insanity of a $350,000 entrance fee – to elect a new leader. With Trudeau remaining in place until this is done. Something that could take several months. This cannot come at a worse time for Canada given Donald Trump is about to retake the White House threatening both 25% tariffs on Canadian goods and annexation of Canada itself. To have now effectively a PM with no authority in either his own party and the country at large is potentially disastrous.
This lack of authority is compounded by the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois all signalling their intent to vote for a no confidence motion in the government when parliament returns in late March. The Liberal Party is a minority government, and the votes of all three parties combined is enough to bring it down.
This means whoever does eventually become the new leader of the Liberal Party will almost certainly go immediately into the role as caretaker PM as an election will be called. This will limit their ability to act on whatever chaos Trump is creating south of the border.
It’s worth spending a bit of time on who may replace Trudeau as leader.
More often than not, the Liberal Party is led by a politician from Quebec – from Wilfred Laurier to Louis St Laurent, Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin1, Stéphane Dion and Justin Trudeau (all bar Dion have also been PM).
In an extraordinary statistic, the last time that the Liberal Party won a majority in the House of Commons with a leader whose mother-tongue was English was William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1945.
This is because the island of Montreal is the Liberal Party’s stronghold – currently holding 19 of the 21 seats on the island. And the party has always seen strong support in Quebec as essential to electoral victory (as the second largest province), and for keeping the country together.
Which is why, although former “Minister for Everything” Chrystia Freeland – whose resignation from cabinet finally brought Trudeau down – and former governor of both the reserve banks of Canada and England, Mark Carney, may be front-runners to win, the dark horse may be the impeccably named François-Philippe Champagne – the former minister of foreign affairs and current industry minister. The other potential candidate is former premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark2 – who has been spending time in Quebec City trying to improve her French as an indication of her intention to run (fluency in both English and French is considered a must for party leaders).
Whoever does win the contest, their tenure as PM is likely to be very short. With an election as early as June (and October at the latest) the Liberals are highly likely to lose power. The new leader’s job will simply to be save as much furniture as possible.
A poll taken just prior to Trudeau’s resignation had the party as low as 16% of the vote. Which – depending on the vagaries of the First-Past-The-Post voting system, may return Canada to the extraordinary situation it had between 1993-1997, when the Bloc Québécois were the official opposition.
The Theme is Power
I thought I’d also provide a few brief thoughts on Elon Musk – and the Chaos Media Ecosystem – and their weaponisation of a decade old sexual abuse scandal in the United Kingdom. Where over a period between 1997 and 2013 around 1400 girls were raped and sexually abused in a horrific coordinated and well-organised campaign.
We shouldn’t for a second think that Musk cares at all about the victims of sexual abuse. It’s merely a tool he is using for power. Musk has seized upon this issue to expand his influence from his current (thoroughly weird) hand-holding of Donald Trump into other countries. With the intent on proving he has the ability to shape politics globally (he’s doing the same in Germany).
Musk has become a throughly sinister individual, and now competing with the Russian state as the world’s greatest spreader of disinformation.
The argument that Musk and the online swamp of reactionary trolls are basing their agitation on is that the police force and other authorities in Rotherham overlooked the rape and sexual abuse of these girls because they didn’t want to appear racist – the grooming gangs were mostly men from Pakistani origin.
While the permanent social fear of being labelled a racist and the new racial essentialism within progressive politics is apparent in some circles, police forces are hardly institutions mired in post-modern progressive shibboleths. No matter how much people like Musk fantasise about this being true.
There is a far more obvious explanation for what happened – both the state and society at large simply don’t see sexual assault as a crime (or even a problem). Both rape and sexual assault are effectively decriminalised. In the UK only 1.3% of rapes recorded by the police progress through to perpetrators being charged, and most rapes and sexual assault go unreported because women know that the likelihood of receiving justice is minuscule.
Men’s ownership of women and girls’ bodies remains the core pillar of how the world views women and girls.
For want of rewriting Hanlon’s Razor – Never attribute to wokeness that which can be adequately explained by misogyny.
Digital Death and Resurrection
I’ve had this dead laptop sitting around my place for over a year. The laptop contained a pretty extensive catalogue of music that hasn’t found its way to Spotify yet. Some of it I have on CD – sitting in boxes in my cupboard – but I don’t own anything to play CDs with anymore. So this week I decided to take the hard drive out of the laptop and put it in an external hard drive enclosure. Unfortunately, the data was still inaccessible. So I decided to take it to a data recovery centre to see what they could do. They were confident in being able to recover the data, but the minimum cost would be $800. Which I found a little too steep.
So instead I’ve been trying to find all this music on various less-than-legal platforms. The online world of MP3 file sharing is still very much alive.
In keeping with the Canadian theme, the early-2000s were the golden age of Canadian bedroom pop. Somehow The Russian Futurists never took off, and this never found its way to Spotify. But given that all music now exists at once – rather than us living in musical eras – maybe there’s a chance it’ll gain traction one day?
Technically Paul Martin is Franco-Ontarian, but he represented a seat in Montreal during his 20 years in Parliament
Christy Clark was premier for the BC Liberal Party, who are (or were) unaffiliated with the federal Liberals, and considered a coalition of liberals and conservatives much like the Australian Liberal Party. The party, of course, no longer exist, thanks to a perplexing – and hilarious – suicide last year, which I wrote about in October. But her lack of association with the Trudeau government could be a plus.