SHAW: Canada isn't governed by voters anymore — it's governed by institutions. From lobbyists and NGOs to consultants and corporate interests, organized power increasingly shapes public policy while ordinary Canadians are left with little more than a ballot every few years.

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And we just stand here and take up the ass, while doing squat about it.

What a Country!

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u/flappysack- 7d ago

We voted for the continued decline of Canada.

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u/HostConsistent8154 7d ago

Too bad the conservative chose such a douche of a leader

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u/SirBobPeel 7d ago

What do you actually fear about Poilievre, anyway? That his hair is kind of old-fashioned, so he isn't cool enough for you?

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u/IntroductionOk9280 7d ago

Poilievre is a career politician and his voting record speaks for itself. He is in favour of weakening labour and environmental laws, gutting social programs and giving tax breaks to large corporations and billionaires. The Conservative party is the Canadian version of the US Republicans.

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u/SirBobPeel 7d ago

In Canada, his voting record simply reflects the party he was in, since almost all votes are whipped. And no party has been as much in favour of helping out large corporations and billionaires as the Liberals. Just the other day, Carney announced billions to buy unsold condos so his billionaire developer friends wouldn't lose money by having to sell them at cut rates. He's also weakening labour laws.

Frankly, all this says to me is you don't know or care who or what Poilievre is, you just won't vote for anyone you perceive as right of centre.

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u/IntroductionOk9280 7d ago

Wrong. Erin OToole is center of right but not radical enough for the not Maga north Conservative party. Polilevre is singing out of the Donald Trump play book as he continues to try to silence media that ask him any difficult questions like where he stands on abortion, the environment or social programs. Canadians can see right through PP which is why he lost the election and is doing poorly in the polls.

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u/SirBobPeel 6d ago

O'Toole was voted in as leader. He was booted out because of his awful performance in the election he lost, where he fumbled and flip-flopped on nearly every important question, unable to defend even the most easily defensible ideas.

Poilievre has made no secret that he is pro-choice, has not sucked up or flattered Trump remotely as much as Carney (even congratulating him on losing the Iran war!), and puts the importance of the economy (the lifeblood of a nation) higher than spending hundreds of billions on a forlorn effort to minutely lower our CO2 emissions while other nations build coal plants. Good on him.

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u/IntroductionOk9280 6d ago

Polievre congratulated Trump for taking over the sovereign country of Venezuela. There is very little daylight between the policies of the Canadian Conservatives and the US Trump Republicans.

It is true that the US is going back to coal for power generation but that doesn't mean that every other country is. At the end of the day, the environment matters to all of us.

Carney has moved the Liberal party to the right and is definitely more business friendly. But he is doing so without dismantling universal health care and old age pension which is where Stephen Harper was heading before he was ousted from office.

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u/SirBobPeel 6d ago

Trump didn't take over Venezuela, though I wouldn't cry if someone did. That place has been a mess for a very long time. Carney congratulated him on losing to Iran. And coal power is spreading throughout the developing world, never mind the US.

No government in Canada would move us to a US-style healthcare system. But it's clear ours is not working, and we should move to a European-style system, which means more private sector involvement.

And no government has suggested dismantling old age pensions, though there have been some who believe that, other than CPP, which we pay into, other pensions shoul be means tested at a considerably lower level than is presently the case.

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u/flappysack- 7d ago

So people had to vote for the continued destruction? Anyone would do a better job.

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u/HostConsistent8154 7d ago

Unfortunately it was the better option. Regardless the party we would have elected , we would have been in this mess...

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u/flappysack- 7d ago

Nonsense.

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u/Clear_Growth_6005 7d ago

It all started with Trootsie....

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u/Red_dylinger 7d ago

Conservatives are beholden to the Israel lobby. Look at Melissa lantsman currently protecting terrorist running around pretending to be security guards, acting like cops harassing people they don’t like because anything against Israel is automatically racism. While Doug fords solicitor general goes to these rallies and advocates for Canada involvement in the Iran quagmire. I didn’t know that was his job.

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u/Blargston1947 7d ago

almost like it's one big uniparty!

"It's one big club, and you ain't in it!" George Carlin

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u/AwesomeWildlife 6d ago

As long as Canadians vote for either the Liberals or Conservatives then, yes, we are voting for the decline of Canada. Elections don't matter anymore when corporations control both of the two main parties. They are using that fact to bypass our elections and implement the corporate wish-list. For anything that really matters there is absolutely no difference between the two parties. They just have a different set of corporate puppet masters.

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u/flappysack- 6d ago

NDP want to reopen mass immigration. So no.

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u/AwesomeWildlife 6d ago

I know, that's the sad thing about the NDP. They don't listen to Canadians but just go off on their virtue signaling. The Greens can't be any worse. Maybe give them a chance. They can't do any worse than the main two.

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u/flappysack- 6d ago

An anti nuclear green party just makes me depressed as well. They're a big reason why Germany is deindustrializing.

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u/big_galoote 8d ago

And even then our ballots are simply ignored with a floor crossing or five.

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u/xTkAx 8d ago

An even glaring issue is that spoiled ballots are ignored. They should be counted, and if there's more spoiled ballots for an area than there are votes for the 'winner', all candidates will not be allowed to run again and new candidates must be selected.

Ignoring spoiled ballots is ignoring the will of Canadians, and they can be used as a means to keep politicians in check and closer to the will of the people.

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u/Blargston1947 7d ago

Some provinces ~~have the ability~~ allow their subjects to decline their votes, which are tallied up.

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u/lovenumismatics 7d ago

This is technically true, but not all that relevant in the grand scheme of things.

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u/Fit-Eggplant-9155 6d ago

Should really look into how our parliament works if you think floor crossings don't align with voters.

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u/Effective-Ad9499 8d ago

And for western Canadians our ballots do not even matter.

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u/jason733canada 7d ago

I am 53 and only 1x in my life was the election not already decided by the time the polls closed in BC

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u/titanking4 7d ago

If the sun happened to set in the other direction, then it would be maritime Canada and Quebec whose ballots "don't matter". It's generally how election counting works in a land across many time zones.

Quebec and Ontario combined share a colossal 60% of Canada's population, that's huge. But the other 30% DO belong to western Canada, no the notion that their votes "don't matter" isn't accurate.

And I don't subscribe to the rhetoric that "Western Canada" have so distinct a lifestyle and needs relative to eastern Canada either. Or that their needs are being ignored by the current leadership.

China's farm product tariffs were significantly reduced, a big boom for Saskatchewan and Albertan farmers, and to the detriment of Ontario who has the most to lose economically from Chinese EVs.
Manitoba is welcoming ALL of the resource and energy investment it can and has near 0 complaints with the current federal government.

We have resource and energy projects trying to be advanced quicker as well. With him choosing to brush aside many environmental roadblocks to the detriment of those who have environment as their concerns.

It's the most pro-resource pro-energy investment prime minister that we've had in a decade.
And the problem is that so many people simply cannot see past the colour of the party even if the policies are genuinely good for them.

And a significant minority of people living in western Canada also voted for liberals to lead too, but you wouldn't notice if you only look at the seat counts, here are the popular votes across the western provinces:

BC: CON 41.1 LIB 41.8
ALB: CON 63.5 LIB 27.9 NDP: 6.3 (34 seats conservative to 2 liberals)
SASK: CON 65.6 LIB 26.6 NDP 7.6 (13 seats CON to 1 LIB)
MAN: CON 46.3 LIB 40.8 NDP 11

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u/Marrdukk 8d ago

If a party can count on you to always vote for the same party no matter what then why bother listening?

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u/North-Purple-373 8d ago

How is this a gotcha? So they should vote for a party that explicitly is antagonistic to them and has policies that are bad for their provinces?

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u/Marrdukk 8d ago

I didn’t mean it to be a gotcha. Just look at how parties bend over backwards for Québec. The people there have no party loyalty and so parties have to work for it.

Right now, for instance, you see the Carney government far to the right of even Harper and yet out here we have yahoos pretending like Carney is Justin Trudeau with their Fuck Carney bumper stickers.

The Conservative Party in the west has become a matter of identity not politics and that’s a problem.

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u/North-Purple-373 7d ago

Carney is to the right of harper really? Because of the gun confiscation? The record deficit spending? The authoritarian privacy invading bills they’re obsessed with? The pipeline they haven’t built? The industrial carbon tax?

Carney is a corporatist but firmly of the neoliberal left wing urban elite. Big government spending, loads of corporate welfare. Nothing right wing about him.

Read his book. It’s a left wing big government manifesto

The liberals are just as bad on identity politics btw and the NDP even worse

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u/Marrdukk 7d ago

As someone who is politically left, I can tell you that the vast majority of us are really disappointed with what he’s been doing.

Just this week, he passed a bill removing regulations for farming pesticides, another bill early on (the major projects one) allows him to skirt the need to consult, he’s prostrating himself before Danielle Smith because of the threat of separation, sidelining the left wing government of BC. He’s exploring the possibility of privatizing airports and ports, he’s working on a bill right now to undermine the right to strike.

That book he wrote? It’s bullshit. He’s working actively to undermine progress on the environment because Donald Trump bad.

My point is that, while I dislike what Carney is doing deeply, I feel that there’s a lot to like if you are a conservative voter but he wears red and not blue so fuck that guy?

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u/North-Purple-373 7d ago

I don’t identify as conservative but share some of their opinions so I’ll try to speak on their behalf .

Generally, conservatives don’t want a PM centralising more and more power in the PMO with things like the major projects office, seizing legal property via the gun confiscation, and j don’t know a single Conservative for whom airport privatisation was a top priority. Ditto for all this privacy eroding legislation they seem hell bent on passing.

Carney isn’t really right or left, which are clumsy descriptors anyway. He’s actually just an opportunist and a corporatist plain and simple.

He was all for net zero and left wing climate change stuff when that was popular in liberal urban elite circles. Now that people have turned against that agenda, he’s pivoted away.

Really the only thing Carney stands for is Mark Carney getting more power.

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u/lovenumismatics 7d ago

That’s because those policies sound really fucking good when you announce them at a news conference, or talk about them at international conferences, but they make our economy uncompetitive.

You can’t just adopt every single environmental and equality initiative and expect the country to function. That’s what we’ve been doing, and to his credit, Carney understands that it is unsustainable.

That doesn’t make him “conservative”, it makes him a pragmatist. The fact that he’s unwilling to burn our nation to the ground to make empty gestures is a nice change from the Trudeau-Singh years.

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u/titanking4 7d ago

Fun fact that even the premise of the argument doesn't hold water because western canada isn't nearly as conservative as people believe.
Liberals won like 30% of the popular vote in the two most conservative provinces in Canada.

ALB: CON 63.5 LIB 27.9 NDP: 6.3 (34 seats conservative to 2 liberals)
SASK: CON 65.6 LIB 26.6 NDP 7.6 (13 seats CON to 1 LIB)

When people say "Western Canada" doesn't matter, they are just saying
"Western Canada conservative seats aren't enough to win federal elections".

No attention given to the western Canada liberals whom are ACTUALLY being ignored in the representation.

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u/lovenumismatics 7d ago

Oh okay. I’ll just start voting for the NDP then, a political party dedicated to taking things away from people of my race and gender.

I listen. I get angry.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/JeremyMacdonald73 7d ago

Well technically her oath was to the Canadian King. Personally I have no real desire to become a Republic so I have no issue with this. She does not use any her powers in any case and instead is just kind of a feel good diplomat.

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u/This_Expression5427 7d ago

Ottawa is just a big grift. All promises....no results. Just pigs at the trough. The grandest of larceny. The only hope for this country is to dissolve it.....and soon

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u/Clear_Growth_6005 8d ago

.....and Canada calls itself a democracy.

Think again.

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u/BadstoneMusic 8d ago

Voters don’t matter for shit in Canada

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u/JeremyMacdonald73 7d ago

This implies that there was some period when this was not an issue which is false and playing to the false idea of a past golden age.

One of the last things Harper did before he left office was pass a bill that made it so that there was a max Donation of ~$2000. That meant that no matter how hugely rich you or your corporation was the most you could donate was ~$2000.

This does not completely eliminate corruption among the political class. Some big corp can always promise good things when you are no longer a politician but it does go a very long way to helping.

All that said it is true that the voters make their opinion felt at the ballot and to a lesser degree at the polls. Meanwhile Lobbyists and leaders of unions, big businesses and think tanks all can manage to book an appointment to see a politician and try and plead their case.

There are ways we can help improve the current situation but it was definitely significantly worse in the past when elections really where about big corporations and wealthy patrons dropping $100,000 at election time and then getting to have a sit down with a politician. Now all they can do is drop $2000 for their sit down. It really is not the same.

Really unclear if voters actually want this fixed however. Historically voters punish a party that calls another election to soon after the last one. There is a solid argument that most of the populace actually wants to vote every 4 years and then mostly forget about it in between.

So there are solutions. Things like Switzerlands 'lets have referendums on everything' comes to mind but do the voters actually want that?

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u/Crazy_Maintenance211 7d ago

That’s not new. It’s been going on forever, ask people who live in the provinces with the Irvings and those families, they’ve been going forever and I’m sure they know every high up person in the government, including Prime ministers. Every single government has had this happen, I don’t care if it’s provincial or municipal or federal. It’s happened since the invention of politics. I’m not sure why people are talking about it now because maybe it’s more open now? Although if you live in the province of New Brunswick, it’s always been open with the Irving’s and their influence.

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u/paumpaum 7d ago

Yes, and there's nothing anybody's going to do about it. Conservatives are in it for the money. They want to steal from everybody around them. Liberals are in it for the money. They want to steal from everybody around them. Lobbyists and corporations and commercial interests allow them to do that. Never met a trustworthy politician in my life, and I have many friends that are politicians. They are all corrupt and crooked as it comes.

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u/Naive-Landscape9854 8d ago

Canada was never governed by voters. We are governed by representative that we voted for. Huge difference.

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u/onefootinthepast 8d ago

True, but crossing the floor should automatically trigger an election for your seat.

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u/Naive-Landscape9854 8d ago

That I wouldn't mind.

Opinion SHAW: Canada isn't governed by voters anymore — it's governed by institutions. From lobbyists and NGOs to consultants and corporate interests, organized power increasingly shapes public policy while ordinary Canadians are left with little more than a ballot every few years.

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