mackaycartoons

Graeme MacKay's Editorial Cartoon Archive

  • Archives
  • Kings & Queens
  • Prime Ministers
  • Sharing
  • Special Features
  • The Boutique
  • Who?
  • Young Doug Ford
  • Presidents

Maxime Bernier

Thursday October 21, 2021

October 21, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 21, 2021

Vaccine mandate coming to House of Commons, MPs rule

Anyone entering the House of Commons precinct — including MPs — will need to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of Nov. 22, the Board of Internal Economy has ordered.

Thursday August 19, 2021

The new rule starts on the day the 44th Parliament kicks off.

“This requirement will apply to any person who wishes to enter the House of Commons precinct, including members and their staff, political research office employees, administration employees, members of the parliamentary press gallery, parliamentary business visitors, contractors and consultants,” said Speaker Anthony Rota in a statement.

The cross-party committee of MPs that oversees the workings of the House of Commons made this decision following a two-hour closed-door meeting on Tuesday.

August 17, 2021

“Details with respect to the implementation of the Board’s decision are being developed and will be communicated in due course,” reads the Speaker’s statement. “These decisions were made to meet ongoing recommendations from public health authorities to help limit the spread of COVID-19 within the work environment.”

The House is considering people to be fully vaccinated 14 days after they have received the recommended doses of one or a combination of Health Canada-approved vaccines.

September 17, 2021

The decision to include MPs as part of the vaccination mandate comes amid discussions over parliamentary privilege and whether there would be a different set of rules for elected officials than there would be for those around them.

The Liberals, New Democrats, and Bloc Quebecois have said that all their MPs are fully vaccinated, though the Conservatives have continued to refuse to say how many of their MPs are vaccinated. Given the timing of this order coming into effect, it’s possible unvaccinated Conservatives would not be able to enter the House of Commons next month unless they have a medical exemption.

According to the new policy, in cases of individuals who have a “medical contraindication,” they will have to provide proof of a recent negative COVID-19 rapid antigen test to be able to enter the buildings that are part of the House precinct. These requirements to get on the Hill will not apply to anyone under the age of 12.

This news follows the federal government announcing on Oct. 6 that “core” federal public servants will have to attest to being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Oct. 29 or face being put on leave without pay by Nov. 15.

While the House of Commons and Senate were not part of that mandate, they were among the federal employers asked to mirror the government’s vaccine policy in developing their own approaches. (CTV) 

 

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2021-35, Canada, caucus, Conservative, covid-19, gargoyle, mandate, Maxime Bernier, pandemic, Parliament, Vaccine

Wednesday October 13, 2021

October 13, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday October 13, 2021

Canada faces wave of terminations as workplace vaccine mandates take effect

Canada is facing a potential wave of terminations tied to mandatory workplace vaccine policies as a growing number of employers require workers to be fully inoculated against COVID-19 – or risk losing their jobs, legal experts say.

September 15, 2021

Governments, institutions and companies have spent months hammering out vaccine mandates in a bid to curb an unrelenting pandemic fuelled by variants.

As employer deadlines to be fully vaccinated approach, unvaccinated workers could soon be placed on unpaid leave or terminated altogether, lawyers say.

“We’ve been contacted by thousands of people from across Canada who all have these ultimatums in front of them saying they have to be vaccinated by a certain date or risk losing their jobs,” employment lawyer Lior Samfiru, a partner with Samfiru Tumarkin LLP, said in an interview.

“We’re going to see the biggest wave of terminations we’ve seen since the pandemic started,” he said, noting that his firm has been contacted by workers in a range of industries including health care, education, banks, construction and restaurants.

“It will be significant.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled Canada’s new mandatory vaccine policy on Wednesday. It requires the core public service, air travel and rail employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of October.

The federal vaccine mandate mirrors provincial policies, such as in Nova Scotia where all school and health-care workers are required to have two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of November.

Private companies have also developed corporate vaccine mandates, with looming deadlines for staff to be fully vaccinated.

The situation has left legal experts grappling with the tension between protecting the rights of individual workers and ensuring employers meet their health and safety obligations toward staff, clients and the public. (CTV) 

 

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2021-33, Canada, covid-19, Employment, graveyard, Grim reaper, Halloween, mandate, Maxime Bernier, pandemic, spooky, vaccination, Vaccine

Monday September 20, 2021 – Election Day

September 20, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

A gallery of editorial cartoons during the September 20 2021 federal election campaign: 

July 9, 2021
July 9, 2021
July 23, 2021
July 23, 2021
August 14, 2021
August 14, 2021
August 17, 2021
August 17, 2021
August 20, 2021
August 20, 2021
August 24, 2021
August 24, 2021
August 26, 2021
August 26, 2021
August 27, 2021
August 27, 2021
September 1, 2021
September 1, 2021
September 2, 2021
September 2, 2021
September 3, 2021
September 3, 2021
September 4, 2021
September 4, 2021
September 8, 2021
September 8, 2021
September 9, 2021
September 9, 2021
September 10, 2021
September 10, 2021
September 15, 2021
September 15, 2021
September 14, 2021
September 14, 2021
September 16, 2021
September 16, 2021
September 17, 2021
September 17, 2021
September 18, 2021
September 18, 2021

Drawing the Federal Leaders

Posted in: Canada Tagged: Annamie Paul, election2021, Erin O’Toole, gallery, Jagmeet Singh, Justin Trudeau, Maxime Bernier, Yves-François Blanchet

Saturday September 18, 2021

September 20, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday September 18, 2021

This was no ordinary election campaign, but perhaps not ‘important’

If the polls are to be believed, we have all just wasted five weeks of our lives. An election that, in law, should never have been called, the reason for which has never been adequately explained, limped through a listless campaign on track to producing a Parliament remarkably like the one it was supposed to replace. The “most important election since 1945,” according to Justin Trudeau, might as well never have happened.

September 1, 2021

Compare the most recent polls (at time of writing) to those taken at the same stage of the previous campaign. The similarity is striking: The Liberals and Conservatives are again in the low 30s, with the NDP at around 19 and the Bloc at a little over six. The seat projections, likewise, look eerily familiar: The Liberals are projected to win about 150 seats, the Conservatives about 120, the NDP and the Bloc about 30 each. Only on the margins has there been much change: the Greens have lost half of their support, while the People’s Party of Canada have tripled theirs.

But. Well, there are lots of buts. National polls mean little: to really get an idea of what’s going on, you have to drill down into the regional figures. Polls are snapshots, not predictions: Much could change in the last days of the campaign. And the polls are often wrong. Turnout is an especially difficult thing to model: Are Conservative voters more motivated than Liberal? Will NDP voters show up? Are PPC supporters so angry they will crawl over the proverbial broken glass to vote, or so alienated that they will not bother?

July 9, 2021

So much for where we are – how did we get here? At the start of the campaign, each of the party leaders faced their own personal and strategic challenges. For Mr. Trudeau, the personal challenge was his faded popular appeal: Once the Liberal Party’s most significant asset, he had become its most significant liability, under the accumulated weight of broken promises, ethical lapses and sundry other controversies. The party led all polls going into the election, some by double digits. But the leader trailed the party.

The strategic challenge, as for any Liberal leader, was to win the “progressive primary.” A substantial majority of Canadians might be described as left of centre. But their vote is divided among several parties, with no enduring loyalty to any of them. In 2015, many of those voters were drawn to the Liberal side by a youthful, charismatic leader and a positive vision of change; in 2021, they would have to be frightened into it, as the party best placed to avert the dread prospect of a Conservative government.

August 25, 2020

For Erin O’Toole, personal unpopularity also presented a challenge: His precampaign approval numbers were even worse than Mr. Trudeau’s. A year into the job as Conservative Party Leader, people still did not know much about him, but what they did know they didn’t much like.

His strategic challenge: Conservative support has a high floor and a low ceiling. Where Liberal support can range anywhere from 20 per cent to 50 per cent, the Conservatives can reliably count on winning at least 30 per cent of the vote, but have difficulty getting beyond 37 per cent or 38 per cent. Only once in the past eight elections, in 2011, have they managed it.

January 22, 2021

To remedy that, Mr. O’Toole needed to shift the Conservatives from an angry, grievance-based party, more concerned with turning out its existing supporters than reaching out to new ones, into one that could attract centrist voters. The aim was not just to expand the Conservative vote, but to distribute it more efficiently: fewer votes wasted racking up huge majorities in the West, more going to win those tight races in suburban Ontario and Quebec.

That meant presenting the Conservatives as a safe, inoffensive choice, largely indistinguishable from the Liberals ideologically, but with a less polarizing leader. (In Quebec, where votes divide on different lines, it meant pitching the Tories as a more pragmatic version of the Bloc: nearly as nationalistic, but with more ability to “deliver the goods.”)

October 18, 2019

The catch: people might believe that about Mr. O’Toole. But would they believe it about his party? For Mr. O’Toole, in short, the problem was his base; for Mr. Trudeau, it was him. (Continued: Andrew Coyne, The Globe & Mail)


Drawing the Federal Leaders





 

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2021-32, Annamie Paul, Canada, covid-19, Doug Ford, election2021, Erin O’Toole, Francois Legault, Jagmeet Singh, Jason Kenney, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Justin Trudeau, Maxime Bernier, pandemic, race, Yves-François Blanchet

Friday September 17, 2021

September 20, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday September 17, 2021

‘Mad Max’ and why his party is on the rise

August 17, 2018

In 2018, after a falling out with his party and amid a backlash over statements he made about immigration and multiculturalism, then member of Parliament Maxime Bernier quit the Conservatives and formed his own federal party.

Mr Bernier, a former Canadian foreign minister, is a populist with a libertarian bent who supporters have nicknamed “Mad Max”. He has previously described his upstart party, the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), as a coalition of people “disenchanted with traditional politicians”.

The PPC has a wide-ranging platform that includes limiting immigration, an end to corporate welfare, a pro-firearms stance, and a rejection of what it terms “climate change alarmism”.

April 27, 2021

However, one issue above all has come to the forefront in the 2021 election: vaccine mandates and lockdowns.

Mr Bernier, 58, has been a vocal opponent of the what he calls “authoritarian” restrictions, claiming in an August rally, for example, that vaccine passports “will create two kinds of citizens, some with more rights than others”.

Such statements are “a huge part of the story behind the surge [for the PPC]”, said Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, a political studies professor at Queens University.

“A lot of this has been generated by the party seizing on the sense that anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine passport sentiments exist in the population.”

September 15, 2021

Polling data suggests that this message is gaining momentum among some Canadian voters even while the country has some of the world’s highest vaccination rates – over 80%.

Recent tracking poll numbers from CBC, for example, ranked the PPC in fourth place nationally at 6.5% – ahead of the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois, which only runs candidates in Quebec. (The Liberals and the Conservative are in a statistical tie at around 30%).

In the 2019 election, by comparison, the PPC earned just 1.6% of the popular vote and Mr Bernier lost his own seat.

A significant portion of the party’s swelling support base comes from first time or irregular voters, as well as siphoning support from the Conservatives in parts of their western Canada political strongholds, said Prof Goodyear-Grant.

Federal Election 2021

“They are taking some support from all the other parties as well, which suggests there are people across all parties that are opposed to some of the [pandemic] measures that have been put in place,” she said.

Provinces like Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia have all in recent weeks brought in vaccine passport systems that limit access in certain settings as cases rise in a fourth pandemic wave. (BBC News) 

 

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2021-32, Canada, covid-19, election2021, Maxime Bernier, pandemic, pie, polls, PPC, virus, wedge, wedge issue
1 2 … 5 Next »

Click on dates to expand

Please note…

This website contains satirical commentaries of current events going back several decades. Some readers may not share this sense of humour nor the opinions expressed by the artist. To understand editorial cartoons it is important to understand their effectiveness as a counterweight to power. It is presumed readers approach satire with a broad minded foundation and healthy knowledge of objective facts of the subjects depicted.

Social Media Connections

Link to our Facebook Page
Link to our Flickr Page
Link to our Pinterest Page
Link to our Twitter Page
Link to our Website Page
  • HOME
  • Sharing
  • The Boutique
  • The Hamilton Spectator
  • Artizans Syndicate
  • Association of Canadian Cartoonists
  • Wes Tyrell
  • Martin Rowson
  • Guy Bado’s Blog
  • You Might be From Hamilton if…
  • MacKay’s Most Viral Cartoon
  • Intellectual Property Thief Donkeys
  • National Newswatch
  • Young Doug Ford

Your one-stop-MacKay-shop…

T-shirts, hoodies, clocks, duvet covers, mugs, stickers, notebooks, smart phone cases and scarfs

Brand New Designs!

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets
Follow Graeme's board My Own Cartoon Favourites on Pinterest.

MacKay’s Virtual Gallery

Archives

Copyright © 2016 mackaycartoons.net

Powered by Wordpess and Alpha.

 

Loading Comments...