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Wednesday December 14, 2022

December 14, 2022 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday December 14, 2022

By-elections don’t matter, except when they do

August 1, 2013

Do by-elections, which usually have notoriously low turnout, matter?

We get told general campaigns do, all the time. But what about by-elections? Should we care — and should we care that no one seems to, you know, care about them?

That legendary political muse, Dan Quayle, had the best take on it all. Said the former U.S. vice-president: “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.”

Well, yes. Hard to quibble with that one. Good insight, Dan.

Fewer folks went to the polls in this weeks by-election in Mississauga Lakeshore — only around 30%. But, before some political scientist starts writing wordy op-eds about the need for compulsory voting, remember: by-elections are beloved by hacks and flaks, but rarely ever regular folks. And they’re the bosses.

June 9, 2022

For instance: Toronto Centre had a byelection in October 2020. More than 80,000 people were entitled to vote. Slightly over 16,000 did. York Centre had a byelection in the same month, with about the same result: more than 70,000 were eligible to cast a ballot. Only 11,000 bothered. Democracy survived.

So, before academia gets its tenured knickers in a knot, remember: by-elections don’t ever attract as much attention ruin as general elections do. That’s normal. And it’s unlikely to change.

Mississauga-Lakeshore therefore had the standard byelection turnout, but a notable result. The result tells us a few things, participation rate notwithstanding. Here they are.

December 18, 2013

One, the Conservative Party got clobbered. The Liberal candidate — a former Kathleen Wynne government minister, and therefore not without blemish — basically massacred his Tory opponent, by thousands of votes. He took 51% to the Conservative’s 37%.

That’s notable, as noted, because that’s a worse showing than what the much-derided Erin O’Toole got when he was running things. In that race, O’Toole’s chosen candidate did better than Pierre Poilievre’s.

Wasn’t Poilievre supposed to sweep the ‘burbs and all that? Wasn’t he supposed to be the thing that cured all that ailed Team Tory?

September 13, 2022

Well, Pierre has represented an Ottawa suburb for years, winning in seven elections. But he didn’t in Mississauga-Lakeshore. How come?

His spinners, all coincidentally anonymous, insist it was because the aforementioned riding is all-Liberal, all the time.

Well, no. That’s false. Sure, Liberal Svend Spengemann represented the riding in the Trudeau era — but before that, Mississauga-Lakeshore was federal Conservative territory for a number of years.

And, oh yes, this: provincially, the riding is still Conservative territory. Just a few months ago, in June, a provincial Conservative candidate won there — by many thousands of votes. And four years before that, same result: the Tories won it, by a lot.

So, that’s all you need to know about the excuse that Mississauga-Lakeshore is a Liberal fortress and Conservatives will never win there: it’s an excuse. It’s bollocks, in fact.

June 24, 2022

What about Team Poilievre’s other excuse — duly reprinted, without attribution in the pages of the Toronto Star, because it serves both their interests — that it’s all Doug Ford’s fault? You know, that the Ontario Premier sank his federal cousins in the by-election because he’s unpopular? Guilt by association and all that.

Except, that one doesn’t wash either. When he’s been running things, in good times and bad, Ford has taken that riding handily. Twice.

Did Ford’s misadventure with the notwithstanding clause, and the general strike it would have caused, hurt Poilievre’s chances?

Again, no. Ford ultimately never used the notwithstanding clause to win a fight with an education union — and there was no general strike, either. And, besides: both those things were controversies many weeks before the by-election even got underway.

So, what was it? Who is to blame for the first real-world test of Pierre Poilievre’s leadership since he became leader?

November 5, 2022

Well, that would be what Poilievre and his caucus see in the bathroom mirror every morning: themselves. The convoy crap, the crypto-currency craziness, the whackadoodle WEF weirdos. All of that, and more, has persuaded many Canadians that, under Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party of Canada has abandoned the political center. And is, you know, chasing the People’s Party vote.

Which, by the by, got 286 votes in Mississauga-Lakeshore.

About which, our muse Dan Quayle might say: “Not winning enough of the popular vote? It means you are not popular.” (Warren Kinsella, Toronto Sun) 

 

Posted in: Canada, Ontario Tagged: 2022-42, bitcoin, by-election, Canada, Doug Ford, freedom convoy, greenbelt, mainstream, media, Ontario, Pierre Poilievre

Tuesday December 6, 2022

December 6, 2022 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday December 6, 2022

Pierre Poilievre’s self-imposed media vacuum is about to face its first test

October 20, 2022

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre believes the voters whose support he needs to lead his party to government in the next federal election will not be reached via the mainstream media.

His strategy is about to be tested.

On Dec. 12, the voters of the GTA riding of Mississauga-Lakeshore will be going to the polls to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Liberal MP Sven Spengemann last spring.

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2022-41, bitcoin, Canada, Conservative, convoy, freedom, Journalism, leader, media, party, Pierre Poilievre, press, transparency

Tuesday November 1, 2022

November 1, 2022 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday November 1, 2022

U.S. Headlines Expressing Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness Increased Hugely Since 2000

About 42 percent of Americans now actively avoid news coverage, according to the Reuters Institute’s 2022 Digital News Report. That’s up from 38 percent in 2017. Nearly half of Americans who’ve turned away from the news say that they are doing so because it has a negative effect on their mood. As it happens, a new study in the journal PLoS One tracking the headlines in 47 publications popular in the United States reports that they have trended decidedly negative over the past two decades. 

Coincidence?

June 12, 2019

In their study, the team of New Zealand-based media researchers used a language model trained to categorize as positive or negative the sentiments of 23 million headlines between 2000 and 2019. In addition, the model was finetuned to identify Ekman’s six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise), plus neutral, to label the headlines automatically. Using the 2019 Allsides Media Bias Chart, the publications were ideologically categorized as left, right, or center. For example, The New Yorker, the New York Times Opinion, and Mother Jones were identified as left; National Review, Fox News Opinion, and The New York Post as right; and A.P., Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal as center. (Reason was pegged as right-leaning.)

After turning their language model loose on the millions of headlines, the researchers found “an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000.”

June 5, 2012

Overall, the researchers find that the prevalence of headlines denoting anger since the year 2000 increased by 104 percent. The prevalence of headlines denoting fear rose 150 percent; disgust by 29 percent; and sadness by 54 percent. The joy emotional category had its up and downs, rising until 2010 and falling after that. Headlines denoting neutral emotion declined by 30 percent since the year 2000. Breaking these down by ideology, headlines from right-leaning news media have been, on average, consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets.

Why are negative headlines becoming more prevalent? “If it bleeds, it leads” is a hoary journalistic aphorism summarizing the well-known fact that dramatic, even gory, stories engage the attention of news consumers. In other words, journalists are supplying news consumers with what they want. Given the global reach of modern news media, there is always some attention-grabbing horror that occurred somewhere that can be highlighted between weather and sports on your local TV news.

November 4, 2020

Journalistic catering to people’s negativity bias ends up misleading a lot of their audiences into thinking that the state of the world is getting worse and worse. However, looking at long term trends, the opposite is the case. Yes, yes, there are wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Yemen and, of course, a global pandemic during the past two years has killed around 6.5 million people so far. “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell, and become huffy and scornful when some idiotic optimist intrudes on their pleasure,” wrote economist Deidre McCloskey. “Yet pessimism has consistently been a poor guide to the modern economic world.” (Continued: Reason) 

 

Posted in: Canada, International, Lifestyle Tagged: 2022-36, climate crisis, crisis, depression, disaster, disease, division, Halloween, hate, inflation, media, negative, news, newspaper, pessimism

Thursday May 5, 2022

May 5, 2022 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday May 5, 2022

Canadian Conservatives reluctant to comment on report that U.S. Supreme Court will overturn abortion law

September 14, 2021

Conservative MPs and candidates for the party’s leadership were reluctant to talk Tuesday about a leaked report that suggests the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn decades-old case law on abortion.

A decision by the U.S. top court to upend abortion services would have little practical effect on Canadians; some women pursuing late-term abortions go south of the border for care because of limited access here at home. But the political ramifications could be enormous.

Late Monday, Politico published a copy of an initial draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, a Republican appointee, that suggests a majority of justices are prepared to overrule Roe v. Wade — the landmark decision that allowed legal abortions in the U.S. — and return the issue to state legislatures.

The opinion claims the 1973 Roe decision was constitutionally dubious and “egregiously wrong from the start” because its reasoning was “exceptionally weak.”

Alito said that decades-old decision, which essentially found that the right to privacy extended to reproductive choices like an abortion, has had “damaging consequences” by dividing a nation into anti-abortion and pro-choice factions and robbing state officials of the power to regulate the practice.

Posted in: Canada, USA Tagged: 2022-15, abortion, Canada, Candice Bergen, Conservative, debate, Elephant, media, Roe vs. Wade, USA, women rights

Tuesday August 24, 2021

August 31, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday August 24, 2021

Canada doesn’t need more social media trickery

The last thing this election campaign needs is a drift toward American style social media political manipulation and disinformation.

April 21, 2021

We saw an example of that over the weekend, and the offender is someone we would have hoped was above it — Chrystia Freeland. 

It starts with an online question-and-answer session made in 2020 during the Conservative leadership race. In a tweeted video of the session, which was retweeted by Freeland, O’Toole is questioned about privatized health care. Asked if he would advocate private, “for-profit” health care in Canada, his clear response was “yes.”

The only problem is, the video was edited to manipulate the message. In the same segment, the original video shows O’Toole also noted that universal access to health services is of paramount importance. The condensed clip used in Freeland’s tweet did not include that statement.

Justin Trudeau later retweeted the video, and Twitter marked Freeland’s tweet as “manipulated media.” Conservative lawyers sent a complaint to Elections Canada demanding an investigation and disclosure of who was involved in making the video. Conservative manager of media relations Mathew Clancy said: “It’s disappointing to see the Liberals resort to American-style divisive politics.”

March 1, 2012

That’s rich, considering the Conservatives had their own social media mud slinging event just a week ago, distributing a video mocking Trudeau by placing his face on a character from the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” It was so offensive even some sitting Conservatives called the tweet juvenile, amateur and a bad idea during an election campaign.

April 10, 2019

Fair enough. The Conservatives are hypocritical and too precious by half, but that doesn’t excuse what the Liberals did. Their campaign social media gurus manipulated a piece of content to change the message from the original. And the Conservatives did the same thing by adding Trudeau’s face to a fake partisan message. 

Both these things are wrong. We should not be concerned about the feelings or reputations of the politicians and parties involved, but Canadians certainly deserve an apology.

This sort of social media distortion is a toxic import from our friends down south. It has become big business and high art in American politics to manufacture social media demonizing the opposition. The Trump Republican leadership and presidential campaign used literally hundreds of operatives to generate false and misleading storylines about their opponents. Many pundits argue that had an impact on Trump’s successful campaigns.

June 26, 2019

Granted, it was probably naive to hope this twisted tactic would not eventually migrate north, and in fact there have been previous examples. But things are getting worse, and that is not something Canadians should sit quietly and tolerate. 

Much as we have been critical of social media giants for accepting and even encouraging this sort of behaviour, Twitter is to be congratulated for its practice of clearly labelling manipulated content. Other social media platforms have taken their own measures, but Twitter’s is among the most clear and identifiable, and that should sufficient incentive for political parties to lay off the disreputable tactic. 

It cheapens already damaged election discourse. It disrespects our democratic process and ideals. Everyone knows election campaigns have their share of spin and partisan fakery. But outright manipulation is a line parties should not to cross. Parties need to understand that, and the best way to ensure that is by public reaction to this sort of unethical behaviour. We don’t need this garbage in our election. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2021-29, Afghanistan, Canada, Chrystia Freeland, computer, editing, election2021, Erin O’Toole, manipulation, media, propaganda
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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.

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