Leaf kiwis, can I get a quick rundown on Stephen Harper? How do you from that to liberal domination under Trudeau Jr.?
Canadians don't tend to vote federal parties & leaders IN, they tend to vote them OUT.
Despite Canadians feeling superior to Americans that they aren't a "two-party system", only two parties in reality have ever formed government since 1867. So they really just trade back&forth every decade or so.
Trudeau's father Pierre was PM for a few terms in the 70s and early 80s for the Liberals. He was a literal commie and was the biggest "rock star" leader Canada ever had, hanging out with Fidel Castro and Hollywood elites. He was really the first leader to run up the debt and tried to nationalize Alberta oil resources, killing the Liberal brand in the prairie provinces for generations. Future PM Jean Chretien was his Indian Affairs minister.
When the country got tired of Trudeau Sr BS, they put the Progressive Conservatives & Brian Mulroney in power for the Reagan/Bush Sr era. Mulroney was an anglophone Irish Quebecker. Mulroney & the PCs were pro-business and generally socially progressive as far as conservatives go. After two terms, Mulroney resigned because the country was going to lynch him after two failed attempts to open the constitution, a new federal sales tax, massive debt lowering the nation's credit rating and a NAFTA agreement that hollowed out manufacturing.
The PC party put in their own Kamala Harris, Kim Campbell, a BC woman to run for PM and get trounced at the polls. The party lost all but 2 seats in 1993, losing to Jean Chretien's revived Liberal party who won a majority. It was a narrative that Campbell & the PCs lost because they ran an attack ad mocking Chretien's crooked mouth from childhood polio.
Chretien would come to power in 1993 under an awful Greece-like credit crunch. Chretien was the francophone half to his anglophone Quebecker Finance Minister Paul Martin, a shipping magnate.
They both get credit for fixing the country's finances over the next decade by downloading costs & programs to the provinces, canceling military hardware purchases and raising taxes. They also narrowly won a referendum in 1995 by only a few percentage points where Quebec tried to separate.
Meanwhile, the PC party with two out of 300 seats annihilated itself. It's
Quebec wing broke off over the failed constitutional accords, forming the provincial separatist party, the Bloc Quebecois, that would form the Official Opposition in 1993 as the second place party.
Similarly, the Western Canadian wing of the PC party would break away as well over alienation from Trudeau Sr's stealing of oil wealth and tiring of being ruled from afar by Laurentian old money Central Canada elites. Preston Manning, a caricature, almost American-style boomer with a nasally voice would lead them for the next decade. The new Reform Party would eat up all the old right-leaning Prairie ridings West of the Manitoba border.
The old PC party would survive another decade but was largely irrelevant with Chretien's Liberal majorities.
With the prairie-based & more socially & fiscally conservative Reform party unable to break through in vote-rich Ontario & Quebec, the Reform party swallowed up the old PC party, eventually forming the current day Conservative Party of Canada with Stephen Harper as leader.
Chretien & Martin's Liberal government by the early aughts was embroiled in corruption scandals where they were found out embezzling money in Quebec under the guise of fighting separatism. Chretien would step down and leave Martin to be party leader, leaving him to wear the decade of scandals & fatigue.
The newly formed national Conservative party under Harper would come to power in the mid aughts defeating Martin. Harper, a Toronto-born but Alberta-posing Conservative would lead the country until 2015.
He was credited for keeping Canadian banking regulations in place during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that didn't impact the country much.
In general, Harper was a shrewd campaigner, fiscally conservative but fairly socially moderate at the time. He defeated 3 Liberal leaders - Paul Martin, Stephane Dion (climate nerd) & Michael Ignatieff (Harvard carpetbagger).
Harper was also often saddled with a minority government, so he was at constant risk of having his government fall with every bill & vote. He ruled for so long with his prowess in intimidating his opponents into not calling for new elections by pointing out their parties were broke, that Canadians would punish frivolous elections, by poison-pilling votes, etc.
Otherwise, Harper was pretty uncharismatic and boring. He did a lot of retail politics like shaving 2 po
off the national sales tax, catering a lot to specific ethnic voting blocs, complicating the tax code with boutique tax credits, etc.
The Liberal party was pretty decimated in the mid-aughts after Chretien & Martin. They slipped out of second place when Ignatieff lost around 2011 and the socialist NDP party under Jack Layton somehow swept the majority of Quebec's 75 seats, including paper candidates and an English-speaking waitress who went to Vegas for the campaign & won a French-only district she had never visited.
Eventually after 3 consecutive losses to the Conservatives, the Liberals elected Justin Trudeau as leader, who was a relatively unknown MP from Montreal besides his name. The Liberals were still widely seen as the fledgling 3rd party at the time with the NDP still being the 2nd place party under Tom Mulcair after popular Jack Layton died of cancer.
By this time, the Harper government had been in power for a decade. They had accrued a few scandals of their own such as Minister Bev Oda expensing a $15 OJ and a few election integrity where Harper's MPs were caught doing voter suppression by hiring third party robocall agencies.
In 2015, Trudeau ran mostly on a platform of legalizing weed & electoral reform, promising to immediately do away with the First Past The Post system for some sort of proportional representation.
Trudeau's victory in 2015 came somewhat as a surprise. Harper's party seemed like old, boring white men who had been around too long. Trudeau did eventually legalize weed, but the whole thing was a predictable government shitshow. He immediately reneged on any electoral reform deciding "it's not the right time for Canadians" after declaring that 2015 would be the "last FPTP election".
Harper mostly disappeared from public life. He eventually got some WEF job for some African thinktank iirc.
The Conservatives would similarly spend the next decade in the wilderness electing feckless, milquetoast leaders - first Andrew Scheer, Harper's old House of Commons speaker, who never had a real job and was criticized for hiding American citizenship. Scheer's leadership win also created the rival libertarian People's Party of Canada after he defeated Maxime Bernier in the race with help from the dairy lobby wanting to keep Canada's closed, supply management dairy market in place. Bernier, another former Harper Industry and Foreign Affairs Minister who infamously left national security documents at his biker gf's place, would leave the party to create the one-man purple PPC libertarian party that leans the furthest right today but has no seats and polls around 2-5%.
Then the Conservatives put in place Erin O'Toole, a former military SAR helicopter vet & lawyer who is younger than Trudeau but somehow looks like he could be his grandpa. O'Toole presided over the pandemic and was a Trudeau clone. He was in lockstep with all Trudeau's COVID shenanigans with hardly any opposition or difference in policy. O'Toole's party was pro-jab, pro-lockdown, pro-mandates, etc.
Trudeau, having won a second majority against weak Andrew Scheer in 2019, called an opportunistic snap election in fall 2021 while still doing full COVID tyranny and theatre. He hoped to extend his majority by another 2 years while polls were favourable after all the COVID gibs and before crushing inflation hit.
Trudeau would be partially punished, being reduced to a minority even with a weak O'Toole not offering a strong alternative and doing cringe photops wearing high heels. The socialist NDP also wasn't popular under new leader Jagmeet Singh, a champagne socialist Sikh who spouts disingenuous woke talking points with a turban, an Armani suit and a Rolex.
A few months later in late Jan 2022, hundreds of truckers from across the country camp out in front of Parliament to protest a new edict from Biden closing the border to unjabbed truckers, feeling Trudeau is complicit. The event goes viral, with many Canadians fed up with two years of COVID BS. Other normie boomers and commies, along with the MSM and politicians, label them all as Nazis and fascists.
The truckers are very popular with the right-wing, but stodgy, moderate, risk averse Erin O' Toole refuses to let his party members offer public support. As the protest drags on, his own party stages a mutiny, oosting O'Toole in an emergency leadership review. Candace Bergen becomes interim leader and Pierre Poilievre announces his intention to run.
Trudeau crushes the trucker protest with military force soon thereafter, though the freed Conservatives still only offer middling public support to the blue collar workers.
Poilievre campaigns all summer and eventually wins a resounding victory in September at the convention. He barely acknowledges the trucker protest that gave him his opportunity. He's out campaigning the day it gets crushed and his social media is silent.
Putin invades Ukraine shortly after the trucker protest is broken up, becoming the next Current Thing. Both Trudeau & Poilievre argue about who loves Zelensky more.
Trudeau signs a Confidence&Supply agreement with the socialist NDP Sikh Jagmeet Singh in Sping 2022 to rubberstamp every bill he tables until Oct 2025 in exchange for some funding for birth control and some dental coverage for 90 y/os.
Trudeau eventually lifts most of the remaining unpopular COVID travel and workplace mandate restrictions by Summer 2022 & Biden eventually opens the border to the unclean.
Inflation hits and goes crazy, spiking food prices, rents and housing. Trudeau ramps up the post-pandemic mass Indian migration numbers to 1-2 million a year, worsening rents and cost of living. Every gas station, convenience store, fast food & retail job is overnight filled with annoying, smelly pajeets who Trudeau is subsidizing 50-70% of their wage with tax dollars.
Even remote Canadian towns are flooded with Indians similar to Springfield, OH with Haitians.
Trudeau and his insane Environmental Minister Steven Guilbeault continued to hike up the carbon tax on fuel and everything despite inflation being out of control.
Canadians eventually get sick of the high CoL, Trudeau's woke virtue signaling & millions of new smelly Indians everywhere stealing jobs from their children.
Poilievre is running 10-20 points consistently above Trudeau for the last year. Poilievre is playing it safe, blabbering about cutting taxes, building more homes & "removing the gatekeepers". But he's constantly pandering to Indian groups and wouldn't mention controversial things like mass immigration or gender-affirming care whatsoever publicly.
The next election isn't until Oct 2025 because champagne socialist Sikh Jagmeet Singh keeps rubberstamping all Trudeau's bills and won't take the unpopular government down because he doesn't qualify for his 2 million+ pension until Feb 2025.
Time to start huffing copium
