Politics
Kamala Harris inspiring young Black Canadians toward politics: MPs – Nelson Star
The election of Kamala Harris as vice-president of the United States will inspire more young Black women in Canada to engage in politics and run for office, says Velma Morgan, a Black Canadian activist based in Toronto.
Harris’s father was born in Jamaica, her mother in India. She is the first woman and the first Black or South Asian person elected to the vice-presidency.
Through Morgan’s work as the chair of Operation Black Vote, a not-for-profit, multi-partisan organization that aims to get more Black people elected at all levels of government, she supported Annamie Paul in her bid for the Green party leadership.
“The combination of those two (Harris and Paul), young girls are seeing themselves,” Morgan said in an interview.
“Representation does matter,” she said. “You can’t be what you don’t see.”
After the next election, those girls might also see a Black woman on the Conservatives’ front benches in Leslyn Lewis, who showed strongly in the last Tory leadership race and is the party’s nominated candidate in a solidly Conservative riding in southern Ontario.
(Neither Lewis nor other Conservatives approached by The Canadian Press would weigh in on whether they think Harris’s prominence in the U.S. will make a difference in Canada.)
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who became the first person of colour in Canada’s history to run for prime minister during the 2019 election, said Harris’s election will encourage a future generation of Canadian women to get involved and run in elections.
“Each person who breaks a barrier inspires more people,” he said in an interview.
“We’re only here today because of the people who broke barriers before us.”
Singh said he was happy about — and proud of — the positive impact he had on young people of colour in Canada during the election campaign last year.
“Young kids would come up to me and literally tell me, ‘Thank you. Seeing you running for prime minister makes me feel like I could do anything,’” he said.
Liberal MP Greg Fergus, who is chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, said there is a need to elect more Black people to the House of Commons.
“I remember when there was only one Black MP in the House. And then we went to two, and then we stayed for a number of years, and then we went to five,” he said.
Fergus said there has been some progress, but the number of Black MPs do not yet represent the “democratic weight” of the Black population in Canada. According to the 2016 census, there were just under 1.2 million Black people in Canada, making up 3.5 per cent of the country’s population.
Morgan said Canada needs more Black policy-makers. Her organization facilitates training sessions and fellowships programs for young Black Canadians to encourage more of them to run in elections.
“We’re giving them the tools to participate, whatever way they want to participate, whether it’s to run, or to volunteer or to just help out,” she said. “We’ve been trying to get the word out to say, ‘You know what, we’re here, there’s not a lot of us, but we can change that by bringing a lot more people on.’ “
NDP MP Matthew Green, a Black person representing the riding of Hamilton Centre, remembers in 2008 when he gathered with his community to celebrate the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States.
But he said the goal shouldn’t only be to achieve representation and reflect the diversity of the population. It should also be to achieve inclusion and equity.
“Having diverse people, women elected, for me personally, is only important if their legacy is dismantling the barriers that they faced to get there,” he said.
He said people have traditionally been privileged in Canada by race, gender and economics.
“(The system is) disproportionately, advantaging white men … that still remains a fact,” he said.
“As a city councillor, the first elected person of African-Canadian descent in my city’s history, I was still racially profiled by police in my own community.”
He said Harris — a former district attorney in San Francisco and then attorney general of California — was part of a system that also incarcerated and disenfranchised Black and Latino communities and low-income people throughout her career. What really matters, he added, is whether she will be able to help marginalized people break barriers.
Former MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes, who left the Liberal caucus several months before the 2019 election to sit as an Independent, said that claiming “diversity is our strength,” as the Liberals often do, is misleading.
“Having people of different colours and different races or ideas within your systems or organizations does not mean that you’re going to build strength if those people feel excluded,” Caesar-Chavannes said in an interview Friday.
She said collective strength comes when Canadians make spaces inclusive, so racialized people can voice their ideas and feel like they belong.
“That for sure creates a system that is more fair and more just,” she said.
VIDEO: Harris pays tribute to Black women in 1st speech as VP-elect
Caesar-Chavannes, expected to detail her disillusionment with the Liberal brand of politics in her upcoming book, “Can You Hear Me Now?” to be published in February, said she’s not optimistic.
“If we never address the root cause, and we keep putting Band-Aids on a situation, it’s not going to get better,” she said.
Singh said it’s sometimes hard to understand that Canada has systems that are designed to exclude people.
“We look at the way the criminal justice system works, we look at the way policing works, and realize that there are systems in place that have to be changed because, right now, they’re designed to discriminate,” he said.
Some of these systems have to be changed and some have to be dismantled, he said. But he said he believes there’s enough appetite in Canada for a person of colour to be elected prime minister.
———
This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
Maan Alhmidi, The Canadian Press
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Politics
Florida's Bob Graham dead at 87: A leader who looked beyond politics, served ordinary folks – Toronto Star
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A leader like Bob Graham would be a unicorn in the hyper-partisan politics of today.
The former Florida governor and U.S. senator wasn’t a slick, slogan-spouting politician. He didn’t have an us-against-them mentality. Sometimes, he even came across as more of a kind-hearted professor just trying to make the world a better place.
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Politics
The Earthquake Shaking BC Politics
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Six months from now Kevin Falcon is going to be staggering toward a catastrophic defeat for the remnants of the BC Liberals.
But what that will mean for the province’s political future is still up in the air, with the uncertainty increased by two shocking polls that show the Conservatives far ahead of BC United and only a few percentage points behind the NDP.
BC United is already toast, done in by self-inflicted wounds and the arrival of John Rustad and the Conservative Party of BC.
Falcon’s party has stumbled since the decision to abandon the BC Liberal brand in favour of BC United. The change, promoted by Falcon and approved by party members, took place a year ago this week. It was an immediate disaster.
That was made much worse when Rustad relaunched the B.C. Conservatives after Falcon kicked him out of caucus for doubting the basic science of climate change.
Falcon’s party had fallen from 33 per cent support to 19 per cent, trailing the Conservatives at 25 per cent. (The NDP has 42 per cent support.) That’s despite his repeated assurances that voters would quickly become familiar with the BC United brand.
BC United is left with almost no safe seats in this election based on the current polling.
Take Abbotsford West, where Mike de Jong is quitting after 30 years in the legislature to seek a federal Conservative nomination. It’s been a BC Liberal/United stronghold. In 2020 de Jong captured 46 per cent of the votes to the New Democrats’ 37 per cent and the Conservatives’ nine per cent.
But that was when the Conservatives were at about eight per cent in the polls, not 25 per cent.
Double their vote in this October’s election at the expense of the Liberals — a cautious estimate — and the NDP wins.
United’s prospects are even worse in ridings that were close in the 2020 election, like Skeena. Ellis Ross took it for the BC Liberals in 2020 with 52 per cent of the vote to the NDP’s 45 per cent.
But there was no Conservative candidate. Rustad has committed to running a candidate in every riding and the NDP can count on an easy win in Skeena.
It’s the same story across the province. The Conservatives and BC United will split the centre-right vote, handing the NDP easy wins and a big majority. And BC United will be fighting to avoid being beaten by the Conservatives in the ridings that are in play.
United’s situation became even more dire last week. A Liaison Strategies poll found the NDP at 38 per cent support, Conservatives at 34 per cent, United at 16 per cent and Greens at 11 per cent. That’s similar to a March poll from Mainstreet Research.
If those polls are accurate, BC United could end up with no seats. Voters who don’t want an NDP government will consider strategic voting based on which party has a chance of winning in their ridings.
Based on the Liaison poll, that would be the Conservatives. That’s especially true outside Vancouver and Vancouver Island, where the poll shows the Conservatives at 39 per cent, the NDP at 30 per cent and United lagging at 19 per cent. (The caveat about the polls’ accuracy is important. Curtis Fric and Philippe J. Fournier offer a useful analysis of possible factors affecting the results on Substack.)
And contributors will also be making some hard choices about which party gets their money. Until now BC United was far ahead of the Conservatives, thanks to its strong fundraising structure and the perception that it was the front-runner on the right. That’s under threat.
The polls also mark a big change in the NDP’s situation. This election looked like a cakewalk, with a divided centre-right splitting the vote and a big majority almost guaranteed. Most polls this year gave the New Democrats at least a 17 per cent lead over the Conservatives.
Politics
Political longevity of Sunak smoking ban likely to outlast PM – BBC.com
Unless the opinion polls shift and shift quite a bit, Rishi Sunak knows his time left as prime minister might be running out.
But he is the instigator of a smoking plan with substantial, cross-party political support, which looks set to herald a sizeable social change.
And that cross-party support suggests it’s an idea with greater political longevity than he might have, because Labour wouldn’t scrap it if they win the election.
In other words, whatever happens, it is what some in politics call a legacy.
As I wrote here when Mr Sunak first set out his plans last autumn – in what he described at the time as “the biggest public health intervention in a generation” – this is a government seeking to nudge, or elbow, a societal shift along: the near end of smoking.
On Tuesday, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said she hopes creating a smoke free generation will “spare thousands of young people from addiction and early death as well as saving billions of pounds for our NHS”.
What was once mainstream is already marginal. Now the attempt to near-eradicate it, over time.
This isn’t the end of this discussion: what we have seen so far are the early parliamentary stages. There is more to come before it becomes law.
So that is the big picture, potential social change stuff. What about the politics?
Nearly 60 Conservative MPs voted against Mr Sunak’s idea.
Yes, they had a free vote – they weren’t told how to vote – but they defied him nonetheless. The cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch among them.
Another 100-ish abstained. The cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt among them.
A source close to Ms Mordaunt told me that she abstained because “she was not a supporter of the bill. She has many objections to it. The practicality of it. The implementation and enforcement of it. But being a serving cabinet minister she thought voting against it would look more confrontational and posturing than abstaining would have been.”
Who could that possibly be a dig at? Ah, Kemi Badenoch.
And what do Ms Mordaunt and Ms Badenoch have in common? A splash of ambition.
They are both talked up by some as future Conservative leaders.
Read more about the smoking ban
When you look at the numbers, nearly half of Conservative MPs couldn’t bring themselves to endorse one of their leader’s flagship ideas of the last six months.
Which tells you something about the fractious nature of the Conservative parliamentary party, although not a lot that wasn’t pretty clear to the regular observer already.
Labour are already gleefully talking up that it is a good job they backed the idea or Mr Sunak would have lost.
And they are also publicly pondering what those opponents might do once the chance arises to change the ideas, to bolt on amendments.
But then again they would be defeated if those in favour keep backing the plan as it is.
When governments manage to latch on to a plan which goes with the grain of where a society is already heading, the might of the law can shove it along profoundly and, probably, permanently.
This idea – for now at least – looks like it might be one of those.
And, for all his political troubles, it is Mr Sunak who is its author.
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