Politics
So who’s ‘woke,’ what does it mean and how is it being used in Canadian politics?
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The word “woke” — originally used to describe awareness of discrimination — has been adopted by figures on the political right to discredit policies and politicians they consider too progressive, experts say.
The word was directed earlier this week at the Liberals and NDP by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. And some Liberals have been dancing around the term when asked about it by journalists.
“It’s a term that’s been evolving fast,” said Jennifer Saul, a professor who specializes in the philosophy of political language at the University of Waterloo.
“For a while, there were people happily identifying themselves as woke. It now has been adopted as a term of abuse.”
Some Liberals distance themselves
After Poilievre was elected to lead the Conservatives, a number of Liberal MPs told Radio-Canada that they want their party to shift to the centre to combat Poilievre’s populist brand of conservatism.
“We need a government that is down to earth and less woke,” one MP, speaking on the condition they not be identified, told Radio-Canada.
Poilievre would later call the Liberals and the NDP — who are supporting the government through a confidence-and supply-agreement — a “radical woke coalition” in his first address to caucus as Conservative leader.
Poilievre’s use of “woke” as a pejorative had a number of Liberal cabinet ministers circling the word cautiously during the party’s caucus retreat earlier this week.
“Frankly, I don’t even know what it means to be woke. I’m working to serve Canadians,” said Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault.
“I certainly don’t believe I’m woke, trust me, and no one in my family believes that either,” said Innovation and Science Minister François-Philippe Champagne.
Even NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh didn’t explicitly embrace the term when asked about it during an interview on CBC Radio’s The House — although he did say he doubts Poilievre understands what it means.
“I don’t think that Mr. Poilievre knows what he means when he says that. I don’t think he understands what he’s saying when he just throws the words around,” Singh told host Catherine Cullen in the interview airing Saturday.
“I think it’s a baseless kind of position. It doesn’t really add up to the reality,” he said, adding that his party’s focus is on getting help to Canadians.
Where does the word come from?
The use of the term “woke” in a political context originates with black activists in the United States in the early- to mid-20th century, according to McGill political science professor Terri Givens.
Givens said it was used as a term of vigilance, calling for greater public awareness of racial discrimination. As a black woman growing up in the United States, she said, she was very familiar with the term.
“I’ve heard this term throughout my life,” she said. “It’s a term that means, ‘We need to wake up to the fact that [discrimination is] happening to us.'”
Givens said that while the term has been used within black communities in North America for decades, it gained prominence in the wider public discourse during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Saul said that in the years following the rise of Black Lives Matter, people started applying the term more broadly to awareness of other social issues, such as sexism, poverty and the challenges facing LGBTQ people.
Both Saul and Givens said the term has since been seized by right-wing figures to castigate people or policies they see as too progressive.
“This has become a blunt instrument of the right,” Givens said.
Saul agrees but notes that “woke” has gained some negative meaning on the left as well. The term “woke-washing,” he said, is used to describe the actions of people or organizations that try to convince others they care about certain issues.
Woke in the current political climate
Both Saul and Givens said Poilievre’s use of the word to discredit the Liberals, and subsequent attempts by some Liberals to distance themselves from it, are not surprising. The same things are happening in the U.S. and Europe, they said.
“I think a defence of, ‘Yes I’m woke and proud of it’ is unlikely to succeed because the term ‘woke’ has become so thoroughly appropriated,” Saul said.
Givens said she doesn’t think the historical context of the term is understood by either the Liberals or the Conservatives.
“It really pains me to see politicians throwing these terms around … [as] a quick soundbite, instead of having a nuanced conversation,” she said.
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 – TheTyee.ca
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.
If the two recent polls prove accurate and that gap is much smaller, the NDP faces a tougher campaign challenge than anyone expected a few weeks ago.
Next: What’s behind the B.C. Conservatives’ surge?
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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