Elections

The prime minister struggled to find a campaign issue that could distinguish his party and expand its power in Parliament.OTTAWA — One day after an election Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a “pivotal moment” in his country’s history, Canada seems to have pivoted right back where it started.Mr. Trudeau eked out a slim victory on Monday after voters turned out in record-low numbers, but his Liberal Party’s share of power in Parliament remains virtually the same as it was during the last session of Parliament. So does every other party’s.That helps explain why some Canadians are calling it the election to nowhere.And the winner may turn out to be the loser. Critics say the vote may have undermined Mr. Trudeau’s credibility and reinforced the notion among many Canadians that he is a political opportunist.“His job is secure, but I still think he comes out diminished in the end from this,” said Andrew McDougall, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.When Mr. Trudeau called the 36-day campaign — the shortest allowed by law — in August, he said he needed a strong mandate to bring the pandemic to heel and lead the country to economic recovery.Mr. Trudeau never explicitly acknowledged that he hoped to ride his popularity from the government’s handling of the pandemic to a majority in Parliament. But he also never denied it.Still, some questioned both the timing of the election, and the need.Prominent Liberals, among them his friend and former top political adviser Gerald Butts, argued that Mr. Trudeau never offered a compelling case that a minority Parliament had stopped him from accomplishing his legislative goals, especially its large pandemic-related spending programs. While the opposition delayed some of Mr. Trudeau’s measures, the only legislation he presented that did not pass were the bills still outstanding when Parliament was dissolved at Mr. Trudeau’s request for the vote.Anger over the prime minister’s decision to call an election followed him throughout the campaign. So did apathy.Several polls found that few voters were paying much attention, particularly before Labor Day, when it seems much of the nation’s attention was turned toward beaches, boats and barbecues.Although the election was the most costly in Canada’s history — it cost $600 million in Canadian dollars — voter turnout, which is likely to remain unchanged when final results are released, was 58.44 percent, the lowest ever.During the campaign itself, Mr. Trudeau struggled to find an issue that clearly distinguished him from his closest rival, Erin O’Toole.The first Conservative leader from Ontario, the most populous province, in more than half a century, Mr. O’Toole drafted a new platform for his party that on many key issues differed from Mr. Trudeau’s only in scope and detail. Then, when it appeared during the campaign that Mr. Trudeau was gaining traction by condemning a Conservative promise to repeal the Liberals’ ban on 1,500 models of assault-style rifles, Mr. O’Toole dropped it, if conditionally.The Conservative leader, Erin O’Toole, speaking to supporters on election night in Oshawa, Ontario.Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Trudeau was similarly unable to make headway by championing his climate change measures, including this introduction of a national carbon tax, to his advantage.Before the campaign, record-setting heat waves descended on parts of Western Canada, bringing death and out-of-control wildfires, including one that consumed a town in British Columbia. It put climate change higher on the list of concerns for Canadian voters.But in a bid to attract moderate voters to the Conservative Party, Mr. O’Toole dropped its long-held opposition to carbon taxes, which had been driven by the party’s power base in Alberta, the home of the oil sands. Mr. O’Toole released a carbon tax proposal as part of a package of climate measures.That undercut Mr. Trudeau’s efforts to argue that the Conservatives did not have a credible plan to mitigate climate change.“The Conservative Party has put forward a more ambitious platform than in 2019, in part to take that off the agenda,” said Kathryn Harrison, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia.At the end of the campaign, Mr. O’Toole did give Mr. Trudeau an opening, and Mr. Trudeau pounced on it. The Conservative leader expressed opposition to Mr. Trudeau’s mandatory vaccination and vaccine passport plans, a stance well outside what polls show to be the Canadian consensus.“Trudeau tried to use vaccine mandates as a wedge, and it worked quite efficiently,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.But perhaps not efficiently enough.Mr. Trudeau on Election Night in Montreal.Andrej Ivanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile the final results are days away, Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals stood at 158 seats, just one more than they emerged with after the 2019 vote — and well short of the 170 seats needed to control Parliament. The Conservatives had 119 votes, two fewer than before.The Conservative did score a symbolic victory: They won the greatest share of the popular vote. But the concentration of Conservative support in places like Alberta meant that it didn’t translate into the largest number of seats.The New Democrats under Jagmeet Singh, whose support Mr. Trudeau will again need to govern, gained one new seat, and now have 25. The Bloc Québécois emerged with 34 seats, a gain of two.With the distribution of power roughly the same as before, Mr. Trudeau will be forced to govern just as he did during the last session of Parliament.The left-of-center New Democrats will probably try to push Mr. Trudeau to adopt some of their proposals in exchange for their votes. But Mr. Singh’s powers are limited. His only alternative if he is rebuffed would be to force the government’s fall — and another election — or to back the Conservatives, his ideological opposites.The Bloc Québécois may also back some Liberal bills. But Mr. Trudeau will not court the support of the group, which champions Quebec independence.The New Democratic Party leader, Jagmeet Singh, in Vancouver on Monday night.Don Mackinnon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlthough Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals will return to Parliament a bit worse for wear, there is no sign that anyone within the party plans to challenge his leadership, even in the wake of what proved to be, at best, an ill-conceived election call.Mr. Trudeau is the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the famous — and famously polarizing — Liberal Prime Minister. When the younger Trudeau took over the reins, the party had governed Canada longer than any other, but it had fallen into third place. Many political commentators had it on a death watch.The came the 2015 election.The younger Mr. Trudeau, who remains Canada’s biggest political celebrity, not only revived the party but unexpectedly swept it into power by a large margin.The result, said Lori Turnbull, who teaches political science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is that in 2021, the Liberal Party is under the absolute control of Justin Trudeau. Its political brand, and his personal one, have become one and the same.“Loyalty to the party is really loyalty to him, which is going to be really difficult when people start thinking about who the successor is going to be,” Ms. Turnbull said. “But right now, if you’re part of that movement, then you are all-in with him.” More

THE CONTRARIAN Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of PowerBy Max ChafkinA few years ago, on a podcast called “This Is Actually Happening,” a penitent white supremacist recalled a formative childhood experience. One night his mother asked him: “You enjoying your burger?” She went on, “Did you know it’s made out of a cow?”“Something died?” the boy, then 5, replied.“Everything living dies,” she said. “You’re going to die.”Plagued thereafter by terror of death, the boy affected a fear-concealing swagger, which eventually became a fascist swagger.By chance, I’d just heard this episode when I opened “The Contrarian,” Max Chafkin’s sharp and disturbing biography of the Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel, another far-right figure, though unrepentant.An epiphany from Thiel’s childhood sounded familiar. When he was 3, according to Chafkin, Thiel asked his father about a rug, which his father, Klaus Thiel, explained was cowhide. “Death happens to all animals. All people,” Klaus said. “It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you.”A near identical far-right coming-of-age tale — a Rechtsextremebildungsroman? The coincidence kicked off a wave of despair that crashed over me as I read Chafkin’s book. Where did these far-right Americans, powerful and not, ashamed and proud, come from? Why does a stock lecture about mortality lead some 3-to-5-year-old boys to develop contempt for the frailties in themselves — and in everyone else? Like the anonymous white supremacist, Thiel never recovered from bummer death news, and, according to Chafkin, still returns compulsively to “the brutal finality of the thing.” Thiel also turned to swaggering and, later, an evolving, sometimes contradictory, hodgepodge of libertarian and authoritarian beliefs.Thiel stalks through Chafkin’s biography “as if braced for a collision,” spoiling for a fight with whomever he designates a “liberal” — meaning anyone he suspects of snubbing him. Unsmiling, solipsistic and at pains to conceal his forever wounded vanity, Thiel in Chafkin’s telling comes across as singularly disagreeable, which is evidently the secret to both his worldly successes and his moral failures.Young Thiel had the usual dandruff-club hobbies: He played Dungeons & Dragons, read Tolkien and aced the SATs. He was arrogant, and set his worldview against those who mocked him for it. One of Thiel’s classmates at Stanford told Chafkin, “He viewed liberals through a lens as people who were not nice to him.” Looking back on Thiel’s anti-elitist and eventually illiberal politics, Chafkin is succinct: “He’d chosen to reject those who’d rejected him.”Chafkin serves as a tour guide to the ideological roadhouses where Thiel threw back shots of ultraconservative nostrums on his way to serve Donald Trump in 2016. There was his home life, where — first in Cleveland, then in South Africa and, finally, in suburban California — he ingested his German family’s complicity in apartheid (his father helped build a uranium mine in the Namib desert) and enthusiasm for Reagan; his requisite enlightenment via the novels of Ayn Rand; his excoriations of libs at Stanford, which (Chafkin reminds readers) still shows the influence of its eugenicist founding president, David Starr Jordan; and his depressing stint at a white-shoe corporate law firm, where he was disappointed to find “no liberals to fight.”These stages of the cross led Thiel to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, hot to leave big law and gamble on young Randian Übermenschen. An early bet on a coder named Max Levchin hit it big. The two devised PayPal, the company Thiel is famous for, which supercharged his antipathies with capital. Thiel, who’d published a book called “The Diversity Myth,” “made good on his aversion to multiculturalism,” Chafkin writes. “Besides youth, PayPal’s other defining quality was its white maleness.”In 2000, PayPal got in business with Elon Musk. “Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart,” one source tells Chafkin. “Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath.” According to Chafkin, Thiel remained coldblooded during the dot-com crash that year, as PayPal loopholed its way to market dominance. The company rebounded with a growth strategy known as “blitzscaling,” as well as the use of some supremely nasty tactics. “Whereas [Steve] Jobs viewed business as a form of cultural expression, even art,” Chafkin writes, “for Thiel and his peers it was a mode of transgression, even activism.”When PayPal went public, Thiel took out tens of millions and turned to investing full time. With various funds he scouted for more entrepreneurial twerps, and in the mid-2000s he latched onto Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. He also set up a hedge fund called Clarium, where, according to Chafkin, Thiel’s staffers styled themselves as intellectuals and savored the wit of VDARE, an anti-immigration website that regularly published white nationalists. Hoping to make death less inevitable, at least for himself, Thiel also began to patronize the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which has been steadily freezing the corpses of moneyed narcissists in liquid nitrogen since 1976.Thiel passed on investing in Tesla, telling Musk (according to Musk) that he didn’t “fully buy into the climate change thing.” But he gave Zuckerberg a loan for Facebook, which intermittently let him keep a leash on the young founder. After Sept. 11, Chafkin reports, Thiel also panicked about “the threat posed by Islamic terrorism — and Islam itself.” Libertarianism deserted him; he created Palantir, a data-analytics surveillance tech company designed, in essence, to root out terrorists. The C.I.A. used it, the N.Y.P.D. used it and Thiel became a contractor with big government. By 2006 his Clarium had $2 billion under management.Around this time, the wily Nick Denton, of the gossip empire Gawker, took notice of what Chafkin calls Thiel’s “extremist politics and ethically dubious business practices.” Gawker’s Valleywag site dragged Thiel, whose homosexuality was an open secret, suggesting he was repressed. This enraged Thiel, who by 2008 seemed to have lost it, firing off a floridly religious letter to Clarium investors warning of the imminent apocalypse and urging them to save their immortal souls and “accumulate treasures in heaven, in the eternal City of God.”The planet avoided the apocalypse, as it tends to do, but that year the financial crash laid the economy to waste. Several big investors pulled out of Thiel’s fund. In Chafkin’s telling, Thiel unaccountably blamed Denton for scaring away ultraconservatives by outing him. He determined to put Denton out of business, and in 2016, by clandestinely bankrolling a nuisance lawsuit designed to bankrupt Gawker, he did.Chafkin’s chronicle of Thiel’s wild abandon during the Obama years contains some of the most suspenseful passages in the book, as the narrative hurtles toward his acquisition of actual political power. Thiel seemed intoxicated by the rise of Obama, who galvanized the liberals Thiel most loved to hate. Chafkin recounts decadent parties at Thiel’s homes with barely clad men, along with his investments in nutjob projects, like seasteading, which promised life on floating ocean platforms free from government regulation. In a widely read essay, he argued that democracy and capitalism were at odds, because social programs and women’s suffrage curbed the absolute freedom of above-the-law capitalists like himself. He was officially antidemocracy.Thiel then began to direct money to nativist political candidates and causes, and to collaborate — via Palantir — with Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the strange right-wing figure who would later become a zealous Trumpite embraced by the QAnon cult. He built an army of mini-Thiels, the Thiel fellows, teenage boys (along with a few girls) whom he paid to quit college, forfeit normal social life and try to get rich in the Valley.Thiel backed Ron Paul for president in 2012, and helped Ted Cruz win a Texas Senate seat. (Gawker noted that Thiel’s support for the anti-gay Cruz was “no crazier than paying kids to drop out of school, cure death or create a floating libertarian ocean utopia.”) He contributed to Tea Party politicians with the aim of building a bigger “neo-reactionary” political movement, and in 2015, he gave his followers their own holy book when he published “Zero to One,” a compendium of antidemocracy, pro-monopoly blitzscaling tips.Peter Thiel, speaking at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. After Donald Trump won the nomination, Thiel decided Trump was a delightful disrupter and kindred spirit and urged voters to take him “seriously, but not literally.”Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesAt the same time, by investing in Lyft, TaskRabbit and Airbnb with his Founders Fund, Thiel seemed to be on the right side of history. When he spoke before mainstream audiences, he sometimes softened his extreme views and even laughed off his more gonzo follies — seasteading, for one.Yet one friend described Thiel to Chafkin as “Nazi-curious” (though the friend later said he was just being glib), and during this period Thiel also became, Chafkin writes, closer to Curtis Yarvin, a noxious avatar of the alt-right who had ties to Steve Bannon. He turned to survivalist prepping, kitting out a giant estate in New Zealand, where he took citizenship, making it possible that at a moment’s notice he could slip the knot of what, Chafkin says, had become his ultimate nemesis: the U.S. government itself.In the mid-2010s, a Palantir rep was also meeting with Cambridge Analytica, the creepy English data-mining firm that was later recorded boasting about using twisted data shenanigans to all but give the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.Like just about every powerful figure who eventually went all in for Trump, Thiel was initially skeptical, according to Chafkin. But once Trump won the nomination Thiel decided he was a delightful disrupter and kindred spirit. High from crushing Gawker, Thiel spoke for Trump at the Republican National Convention, and poured money into Rebekah Mercer’s PAC to rescue the campaign as Trump revealed increasing madness on the stump. He also urged voters to take Trump “seriously, but not literally.” Simultaneously, at Thiel’s recommendation, Chafkin suggests, Zuckerberg continued to allow popular content, including potentially misleading far-right articles, to stay at the top of Facebook’s trending stories, where they could attract more clicks and spike more get-out-the-vote cortisol.Why did Thiel go to such lengths for Trump? Chafkin quotes an anonymous longtime investor in Thiel’s firms: “He wanted to watch Rome burn.” Trump won, which meant that Thiel’s money and his burn-it-down ideology also won.Chafkin recounts that some of Thiel’s friends found this concretizaton of his cosmology too much to bear, and turned on him. But most did what most Trump opponents did for four years: waited it out, tried to wish away the erosion of American democracy and turned to their affairs.For his part, Thiel embraced the role of kingmaker, and Palantir benefited handsomely from contracts the Trump administration sent its way. Thiel found another winning sponsee: Josh Hawley, then Missouri’s attorney general, with whom he fought Google, which threatened the stability of many Thiel-backed companies, and which Hawley saw as communist, or something.Chafkin, a writer and editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, is especially interested in the friction between Zuckerberg and Thiel, who drifted apart for a time as Thiel became more involved in conservative politics. The words spent on discord in this relationship — and on tension between Thiel and other tech titans — distract from the more urgent chronicle of Thiel’s rise as one of the pre-eminent authors of the contemporary far-right movement.“The Contrarian” is chilling — literally chilling. As I read it, I grew colder and colder, until I found myself curled up under a blanket on a sunny day, icy and anxious. Scared people are scary, and Chafkin’s masterly evocation of his subject’s galactic fear — of liberals, of the U.S. government, of death — turns Thiel himself into a threat. I tried to tell myself that Thiel is just another rapacious solipsist, in it for the money, but I used to tell myself that about another rapacious solipsist, and he became president.By way of conclusion, Chafkin reports that Thiel rode out much of the pandemic in Maui, losing faith in Trump. Evidently Thiel considers the devastating coronavirus both an economic opportunity for Palantir, which went public in 2020 and has benefited from Covid-related government contracts, and a vindication of his predictions that the world as we know it is finished. More

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s political gamble failed to pay off Monday when Canadian voters returned him to office but denied him the expanded bloc of power he had been seeking in Parliament.Unofficial election results on Monday indicated that while he would remain as prime minister, it would again be as the head of a minority government.In August, with his approval ratings high, Mr. Trudeau called a “snap election,” summoning voters to the polls two years before he had to. The goal, he said, was to obtain a strong mandate for his Liberal Party to lead the nation out of the pandemic and into recovery.But many Canadians suspected that his true ambitions were mere political opportunism, and that he was trying to regain the parliamentary majority the Liberals had until they lost seats in the 2019 election.Whatever his motive, it did not work.With some votes still being cast or uncounted, the preliminary results were a near repeat of the previous vote. The Liberal Party won 156 seats on Monday — one fewer than it acquired in 2019 — while its main rival, the Conservative Party, won 121 seats, the same as before.“If you missed the 2019 election, don’t worry, we just did a rerun for you,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.The outcome left Mr. Trudeau in a familiar situation. To pass any laws, he will once again have to win members of the opposition over to his side. And, at least in theory, his party’s shaky grip on power leaves his government vulnerable to being overturned by Parliament.In his victory speech early Tuesday, Mr. Trudeau acknowledged the unpopularity of his call for a snap election.“You don’t want us talking about politics or elections anymore; you want us to focus on the work that we have to do for you,” he told a partisan crowd in a hotel in downtown Montreal. “You just want to get back to the things you love, not worry about this pandemic, or about an election.”In calling for the early election, Mr. Trudeau had argued that, like his predecessors in the aftermath of World War II, he needed a strong mandate from voters to vanquish the coronavirus and rebuild the national economy, badly damaged by the pandemic.But the announcement was not well received by many Canadians.Alarm that the government was holding an election when it did not have to, even as the Delta variant was straining hospitals in some areas, never abated for many voters during the 36-day campaign. And Mr. Trudeau’s opponents were quick to characterize his move as a reckless power grab. Erin O’Toole, the Conservative leader, went so far as to call it “un-Canadian.”In the end, Mr. Trudeau not only failed to secure a majority in Parliament, according to unofficial results, he may have also squandered the good will he had gained as he led his nation through the coronavirus crisis.“I’m wondering if the Liberals, in their minds, are saying: ‘Dang it, why did we — why did we call it?’” Kimberly Speers, a professor of political science at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said during the final week of campaigning.Now, she said, it is unclear how long any Liberal minority government will be able to hold together and what this will all mean for the party’s leader. “How long is Trudeau going to last?” Ms. Speers wondered.The Conservative Party leader, Erin O’Toole, at a campaign rally in Toronto this month.Blair Gable/ReutersWhen Mr. Trudeau first ran for office as leader of the Liberals in 2015, few political experts thought he could pull it off. He began that campaign in third place, behind the incumbent Conservatives and the left-of-center New Democratic Party.He won by presenting himself as a new voice in politics with a different approach and different ideas to go with itBut that fresh young politician was little to be seen this time around.Mr. Trudeau, 49, offered voters less a vision for the future than a warning, sometimes explicitly. A return to the Conservative government under Mr. O’Toole, he said, would wipe away his government’s achievements in a variety of areas, among them gun control, gender equity, climate change, child care, poverty reduction and, above all, fighting the pandemic and getting Canadians vaccinated.“Mr. O’Toole won’t make sure the traveler sitting beside you and your kids on a train or a plane is vaccinated,” he said at a campaign rally in Surrey, British Columbia, last week. “This is the moment for real leadership. Mr. O’Toole doesn’t lead — he misleads.”Mr. Trudeau at a campaign stop on Sunday in Burnaby, British Columbia.Carlos Osorio/ReutersBut in Mr. O’Toole, the prime minister was running against a different opponent than the Conservative leaders he had encountered in the two previous campaigns.“I am a new leader with a new style,” Mr. O’Toole, who took over the party just over a year ago, said at the outset of the campaign. “There are five parties but two choices: Canada’s Conservatives or more of the same.”A former air force helicopter navigator and corporate lawyer from Ontario, Mr. O’Toole, seeking to broaden Conservatives’ appeal, produced a 160-page campaign platform that essentially turned the party’s back on many once-central positions, like opposition to carbon taxes.After condemning Mr. Trudeau for running up large deficits with pandemic spending, Mr. O’Toole issued a plan that forecast similar budget shortfalls.He even reversed a major campaign pledge — to repeal Mr. Trudeau’s ban on 1,500 models of assault-style rifles — when it became apparent that it alienated voters who were not core Conservative supporters.Mr. O’Toole did, however, maintain his opposition to mandatory vaccination and vaccine passports.Mr. O’Toole also repeatedly attacked Mr. Trudeau’s personal integrity. He cited, as the Conservatives have repeatedly in Parliament, several low points in the prime minister’s career.The federal ethics commissioner found that Mr. Trudeau broke ethics laws when he and his staff pressured his justice minister, an Indigenous woman, in 2018 to offer a large Canadian engineering firm a deal allowing it to avoid a criminal conviction on corruption charges. Last year a charity with close ties to the Trudeau family was awarded a no-bid contract to administer a Covid-19 financial assistance plan for students. The group withdrew, the program was canceled and Mr. Trudeau was cleared of conflict of interest allegations.And while Mr. Trudeau champions diversity and racial justice, it came out during the 2019 vote that he had worn blackface or brownface at least three times in the past.“Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives — privileged, entitled and always looking out for No. 1,” Mr. O’Toole said during the campaign. “He’ll say anything to get elected, regardless of the damage it does to our country.”During the campaign, Mr. O’Toole chipped away at Mr. Trudeau’s personal integrity, reminding voters of the prime minister’s missteps.Blair Gable/ReutersMr. Trudeau returned the criticism, saying Mr. O’Toole’s willingness to ditch Conservative policies and alter his platform mid-campaign showed it was he who would say or promise anything to voters.While many voters eagerly bumped elbows and posed for selfies with Mr. Trudeau at campaign stops, his campaign was often disturbed by unruly mobs protesting mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports. One event was canceled out of safety concerns, and Mr. Trudeau was pelted with gravel at another.Mr. Trudeau did have a strong political challenger on the left nationally with Jagmeet Singh of the New Democrats. Mr. Singh, a lawyer and former provincial lawmaker from Ontario, consistently had the highest approval ratings of all the leaders before and during the campaign.Mr. Trudeau will most likely rely on the New Democrats as his primary source of support in Parliament. But despite gaining three seats, the New Democrats’ total, 27, is a long way from holding power.In his victory speech, Mr. Trudeau evoked his “sunny ways” remarks of 2015, but in a very different context.“You are sending us back to work with a clear mandate to get Canada through this pandemic into the brighter days ahead,” he said to cheers. “My friends, that’s exactly what we are ready to do.” More

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Hotels in New York City that have been left empty by the pandemic would be converted into “supportive housing” that provides a wide range of assistance to people struggling with mental illness or substance abuse and to people leaving the prison system, under a plan proposed on Monday by Eric Adams, who is likely to be the city’s next mayor.More than 20 percent of the city’s hotels are now closed, a trade association says. At the same time, the city faces a homelessness crisis, growing sentiment against warehousing homeless people in barrackslike shelters and a lot of severely mentally ill people living in the streets.“The combination of Covid-19, the economic downturn and the problems we’re having with housing is presenting us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr. Adams, who won the Democratic primary for mayor in June, said as he stood outside a boarded-up hotel in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “Use these hotels not to be an eyesore, but a place where people can lay their eyes on good, affordable, quality housing.”Details of the plan were thin. Mr. Adams mentioned the possibility of 25,000 converted hotel rooms, but he said that he would focus on boroughs outside Manhattan, where the number of rooms in closed hotels is much smaller than that.He was not clear about whether there was any overlap between his plan and those that the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the former governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, have already launched to build 25,000 supportive housing units in the city by about 2030. A spokesman for Mr. Adams’s campaign said that Mr. Adams was also considering converting rooms in former hotels that have already become homeless shelters into permanent supportive-housing apartments, something that Mr. de Blasio has also discussed.The nexus of hotels and homelessness has been a contested one during the pandemic. Early in the lockdown imposed to stem the spread of the coronavirus, thousands of people who had been living in dorm-style shelters were moved to hotel rooms, mostly in Manhattan where their presence led to complaints from some residents about harassment and sometimes violence. The city has since moved most of those people back to group shelters.Several advocates for homeless people and for supportive housing endorsed Mr. Adams’s plan and stood with him at the news conference. “Adams can be the mayor who uses this inflection moment to change the trajectory on homelessness,” Laura Mascuch, executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, said in an interview. “We look forward to working with Adams to implement the strongest supportive housing program in the nation.” More

If President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill dies in Congress, it will be because moderate Democrats killed it.Over the past month, those moderates have put themselves at the center of negotiations over the $3.5 trillion proposal (doled out over 10 years) for new programs, investments and social spending. And they’ve made demands that threaten to derail the bill — and the rest of Biden’s agenda with it.In the House last week, a group of moderate Democrats successfully opposed a measure that would allow direct government negotiation of drug prices and help pay for the bill. One of the most popular items in the entire Democratic agenda — and a key campaign promise in the 2018 and 2020 elections — federal prescription drug negotiation was supposed to be a slam dunk. But the moderates say it would hurt innovation from drugmakers. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has likewise announced her opposition to direct government negotiation of the price of prescription drugs.Similarly, a different group of moderate Democrats hopes to break the agreement between Democratic leadership and congressional progressives to link the Senate-negotiated bipartisan infrastructure bill to Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal, which would be passed under the reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster by Senate Republicans.The point of the agreement was to win buy-in from all sides by tying the fate of one bill to the other. Either moderates and progressives get what they want or no one does. Progressive Democrats have held their end of the bargain. But moderates are threatening to derail both bills if they don’t get a vote on infrastructure before the end of the month. “If they delay the vote — or it goes down — then I think you can kiss reconciliation goodbye,” Representative Kurt Schrader of Oregon, one of the moderates, told Politico. “Reconciliation would be dead.”Of course, if the House were to vote on and pass the infrastructure bill before reconciliation was completed, there is a strong chance those moderates would leave the table altogether. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, for example, wants to table the reconciliation bill. “Instead of rushing to spend trillions on new government programs and additional stimulus funding, Congress should hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation,” Manchin wrote this month.Moderate Democrats want Biden to sign the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But it seems clear that they’ll take nothing if it means they can trim progressive sails in the process, despite the fact that many of the items in the “Build Back Better” bill are the most popular parts of the Democratic agenda.Here, it’s worth making a larger point. In the popular understanding of American politics, the term “moderate” or “centrist” usually denotes a person who supports the aims and objectives of his or her political party but prefers a less aggressive and more incremental approach. It is the difference between a progressive or liberal Democrat who wants to expand health coverage with a new, universal program (“Medicare for All”) and one who wants to do the same by building on existing policies, one step at a time.Moderates, it’s commonly believed, have a better sense of the American electorate and thus a better sense of the possible. And if they can almost always count on favorable and flattering coverage from the political press, it is because their image is that of the “grown-ups” of American politics, whose hard-nosed realism and deference to public opinion stands in contrast to the fanciful dreams of their supposedly more out-of-touch colleagues.Given this picture of the ideological divide within parties, a casual observer might assume that in the struggle to move President Biden’s agenda through Congress, the chief obstacle (beyond Republican opposition) is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its demands for bigger, more ambitious programs. Biden was, after all, not their first choice for president. Or their second. He won the Democratic presidential nomination over progressive opposition, and there was a sense on the left, throughout the campaign, that Biden was not (and would not be) ready to deal with the scale of challenges ahead of him or the country.But that casual observer would be wrong. Progressives have been critical of Biden, especially on immigration and foreign affairs. On domestic policy, however, they’ve been strong team players, partners in pushing the president’s priorities through Congress. The reconciliation bill, for instance, is as much the work of Bernie Sanders as it is of the White House. As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders guided the initial budget resolution through the chamber, compromising on his priorities in order to build consensus with other Democrats in the Senate.Progressive Democrats want the bill to pass, even if it isn’t as large as they would like. They believe, correctly, that a win for Biden is a win for them. Moderate Democrats, however, seem to think that their success depends on their distance from the president and his progressive allies. Their obstruction might hurt Biden, but, they seem to believe, it won’t hurt them.This is nonsense. Democrats will either rise together in next year’s elections or they’ll fall together. The best approach, given the strong relationship between presidential popularity and a party’s midterm performance, is to put as much of Biden’s agenda into law as possible by whatever means possible.But this would demand a more unapologetically partisan approach, and that is where the real divide between moderates and progressives emerges. Moderate and centrist Democrats seem to value a bipartisan process more than they do any particular policy outcome or ideological goal.The most charitable explanation is that they believe that their constituents value displays of bipartisanship more than any new law or benefit. A less charitable explanation is that they see bipartisanship as a way to clip the wings of Democratic Party ambition and save themselves from taking votes that might put them in conflict with either voters or donors.What is true of both explanations is that they show the extent to which moderate Democrats have made a fetish of bipartisan displays and anti-partisan feeling. And in doing so, they reveal that they are most assuredly not the adults in the room of American politics.There is nothing serious about an obsession with the most superficial aspects of process over actual policy and nothing savvy about leaving real problems unaddressed in order to score points with some imagined referee.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

A vote few Canadians wanted took the country back to 2019.Over the past few weeks, analysts and political advisers have repeatedly told me that Monday’s vote, which cost 600 million Canadian dollars to hold, would produce a Parliament that looked pretty much like the one Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dissolved in August.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, on Tuesday after his victory.Carlos Osorio/Reuters[Read: Trudeau Will Remain Prime Minister, but Falls Short of a Majority]It was an uncannily accurate forecast. As I write this, some votes were still being cast and many more were uncounted. But Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals stood at 156 seats on Monday — one fewer than it acquired in 2019 — while Conservative Party had 121 seats, the same as before.The standings may change slightly. But given that Mr. Trudeau had called the vote to regain the majority in the House of Commons he lost in 2019 — without ever explicitly putting it in those terms — it was a vote to nowhere.Here are some immediate takeaways from the result.What’s Erin O’Toole’s Political Future? Erin O’Toole, the Conservative Party leader, ran a better organized and more disciplined campaign than the one run by the party’s previous leader.Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesErin O’Toole, who became the Conservative leader just over a year ago, took the party in a new, more moderate direction to broaden its appeal. He rejected a number of once-core Conservative positions, including opposing carbon taxes. And during the campaign, he reversed, with a condition, a much-publicized promise to repeal Mr. Trudeau’s ban on 1,500 models of military-style assault rifles.His campaign was noticeably better organized and more disciplined than the one run by Andrew Scheer, the party’s previous leader, in 2019. Yet it brought no gains.On Tuesday morning Mr. O’Toole devoted much of his concession speech to outlining how he’ll take on the Liberals in the next election. But Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, told me that before that happens, Mr. O’Toole will have to sell himself to his party.“He could not penetrate the 905 in Ontario,” Professor Bratt said, referring to the area code for suburban Toronto. “As someone from a riding in that area, he said that he could win there.”Mr. O’Toole, Professor Bratt said, will most likely argue that there’s a benefit to keeping him as leader for the next vote — something the history of successful Conservatives in the past has shown. But it may be a difficult sell.“Is there a benefit to giving him a second go run?” he said. “I think voters might like that. I just don’t know about the Conservative Party; they’re a tough party.”And Justin Trudeau’s?Mr. Trudeau during a campaign stop in Maple, Ontario, this month.Cole Burston/Getty ImagesAfter Mr. Trudeau steered his party to two consecutive minority governments, will the Liberals start doubting the worth of their leader, who unexpectedly swept them to power with a strong majority in 2015? Not likely, Lori Turnbull, a political scientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, told me last night.“There is really something to the argument that Trudeau has made the Liberal Party his own,” she said. “And the loyalty to the party is really loyalty to him. When everybody’s loyalty is to the leader, then it’s almost like the leader can do no wrong and people kind of rally around him.”The Election BacklashVoters in Toronto lined up to cast their ballots in a snap election called by Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau. The government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic recovery have been top issues for many voters.Andrej Ivanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesProfessor Turnbull said that she was hard-pressed to recall another time when an early vote call by a government that sensed political game persisted throughout the campaign.It’s also difficult to recall any kind of an election that was met with general jubilation in Canada. But Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, a professor of political science at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said in an email that while Canada was not a land of election haters, there was definitely “push back” against early votes.“From a political science perspective, voters want accountability and ‘voice,’ so it seems a bit odd not to seize on those opportunities to exercise them,” she wrote. “Even if the outcome is relatively similar to the 2019 federal election, rather than ask ‘what was the election for?’ we could also choose to see it as an endorsement of the path we’re on.”Is This the Future of Canadian Votes?Supporters for Mr. O’Toole waiting for his concession speech on Monday. Future elections may see the major parties trade a small number of seats without substantially altering their positions.Ian Willms/Getty ImagesAllan Tupper of the political science department at the University of British Columbia told me this morning that’s there’s no obvious sign that broad regional voting patterns found in the past two elections will change.“The pattern of support is quite strong,” he said. “It will require a major set of changes in political problems, political issues, political values to shift Canadians out of those patterns.”Until that happens, Professor Tupper said, we’re likely to see more elections like this one, in which the major parties trade a small number of seats without substantially altering their positions relative to each other.“It just means the elections become a game of inches,” he said.A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.How are we doing?We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to [email protected] this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. More

Justin Trudeau will remain Canada’s prime minister following the vote in an early election on Monday, Canadian broadcasters projected.Because many voters were still in line casting ballots, perhaps for several more hours, it is unclear whether Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party would regain a majority in Parliament — Mr. Trudeau’s objective. Preliminary results suggested that the Liberals would probably not achieve that.The prime minister called the election last month, two years ahead of schedule, expecting that the boost in his popularity provided by his handling of the pandemic would give him the majority he was denied in 2018. But those promising numbers immediately fell as Canadians expressed dismay about the election being held while the Delta variant of the coronavirus was straining hospitals and prompting the authorities to restore restrictions in some areas.While disgruntlement about the election call dominated the five-week campaign, the pandemic intensified as a campaign issue over the final days. Mr. Trudeau has proposed mandatory vaccination for some and championed vaccine passports. Erin O’Toole, the Conservative leader, rejected both.Mr. Trudeau first came to power in 2015 by presenting himself as a new voice in politics with a fresh approach and policies.This time around, Mr. Trudeau is part of the political establishment. So he focused on telling voters, explicitly or otherwise, that a return to a Conservative government under Mr. O’Toole would wipe away his achievements in a variety of areas including gun control, gender equity, climate change, child care, poverty reduction and, above all, ending the pandemic and getting Canadians vaccinated. More