Monthly Archive: September 2021

The mired and the admired

Erin O’Toole is a dead duck. Despite the fact that the Conservatives won the popular vote in this week’s election, they did not win the seat count. That’s why the Liberals will never bring in election reform as they said they would. First-past-the-post works fine for them. Just as Andrew Scheer became a former leader after the last election, so too will O’Toole. If he doesn’t resign on his own, he will be pushed by the party and it will be as messy as it will be humiliating. The party will follow Oscar Wilde’s dictum, “A good friend will always stab...

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They’ll have to go

Whatever the outcome of this election, the status of the Bloc Quebecois as a federal political party should be rescinded. The Bloc is little more than a bunch of hypocrites who take federal paycheques as well as federal funds for parliamentary staff and constituency offices all the while trying to create a sovereign Quebec. The party has had some electoral success in Quebec under a variety of leaders since its founding in 1991. Led by Lucien Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe, among others, the Bloc won fifty-four seats in 1993 and 2004 while hitting a low of two seats in 2014. At...

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Ghosts from the past

Keith Davey, Pierre Trudeau’s campaign manager, also known as “The Rainmaker,” used to say that every election required a move to the “radical middle.” By that he meant a political party shifted to the left to capture votes but then turned back to the right to govern. That radical middle was where Erin O’Toole was headed until he got rudely interrupted by reality. A week ago, according to the Nanos poll, he was a “political freight train” in the lead ahead of Justin Trudeau. Now, O’Toole is beginning to look more like a train wreck.  After all, can a Conservative...

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