Roundup: Kellie Leitch’s long farewell

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The news went around last night that former Conservative leadership candidate and now backbench denizen, Dr. Kellie Leitch, has decided that she won’t run again in 2019. She is not the first current Conservative facing a nomination challenge not to run again, and there has been a whisper campaign going around that the leader’s office is organizing this push for contested nominations, leading to at least one other MP opting not to run (and in that case, there were some fairly large questions looming around why an Ontario staffer was choosing to contest the nomination of an Alberta riding that he didn’t live in). Despite this, the writing was on the wall, and Leitch’s disastrous leadership campaign sealed her fate.

With this in mind, I have to say that I’m a little troubled by some of the characterisations in John Ivison’s piece about Letch’s decision. In particular, he describes how Leitch, a progressive Conservative (and I have heard this from a number of conservative operatives, many of whom are gay, who had nothing but high praise for the good doctor in the years before her leadership bid), had fallen “under the spell” of Nick Kouvalis, who apparently convinced her to tack alt-right if she wanted to win the leadership. Considering that Kouvalis was in and out of positions of authority in the campaign after his need to go to rehab partway through, I think this perhaps gives him a little too much credit for Leitch’s series of bad decisions. She saw something in the Trump victory and the lead up to it and thought that she would be able to tap into that, and miscalculated the differences in how it manifests between our two countries. At least she’s owning up to that and not giving more tears about how she was wrong to do it (like she did with the Barbaric Cultural Practices Tip Line). And it’s not like she didn’t have other blind spots, like the utter lack of EQ when it comes to dealing with people on a personal level (and I had one Conservative commentator refer to her on background as a “psychopath” that people would never warm up to, and lo, they did not).

The other thing that I will note that Leitch’s run did was reiterate for me just how broken our country’s leadership selection process has become. She never would have made the calculation if she didn’t think she could mobilise a voter base outside of the caucus, courting the ugly side of populism. Meanwhile, swaths of ostensible NDP and Green voters took out Conservative memberships in order to ensure that Leitch didn’t win, and while she didn’t get more than seven percent of the vote, the putative favourite of those temporary Conservatives, Michael Chong, didn’t do as well as Brad Trost (who is also facing a nomination challenge and may himself soon declare that he too won’t run again if the pattern holds). Taking out party memberships for the sole purpose of ensuring someone you don’t like doesn’t get in is nothing short of perverse in terms of the meaning of what those memberships are supposed to hold, and it demonstrates how the process is hopelessly broken. Leitch would never have become such a caricature under a proper caucus-driven leadership selection system.

Good reads:

  • At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Justin Trudeau gave a speech extolling the virtues of better including women in the economy.
  • The TPP-11 deal is reached, and Canada got our cultural exemptions and some non-tariff barrier concessions from Japan, and may have been an issue of timing.
  • While some unions were outraged by the TPP deal, saying it throws NAFTA talks “under the bus,” NAFTA negotiators say they won’t be affected.
  • Bill Morneau says that Canada will remain competitive despite US tax cuts.
  • Patty Hajdu was making the rounds of clarifications on the “core mandate” aspect of the summer jobs attestation, saying it’s about primary activities, not beliefs.
  • Jane Philpott laid out some more of her new department’s priorities, which included assuming responsibility over more First Nations water treatment facilities.
  • In case you were worried, the PBO says that the government’s fiscal plan is very sustainable over the long term, and that debt-to-GDP will continue to fall.
  • After years of assurances, the government has announced it will spend a “substantial” sum of money on a rail bypass around Lac-Mégantic.
  • The federal government’s blind hiring pilot project found that it didn’t yield more diverse hires than they had before.
  • Mike Moffatt looks at how the TPP negotiations were likely more successful, which includes Canada’s willingness to walk away rather than sign anything put before us.
  • Chantal Hébert reads the polls to see the structural faults in the Conservatives’ support, and why it will be difficult to overcome before 2019.
  • Susan Delacourt reads into Trudeau’s speech on feminist values at Davos, and what it signals for global politics.
  • My column looks into the phenomenon of increased lobbying in the Senate, and what some of the problems therein are going to be.

Odds and ends:

Here’s an explainer about how our Westminster system avoids government shutdowns, like the Americans are currently suffering.

In light of the licence plate conflagration, Tristin Hopper imagines what an actual war between Alberta and Saskatchewan would look like.