On a third ballot result, Erin O’Toole won the Conservative leadership race. The big event turned into a very big disaster. It was delayed by over six hours because the machine they were using to open the envelopes with ballots started destroying thousands of ballots, and it was well past midnight by the time the first ballot was even announced – far beyond the day’s news cycle and past the deadlines for newspapers’ first editions, which had long since gone to print. While we were waiting, Andrew Scheer gave his farewell speech, which was bitter, and full of jejune understandings of conservatism or the political landscape – he railed against imaginary left-wing straw men, scared up a Bolshevik threat, lied about the media – to the point where he called The Post Millennial and True North (aka Rebel Lite™) as “objective” that more people should pay attention to, which is incredible.
Scheer says that people many people don’t understand the free market economy.
I’m sorry – the man who derided carbon pricing which is the EPITOME of free market economics, says that no one else understands it.
IRONY DIED. #cdnpoli— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) August 24, 2020
https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1297768475939819521
As for the result, this was very much about the social conservatives flexing their muscles within the party. Both Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan got over 35% of the votes combined on the first ballot, and there were places where either of the front-runners came in third to Lewis, and she swept Saskatchewan, where MacKay came in last. And true to form, it was those social conservatives’ down-ballot support that played kingmaker to O’Toole over MacKay, who was inexplicably considered the “last Progressive Conservative standing” (which doesn’t make sense because he was in no way a PC MP, especially if you look at his voting record). O’Toole at least has a seat, so that means he can get to work immediately, but we’ll see how many bruised feelings are in the caucus and party ranks given how the campaign played out, especially given that O’Toole hired a professional shitposter to run his campaign.
For his victory speech, O’Toole graciously thanked his competitors, and thanked the “patriotic Canadians” who made the victory happen. He paid special mention to Quebec, where he won the most votes, and made it clear that he was going to keep Sloan in the fold, in spite of some of his odious statements. O’Toole insisted that he was going to unite the party, before he took pot shots at Trudeau. He said they would be proposing a new “positive Conservative vision,” and that they would be ready for the next election, which could be as early as this fall. And then it was onto the doomsaying about the direction of the country under the Liberals, complete with the economic illiteracy that has marked the modern Conservative party. “The world still needs more Canada – it just needs less Justin Trudeau,” O’Toole said, before insisting that everyone has a home in the Conservative party.
We’ll delve into the entrails of the regional breakdowns of the race, and the particular mechanics of it and how that affected the results, but I will tell you right now that I have little patience for these takes about how this result means that the party’s power is shifting eastward – that’s hard to believe given the concentration of their votes, even though none of the leadership candidates came from there. And frankly, the notion that the party requires someone from Alberta to helm it keeps it blinkered, and insular. That’s not how you build the kind of national party that the country needs.
Good reads:
- Carla Qualtrough says the government plans to work with the opposition on EI reform during the prorogation. The NDP has a shopping list for their support.
- François-Philippe Champagne will head to Beirut this week to tour the damage there, which will be his first overseas trip since the pandemic.
- A Canadian vaccine candidate for COVID-19 is being delayed by the need to build its own manufacturing facilities.
- Iran says that the black boxes from the downed flight PS752 show that the passengers were still alive in the 25 seconds between the first and second missiles.
- A new research paper shows that Canadian intelligence of Iraq’s capabilities before the 2003 invasion proved to be correct.
- Susan Delacourt offers a reminder as to why Justin Trudeau has told his MPs to stop tweeting about the American election.
- Chantal Hébert considers the prorogation as a gift to the incoming Conservative leader.
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Well with election of O’Toole as leader of the Conservative Party I can discern two things out of that, the hard right wingers and the social conservatives now have full control of the party and we are in for a continued smear campaign against the Liberals and especially the PM maybe even more vicious that under Scheer’s leadership.
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This is ugly AF. They’ve gone full-blown Trump, with Ballingall as the Steve Bannon of the north and Kenney as their deputy Svengali seeking the PM role by proxy. This party is irredeemable, and I hope their sharp turn downward as a real basket of deplorables turns off enough voters to give Trudeau a third-term crushing majority. For all the “controversies” or human flaws or complaints about Trudeau, at least he and the Liberals are civil and actually care about people. The CPC are unfit to govern. They’re not a valid political party. They’re a crew of frat boys and Internet trolls underwritten by petrodollars and other avenues of dark money. The Harper IDU transformation of the once respectable party of Clark and Stanfield into Canada’s GOP is complete. What bitter irony that it was Peter MacKay’s monster that ended up eating him alive.