[Newsbot]

Title: O’Toole faces caucus revolt as 35 MPs sign letter calling for leadership review vote
Category: Political
Posted By: Scape
Date: 2022-01-31 17:30:15
Canadian

[xerxes]

Great plan. Fight amonst each other and take the pressure off Trudeau.

Who are they going to replace him with? Pollivere? Someone even more useless?

Trudeau must be laughing at his good luck to have such an ineffective opposition.

[Thanos]

The implosion/suicide is long overdue. I'm looking forward to them choosing someone so reactionary and radical that they make themselves incapable of winning even ten seats east of the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border.

[Scape]

Let this sink in:

The next leader of the CPC will be its 5th since Justin Trudeau was elected leader of the Liberal Party in 2013.

[Scape]

Otool: There are two roads open to the Conservative Party of Canada. One is the road of Randy Hillier and Derek Sloan. It is angry, negative, and extreme. It is a dead-end; one that would see the party of Confederation become the NDP of the right.

Concur. Your base is dead set on driving into the ditch. Good luck, you'll need it.

[DrCaleb]

That this revolt is led by the people who opposed the ban against conversion 'therapy' also portents the CPC remaining opposition at best.

[xerxes]

If the hard liners get their way, the CPC will be what the NDP is now and the NDP will be the official opposition and Trudeau will PM for another twenty years.

[DrCaleb]

I think that is possible, but more likely the hard liners leave for the PPC and get wiped off the board by popular choice. Or the party fractures again, and the hard liners form yet another conservative party.

[xerxes]

It would be nice if the old Red Tories could get their party back from the western malcontents of the Reform/Canadian Alliance party. Then the idiots could merge with the PPC and slide into electoral obscurity.

[Zipperfish]

Westerners have some evidentiary basis for being malcontent, tbh. Not that I'm going to sign up for the Maverick Party any time soon. But really, the west is to Ottawa-Gatineau in modern times what Canada was to London in past times. The colonies.

[DrCaleb]

It can be truly said, the Conservative Party of Canada is revolting.

[bootlegga]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Westerners have some evidentiary basis for being malcontent, tbh. Not that I'm going to sign up for the Maverick Party any time soon. But really, the west is to Ottawa-Gatineau in modern times what Canada was to London in past times. The colonies.

You're not wrong - the National Policy created in the 19th century by MacDonald actually viewed western Canada as an area for exploitation and growth to the benefit of central Canada, not those living in western Canada.

Pierre Trudeau's NEP did much the same in the 1980s (especially in Alberta), forcing the peripheries of Canada to suffer economically to the benefit of central Canada. The big difference though was that the NEP lasted far less time than the National Policy did, which was still being promoted in the 1930s under R.B Bennett. Despite it's short life, the NEP kicked the shit out of Alberta (and other oil producing areas), and estimates are that the economic cost to Alberta was between $50 and $100 Billion. And that's in 1980s numbers, so you can double/triple it for inflation to get an idea of how much it hurt.

It's why there are a large number of Albertans who cannot stand Trudeau Jr, because the sins of the father have passed onto him. Granted, he hasn't done himself many favours with his many gaffes (forgetting to mention Alberta on a Canada Day address rankled many here), and all his spending here is ignored by those who hate him no matter what he does.

Having said all that, the CPC as it stands is unelectable because the prairie base is too far right to be palatable to central & Atlantic Canada, and the conservatives in those regions are considered 'conservatives only in name' by the prairie base.

While I haven't liked everything Trudeau has done, he's done a fairly decent job IMO and I'm thankful he was in office for the pandemic. I'm one of the fortunate ones who didn't need CERB or other benefits the federal government rolled out to support Canadians, but I have friends and family who did need it. Had Scheer or O'Toole been in charge, I believe the death toll and economic consequences would have been much higher, mostly due to their need to placate the prairie base. If you don't agree, just look at the shitshow that is Alberta.

[Zipperfish]

Also...

[JaredMilne]

The sad thing is, if you actually look deeper, Albertans aren't all that different in practice from other Canadians.

Every single Alberta conservative that I've asked about it supports public health care. Stephen Harper and Ralph Klein suffered zero political damage for refusing to try and roll back gay marriage and rights. The Wildrose Alliance lost the 2012 provincial election on the "lake of fire" comments. A lot of people despise the long gun registry, but nobody seems to care about the handgun registry that Trudeau Senior implemented about 45 years ago. Preston Manning and Peter Lougheed

A part of me wonders how federal Tory leaders like John Diefenbaker and Bob Stanfield managed to comfortably fit Alberta conservatives into their political coalitions. Brian Mulroney managed it for a time, and even Stephen Harper managed to get enough support east of Manitoba to spend nearly a decade in power. Did free-market neoliberalism take deeper root here than it did in eastern Canada, leading to so many Alberta conservatives seeing eastern conservatives as TINOs (Tories In Name Only)? Would Erin O'Toole have an easier time bridging the gap if it hadn't been for COVID, or did he screw himself from the start by campaigning on the hard right then tacking to the centre?

Does the alt-right have an easier time latching onto conservative political movements than the alt-left does progressive ones? We probably all remember how some of the Reform Party's candidates caused political fires that hindered Preston Manning's early attempts to get the Reform Party going. In his book "The New Canada", he even describes how he had to convince the grassroots in B.C. not to nominate a Vancouver-area shock jock as a candidate, because he knew how toxic the optics would be. The CPC is not simply a white person's party when you consider the number of visible minority people in Harper's caucuses, or the likes of Leslyn Lewis, who could probably be the party leader herself at some point?

I'm still trying to figure all this out, and I probably will be for a while.

[xerxes]

I think what's happened in US right-wing politics has infected Canadian conservatives. Not all of course, but judging from the amount of Trump flags at the protest in Ottawa, it's obvious that a lot of the people there have absorbed the grievance politics practices by the GOP south of the border.