What could possibly go wrong?
At the time of Mr. Harper’s visit to Rideau Hall, he was thought by the entire political commentariat to be the Smartest Man in Canada, and his idea of an 11-week election campaign was seen as a stroke of pure political genius.
It was the longest campaign in modern Canadian history, the media kept telling us – which is the kind of thing superlative-loving journalists come up with when the thing in question isn’t actually quite the longest.
With the deepest pockets and what we’d all been advised repeatedly to think of as the most brilliant political team, enhanced by election rules freshly rewritten to benefit the PM’s Conservative Party, Mr. Harper and his political brain trust called the election earlier than necessary or traditional so they could double the cash limits that would have applied during a traditional campaign and spend those other parties into oblivion.
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, then the leader of the Opposition, had been described for months as an angry old man. Youthful Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, we were told, just wasn’t ready, and neither was the Parliamentary third party he led. What a loser, we’d been instructed, over and over.
Mainstream media commentators enthused about how the vast Tory war chest and the new rules designed to tilt the playing field in their favour would ensure the continuation of Mr. Harper’s rule. “Harper stands to become the first prime minister since Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1908 to win four consecutive elections,” the National Post panted with enthusiasm.
Mr. Harper himself, smarmily and smugly told the media that it didn’t really matter when he called the election. “In terms of the advantages this party has, in terms of the fact that we are a better financed political party, a better organized political party and better supported by Canadians, those advantages exist whether we call this campaign or not.”
The Canadian right has been having a protracted tantrum ever since. Never mind interim Opposition Leader Rona Ambrose’s weak, if reasonably civilized, performance. Read the rantings of their Outrage Machine on social media for a glimpse of the state of fury that has engulfed the Canadian conservative movement.
Canadian Conservatives seem to be waiting, teeth grinding and prayers wending upward to the Almighty, for Donald Trump to be elected south of the Medicine Line show that Trudeau punk a thing or two.
But for the rest of us – and that is a pretty comfortable majority across Canada – no one can deny this has been a far happier country since Mr. Harper slipped out the back door of Parliament and schlumped off into the sunset, which is thought in Alberta Conservative circles to take place every night somewhere just west of Bragg Creek where the edge of the world is located.
Of course, there is plenty of fault to find in the way Mr. Trudeau is running the country, but it’s a sign of how happy Canadians are with the new state of affairs that the old Harper brain trust seems to have given up on federal politics entirely and migrated en masse to Alberta in hopes of re-establishing a Tory redoubt here in oil country.
They reason, I suppose, that if they can only re-unite the Alberta right under the unlikely and uncharismatic Jason Kenney, push Premier Rachel Notley’s New Democrats out of power and get their prayers for higher oil prices answered in a timely enough fashion, they can try to stoke the fires regionalism and erect the firewalls of alienation to undermine the federal government.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Trudeau was in Vancouver again yesterday, welcomed back to the Pride Parade with his wife and kids, where they were generally acknowledged to be the stars of a show attended by half a million people, most of them smiling.
Eventually, as always happens, Canadians will tire of Mr. Trudeau and his government, even if the Liberals never really stopped being Canada’s Natural Governing Party.
But the honeymoon will probably take longer than the pundits predict and the Tories pray because we Canadians still have the image of what a decade of Conservative Party government looks like, looming large in our collective rearview mirror.
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http://forums.canadiancontent.net/c...post-conservatives-salty.html?highlight=salty
At the time of Mr. Harper’s visit to Rideau Hall, he was thought by the entire political commentariat to be the Smartest Man in Canada, and his idea of an 11-week election campaign was seen as a stroke of pure political genius.
It was the longest campaign in modern Canadian history, the media kept telling us – which is the kind of thing superlative-loving journalists come up with when the thing in question isn’t actually quite the longest.
With the deepest pockets and what we’d all been advised repeatedly to think of as the most brilliant political team, enhanced by election rules freshly rewritten to benefit the PM’s Conservative Party, Mr. Harper and his political brain trust called the election earlier than necessary or traditional so they could double the cash limits that would have applied during a traditional campaign and spend those other parties into oblivion.
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, then the leader of the Opposition, had been described for months as an angry old man. Youthful Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, we were told, just wasn’t ready, and neither was the Parliamentary third party he led. What a loser, we’d been instructed, over and over.
Mainstream media commentators enthused about how the vast Tory war chest and the new rules designed to tilt the playing field in their favour would ensure the continuation of Mr. Harper’s rule. “Harper stands to become the first prime minister since Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1908 to win four consecutive elections,” the National Post panted with enthusiasm.
Mr. Harper himself, smarmily and smugly told the media that it didn’t really matter when he called the election. “In terms of the advantages this party has, in terms of the fact that we are a better financed political party, a better organized political party and better supported by Canadians, those advantages exist whether we call this campaign or not.”
The Canadian right has been having a protracted tantrum ever since. Never mind interim Opposition Leader Rona Ambrose’s weak, if reasonably civilized, performance. Read the rantings of their Outrage Machine on social media for a glimpse of the state of fury that has engulfed the Canadian conservative movement.
Canadian Conservatives seem to be waiting, teeth grinding and prayers wending upward to the Almighty, for Donald Trump to be elected south of the Medicine Line show that Trudeau punk a thing or two.
But for the rest of us – and that is a pretty comfortable majority across Canada – no one can deny this has been a far happier country since Mr. Harper slipped out the back door of Parliament and schlumped off into the sunset, which is thought in Alberta Conservative circles to take place every night somewhere just west of Bragg Creek where the edge of the world is located.
Of course, there is plenty of fault to find in the way Mr. Trudeau is running the country, but it’s a sign of how happy Canadians are with the new state of affairs that the old Harper brain trust seems to have given up on federal politics entirely and migrated en masse to Alberta in hopes of re-establishing a Tory redoubt here in oil country.
They reason, I suppose, that if they can only re-unite the Alberta right under the unlikely and uncharismatic Jason Kenney, push Premier Rachel Notley’s New Democrats out of power and get their prayers for higher oil prices answered in a timely enough fashion, they can try to stoke the fires regionalism and erect the firewalls of alienation to undermine the federal government.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Trudeau was in Vancouver again yesterday, welcomed back to the Pride Parade with his wife and kids, where they were generally acknowledged to be the stars of a show attended by half a million people, most of them smiling.
Eventually, as always happens, Canadians will tire of Mr. Trudeau and his government, even if the Liberals never really stopped being Canada’s Natural Governing Party.
But the honeymoon will probably take longer than the pundits predict and the Tories pray because we Canadians still have the image of what a decade of Conservative Party government looks like, looming large in our collective rearview mirror.
rabble.ca | News for the rest of us
http://forums.canadiancontent.net/c...post-conservatives-salty.html?highlight=salty
