And who would you get to replace them.........?
In many ways, it's much more fun to serve as
Official Opposition than in cabinet. You can feign outrage over omnibus bills, since you are no longer in the position of writing them.
You can scold ministers for resorting to pre-programmed talking points in question period, having finally been freed from the obligation of reciting your own. And you can attack the government's lack of transparency, having emerged from the protective fortress that insulated you from all sorts of opposition attacks for the better part of a decade.
Sure, you might spend your evenings crying into a bottle of scotch, wondering when exactly you became everything you once despised, but when the sun comes up that shame disappears — replaced with a roughly two-year-old sense of righteousness.
It's not all fun, though. At some point, you need to move beyond being a party defined simply by being in opposition. This is particularly important when you're in that post-electoral-defeat soul-searching period, when you're trying to figure out how this "new" party distinguishes itself from the old.
The majestically dumb comments Conservative MP Peter Kent made about marijuana earlier this week, however, suggest that the Tories' re-branding efforts are not going particularly smoothly.
During debate over Bill C-45, the Liberals' pot legislation, Kent suggested that growing marijuana at a home where children could ostensibly get at it is "virtually the same as putting fentanyl on a shelf within reach of kids."
"Having plants in the home, it's just as wacky, it's just as unacceptable, it's just as dangerous for Canadian society," he added.
That is wrong, obviously: fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine, and opioid-related
deaths have exploded in Canada. Marijuana, on the other hand, makes you feel funny.
Comparing marijuana to fentanyl is social conservatism without a clue: Robyn Urback - CBC News | Opinion