There is a flow to this election. It is like the wave that starts far out to sea as a gentle roller. It grows in size and anger until it crashes on the shore.
Four years ago, I had a long talk with a Canadian who was telling me how much she admired then American president Donald Trump. I was hardly surprised when her husband echoed her stand. They have two older kids who wisely stayed away from the discussion. I mention this today as the husband is running for the conservatives in the current election. He would never get my vote. He is an anti-vaxxer and belongs with the crazies supporting Maxime Bernier’s libertarian peoples’ party.
But we have conservative leader Erin O’Toole refusing to weed out the anti-vaxxers who are running as conservatives. He needs them. That small, but growing, percentage of Canadians supporting Maxime Bernier’s peoples’ party are what O’Toole needed to follow in the path of Stephen Harper. Instead, polls show his conservatives stuck in a statistical tie with the liberals
I hated the French debate of Wednesday evening. It was a noisy, overly structured, question and answer session. It proved nothing. It was a status quo discussion between people following their individual scripts. The only time I enjoyed it was when the first question came from a New Brunswick woman. It only made a point to francophones living outside of Quebec. It was the point made by Pierre Trudeau many years ago. Canada is bilingual country and its provinces need to be bilingual. And the Bloc Québécois is an ongoing insult to our Canadian parliament.
I have been working and reworking the figures for the election odds that will be published in Saturday’s Babel-on-the-Bay. I am disappointed with the results the figures come to. Maybe, I am more disappointed with the politicians in this election. Justin Trudeau has hardly lost his arrogance. Erin O’Toole thinks he can tell voters anything just to get elected. Jagmeet Singh might come across as a nice guy who amuses children but when it comes to political success, he can forget it.
It looks like another minority government for the next couple years. That will allow the hiatus needed for the three parties to try to find better leaders. The parties need it and the voters need it.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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