We all know that liberal Justin Trudeau blew his chance at a majority in the election. Luckily some of the house cleaning he was unwilling to do was done for him. Whether the liberals are going to take this opportunity to choose a new leader was certainly not answered.
But you can say the same for conservative Erin O’Toole. He was still campaigning when given an opportunity early Tuesday morning to speak to Canadians. Somebody should have told him he had lost. O’Toole spent most of his campaign time trying to shake off conservative and reform-party history. It was likely the confusion this caused for many conservatives that added to the loss.
There was minimal time provided for this election and O’Toole spent entirely too much time on the attack. If he had used the time to give his policies the thought they needed, he would have appeared much smarter. It is too bad he did not take advantage of the opportunity to resign as conservative leader.
But what was really fun in this campaign was listening to all the pollsters telling Canadians that the NDP were going to make a breakthrough. If you think anyone, over the age of 12, can make a breakthrough on a children’s Internet program such as Tik Tok, have at it. There are still lots of votes to count but they are unlikely many for the NDP.
Babel-on-the-Bay.com might have been the only source on the Internet telling people that the NDP were unlikely to exceed 18 per cent of the vote. The polls that kept showing the NDP in the 20 per cent range were not making adjustments for the parked votes that only claimed to be NDP to get rid of the pollster.
The truth is that Jagmeet Singh is never going to take the new democratic party out of the also-ran category. The party’s hey-day was in the 1960s and 70s. Even the NDP’s wunderkind, Avi Lewis, came third behind the Liberal winner and the conservative in the West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky country riding. I did not stay up to hear Jagmeet’s speech. Did he promise to resign?
Canadians should make a pact that we will never again tolerate an election campaign wherein all the leaders devote more time to slagging their opponents than to telling us why we should vote for them. If we don’t, we will get more results like we just had.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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