It might seem disorganized to some politicos but the meanness of MP Pierre Poilievre’s campaign for the conservative leadership is coming into focus. He is befriending the conservative party’s extremists.
Poilievre is appealing to the hardened right wing of conservatism. Yet, he is not really a doctrinaire conservative. He is like a weasel appealing selectively to groups such as the Bitcoin proponents, the Freedom Convoy and the libertarians still within the conservative party, as well as the callow youth in a hurry and Canadian admirers of America’s Donald Trump.
But within this vale of lost souls, he promotes his eventual failure.
He is going against conservative tradition in attacking the Bank of Canada. For someone who can so maliciously malign the financial planning of other parties, he is promoting the fiction of cryptocurrency. Nobody wants others to control the currency—until you need someone to protect your savings.
The weasel is the pal of the people who came to party on Ottawa streets through February of this year. Maybe he would like to help pay the bill for cleaning up their mess.
But in his successes, he is building his failure. What we are seeing in this contest is three or four of the leaders in the race dividing up maybe 70 per cent of the party to their cause. You have to look at their second or third choice selection before you can figure out who can win the brass ring. This is the dangerous consequence of preferential voting. What you want to know at this stage is who would be so foolish as to make Poilievre their second, third or even fourth choice?
Not Jean Charest’s supporters. His base is Quebec. He can expect little of the west. He might honour the deal with Patrick Brown who would be strong in Ontario. My guess would be that Brown could make it to the at least the fourth count of the ballots. It makes sense that his voters in Ontario would have Charest as their second choice. If I were a betting person, I would be inclined to make a trifecta bet on Charest in first place, Poilievre in second and Brown in third.
But the way this vote is manipulated with the preferential vote and all electoral districts being treated as equal, it’s anyone’s guess.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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