Yes, this was the theme yesterday. More has happened. Some good.
We see that, according to the news media, Gerard Kennedy has taken the gloves off. He is going to be a peacekeeper in the war against teachers. As a former Minister of Education, he probably could bring peace to that conflict. Somebody has to. Gerard has also noted that the party is running a series of namby-pamby debates for the leadership and he thinks they are boring people. (That is the first sensible thing anybody has said about those debates.)
We got an interesting call last evening from a live volunteer from Eric Hoskins’ campaign. If this guy did not have two university degrees, he would have an assured career ahead of him in telemarketing. He was good. The only thing wrong was that he kept referring to Hoskins as “doctor.” Hoskins had better come down off his perch and talk to the people. It was a good conversation with his volunteer and the Hoskins’ campaign probably has us down as “undecided/possible/leaning.”
Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star revealed this morning that of the seven candidates for leader of the Ontario Liberals, one is a lesbian and one is gay. It does seem to be a higher ratio than the average population. Since we have known about this sexual orientation since these people announced their candidacies, what is the big deal? Do we know how it is going to fly in Barry’s Bay? No, we do not.
Asking former MPP George Smitherman’s opinion on this was really quite amusing. George was the openly gay former MPP running for mayor of Toronto who got trapped between his strong showing in downtown Toronto and Rob Ford’s solid support in the suburbs. There will be a lot of small “l” liberals among the Liberal Party delegates in January and they could probably care less about a person’s sexual orientation. We need to choose the best candidate and worry about their sexual orientation later.
In the meantime, Kathleen Wynne’s team is aggressively selling her as a tough kind of grandmother. She seems to have some support up here among Babel’s Whigs. We have seen little of Glen Murray’s campaign to date but he does seem more intelligent than some of his opponents. It will be interesting to see his campaign, if he ever launches it.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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