A surprising number of Conservatives read this blog. And sometimes it upsets them. Talking to one of these upset people this morning, he admitted that he had run out of alternatives for the coming Ontario election. The recent blog on Premier Wynne’s worries had convinced him that he had nowhere to go. He could not face voting for Mother Goose—Andrea Horwath and her New Democrats.
The only advice that we could give him was to vote for the most intelligent of his local candidates and hope for the best. This might seem like a novel approach for someone who had always voted in a lazy manner for one political party but he promised to try it.
If we take our own advice, we could be in deep trouble. Either in the old electoral district or the newly gerrymandered ridings that have split Babel in two, we are likely to find ourselves in the only riding where an incumbent Conservative Member of the Legislature has actually looked good in recent months. Admittedly, this is more by accident than design but until we find out who the Liberals and New Democrat candidates will be, this guy’s got a free ride.
He was a loser municipally four years ago and decided to try for the provincial seat. He won against a weak New Democrat and a Liberal newcomer who seemed to come across to the voters as arrogant. It looked like he was going to just sit like a lump in the Legislature but he was given the upcoming Pan/Parapan-Am Games in 2015 to critique. That made his day.
His luck was the Minister responsible for the Games in the Wynne Government. Michael Chan, is a two-term MPP from Markham who does not get high marks in political communication. The Conservative found he could question the Minister in the Legislature and look good because of the inadequacy of the answers. Minister Chan did not seem to be well briefed on his ministry. The questions became more brazen and the government found that people were starting to laugh at them. The entire fiasco has tended to embolden Babel’s neophyte MPP.
The only problem for the Liberals in the new riding that encompasses the north half of Babel, where the Conservative incumbent lives, is going to be added to a rural area north of Babel where the voters have no idea of the reasons why municipal voters in Babel dropped him from municipal council.
We will just have to wait for the Liberals or New Democrats in the electoral district to come up with a better candidate. And we can only hope they also have some good candidates in your Ontario ridings.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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