The articles and commentaries of Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star are always a delight to read. In the same way it would be a shame to miss one of her At Issue dialogues on CBC television with Peter Mansbridge, Andrew Coyne and Bruce Anderson. She delivers her unique perspective on Canadian politics in a blunt and unequivocal style. In her commentaries, it is a wonderful writing trick she uses to spread bread crumbs of possibilities to see which little birds go after them.
The lady also has a whimsical sense of humour. In a recent commentary in the Toronto Star, she actually said that Liberal Party insiders believe that Justin Trudeau’s advisers are seasoned, battle-hardened political strategists. And if you believe that you also believe that former Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is doing an Eve Adams number and running for the Liberal Party in the coming election.
The problem she has probably observed is that the palace guard around the Liberal Party Dauphin are a well-meaning collection of misfits without a collective knowledge of politics in this country. The oldest of the insiders, grey-beard(!) Dan Gagnier, is national campaign co-chair and his experience is as a civil servant. These are insiders’ insiders. Justin Trudeau might find they make him feel good but that feeling will likely be all he gets from them.
Collectively, Trudeau’s insiders do not have a tenth of the experience of former Senator David Smith who was cast aside as national campaign co-chair. David was trained by the late Keith Davey and while he is not good at picking leaders, he does know Canada’s political levers.
But the main contention of the recent commentary was the question Chantal Hébert raised about Dimitri Soudas’ value in regards to Liberal concerns about Conservative attack ads. Because frankly real Liberal Party insiders have more intimate knowledge of political dirty tricks than the Conservative Party apparatchiks have ever conceived. And if you have not figured out yet how to crash the other parties’ voter databases just before election day, you are not even thinking dirty tricks.
And the only way that Soudas is going to tell all to the Liberals is if they use a CIA debriefing team that is experienced in water-boarding techniques. The problem is that he has no idea of what they do or do not know about the Conservative plans. Nor is he likely to know what they really need to know.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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