Ottawa is so bereft of excitement and speculation now that former Foreign Minister John Baird has flounced out of cabinet and gone home to Nepean. It leaves Minister of National Defence and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney as the last Bobbsey Twin standing. It leaves the obvious succession line for the Conservative Party of Canada an open door for the Conservative Cardinal of Calgary.
But wait. Did not Brother Brown from Barrie not just give away the secret of how the Minister of Multiculturalism intended to use the keys held by his department to win the party? Was it not Kenney who set up the do-nothing MP from Barrie with the key to a half million Ontario residents with roots in India? Why else would Kenney insist on keeping two time-consuming portfolios? National Defence makes serious demands on its minister in peace-time let alone when we have military deployed in harm’s way in various parts of the world.
It was Kenney who, as multicultural minister ingratiated himself with the Prime Minister by coming up with the multi-cultural people walls that the Prime Minister uses for his major announcements. God forbid that PM Harper would have to announce anything important in the sterile confines of Canada’s Parliament. Mind you some of those people on the walls are starting to make facial expressions about what the PM is saying. It is time to hire a Village People group who know to keep their emotions in check.
But how is any contender to replace Stephen Harper going to compete with Kenney’s easy ability to bring in new Conservative Party memberships in the hundreds of thousands. He could make the effort by Justin Trudeau before the last Liberal leadership contest look pitiful by comparison. What will cause him to stop will be all the $10 memberships he will have to pay for. No likely Conservative Party contender could compete with a half-million sign-ups.
Mind you there is a great deal of thinking in the political parties today about how to contend with those numbers of ethnic sign-ups. As Brother Brown is about to prove in Ontario, wholesale sign-ups are not guaranteed to be highly reliable. Nor are they particularly useful as they have been signed on a one-time basis. These are not people interested in long-term political participation. The best solution might be to cut off the memberships at the same time a leadership convention is called.
Political people just have to think more long-term in their planning. Good grief, we are becoming more like the Americans every day.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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