Back in March Babel-on-the-Bay commented on how sad it would be if Pierre-Karl Pèladeau won the Parti Quèbècois leadership in Quebec and Patrick Brown won the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership in Ontario. We need be more careful in what we do not wish for.
Both these men are giants only in their own minds. They won their respective prizes by an average of about 60 per cent of the votes. Both are in their party’s driver seat on sufferance. Neither has ever shown any skills in leadership or in political policy direction. And neither of them has ever shown any political personality. That is not charisma that they have shown Canadians.
Both are the antithesis of what their parties really need. At a time when the separatists in Quebec need a patient, methodical person who can rebuild the Parti Quèbècois in its once left-wing strength, they have a right-wing, self-important individual hell-bent to get to another referendum. In Ontario where the Conservatives needed a compromise candidate who could pull the party’s factions together, they had their membership swamped by people new to the province who had no idea who or what they were supporting. They got a right-wing, right to life candidate who has never accomplished anything.
Parti Quèbècois’ Pierre-Karl Pèladeau is also right wing politically and thinks he can pull together Quebec’s disparate separatists from the political left and the right. And besides that on Tuesday he has to face the Quebec National Assembly in Quebec City in the role of Leader of the Opposition.
Patrick Brown has time to think about that as he will also become Leader of the Opposition at Queen’s Park. All he has to do is find a Conservative member who will resign his or her seat for him to run for election. He already resigned as Member of Parliament for Barrie on Wednesday.
(That did not save Barrie residents from full page, four-colour advertisements in the two local papers wherein Brown congratulated himself for his nine years in Ottawa accomplishing nothing. Mind you, who paid for Brown’s $400,000 worth of PC Ontario memberships is still a far more important question than who paid for his self-aggrandizing advertising?)
It is a simpler question in Quebec because Pierre-Karl can pay his own bills while he still has control of the major news media in the province.
At least Pèladeau will have his “grand coalition” to create an independent Quebec to keep him busy. All the Ontario PC leader has is probably some marathons to run.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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