I guess it is not going to happen. My member of parliament is not the brightest bulb on the conservative party’s tree but he does not seem eager to head out into the wilderness to follow former conservative, Quebec’s Maxime Bernier. Maybe someone explained the difference between conservatism and libertarianism to him.
After all, before Bernier took him under his wing in the federal party, Alex Nuttall was an acolyte of Barrie’s pragmatic wannabe MP and MPP Patrick Brown. Nuttall seemed to take a lot of stop-gap jobs over the years waiting for Brown’s retirement.
Alex Nuttall, conservative, was elected to parliament in the electoral district of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte in October, 2015. The voting breakdown told a story. The liberal candidate won in a close fight in the Barrie portion of the electoral district. He lost to the farmers in Springwater Township. On a recount, Nuttall won because of those farmers by 86 votes. The farmers did not know him. Voters in Barrie had a chance to see him on their city council.
But the point of this is that Bernier’s boy Alex Nuttall was the only MP to support Bernier’s bid for the leadership of the federal conservatives in 2017. When ‘Chuckles’ Scheer won over Bernier by a narrow margin, you have to remember it was a preferential vote that selected the least objectionable candidate, winning over a field of also-rans.
It took more than a year for Scheer to get thoroughly tired of Bernier and Bernier to lay plans for his next party participation. Whether Bernier starts his own party or just co-opts the Libertarian Party of Canada is immaterial. He takes a stand on the far side of right from Canada’s conservatives. His best hunting grounds for support are in Alberta where his former cabinet colleague Jason Kenney has pulled every trick in the book to unite the right and be ready to take the new mongrel party into the next provincial election.
But it looks like some of those former Wildrose party people are already tired of tilling the fields for dictator Kenney and would welcome the return to a libertarian fold.
And if that prospect did not scare hell out of a babe-in-the-woods such as Alex Nuttall, then he probably still does not understand the difference between Canadian libertarians and conservatives.
-30-
Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]