There is a repertory theatre here in Ottawa that has been showing old classics in order to stay afloat during the pandemic. Beginning last week and continuing until mid-September they are having a Bruce Lee festival. They are showing each of his movies, in order, one week at a time during the festival. I am a Bruce Lee fan and I have seen all of his movies but not on the big screen. I was still in elementary school when he died so I could not see them when they were first released. So, I have been taking advantage of the festival to finally see them on the big screen and the second movie of the festival was shown last night. As a result I did not get home until around 11:30 last night.
I mention all of this to indicate that I was not home to monitor the Conservative Leadership convention. When I got home I figured I would take a quick look on-line, see who won and then go to bed. I was wrong. By the time I climbed into bed, just after midnight, the first ballot had not even been counted, a machine designed to open the envelopes was revealed to have torn up hundreds, maybe thousands of the ballot and there was no indication from the party of when the results would be announced.
I am not going to pass judgement on what all this means. However, I would point out that in 2007, after Stephen Harper gave a national televised address, Stephane Dion gave a rebuttal address that was filmed using a mobile phone instead of an actual camera, leading to less than good picture and sound quality. (This was before selfies became a thing). The result of that is he was raked over the coals with people saying if the Liberals could not pull themselves together to produce a good quality video how can they be expected to run the country? In his defence, the Liberals did not have alot of time to prepare. Contrast that to the CPC that have had August 23 circled their calendars for months and their vote counting is still a debacle. I will leave it up to everybody else to decide if there is any broader implications to that and what are those implications.
I then checked again this morning to discover that they had finally sorted themselves out and that they announced the results at around 0130 but that there were some 3000 ballots missed for reasons that are not yet clear. I doubt that those votes would have changed the outcome but still the CPC has a bit of a reputation for questionable tactics during elections and those ballots being eliminated without a reasonable explanation can only feed into the reputation.
So after all of that Erin O'Toole was announced as the winner of the election. I have read all sorts of hot takes on it so I will not add to it except to say that the Liberals are the favorite to win the next election, as I indicated in a previous post from this month, and nothing that has happened in the last 24 hours had changed that.
I would also say that my assertion that an election this fall is very unlikely stands. Mr. O'Toole will have barely enough time to find all of the bathrooms in Stornaway before the House comes back. As well, if he loses to Justin Trudeau his chances of staying on as leader of the CPC drop precipitously. The Conservatives do not take well to leaders who lose elections, even ones that only won the leadership weeks or months in the past. So he will want to maximise his time as leader and forcing an election that he is more likely to lose than win, and maybe allow Justin Trudeau to win a majority government, is not the way to accomplish that.
All in all, last night was an inauspicious start to the Erin O'Toole era of the Conservative Party of Canada.
No comments:
Post a Comment