Will Pierre Poilievre Quit?

No, he will have to be pushed out, in January, by gaining less than 50% of the vote at the Conservative Party leadership review. If he wins more than 50% he will claim victory and hang on.

In all of the talk about the troubles in the CPC one thing is missing. The Liberals only had a 50/50 chance of winning the last election going into it. If it were not for the actions and words of the current US president, before and during the election campaign, the Liberals could very well have lost.

They did not and Mark Carney is enjoying a rather extended honeymoon, although the Liberal Party is not. That honeymoon will end. It is as inevitable as the sun setting tonight and when it does the Liberals will likely lose any subsequent election to the CPC. You see, the Liberals have been governing on borrowed time for a couple of years and historical voting patterns will make their loss virtually inevitable next time.

Pierre Poilievre knows this. I have questioned his political acumen and instincts in the past but even he has to see that the leader of the CPC will likely be PM after the next election. So if he is that leader he will be that PM. So he is going to hang on as hard as he can, despite the short term negative impacts that will have on the CPC. As an aside, others in the CPC, who have Prime Ministerial ambitions should know the same thing which is why I am surprised that campaigns to oust him have not been more prevalent.

Of course, his hanging on could shake loose more CPC MPs who decide to cross to the Liberals, giving them a majority government. While this would hurt Mr. Poilievre in the short term it would actually allow for more time for the positive aura around PM Carney to become tarnished. Or to put it another way, if we have an election within the next 12 to 18 months the Liberals still have a 50/50 chance of winning it. If the election takes place 4 years from now they have virtually no chance. So the short-term pain would actually be to his advantage in the long run.

I am not saying that Mr. Poilievre is play 4D chess and letting all of this happen as part of some master plan. He just wants to hang on because he likes the perks and he believes, rightly, that if he does he has a very good chance of becoming PM someday. 

There is the wildcard of CPC members not deserting to the Liberals but quitting the caucus and attempting to form a conservative alternative to the CPC. Perhaps an attempt to resurrect a progressive conservative party within Canada. I do not believe this is likely to happen or whether they would be successful if they attempted it but it cannot be discounted and if they do succeed then the next election could be very interesting.

So if he receives even a small majority of the vote in January he will claim victory and stay on as leader of the CPC. He will then try to rehabilitate his image. Incidentally, assuming he is able to do so or he just decides to wait until PM Carney's popularity starts to slide it will take time so I would not expect the CPC to bring down the government anytime soon. He will find a way to allow this government to continue until he believes he can win.

The Federal and Alberta Governments Make a Deal

Or more accurately the two governments have settled on a framework that could potentially lead to a new pipeline being built to the BC coast.

When I first read about it I asked the question: WTF is Mark Carney doing? 

Then I read the agreement, or Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and I have concluded that no pipeline will ever be built. The reason for that conclusion is the MOU specifically states that the funding for such a pipeline has to come from the private sector and that those very same companies will have to come to an agreement with all of the potentially impacted indigenous peoples to build it.

At this time I can confidently state that this is not going to happen. The biggest reason is there is no business case for a new pipeline. There has not been one for over a decade, whether you are talking about one to the Pacific, Churchill or points east. Most oil and gas industry analysts, who do not work for the industry, are indicating that oil and gas demand, and therefore prices, will permanently decrease by the end of this decade. So considering it will take at least that long to have a pipeline approved, even with the new approval process in the Build Canada Act, and built, that the pipeline will never show a profit. No profit, no business case, no pipeline.

The MOU also holds out the possibility of revoking the tanker ban, although the language around the conditions to do so is quite convoluted, but again private interests will make that meaningless. The waters that the tankers would have to go through to pick up the oil are very treacherous and no insurance company would insure a tanker going through them. Without insurance the tanker company would be on the hook for the entirety of the liability for any accident and they will not accept that risk.

So in the end the MOU is virtually meaningless.

Of course, there has been alot of talk about how the MOU has put the ball into Danielle Smith's court, taking away a bone of contention that she could use to fire up her base and hang on to power. I am not going to repeat all of that here, although I will disagree on two points.

The first point is the peace between Ottawa and Alberta will be short lived. The next battle will be Alberta demanding that Ottawa put up a substantial amount of money to build the pipeline. Danielle Smith promised her voters a pipeline, the private sector is not going to step up to build it, which will leave governments to foot the bill. Alberta does not have the financial wherewithal to do it alone so they will eventually get around to demanding Ottawa to kick in, which means most of the cost. 

The second point is this MOU will not help the Liberals in any way with Alberta voters during an election. During the next election the Liberals will most likely lose seats in Alberta instead of gain any. That was true before the MOU was signed and it is still true.

So in the end it is status quo. There will be relative peace between the two governments for a short period but the Alberta government will go back to blaming Ottawa for all of the ills in the province because that is what provincial governments do when they shit the bed. No pipeline will be built, without governments paying for it. The Liberals will lose seats in the next federal election.