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Originally Posted by MonctonRad
He was doing really well early on in the election period until JT pulled out all the stops with the big bad Conservative attack ads, bringing up all sorts of irrelevant almost hysterical stuff to frighten urban voters into thinking O'Toole was equivalent to the anti-Christ.
O'Toole could have done better. He could have done a better job on defining the Tory policy on assault weapons, and I think he should have just accepted JTs $10 a day daycare solution rather than coming up with a weaker plan on his own. Just those two things alone I think could have made a difference........
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JHikka
What? 
'He was doing really well until his opponent outclassed and outmanouevered him politically to ensure victory.' As someone else pointed out previously, the CPC and O'Toole couldn't do anything to prevent these sorts of narratives from sticking, and it's entirely up to them to change that narrative. They couldn't. Politics is politics, and no amount of excuses can change the results on the ground. As if the Conservatives have never run an attack ad before, as if Trudeau hasn't been the target of 'nice hair, though'. |
Agree with you both. I think the Liberal attacks were unfair and a disservice to the public: the conflation between "assault weapons" (i.e. actual full automatic weapons) and "assault-style weapons" (i.e. weapons that look "military" or are "military grade" but functionally hold the same number of bullets and shoot at the same speed as other permitted weapons), diverting $ to a buyback rather than spending on root causes, etc. But that's politics, and O'Toole should have had a better response, e.g. funding diversion programmes to stop gang violence, targeting illegal imports, doing an actual expert review of gun policy, while in the meantime keeping the restrictions should have been a reasonable sell.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
No, definitely not her. Much too socially conservative. They do not need to pander to their base. They need to recruit from the political centre.
Chong maybe, but I think they need to give O'Toole one more chance.
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I think it is good Lewis won her seat, which may help keep the message that the Conservative Party remains a "big tent" and prevent further vote splitting. (Her own social conservative tack seemed a reasonable approach from that perspective during the leadership race - e.g., removing public funding for sex-selective abortion while guaranteeing actual medically-necessary care. [How this would work is another issue - presumably deferred to the providing physician, in the same way that plastic surgeons are trusted to submit only for services that were actually medically necessary.])
Chong ran for the leadership a few years ago, and would have been my choice, but at the time things were still very much in the post-Harper social conservative mindset, he didn't get very far. The shifts O'Toole led this election, if sustained, would set up very well for Chong to make another leadership run. I think he would make a more genuine offer for the centrist core: one of the Conservative MPs to have supported a carbon tax all along, for example.
Again I hope that this result does not undo the shift O'Toole started towards offering a reliable centrist alternative for the broader moderate middle come election time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JHikka
The CPC can come back with O'Toole if he manages to survive, but he's going to be countered by a pretty strong woman in Freeland (presumably), and I don't think he'll match up all that well. If O'Toole doesn't survive then I don't think any of their suitors are really much better. It would be peak CPC for them to slide in Lewis to go up against Freeland only for Lewis to pull them harder right than they've been in a loooong time. I think we all know how the Poilievre-led CPC fares.
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It would be a shame if Freeland did follow Trudeau as leader, but then lose simply because it will have been so long under the Liberals at that point and people naturally vote elsewhere (e.g. Chretien handover to Martin, who would have been fine in his own right as PM). Opening the door to Lewis as leader, if that happens, would be part of the consequence of O'Toole's centrist shift still not being enough to win over the middle last night: the message to the party that moving to the centre wasn't the way forward.
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