What exactly is the look you want, Mr. O’Toole?
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole was wise to declare that he has a moral limit and MP Derek Sloan accepting a donation from a white supremacist was it. It’s healthy to have a functioning Opposition in a democracy, and after the feeble leadership of what’s-his-name Andrew Scheer, O’Toole is trying to present a fresh face.
Trump Lite is not a good look in Canada.
The problem for conservatives everywhere is the four-year Trump debacle that formally, at least, ends on Wednesday; one hopes without violence. All nations have a limit and for most, it’s a man wearing animal pelts and horns resting his hooves on a desk in Parliament. I look back to American comic John Mulaney’s bit about Trump being “a horse loose in a hospital” with a shudder.
Trump took Republicans into the realm of violent idiocy, irrationality, contempt for education and science, open and violent racism, the orphaning of refugee children at the border, and of course, armed insurrection.
I could go on and I won’t because you know all that. Trump was a Republican without limits, and the Republican Party has to extricate itself from this anarchy. It will be like removing millipedes from a honey pot without leaving all the legs behind. I doubt it can be done.
“The Conservatives are a moderate, pragmatic, mainstream party,” O’Toole said. He was right to say this; it’s the only path to victory. Conservatives should remove borderline MPs and this is the time. Do it later and they may try to sneak back into respectability.
O’Toole was sending out extremeright signals and one of them was having MPs like Sloan, Pierre Poilievre and Michael Cooper. If O’Toole succeeds in ejecting Sloan from caucus, that’s one down and two to go.
I do understand that every party and every workplace contains a scattering of dreadfuls, but Poilievre and Cooper are Trumpish norm-violators, if you accept civility as a Canadian norm, and I do.
O’Toole is fortunate to already have a magnet for extremists, and it is the Alberta UCP and its travelling cabinet. Premier Jason Kenney is doing a fine job of mismanaging the pandemic and blowing $1.5 billion on a pipeline he knew U.S. president-elect Joe Biden would block.
Kenney bet Trump would win. What a foolish man. I am in awe of the damage he has done to beautiful Alberta. Again, I wonder why the most gorgeous landscapes seem to attract the worst leaders. Is it something in mountain air? Tarsands particulate matter, I assume.
Let Kenney take the blame. He’ll get all petulant, he always does. In 2012, when Kenney was Canada’s immigration minister in the Harper government, he felt unappreciated. So he added a petition on his website in which voters “we the undersigned” were asked to thank him for his “efforts to streamline benefits afforded to refugees (sic) claimants” and other triumphs.
Imagine a politician so under-thanked that he had to remind voters to pay him homage. The ingratitude. Kenney must be feeling particularly bereft at this time as he sells off used cranes and tanks to pay off debt on a pipeline to Nowhere, U.S.A.
Any hostility O’Toole might face in his party from Sloan’s friends should be transmuted into Kenney love for a man who was only doing his best, which was shooting Albertans’ money into a large tube that turned out to be extremely short.
As I wrote then, “Thank you, Jason! Jason, thank you! That sentence works both ways, like a reversible raincoat. It’s twice the coat and twice the thanking.” This time it’s retro-double-thanking.
Now that O’Toole has our attention, we are asking for a traditional Opposition complaining about all that CERB money going to people who, let’s face it, never made that much money in their lives. I don’t mind. Unlike money given to foreign airlines and long-term-care corporations, CERB money is actually spent, greasing the wheel of the grinding Canadian economy. And it will be paid back.
But go ahead and goad people into vaguely spiteful feelings. It passes the time and it reminds me of Harper Conservatives. Is this the look you want, Mr. O’Toole?