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Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole, left, and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau PHOTO BY BLAIR GABLE/REUTERS |
The Conservatives are recommending a national suicide line; if we can’t get more impressive leaders, we may need it
This promises to be the most absurd federal election since 2000, when Jean Chrétien was facing four opposition parties of somewhat equivalent strength , ensuring he could not possibly lose, in an election he called prematurely, to try to stifle the majority of his own party who were unimpressed with him. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau faces no such challenges, but rather is running against the precedent set by Lester Pearson in 1965, Bill Davis in Ontario in 1977 and David Peterson in Ontario in 1990, all of whom called elections prematurely. The apparent motive behind this election is to give the prime minister a blank cheque to impose a high tax, high spend, high deficit, green-obsessed, authoritarian left-wing course correction that flies in the face of practically all of Canadian history. He ran at the previous Conservative leadership convention in 2016 against Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier as more or less a red Tory, and ran against Peter MacKay in 2019 as a genuine conservative, but lost no time abandoning the social conservatives in his party and zigzagging back towards the left.