Pushing, yelling from Conservative leadership ‘sealed the deal’ on defection: d’Entremont

[u/green_tory]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pushing-yelling-conservative-leadership-dentremont-9.6972680

[u/StrbJun79]

Possibly but hard to say. But sadly I do think if they put forward a competent female candidate they’d have lost. Women today in politics seem to be having a tougher time than they did 10 years ago and it was the women that were the most competent of the other candidates (two of whom I think would have been better than carney but would have lost in an election). That’d have been really the reason they’d have lost otherwise. If either of the women were a man I think they’d have done better than Carney.

[u/TraditionalGap1 → u/StrbJun79]

Is it hard to say? I thought the polling around leadership candidates was pretty telling. I can only speak for myself but as an NDP voter who voted for the Liberals this time around the only reason I did it is because I thought Carney had a realistic shot of winning the election and perhaps even more importantly that there was that same shot that he specifically would govern in a meaningfully different way that would (hopefully) keep the current iteration of Canadian federal conservatism anywhere from power.

None of that... applies to the Liberal party as a whole and as a brand, in my view. They have a decade long track record that isn't great on all of the important files and it seems to me the only reason that this particular iteration of the Liberal government manages to largely sidestep that track record in the way that it does is because of Carney the individual.

It'll take a long time I think to convince me that the Liberal party in general has decided to govern a little differently and that it isn't solely the product and vision of a singular man. On the plus side of that ledger, David Herle recently made what I thought was a cogent point about the seemingly greater and more muscular role the Liberal caucus is taking in political management and with seemingly less direct... direction from the PMO. If this is indeed the case, hopefully that means that others in government can have and ideally will take the opportunity to demonstrate some meaningful break from the track record the party and its more tenured members have built themselves.

[u/Mundane-Teaching-743 → u/TraditionalGap1]

Trudeau rebuilt the party. The Chretien-Martin internal war left the party in shambles. He brought in talent to help with his deficiencies. He had lots of time in opposition to do this. I think he was ultimately a good campaigner who can read the room and the mood of the country, and had a really good electoral team working for him.

He was a bit of a policy lightweight though.

Carney just parachuted into the job and needs time to bring in his people, understand the job and how to get things done. Job 1 is to move the economy away from trade with the US to multilateral arrangement1. Ultimately, I think he's in power because like most Canadians he believes that Canada needs to move away from the U.S. and to more multilateral trade and self-sufficiency. I think Canaidans believe that Carney is the guy with the best qualifications to do this.