Stephen Harper's ghost still haunts the Conservative Party. In fact, Michael Harris writes, it's still driving the Tory Bus:
The CPC is supposed to be doing some soul-searching in the process of its 2020 leadership race. In 2017, the last time the party went searching for its soul, it came back with Andrew Scheer. The karaoke Stephen Harper.
Again in 2020, they have headed straight back to the vacant parking lot of Harper’s political vision — the CPC as archly socially conservative, northern Republican, anti-environment, pro-oil and meaner than ever.
The word is that, after the Conservatives' defeat in the last election, Harper moved quickly to dump Andrew Scheer:
Andrew Scheer was pushed out, thanks to the strategic leak of closely held information about the Opposition leader allegedly using party funds for his children’s private school education. When CPC executive director, Dustin van Vugt, vouched for the leader’s expenses, he was summarily fired by the board of the Conservative Fund.
A lot of Conservatives who spoke to The Tyee on background, including former national candidates, hold the opinion that Stephen Harper was the source of the leak. Here’s how one of them put it:
“Scheer knows that he got screwed over by everyone from Bernier to Harper, basically everybody. When Conservative party activists got paperwork on the private school thing, anyone who knows anything knows that stuff like that is not widely available. Somebody on the fund decided to do that.”
Next, Harper let it be known that Jean Charest would not be an acceptable leader:
Then Harper blocked former Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest, from even running for the job by withholding his endorsement. Although the former PM has not publicly endorsed any candidate, the signs are there that front-runner Peter MacKay may not be his man — co-founder of the party or not.
It's beginning to look like Erin O'Toole is Harper's man:
The first sign that there could be some truth in that assessment was Premier Jason Kenney’s endorsement of Ontario MP Erin O’Toole for leader.
Kenney didn’t just endorse O’Toole, he took Peter MacKay to the woodshed. He publicly trashed the former Harper cabinet minister for talking about the “stinking albatross” of the party’s socially conservative values during the last election.
“No one will have their deeply held beliefs dismissed as stinking albatrosses under Erin O’Toole’s leadership,” Kenney bristled. “Erin O’Toole respects the breadth of our big tent coalition.”
In assessing Kenney’s endorsement of O’Toole, it can’t be overstated that Harper and Kenney have always been a team, the two most powerful Conservatives in the country. That may have been why Opposition leader Andrew Scheer consulted Harper and Kenney before making any major decisions. He knew who the real Big Dogs were.
Harper may have moved from the front bench to the back room. But he's still king.
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8 comments:
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"In assessing Kenney’s endorsement of O’Toole, it can’t be overstated that Harper and Kenney have always been a team."
Perhaps this explains their fixation on Trudeau's hair!
They're fixated on Trudeau, !? And it's personal.
Harper and his party, just like their Big Daddy GOP, are dedicated to the idea that government should not exist and must be destroyed. Harper systematically destroyed almost every government function, even such banal functions as census taking and record keeping. Scheer would do the same, as would anyone else backed by Harper.
Normally, we call people dedicated to the destruction of our government "the enemy." I'm not sure why the Cons claim to be patriots.
Cap
It's all a little too embarrassing isn't it. The previous nine years wasted, the following four uneventful and who is to say what the next stint will bring when you think of the parade of underachievers we will be looking at. I don't know whether to cry or laugh.
In the end, Cap, two words describe them -- angry and mean. Little good can come from such people.
The truth, zoombats, is that few of us achieve greatness. Most of us are just run of the mill human beings.
I suppose this is only to be expected. An interesting article in today's Guardian explores how the world's cadre of rightwing strongmen - Trump, Bolsonaro, Assad, Xi, Putin, Orban, Modi and Netanyahu - have been exploiting the pandemic as cover for all manner of authoritarian outrages. Why would we expect anything else from Team Harper?
The article points out that while progressives fawn over a bright new post-pandemic world, the thug team are acting to ensure that won't happen.
Like true disciples of Milton Friedman, Mound, they're not going to allow this opportunity to go to waste.
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