Do you remember the precise moment when you finally lost interest in the Conservative leadership race? For me, it was late March, when leadership hopeful Peter MacKay posted his hot new social media meme: “Democracy is calling. Will you answer?” The Twitter version — which also featured the bonus catch phrase, “Answer the call. It’s your duty” — was illustrated with a black rotary telephone of the type that hasn’t been state-of-the-art since Jean Chrétien was the fresh young thing on the Canadian political scene. When imagining the superannuated campaign staffers who presumably came up with this masterpiece, I kept thinking back to Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character on “SCTV” lecturing the piano player: “Give me a C, a bouncy C … da-da-da-da-dee … ah, whatever the hell else you want to put in it.”
My intention here is not to beat up on MacKay, whom I’ve met a few times, and who seems like a perfectly decent fellow — even if it’s not exactly clear why he imagines his audience to be irony-deficient octogenarians feverishly pining for a Conservative leader who’ll unleash the political sex magic of Joe Clark and David Peterson. The whole race has been a shambles, as illustrated by the fact that MacKay’s telephone tweet didn’t even pretend to focus on any substantive political issue: it was actually part of a (failed) attempt to keep the race going despite the inconvenient fact that everyone in Canada was then primarily interested in not dying of acute respiratory failure.
Since that time, we’ve witnessed equally self-destructive Tory sideshows, including public bickering over which candidate should disavow which bozo eruption. It doesn’t help that the reporters who’ve bothered to cover the race have exhibited their traditional press-gallery fixation on social conservatism, which they regard as ranking somewhere between COVID-19 and Ebola on the index of human pestilence.
[Interesting Read]
Jack’s Note: The party lost me the minute they pulled that stunt on Maxime Bernier. I have had no use for them ever since because what Canada does not need is another Liberal party in drag and that’s what is on offer. Like Stephen Harper and many others who truly mattered count me out.
See Also:
(1) Feds say cost of carbon taxes a ‘secret’
(2) Long medical wait times cost patients $2 billion annually
(4) The mis-imagined rifle behind Trudeau’s misguided gun ban
(5) The Liberals are spending another $70M on a jet they don’t want to want
