cracked_ribs
Well-Known Member
He's not my kind of guy but I think it's early to write him off. He was pretty well respected as the Speaker of the House.Doubt that. New Con leader doesn't seem electable to me. Unfortunately
Consider that in the last federal election, the Conservatives were really only down about 400,000 votes nationwide, despite running on their third straight election with the same, notoriously cold and unrelatable, leader. It's rare that any party wins four straight elections in this country, let alone one with a leader who is not only pretty robotic and remote, but also who's been run through the grinder of a motivated establishment media (not to mention the first ever leader to face today's social media).
Despite a pretty serious hamstringing, the CPC only lost around 10% of their voting base. The Trudeau win is, therefore, largely the result of NDP voters loaning support to a party which out-lefted the NDP in promises.
That'll be difficult to repeat, considering they've clearly abandoned their whole "we're going to do things differently" vibe, and haven't stayed true to their pseudo-NDP promises. They won't get the big surge of young voters twice, and they won't get the NDP support twice.
Scheer is not how I would have wanted the CPC to go; I'm basically a libertarian and I'm one of those "I want my married gay neighbours to be able to defend their pot plants with guns, and sell their defensive services to me tax-free so I can invest the savings in a for-profit MRI clinic" types. I don't really know how I feel about the CPC under Scheer; he's WAY more socially conservative than I can really get into. On the other hand he's supposed to be very ethical and disciplined about allowing his personal beliefs to define his actions as far as the best interests of Canada.
So we'll see. Trudeau may win 2019 and that's quite possible just based on the infrequency of one-term governments. But the wave that swept him into power was, in my opinion, a one-time event, so he's more vulnerable than I would guess a lot of people realize.