Canada: God The Conservatives Suck

The World's Most Useless Opposition

So, there are a bunch of caveats to what I'm about to write - it's one poll, I haven't been strenuously following the data, it's possible this is extremely aberrant to the fuller scale of the problem, all that's true, I don't care.

The Canadian Tories are at 25% in Abacus this morning, and my response is very simple; sucks to suck.

…

The Canadian Conservatives are in third place in BC in this poll, down 14% in Ontario, they're tied with the NDP in Atlantic Canada, and the Liberals would romp home to majority government because they're more useless than tits on a bull. There is no political party whose pain I take more pleasure in than the Canadian Conservatives, because I wrote for my last site that the Tories had no chance in the next election on January 2nd, 2020, and every day of every week since they have validated that opinion. They are the most incompetent political party in the western world, and they are going to pay the price for it.

Now while Abacus is definitely an outlier to have them down as low as they are, no poll from anything resembling a good pollster has had them making anything resembling seat gains since the 2019 election, and basically consistently since the 2019 election every seat projection worth anything has had them losing seats to the Liberals. This poll may be at the higher end of their troubles, but the Tories are fucked, and we all know it, and we all know why.

Erin O'Toole was elected by a party membership who are, plainly, batshit crazy, and he doesn't realize that fact. He has tacked right at almost every opportunity, and in doing so he now faces wipeout in the suburbs. 26% in Ontario, 21% in BC, that's annihilation in the areas in the Greater bits of Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver. Genuinely, I'm not sure they'd get 80 seats if this poll were to be true, especially because of the risk they could bleed seats in Calgary and Edmonton as the swing is huge in Alberta in this poll. It's pathetic, and it's all because O'Toole doesn't know what he's doing.

Justin Trudeau is not a great Prime Minister - I won't vote for him next time, hell, I think he should resign as PM for his ethics malpractice on SNC and WE - but he has done a good job with the pandemic. It is unreasonable to act like any leader can handle a once in a century pandemic well, and he's done as well as could be reasonably expected. The Tories have spent 15 months acting like he's both an incompetent buffoon and a malicious mastermind, without realizing either the contradiction or that it's not working. O'Toole likes to criticize, but he has no answers on what he would have done differently on any important question, from COVID restrictions to government spending to how to handle China. He says the Liberals fucked up, but he can't say what he would have done differently.

This is a man who won the leadership of his party on second preferences from anti-abortion candidates, and who has greenlit a safe Tory seat for his no-abortion-in-any-case former leadership opponent Leslyn Lewis, because that's how you win back socially liberal Milton, apparently. He has no answer on whether a women's right to choose would be protected, O'Toole refuses to march in Pride, and while many call O'Toole a social moderate himself, he is certainly enabling the dumbest and worst members of his party to take centre stage. A majority of his caucus just voted against a bill designed to ban conversion therapy, and one of his caucus members actively defended conversion therapy because of an alleged constituent who told the member that conversion therapy stopped the constituent's desire to engage in, and this is a direct quote, "lesbian activities." No, I'm not joking - I'm not funny enough to make that up.

O'Toole is trying to do a working class revival thing, kind of, I think, with attempts to pitch himself on the basis of his family's history working for GM in Oshawa, but he is trying to do so in a country where there are way more seats in the suburbs you're going to lose than exurban and regional seats you'll win with that message, especially if you're tanking in BC, the one bright spot of the 2019 campaign for the Tories. O'Toole will not win the next election, he will not hold the 121 members that the Tories won at the 2019 election, and he will be lucky to match the 99 Stephen Harper won in 2015. The Canadian Tories are a disgrace, an opposition that will allow the government to waltz back into government with no resistance whatsoever. I'm just glad everyone else sees how terrible they are at this point.