Erin O'Toole's impossible mission
In retrospect, the fact that I was an enthusiastic supporter of Erin O’Toole shows why his Conservative Party of Canada leadership was doomed from the start.
The CPC was founded by a merger of the Western-based, right-wing Canadian Alliance, and the once-mighty center-right Progressive Conservative1 Party, reduced to a mostly Atlantic Canadian rump by the early 2000s. I grew up in the PC Party (please don’t talk to me about 1993) and even in the post-9/11 blogging era, when I was much more right-wing than I am today, I was in the “moderate” wing of the CPC from the start.
Now, I have to wonder if there’s even much of a moderate faction left. O’Toole tried to have it both ways by appealing to social conservatives during the leadership campaign, while trying to assure swing voters that he’s not one of those wackos.
It didn’t work. (To be fair, Trudeau’s cynical, unnecessary election call didn’t work out as he’d planned, either.) In contrast to Andrew Lawton, who thinks the Tories lost in 2021 because O’Toole was too squishy and moderate, I think the opposite is true: voters didn’t believe he was truly moderate because of what his MPs and supporters were saying.
The “Freedom Convoy” fiasco is a perfect illustration of what went wrong. O’Toole initially stopped just short of fully endorsing the protest, and then had to backtrack furiously when some of the demonstrators showed up with confederate flags and worse.2 He walked right into another trap, and Justin Trudeau took full advantage of it. At the same time, many members of his caucus and the party base thought he looked wishy-washy and unprincipled, not someone who can be counted on to own teh libs at every opportunity.
Now he’s out as leader. The caucus vote wasn’t even close. And I strongly doubt anyone who voted to remove him did so because they thought he’d swung too far to the right.
Manitoba MP Candice Bergen (yeah, I know) is the interim party leader for now, and check out what photo is making the social media rounds today:
Contrary to the very downtown-Toronto belief that this country is somehow immune to right-wing populism and that any sign of it on this side of the border must be American-backed astroturfing, there is a real market for a small-C conservative party in Canada, and not just in the West. Compared to every other major party in Canada, the Tories might have the strongest base of support.
The problem is, compared to the all-things-to-all-people Liberals, the Tories also have a low ceiling which will get even lower if brands itself the MCGA party. Even as he recovers from COVID, Justin Trudeau must be a happy man today.
Telegram: it’s not just for QAnon and crypto believers anymore. The great Europe Elects has its own channel, and that means I can keep up with political polls from across the Atlantic without having to check (ugh) Twitter.
Aside from the American midterms this November, the big election I’m watching closely this year is for President of France. If no candidate gets over 50% of the vote in the first round - and that has never happened since the current electoral system was adopted in the mid-sixties - it goes to a runoff between the top two candidates.
France isn’t exactly experiencing Macron-mania at the moment, but the incumbent looks like a lock to make it to the second round. The horse race is for the second spot, with far-right candidates Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, and center-right candidate Valérie Pécresse battling it out. (Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who despises capitalism and inequality even more than he hates Jews, also appears to be gaining some momentum.)
It’s starting to look like the heavily hyped Zemmour moment has passed, with the far right once again going “home” to Marine Le Pen:
Le Pen has a better chance of making it to the second round than Pécresse, and yet The Economist still gives the latter a better chance of winning the Presidency:
How does that make any sense? When Marine Le Pen made it to the runoff against Macron in 2017, and in 2002 when it was her estranged father in the second round, a strong majority of French voters rejected them. And the same thing will likely happen in 2022, should Le Pen get another shot at the title - she would likely win more than the 33.9% of the vote she received in 2017, but would still be trounced by Macron. Pécresse, representing the traditional French center-right, won’t have that many people united against her, and would actually have a slim but not imperceptible chance of winning.
The far-right candidate has a strong base of support but also a hard ceiling. That’s not just true in Canada.
Sister Janet Mead, the other Singing Nun who recorded an unlikely top ten hit, passed away a few days ago at age 84:
Sister Janet Mead, a nun from Australia who sang a rock ‘n’ roll rendition of The Lord’s Prayer during the 1970s, died Wednesday. She was 84.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide confirmed the nun’s death but did not give a cause, the Australian Broadcasting Company reported. Friends said she had been suffering from cancer, according to The Washington Post.
A reluctant pop star, Sister Mead preferred to speak out against welfare cuts for the working classes and opposed the Vietnam War. But it was her rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer,” composed and arranged by Arnold Strais in late 1973, that rocketed her to fame, the Post reported.
The song charted in the U.S. for 13 weeks beginning in February 1974, rising to No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 during Easter week. She became the first Australian artist to have a gold record in the U.S. and the song was nominated for a Grammy Award for best inspirational performance (nonclassical), the newspaper reported. The song lost to Elvis Presley’s version of How Great Thou Art.”
“The Lord’s Prayer” single was distributed to 31 countries and sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company. It became the only Top 10 song in which the entire lyrical content originated from words taken from the Bible.
[…]
Despite her newfound fame, Sister Mead shunned the spotlight and turned down offers to tour in the U.S., according to the Australian Broadcasting Company.
She continued to teach at St. Aloysius College and donated the royalties from her record to charity.
“It was a fairly big strain because all the time there are interviews and radio talkbacks and TV people coming and film people coming,” she told the news outlet.
Born in Adelaide, Sister Mead was named the South Australian of the year in 2004 for her work over the decades caring for the homeless, [according to] the Australian Broadcasting Company.
What an interesting life she led. And the recording itself is kind of awesome, in that sixties-hangover/early-seventies way.
It’s not even the only recorded version of The Lord’s Prayer to become a pop hit, at least in Britain. Sir Cliff’s version was recorded many years later, yet sounds much more dated.
The second greatest oxymoron in the history of political party names, after Mexico’s venerable Institutional Revolutionary Party.
For the record, it’s pretty clear that the idiot with the Nazi flag was carrying it to compare the Liberals to Nazis. Which is still shockingly inappropriate, but not the same as endorsing Nazism. Anyone who’s spent more than two minutes on the internet knows that everyone gets compared to Hitler eventually.