Right now, like Republicans in the United States, Canadian Conservative politicians should be seizing onto this political opportunity created by the overbearing government response to COVID-19 to promote the upholding of Canadian rights and freedoms.
Unable to make any headway in the polls against the Liberals, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole could use a little help from his friends Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
Basically, he needs Ford and Kenney to avoid doing anything that makes matters worse for him.
Trailing the Liberals by six percentage points nationwide in the CBC’s Poll Tracker — an aggregation of all publicly available polling data — the Conservatives are struggling in both Ontario and Alberta, among other places.
Court finds no evidence broadcaster suffered reputational damage
A lawsuit launched by the CBC against the Conservative Party of Canada in the final days of the 2019 federal election accusing the party of copyright infringement for using the broadcaster’s footage in an online ad and tweets has been dismissed by a federal court.
In his written decision released Thursday, Federal Court Justice Michael Phelan found that the use of such material fell under “fair dealing,” and that there was “no objective evidence of the likelihood of any reputational damage” to the CBC.
“There was no evidence presented that a broadcaster’s segment disclosed in a partisan setting reflected adversely on the broadcaster,” Phelan wrote.
Here is the election ad the CBC and Liberals were desperate to prevent Canadians to see during the election.
And I bet they still don’t want you to share it now they lost their frivolous lawsuit! @JustinTrudeau @CBCNews @RosieBarton @AtIssueCBC @sunlorrie pic.twitter.com/mxz3k1vNHO
— Mark O'Henly (@SeeClickFlash) May 13, 2021
OTTAWA–Peter Kent is pretty sure he knows why the Conservatives failed to win GTA seats in the 2019 election.
Two words: Doug Ford.
“We might have won that election but for Doug Ford’s disastrous first year,” the former cabinet minister and retiring Thornhill MP told the Star in an interview this week.
“It’s that simple. That’s what we heard at the door. We were leading in a lot of York Region ridings … up until about three weeks, four weeks before the election.
The numbers are particularly troubling for Mr. O’Toole’s new leadership of the Conservative Party. His main strategic thrusts, to move the party to more moderate centre terrain, to admonish the Liberals for a disastrous vaccine procurement performance and to pursue the working class and union vote, have all been singularly ineffective to date.
The Conservatives broke new fundraising records in the first months of 2021, raising more money than any party ever has in a first quarter and outpacing the governing Liberals by their widest margin yet.
But the party’s success on the fundraising front hasn’t led yet to a boost in its political fortunes.
According to data published by Elections Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada raised $8.5 million between January and March 2021 — its best first quarter ever. And because the CPC has a long history of raising more money than any other party, its first quarter performance was the best by any federal political party on record.
BONOKOSKI: Lisa Raitt kicked off riding executive by new candidate
In one foul swoop, 10 directors up for re-election at the Milton Conservative riding association were given the boot, including its high-profile former MP Lisa Raitt — the coup led by new Tory candidate Nadeem Akbar, who stacked his deck with 200-plus new voting members.
The average turnout for an annual general meeting for the Conservatives in the Ontario riding of Milton is approximately 30.
This is the realization of the Conservative Party’s Diversity Dream!
“While we support creating a level playing field between large foreign streaming services and Canadian broadcasters, C-10 is a bad piece of legislation giving too much power to the CRTC to regulate the internet and provides no clear guidelines for how that power will be used,” Reyes said in a statement Monday morning.
Conservative Party of Canada leader Erin O’Toole has proposed a climate change plan he says will meet Canada’s Paris agreement commitments without killing jobs. Yet one week after announcing it, Justin Trudeau increased Canada’s emissions targets and the media is already asking O’Toole why his plan doesn’t go further. True North’s Andrew Lawton says this is proof the Conservatives will never win by playing on the left’s turf.
Expanding on the last several weeks’ columns here, the federal Liberals apparently believe that just 20 months after the last election, they can win back a majority on the basis of their handling of the COVID pandemic and of the much declaimed “existential crisis” of climate change. They will probably be justified in their confidence if the Conservatives, the most unsuccessful principal political party in any important country in the world, allow them to get away with such a spurious reformulation of these issues. In fact, Canada’s entire political community voluntarily panicked with great shared enthusiasm at the arrival of the novel coronavirus, and unanimously agreed with the general drift in the Western countries towards an almost total shutdown of the country in order to “flatten the curve.”
According to sources close to O’Toole, very few people within the party knew about the new climate plan until it was reported by the media.
“…The latest reliable statistics show that Canada leads the world in percentage of Covid deaths in homes for the elderly: 70 per cent of our total, compared to 27 per cent in the UK and Germany, 33 per cent in Israel, 38 per cent in the United States, 47 per cent in Sweden, and 59 per cent in Spain. If we had just protected the elderly and infirm a year ago, we might have been able to save at least a third of those who have died, at a minimum cost in inconvenience and in money. Why doesn’t Erin O’Toole say something about that? There are more than 40 countries with a higher level of per capita vaccination than Canada. Amongst them are not just obvious scientifically advanced nations like Israel and the United States and the UK, but Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden. Has the official opposition uttered one word about these completely unacceptable, uncompetitive and ultimately death-dealing numbers?”
Erin O’Toole takes one for the team with his carbon-pricing plan
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s about-face on carbon pricing may not improve the odds that he will become prime minister. The opposite is just as likely. But come what may in the next election and beyond, he will be leaving his party a legacy most Conservatives should eventually come to appreciate.
Far from making the party politically bulletproof on an issue that is increasingly stunting his party’s growth outside of the Prairies, O’Toole’s climate plan — at least in the short term — puts the Conservatives right in the middle of the climate change crossfire.
This I suspect lays out the thinking behind the CPC’s decision to ape LPC policy. Fuck the rest of Canada and concentrate on Ontario and Quebec for electoral success, somewhere down the road. Perhaps not this century but surely maybe some time. It’s worked for the Liberals after all.
‘Not a tax at all’: O’Toole on party’s carbon price loyalty program
OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole is pushing back against criticism by some that a key pillar of the party’s new climate plan is akin to a carbon tax, a Liberal-instituted policy he has long criticized.
In an interview on CTV’s Question Period airing Sunday, O’Toole says the party’s proposed carbon pricing mechanism is “not a tax at all” because money is not collected by the government.
It’s just like Interac says O’Toole! Really he said that.
OTTAWA — When Conservative leader Erin O’Toole announced on Thursday that his party will include a carbon price on consumer fuels as part of their election platform, internal backlash was inevitable.
Scrapping “Trudeau’s carbon tax” is a core promise the Conservative Party has made to its supporters for years. O’Toole won the Conservative leadership race last year while repeatedly promising to get rid of it, even signing a pledge that he would never introduce a carbon tax of his own.
