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The best way to win the Republican presidential nomination, someone once said, is to run as far as possible to the Right.

Then, when one wins the nomination?

Start running back to the centre.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole heeded that advice. His leadership campaign was brimming with the sort of stuff that right-wing folks love. His campaign’s strategy was to depict Peter MacKay as the squishy One World Government crypto-Liberal, and O’Toole the conservative’s Conservative. 

He was the “true blue” Conservative. He was going to do battle with “the Chinese regime,” which would be news to our military.

He was going to start a fight to “take back Canada” – from whom, he never said, but Indigenous people were likely unamused, having always correctly believed they had Canada first. 

And, of course, O’Toole was going to give social conservatives what they wanted. He was their candidate, because he was the only one who could beat the communist MacKay. 

So:

• he suggested he had “concerns” about banning conversion therapy 

• he mused about creating “conscience rights” to make abortions harder to get

• he intoned that he didn’t like medically-assisted death, and would work to limit its use

• he implied he he would give some the “right” to refuse LGBTQ marriage 

• and he said SoCons “will have a seat at the table” when he became Conservative leader. 

Which, after a clown show of a voting process, he eventually did. He won the Tory crown in the wee hours, when most of us had gone to bed. 

And then, as in a dream, Erin O’Toole switched the script.

It was kind of like the Bobby Ewing dream sequence on Dallas, many years ago. JR was dead and we were trying to figure out the identity of the murderer. And then Bobby woke up, and it was all a dream!

The producers of Dallas lost not a few fans with that little stunt, and my suspicion is Erin O’Toole is going to lose some fans, as well.

On the progressive side of the spectrum, he has created a credible case for the criticism that he has a hidden agenda. On the social conservative side – a side he actively and indisputably courted for many months – there will be feelings of betrayal and anger.

That’s what happens when you try and suck and blow at the same time. That’s what happens when you try to be all things to all people. You end up satisfying nobody, really.

O’Toole had an exceedingly competent campaign team. That is obvious. They were up against a likable, experienced former senior cabinet minister. They were up against the widely-held impression that their candidate lacked charisma, name recognition or a policy or two that were in some way newsworthy.

Despite that, they expertly manipulated the Byzantine Conservative voting process and captured ridings that were ridings in name only.  They decisively beat Peter MacKay by doing that. 

But make no mistake: they also did that by pretending to be the most electable social conservative candidate. The other two social conservatives in the race could not speak French – a nonstarter for a truly national political party.

Sure, sure.  It is true that Justin Trudeau is no longer as popular as he once was. It is true that he has become enmeshed  in multiple ethical scandals. It is true that one of those scandals – the one that has soiled his family name – may yet take down his government.

But only a fool would underestimate Justin Trudeau‘s electoral skills. Andrew Scheer did that, and he ended up looking like a fool. He ended up looking like a guy who couldn’t score on an empty net if his life depended on it.

With a pandemic raging, and Canadians worrying about kids returning to school and businesses going under, it may be that Canadians will forget about Erin O’Toole‘s whiplash-inducing flip-flop. Or they may not care. 

But Conservatives are dreaming in technicolor if they think the Liberal electoral machine has not noticed. They are delusional if they think Justin Trudeau will not take full and frequent advantage of their massive volte-face.

In politics, you have to believe In something. You do.

After last week, to both progressives and social conservatives, it is fair to wonder if the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada believes in anything at all.

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…to what?

To this:

• he has said he has “concerns” about banning conversion therapy
• he’ll create “conscience rights” to make abortions much harder to get
• he says he’ll vote against medically-assisted death
• he wants to give SoCons the “right” to refuse LGBTQ marriage
• he says anti-abortion, anti-gay conservatives “will have a seat at the table” when he becomes leader

So.

Last night wasn’t a leadership vote.

It was a suicide note.

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There isn’t going to be an election.

Not anytime soon, anyway. Blame Covid.

For a while there, it looked like there could be. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had surged ahead of the leaderless Conservatives. His lead was big – big enough to suggest a Parliamentary majority was likely.

Speculation grew about a snap election. A referendum-election on how to respond to the pandemic, perhaps: big-hearted, high-minded Liberal spending versus mean, miserly Conservative austerity. A renewed majority looked to be in the bag.

And then the WE scandal hit. Trudeau’s mother and brother were caught receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a charity. A shady, shadowy “charity” that had been handed a billion-dollar Trudeau government contract with no competition.

Almost overnight, Trudeau’s polling lead evaporated. Even without a leader, the Conservatives were running even with the Liberals. The Bloc Québécois commenced declaring its intention to defeat the government if Trudeau, his Minister of Finance and his Chief of Staff did not resign.

Speculation about an election surged once again – but this time, the Opposition parties appeared to be the likeliest winners, not the Trudeau Liberals. WEscam had changed everything. The former winners were looking like losers, and the former losers were starting to look like winners.

But there isn’t going to be an election anytime soon, and everyone in Ottawa knows it. And prorogation isn’t the main reason.

Elections are essentially great big job interviews. Candidates seek public office, and voters consider whether to hire them or not. As in every job interview, those doing the hiring – and those wishing to be hired – communicate back and forth. In an election, they do that via the media and the Internet. Lots of technology. It’s modern.

But quite a bit of our elections, still, take in the old-fashioned way: with candidates, voters, campaign staffers and elections officials interacting in close quarters.

Lining up to vote. Scrutinizing ballots. Counting them. Holding all-candidates’ debates. Knocking on doors. Shaking hands. Holding rallies. Coming to hear someone speak. Handing out campaign literature. Building lists. Putting up signs.

All of those emblems of elections – as antiquated and antediluvian as they may be – are still the way we do things. They’re still important.

But in a global pandemic, they’re also things that can get some of us sick. They’re things that make some of us die.

That’s what happened in Chicago a few weeks ago. During the March 17 Illinois primary, multiple precincts experienced Covid-19 outbreaks. Dozens got sick. One poll worker, 60-year-old Revall Burke, died.

Burke was at the Zion Hill Baptist Church, working as he had during many primary votes. He got sick. Five days after the primary, Burke was dead.

In other states, well-intentioned efforts to prevent voters and campaigners from falling ill failed. In Wisconsin in April, dozens of voters and poll workers got infected. It happened, said a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, to people “who voted in person or worked the polls on election day.” In the days and weeks that followed, many, many more got sick.

Anywhere primaries took place, in fact, experienced coronavirus outbreaks. It couldn’t be avoided.

The obvious solution is mail-in balloting, some say. But in the United States, the ruling Republican Party has literally authorized the removal of mail boxes in locations across the United States. They hope to forestall losing by doing that. And it just might work.

Up here, the same sort of considerations apply. We are simply not ready to conduct a federal general election vote entirely via the postal system. Elections Canada has simply not had enough time to prepare for that sort of historic change.

So, whomever is ahead in the polls – the Trudeau Liberals in the Spring, the leaderless Conservatives in the Summer – the same considerations apply. If you force an election, you are forcing people to participate in a process where they might get very sick.

Where they might die.

No one wants to take that chance. No one wants to be accused of indifference to sickness and death befalling the very people whose votes you seek. Not much of an election slogan, that: vote for us, but do it before you are dead.

The Americans have no choice: their constitution mandates an election takes place. And when it is over, Canadians will mostly agree:

The election can wait.

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Column here.

Best part:

It won’t fly.

All those old tropes about castrating women are threadbare as Trump’s despicable attempt to recycle the birther smear he used to slime Barack Obama, this time against Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother. She was born in Oakland, Calif.

Biden looks confident for choosing an accomplished woman who delivered a haymaker in a debate. After Donald Trump’s petty vindictiveness, Biden rising above grudges is a lovely thing to behold.

President Trump represents the last primal shriek of retrograde white men afraid to lose their power. He’s a dinosaur who evokes a world of beauty pageants, “suburban housewives,’’ molestation, cheating on your wife when she’s pregnant, paying off porn stars, preferring women to be seen and not heard, dismissing women who challenge you as nasty, angry and crazy.

Even as Fox hacks lambasted Harris as “transactional,” Michael Cohen dropped an excerpt from his tell-all describing life with Trump as a mob movie: “I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

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There’s even a name for it. 

It’s in the dictionary and everything. The Merriam-Webster people define it as “government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.”

That’s what we’ve got in Canada, now. Our national government, the Justin Trudeau-led government, is that. 

It’s arrival was heralded in Friday night. The National Post’s Christopher Nardi story was headlined thus: “Trudeau government paying $84M to firm employing Katie Telford’s husband to manage rent assistance aid program.”

Katie Telford is the Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The sub-headline read: “The PMO says Telford had nothing to do with the contract between Robert Silver’s firm and a federal crown corporation.”

When the story landed, you could practically picture Trudeau’s factotums congratulating themselves: the story had come out on a Friday evening, when no one would really notice it. One-day wonder, they’d tell themselves, then go back to Googling their names and posting selfies. 

But then the Globe and Mail published, too. 

“Spouse of PM’s chief of staff had meeting on Liberals’ rent-relief program,” read the headline on the Globe story, written by Marieke Walsh. 

The lede paragraph expanded on it: “The spouse of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff took part in a meeting with the Crown corporation responsible for the government’s commercial rent-relief program after the company where he works was awarded the contract to administer the program, and before the contract was extended.”

Both stories were atop their respective web sites. And, at that point, Trudeau’s insular little clan may have fretted, a bit. But then they reminded themselves: the boss had been found guilty of taking gifts from lobbyists, and he got through it. 

And he – and his staff – had conspired, 22 separate times, to stop the criminal prosecution of a corrupt Quebec-based corporate donor. And they’d driven out two brilliant women – one Indigenous – who tried to stop them from doing it. 

And there was the time the boss had been caught wearing racist blackface – not once, not twice, but three times! 

And they’d gotten re-elected anyway. 

So this latest controversy – wherein Trudeau and his cronies had again been caught prospering in the middle of a pandemic that has seen millions of Canadians lose their jobs – wasn’t such a big deal, to them. They all gave a Trudeauesque shrug, and went back to seeing how many likes they were getting on Instagram. 

But they should care. They should. 

It’s true that voters hear the “scandal” allegation too often. The media, and politicos, allege wrongdoing all the time, and thereby become the boys and girls who cry wolf. 

It’s also true that no one has been outfitted with an orange pantsuit and handcuffs, and trotted off to Millhaven yet. That is true, as Nixonian as it sounds: no one has gone to jail yet. 

And it’s true that the coronavirus pandemic should be the biggest concern of every one of us. The virus has infected tens of thousands of Canadians, and killed 9,000 of us. It has shattered our economy, and changed the way we live our lives. All true. 

But the reason why all of Justin Trudeau’s latest scandals are so profoundly, irretrievably scandalous is just that: the pandemic. Because the allegation is that Trudeau’s cabal sought to enrich themselves during a pandemic that is impoverishing millions of Canadians. 

What’s the problem, the dwindling number of Liberal partisans ask? The problem is this: the governed were losing their homes, losing their jobs, losing their futures. While Trudeau’s gang were apparently making out like bandits.

That is not merely wrong, it is actually evil. It is beyond the pale. Beyond words. 

The Prime Minister’s mother, being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by a “charity” to give two-minute talks? His brother, too? His wife and his Finance Minister getting free trips? The children of cabinet ministers getting jobs when they shouldn’t?

Those aren’t allegations. They are facts. They are things that have happened – provided by a vile, wicked “charity” that hired detectives to spy on Canadian reporters and their families. Was some of the public monies Justin Trudeau earmarked for his friends to be used to tail journalists? Isn’t that against the law?

It goes on and on and on. It never stops, this fetid, foul stew of corruption and moral blindness. Even during a pandemic, the Trudeau government’s descent into the muck continues unabated. 

So, there’s a name for what we’ve now got. There’s a name for a government like Justin Trudeau’s – a government run by those who seek status and personal gain at the expense of the rest of us.

It’s a kleptocracy. 

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And I’m not kidding about the Lord thing. Please ensure future correspondence contains the proper salutation. Thank you, my subjects. 

 

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