It's clear that the Liberal leadership race will be all but a two person affair between Ignatieff and Rae with Dominic LeBlanc there only to raise his profile for the future.
My prediction at this point is it will be Iggy on the first ballot as most of the senior people who backed Dion, Kennedy or Dryden last time seem to have lined up at Iggy's alter and no one of note appears to have come over to Rae.
well, why do they not just crown him and get it out of the way without the expense? As they obviously put their boots to the throats of Hall-Finley and Kennedy.
Interestly that this occured, as Angus Reid did a poll last week asking who one thought should be the next Liberal leader. I put Scott Brison.
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"watching the tide roll away"
why do they not just crown him and get it out of the way without the expense?
Because the grandfather of Michael was not the Tsar of Russia, only his minister of education.
TFF, but your point would be what?
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Hello! A democracy is not a monarchy.
Well my point would be that the Liberals think they are the natural governing party and they undemocratically forced other leadership contenders out, and no one is aligning behind Rae, so why go to all the expense. You apparently took my words literally though.
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Stabbed vs Shot.
Well my point would be that the Liberals think they are the natural governing party and they undemocratically forced other leadership contenders out, and no one is aligning behind Rae, so why go to all the expense. You apparently took my words literally though.
A leadership convention is useful in the sense that a democracy needs to fill the public space with political messages so that misinterpretations and prejudices like yours can die.
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Action!
Iggy should win easily. Probably on the first ballot.
Where does LeBlanc fall on the Liberal spectrum, to the extent there is one?
Iggy makes my skin crawl, for some (probably very good) reason, whereas Bob is just a pompous ass.
I hope the Liberals pick as rightwing a leader as possible. The only way that the Tories will ever be dislodged is if the Liberals find a way to win back the votes of centre-right Liberal/Tory switchers that the NDP cannot access.
Iggy is better for the NDP, I think. There are way more Lib/NDP swing voters who respect Rae than Iggy.
I hope that the Liberals allow "one member, one vote" to be put in place, something they refused at the last convention. The Liberals are the only major party that still uses delegates. Many party members feel as though they don't matter and the elitists will always control things through the delegate system (probably true). Going to one member, one vote, would certainly re-enage the membership and could even draw back some ex-Libs who quit over the elitist image. Now all that has to happen is for both Iggy and Uncle Bob to lose and some new blood, capable of engaging the electorate and not representing the elitist elements of the party should win. I am a member of the LPC, so this isn't bashing from without, it is constructive criticism from within.
Where does LeBlanc fall on the Liberal spectrum, to the extent there is one?
He's squarely on the side of winning. In other words, right in the Liberal mainstream. He knows the carbon tax hurt them in Atlantic Canada, though. But the guy was born into the Liberal Party, so it's less about ideology for him, I think.
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The Liberals will have a delegated convention. They narrowly voted down a proposal to move to OMOV at their last convention.
Ignatieff seems to me to be interested more by international problems than by local problems. For Canadians, it seems to me, it is the converse: they are mostly interested by local matters.
Am I the only one who desperately hopes this doesn't turn into a grudge mud wrestling match at some point?
Seeing Mercer and Rae's asses come at me from my tv screen was bad enough.
I think we can count on a kind of Obama effect to temporarily put political contests out of reach of dirty tactics.
I think we can count on a kind of Obama effect to temporarily put political contests out of reach of dirty tactics.
If only. We shall have to see.
Generally, though, as a former-NDPer (full disclosure!), I really really want Rae to win. Not because I like him. At all. But because it will forever diassociate him from the NDP. Cut off the Rae albatross, says I.
- We can also expect it because politicians nowadays are mentioning Obama like if they were promising to copy him.
- I think you have some explaining to do by not always and systematically wishing for the best candidates to win positions.
I hope the Liberals pick as rightwing a leader as possible. The only way that the Tories will ever be dislodged is if the Liberals find a way to win back the votes of centre-right Liberal/Tory switchers that the NDP cannot access.
Got that right. The Liberals winning back the centre-right of the 905 and Southern Ontario generally has a huge impact on both provincial and federal politics. I loathe Ignatieff, but there are still many in Ontario who will never vote for Rae, and they'll go Right, not Left.
Rae's only hope: either outstanding Foreign Affairs Minister, or Finance Minister presiding over balanced budgets. That and having his picture taken with Obama. *wink*
I know Stockholm. I am just saying that this is both a leadership and policy convention and OMOV should be on the ballot again. Delegates should wake up and come into the 21st century, like other parties.
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I hope the Liberals pick as rightwing a leader as possible. The only way that the Tories will ever be dislodged is if the Liberals find a way to win back the votes of centre-right Liberal/Tory switchers that the NDP cannot access.Got that right. The Liberals winning back the centre-right of the 905 and Southern Ontario generally has a huge impact on both provincial and federal politics. I loathe Ignatieff, but there are still many in Ontario who will never vote for Rae, and they'll go Right, not Left.
I think any politician can radically convert the righteous into Leftists if only s/he speaks the truth about Alberta’s natural resources causing short-term and long-term disequilibrium.
The mood for change is generational:
To balance the Obama effect, in the past four weeks, two countries in the so-called Anglo-sphere, Canada and New Zealand, have quietly elected equally youthful but conservative leaders. Canada has just re-elected Stephen Harper, 49, with an increased vote. And Britain faces an election by 2010, in which the 42-year-old Tory leader David Cameron is competitive. John Key, at 47, was born within five days of Obama in August 1961. And while they hail from different sides of politics and the world, the two men share the adaptable middle-child sensibility of the generation caught between the baby boomers and generation X. Claimed by both demographics, they are sometimes called the "cuspers" or the "Jones generation", too young to have experienced 1967's Summer of Love but old enough to witness the boomers trashing the moral certainties of their forebears. They were too wise to share the "slacker" mentality of the gen Xers but understood the disillusionment that drove it. They are more aware than their boomer predecessors of the growing importance of authenticity of character over laundry-list ideology. Their cunning pragmatism makes them the agents of change.
Canada's Liberals seem to have a problem.
I hope that the Liberals allow "one member, one vote" to be put in place, something they refused at the last convention.
In effect, they do. The delegates are bound to vote on the first ballot for the candidates whose slate they were elected on. The membership vote at the Delegate Election Meetings is a proportional vote: if Rae gets 55% of the vote at the meeting, he gets 55% of that riding's delegates. If one of the two main candidates gets over 50% of the delegates, the others might as well concede and save the travel costs of those thousands of delegates.
Note: if proportional voting is good enough for the Liberal Party, why not for Canada?
I've seen Dominic LeBlanc on Newman's show a few times, and he has a really awkward smile, almost as bad as Iggy's sometimes, as if he's forcing himself to smile in a bad situation. If these three (with Rae) are the future of the Liberal party, then that party is doomed. I would have liked to see Martha Hall Findlay and Martin Cauchon on the ticket, myself.
Because I think Canadians like to compare generations, I guess the smiley Justin Trudeau will at some point run the Liberal party.
So who has Bob Rae hurt the most this weekend with the whole flameup around the "town hall" debate. Himself? The Liberal Party? Ignatieff? All three?
The Liberal Party, for sure, and maybe Iggy.
It is better I think to ask ourselves who in between Iggy and Rae can incorporate the other as the subset of a set than it is to ask who can hurt the other.
prediction: Liberal infighting, among other reasons, will keep Harper in power - although with continued minorities - far into the future.
Mr. Rae succeeded in putting front-runner Michael Ignatieff on the defensive. In
a populist and "inclusive" age, no one wants to be seen to be engaged in, much
less defending, meetings "behind closed doors."More important, having been accused of running a
"peek-a-boo campaign," it will now be difficult for Mr. Ignatieff to reject the
weekly debates that Mr. Rae is proposing. In making this proposal, the Rae camp
astutely referred to the Obama-Clinton debates that saw the president-elect beat
the odds over front-runner Hillary Clinton. For a candidate like Mr. Ignatieff
who was hoping to style himself as an Obama-like agent of change in Canada, that
had to hurt.
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What I want to know is, why does NSpector believe that there is no one in Canadian politics that can match Rae on a one to one debate?
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Becasue regardless of what a shitbag he is, he does speak very well and is quite knowlegable. I also have to agree that even Jack would be hard pressed in a one on one debate with Rae
Iggy vs Rae....
That feels like the eternal conundrum. Would I prefer to be hit in the face with a sock full of rocks or a sock full of poo?
(Leblanc is the equivalent of being hit in the face with an empty sock)
Becasue regardless of what a shitbag he is, he does speak very well and is quite knowlegable. I also have to agree that even Jack would be hard pressed in a one on one debate with Rae
Really, I had not thought him that good of a speaker, or knowlegable, but perhaps it is my distance from the centre of the universe.
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Get to know more about Rae. For example that he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship…
Knew he was a Rhodes scholar, but uh, don't care and don't think it means much n way of knowing.
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If you don’t care and if you think it doesn’t mean much then how come you know it?
