LPC leadership race - 2025

[Remius]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1899480267607150793

Maybe Carney should recruit Doug Ford. lol. Singing his praises on American media.

 

[Haggis]

Along with a 10-15% cut to the Civil Service ranks, excluding the CAF, RCMP, CSIS and CCG.

and CBSA, which is already about 2K short on the front line.

 

[Quirky]

He’s gone but not without making himself look like an ass.

He took everything from Canadians, what’s another chair.

 

[PuckChaser]

Maybe Carney should recruit Doug Ford. lol. Singing his praises on American media.

Yeah its weird to hear a politician be able to praise a rival after 10 years of the Prime Minister name calling regular Canadians who disagreed with him.

 

[Remius]

Yeah its weird to hear a politician be able to praise a rival after 10 years of the Prime Minister name calling regular Canadians who disagreed with him.

Something tells me Ford doesn’t see Carney as a rival.

 

[Good2Golf]

Something tells me Ford doesn’t see Carney as a rival.

Carney is a lot closer to Martin. Maybe not 100% Blue Grit, but well along in that direction. I’m keen to see his words/actions on energy.

 

[RangerRay]

Carney is a lot closer to Martin. Maybe not 100% Blue Grit, but well along in that direction. I’m keen to see his words/actions on energy.

Blue Grits are probably the worst in terms of being in the thrall of United Front influence. It’s all about the Bordens…

 

[YZT580]

He took everything from Canadians, what’s another chair.

who would want to use it? Superstitious or not it is always better to be safe.

 

[lenaitch]

Actually I believe they can take it but have to pay $2000.
No need for the stoopid tongue thing. What an embarrassing individual

Ya, not endorsing the juvenile last-day-of-school style, but apparently it is an allowable thing:

https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/MAS/mas-e.pdf

"Purchase of assets Members who are not re-elected may not purchase House assets for their personal use, with the exception of a replica of their chair in Chamber, which may be purchased at replacement cost, plus applicable taxes,"

Or he's actually walking out with the furniture, and the towels and little soaps and shampoos.

 

[RangerRay]

A couple of interesting takes…

Warren Kinsella

My latest: the banker vs. the beast

Trump, that is.

thewarrenkinsella.substack.com

So, there are three main reasons why the Carney Grits have obliterated Pierre Poilievre’s 30-point lead. One, Justin Trudeau left, and the country was quite happy about that. Two, voters suspect that the Conservatives secretly (and some, not-so-secretly) love Donald Trump.

Three, Carney is a typical Canadian: he is calm, collected and courteous. He is the polar opposite of the ugly American – in this case, Donald Trump. Carney reminds us of our better selves. We don’t want a Prime Minister who acts like the guy we despise.

But there is a risk in all that, of course. The Canadian who has given Donald Trump pause – more than any other – is Doug Ford. Ford has been anything but polite about Trump. He has been very direct and very tough about the American president - threatening to cut off his power, removing American booze from the shelves, going on Fox to growl about betrayal. Ford has metaphorically taken Trump into the boards, many times, and Canadians have cheered every single time.

That, then, is the danger that Mark Carney faces. And it is the worry that many Canadians will have, too: that the new Grit leader will be the typical Canadian. And, when Donald Trump treads on his loafers, Carney will be the one who says he's sorry. As some Canadians are wont to do.

Right now, we want a fighter – like Ford, like Chretien, like Don Cherry. We don't want to become the doormat of North America. Knowing this, and towards the end of his speech, Carney talked about dropping his gloves in a hockey fight. But literally no one can picture Mark Carney dropping his gloves for a fight. (He was a backup goalie, after all.)

In the leaders' debates, the aforementioned Poilievre and the Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet are going to make mincemeat of Carney. But as my Postmedia colleague Tasha Kheiriddin said to me on my podcast this week, that still may not matter. Sometimes, voters want a leader like Ontario’s Brampton Bill Davis - someone also calm, cool and collected. Not Bob Probert.

The Line

Carney presents himself well; a sensible, adult technocrat who seems to be refreshingly serious about the country and its problems. Given recent global events, we suspect that a lot of Canadians will be reaching for this. Donald Trump is a tonic for populist impulses, and given the nature of the existential threat the president poses to this country, we have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of Canadians — even Canadians who broadly agree with Pierre Poilievre — are going to see in Carney a sober antidote and a reassuring throwback to the best of Canada’s yesteryears.

To be honest, we even felt the pull of that appeal ourselves. For a man with no real frontline political experience, we have to give Carney (or the remnants of Team Trudeau managing him) credit: this is an individual who understands what the ballot question of the next election is going to be. If he leans into that and stays focused on his message, and if Trump continues to behave the way he has, we don’t rule out that Carney could win. We aren’t betting the farm on it, but he has a better shot than Trudeau — and that is, after all, the point of all this, isn’t it?

With respect to the Conservatives, in the year of our lord 2025, voters aren’t going to marking the X for the party that can Axe the Tax, Build the Homes, and Stop the Crime. They’re going to be voting for the leader who can make the most credible case that he’s best equipped to handle Donald Trump, and the threat Trump represents to Canada.

Right now, we at The Line really don’t know how the voters will answer that ballot question. The Liberal party is spent. The Conservatives still have the money and the mo. We certainly don’t rule out the importance of an election campaign — nor do we put our bets on Carney over Poilievre, a seasoned rhetorician, in a live debate. We also don’t think that Carney, for all his carping about the Conservatives’ lack of a plan, has come up with anything particularly detailed, solid or compelling.

But what we are starting to see is that one of these men has a very clear grasp of what the ballot question is going to be — while the other one consistently struggles to rise to the moment, and as a result comes off as comparatively petty and, well, small. We suspect Canadians need to see Pierre Poilievre chomp an apple in the face of Donald Trump. And the fact that the Conservative leader seems happy to trade in utter contempt for everyone except the U.S. President is a problem, whether the Conservatives want to admit it to themselves or not.

It’s like the neophyte has read the room and changed accordingly while the professional is still playing by the previous rules that worked for him. At this point, I don’t know how things will go.

 

[CBH99]

It’s like the neophyte has read the room and changed accordingly while the professional is still playing by the previous rules that worked for him. At this point, I don’t know how things will go.

Same. I have no idea how things will go either...not a clue.

We've seen the world change so drastically over the last decade, and seemingly U-Turn hard a few times that (to me anyway) came out of nowhere



Personally, I really hope the LPC/NDP uni-party has given enough Canadians reason to pause & consider giving the reigns to a party that hasn't intentionally driven the country into the ground, rather than give the party that has yet a 4th term.

A party that values democratic values so much that 2/3 of the party membership was disqualified from voting for their new leader, nor did they even bother to set the bar that the person replacing the party leader was an elected MP. (Kind of a big deal, you would think!)



Whether people like him or not, or get most of their information from specific mainstream sources that seem to lean left or right...Pierre has earned the chance to be a great PM far more than Justin ever has/did.

But this upcoming election is going to be very interesting I think, and probably the most important Canadian election of our times.

I really hope we don't elect another 4 years of this same old scandalous bull****...but like you said, I honestly haven't a clue to what direction this will ultimately go

 

[CBH99]

He’s gone but not without making himself look like an ass.

He didn't make himself look like an ass...

He's just an ass

 

[Fabius]

Walking back the OICs on firearms might help him capture more of the center.

If he follows through on his end to the carbon tax and capital gains tax it's obvious the party recognizes it's over stepped.

Until the LPC officially, publicly and demonstrably divorces itself from the Toronto and Montreal based gun control extremists and un does everything the Trudeau government has done on firearms I would not consider the LPC a viable option for my vote. Period.

I reluctantly believe that most Canadians don’t care and willing to overlook basic principles such as right to property etc. whether enshrined in our written constitution or not as long as the Federal government offers them dollars for things that are not constitutionality in their realm.

Some countries leaders have to deliberately create foreign wars and crisis to mask their own failures at home. The LPC is likely secretly overjoyed that Trump has in effect done that for them.

 

[OldSolduer]

I reluctantly believe that most Canadians don’t care and willing to overlook basic principles such as right to property etc. whether enshrined in our written constitution or not as long as the Federal government offers them dollars for things that are not constitutionality in their realm.

Those that trade liberty for security deserve neither.

"Security" means government poking there noses in everywhere.

 

[Haggis]

Walking back the OICs on firearms might help him capture more of the center.

They'd lose support in the GTA and Montreal real quick.

If he follows through on his end to the carbon tax and capital gains tax it's obvious the party recognizes it's over stepped.

Rebranding the carbon tax is not ending it.

 

[dapaterson]

They'd lose support in the GTA and Montreal real quick.

Lose to who?

 

[Haggis]

Lose to who?

NDP in the GTA. Bloq in Montréal. The other "gun ban" parties.

 

[CBH99]

Something tells me he's not leaving with much
disappointment with how it ended. For all the bad publicity and ethical violations, his actions and speeches theast couple of weeks is how he's going to be remembered now. Sorry Trudeau haters!

https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/s/zVSO5duqAM

Sorry Lumber...

But a few speeches on his way out of office IN NO WAY cancels out basically 10 years of blatant corruption that has left the country far worse off than when he became PM.

 

[RangerRay]

Terry Glavin suggests the knives were out for Freeland because she was too uppity with the United Front caucus, not to mention would embarrass them with her stance on autocrats.

An absolutely fascinating read.

Backstory: Chrystia Freeland's Last Stand

The numbers don't make sense, but that's not all that doesn't add up about Freeland's humiliation and Mark Carney's succession to the Liberal throne.

therealstory.substack.com

Freeland had simply become too dangerous.​

The thing about Freeland is that she had been warning about the rise of strongman politics and the fatal attraction of police-state appeasement for years, and when Trudeau came on the federal scene more than a decade ago he was as determined to partner with China’s Xi Jinping as Donald Trump is with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. By 2015, Trudeau had transformed the Liberal Party into the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. So Team Trudeau was always an odd fit for Freeland.

From her arrival on the government benches in 2015, Freeland distinguished herself in Trudeau’s cabinet by refusing to acquiesce to collusions with autocracy. Freeland’s first run-in was with Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister, the Chretien-era fixture Stéphane Dion. . .

All those years before Trump decided to turn the world upside down by turning his back on NATO and aligning the United States with Putin’s Russia, Dion was pushing Trudeau to restore full diplomatic relations with Khomeinist Iran, to sign an extradition treaty with the Chinese police state, and to adopt an arms-wide-open approach to Moscow.

Dion openly advocated a complete about-face on the Liberal Party’s campaign promise to impose Magnitsky-type sanctions on Putin’s oligarchs. Dion further proposed a Russian re-engagement by way of an invitation to Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to resume Canadian collaborations with Russia via the Arctic Council. Dion quickly emerged as Lavrov’s best friend in the NATO capitals.

It’s worth remembering that all this was within two years of Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, and it was during the time that Russian fighter-bombers were destroying Syrian hospitals and cratering Syria’s cities on behalf of Bashar Assad.

In not so many words, Freeland told Trudeau: Either Dion goes or I go.

By the first week in January, 2017, Dion was put out to pasture as a purposely useless diplocrat in Europe, and Chrystia Freeland was Canada’s new foreign affairs minister.

Freeland was immediately subjected to one of Moscow’s most successful disinformation operations, the global “Chrystia Freeland Lied About Her Family’s Nazi Past” hoax. It came straight out of Russia’s embassy in Ottawa. Buy she survived and persevered.

She also became an increasingly impatient adversary to the China caucus within Trudeau’s circle, including the wealthy Mandarin-bloc beneficiaries of Trudeau’s scandalous “cash for access” circuits. In a particularly audacious move, Freeland ordered three of the founding investors of Wealth One Bank of Canada to divest their shares,and also imposed strict national security conditions on the bank to firewall its operations against the dodgy investors.

When longtime Liberal politician and close Trudeau ally John McCallum insisted on publicly defending Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in his capacity as Canada’s ambassador to China, Freeland put her foot down. Meng had been detained in Vancouver on a U.S. fraud and sanctions-evasion warrant, prompting Beijing to take two Canadian hostages - Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

Freeland fired him.

Two years ago, Freeland threw a wrench straight into the gears of one of Trudeau’s Chinese vanity projects: the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, after the AIIB’s Canadian communications director resigned and fled Beijing after discovering that the Chinese secret police had set up a bureau inside the bank itself. That same day, Freeland froze Canada’s involvement with the AIIB.

When the Hogue Commission into Foreign Interference released its findings in January, Freeland’s response left the unmistakable impression that certain politicians, who NSICOP and Hogue had left tactfully unidentified, would not remain protected by anonymity for much longer.

“I welcome Justice Hogue’s recommendations. A government led by me will take foreign interference seriously - and will never risk our national security for political gain,” Freeland pledged. For political gain was an incendiary choice of words.

“. . . If I become Prime Minister on March 9, I will immediately declassify all intelligence and evidence of foreign interference in federal elections over the past two decades, while ensuring that sources and methods and any information that would be harmful to our allies is protected.”

The reasons behind Freeland’s dramatic and public split with Team Trudeau last December have gone mostly unexamined. A close look suggests that they had almost everything to do with Trudeau’s consistently frivolous response to the nature of the threats to Canada and to the entire rules-based world order posed by the democratic west’s accommodation of police states and the backsliding of democracies into authoritarianism and plutocracy.

Freeland had somehow stuck with Trudeau to the point of obsequiousness, despite sharp differences in their values and their orders of priority. It’s a peculiar thing that may be comparable with the syndrome that has befallen formerly reasonable Republicans now cowering in the shadow of their unhinged president.

 

[OldSolduer]

Sorry Lumber...

But a few speeches on his way out of office IN NO WAY cancels out basically 10 years of blatant corruption that has left the country far worse off than when he became PM.

The vacation on the Aga Khan’s island
SnC Lavalin
The firing of JWR
The WE charity
Numerous ethics issues
Virtue signalling to allies.

Any one care to add?