https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/supporters-in-vancouver-riding-would-back-wilson-raybould-as-an-independent-1.4363443
Supporters in Vancouver riding would back Wilson-Raybould as an Independent
Laura Kane and Hina Alam, The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, April 3, 2019 4:35AM EDT
VANCOUVER - Supporters of Jody Wilson-Raybould in her Vancouver Granville riding say they're disappointed she was ejected from the Liberal caucus but they would back her in the federal election if she ran as an Independent.
Tracy Beshara, executive director of Marpole Oakridge Family Place in south Vancouver, said she has met Wilson-Raybould and she is a woman of "integrity and quality."
"All that is going on with her is a disappointment, and we support her fully," said Beshara. "She's honest. She's real and she can tell you both sides. She won't tell you what you want to hear. She'll tell you the way it is. Most politicians don't do that."
<snip>
Throughout it all, many supporters in Vancouver Granville have stood by their MP, who they describe as direct, honest and genuine. Beshara said she hadn't kept up with every news development but she would "absolutely" support Wilson-Raybould if she ran independently or for a different party.
<snip>
Epperson said if Wilson-Raybould chose to run as an Independent, he'd volunteer for her campaign, as an individual and not as a representative of the church.
"Just after she was elected she reached out to me - I didn't reach out to her - recognizing we were an important constituency within her riding. She's an excellent retail politician and that's a compliment."
<snip>
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-one-and-only-person-to-blame-for-the-snc-lavalin-scandal/
The one and only person to blame for the SNC-Lavalin scandal
Andrew MacDougall: It was Justin Trudeau making bad calls every step of the way. He is the sole author of his government's misfortune.
by Andrew MacDougall Apr 5, 2019
<snip>
Instead of barking at the doctor for diagnosing the disease the Liberals should instead thank Wilson-Raybould and Philpott for highlighting the pathology. Because there is one person to blame for the eight weeks lost to the oozing SNC-Lavalin scandal: Justin Trudeau.
It was Justin Trudeau's advisors who took meeting after meeting with SNC-Lavalin as the company repeatedly begged for a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) regime in Canada.
It was Justin Trudeau who acquiesced and stuffed the legislation creating DPAs into the 2018 budget.
It was Justin Trudeau who told Jody Wilson-Raybould to find a solution when the independent Public Prosecution Service of Canada rejected SNC's application for a DPA.
It was Justin Trudeau who sent adviser after adviser after Wilson-Raybould and her advisers, including his advisers — Elder Marques and Mathieu Bouchard — who met with SNC more than anyone else.
It was Justin Trudeau that was in a mood to get the DPA done, and Justin Trudeau who sent Michael Wernick over to send a message that Wilson-Raybould's job was on the line if she didn't deliver one.
It was Justin Trudeau who pulled the trigger on the cabinet shuffle that sent Wilson-Raybould to Veterans Affairs, and Justin Trudeau who gagged his former minister from giving her side of the story on her resignation.
It was Justin Trudeau who lied and called the original Globe and Mail report "false", and Justin Trudeau who sanctioned his office to go after Wilson-Raybould off the record.
It was Justin Trudeau who gave what was advance-billed as an apology press conference and then forgot to deliver an apology. It was Justin Trudeau who tossed into word salad every time the opposition asked a pointed question about any of it.
It was Justin Trudeau who kept changing his story, and Justin Trudeau who kept calling interference in the criminal justice system a difference of interpretation.
And it was Justin Trudeau who shot the messengers and Justin Trudeau who gaslighted them in the presence of young female leaders, all because he can't take one good look in the mirror.
If Liberals want to be mad at anybody, they should direct their anger to Justin Trudeau, who is the sole author of his government's misfortune.
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/liberal-support-just-bleeding-all-over-the-place/
'Liberal support just bleeding all over the place'
A deep dive into recent Angus Reid data shows Liberal support is moving to the Conservatives, NDP and Green parties - a stampede away, rather than a dash toward any particular tent
by Shannon Proudfoot Apr 5, 2019
<snip>
Vote retention - the proportion of people who voted for a party in 2015 who say they would choose the same party again this fall - is "rock solid" for the Conservatives, at 88 per cent, while the Liberals would retain 58 per cent of their 2015 voters. And that erstwhile Liberal support has been sprinkled relatively equitably between the Conservatives, NDP and Green party. That suggests that the shift is a stampede away, rather than a dash toward any particular tent.
"It does suggest that the bleed or the fleeing from the party at the moment has more to do with an anger at the party and a rejection of what people are seeing today from their government and from their prime minister," Kurl says. "[If] we saw a clear signal that all of that vote was going NDP, or Conservative, then it would say to me, okay, this has to do with the other leader more than it has to do with the own goals or the self-inflicted wounds of the Liberals. People are just sort of scattering in all directions, it's a bit of a blast radius."
The big questions are whether the Liberals can draw those exasperated voters back, whether they can do it by October, and how durable that electoral anger is, says Kurl. Those kinds of questions quickly slide into the realm of strategic voting and open up the possibility of a left-of-centre drift to the NDP, she notes, and while Jagmeet Singh's languishing approval numbers would seem to make that unlikely, elections are full of "never say never" oddities (please see: Mulcair, Thomas c. 2015).
In Angus Reid's polling, Kurl sees a significant gender split, with men far more likely to say they will vote Conservative and the Liberals leading among women. The Liberals just tabled a budget filled with measures aimed at dealing with poverty, income inequality and affordability - all issues that tend to resonate with female voters - but it has been virtually impossible for the government to make any of that messaging heard over the din of SNC.
"If there is a saviour right now for the party, it will be the female vote," says Kurl - but the optics and main characters in this saga are doing them no favours on that front. "They need women. And who are the faces and the standard-bearers of this conflict? It's two very strong women."
<snip>
It's a cautionary tale for building a political party's brand so firmly around the persona of the leader, says Kurl, and Trudeau and his party are in a uniquely difficult spot for navigating around it. When Jean Chretien faced an unfavourable personal brand, dubbed "yesterday's man" before he won the leadership of the Liberal party in 1990, he made everything about the team around him, but that does not seem like a plausible option for the Trudeau Liberals.
"This is more than an issue of emphasis. Justin Trudeau has been the party. He has been the brand, he has been the face of government," says Kurl. "Justin Trudeau has never talked about the team, and the party has never talked about the team; it's been the Justin Trudeau show. When the ratings start to go south for the Justin Trudeau show, people are not going to say, 'Well, there's a whole bunch of key supporting players here and an ensemble cast, and the storyline is really interesting so I'm going to stick with it."
Instead, she says, "They change the channel."
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-it-will-be-a-while-before-vogue-calls-on-trudeau-again?video_autoplay=true
Rex Murphy: It will be a while before Vogue calls on Trudeau again
Sans halo, he now walks the ground like every other politician, as pedestrian as the rest of them
Rex Murphy April 5, 2019 4:18 PM EDT
<snip>
It'll be a while before Vogue comes calling again. Or Vanity Fair, oracle of the yuppie woke, teases out such spellbinding headlines as "Let Justin Trudeau in His Pajamas Brighten Your Monday," followed by the beautiful kite tail of a sub-head "Not all superheroes wear capes." Which is shorthand for saying that the "stylishness" component of the Trudeau brand, the meretricious appeal of the politician as celebrity, is done and gone. The charisma of celebrity as opposed to the celebrity of accomplishment or real achievement, is always a thin halo, and can vanish with a tweet. Once evaporated it never returns.
<snip>
What a mockery the tactics of the past few weeks have made of that pledge, that electing the Trudeau team would drag Canada out of the demon pit of "Harper-style politics." Canadian comedy is not nearly as good as it thinks it is, but the purge after-spin has provided a few lines that out-Leacock Stephen Leacock's best for magnificently absurd humour.
On how the Liberals are "doing politics differently," Seamus O'Regan, among the most mobile of the Trudeau cabinet, bested his own (surely immortal) "O Captain! Our Captain!" tweet - the Everest summit of courtier sycophancy - when he came up with this one-liner for CTV: "I think it's a real strength that it took us time to come to terms with this." Absolutely. And just think how much stronger the party would be if it had dragged it out even longer. No pain, no gain, I suppose.
Superb bon mot that it was, O'Regan's must bend the knee and take the silver to the real howler than came from fellow standup artist/cabinet minister Marie-Claude Bibeau: "If we had done politics like it used to be done, they would have been kicked out two months ago ... this is why we say it's doing politics differently." Translation: we're like Stephen Harper, only slower. Harper in lead boots.
<snip>
Twelve hours after firing the two women that - I think it's fair to say - the majority of the Daughters of the Vote most wanted to meet, or looked up to, Mr. Trudeau mumbled-stumbled through the most awkward six minutes of his none too distinguished oratorical life. At one point he appeared not to remember Jane Philpott's name. Perhaps a kinder explanation is that he was too embarrassed to say it. He did show up - he must be given credit for that.
But what could he say to the gathering of young feminists, as it were, the morning after? He wandered, as is his wont, through a forest of non-sequiturs, referenced a fantasy feud between Jody Wilson-Raybould and Chrystia Freeland ("I know nobody in here wants to have to pick who to believe between Jody Wilson-Raybould and Chrystia Freeland"), tried his best to ignore that he was speaking to the backs of about 50 or so of his audience, muttered the obligatory reference to diversity, something about trust and teams, and things went more or less downhill from there.
<snip>
Mr. Trudeau is 47, white, and male. A few more years and he'll hit the trifecta he so abundantly abhors.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/04/05/the-liberals-have-abandoned-their-moral-principles-and-its-justin-trudeaus-fault.html
The Liberals have abandoned their moral principles and it's Justin Trudeau's fault
By Rosie DiManno Star Fri., April 5, 2019
It is dismaying to me, a political agnostic, that thuggery is now attached to the federal Liberal party.
It is appalling to me, a feminist, that so many who claim to respect women, who call themselves feminists - most especially the piously feminist prime minister but all his acolytes in the partisan media - have turned themselves inside-out to rationalize the bullying of female Liberal ministers. Because, readily admitted even, the existential threat of Andrew Scheer at 24 Sussex Drive looms as such a calamity, come the October election, that anything, anything, would be preferable, up to and including the abandonment of all moral principles.
It is grotesque, to me, how small and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had become - lifted on the shoulders of his party disciples - trying to make a virtue out of the jettisoning of two women who dared to vouchsafe integrity, falling afoul of the caucus cabal.
While it is marginally understandable that Jody Wilson-Raybould had to be cut loose despite the ugly optics of ditching the country's first Indigenous justice minister and attorney general - before she was shuffled to veteran affairs in January, at the dawn (though we didn't yet know that) of the SNC-Lavalin scandal - her utter expulsion this week, the pariah-making of an ethical individual is confounding in its berserk timing, seven weeks into the shemozzle and guaranteed to do the exact opposite of bringing this ruinous episode to an end.
<snip>
There is no redeeming dimension to Trudeau's brutality. He has dissembled and shammed his way through nearly two months of tortuous squabble. If the Liberal party is in crisis, the seeds were sown in the PMO and a PM of towering hauteur.
A phoney feminist to boot.
To be worn only like a rose on his lapel.
Supporters in Vancouver riding would back Wilson-Raybould as an Independent
Laura Kane and Hina Alam, The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, April 3, 2019 4:35AM EDT
VANCOUVER - Supporters of Jody Wilson-Raybould in her Vancouver Granville riding say they're disappointed she was ejected from the Liberal caucus but they would back her in the federal election if she ran as an Independent.
Tracy Beshara, executive director of Marpole Oakridge Family Place in south Vancouver, said she has met Wilson-Raybould and she is a woman of "integrity and quality."
"All that is going on with her is a disappointment, and we support her fully," said Beshara. "She's honest. She's real and she can tell you both sides. She won't tell you what you want to hear. She'll tell you the way it is. Most politicians don't do that."
<snip>
Throughout it all, many supporters in Vancouver Granville have stood by their MP, who they describe as direct, honest and genuine. Beshara said she hadn't kept up with every news development but she would "absolutely" support Wilson-Raybould if she ran independently or for a different party.
<snip>
Epperson said if Wilson-Raybould chose to run as an Independent, he'd volunteer for her campaign, as an individual and not as a representative of the church.
"Just after she was elected she reached out to me - I didn't reach out to her - recognizing we were an important constituency within her riding. She's an excellent retail politician and that's a compliment."
<snip>
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-one-and-only-person-to-blame-for-the-snc-lavalin-scandal/
The one and only person to blame for the SNC-Lavalin scandal
Andrew MacDougall: It was Justin Trudeau making bad calls every step of the way. He is the sole author of his government's misfortune.
by Andrew MacDougall Apr 5, 2019
<snip>
Instead of barking at the doctor for diagnosing the disease the Liberals should instead thank Wilson-Raybould and Philpott for highlighting the pathology. Because there is one person to blame for the eight weeks lost to the oozing SNC-Lavalin scandal: Justin Trudeau.
It was Justin Trudeau's advisors who took meeting after meeting with SNC-Lavalin as the company repeatedly begged for a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) regime in Canada.
It was Justin Trudeau who acquiesced and stuffed the legislation creating DPAs into the 2018 budget.
It was Justin Trudeau who told Jody Wilson-Raybould to find a solution when the independent Public Prosecution Service of Canada rejected SNC's application for a DPA.
It was Justin Trudeau who sent adviser after adviser after Wilson-Raybould and her advisers, including his advisers — Elder Marques and Mathieu Bouchard — who met with SNC more than anyone else.
It was Justin Trudeau that was in a mood to get the DPA done, and Justin Trudeau who sent Michael Wernick over to send a message that Wilson-Raybould's job was on the line if she didn't deliver one.
It was Justin Trudeau who pulled the trigger on the cabinet shuffle that sent Wilson-Raybould to Veterans Affairs, and Justin Trudeau who gagged his former minister from giving her side of the story on her resignation.
It was Justin Trudeau who lied and called the original Globe and Mail report "false", and Justin Trudeau who sanctioned his office to go after Wilson-Raybould off the record.
It was Justin Trudeau who gave what was advance-billed as an apology press conference and then forgot to deliver an apology. It was Justin Trudeau who tossed into word salad every time the opposition asked a pointed question about any of it.
It was Justin Trudeau who kept changing his story, and Justin Trudeau who kept calling interference in the criminal justice system a difference of interpretation.
And it was Justin Trudeau who shot the messengers and Justin Trudeau who gaslighted them in the presence of young female leaders, all because he can't take one good look in the mirror.
If Liberals want to be mad at anybody, they should direct their anger to Justin Trudeau, who is the sole author of his government's misfortune.
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/liberal-support-just-bleeding-all-over-the-place/
'Liberal support just bleeding all over the place'
A deep dive into recent Angus Reid data shows Liberal support is moving to the Conservatives, NDP and Green parties - a stampede away, rather than a dash toward any particular tent
by Shannon Proudfoot Apr 5, 2019
<snip>
Vote retention - the proportion of people who voted for a party in 2015 who say they would choose the same party again this fall - is "rock solid" for the Conservatives, at 88 per cent, while the Liberals would retain 58 per cent of their 2015 voters. And that erstwhile Liberal support has been sprinkled relatively equitably between the Conservatives, NDP and Green party. That suggests that the shift is a stampede away, rather than a dash toward any particular tent.
"It does suggest that the bleed or the fleeing from the party at the moment has more to do with an anger at the party and a rejection of what people are seeing today from their government and from their prime minister," Kurl says. "[If] we saw a clear signal that all of that vote was going NDP, or Conservative, then it would say to me, okay, this has to do with the other leader more than it has to do with the own goals or the self-inflicted wounds of the Liberals. People are just sort of scattering in all directions, it's a bit of a blast radius."
The big questions are whether the Liberals can draw those exasperated voters back, whether they can do it by October, and how durable that electoral anger is, says Kurl. Those kinds of questions quickly slide into the realm of strategic voting and open up the possibility of a left-of-centre drift to the NDP, she notes, and while Jagmeet Singh's languishing approval numbers would seem to make that unlikely, elections are full of "never say never" oddities (please see: Mulcair, Thomas c. 2015).
In Angus Reid's polling, Kurl sees a significant gender split, with men far more likely to say they will vote Conservative and the Liberals leading among women. The Liberals just tabled a budget filled with measures aimed at dealing with poverty, income inequality and affordability - all issues that tend to resonate with female voters - but it has been virtually impossible for the government to make any of that messaging heard over the din of SNC.
"If there is a saviour right now for the party, it will be the female vote," says Kurl - but the optics and main characters in this saga are doing them no favours on that front. "They need women. And who are the faces and the standard-bearers of this conflict? It's two very strong women."
<snip>
It's a cautionary tale for building a political party's brand so firmly around the persona of the leader, says Kurl, and Trudeau and his party are in a uniquely difficult spot for navigating around it. When Jean Chretien faced an unfavourable personal brand, dubbed "yesterday's man" before he won the leadership of the Liberal party in 1990, he made everything about the team around him, but that does not seem like a plausible option for the Trudeau Liberals.
"This is more than an issue of emphasis. Justin Trudeau has been the party. He has been the brand, he has been the face of government," says Kurl. "Justin Trudeau has never talked about the team, and the party has never talked about the team; it's been the Justin Trudeau show. When the ratings start to go south for the Justin Trudeau show, people are not going to say, 'Well, there's a whole bunch of key supporting players here and an ensemble cast, and the storyline is really interesting so I'm going to stick with it."
Instead, she says, "They change the channel."
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-it-will-be-a-while-before-vogue-calls-on-trudeau-again?video_autoplay=true
Rex Murphy: It will be a while before Vogue calls on Trudeau again
Sans halo, he now walks the ground like every other politician, as pedestrian as the rest of them
Rex Murphy April 5, 2019 4:18 PM EDT
<snip>
It'll be a while before Vogue comes calling again. Or Vanity Fair, oracle of the yuppie woke, teases out such spellbinding headlines as "Let Justin Trudeau in His Pajamas Brighten Your Monday," followed by the beautiful kite tail of a sub-head "Not all superheroes wear capes." Which is shorthand for saying that the "stylishness" component of the Trudeau brand, the meretricious appeal of the politician as celebrity, is done and gone. The charisma of celebrity as opposed to the celebrity of accomplishment or real achievement, is always a thin halo, and can vanish with a tweet. Once evaporated it never returns.
<snip>
What a mockery the tactics of the past few weeks have made of that pledge, that electing the Trudeau team would drag Canada out of the demon pit of "Harper-style politics." Canadian comedy is not nearly as good as it thinks it is, but the purge after-spin has provided a few lines that out-Leacock Stephen Leacock's best for magnificently absurd humour.
On how the Liberals are "doing politics differently," Seamus O'Regan, among the most mobile of the Trudeau cabinet, bested his own (surely immortal) "O Captain! Our Captain!" tweet - the Everest summit of courtier sycophancy - when he came up with this one-liner for CTV: "I think it's a real strength that it took us time to come to terms with this." Absolutely. And just think how much stronger the party would be if it had dragged it out even longer. No pain, no gain, I suppose.
Superb bon mot that it was, O'Regan's must bend the knee and take the silver to the real howler than came from fellow standup artist/cabinet minister Marie-Claude Bibeau: "If we had done politics like it used to be done, they would have been kicked out two months ago ... this is why we say it's doing politics differently." Translation: we're like Stephen Harper, only slower. Harper in lead boots.
<snip>
Twelve hours after firing the two women that - I think it's fair to say - the majority of the Daughters of the Vote most wanted to meet, or looked up to, Mr. Trudeau mumbled-stumbled through the most awkward six minutes of his none too distinguished oratorical life. At one point he appeared not to remember Jane Philpott's name. Perhaps a kinder explanation is that he was too embarrassed to say it. He did show up - he must be given credit for that.
But what could he say to the gathering of young feminists, as it were, the morning after? He wandered, as is his wont, through a forest of non-sequiturs, referenced a fantasy feud between Jody Wilson-Raybould and Chrystia Freeland ("I know nobody in here wants to have to pick who to believe between Jody Wilson-Raybould and Chrystia Freeland"), tried his best to ignore that he was speaking to the backs of about 50 or so of his audience, muttered the obligatory reference to diversity, something about trust and teams, and things went more or less downhill from there.
<snip>
Mr. Trudeau is 47, white, and male. A few more years and he'll hit the trifecta he so abundantly abhors.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/04/05/the-liberals-have-abandoned-their-moral-principles-and-its-justin-trudeaus-fault.html
The Liberals have abandoned their moral principles and it's Justin Trudeau's fault
By Rosie DiManno Star Fri., April 5, 2019
It is dismaying to me, a political agnostic, that thuggery is now attached to the federal Liberal party.
It is appalling to me, a feminist, that so many who claim to respect women, who call themselves feminists - most especially the piously feminist prime minister but all his acolytes in the partisan media - have turned themselves inside-out to rationalize the bullying of female Liberal ministers. Because, readily admitted even, the existential threat of Andrew Scheer at 24 Sussex Drive looms as such a calamity, come the October election, that anything, anything, would be preferable, up to and including the abandonment of all moral principles.
It is grotesque, to me, how small and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had become - lifted on the shoulders of his party disciples - trying to make a virtue out of the jettisoning of two women who dared to vouchsafe integrity, falling afoul of the caucus cabal.
While it is marginally understandable that Jody Wilson-Raybould had to be cut loose despite the ugly optics of ditching the country's first Indigenous justice minister and attorney general - before she was shuffled to veteran affairs in January, at the dawn (though we didn't yet know that) of the SNC-Lavalin scandal - her utter expulsion this week, the pariah-making of an ethical individual is confounding in its berserk timing, seven weeks into the shemozzle and guaranteed to do the exact opposite of bringing this ruinous episode to an end.
<snip>
There is no redeeming dimension to Trudeau's brutality. He has dissembled and shammed his way through nearly two months of tortuous squabble. If the Liberal party is in crisis, the seeds were sown in the PMO and a PM of towering hauteur.
A phoney feminist to boot.
To be worn only like a rose on his lapel.