Liepert, who was interviewed on CBC’s “As It Happens” on Wednesday, said the Tories had strayed off message, and put the blame squarely on the party’s campaign manager, Jenni Byrne.
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“And we will offer that alternative as a party that has a solid basis, including in Quebec”. Even The Economist, the intellectual voice of globalized conservatism, called the prime minister’s campaign “Muslim bashing”.
Yet he was right.
It’s unfortunate, McVety concludes, but Canadians can expect the Trudeau government to be very hostile toward Israel. It is Harper’s party and now it is Harper’s debacle. The Liberals received 39.5 percent of the overall vote compared to 32 percent for the Conservatives and 19.6 for the New Democrats.
But in terms of the popular vote, the Conservatives dropped only a few points below their majority government position in 2011 – from 39.6 to 31.9 per cent.
In a move that baffled many foreign observers, Canada abruptly closed its embassy in Tehran in September 2012 and gave Iran’s diplomats five days to leave the country, calling Iran “the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today”.
Not everywhere. The Conservatives were virtually wiped out in Atlantic Canada. He is Alberta-bound, where he will find himself in a Looking-Glass World in which two of his fiercest political rivals, Premier Rachel Notley and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, hold sway for the foreseeable future. Remember August? Around dinner tables, aficionados of politics toyed with the hypothesis that the once-mighty Liberal Party of Canada was on the way to extinction, like the British Liberal Party that disappeared in 1988.
“On every issue, polling shows Canadians are with the government”.
Asked if he’s considering a run for the leadership of the Conservative Party, MacKay said “that’s not on the table”.
It can and did backfire – particularly among so-called ethnic voters in the 905 region outside Toronto.
But the essential Harperist credo on the need to take an uncompromising stand against terrorism at home and overseas rings true for many voters.
“The Liberals will never vote Conservative – so we need to always rally the Conservative base”.
Rathgeber condemned this divisive strategy again at a recent all-candidates’ meeting when the Conservative candidate in the St. Albert-Edmonton Riding, Michael Cooper, tried unsuccessfully to scare the bejeepers out of the crowd with suggestions jihadists are lurking everywhere.
“When the party conducts its internal review, over the course of the next number of months, this one is going to be very thorough and we’re going to identify the mistakes that were made, the processes that weren’t followed”.
But those who ache for the party to return to its old Red Tory roots of Progressive Conservativism may well be disappointed. He says there has been no communication of Harper’s status to MPs – or at least, not to him. His cuts to the GST are now accepted by all parties.
Monday turned out to be a Black Monday for the outgoing prime minister, Stephen Harper, and his Conservative party.
Canada shifted to the center-right under Harper, who lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided climate change legislation, and strongly supported the oil and gas extraction industry.
But the Liberals are also in favour of new heavy-oil pipelines. They say only that they will be smarter about getting them approved. “It was the most inappropriate conversation I’ve ever had with somebody who’s running a campaign, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who run campaigns, for 35 years”.
And while they mocked his “barbaric cultural practices” bill, the only substantive aspect of it that they objected to in the Commons was the name.
In short, much of Harper’s agenda seems destined to remain in place.
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But the kicker of a contention that this election was not about Stephen Harper?
