Probably no other leader, including Justin Trudeau, has landed in a party leadership with less real-world work experience than Pierre Poilievre, says Don Martin in a column for CTVNews.ca. But Poilievre’s an able communicator, and this weekend’s Conservative convention is a golden opportunity for him to sell himself as PM-in-waiting.
I feel frustrated that we’re going to choose a trainwreck of a government that only cares about slogans and making life worse for workers. Their party is the political equivalent of nihilists right now and they don’t actually care about anything except wearing a CPC pin and tallying votes. Bitcoin Milhouse was a disgrace as finance critic and he’s going to be an awful leader if he wins. I haven’t always hated all CPC leadership, but this crop is undisputably utter shit.
This is happening primarily because the centrist party is too proud to drop their leader after the last election clearly showed voters were tired of their leadership. They’ve been slow to act on important issues like housing and never even bothered playing goalie against criticisms that they don’t understand finances. Now that we’re in financially hard times, that reputation has metastisized into a full blown cancer that will kill them, but it’s too late for treatment, so we’ll just get to see the Liberals get more desperate and play identity politics during the election.
And the NDP won’t dump their leadership either. Nobody really likes Jagmeet Singh, he’s not a low/middle class and doesn’t come from that background, but he comes across like he pretends to. Their policies last election were foolish and would have pushed the parts of Canada’s economy that we actually do well south of the border. They need a better grassroots candidate and to rethink how the economy works and match it with Canada’s talents. I applaud them on wanting to improve housing but I don’t trust them to win or do it.
The next election we’re doomed to repeat the following outcome: left/center votes split to NDP, the liberals lose a ton of seats (see Ontario), people feeling the financial pinch vote Conservative to try and soften it.
Then watch what happens to environmental regulations and healthcare, because the conservatives controlling all levels will drop it promising lower taxes (wait for abortion to be deemed elective and not covered anymore or supported in public hospitals for example). Then we’ll all start voting Liberal or NDP at the provincial level when we realize we didn’t actually want to gur our social systems, and we’ll run that way for two more election cycles, then we’ll rotate back.
I would love to support the NDP, I’m a union tradesman and they used to be my party. Jack Layton should have been PM in 2011, and it still hurts thinking of how quickly we lost him shortly thereafter. Jagmeet doesn’t do it for me, you’re right he comes off as a pretender trying to lower himself to be one of “us”.
I’m optimistic on Poilievre playing hardball with the country for what I think matters most in this election which is inflation and housing. I don’t like everything he has to say, especially the crypto bullshit which thankfully he dropped, but maybe he and the conservatives are what we need to get things back on track.
Maybe I’ve missed it but has Poilievre proposed anything for a housing or inflation fix? Most of what I’ve seen has just been platitudes about how Canadians are hurting and Trudeau is to blame. Obviously not untrue, people are suffering and Trudeau hasn’t done enough but saying that is not a solution.
Or I missed his proposals; I try not to get too focused on candidates this far before an election.
The plan so far is to build 1 million homes in three years. They plan on attaining this by playing hardball with those who get in the way, municipalities and the NIMBYS who govern them are going to have federal funding withheld for getting in the way of new housing starts. There’s also going to be extra funds granted for jurisdictions that go beyond the “quota”. A lot of our housing issues are due to red tape and local government interference. To paraphrase, he’s said if those municipalities don’t want to play ball that’s fine, but their easy federal cash is going to be given to those that make it easy to build housing. As for inflation if I recall correctly he wants to limit new carbon taxes, I’d have to look up if he wants to reverse all or some of what is already in place.
Bro shut the fuck up. “Build more homes” won’t do shit unless they’re affordable, which they 100% will not be from the cons. Look at Doug Ford for exactly what they’ll be doing. They’ll blast through environmental protections and force municipalities to build costly, unsustainable sprawl that will get bought up by corporations and speculators trying to make a profit.
As for inflation, carbon taxes have 0 impact whatsoever. Inflation is being driven by corporate greed, which will get even worse with the cons.
I have a bridge to sell you. None of that shit will be affordable. Ontario is a good example of the damage this fucker will do.
He gave us dental care so at least he’s pretending to understand the working class. Or at the very least doing what is proven to be cheaper in the long run