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What's the future for the Conservative Party?

tiffer24 said:
And now, curtesy of CPC candidate Deepak Obhrai, another hilarious episode from "My Dinner With Vladmir"...
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Not exactly funny unless you intended to offend on behalf of your government. Perhaps he should watch out what the FSB has on him instead eh, because we might just find out it wasn't just his fish that was small.

As to intentional slights, hard to beat the anecdotal (and quite possibly false) handshake story between Khrushchev and Zhou Enlai.

AoD
 
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tiffer24 said:
O'Leary mulls auctioning off senate seats...

http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/senate-seats-for-sale-o-leary-says-he-d-consider-it-1.3240864

Kevin O’Leary is continuing to float unconventional ideas as he mulls a bid for the Conservative leadership -- including allowing people to buy Senate seats.

“I don’t know why we can’t have a hundred thousand or a couple of hundred thousand committed each year per senator,” the businessman and celebrity investor said in an interview with Evan Solomon, host of CTV’s Question Period.

“Instead of it being a cost centre to Canada, why can’t it be a profit centre?”
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Why? Let's aim high - it would have been easier and more profitable to make the state the sole provider of illicit drugs. None of this seat auction BS netting pocket change.

AoD
 
Ironically, O'Leary's proposal is not much different than what has happened for decades (centuries?) in the U.K., where big political donors/supporters are sometimes rewarded with life peerages and a seat in the House of Lords (among other rewards). Not as blatant as what O'Leary is off-the-cuff proposing here, but effectively the purchase of a seat in the upper house nonetheless.

In Canada, the Liberals and Tories over the years have appointed all sorts of political bagmen to the Senate as rewards for loyal service. The Tories were far more blatant in appointing Senators whose primarily role was to fundraise for the Conservative Party, although the Liberals did the same thing to a lesser degree (in part because the political contribution rules were different then). Both parties for the most part appointed party loyalists. In a way, many Senators here effectively paid for their seats, although both Canadian parties have tended to be a little less blatant about appointing large donors to the Senate (at least compared to the U.K. Tories who seem to have no shame when it comes to dispensing rewards like this). This has presumably ended under Trudeau, but we'll see.

In Canada, though, why would anyone pay $100,000-200,000/year to be a senator? It has some perks, but it would be cheaper to spend your own money to buy those perks, and many more. It carries some prestige, but not that much, and certainly nothing like being able to call oneself Baron Moneybags as in the U.K. The salary is just under $140,000, and it's not as if the position carries with it tremendous opportunities for lucrative recompense. Constitutionally, a Senator has a vote on legislation, but I can only presume the outrage if unelected senators who openly bought their seats tried to defeat the will of the elected House of Commons. I understand why a political hack would want to be appointed to the Senate, but it's not quite clear why someone would want to pay annually for the privilege.

O'Leary is counting on the fact that some people don't think too hard and having Senators pay to be in the Senate sounds appealing in a very uninformed, superficial way. File under "Stop the gravy train"-type rhetoric.
 
Funny story about my dad. He got a call from the Leitch campaign. His answer was simple: he would vote for O'Leary or Bernier. It was a short call.
 
The future of the Conservative party should be oblivion and they should be banned. Seriously this Kevin O'Leary clown is a Trump wannabe. For those right wingers and this forum is full of them who say "You can't do that. It's free speech." look what happened in the USA. Trump is now president and he's already trying to round up minorities, blacks, latinos, Muslims, gays, Jews and everybody who's not a white heterosexual male and arrest them. Don't believe me, Hitler started the same way. That shuld nOT happen in Canada.
 

I miss Harper.

I wish I got to see this side of him while he was in office. How is it that heads of state/governments become so wise and reasonable the moment they leave office?
 
http://globalnews.ca/news/3207501/kevin-oleary-justin-trudeau-conservative-leadership-race-poll/

If the federal Conservatives want a shot at regaining power in 2019, their best bet would be with Kevin O’Leary as leader, a recent Ipsos poll results suggest.

“Head-to-head, it’s competitive between [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and O’Leary,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, which conducted the poll on behalf of Global News.
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  • With O’Leary as leader, the Conservatives would sit at 37 per cent, the Liberals at 38 per cent and the NDP at 17 per cent.
  • With Bernier at the helm, the Conservatives would earn only 28 per cent of the vote, moving the Liberals up to 42 per cent and the NDP up to 20 per cent.
  • And if Kellie Leitch was elected leader, her party’s support would shrink to 26 per cent, while the Liberals sat at 42 per cent and the NDP would have 21 per cent.
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And probably most interesting:

Though the vast majority of decided voters indicated they’d vote their party regardless of who’s leading the Conservatives, more than two in 10 NDP voters appeared ready to jump ship to the Conservatives if O’Leary was leader.

“We’ve seen this trend elsewhere. The idea that it’s exclusively people from the right that are attracted to the populist message is incorrect,” Bricker said, pointing to former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, the successful Brexit referendum in the U.K. and America’s election of President Donald Trump as examples.
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Populism is on a winning streak around the world and could come to Canada in 2019 (or earlier in some provincial elections).
 
Migos said:
And probably most interesting:

Populism is on a winning streak around the world and could come to Canada in 2019 (or earlier in some provincial elections).
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Isn't there some idea that Canada lags behind political trends (eg. Harper came after Bush, Trudeau came after Obama, etc.) stateside, if not in the Western world as a whole.

I don't know how accurate it is or why Canada in particular would tend to be late on trends, but I've heard it been said before.
 
Migos said:
Populism is on a winning streak around the world and could come to Canada in 2019 (or earlier in some provincial elections).
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These are example of celebrity worship more than populism. It started with Obama in 2008, then Trudeau, then Trump.

McCain, Harper and (to a lessor degree) Clinton were more just quiet, boring people who campaigned on policy.
 
Trudeau for his faults is a 'people person' and I think can read the tea leaves...I actually think he saw the victory of Trump likely...

Nonetheless the Liberals wont change the electoral system as they will think it will favour them and in about 10 years we will have a Tory Majority with 39% of the vote again lol
 
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