Conservative

Tuesday September 13, 2022

September 13, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday September 13, 2022

Firebrand Poilievre now starts the hard search for wider support as a no-pivot party leader

It’s a daring experiment by the Conservatives – overwhelmingly elect a hard-right fire-breathing leader and expect enough voters to gravitate in his direction to win a federal election.

September 14, 2021

That wasn’t the case with post-Harper leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, who shifted right-wing positions toward the mainstream in what became a futile effort to find broader voter support.

But there’ll be no waffling in the political winds by steamrolled-to-victory Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre; no pivoting to a kinder, gentler, mushy middle to win over voters. That’s just not in Poilievre’s DNA.

This makes Saturday’s commanding leadership win (with 68 per cent of the ballots) the easy part of Poilievre’s ultimate goal to become prime minister.

The baby-faced 43-year-old partisan pit-bull faces an even tougher test now to reposition himself as leading a viable government-in-waiting.

His next quest has bedevilled Conservatives and indeed majority-seeking Liberals for the last two decades: Where to find the crucial five per cent bump in voting support that it takes to win a federal election?

It’s not a simple search. His oratorical assault on elites, gatekeepers and the ArriveCAN app easily fires up those fed-up and frustrated with Justin Trudeau’s preachiness and his open-the-vault response to every politically correct cause.

But to corral votes further left politically and further east geographically would seem a mission impossible, particularly given that the issues he’s attacking are now losing some of their traction.

May 13, 2022

Poilievre’s preoccupied with “Justinflation” that’s easing slightly courtesy of a Bank of Governor he wants to fire. Meanwhile, the cryptocurrencies Poilievre advocated as a safe monetary alternative are in the dumpster and the illegal “Freedom Convoy” he supported for protesting vaccine mandates he opposed are a repressed memory and unlikely to be revived.

And then there’s his party unity problem.

While he delivered a classy outreach to rival camps on Saturday night, lasting damage has been done to the progressive wing of the party after his campaign trash-talked rivals as unworthy Conservatives from the opening bell of this seven-month leadership brawl. You can bet distant-second-place-finisher Jean Charest and his pathetic 16 per cent of voting party members will not lift a finger to help a Poilievre-led party. Ever.

That suggests we’ll see an Official Opposition that’s a Reform reincarnation – and that will be a tough sell in urban Ontario and B.C., a seat expansion challenge in Quebec and register at best modest support growth in Atlantic Canada.

All is not lost, of course.

August 5, 2022

The Liberal government is failing to deliver basic services on multiple fronts, has unleashed inflation-fuelling budgets and is led by a Prime Minister whose popularity is at a personal low. This government seems hell-bent to defeat itself.

Poilievre, for his part, is going to be a masterful Opposition leader, slicing and dicing the Trudeau Liberal cabinet with devastating quips and clips on the government’s economic failures and working-class letdowns, many of which were nicely previewed in his feisty victory speech.

Anyone watching Question Period starting next week will see his exquisitely entertaining eviscerations of Justin Trudeau, which will stand in favorable contrast to a Prime Minister who pretends not to hear his questions while reading staff-scripted responses.

And with two-thirds of the Conservative caucus behind him and that massive convention victory, Pierre Poilievre will undoubtedly get something Scheer and O’Toole didn’t – two election campaigns before the party does its usual dump-the-loser-leader routine.

December 3, 2015

But his longer-term success depends on swaying the undefined, unpredictable and risk-adverse voters in Central Canada and B.C. who usually christen the election winner and do it while sticking to his controversial positions.

If those voters don’t pivot to firebrand Pierre Poilievre, well, congratulations Conservatives — you’ve just voted yourself four more years or longer in Official Opposition. (Don Martin – CTV) 

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …

 

Friday August 26, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday August 26, 2022

Diagolon: What to know about the group whose founder shook Pierre Poilievre’s hand

Conservative leadership front-runner Pierre Poilievre came under fire this past weekend after an image of him shaking hands with Jeremy Mackenzie, the founder of a group known as “Diagolon,” emerged.

August 4, 2022

Shortly after the image surfaced on Mackenzie’s public Telegram channel, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called on Poilievre to “denounce Jeremy Mackenzie and Diagolon,” who he said are “designated as violent extremists by Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre.”

Singh was referring to a report from Press Progress, which last week published a document it obtained through access-to-information from the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, a federal organization that assesses threats of terrorism to Canada.

The document, dated Feb. 17, 2022, classifies Mackenzie as one of the “key anti-government IMVE (ideologically motivated violent extremism) adherents” that attended the so-called “freedom convoy” protests in Ottawa earlier this year.

The Canadian government has not expressed formal concern about Diagolon nor does it list the group as a terrorist entity.

“Over the course of my campaign I have shaken hands with literally tens of thousands of people at public rallies. It is impossible to do a background check on every single person who attends my events,” Poilievre’s campaign team said in response to Global News’ request for comment on Aug. 20.

“As I always have, I denounce racism and anyone who spreads it. I didn’t and don’t know or recognize this particular individual.”

So who is Mackenzie — and what is Diagolon? 

A drug-addled demonic goat named Phillip. A fictional diagonal country running from Alaska to Florida. An alleged plot to kill RCMP officers in Coutts, Alta.

There’s a common thread uniting these topics: they’re all, in some way, tied to Diagolon.

June 30, 2022

Founders of the group say it’s all one big joke, a meme, and they’re just a group of anti-establishment comedians. The demonic goat and fictional country were the product of “several edibles,” to hear Diagolon founder Jeremy Mackenzie tell it.

His telegram channel has more than 13,000 members, and he has at least 10,000 subscribers on YouTube.

But after a patch bearing the group’s insignia was found alongside weapons seized by the RCMP near the border in Coutts in February, some extremism experts say they are concerned about what the multi-hour livestreams could inspire their viewers to do.

“It’s not just an innocent podcast. It’s not just irony,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor at Queen’s University and expert on extremism.

These podcasters are giving their viewers a new “lens” through which to interpret their struggles, he said – one that paints government as the villain and societal collapse as inevitable. (Global) 

 

Thursday July 28, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday July 28, 2022

Stephen Harper says Pierre Poilievre has the best chance to win the next federal election

May 18, 2022

Former prime minister Stephen Harper says Pierre Poilievre is the Conservative leadership candidate with the best shot at leading the party to victory in the next federal election.

Harper’s declaration came in a Monday evening video posted to Facebook and Twitter, in which he described Poilievre’s ability to galvanize support from new members as a critical ingredient for success.

“That’s how we win the next federal election, and in my opinion, Pierre has made by far the strongest case,” Harper said.

Poilievre’s campaign claims to have signed up more than 300,000 members to vote in the leadership race.

Tuesday June 14, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday June 14, 2022

It’s time for Pierre Poilievre to get serious

May 13, 2022

Does Pierre Poilievre believe in vaccinating kids against measles and mumps and chickenpox? How about polio?

The question may sound ridiculous. After all, mass vaccination, compulsory in some provinces as a condition of attending school, has succeeded in all but eliminating these and other childhood diseases.

But to read Poilievre’s recent comments is to come away wondering whether the Ottawa MP and front-runner for the Conservative leadership might well roll all that back if he had the power to do so.

He introduced a private members’ bill in the House of Commons this month that would prevent the federal government from imposing vaccine mandates on travellers and federal workers. But in his tweets he goes further, saying the point is to “scrap all vaccine mandates and ban any and all future vaccine mandates” in the name of upholding “medical freedom.”

So what about that polio vaccine? It’s a provincial medical matter, of course, but in principle does he find requiring parents to get their kids vaccinated before they go to school (as Ontario, New Brunswick and to a lesser extent Manitoba do) an outrage against his concept of “medical freedom?”

May 18, 2022

Who knows? It’s all rather vague and perhaps that’s the point. In his quest for the national Conservative leadership it seems there are no limits on what Poilievre is prepared to say to curry favour with the angry anti-vax constituency in his party, the same people prone to disappear down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about globalist plots to run the world.

This matters more than ever now that Poilievre is heading to almost certain victory in the leadership race. His campaign says it’s signed up almost 312,000 new members — considerably more than the total enlisted by all candidates in the party’s last leadership contest two years ago.

Those new members have to actually vote, of course, and much depends on which ridings they come from. But it’s an enormous number and it means the leadership is now Poilievre’s to lose.

That would put him at the head of one of the country’s great national political parties. And with political pendulums swinging as they do, he’ll have a good shot at winning power once the public grows tired of the Liberals and Justin Trudeau. Anyone tempted to write Poilievre off because he sounds so extreme right now should think again.

February 2, 2022

Which is why his views on things like vaccine mandates and those conspiracy theories actually matter. How much of what he’s saying now is based on sincere belief, and how much is just a cynical bid for votes among the Conservatives’ furious fringe?

It’s hard to believe, for example, that he actually believes those conspiracy theories about how the World Economic Forum, the annual elite talk-shop in Davos, Switzerland, is actually ground zero for a quasi-socialist attempt to remake western economies.

In its wackier variations, conspiracists suggest Davos is behind a plot to invent COVID-19 just to sell vaccines, or even to use vaccinations as a way to inject 5G-enabled surveillance chips into unsuspecting citizens. Poilievre, we assume, sees this as the nonsense that it is. But he’s still happy to give the conspiracy-mongers political comfort.

February 8, 2022

The point is not that a Poilievre government would push all this on the public. But at the moment he is riding a tiger. It looks like it’s carrying him to the Conservative leadership, but he’s feeding forces that he may not be able to control down the road.

It’s time for Poilievre to get serious and make clear where he stands on all this. Becoming leader of one of the country’s national parties carries with it great responsibility. Fuelling fringe theories and casting doubt on whether he would fight a future pandemic fails that test spectacularly. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Friday May 20, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday May 20, 2022

Don’t look now, but conservatives are developing a culture of cancelling their own

Jason Kenney Cartoon Gallery

Jason Kenney was ousted by the Alberta United Conservative Party he created. Ed Fast was pushed out of his post as federal Conservative finance critic for suggesting it might hurt Canada’s financial credibility if political leaders such as Pierre Poilievre attack the independence of the Bank of Canada by promising to fire the Governor. That came a few months after Erin O’Toole was dumped as leader.

It sure seems like conservatives in Canada are turning their parties into meat grinders that are churning their own into pieces.

Oh, there are always reasons, from Mr. Kenney’s haughty disconnect to Mr. Fast’s daring to criticize a leadership contender to Mr. O’Toole’s identity flip-flops.

But while there have always been squabbles inside the conservative tent, more people are being cast out of it now – and more quickly. Say, what do you call a political culture where people keep getting cancelled?