CPC Leadership Ballot, Co-op Boards, Shooting in Winnipeg
May 2, 2017
This week, I finally got my Conservative Party leadership ballot, which I promptly filled out and put in the mail.
Though I don’t think either one has a realistic chance of winning, I voted with my conscience and ranked Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost one and two, respectively, on my ballot. Their views most closely resemble mine, and as Lemieux said when I saw him here in St. Catharines, ranking them highly sends a message to the party. There are millions who agree with us and it’s time we spoke up and had our voices heard rather than just go with the traffic.
Beyond that, my next two choices, in order, were Maxime Bernier and Andrew Scheer. I liked a lot of what I heard from both of them and I think both would make a good prime minister. But I had to put one ahead of the other and chose Bernier. It was nice, however, to have a choice between two excellent candidates rather than having to choose the least undesirable option, which was the case with almost every mayoral election in Winnipeg I voted in.
Now without the threat of Kevin O’Leary, I could have simply stopped there and not marked any more names, but I used all 10 of my choices to do what I could ward off any possibility of Liberal-lite Michael Chong becoming leader. In order, I chose Steven Blaney, Erin O’Toole, Andrew Saxton, Rick Peterson, Chris Alexander and finally, Lisa Raitt.
Based on Raitt’s disastrous performance in Jordan a few weeks ago, which I detailed in a recent posting, it hurt to even mark her as my 10th choice, but if it came down to it, I would still rather see her as the leader than Chong, Kellie Leitch or Deepak Obhrai, a man with a lower profile than most members of the Witness Protection Program.
I do agree with some of her views, but Leitch earned her way completely off my ballot thanks to a mean-spirited campaign she was waging against Bernier. Other candidates were certainly engaged in spirited debate with each other, but by and large, they handled it all in a much more professional manner. Throughout the leadership campaign, Leitch impressed me as a conservative’s answer to Monica Lewinsky’s ex-boyfriend’s wife.
I was pleased to see that the ballot itself was simply listed in alphabetical order without any comments or endorsements from Party executives, unlike the case with the brochure for the MEC board of directors election I got in the mail this week. MEC, along with many other co-operatives and credit unions, have been taking it upon themselves to endorse or recommend candidates who best fit their values.
The board’s values, that is. Not yours.
What amounts to a shift from a member-focused to a board-focused entity was a point I made on social media this week, to which MEC responded, “We strongly encourage members to vote for whoever they want. But here’s why we recommend candidates ...” In other words, we really want you to vote for our preferred candidates, but we really can’t stop you from considering the others. Much as we’d like to.
Seriously, imagine the outrage if any sitting government at the federal or provincial level moved it’s party’s candidate to the top of the ballot above the caption, “The Government of Canada recommends you vote for this candidate.” There would be rioting in the streets if any governing party even as much as proposed such a thing. Yet this practice is growing like a mushroom cloud among co-operatives and credit unions whose boards either think we’re too stupid to pick a candidate on our own without their “help” or just want to solidify their own positions by bringing in as many like-minded people as possible.
This is exactly why federal legislation is needed to put a stop this detestable practice from coast to coast. But I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Finally, I read about the recent shooting in the skywalk in downtown Winnipeg, a place that has seen my shadow a lot more than once. Far from being in an isolated dark alley in the middle of the night, this confrontation between an officer and an allegedly armed thug took place in the middle of the lunch hour, when the skywalk is always packed. As a library employee said in the Socialism Illustrated article, “It’s too close to home.”
Indeed.
When I lived there, I could just have easily been the thug’s target, and just like the incident when a Winnipeg Transit driver was fatally stabbed, the only real surprise is that such a thing hasn’t happened before now. Winnipeg has been a city in serious decline for many years, long before I left, and I was far from alone in referring to it as Canada’s toilet bowl.
Yet another reason why I’m relieved to be away from that part of the world.
| Previous post | Next post |