Biggest crowd I’ve seen so far for Andrew Scheer. We’ll do a rough count and ask party for numbers as we do. The rally is being held in a Richmond Hill, Ontario, banquet hall. pic.twitter.com/F1oVNAqc7s— Katie Simpson (@CBCKatie) October 20, 2019
Well, Justin Trudeau attracted 1,500 people yesterday too. In Calgary. At midnight:
Saturday night in #Calgary, nearly midnight — at least 1,500 supporters waited HOURS in the cold to see @JustinTrudeau & @NirmalaNaidoo. Amazing.#ChooseForward #elxn43 #cdnpoli #abpoli pic.twitter.com/Urhoy4M1FD— Cameron Ahmad (@CameronAhmad) October 20, 2019
When the story of this campaign is written, it must include the number of times federal leaders were thrown off their message by the hurly-burly of news and events -- for Trudeau, it was the blackface scandal three weeks ago; now for Scheer it is the Kinsella secret smear scandal, which couldn't have some at a worse time for him.
But the measure of leadership is not whether such scandals happen, but how a real leader handles it.
For Trudeau, he immediately admitted he had done it, apologized profusely, and also volunteered that there had been other times he had worn blackface when in high school. This all immediately tooe the wind out of any follow-up stories, and ended any "gotcha" questions from reporters. Everybody moved on.
While over several days now Scheer has been robotically repeating stupid war room talking points about how some mythical CPC "rules" prevent him from talking about "vendors" at all -- thereby creating the #ScheerVendors hashtag trending this morning, extending the scandal right into election day itself, making it the only thing reporters are asking him about (except for a few questions about why in the world he would tell such a stupid lie about the Liberals raising the GST). And all at a time in the campaign when there is no time for moving on at all.
I hope Canadians are making note of who is handling problems well, and who is not.
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