Thursday, January 16, 2025

Today's News: It's Carney vs Freeland

Wow, a thousand views of my last blog post, and 500+ "likes" on my Thread post about it! 
Just goes to show how much interest there is in Mark Carney, I think. 
Canadians really know very little about him, so that Jon Stewart interview was our introduction to someone who might well be the next Prime Minister of Canada, for a while I guess. 

Eric Grenier / The Writ
Liberal race firms up
Some big names are out, but the two biggest names are still in.
...Most of the news this past week came from potential candidates who have withdrawn their names from consideration. Arguably none of them were in the top tier that consists solely of Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney, but some of them were just below that tier — candidates who had a real shot if one of the two frontrunners declined to run or flamed out on the (short) campaign trail.
... A second tier made up of Joly, Anand and/or Clark would have added an interesting dynamic to the contest and given party members some viable alternatives to the top two.
The decisions of François-Philippe Champagne and Steven MacKinnon not to run, combined with Joly’s, mean there will be no significant candidate from Quebec. It’ll be the first time that a contested Liberal leadership race hasn’t had a candidate either born in or representing a riding in Quebec among the top finishers since 1958.
It also means that there will be a bit of a gap between the frontrunning candidates and the rest of the field — at least at first...
And people who thought the Liberals were toast are now liking Carney a lot (though of course, the bar for preferring the personable Carney over the grumpy Poilievre isn't really that high!)
View on Threads

View on Threads
View on Threads
View on Threads

Evan Scrimshaw / Scrimshaw Unscripted
Carney For Canada
Why He’s The Right Choice
...I cannot for a million reasons and in a million years believe I’m about to say what I’m about to say, but I am. Mark Carney is the right choice to lead the Liberal Party. And I don’t think it’s even particularly close.
The path to getting here has been … I was going to say rocky, to say the least, but honestly that feels like a dramatic undersell. I never thought I’d get here. And then I started to think about things and I can’t stop. Carney, for all of my (I’d like to think) legitimate concerns, has the opportunity to be the candidate we need in this moment, and to position the party in a better place moving forward. He has the profile, the resume, and the team around him to lead and lead well. And his interview with Jon Stewart was genuinely good, which is important.
I will not lie and pretend that I’ve been a dyed in the wool Carneyite since the beginning of this process. I’m precisely as surprised as everybody else that I’ve ended up here. But given this field of candidates, it’s Carney, and honestly it’s pretty clear. ...He has none of the baggage of the worst of this government.
He can play well in places the government had done well in in 2019 and 2021, especially the socially liberal suburbs of the GTA. There are a lot more places in Canada where being a banker and an expert can play well...
The case for Carney is also fundamentally a bet on him - an untested politician who, whatever experience he has in the more staid world of central banking, has not done the rough and tumble of a political campaign.
...I’m also not sure about Quebec, plainly. His French is good, by all accounts, but there’s a difference between speaking the language and understanding Quebec. But given the decision of Steve MacKinnon not to run, I’m not sure there’s a candidate in this race who can make a more honest or convincing case to understanding Quebec.
His interview with Jon Stewart did a lot to reassure me on himself, though. He seemed looser, funnier, and a bit better on his feet than I’d have thought. Did every joke land? No, but that’s not the point. He sounded plausibly real, and honestly in the great vain of fairly Dad-ish politicians this country has embraced. ...
Meanwhile, the Poilievre Conservatives are imploding - Jennie Bryne attacked O'Toole for the crime of being nice to Anand... 
Dale Smith / Routine Proceedings
Roundup: The heresy of well-wishes
...this is the kind of toxic, purity-test bullshit that she thinks the party really needs—and make no mistake, she is running the party. (If people thought it was bad that Katie Telford was running the PMO, should Poilievre win it’ll be Byrne doing the same). There’s a reason why Conservative MPs aren’t allowed to travel with anyone from other parties anymore, or why Byrne is attacking O’Toole for showing a modicum of human decency is praising someone from the other side—because in her conception of the world, they are not rivals or people who disagree on matters of policy, but rather they are the enemy, and if you don’t realise that you are a heretic and the problem. This is going to make Canadian politics even more toxic the more this takes hold.
...This in turn led to people praising O’Toole for being a decent Conservative, which is in and of itself revisionist history, and ignores his own behaviour during his leadership contest and right up until his ignoble ouster as leader, where he lied about everything under the sun, and acted imperiously with his own caucus, going so far as to kick Senator Batters out of caucus for daring to challenge him. That, in his retirement, he did the classy thing to wish Anand well, doesn’t change his prior behaviour, and it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills that everyone else has memory-holed his actual record.

View on Threads

And finally, does anybody want some Conspiracy theories?
View on Threads
And WTF is this?

"Trump received a clear mandate to assemble an extinction level event administration" Read ‘The Sale of the Century’ by Chrystia Freeland. Putin is not 'joking' about Alaska any more than he was joking about Ukraine. He bought the US, he certainly intends to get Alaska and more out of it.

[image or embed]

— Anonymous (@youranoncentral.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)