Gunter, You've Lost Gunter?


I guess Lorne Gunter simply can't hold his tongue, even with an election just three days away.  

No doubt about it. O'Toole has lost The Grunter.

Time and again, O’Toole seems to cower and say, “Oh, please forgive me for daring to have alternate ideas. Give me a minute and I’ll cut and paste the relevant pages from the Liberal Red Book into the CPC policy manual.”

The latest example is the Conservative leader’s ever-evolving stance on carbon taxes.

To win the Conservative leadership last year, “True Blue” O’Toole was steadfastly against carbon taxes, especially the Liberal government’s federally imposed “carbon pricing.”

This which-way-is-the-wind-blowing vacillation only serves to make O’Toole look weak with his own voters, while I suspect at the same time it fails to win him new voters among suburbanite Ontarians and Quebecers.

By mimicking the Liberals at every turn, maybe — maybe — O’Toole is convincing voters they can have Liberals policies without having to have the smarmy, vacuous Justin Trudeau as prime minister.

The Grunter probably broke out in hives while struggling not to endorse Maxime Bernier but he does have a following and this un-endorsement won't help O'Toole come Monday.

Comments

  1. Northern PoVSeptember 17, 2021 at 10:04 AM

    Th SUN chain is very vocal about supporting the CONs and not voting for Max. Ontario Proud as well. I guess the Frankenstein monster has escaped the lab?

    All hail holy Purple to deliver us from the O'fool!

    If the right splinters again, perhaps we'll see new support for a rational electoral system emerge?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibSeptember 17, 2021 at 1:05 PM

      Wishful thinking, NPoV. When the Liberals and Conservatives list how many parties have ever formed government in Canada, they still come up with just the two. It's a racket too rewarding to change.

      Delete
  2. rumleyfipsSeptember 17, 2021 at 1:09 PM

    These are my principles: if you don't like them I have others.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more