Conservatives missed where they should have scored. Calls for Andrew Sheer to step down arrive in tandem with Tory campaign funds being depleted, the party’s policies mostly indistinguishable from Liberal promises, and a pending “leadership review” for party members to vote on keeping a leader who, as Peter McKay put it, “failed to score in an empty net on a clean breakaway.”
The Bloc Quebecois is ecstatic about its electoral resurrection. Driving its agenda in the Commons against a prime minister from Quebec outshines returning to the campaign trail and risking those gains.
New Democrats are in a raw state. Many veteran MPs did not seek re-election, good candidates failed to win, campaign fund-raising has become moribund, and no “Sing surge” flowed from Jagmeet’s high caliber campaigning.
Greens, with three MPs, lack party status in the Commons and face the leadership dilemma of replacing Elizabeth May yet unable to imagine the Green formation without her.
Indeed, the party in parliament most likely wanting an early election would be the Liberals, once finding themselves strong in the polls. But to engineer their own defeat, they’ll have to back all opposition parties into the same corner at the same time to outvote them. With nothing pointing to an early election, the Liberals could carry on, potentially even to the next election in 2023.
Another fallacy in the former MP’s analysis is that opposition MPs (including Scott Aitcheson) will be ordered, like government members, to stay in Ottawa and be counted. “There’s not going to be a lot of excuse slips – you can’t miss a vote.”
But that won’t happen for Opposition MPs without a concerted effort to bring down the government, of which there’s no imminent prospect.
It’s curious thinking that an MP, after being elected to represent citizens in Ottawa, is meant to spend a lot of time around the electoral district, especially if he or she knows it well. Stan Darling attended countless constituency events, but as a footloose opposition MP. Tony Clement, pledging to “outdo Stan Darling,” turned up locally a perplexing amount of the time when he was a senior minister with major national responsibilities in the capital.
In Muskoka public life, for years, Scott Aitcheson has been his own man, as I’ve observed in many ways. He knows the people of our district, thinks for himself, makes decisions, works collaboratively, and focuses on what’s most important for the people. Whatever your view of our new MP, non-existent chains will certainly not be holding him back.
