Skip to main content

Canadian Conservative Leadership Race (well not really but it needed to sound exiting)

 For the past six months, Canadian have been following the leadership race for the conservative party of Canada (no they have not, no one really cares except the party members).  The race has been close (not even), and the leader presents a true conservative pedigree of achievements and boldness (not really more of the same pablum).

There are two wings to the party, the economically conservative "lassez faire" wing (classical blue Tories) and the Western socially conservative wing of the party (think of the GOP today);  Anti-abortion, anti-Kyoto, Pro gun, anti-vaccine, against marriage equality etc etc.  There are three candidates for the leadership that matter but we will focus on two which represent the two extremes of the party: The race is between a socially conservative junior minister under Harper and the ex-prime minister of Quebec who was also the leader of the Federal Conservative Party when things were very bad.  The big news: Poilievre recently got the endorsement of Steven Harper, who was until a decade ago the prime Minister of Canada in which Poilievre was a junior (the carrot to keep the unruly quiet) minister.

The stage is set:  Now these two players are not equal in the eye of the party members, insofar as "secret" polls show that Poilievre leads Charest by 20 to 25%.  That Poilievre has reportedly sold more than 360,000  membership cards, that he has the support of virtually all conservative members of parliament, and has for a long time.  The question is, therefore, why did Harper give his sudden support to Poiliever?  It's certainly not desperation on the part of Poilievre, it may help to sway some voters to Poiliever but he's already so far ahead -- what would be the point?  

In my opinion, there are two reasons:  (1) Steven Harper wants to stay relevant, his 90-second endorsement of Poiliever was really more about how he had discovered and promoted Poiliever, and (2) to drive a nail in the coffin of Jean Charest's leadership bid, it is well known in political circles that Charest and Harper hated each other.

The impact of Harper's announcement could be interesting, depending on the polling results that Charest has gotten in the past few weeks he could leave the party and form a new economically conservative one! This would cause a massive problem for the Conservative Party because if they are flanked on the "left" by a new Charest party and on the right by the People's Party of Canada -- its policy range will be limited, especially with the ultra socially conservative that are in the prairies.

In the end, I don't believe that Poiliever will matter.  He will not be the Prime Minister of Canada, he is too socially conservative for the Ontario electorate.  Ontario conservative voters will not vote for the Liberals they will simply abstain in the upcoming elections ( 20/10/25)




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more