"I just don't like him," she told me. "Everything he says ... everything is 'bad, bad, bad' and 'Canada is broken.'" This was a conversation over a coffee with my 72-year-old friend, who voted NDP in March. "I just don't like people like that," she said. "I want to hear something positive, hopeful." She added that this isn't what Canada used to be. "I feel like our politics is so petty now. There just aren't any good men in Canada. That's why things are the way they are."I told her that I voted for the Conservatives because we needed a clean break from Trudeau's regime and Pierre Poilievre was the best option. But her sentiment, obviously, is a common one. .MCINNIS: Repeal DRIPA and put an end to divisive land governance in BC.These days, everyone on the Conservative side seems to still be running breathlessly to defend Poilievre. He apparently rebuilt the Conservative Party. He apparently earned all those extra 8 million votes. He packed those rallies. He apparently almost won the election, too. So quickly has the narrative shifted from "How on earth could Poilievre have lost that massive lead? Everyone hated Justin and the Liberals." It's as if conservatives are trying to hold on to any semblance of strength that they know. They say there's no one in the wings who could do Poilievre's job. So, a man who was voted in by his constituents is going to take one for the team and give up his seat. Conservatives were all in a tizzy when Carney got his job as leader without an election. Apparently for us it's ok that voters have said no to Poilievre and now he's going to slip in the back door. So in four years, we'll have "Bring it home ... this time!" Sheesh. What is wrong with Conservatives in this country? Have we lost our backbones? Scrambling for the scraps is not how Canadians recover their sense of agency. This is not how we rebuild our national pride. .Poilievre and the Conservatives should have had this in the bag and they bombed. We can make excuses all we want, a la "It's the Devil's (Trump's) fault," or "the Liberal's pulled a fast one on us." The fact is, many of us were only voting for Poilievre because he wasn't Trudeau. Prior to the election, his campaign was lackluster.It was obvious he was a career politician. Personally, it got to the point that every time I received the latest mailout with titles like "URGENT" and "THIS IS IMPORTANT," I deleted them. They'd become spam. Nothing new to say. The same cliches from a year ago. Beat the drum over and over. Eventually it had no meaning. I do not want this to happen again. I want a man (or woman) with a sense of statesmanship. I want someone who can think on their feet and make their pitch without resorting to cliches. I want someone who has a vision for the country, and for all Canadians. .EYRE: ‘Lawfare’: How a weaponized Charter of Rights is preventing governments from governing.I had another conversation recently with a former Conservative supporter who voted for the Liberals — one of those boomers that we are all disgruntled with. We got onto Trump-ish leanings. I said, "Do you really think, in this country, any conservative man could have avoided the CBC framing him as scary and Trump-like? I mean, for two terms they made Harper a boogeyman." "Mulroney did it," he replied. People voted for Carney because they had an emotional connection to him. He resembled what we want to think of ourselves as Canadians: wise, ethical, sober, connected — the kindly manager. They connected more with him than with the career politician with LEGO hair in a navy suit that Conservatives were offering up. So I recoil at the Conservative experts suggesting we need to keep on keeping on. We have got to move the goal posts. We have got to learn to invite conversations with all those people in the middle who also want to talk about the environment, indigenous rights, the arts, and gender — many of whom don't trust institutions any more than the rest of us, post-COVID. We have got to be able to discuss what being conservative actually means, philosophically, more than just cliches, tradition, and that it's not woke..Can we not look at Poilievre's resounding defeat, at least in the light of what was to be a cakewalk to a majority — I mean, how bad did Trudeau's juvenile behaviour need to be? — and say it's time for a serious re-think? Must we really circle the wagons again? Doesn't a different result require a different approach? Or are we really expecting things to be that much worse under Carney that we might gain those measly percentage points? Maybe all this is just sour grapes. Three years ago in February while the honking of the Freedom Convoy was forcibly dwindling to a whisper, while friends of mine had had either their bank accounts frozen or their name plastered on Google as supporters, Poilievre did a video clip while walking the streets of downtown Ottawa. .MCCRAE: Every child matters, or perhaps not.At a time when non-violent and dedicated Canadians were getting beaten down on Sparks Street by RCMP billy clubs, Poilievre took ten seconds to tell us to take comfort and not worry that things looked dark. Then, the shift: "When I am Prime Minister…" As a parent skeptical about the vaccine, I and many others wondered if we were heading to the point when CAS would be taking our kids because of perceived abuse. They were already threatening to do it with the truckers. That was the darkness we were in. In the House, Candice Bergen told all the protesters to go home and that the Conservatives would speak for us. And here on YouTube was this man seizing the opportunity to score political points, and in the crassest way. In another video Tamara Lich was, with tears in her eyes, asking us to forgive Justin, "who has two beautiful children," while she was preparing to be arrested. To Pierre and whoever follows him as leader: Show us you care. Show us you have some personal conviction and skin in the game. Show us you're more than a politician with fancy suits, cliches, and a negative view of Canada — broken as it might be. Then, let us do the math.
