Longtime Liberal MP Wayne Long says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should give more weight to the views of his backbenchers in determining his future leading the Party, rather than relying on those in his immediate orbit.
“Seriously, get away from your inner circle,” Long told CTV’s Question Period host Vassy Kapelos, in an interview airing Sunday. “I don’t want to name names, but get away from people, because obviously, prime ministers are somewhat insulated.”
Those sources also told CTV News at least two dozen MPs told Trudeau they’d like him to step aside during the meeting, over the course of the first ninety minutes.
But in a press conference fewer than 18 hours later, Trudeau was adamant he’s running again, a statement which caught some in his caucus, including Long, by surprise.
“I think we had hoped for serious reflection,” he told Kapelos. “Reflection in 18 hours tells me the Prime Minister, with respect, already had his mind made up.”
It would have to be an outsider candidate, and the LPC party structure does not do well with outsiders.
If you’ve ever experienced dealing with the LPC, you can see why: they’re primary composed of compulsive board-of-directors members. Every Liberal representative and most of the party and riding executives are all from the same incestuous BoD members. They encounter each other all the time in their professional circles: they’re on the committee for this, the board for that, the council for something else, the executive director for fill in the blank. They know each other because they’re each other’s lawyers, estate agents, consultants and so forth.
They’re so socially inbred that it’s incredibly difficult for an outsider to break in.
And before you say “All politicians are like this”, they aren’t:
Compared to the above, the Liberals place a much, much higher value on consensus and favour-trading, and have a visceral reaction against outsiders.
By Liberal standards, Trudeau is an outsider candidate. What the LPC wanted was a Dionne or Ignatieff.
Nice explanation. Honestly, I’m not rooting for an LPC revival. I tolerate but am not a fan of their half-measure policies. I’m only interested in their numbers as far as blocking PP from office. Unfortunately NDP don’t seem to be gaining anything from LPC’s drop in the polls. I don’t know what would take for the NDP to change this.
As we’re seeing in the US now, and the in the UK with the ratfucking of Jeremy Corbyn, the owners of the mainstream media are not interested in covering actual left-wing values. Singh isn’t great–I preferred Angus–but anything progressive he says will either get laundered by the media, or ignored completely
What just happened with the LA Times and the Washington Post vis a vis endorsing Harris should be a warning sign to progressives everywhere: the media, or at least it’s owners, are already in the tank for the political right. It doesn’t matter how much you try to be serious or sensible: the mass media will ignore or belittle you, while they throw softballs to the Conservatives.
It’s especially an issue in Canada, where media ownership consolidation is worse than it is in the US.
This isn’t to let the NDP off the hook: they need someone like Bernie Sanders, someone willing to bang the class-war drum, but what they’re getting are consensus-builders who aren’t much better than Trudeau et al.
I gotta say, these processes you describe that affect the media and other things become so clear when you look at reality through the class war lens. Things that get muddy when looking through the left/right lens.