So here we are, four years later and once more in the grip of a national election. I'm confined to the cheap seats for this one but Lord knows that won't stop me from bitching about it on the internet.
In the visionless, micromanaged era of Stephen Harper's Conservative party you could rely on the petty small-mindedness of the man at the centre to really only have one policy goal for Canada: that he be the one running it. The man would occasionally tinker and fiddle with knobs and switches but that was about it.
Power was really the only purpose of the last Conservative government and any backbench MP who could meaningfully threaten their polling numbers, or provide a point for the opposition to unite and rally around would be summoned by trans-dimensional screeching to the Prime Minister's Barad-dûr and suitably coerced back into silence. It was an uncomfortable era and it led to an unprecedented politicization and centralized command of institutions of government, but in the end very little actually changed and most of us - unless you were eating Gerry Ritz's disgusting listeriosis-infested meat - woke up alive every morning.
Yes, boutique tax credits fucked up the treasury and any scientist with a mouth was gagged, but if a right-wing evangelical nut job voiced an intent to use the Army to shell abortion clinics or gay marriages he would simply vanish overnight, and neither the Prime Minister nor his trusty lieutenants would seem to be able to recall the miscreant's name.
It doesn't feel like that now, though, in this age of the Baby-Faced Goon and his squadron of Nazi scumbags. It's impossible to believe anyone would be capable of maintaining such an iron-like grip on the tiller. Remember that Scheer actually lost his leadership race to Maxime Bernier and he knows it, and likely the only way for him to stay at the top of the party is to acquiesce to the lunatic factions that can keep him there...the ones that his predecessor never needed to particularly acknowledge or humour. I mean, Christ, the man can't shake a bystander's hand without looking like a spineless weirdo so the odds that he'd be able to - or even want to - steer the boring but ultimately uneventful course of his predecessor is wishful thinking.
In the grand scheme of things, perhaps this was inevitable. The Harper machine suppressed the hard-right White-Jihadi wing of the party so much they're started to bubble up out of the ground, seeping like sewage through the grassroots of their own party and spilling over into Bernier's PeePee experiment. As the bff of Rebel Media's Squealer Goldy tries to unseat an accomplished air force veteran and more racist tirades and homophobic rants and conspiracy peddling nonsense come out of the closet from an increasing number of staggeringly under-vetted candidates, Scheer knows if he asks them to do more than offer a perfunctory apology there's a chance his base will be won over by Maxime Bernier's insane ramblings about a terrifying new globalist UN Conspiracy to put fluoride in water and stop electrocuting The Gays.
So buckle your safety belts and put on your tinfoil hats. We're in a for a wild 30-something days.
