Michael Harris on Peter MacKay and the Con Losers

In my last post I looked at a recent poll, one that had Peter MacKay so far ahead of the other Con leadership candidates it might as well be a coronation.

But sadly for Dumbo, it's only a cardboard crown, or a silly beanie with a helicopter-style propeller.

It won't mean much to most decent Canadians who remember how faithfully he served the monstrous Harper regime.



And Michael Harris for one, is definitely NOT impressed. 

He can’t speak French, he views the media as either a vanity mirror or the enemy, and a rubber boot has more ideas. 

So why is Peter MacKay the favourite to become the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada? 

Chaos. The truth is the CPC is a hot mess at the moment. It is desperately looking for the stability of a well-known party figure to restore order. Pierre Poilievre, Rona Ambrose, and Jean Charest didn’t want the job. That is the best thing MacKay has going for him, no serious rivals, and trouble in the CPC family.

Like so many others Harris strongly suggests that they don't call him Dumbo for nothing...



First he lost his party, or let Harper steal it.

His signature move as a Progressive Conservative was to abandon the party’s traditions, the better to embrace the Reform vision of Harper. It was not a merger so much as a surrender.

Then he just lost it, over and over again.
 

The follies MacKay committed during his tenure as a Harper cabinet minister were sometimes funny, sometimes outrageous.

He once told Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that California and British Columbia shared a border.

Who can forget the F-35 fiasco?



As minister of defence, MacKay became famous for being photographed hopping in and out of the cockpit of a fake F-35 Stealth fighter jet. He was less forthcoming with real information about this troubled aircraft, including its mind-blowing cost and chronic problems.

Somehow Harris manages not to mention MacKay's clumsy misogyny, which is bizarre. 

As is his failure to condemn this ghastly attempt to try to feminize Justin Trudeau.

What’s with MacKay’s macho-man shtick? Did he really say he’d like to have a cage match with the prime minister, or better yet, a fistfight on the ice — no headgear, no gloves? 

And is extolling hockey over yoga, the PM’s workout of choice, the way to convince Canadians he is fit to run the country? Because, you know, the PM is some sort of a yoga namby-pamby?


Which is both misogynistic and homophobic.

But Harris is right about this:

Only in a party half-paralyzed by an identity crisis could such a person be the frontrunner. If MacKay is the saviour, then the CPC had better have a Plan B.

But will Plan B be Plan B for Baird?



Who knows?

But if he's the Great Con Hope the Harper Party is in big trouble. 

With less than sixteen days to go before the nomination deadline they still have NOTHING.

And their time is running out...