New poll for the CPC leadership: O'Leary is still the first-ballot choice for a lot of people but O'Toole and Scheer are catching up to him and Bernier:
http://ipolitics.ca/2017/04/05/oleary-leads-some-otoole-momentum-mainstreet-poll/
The key numbers:
O'Leary 23.6
Bernier 16.4
Scheer 13.1
O'Toole 9.9
Leitch 8.9
Meanwhile, O'Leary's last-choice number is 30%, which is about 2.5 times higher than the next least-liked candidate (Leitch, at 13). That's why this:
Bet O'Leary will win. Their hate of Trudeau will push them to elect him.
...is still relatively unlikely. I don't see how he makes the jump from less than 25% to 50%+1, particularly when a third of the party members say they're not voting for him. He needs to win over supporters of other candidates as their 2nd/3rd/4th/5th choice, and apart from Raitt (whose support for him was pretty qualified), all those other candidates have been pretty steadfast in their stance that he'd be a terrible leader. Admittedly, I haven't seen the actual 2nd/3rd choice numbers, but from what I've heard those are all O'Toole, Scheer, Raitt and (bizarrely) Leitch.
Is there an update on who is the closest to the least-terrible/actual-chance-to-win nexus?
At this stage, I'd say it goes:
O'Toole (it seems like he'd have fit in with the old PCs)
Scheer (a blander, less exciting version of Harper, in that he's a social conservative who's vowed he wouldn't touch social issues)
Raitt (like O'Toole, but she's been a complete flop as a candidate)
Chong (he has his vocal diehards, but he's totally out of step with the party he wants to lead)
Obhrai (zero chance, but he's funny and his ideas aren't terrible)
After them, it's a mixture of people with insane financial ideas (Bernier being the obvious one, but Peterson is a flat tax proponent, which is nearly as bad), social conservatives (Trost & Lemieux), racists (Leitch and Blaney, and Alexander depending on how clueless he's being on any given day), total non-entities (Saxton), and O'Leary.
Honestly, in a field like this O'Leary is far from being the worst. He's a terrible businessman with all kinds of awful, unconstitutional ideas, and if you have a vote I'd say keep him off your ballot entirely just to be safe, but he's still better than at least half of those candidates.
"John Tory is doing a good job as mayor" is a disagreeable statement. "The cultural genocide of indigenous Canadians was well-intended" is not. It is an ignorant statement that will do nothing but breed ignorance and continue the government's apathetic treatment towards indigenous Canadians. The mere fact that she said this while serving on the committee is so horrifically uninformed and offensive that a resignation and apology for her inexcusable defense of one of the country's worst atrocities should be the very least asked of her. Morever, Lynn has made several other inflammatory statements like her transphobic remarks made during the reading of C-16 that she should be held accountable for. Her being removed from the committee does nothing to absolve her of the defense she mounted for residential schools in any capacity.
I get what you're saying, and I agree that what she said was part of a pattern of awful statements dribbling out of her mouth. But I'd still be really leery of the PM (or anyone else) having the power to remove a sitting senator for saying something stupid, since that'd open the door to future PMs removing other senators they find politically objectionable -- and would you want someone like Kevin O'Leary to have that power? It would set a really bad precedent, particularly when the Constitution is very clear about the removal process for sitting senators.
