Some members of Ontario's Conservatives are trying to push their leader, Tim Hudak out the door.
This brings up something that bugs me about parliamentary politics: the decision to replace the leader is done based on an absolute measure of electoral success, not on the leader's a achievement above or below reasonable expectations.A good example is in comparing Hudak to Ernie Eves. Eves went down to decisive defeat, and thus fell on his sword, as was expected of him. Hudak, in contrast, reduced the governing Liberals from two straight majorities to a minority. That's considered a success, so he keeps his job. But Eves inherited a lot of baggage from the outgoing regime of Mike Harris, and it's doubtful that anyone could have done better. Hudak, on the other hand, was facing a two-term government plagued by scandal and a poor economy. Really, the election was his to lose,and he lost it. Putting aside sheer seat counts, you'd have to conclude that Hudak is an underachiever.
That seemed to be confirmed last week when the Tories won one of five seats in by-elections. Many newspapers went with headlines about how bad it was for the Liberals, but a scandal-ridden government scoring 40% on by-elections was hardly surprising. But the opposition winning even fewer seats, that's something to worry about.
Hudak seems reasonably likeable, so what's the problem? I'd say it's his wishy-washy strategy. As a Conservative in twenty-first century Canada, there's two proven strategies: 1) limit your conservative policies, play the moderate, and win the centre (the Harper Strategy) or 2) be unapologetically, flamboyantly conservative, get your base excited, and overwhelm the half-hearted opposition (the Harris-Ford Strategy.) But Hudak doesn't seem committed to either. So even if they don't remove him before the next election, they need to rethink strategy. Perhaps this is one instance where ads building up their own candidate would be better than spending all their money on attack ads.
No comments:
Post a Comment