I won’t go into details about what a heinously weak performance for democracy this was. It’s already been elaborated on at length by any number of other bloggers in the Eastern time zones while I was still trying to get a balcony panel to defy the law of physics and fit into a slot half an inch smaller that it is. To find something sillier than a party that just last week was prepared to put their leader in the PMO, a leader who then this week stepped down and resigned, and then getting two leadership candidates to step aside to appoint the new chief, you’d probably have to travel to the ends of the Earth, or quite possibly search the last uncharted jungles of Amazonia.
Truly any last vestiges of nonsensical “grassroots democracy” talk will have gone out the window. What could be less democratic than a shady backroom deal involving the Liberal party [who were thoroughly trounced in the last election], the Bloc Quebecois, and the NDP forming a coalition government to sit in power without being unelected except for a leader who also escaped the “technicality” of being elected?
Some Liberals aren’t happy about not having a choice:
Therein lies the dilemma. To support a leadership candidate who can defeat Harper and bring the Liberals back to power in the short term, or the one who can make positive changes for the party in the long term?
I won’t have to make that decision now. But if I did, in the end I would have gone with my heart and not my head. I would have voted for Bob Rae.
Of course it wouldn’t be a sunny sky with a multicoloured rainbow of good news without the official Steve V endorsement. And two posts earlier he writes:
Herle makes the point, and I agree, that it’s imperative Canadians have a sense of legitimacy, that the new leader starts with no baggage. Herle also accurately notes that time is of the essence, six weeks is nothing, when one considers a new team being put in place, preparations for a possible election, developing a strategy to counter Harper, a daunting timeframe.
So principled! So utterly sagacious! How, indeed, could one begin their unelected leadership of the unelected coalition of Canada with any “baggage”? There are bigger issues than messy and untimely things like democratic proceedings. Things like bringing down Harper. As one observer of the ridiculous proceedings notes wryly:
Bob Rae pulls out.
The question is, did he pull out in time?
