Saturday, March 07, 2009

Ontario PCs Already Disgruntled (And: Federal Gov. To Fall In June?)

Fresh from ridding their party of its last semblance of moderation, the Ontario PCs are already looking to the future and, lo and behold, its pissing them off:

I'm hearing disgusting rumours that the Executive of the Ontario PC's are actually considering rushing the just announced Leadership vote, attempting to set things into motion for a June Leadership convention.Hello? Have you guys in the Toronto ivory towers learned NOTHING? What is this, the Liberal Party of Canada, where the powers-that-be get to choose the Leader without the input of the grassroots?

Note the Toronto-bashing already.

Taste more outrage here, where we also have a theory in the comments as to what might lie behind the unseemly rush:

...Brian Patterson ( who was dumped by Tory only after numerous complaints after the 2007 Election) has found his way back into the Party as 1st VP. Patterson wants a quick [leadership] election for reasons unknown - but prevailing opinion is that if you follow Pattersons instincts you end up worse off then when you started.

Probably the most interesting factoid comes from Stephen Taylor, who sees the Ontario Tories as vacillating between two possible dates, June and September. The justification behind September being:

The thinking is that this best time that won’t interfere with a potential federal election.

So I guess the possibility of another Federal election in 2009 is a real one. I am assuming Taylor's musings have the Harper government falling in early summer (June?), and a Federal election having been wound up before the September Ontario PC convention.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another election this year?! We need a law that fixes election dates. Oh wait, never mind...

Stephen Taylor said...

It has more to do with the real parliamentary calendar. If you think of confidence tests for the government, there aren't any in the summer and IIRC, the house isn't back til after the second weekend in September.

There are tests upcoming until the summer break (usually June) and then summer recess and then the House reconvening later on.

The only snafu to this model were to be if debate was extended through the summer due to the economic crisis.