Éric Blais: Marilyn Gladus Auftritt verrät mehr über Poilievre als seine Podcast-Interviews

Wish I could actually read the article, but at least there’s finally someone in the media asking the most important question: Why are Tory MPs, even clearly Blue Tory MPs like Gladu, crossing the floor?

Thus far the Tories and the media have spun a story of Mark Carney as some sort of political predator stalking the halls of Parliament Hill like the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.

There’s so little talk, other than the odd reported rumor, of the sheer toxicity and tone-deafness of Poilievre’s leadership, from the mass parachuting campaign of the last election to harsh media controls on MPs, with the odd exception of Jamil Jivani, who was inexplicably allowed to head down to the States to pal around with old college chum JD Vance and repeat the all too frequent mantra that Canadians are to be blamed for the beating we’re receiving, to the really perverse Type A management scheme of demanding MPs justify their existence.

I won’t even get into how he brought back an exiled Jenni Byrne to continue the beatings until morale improved after d’Entremont’s defection, despite what were apparently making commitments to caucus and the party leadership that Byrne was out of the picture.

Now admittedly in any caucus, big or small, there are going to be divisions. Even the NDP micro-caucus has had its disagreements. It’s not unusual for a few MPs to bleed away, resigning and vacating their seat being the norm, here and there the odd MP who leaves caucus (under their own steam or sacked), and a few floor crossings. These can pick up when the party is facing an electoral thumping and/or they’re saddled with an unpopular leader.

This appears to be an example of the latter, but on steroids. I think the crisis has been brewing ever since the last election, when Poilievre almost willfully refused to pivot away from what was clearly a scripted anti-Trudeau campaign, until the last week of the election. Yes, the Tories won a huge vote share, but that at best only thinly masked the shoddy way he’d treated nearly a hundred riding associations, the fact that the Liberals had managed to pull off one of the most stunning reversals in Canadian history, and that Poilievre had lost his own riding (normally a pretty fatal event for a party leader).

After that came the push out of an MP from a safe seat so he could get back into Parliament, the war to oust Byrne, which Poilievre acceded to in the end, before she made her reappearance to conduct a witch hunt for more floor crossers. Then came the thumbs on the scale leadership review, which I gather, really pissed off a lot of Tories. And of course, this is all happening while the Liberals enjoy a sustained level of popularity that can no longer be explained away as some sort of honeymoon effect, while the Tories remain close to base levels of support and Poilievre himself is incredibly disliked by Canadians.