Tough to watch
Political concession speeches of incumbent Prime Ministers.
Kim Campbell
Paul Martin
CBC Archives doesn't have Turner's 1984 speech...
It's interesting to look back when examining the archives that CBC puts up and making judgments as to which points in history had Canadians making the right decisions when it came to electing governments and Prime Ministers.
I'm very much someone who does not think that the people always make the right decision. I cringe when politicians say those words. The people make stupid decisions ALL THE TIME!, in every country of the world.
From watching various clips and based on my own opinions/knowledge, here's what I think:
1957 - Wrong Decision. Louis St. Laurent was a good Prime Minister. John Diefenbaker was not.
1958 - Diefenbaker wasn't all bad and Pearson's reign as Liberal leader was the start of the Liberal Party's transformation into a statist/leftist party... so this judgment is somewhat hard to make. Still, I would've probably voted Liberal in 1958. I still can't see what allowed Diefenbaker to go from minority to landslide majority so quickly. What exactly did he accomplish between 1957-58? So again, wrong decision.
Canadian electoral history post-1958 is dominated in my mind by the inability of the Progressive Conservative Party to elect effective leaders. The PC party made the right decision in dumping Diefenbaker, but who did they go to? Robert Stanfield, another uninspiring and not very conservative choice.
Still. Stanfield wasn't nearly as activist and arrogant as Pierre Elliot Trudeau. And so it was very much a shame that Stanfield was not able to defeat Trudeau in 1972 or 1974.
Continuing the theme of being unable to find an effective leader, the PCs chose Joe Clark, a man similar in incompetence to John Diefenbaker. Being able to defeat Trudeau wasn't all that impressive in 1979 (beating anyone after they're in power for 11 years is fairly easy), but the real and inexcusable error of Clark's leadership was obviously the idiotic move to put forth an unpopular budget, thereby allowing Trudeau to come back in 1980, instead of having Trudeau go off into history as one of the most unremarkable and inconsequential Prime Ministers in Canadian history. (Who would seriously remember Pierre Trudeau if he was not able to repatriate the constitution in 1982? That's right. No one. But now, we're left with a bunch of CBC miniseries chronicling the greatness of someone who was in large part responsible for a series of economic legacies that Canada is only recovering from now.)
1984 and 1988: Brian Mulroney wasn't great, but he was better than anyone since St. Laurent. So, right decision.
1993 to 2000: The enduring question of whether the Reform/CA party was worth creating. It probably wasn't. Taking over the PC Party from within and influencing it to elect actually conservative leaders would've been a more mature course of action. Chretien probably deserved to win in 1993, and it was probably good that he did, considering that sometimes it takes someone from the opposite political party to do necessary things when it comes to the size and scope of federal spending and regulation (Mitterand in France during the 1980s is another example of this). In 1997 he probably deserved to win again. In 2000, he deserved, at best, a minority government that was not prop-up-able by the NDP. The growth in federal spending since 2000 would have likely been restrained if there was some gridlock in Parliament.
2004, 2006 and into the future: The Conservative Party is actually somewhat conservative... and so it's unlikely that the Liberal Party will ever be worthy of support going into the future, but it's impossible to predict that with absolute certainty. For example, if Peter MacKay were to ever become leader... someone like Michael Ignatieff wouldn't look so bad, but then again, I don't consider that matchup to be all that likely.
Kim Campbell
Paul Martin
CBC Archives doesn't have Turner's 1984 speech...
It's interesting to look back when examining the archives that CBC puts up and making judgments as to which points in history had Canadians making the right decisions when it came to electing governments and Prime Ministers.
I'm very much someone who does not think that the people always make the right decision. I cringe when politicians say those words. The people make stupid decisions ALL THE TIME!, in every country of the world.
From watching various clips and based on my own opinions/knowledge, here's what I think:
1957 - Wrong Decision. Louis St. Laurent was a good Prime Minister. John Diefenbaker was not.
1958 - Diefenbaker wasn't all bad and Pearson's reign as Liberal leader was the start of the Liberal Party's transformation into a statist/leftist party... so this judgment is somewhat hard to make. Still, I would've probably voted Liberal in 1958. I still can't see what allowed Diefenbaker to go from minority to landslide majority so quickly. What exactly did he accomplish between 1957-58? So again, wrong decision.
Canadian electoral history post-1958 is dominated in my mind by the inability of the Progressive Conservative Party to elect effective leaders. The PC party made the right decision in dumping Diefenbaker, but who did they go to? Robert Stanfield, another uninspiring and not very conservative choice.
Still. Stanfield wasn't nearly as activist and arrogant as Pierre Elliot Trudeau. And so it was very much a shame that Stanfield was not able to defeat Trudeau in 1972 or 1974.
Continuing the theme of being unable to find an effective leader, the PCs chose Joe Clark, a man similar in incompetence to John Diefenbaker. Being able to defeat Trudeau wasn't all that impressive in 1979 (beating anyone after they're in power for 11 years is fairly easy), but the real and inexcusable error of Clark's leadership was obviously the idiotic move to put forth an unpopular budget, thereby allowing Trudeau to come back in 1980, instead of having Trudeau go off into history as one of the most unremarkable and inconsequential Prime Ministers in Canadian history. (Who would seriously remember Pierre Trudeau if he was not able to repatriate the constitution in 1982? That's right. No one. But now, we're left with a bunch of CBC miniseries chronicling the greatness of someone who was in large part responsible for a series of economic legacies that Canada is only recovering from now.)
1984 and 1988: Brian Mulroney wasn't great, but he was better than anyone since St. Laurent. So, right decision.
1993 to 2000: The enduring question of whether the Reform/CA party was worth creating. It probably wasn't. Taking over the PC Party from within and influencing it to elect actually conservative leaders would've been a more mature course of action. Chretien probably deserved to win in 1993, and it was probably good that he did, considering that sometimes it takes someone from the opposite political party to do necessary things when it comes to the size and scope of federal spending and regulation (Mitterand in France during the 1980s is another example of this). In 1997 he probably deserved to win again. In 2000, he deserved, at best, a minority government that was not prop-up-able by the NDP. The growth in federal spending since 2000 would have likely been restrained if there was some gridlock in Parliament.
2004, 2006 and into the future: The Conservative Party is actually somewhat conservative... and so it's unlikely that the Liberal Party will ever be worthy of support going into the future, but it's impossible to predict that with absolute certainty. For example, if Peter MacKay were to ever become leader... someone like Michael Ignatieff wouldn't look so bad, but then again, I don't consider that matchup to be all that likely.
posted by Japnaam Singh at
6:37 PM
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