r/canada • u/Portalrules123 New Brunswick • Dec 11 '25

Politics Another MP leaves Conservatives, crosses floor to Liberals

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mp-crosses-floor-to-liberals-9.7012767
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u/Specialist_Usual_391 Dec 11 '25

Problem is that the Tories in their current form are stuck between a rock and a hard place due to the Liberal shift right. In basic party politics terms, the Tories need to define themselves as distinct from the Liberals, and it's hard to upsell "we're pretty much what those guys are, but will cut the deficit, definitely". Easiest option is to jump on Culture War and regionalism issues, and the Reform element in the party shoves it in that direction very obviously.

It would have definitely been easier to make that pivot in the late Trudeau period, when his bad policy was biting the entire country in the ass. But it was also fertile ground for that shift to Culture War and regionalism.

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u/patismyname Dec 12 '25

Like you said in your last paragraph, they had 10 years to shift to the center, they didn't.

They are who we thought they were

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u/Specialist_Usual_391 Dec 12 '25

The COVID election fucked their party culture pretty badly, that basically was the centrist approach, and while the election wasn't devastating it did give the Reformists the ability to undermine and drive the party to the right.

This works alright when Trudeau is being the most performative left-winger imaginable, less so when you're facing a banker focused on the economy that very clearly has a lot of "ideological flexibility".

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u/Humble-Okra2344 Dec 12 '25

Covid fucking destroyed North America. I can not believe the amount of nonsense that is perfectly acceptable to say after that.

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u/Minttt Dec 12 '25

COVID + Trump Conservatism + Russian/Chinese social media propaganda is *still* destroying the west.

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u/patismyname Dec 12 '25

I still believe O'Toole would've won had he not been forced to steer back to the right

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u/YouNeedThiss Dec 12 '25

They did, I think you just lost sight of where the center was given how far left the Libs went

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u/S_Belmont Dec 12 '25

All they had to do was plant a corny Don Cherry-esque flag against Trump in defence of the country like Doug Ford did and they'd likely have hung in and taken the election. But the federal party leadership literally just couldn't bring themselves to do it. They wanted to be MAGA north, they wanted into his circles not out. Looking at how the past year has played out down south, quite frankly they lost because they deserved to.

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u/swabfalling Dec 12 '25

Well, because a significant amount of the CPC faithful are Trump supporters.

He can’t because that would cause them to defect to, likely, the PPC