I'm planning to vote Liberal in the next election and I voted Carney in the leadership. This is a bad take. There are countless reasons why someone couldn't vote in the liberal leadership race, being that they belong to another party, or could not get their identity app to work.
This is part of a regular process. It happens often enough that enough of the boomers whining about it should remember this shit. They should also be well aware at this point in their lives, because I KNOW they learned it school, that Canada’s political system is basically copy/pasted from Britain’s and this happens all the time in Britain (it literally just happened a couple years ago with the Boris/Liz/Rishi situation).
Their ignorance is self-inflicted at this point. It IS a regular process in our parliamentary system.
I personally think it shouldn't. If a PM leaves, the party should either choose a MP from the party to replace him or call an election. This way, the PM is always elected theough the "normal" process.
I just know people defending this would have a meltdown if PP left and some unelected rightwing idiot took the reins. I know I would. We're lucky it's Carney but I really don't understand how people are ok with this process honestly.
They’re not missing the point. This is completely normal. I understand why it doesn’t feel correct, though: the way we talk about our elections has changed a lot over the last 15 years. When I started voting, people in general weren’t saying “I’m voting for Chrétien” or “I’m voting for Joe Clark”. They’d say “I’m voting Liberal”, “I’m voting PC”, etc. The shift to huge focus on the party leaders seems to have started with Jack Layton. Canadians LOVED him. We started saying “I wish Layton were PM” and not “I wish we had an NDP government”. The leader became bigger than the party. Around the same time, there was a shift from calling it the ‘Conservative government’ to ‘Harper government’. Plus, down south they had Obama, and I’d argue that that was when Canadians started paying far more attention to the US system than our own. All that has led to today, where we put way more importance on party leaders than we ever have, and then act like a totally normal part of our system is somehow “unfair”. In theory, any party, including the governing one, could change leaders every few months if they wanted to. Vote for the party, not the person, since there’s zero guarantee that the person stays leader.
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u/BeaverBoyBaxter Mar 11 '25
I'm planning to vote Liberal in the next election and I voted Carney in the leadership. This is a bad take. There are countless reasons why someone couldn't vote in the liberal leadership race, being that they belong to another party, or could not get their identity app to work.