The more things change, the more the stay the same...

Well, it's official: after possibly the least interesting leadership contest in Canadian history, the Conservative Party of Canada have chosen their standard bearer for the next election, and it is.... drum roll please...

 ... yup. Another middle-aged white man. Go figure.

As reported by CBC News:

The Conservative party has a new leader, one who has promised to march in a Pride parade and who will, in the earliest election scenario, face a Liberal government that will have been in office for five eventful years. Is that enough to make Erin O'Toole the next prime minister of Canada?

If the Conservative party only failed to win the last election because its leader couldn't explain why he wouldn't march in a Pride parade and Canadians were not quite tired of Justin Trudeau's government, then O'Toole may indeed be set up to win the next election.

But if the result of the last election had as much to do with public concerns about climate change as it did with anything else, and if the next election could, to some significant degree, be about all that this current pandemic has exposed and left behind, then much remains to be seen.

Previously considered an affable moderate, O'Toole seemed the candidate most willing in this race to speak to the Conservative id. His goal, he said, was to "take back Canada" — Who took it? How was it taken? On whose behalf would it be taken back? — and he pledged to fight the "radical left" and "cancel culture." He billed himself as the "true blue Conservative."

[...]

But there was no mention of taking back Canada in the nationally televised speech that O'Toole delivered in the wee hours of Monday morning. Instead there were direct and explicit appeals to those who have voted for other parties in the past, or who have turned away from the Conservative party.

He was upbeat and humble as he sketched his personal story and praised teachers and health workers. He criticized the Trudeau government — for its fiscal policy, for its ethical controversies, for its handling of the pandemic — but promised to lay out a "positive vision" for a Conservative alternative. He would fight, he said, for working families and offer "serious leadership."

So... he shamelessly pandered to what passes for the reactionary right in Canada, including promises to "take back" the country, in order to win the leadership race, only to suddenly reveal himself as something like a moderate, in order to garner support from the rest of Canadians, once he'd won the leadership race? Sounds like political business as usual for the Canadian Conservatives.

Now, it must be admitted that Justin Trudeau's Liberals have had something of a challenging year. First, there was the madman south of the border to manage; and then, there was a Chinese government that was increasingly antagonistic to Canada, due to our close, long-time trade agreements, defensive pact, and (crucially) extradition treaty with our southern neighbours. The economy was already struggling, mainly due to stubbornly low oil prices, which were mainly due to Saudi Arabia dumping oil onto the market at fire-sales prices, literally pouring their own economic future away in order to kill short-term competition from oil producers in other nations.

With all of these headwinds, stagnant poll numbers, only a minority hold on parliament, and at least two different opposition parties openly declaring their intent to force an election as soon as possible, it was shaping up to be a very challenging year for Justin Trudeau. And then the pandemic hit, and everything changed.

Now here we are, most of a year later, with the Liberals struggling to find some way to spin the fact that corners were cut in the rush to launch a student employment pandemic response program (a contract awarded to a charity called WE, because they were managing a crisis, didn't have time to send the contract out to tender, and instead tapped people they knew for the job), and yet they're polling higher than they were when the won the last election, and significantly higher than any of the opposition parties... who have clearly over-reached by demanding the Prime Minster resign immediately over the issue, threatening to force an election if he didn't.

In response, Trudeau called their bluff, prorogued Parliament, and scheduled a confidence vote on his government's pandemic response for day one of the new Parliamentary session. Congratulations, brand-new-but-somehow-still-tired-and-old Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole. You've got your chance to force the new election that your outgoing predecessor was agitating so strongly for... and which you'll almost certainly lose if you force it, and by more than your party lost the last race. Your move.

Honestly, I don't know what Andrew Sheer was thinking; he was like a dog chasing a car, reacting rather than thinking, and with no real idea what he'd do if he caught the thing. Not a problem for Sheer, though, since he wasn't the one who'd have to manage the fallout of that. And O'Toole is so bland, and so very much the image of the old and tired way of doing everything that the Conservatives have always represented, and which voters have rejected twice now, in a row, that there's basically zero chance of him being able to challenge and win the next election, either.

Unless, of course, Trudeau scores another "own goal." If there's another blackface scandal, or ethics scandal, then all bets may well be off. Barring another unforced error of that type, though, I don't think we'll be changing governing parties anytime soon, and certainly not before our American neighbours do. And if the Democrats win south of us, as currently seems likely given the polling, then Trudeau's job only gets easier.

So.. once again, the entire political landscape has changed, only to stay exactly the same as it was. Plus ça change...