Juno News - September 18, 2018


Trudeau's mismanagement of country causes Liberal MP to jump ship


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

193.80443

Word count

586

Sentence count

27

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Aurora MP Leona Alsav has crossed the floor of the House of Commons and left the Liberal caucus. What does that mean for the rest of her term? And what does it mean for Justin Trudeau's government?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.160 The Conservatives are attracting new people and the Liberals can't even keep their own caucus on board.
00:00:05.480 That's the narrative that's shaping up with the crossing of the floor.
00:00:09.040 Literally, she actually walked across the floor in a session of the House of Commons by Leona Alislav,
00:00:14.760 a GTA Member of Parliament representing an Aurora riding that she only narrowly captured in the 2015 election.
00:00:21.300 Now, Leona Alislav was not a household name, but she certainly is now as one of the more disruptive players in Canadian politics. 1.00
00:00:28.100 She said that she did not believe Justin Trudeau and the Liberals were equipped to do the things that are necessary in Canada,
00:00:35.140 especially on issues like defence, foreign policy, and even more broadly, the economy.
00:00:40.160 Now, this is a woman who knows what she's speaking of.
00:00:42.340 She was an Air Force captain, she worked in the private aerospace sector,
00:00:45.740 and in fact, on paper, looks like she belonged with the Conservatives in the first place.
00:00:50.220 For whatever reason, she wanted to run for the Liberals.
00:00:52.660 And in the last three years, somewhere along the line, she felt that her party and her government had lost her way,
00:00:57.880 and she said that her commitment is not to her party, but rather to her constituents and her country.
00:01:03.140 And for that reason, she has to continue to serve the remainder of her term from the Conservative benches 0.73
00:01:08.220 as a member of Her Majesty's loyal opposition.
00:01:11.840 This is, I think, a fascinating case, because in a tweet the day of her departure,
00:01:16.620 Alislav said that the Conservatives are unafraid to deal with the real issues.
00:01:21.520 And for the Conservatives, this is great.
00:01:23.200 They get to present themselves as a big tent party and a big tent movement with room for everyone.
00:01:28.320 And we know that a path to a majority victory for the Conservatives, especially in the GTA,
00:01:33.960 means picking up a lot of votes and support from disgruntled, disenfranchised Liberals,
00:01:39.180 like, for example, Leona Alislav.
00:01:41.600 Here's where things get a little bit tricky, though.
00:01:45.180 Andrew Scheer has to present the image that his party is one that has room for everyone,
00:01:49.560 while also dealing with the schism caused by Maxime Bernier's departure.
00:01:53.900 Justin Trudeau and his team have to say that,
00:01:56.020 oh, well, this woman never really belonged in the first place.
00:01:59.080 In fact, government house leader, Bardis Chagher, was on Power in Politics,
00:02:03.000 talking about that exact phenomenon, saying,
00:02:04.900 well, you know, she needed to make a decision for herself and that was that.
00:02:09.460 And, you know, the Liberals go forward as though nothing ever happened.
00:02:12.500 They're pretending this isn't a blow.
00:02:14.500 They're pretending that the confidence of even Liberal caucus members
00:02:17.900 has not been eradicated or at the very least diminished.
00:02:22.920 And if they're losing their Liberal MPs, what about Liberal voters,
00:02:26.260 people that backed them in 2015?
00:02:28.480 What's going to happen here is going to be very interesting.
00:02:30.860 We are now just over a year before the federal election,
00:02:34.940 which means that anything that takes place now
00:02:37.040 is all part of that lead-up to when Canadians go back to the polls in October of 2019.
00:02:43.460 Everything is political now.
00:02:45.160 There's no such thing as a political system in which we aren't paying attention,
00:02:49.180 at least for the next year, because everything matters.
00:02:52.340 And this is going to be, if we can say the writing is on the wall,
00:02:55.840 which I think we can, danger for Justin Trudeau.
00:02:58.740 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lawton.