The liberals have maintained preferential hiring for women in the public service for decades, even though they are not the minority, nor have they been the minority since the early 2000s. Their policies are often very heavily entrenched in DEI mentalities, with zero tolerance for discussion / debate. Their feminist and minority-centric policies have explicitly alienated a large number of young men, particularly young white men, as was highlighted even during the introduction of the Liberal speeches/presentations on the cbc coverage.
Running a woman for leader is introducing a wedge issue in terms of voter opinion, at a time when the election results are really critical. Pretending like there aren’t still a lot of voters who have some degree of sexism is not realistic – and it’s of utmost importance that the Liberals do everything they can to challenge PP. I would rather they ran a man, with a higher chance of winning, than pretended like Freeland could win while she was overtly continuing to alienate male voters right up to the end with the “Man eater” music. Like imagine if a male candidate came out grooving to a song about beating women… what a stupid, divisive move.
That sort of blindness to the reality of the voting public, is precisely why the NDP are sunk. They run an overtly Sikh guy, who cozies up to Sikh’s at every public event he goes to… pretending like this isn’t going to alienate a bunch of voters, and be a huge issue in places like Quebec (where they’ve banned overt religious symbols in the past). It’s blind demographic politics optimism, with little serious regard to winning. Same goes for the Greens, when they put in that Black Lesbian Jewish Pro Palestine lawyer lady, who crashed and burned.
I’m historically a green voter – but honestly, I get “the defectors” point on this one, and am a bit surprised that there’s so much drama over it.
Like the news stories about her saying there were no child bodies at one site – people comment how what she’s saying is disrespectful to survivors of the residential system, but they aren’t saying she’s factually incorrect. The articles highlight that even the first nation “revised” their wording over the years from “remains of 215 children”, to “potential burial sites”, to eventually just “anomalies”.
So she’s correct in her statement on that front, no?
This sort of situation alienates moderates. The extreme backlash against anyone who asks questions in this area makes it impossible for moderates to engage with it without being labelled in some way. When moderates are unable to even ask questions/discuss the topic openly, well, they tend to become less moderate. So her going from questioning / highlighting objective truths, to experiencing a huge backlash, to doing a stupid mocking voice on a podcast, isn’t really that surprising a trajectory. The federal government making it a “hate crime” to question this stuff, is just amazing to me – and it’d be a huge point against the Liberals staying in power, if the alternatives weren’t so gross.