This week, Sen. Percy Downe went public with his views amid a downward trend in the polls, economic unease and rumour mills churning about potential Liberal leadership contenders readying to replace him.
In a radio interview on The Vassy Kapelos Show Thursday, Downe said he’s hearing from “many members of the caucus” who are concerned and consider the time between now and February as critical for the party to conduct some internal soul-searching about the best path forward.
“It’s quite widespread,” Downe said. When asked why no other Liberals have said publicly what he claims they’ve communicated privately, the senator said they can’t for a range of reasons, including the fact that the party leader signs their nomination forms.
That website is unfortunately a bit of a joke. It’s a good idea on the face of it, but it counts every single promise as the same amount of importance, so creating a new learn to camp program for kids counts the same as overhauling the electoral system.
It also counts the electoral system reform promise as kept, based on the verbiage of the promise, which was a promise to look at doing electoral reform. While that may be what was said, that’s not what we were all sold, and definitely counts as a broken promise.
If I had been in his position, given the results of the survey, I wouldn’t have changed the system, either.
It was a dead split among the possible choices, and any selection would’ve been attacked for it’s strategic political consequences, so he did the only fair thing which was nothing.
Also, “counting promises as equal” is value projection. The severity or weight of each promise is subjective to each of us (single-issue voters are still a thing after all), so an unbiased, matter-of-fact counting is not a way of equally weighting them.