Moves to unseat the prime minister this week are coming not just from the progressive coalition government-in-waiting, but also from members of his own party.
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As Stephen Harper battled a united opposition in Ottawa, several anti-Harper polls, petitions, e-mail campaigns and sites were launched by groups claiming to be factions of the CPC. Here’s a sampling:
Draft John Baird for Conservative Party Leader seems the most suspect but is no less professional-looking than Baird’s own shoddy site. The site administrator is on a Gmail account and claims in e-mail that “for the time being, the identity of the [site] founders is not being made public because of political retaliation concerns within caucus.”
The site says it’s prepping for a race against the already mobilizing Industry Minister Jim Prentice.
Conservatives for Prentice looks best organized of all the out-with-Harper sites, even though it’s a simple blogspot address. Like the Baird page, it’s filtered through a web domain that keeps its author nameless. There is no outreach on the Prentice page, but it seems to have goaded Prentice campaign manager David Higginbottom into a debate in the comments.
Whether true-blue Conservatives are behind the sites or not, grassroots support for Harper appears jittery, if not disappearing.
Blogging Tories, the online collective of CPC members, began a thread called Should Harper And The Government Resign? Unsurprisingly, many of the responses have been in the affirmative.
A shadowy character calling himself Noam D. Garrett has been sending messages with the subject line, “Harper must resign to save our party” as well as trolling around political websites. On comment boards, he of the blatant alias links to an underwhelming Petition to dump Stephen Harper as leader of the Conservative Party. It has fewer than 200 signatures.
“Enough is enough. He has to wear the screw-ups of the last few months, and if he has to go to save this government and this party, so be it,” says Garrett.
For Liberals, known for in-fighting, all this can be filed under “revenge.”
Anonymous Liberals have been embarrassing their own leaders and MPs for the past decade, up to and including this past election. Liberal blog stalwart CalgaryGrit articulated the frustration with the behind-the-curtain squabbles in the post You, Too, Can Be An Anonymous Liberal!
So it’s probably with glee that noted Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella notes on his site, “I have heard from senior Conservatives -and even some present and former caucus members – who are very, very angry at [Harper]. More than one noted to me how much Jim Prentice looked like a leader in Question Period – and how the prime minister looked like a shadow of his former self.”
joshuae@nowotoronto.com
