With the his party's recent loss in Montreal, Trudeau ought to realize why his post-national experiment needs to end
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The Liberals are being engulfed by diaspora politics and the post-nationalist experiment they brought upon Canada.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the final votes in Montreal’s LaSalle-Émard-Verdun byelection were counted. They revealed that the Bloc Québécois candidate had eked out a narrow victory, wrenching a previously thought safe seat from their Liberal rivals.
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If the Bloc poaching a safe Liberal seat was the biggest story of the night, then the second-biggest was the surge in the vote percentage for the NDP’s candidate Craig Sauvé. He garnered 8,262 votes, or 26.1 per cent of those cast, enough to be neck-and-neck with the Bloc and Liberal candidates.
Compare that to the NDP’s result this week to the 2021 general election, when the NDP attained less than 20 per cent in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, or in 2019, when the party received less than 17 per cent. Given the tiny margins of this byelection, there is no doubt the NDP picked up enough former Liberal votes for them to lose the seat.
What appears to have motivated so many voters to switch sides was Sauvé’s choice to campaign on a war more than 8,000 kilometres away. Sauvé famously — or infamously — plastered his pamphlets with Palestinian flags, as if he was running in Ramallah or Nablus. Whether he actually cares that deeply about Gaza is a mystery, but........