Belated Comments: Belinda Crosses the Floor

[morgan_dhu]

Get over it, people. Members of Parliament have been crossing the floor since parliaments were first invented. And in case you've forgotten your Civics 101, you cast a vote for the candidate, not the party. Of course, the candidate most likely has a party affiliation, but is still at liberty to change zir affiliations, particularly if it appears that zir current party’s policies may be detrimental to zir constituents.

I'm not denying the importance of party politics – who could, these days? And I've seen people, quite understandably, called a traitor or an opportunist for crossing the floor in the past. That's just standard political name-calling. But the level of invective and personal insult that's been levelled at Ms. Stronach is unlike anything I've seen in 30 years of watching politics. Remarks such as:


"A little rich girl who is basically whoring herself out to the Liberals." "I said that she whored herself out for power, that's what she did." Tony Abbott, a Conservative member of the Alberta legislature

"Some people prostitute themselves for different costs or different prices. She sold out for a cabinet position." Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott

Aside from the "whore" remarks, there have also been an astonishing number of people impugning her intelligence, saying things like "Belinda's not the brightest bulb" and so on.

"She sort of defined herself as something of a dipstick, an attractive one, but still a dipstick, with what she's done here today. She is, at the end of the day, going to paint herself as something of a joke." Ontario Conservative Bob Runciman

"I've never really noticed complexity to be Belinda's strong point." Conservative Leader Stephen Harper

Interesting. Setting aside the whole issue of pot, kettle, black, she was smart enough for the boys in borrowed blue when she helped broker the whole deal-making process that led to the creation of their freaking party. She was smart enough to run Magna and be identified as one of the most powerful women in international commerce - until last night of course, when suddenly they're describing her successful stint at the helm of Magna as "playing with the company Daddy gave her." Hello, lots of successful men made their name in the family business.

I've never seen personal insults of this nature directed at a man in her position before. This is pure sexism, and it says so much about the Conservatives and their supporters. I can't help wondering if this is part of the reason that the Liberals are back up in the polls, and the Conservatives are down again. Maybe, just as they always seem do, they've shoved their feet squarely into their mouths up to the knee joint and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory once again. If so, it couldn't happen to a more deserving party.

Comments

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

I've seen a lot of nasty comments directed at her because she had a relationship going with one of the Conservatives (whose name I can't remember) and apparently it was a biiiiiig betrayal for her to cross the floor because somehow or other it meant she was breaking up with him. There were actually news stories on CTV about this guy and his broken heart because Belinda left him. This left me going "Huh?" I thought it was only the Americans who cared who their politicians were sleeping with.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, so she broke poor Peter MacKay's heart. Or so he and Stephen Harper say. That is so totally irrelevant to her situation as a Member of Parliament.

But if we're going to gossip about politicians supposedly in love, what kind of love is it that insists on breaking up just because you're no longer in the same party? Isn't she the same person now that she was a month ago? By his own admission, she had been sharing with him the fact that she was feeling increasingly at odds with Conservative policies.

So...Either she was changing as a person, their relationship was dying anyway, and this has nothing to do with her crossing the floor, except that both are consequences of that change...

Or he thinks it would look bad for him publically, especially around other Conservatives, to stand by her while she makes this decision, so he decided they can't be lovers any more.

Or something else equally irrelevant.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

In this country, crossing the floor is very rare and members who do it can expect all manner of invective. I've seen all the comments above hurled at members of both sexes but it is often said that women cop more.

We had a party leader here a few years back called Cheryl Kernot who defected from the party she was leading. Turned out that she was having an affair with a prominent (and also married) government minister but of course the news media never report personal details about members until after they leave office.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Invective is expected here, too, when someone crossed the floor. It's the nature of the invective that is quite different this time.

For example, about two years ago, Scott Brison, a member of the Progressive Conservatives (one of the two parties that merged to create the relatively new Conservative party), crossed the floor to join the Liberals. Brison had a high profile, having been a contender for the leadership of the former Progressive Conservatives. He was called a turncoat, a traiter, an opportunist (he received a cabinet post, as did Stronach) and all sorts of similar things. What he was not called was a whore, nor did anyone start questioning his intelligence or discussing his physical appearance as if it were somehow relevant to his decision. And Brison is gay, which would certainly have given persons of a certain mindset lots of unseemly things to say if they had chosen to take that route.

It's also interesting that the personal relationships of politicians aren't often turned into media fodder here, but the break-up between Stronach and MacKay (who was the leader of the Progressive Conservatives at the time of the merger between the two right-wing parties) has been in the news a lot. But then, their relationship had garnered some buzz before this, considereing his status as former leader of the PCs and deputy leader of the Conservatives, and her status as a former candidate for the leadership of the Conservatives...