Rona is proud to be the first leader of the Party to march in a gay pride parade. Rona knows policy. As a key member of the federal cabinet for a decade, Rona solved problems as a minister of the crown across nine government departments, including serving as Vice Chair of the Treasury Board for several years and chair of the cabinet committee for public safety, justice and aboriginal issues.
Rona is a determined public policy expert who understands that government actions can have a real impact on families and businesses across the country. As a proud Westerner, Rona is keenly aware of the domestic political, geopolitical and policy forces affecting the energy sector. As the former environment minister responsible for the GHG regulatory regime in place across several industrial sectors today, she understands the challenges facing the fossil fuel industry.
She has spent her life passionately fighting for disadvantaged women and girls. Rona is responsible for ensuring that aboriginal women in Canada were finally granted equal matrimonial rights. Since her retirement from politics, she has served on the boards of several corporations—including as deputy chairwoman of TD Securities, currently—and launched the SheLeads foundation to encourage women to run for public office. When Scheer announced he was stepping down after the election, there was again some very loud wishful Tory thinking that centred on Ambrose.
His party, meanwhile, is mired around 30 per cent support with the Liberals five points ahead, regardless of their controversies or missteps. Contemplating Rona Ambrose as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada CPC is speculative political fiction, but it offers some useful insights into the problems currently dogging the party and its actual leader.
Would Canadian politics be any less polarized and intransigent with her at the helm? Would the Tories be threatening the Liberals in the polls? I think there would have been a sea of goodwill. Indeed, polls point to exactly that, says Philippe J. A Leger poll from January asked respondents who would be the best person to lead the CPC, and Ambrose was the top choice of voters at large 10 per cent , followed by Harper nine per cent and MacKay seven per cent ; the preference for those three candidates was even stronger among CPC partisans.
An Angus Reid poll from December —shortly after the last federal election in the pre-pandemic BeforeTimes—found that Canadians named climate change as their top issue, particularly in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, the three most populous provinces where the CPC needs to make serious inroads if it is to supplant the Liberals. An Abacus Data poll from March found that one-third of Canadians had a negative view of him, compared to 20 per cent with a positive opinion.
But even in an alternate universe where Ambrose is the current CPC leader, the federal political landscape might not be so different. And it also means that when things normalize, the Conservatives might suddenly find more buyers. Saro Khatchadourian, a former communications staffer in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition under Ambrose, thinks of his grandparents, who always serve as his barometer for how average people think about politics and politicians.
When Khatchadourian worked on Parliament Hill, they were always asking him for his insider take on the politicians they saw on TV. Khatchadourian marched in the Pride Parade with Ambrose and points to that openness and a relatively progressive voting record as some of her biggest assets as the hypothetical leader of a Conservative party looking to stake out a bigger tent.
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