Canada’s population is about 50 per cent more than Australia’s, 38 million to our 26 million. Yet get this. The main right-of-centre political party in Canada, the Conservative party (or Tory party), has about 700,000 paid-up party members.  Yes, you read that correctly. Meanwhile, here in Australia the Liberal party probably has somewhere between 20 and 30,000 members tops. (Their website says 80,000 but no MP, no connected party member, heck no sentient being believes that; it’s just too embarrassing for them to be open about the catastrophic and plummeting state of Liberal party membership in Australia.) Put in terms any recent graduates of our useless national curriculum will not understand, Canada’s main right-of-centre party has a good deal more than 20 times the number of paid-up members compared to Australia’s, where population alone suggests it should be 1.5 times. Ouch! Here’s one factor, probably the biggest one by far. Party members of a year’s standing or more in Canada decide who the parliamentary leader will be. Full stop. Not the party room. Not some British gameable scam set-up where the MPs get it down to two candidates then the membership picks. Nope. In Canada the members, and only the members, pick. So there is a strong incentive for people to get involved in party politics. And in Canada the Tory party members most recently chose Pierre Poilievre. Take it from me, the party room would have preferred to eat broken glass than pick him – because he’s an actual, don’t say it out loud, conservative. He’s pledged to slash the CBC (their public broadcaster) budget. He criticises Prime Minister Trudeau et al for Canada’s thuggish lockdowns. He takes the Moira Deeming side of the argument, not Pathetic Pesutto’s. He can say what a woman is and is happy to define what being ‘woke’ means to hostile interviewers. And if the Canadian Malcolm Turnbull types in the party room don’t like it? Nothing they can do I’m afraid.  Only the party membership can remove and install leaders. The Turnbull/Pyne/Brandis/Birmingham, etc coup against Abbott would have been stillborn. But is this approach of having strong conservative principles and promising to act on them the electoral suicide that the Labor-lite wing of the Libs (disingenuously known by the lefty media as the ‘moderates’) says it is? No! Poilievre and the Tories are currently up by about 5 points on Trudeau and the lefties in the polls – and this is in Canada where the political centre of gravity is considerably to the left of where it is here in Australia.

Be clear. Every single thing that the media and the ‘moderates’ in the Liberal party tell you about how in order to win the Libs have to move left and ape Labor (even more than they’ve been doing since the Abbott defenestration) is wrong. It runs up against what is known in the philosophy of science as ‘the facts’. How many disastrous lefty Lib electoral performances will it take to fix this? My bet is that as long as today’s party rooms pick the leader the state parties are stuffed and the Libs nationally are vulnerable. We need to go down the path they’ve taken in Canada, and now. Hands up readers if you’d join the Liberal party if you got a vote on who the leader was (and your vote was worth the same as Leeser’s, Birmingham’s, Ley’s, Pesutto’s, but I repeat myself).

Meanwhile in the US former President Trump was last week invited to do a town hall meeting by cable broadcaster CNN. The left-wing network chose a hostile interviewer and expected to have her rip Mr Trump to pieces with left-wing talking points. Amusingly, it did not go according to their plan. These settings, with a live audience, play to Trump’s strengths. Readers should go and watch the entire thing, which included a standing ovation from the audience and CNN unilaterally ending the town hall after 70 minutes though they’d scheduled it for 90 minutes. That tells you all you need to know, that and the fact that every left-wing talking head and politician was apoplectically angry at CNN after the fact for giving Trump a forum to give his side of things. Imagine that, in a democracy!  His response to the evidence-free New York City civil rape trial relating to events back thirty years ago – with the plaintiff known to have sent out tweets years later about how much she loved Trump in The Apprentice, and with Trump’s blunt, mean, brutal, but wholly convincing answer to why it never happened and no one could believe it happened – was first-rate. But most appealing of all was the fact that he did not back down, not one iota, in the face of media demands that he accept their characterisations of world events. Not on the state of the US border (non-existent); not on Biden corruption; not on the Ukraine war (why, asked Trump, had Europe only spent all-up some $20 billion while the US had spent $170 billion and this when the Biden administration was spending comparative pennies to stop the seven million illegal immigrants pouring across the southern border); not on January 6th (where Trump pointed out, accurately, that the rioters were not armed and that the one death was a woman veteran who was unarmed and why hadn’t the police officer who shot her been charged?).

Let’s be honest. Trump is boorish. He’s crass. He is, though, way smarter and more articulate than the left-wing media pretends (and a few galaxies more so than senile Joe Biden). No one would want him as their party’s standard-bearer in normal times. But these are not normal times. 51 senior intelligence officers signed that letter about the Hunter Biden laptop that they had to have known was a flat-out lie. Big Tech and the censorious ‘fact-checking’ online and mainstream media world look to be in the back pocket of the Dems. You need someone with a skin a few miles deep to stand up to the media abuse. And that’s what we saw on the CNN town hall.

Let’s be clear. Trump owns the Republican primary vote. I’ve been saying it for a while – and remember, as a big-time lockdown sceptic I loved the DeSantis Florida performance fighting the authoritarian public health caste’s desire for lockdowns – but it’s hard to see how DeSantis can beat Trump for the Republican nomination. And no one else has a snowball’s chance in hell. In any conventional political time Trump should be finished – discredited, crushed and abandoned. The Biden Department of Justice has tried everything and The Don just ploughs on, stronger right now politically than he was six months ago.

So can he win the general election? I’ve always thought he could. To some small extent the ballot harvesting and unsolicited postal votes voting rules in some states have been tightened up. The Biden economy is looking more and more as though a recession is coming (see Niall Ferguson in this magazine). But most tellingly the identity-politics-obsessed Democrats are right now hoist with their own petard. The only person less popular than Joe Biden is Kamala Harris. But how do the Dems stop Biden from running in 2024 without being stuck with this black, female VP as their nominee? Any answers go straight to US Democrat headquarters for the million dollar prize.