So I went a little bit Mr Freaky-Boots on Friday, and followed that up with Hello Logorrhea! on Saturday.

Upon calm and, regrettably, sober reflection, it seems like the membership and their delegates did something approaching The Right Thing at the CPC convention. They have settled on what seems to be a potentially winning platform. It now remains for the Tory leadership to take this steel and forge it into a sword with which to smite mine enemies!

Despite my approval of the policy platform arising out of the convention, however, I stand by my fears regarding the party leadership. Why did Harper and MacKay not vet the contentious proposals beforehand? Why did MacKay freak out on Friday? I mean, I did, but this is a freakin’ anonymous blog for Pete’s sake. I don’t freak out at work like I do here, and I wish MacKay hadn’t either. He could have made his resignation threats to Harper behind closed doors, and Harper and he could have made a personal and public appeal to the convention to reject Reid’s plan, thereby avoiding all the b.s. distraction of Friday. Some commenters below have indicated they think the whole brouhaha was a tempest in a teapot, because it ended up okay (i.e. the delegates rejected the rep-by-membership thingy advanced by Scott Reid). But my eruption on Friday, and my dolorous whingeing Saturday, centred not on the issue but upon its management. Yes, I’m glad that the delegates avoided splitting the party in two (hooray for low expectations!), but this teapot tempest has exposed what I think are severe management problems within the CPC leadership.

Short version: the CPC leadership better do some soul-searching about this. If they don’t, we should not be surprised if the wheels fall off the Tory bus midway through the next campaign, whether it’s another Paul-Martin-Supports-Child-Porn? thing or something equally outrageous. What happens on the surface is important, but what it tells us about the deeper currents is more important still.

I’m checking the box next to “wait and see” when it comes to the Tory leadership. For now, I’m worried. But as Principal Skinner enthused to Bart’s classmates, after being overheard telling Edna Krabappel that the students have no future: “Prove me wrong, children. Prove me wrong!”