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tuesday hawking.

There’s been some good breakdown of the potential outcomes of next Saturday’s Alberta PC leadership second ballot. As I’ve said before, a lot will depend on how many memberships can be sold this week and how well defeated candidates like Dave Hancock, Lyle Oberg, and Mark Norris can retain the support of supporters and direct them to support Ed Stelmach.

Also, it should be interesting to see if the 36 MLA’s who are supposedly supporting Jim Dinning actually get out and sell PC memberships this week (we’re all looking at you Barry McFarland…).

I wouldn’t be surprised if large portions of Lyle Oberg’s support and Mark Norris’ rural support went to Ted Morton on the second ballot. But, because of the PC membership sales this week it will be fairly difficult to track this.

Ted Morton is definately the anti-establishment candidate in this race. If you’re a Tory and you want things shaken up, I’m pretty sure Ted Morton is your man. Ed Stelmach may have “integrity,” but I still can’t name one thing he did after being a member of the PC Cabinet and Caucus for 13 years. And I think I’ve made my thoughts on Jim Dinning fairly clear in the past.

I’ll have more of my thoughts in the next couple days, but until then I’ll direct you to Duncan’s breakdown on the probabilities of the preferential second ballot.

Also, I was impressed with Green leader Elizabeth May‘s second place good showing of 25% in last night’s London-North Centre by-election. Considering Liberal Glen Pearson was only elected with 34% and Conservative Diane Haskett placed third with 24%, it should be interesting to see how this will effect future Green support across Canada. It doesn’t do anything bad for their legitimacy…

And finally, the Federal Liberals are holding their leadership selection this upcoming weekend. Who will win? Michael Ignatieff? Bob Rae? Gerard Kennedy? I guess we’ll see, but to tell you the truth, other than reading the weekly pdf edition of the Hill Times than arrives in my mailbox weekly, I haven’t been spending any large amount of time paying attention to Federal politics…

UPDATE: Will has some thoughts on Jim Dinning’s speech yesterday…

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