Afterwords

The Tyee's Richard Warnica has a couple of interesting post-mortem posts on this weekend's leadership races.

First, he draws the comparison between the voting procedures at this weekend's leadership races and the FPTP system that still rules general elections - highlighting that in both races, the long-declared frontrunners eventually lost out to popular will (whether of members as a whole in the case of Alberta's Cons, or at least of the delegates at the federal Lib convention) due entirely to the presence of preferential balloting. Which leads naturally to the question of why we're stuck with a single FPTP electoral vote when the parties themselves understandably insist on at least some form of majority approval for their leaders.

Second, he highlights the fact that for all the portrayal of Stephane Dion as an outsider, his campaign was far from an independent movement, and featured more than a few well-known (and in some cases infamous) Lib insiders. And moreover, it's worth wondering as well what promises he made to secure the momentum he won at the convention.

(Edit: completed post.)