Ask anybody in Canada’s last Parliament who the most popular Conservative MP from Ontario was, and I’m betting the vast majority of folks would have picked the member for Milton.

Lisa Raitt had so many appealing qualities. She was a partisan, but not blindly or stupidly so. She was conservative enough for Stephen Harper to have put her in his cabinet in several senior portfolios. She was important enough in conservative circles for the current leader, Andrew Scheer, to have made her deputy party leader after he defeated her (along with many others) for the leadership in 2017. (She was the Conservatives’ first-ever female deputy party leader.)

She was highly respected on all sides of the House — so much so that Liberal MP Roger Cuzner once said of her, “She’s tough, quick, funny, and hard-working — she can give as good as she gets.”

Certainly, the Conservative party’s lacklustre performance across Ontario didn’t help Raitt’s fortunes. Scheer’s party took only 36 of the 121 seats in Canada’s most populous province. But plenty of other well-known MPs were able to stave off the red Liberal tide across the province.​​​​​​​

Read the entire Steve Paikin article HERE