Canada’s Conservative Party may have run an arrogant and tone-deaf campaign last autumn. But let’s have a nanosecond of sympathy, please, for the federal Conservative Party.
It’s tough enough to have to face up to the fact that Conservatives themselves did the most to get Justin Trudeau – son of the he who is the anti-Christ to hardcore Conservatives – elected prime minister.
Worse still, as the more astute among Conservatives realize, the results of the Oct. 19 election were not the beginning of the party’s current troubles. The troubles began years before, when party members allowed their autocratic leader to rebrand them into the Harper Party.
The timing for a revitalized Conservative party couldn’t be much worse.
In the U.S., Donald Trump has managed to make the conservative brand synonymous with bigotry and thuggery. Canadian politics, when compared with its American counterpart, looks like the land of Pollyanna. Just the same, some of the Trump Effect is bound to spill north of the border.
Worse still, some parts of the Canadian Conservative voting base will want a Donald of their very own. This is why Kevin O’Leary, famous for being famous, came to the recent Manning Centre conference in Ottawa to deliver an entertaining but substance-free campaign speech.
In addition, the Conservatives are on the wrong side of history on many issues, such as legalized marijuana or physician-assisted death – just as they were a generation ago, when they railed against turbans in the military, the metric system and bilingual cereal boxes.
The Conservatives also will have to wake up to the fact that they no longer control the public agenda as they did when they were in power. This will mean they must develop policies on two issues the party regards as kryptonite – health and climate change.
Dealing with issues such as these will be a challenge – a challenge that was on display at the Manning conference.
In a session that might have been called Conservatives on Cannabis (not literally), moderator Matt Bufton urged panelists to resist rehashing arguments for and against legalizing marijuana and think forward on the assumption the Trudeau government will honour its election promise.
But the panelists were having none of that, and the session turned into an angry schism between older and younger delegates.
Dr. Dean Vause, executive director of the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre and who lives in former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s riding, said the Conservatives were the only party in the election that had it right on pot: “We should be alarmed. It’s ugly. It’s horrific.”
Dr. Daniel Lindsay, president-elect of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba, called on the Conservatives to push back against young people’s assumption that pot is a low-risk drug.
The comments of both brought delegates to the mics. One young man from McGill University said many of his friends in the room have smoked pot and the Conservatives will just have to get over it.
The mere fact that health care would be on the agenda of the Manning conference represents a quantum leap for the Conservative movement. As recent as two years ago, Preston Manning told his namesake conference that convincing Canadians that health was purely a provincial responsibility was a Conservative goal.
At this year’s conference, there was much talk about making the Canada Health Act better to serve Canadians. Conservatives, apparently, now accept that Ottawa has a leadership role to play in health care.
Nadeem Esmail, an economist from the right-leaning Fraser Institute, said he was not seeking to privatize Canadian health care; only to “Swedenize” it. Sweden, over the past 19 years, has been privatizing large segments of its health-care system. This is like saying “Privatization if necessary, but not necessarily privatization.”
The Conservatives need to find a leader who won’t commandeer their party in the way the previous one did. They also might consider appealing to all Canadians – instead of just the party’s angry base.
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