Ever since my ballot arrived from the Conservatives, I have been puzzling over what to say regarding the party’s malaise.
This is our third leadership contest in 40 months, with the previous two drivers having been chucked under the bus they failed to steer to victory, all while Trudeau lets the country decline. None of this inspires confidence. But all pejoratives aside, clearly the Tories are in need of a rebirth. Here then are some new and oldfangled suggestions.
First, it is time to put the myth of Right Honorable Stephen Harper to bed. He served his purpose as the unifier of the right and won a majority; but once in power, his incrementalism only wasted his supporters’ patience, while making the legislation easily reversible when the Tories lost. Add to this his fumbles of the Senate, Supreme Court, and GST -–while still doing nothing for social conservatives – and the mediocrity of his government’s tenure comes into sharp relief.
Secondly, since small-minded short sightedness defeated us last time, the solution is to think bigger and act boldly. There are so many atrocious and idiotic policies on the books in this country that keeping the various bands of Tories united is as simple as letting them set their teeth into whichever Laurentian consensus they hate most.
From anti-gun laws to government waste, from taxation reform to ecological conservation, the opportunities are literally endless.
We need to understand that the realignment is real, and that the mantle of “austerity for thee but endless greed for me” has been taken up by the liberal-left leaning parties of the West, thanks largely to COVID-19 mandates. The voters are restive, looking for any political apparatus that will bring back accountability to their institutions and affordability to their lives. Tories do not need to couch their policy in terms of philosophical principle – they need only produce results.
The nationalization of industries and repatriation of the profits made off of our resources is an idea that only offends the feckless tuxedos on Bay Street who usually vote Liberal anyway; the redistribution of headcount and salaries in our public institutions from the obese executive management to the starving frontline would instantaneously change how 50 per cent of civil servants currently vote; and the renovation of all infrastructure would keep people employed for decades.
My critics on the right are welcome to object, using neo-liberal word salad that ran out of gas in 2008, or my adversaries on the left can proclaim I have finally converted to their superior ideas. The truth is I know my faith, which demands a healthy morality and society – that is all.
But none of these obvious solutions to Canada’s problems can ever come to fruition if the Tories can’t solve the problem of getting elected. My third point is simple and perhaps the most important: it is time for Conservatives to develop an electoral strategy that isolates and requires fewer seats in the Greater Toronto Area. In short, if a seat does not touch a major urban area, or is a suburban-rural riding, it ought to be blue; if it is any other color but blue, every effort must be made to bring it into our tent in both general and by-elections.
Detractors, short-pantsed and long, will wave this off as nonsensical. I’ll parry with a final tip of the hat to the old boss -– look at Harper’s 2011 majority map and observe everything that isn’t the GTA. We can win the territories, Atlantic Canada, even Labrador and parts of Quebec. It isn’t a fantasy, the idea of building a coalition that reduces the importance of urban Canada; it is the only path to “a strong, conservative, majority government,” that rules securely for decades.
To be clear, I do not believe that the Conservative Party will save us.
The fact of the matter is that Canada will not survive on its current trajectory, and these propositions are just a few of the necessary corrections.
All that remains is to see if the Tories rise to the occasion.
