Chantal Hebert writes that Peter Mackay may lead in the Conservative leadership race. But the party is still stuck in the past:
The party may be about to change its head cook but, if the debates suggested anything, it is that it is not in the process of rewriting its last election menu.
Take climate change. In the last campaign, the Conservatives lost votes over the perception that they were not serious about the issue.
But if an election were held tomorrow, the plan the party would put forward would be built on the same premises as Scheer’s.
As prime minister, Erin O’Toole and Peter MacKay would similarly dismantle the climate-change framework put in place by the Liberals, including, of course, the carbon tax.
Both talk a bigger game on pipeline building than on transitioning to a carbon-free economy.
But the Conservatives are reaching back further than the recent climate change debate:
In fact, with two social conservatives — Ontario MP Derek Sloan and Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis — rounding out the leadership lineup, this week’s debates featured more talk of turning back the clock on abortion and LGBTQ rights than of moving the country decisively forward on climate change.
For decades now, the Conservative Party of Canada has looked to the past for inspiration. That's why it keeps being run over by The Train From The Future.
Image: CBC.ca
12 comments:
it was a title he largely owed to his [McKay's[] credentials as the Tory leader who, along with Stephen Harper, presided over the reunification of the Conservative party
I have never been a PC or conservative but I have always thought of that as the "Great Betrayal" that would ensure I never trusted his word again.
I suspect a great many Canadians agree with you, jrk. They don't trust a word that comes out of Mackay's mouth.
The Cons will always be men of the past, Owen. It's their nature. John Kenneth Galbraith summed up the conservative project in 1963:
The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor. The man who has struck it rich in minerals, oil, or other bounties of nature is found explaining the debilitating effect of unearned income from the state. The corporate executive who is a superlative success as an organization man weighs in on the evils of bureaucracy...
Not much has changed since then.
Cap
Galbraith understood the modern conservative to a T, Cap. He or she is always in search of a moral justification for selfishness. This isn't Edmund Burke's Conservatism. It's Ayn Rand's "Objectivism." And that term is itself a fraud.
They add a new definition to the term "dead weight," Owen. Theirs is no longer a political ideology but a political emotion. Strip away the cultivated fear and anger and there's very little that remains.
They're selling paranoia, Mound. They fear the present. And the future horrifies them.
Commentators seem to be touting potato Pete as the debate winner. How sad he is the best they can do.
As Mound writes, rumley, we're looking at dead weight.
Isn't dead weight the whole point, Owen? I can't imagine the CPC wanting someone with the guts to discard Harper's non-vision for Canada's future.
That seems to be the point, Toby. Harper still controls the party.
.. Thanks.. !
Ms Hebert is of course a Canadian gem.. Sadly, her fine written analysis is behind a paywall if I'm not mistaken.. but her pithy hammer hits nail journalism is so refreshing.. We see her almost nightly anyway though.. via Mainstream Media - CBC - along with Coyne etc. She really is a 'one woman' poll.. presenting the unvarnished medical (pathology - cononer's report on the corpse) .. As a Twitterati, i like to read Kady O'Malley's rehash of what passes for Federal Governance.. (corpse still atwitching.. but seemingly somewhat dead.. or walking & dead) then progress on to measure the sage & brief observations of Ms Hebert. They are an astonishing & remarkable pair, those two.
Smart ladies both, sal. And Ms. Hebert is smart in both official languages.
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