The Centre Cannot Hold

                                                        http://www.cbc.ca/

Stephen Harper told us that we wouldn't recognize Canada when he was through with it. These days, there are lots of Conservatives who don't recognize their party. In the wake of the party's rejection of Chess Crosbie's candidacy, Michael Harris writes, John Crosbie has been receiving phone calls:

When former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney calls from Rome to express sympathy and outrage that Ches Crosbie was blocked from running as a Conservative candidate in the 2015 federal election, you know the Conservative Party of Canada has a big problem.

Nor does that problem get any smaller, when former Conservative cabinet minister Jim McGrath calls to add his voice to the political maelstrom triggered by this blunder of epic proportions.

“The party has gone to hell,” he told his former cabinet colleague and fellow Newfoundlander.

And the elder Crosbie doesn't buy the line that the decision was entirely out of the prime minister's hands:

When asked about the prime minister’s hand in this, Crosbie replied, “There is no way that he didn’t know. It’s like the Duffy matter.”

The word is that Harper didn't enjoy the younger Crosbie's skewering of the Cowboy from Etobicoke. But Conservative candidate Kevin O'Brien once claimed that Harper had "no integrity." There is more behind the Crosbie saga:

A far more plausible reason is that Ches Crosbie looks like he would be headed to trial this September on a ground-breaking class action suit representing 1,000 clients in a case involving allegations of physical and sexual abuse at five Indian Residential Schools in Newfoundland and Labrador.

For historical reasons, indigenous people from Newfoundland and Labrador were left out of the compensation package for First Nations, and also from Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology for the Residential Schools. The Harper government denied responsibility for schools that opened before the province joined Confederation in 1949. 

It's one thing to apologize to Canada's First Nations. It's something else again to seek justice for them. Ches Crosbie will do just that. Justice is not in Stephen Harper's DNA. Long time Conservatives understand that.

That's why the Conservative Party is falling apart. The centre cannot hold.

A Grave Mistake

                                               http://news.nationalpost.com/

The story of the Harper Party's rejection of Ches Crosbie's candidacy in Avalon tells you much more about Stephen Harper than it does about Mr. Crosbie. Stephen Maher writes:

It is part of the culture of the distinct society of Newfoundland to have a bit of fun, to mock oneself, one’s fellows and, especially, one’s betters, who must either laugh or lose face.

So Crosbie put on a Stephen Harper wig, a kilt, a seal-skin vest, took up a wooden sword and performed the final, bloody scene of Macbeth, in which, in this version, Stephen MacHarper confronts Mike MacDuffy, swearing he will not “yield to one of Senate born.”

“Before my body, I throw my political friends,” Crosbie declaimed. “Lay on, MacDuffy, And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”

Mr. Harper makes jokes at other people's expense. But if there's one thing he won't -- or can't -- do, it's to laugh at himself. And the National Candidate Selection Committee doesn't believe in laughing at Harper's expense, either:

Crosbie didn’t learn that some humourless mainlanders disliked this until Monday, when he got an email from Dustin van Vugt, executive director of the Conservative Party of Canada, informing him that the National Candidate Selection Committee had held a meeting.

“The NCSC has disallowed your candidacy as a potential nomination contestant for the Conservative Party of Canada,” Van Vugt wrote.

There were three reasons, the party said: the MacHarper skit, his role in a lawsuit by Labrador residential school survivors and an innocuous interview he gave to the Hill Times, the newspaper that covers Parliament Hill.

The problem, you see, is that Crosbie claimed he would be an independent voice for the good burghers of Avalon. The Harper Party will have none of that. Maher writes:

I don’t think Harper’s palace guard cares about the Crosbies or about Newfoundland’s tradition of satirical humour.  They care about winning, and they have a script to follow. It calls for candidates to stand silent while Harper stands at centre stage, sternly warning that only he can protect our families from terrorists.

Yet another reminder that Canada is ruled by a paranoid, humourless man. Extending his stay at 24 Sussex would be a grave mistake.