Kicking The Harper Habit

The Conservatives, under Stephen Harper, were addicted to power. Michael Harris writes:

The Conservative Party of Canada is still deep in the throes of withdrawal — and the addiction to absolute power is the hardest habit of all to kick. Their thrashing on October 19 came about because of what they did with that power — that, and the fact that they allowed their party to become a cult led by a man who diminished them all. The lesson clearly hasn’t sunk in.

That's clear every time Rona Ambrose opens her mouth. But Ambrose isn't the only one to not have taken the election to heart.  Consider the case of Erin OToole, who briefly replaced Julian Fantino as Minister of Veterans Affairs:

In a recent blog post, O’Toole tried to make the case that Justin Trudeau displayed “hubris” when he said Canada was “back” the day after the election.

It wasn’t hubris. It was the way a lot of Canadians saw it. The “hubris” actually belonged to the former minister of Veterans’ Affairs, who has been drawing some rather absurd parallels between the policies of the new government and those of the old one.

He really couldn’t have picked worse examples. For starters, he claimed that the Liberals “abandoned” their promise to bring 25,000 government-sponsored Syrian refugees to Canada, leaving them with a policy that looked a lot like Harper’s.

Trudeau did not “abandon” his promise — he rescheduled part of it. The number is still 25,000 — higher than the Conservative number — but the arrival times were moved three months down the road. Nor is the Trudeau PMO screening the refugee files to prioritize Christian candidates. Despite the verdict at the polls, O’Toole is still pushing rejected Harper policy.

But where O’Toole became poisonously partisan was in his claim that the Liberals are pursuing the same policy on climate change as the Conservatives did at the Paris talks. O’Toole’s party did nothing for the environment during its decade in power, except make it more vulnerable to destructive resource exploitation.

Harper promised for seven years running that he would regulate the energy sector. He never did. It takes an awful lot of hubris to defend seven years of sitting on your hands.

Clearly, the Conservatives haven't kicked their Harper habit.

It Will Take More Than Plastic Surgery

The Harperites have undergone some plastic surgery. They believe Canadians will like Rona Ambrose's face and her soothing tone of voice. But Andrew Coyne writes that it will take more than a new face and a new voice to reboot the party:

Conservatism is not just losing elections. As a political movement, it has — let us not mince words — ceased to offer a coherent or attractive alternative. On the most pressing questions of the day, from the environment to social justice, it is either unwilling or unable to present any serious answer to the prescriptions of the left, or even to offer much resistance.

At best it can hope to profit from the left’s miscues, but even in power it lacks the self-confidence to define an agenda, let alone pursue one. The nastiness of the Harper government may have been peculiar to it, but in its aimlessness and timidity, its unwillingness to invest political capital or confess to an ideology, it has its counterparts in conservative parties across the country — in sharp contrast to the robust self-confidence of the left.

Under Stephen Harper, power trumped policy. The most glaring example of Harper's failure was on environmental policy:

A generation of environmentalists has grown up fully versed in the potential for market solutions to be applied to environmental problems; markets, they realize, are social institutions, like governments, each with its own proper sphere. Conservatives could have seized this opening, and run with it. If you like what the market can do for you in the environment, they could have said to voters, can we interest you in what it can do for your schools and health care?

I don't agree with Coyne. Conservatives have regarded the market as sacrosanct -- a glaring misunderstanding of the complexity of life. And I suspect that most Canadians -- when push comes to shove -- would also disagree with Coyne. Canada is a huge, sparsely populated country, where the market can't solve some intractable problems.

But I take Coyne's point: It will take more than plastic surgery to revive the Conservative Party.

Image: blogs.babycenter.com