Junkyard Dogs

The race for the leadership of the Conservative Party is turning into a brawl among junkyard dogs. Campbell Clark writes:

The things Tory leadership candidates are saying about each other are downright scathing. To Canadians outside the Conservative tent, that’s bound to send an ugly message about the folks squabbling inside.

Then on Sunday, when Brampton, Ont., mayor and former Ontario provincial Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown jumped into the race, Mr. Poilievre’s campaign quickly posted a social-media ad to attack him.

It said Mr. Brown “will say anything” to win votes – because Mr. Brown opposed carbon taxes when he ran for the provincial PC leadership in Ontario, but once he won, adopted a carbon-tax policy.

The next day, Mr. Brown fired back with a statement that accused Mr. Poilievre of backing “discriminatory policies.”

It cited Mr. Poilievre’s support for the Conservatives’ 2015 election campaign proposal for a “barbaric cultural practices tip line,” and the ban on wearing a niqab while taking a citizenship oath – a ban which former prime minister Stephen Harper once said he would consider extending to civil servants. Mr. Brown said that Mr. Poilievre “has never once spoken out against these policies.”

Then there is Roman Baber who was kicked out of Doug Ford's caucus for opposing COVID 19 lockdowns. They're quite a collection, these hopefuls.

Post Stephen Harper, the party's bedrock has been grievance. What would life be like if they were given a majority?

Image: insightbyseymour.com

Get Rid Of The Clowns

 

It's time, Andrew Coyne writes, for the Conservatives to get rid of the clowns:

For much of the past decade, voters across the democratic world have indulged in the fantasy that they could elect, in essence, a bunch of clowns to lead them: demagogues, dilettantes, billionaire brick-throwers, people with no experience of or fitness for office but only a talent for distraction. Politics was not about electing serious people to make serious decisions in a dangerous world. It was about sending a message, or making a point, or sticking it to the people we don’t like. Or else it was about entertainment. It was only the government, after all. What was the worst that could happen?

We might not want to admit it. But we are at war:

Those may not be our soldiers fighting in Ukraine, but they are our weapons, and it is our fight. Vladimir Putin, it can no longer be denied, represents a singular threat to the democratic world. A leader who invades a neighbour for the sole purpose of extinguishing a nascent democracy, who levels whole cities in this pursuit, and who threatens any country that intervenes to stop the carnage with nuclear annihilation – and who can do all this entirely at his own, not-necessarily-rational discretion – is a creature out of our worst nightmares.

Therefore, all of our leaders must be serious. Unfortunately, the ghost of Stephen Harper still hovers over the Conservatives:

Too many Conservatives make the same mistake as their most blinkered opponents – of confusing being conservative with being a jerk. Stephen Harper was certainly blessed with the ability to irritate Liberals, but in 10 years in government left precious little in the way of a lasting conservative legacy.

What he did leave was a party that was all too prone to picking needless fights and peddling conspiracy theories – the party, or rather that section of it that is attracted to this sort of thing, that thinks the World Economic Forum is a threat to our freedom, but cheered on the lawless mob that occupied Ottawa. To subscribe to such idiocies does not prove you are a principled conservative. It merely marks you as unfit to govern.

Leadership in the mold of Stephen Harper is precisely what we don't need.

Image: The Toronto Star

Still King

Stephen Harper's ghost still haunts the Conservative Party. In fact, Michael Harris writes, it's still driving the Tory Bus:

The CPC is supposed to be doing some soul-searching in the process of its 2020 leadership race. In 2017, the last time the party went searching for its soul, it came back with Andrew Scheer. The karaoke Stephen Harper.

Again in 2020, they have headed straight back to the vacant parking lot of Harper’s political vision — the CPC as archly socially conservative, northern Republican, anti-environment, pro-oil and meaner than ever.

The word is that, after the Conservatives' defeat in the last election, Harper moved quickly to dump Andrew Scheer:

Andrew Scheer was pushed out, thanks to the strategic leak of closely held information about the Opposition leader allegedly using party funds for his children’s private school education. When CPC executive director, Dustin van Vugt, vouched for the leader’s expenses, he was summarily fired by the board of the Conservative Fund.

A lot of Conservatives who spoke to The Tyee on background, including former national candidates, hold the opinion that Stephen Harper was the source of the leak. Here’s how one of them put it:

“Scheer knows that he got screwed over by everyone from Bernier to Harper, basically everybody. When Conservative party activists got paperwork on the private school thing, anyone who knows anything knows that stuff like that is not widely available. Somebody on the fund decided to do that.”

Next, Harper let it be known that Jean Charest would not be an acceptable leader:

Then Harper blocked former Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest, from even running for the job by withholding his endorsement. Although the former PM has not publicly endorsed any candidate, the signs are there that front-runner Peter MacKay may not be his man — co-founder of the party or not.

It's beginning to look like Erin O'Toole is Harper's man:

The first sign that there could be some truth in that assessment was Premier Jason Kenney’s endorsement of Ontario MP Erin O’Toole for leader.

Kenney didn’t just endorse O’Toole, he took Peter MacKay to the woodshed. He publicly trashed the former Harper cabinet minister for talking about the “stinking albatross” of the party’s socially conservative values during the last election.

“No one will have their deeply held beliefs dismissed as stinking albatrosses under Erin O’Toole’s leadership,” Kenney bristled. “Erin O’Toole respects the breadth of our big tent coalition.”

In assessing Kenney’s endorsement of O’Toole, it can’t be overstated that Harper and Kenney have always been a team, the two most powerful Conservatives in the country. That may have been why Opposition leader Andrew Scheer consulted Harper and Kenney before making any major decisions. He knew who the real Big Dogs were.

Harper may have moved from the front bench to the back room. But he's still king.

Image Archemdis's Blog