Canadian conservatism is dead

You know how in the The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the East gets squished by Dorothy’s falling house? Well, today the hopes and dreams of Canada’s conservative movement are in pretty much the same flattened condition as that unfortunate witch. Basically all that remains now is for a Munchkin coroner to examine what’s left of conservative aspirations and proclaim, “they’re not only merely dead, they’re really most sincerely dead.”

Time of death: April 23, when Alberta’s conservative-leaning Wildrose Party, after being swept up high on the winds of the polls, came crashing down to Earth with a disappointing thud. What made this event the equivalent of an ideological house crushing is not so much the result of the vote, but rather how that result is being interpreted. Experts are blaming the Wildrose loss on its conservative agenda. They say Wildrose was just too radical to win.

For instance, in its electoral postmortem, the Toronto Star gloatingly pointed out that Albertans didn’t share “Wildrose’s enthusiasm for rehashed ‘firewall’ policies, privatized health and charter schools.” Of course, you would expect those on the political left to make such an argument. But surprisingly Wildrose leader Danielle Smith is also saying much the same thing. As she put it, “We have some soul-searching to do as a party. Our members have now seen that some of our policies were rejected by Albertans, quite frankly .… We will be revisiting some of those. You can’t run a government if you don’t get sanction from the people.”

In other words, if it’s to win, the Wildrose has to become more like the Progressive Conservatives.

Are the Star and Smith right? Did Wildrose conservative policies fail to resonate with Albertans? Maybe. But there are also other plausible explanations.

My own view is the Wildrose loss had more to do with poor tactics than with policy. The undecided vote in Alberta broke overwhelmingly in the last week for the Progressive Conservatives. Surely, the Wildrose’s own internal polls must have picked this up. So whey didn’t they react? Why not try and stop the bleeding?

One way to turn things around would have been for Wildrose to run ads aimed at degrading Premier Alison Redford and the PC brand name. Yes, I am talking about running “negative” ads. But Wildrose didn’t go negative. Instead they finished up the campaign with positive, jump on the Wildrose bandwagon style ads, the kinds of TV spots you run when undecided voters are leaning in your direction.

Of course, such theorizing is now academic. In politics, perception is reality and right now the perception is that conservatism won’t sell in Canada. That means other provincial conservative parties in places such as Ontario will move to the “centre” so as to avoid Wildrose’s fate.

The perception will also severely undermine efforts by small “c” conservative MPs in the Conservative party caucus to push the federal Tory government to the right. And so the Harper government will continue to offer Canadians more big spending, more big government and little in the way of ideological or fiscal conservatism.

In short, for the foreseeable future no political party in Canada will push for things like fiscal responsibility, freer markets and individual freedom. And without any political leadership, at either the federal or provincial levels, the conservative movement will lose both its direction and its fighting spirit.

I suppose I do hold out some small hope that true conservatism will rise again in Canada in the future, but right now that time seems so far away, it might as well be over the rainbow.

Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Gerry Nicholls