He’s probably half right. No matter how much the Conservatives are fluffed and buffed by the same media enablers who guarded Harper’s flanks in his heyday — the National Post, the Globe & Mail, the CBC and Maclean’s — the CPC will be out of power for a decade.
Judging by the Cons’ remorse-free, self-serving and arrogant post-election analysis, the beleaguered senator’s forecast could prove accurate. Rona Ambrose is turning out to be as poor an interim leader as she was an environment minister. (Remember that sorry-ass Clean Air Act?)
For starters, Rona thinks the Harper party had the right policies. She thinks people who voted Liberal on October 19 were like Albertans who voted NDP in the last provincial election — they didn’t know what they were doing.
Rona thinks history will be kind to the former prime minister — perhaps because he was so kind to her. She thinks the problem with the party’s environmental policy was simply a failure of public relations. Really? For the Harperites, ‘nature’ was that creepy crawly stuff that stood in the way of pipelines.
As for the election, Rona says that the party was hurt by “boutique” issues — you know, like honesty, race-baiting and snitch lines straight out of Orwell. It had fallen out of touch — despite using hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars to keep the propaganda rolling out.
The loss, Rona thinks, had nothing to do with the Harper record of deceit, cheating and contempt for democracy. Nothing to do with the cast of dubious characters elevated to enormously powerful positions by the PM himself. Nothing to do with the heart-stopping conniving and corruption in the Harper PMO during the Wright/Duffy Affair. Rather, it was part of a natural cycle where people reflexively opt for change after ten years. It wasn’t the Harper record — it was some inexorable law of politics playing out last October. At least it was according to Rona.
Which means that it’s beyond silly for Ambrose to talk about putting her “stamp” on the Conservative party. She stands for the very party that got shellacked in the recent election. Like many Harperites, she’s deep in denial. Not an ideal position from which to start the heavy lifting of institutional renewal. If you don’t think anything is wrong, nothing gets fixed, right?
To be fair, I should note that Rona has changed her position on an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women. That’s good but … strange. For nearly ten years, she was a senior member of a government that rejected that idea with considerable vigour.
I await with interest Rona’s description of her intellectual journey to the polar-opposite conclusion. So do Canada’s First Nations people. Which Rona should they believe now — the one who ignored them in power, or the one who embraces them in opposition, where talk is cheap?
To the extent that Rona Ambrose affects the choice of the permanent leader, the Conservative Party of Canada will remain moribund — a captive of the party’s Reform wing, which will not soon be rushing to carry Peter MacKay around on its shoulders as the new Steve. None of the usual suspects stands much of a chance of winning back power. Think about it … Jason Kenney as a champion of renewal?
The Harper era is over. The surest way to take up permanent residence in the political wilderness is to pretend otherwise. And that is exactly what the party is doing by continuing to shirk its responsibility for the awful policies and rotten behavior which were so roundly rejected by Canadians two months ago.
Luckily for the CPC, if Rona doesn’t get it, then someone like Michael Chong does. Chong knows that the Harper government had an attitude problem — a big one. He knows that the ruthlessness Harper adopted towards the political opposition was payback for the arrogance and disrespect the Liberals showed the Conservatives in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Chong also knows what was behind Harper’s antipathy toward the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the spirit of which he was constantly violating. It was a Liberal doctrine — in particular, a Trudeau doctrine. Before the Charter, all power was vested in Parliament. The foundation of the system was Parliamentary Supremacy.
After the Charter became law, power was vested in citizens. In one stroke, the authority of the ten provinces and the Parliament of Canada was restrained, if not diminished. Chong knows that Harper played to Conservatives who hated that proposition, the ones who would rather have the Supreme Court defer to the executive branch of government than to the Charter.
But Harper hurt the party immeasurably by attacking the Supreme Court and besieging it with unconstitutional laws. Not for nothing are there framed copies of the Charter in most parliamentary offices. Canadians love their Charter — and, I might add, their Supreme Court.
Above all else, Chong knows better than most that the Conservatives have to learn to play by the rules again, rather than according to the mercurial fiats of a cult figure. It was a lesson Chong learned the hard way.
He was minister of intergovernmental affairs when Stephen Harper decided to grant nation status to Quebec. This extraordinary measure did not go through cabinet and Chong was never consulted. There was a sense of urgency — even panic — in the national caucus. Chong himself believed that the Clerk of the Privy Council had to step in and remind Harper of the rules. That never happened.
Instead, Chong resigned on a matter of principle — the only person who stood up to Harper and left cabinet when he believed the PM was wrong. Neither Dimitri Soudas nor Harper himself could talk him out of it. Chong saw nation status for Quebec the way that Pierre Trudeau did — as trading national citizenship for tribalism. What Harper did was a fundamental violation of the way government policy is made; Chong knew it and did the right thing.
With the possible exceptions of Chong and, perhaps, Maxime Bernier, no one who ever sat in a Harper cabinet has a reasonable chance of becoming prime minister. If the party turns to someone like Tony Clement or Peter MacKay, it will lose even more seats in the next election. There isn’t much of a market for leaders running from their past and suffering from political amnesia.
As Rona Ambrose will learn one way or another, re-inventing yourself takes a lot more than buying better ads and casting the appropriate lights and shadows over the past.
You have to change. So far, it’s just Steve in a dress.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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