Canada -- faintly conservative now
by Peter O'Donnell
If you were paying attention to our main-stream media in the past two years (and may I ask, why???) you will be aware that Canada supposedly faced a cold-water shock of plunging into conservatism, Margaret Thatcher style, should the voters lose their minds and vote for Stephen Harper.
Perhaps we'll see some truth to that in the fullness of time (I remain hopeful) but for the time being, I would say that we can see the faint signs of conservative values returning to the public discourse.
Our commitment to Afghanistan is perhaps the most obvious litmus test. It would be too much to ask (Thatcher-like resolve, etc etc) to find Canada standing beside the U.S., the U.K. and Australia in the Iraq theatre, although of course we keep hearing about how useful we are even there, from people with vivid imaginations. However, Afghanistan is more acceptable to the post-Pearsonian mind, a peacekeeping mission with a little added muscle, not radically different from what we accomplished in Bosnia and tried to accomplish in Somalia.
When I heard that 48% of the Canadian people support this mission, and 52% want to bring our troops home, I did the math pretty quickly, and figured that meant that the Liberals were 2:1 against staying, because you can pretty much guess how most CPC, NDP and Bloc supporters would vote on such a question. And that says volumes about the Liberals, a party with a minority of people of some responsibility and perspective, and a majority of spineless jellyfish who would be more at home in the Spineless Jellyfish Party (can you guess which one I mean? or which two, being bilingual??).
And I wasn't sure whether to mourn, or celebrate, this odd statistic. On the surface of it, one could say that it looks bad on our country to be this bullied by a couple of random acts of terror. However, having lived through the Sovietization of our country for the past forty years, I have to say that 48% ain't bad, and shows that Stephen Harper has "political capital" to develop in the time given to him.
Another sign of embryonic conservatism is in the health care dialogue. First of all, there is a dialogue, that's always a good sign. One senses that public opinion is beginning to move beyond "Saint Thomas of Regina" and towards "I want my damned hip fixed before I die." Nobody's going to wipe away a tear watching a TV documentary on the latter philosophy, but in the real world, where doctors are partly businessmen and not often saints, a faint and tentative acceptance of a mixed system under any name is welcome, at least to me and probably to you. There is no point in having the nation clogged up with seniors falling where they stand, while waiting for the exact formulations of the "Canada Health Act" to come to full maturity. I say this with increasing resolve in every passing year, for some obscure reason (my joints ache after jogging these days).
And a third article of evidence for an impending conservative revolution is that David Emerson joined the Cabinet, the media and the NDP squawked like mad, and nothing much happened. This illustrates that the mood of the nation in general is, "let's get on with this overdue business of reforming the national government." If it takes the rather tawdry circumstances of appointing a Senator and grabbing a competent Liberal minister to fill out Team Canada at this time, then so be it. We have lived through twelve years of rather strange times in Canada. Economic management under the Liberals, I think most would accept, was competent if not always fair to the disadvantaged or to the provinces. Everything else, from foreign policy to social policy and the environment, was done according to the dictates of a new religion called political correctness.
As a conservative, you (and I) may look at the new government, see the compromises it has already made with the old order of things, and we may start to wonder -- are they going to remain as conservative as they sounded in opposition? Or are they going to acquire what some might have called the Mulroney syndrome, a tendency to drift to the centre and take up as much of the Liberal centrist territory as they could conquer, only returning to the political right at rare intervals to bring forward a policy here or a proposal there?
Will we have conservative government from Stephen Harper? Or will we just be less Liberal, and govern from an agenda of least confrontation? What does the country want, and what do we as conservatives want?
I believe we should be objective, and to some extent pragmatic. This country was never ripe for a philosophical revolution towards the right, as were the UK in 1979 and the USA in 1980. Lib-left politics and social values remain dominant even after Harper's victory, but there has been an erosion of their dominant position. So far, the "undecided" voters, the people who could change to the right, have only bought into one of Harper's many arguments against the Liberal establishment, namely, the charge of corruption. Other charges, such as arrogance, over-reliance on socialist templates, and anti-Americanism, remain "out there" on view, not entirely accepted or more likely under review, not more than partly assimilated. This not only applies to the undecided voters in the centre, it applies to many conservative voters as well. We will see these divisions arising even in the caucus over time.
For the social conservative, patience is still a virtue. It is a relief to think that this government will at least slow down the pace of social change, some of which has been poorly thought out, inadequately discussed by the society at large, and driven by an extremist judiciary in alliance with a Liberal cabinet full of undeclared radical socialists.
It's still basically the same Canada, but it reminds me of a ship that was sailing dangerously towards uncharted waters under the control of a captain who said, "I know what I'm doing," whether it seemed that way or not. Having Svend Robinson as first mate, in terms of the philosophical guidance of the ship of state, was even more unsettling. You could smell the ice, even if the fog shrouded it.
Now we have a new captain and the ship is looking for a new course. But you have to wonder, are we actually in the middle of the icebergs? Does it matter very much which way we go now? Should we proceed with extreme caution, in small incremental changes, or should be set our course for the equator and sail as fast as we can to what we know are safe waters?
Let's hope that the captain has a capable guide of his own.
by Peter O'Donnell
If you were paying attention to our main-stream media in the past two years (and may I ask, why???) you will be aware that Canada supposedly faced a cold-water shock of plunging into conservatism, Margaret Thatcher style, should the voters lose their minds and vote for Stephen Harper.
Perhaps we'll see some truth to that in the fullness of time (I remain hopeful) but for the time being, I would say that we can see the faint signs of conservative values returning to the public discourse.
Our commitment to Afghanistan is perhaps the most obvious litmus test. It would be too much to ask (Thatcher-like resolve, etc etc) to find Canada standing beside the U.S., the U.K. and Australia in the Iraq theatre, although of course we keep hearing about how useful we are even there, from people with vivid imaginations. However, Afghanistan is more acceptable to the post-Pearsonian mind, a peacekeeping mission with a little added muscle, not radically different from what we accomplished in Bosnia and tried to accomplish in Somalia.
When I heard that 48% of the Canadian people support this mission, and 52% want to bring our troops home, I did the math pretty quickly, and figured that meant that the Liberals were 2:1 against staying, because you can pretty much guess how most CPC, NDP and Bloc supporters would vote on such a question. And that says volumes about the Liberals, a party with a minority of people of some responsibility and perspective, and a majority of spineless jellyfish who would be more at home in the Spineless Jellyfish Party (can you guess which one I mean? or which two, being bilingual??).
And I wasn't sure whether to mourn, or celebrate, this odd statistic. On the surface of it, one could say that it looks bad on our country to be this bullied by a couple of random acts of terror. However, having lived through the Sovietization of our country for the past forty years, I have to say that 48% ain't bad, and shows that Stephen Harper has "political capital" to develop in the time given to him.
Another sign of embryonic conservatism is in the health care dialogue. First of all, there is a dialogue, that's always a good sign. One senses that public opinion is beginning to move beyond "Saint Thomas of Regina" and towards "I want my damned hip fixed before I die." Nobody's going to wipe away a tear watching a TV documentary on the latter philosophy, but in the real world, where doctors are partly businessmen and not often saints, a faint and tentative acceptance of a mixed system under any name is welcome, at least to me and probably to you. There is no point in having the nation clogged up with seniors falling where they stand, while waiting for the exact formulations of the "Canada Health Act" to come to full maturity. I say this with increasing resolve in every passing year, for some obscure reason (my joints ache after jogging these days).
And a third article of evidence for an impending conservative revolution is that David Emerson joined the Cabinet, the media and the NDP squawked like mad, and nothing much happened. This illustrates that the mood of the nation in general is, "let's get on with this overdue business of reforming the national government." If it takes the rather tawdry circumstances of appointing a Senator and grabbing a competent Liberal minister to fill out Team Canada at this time, then so be it. We have lived through twelve years of rather strange times in Canada. Economic management under the Liberals, I think most would accept, was competent if not always fair to the disadvantaged or to the provinces. Everything else, from foreign policy to social policy and the environment, was done according to the dictates of a new religion called political correctness.
As a conservative, you (and I) may look at the new government, see the compromises it has already made with the old order of things, and we may start to wonder -- are they going to remain as conservative as they sounded in opposition? Or are they going to acquire what some might have called the Mulroney syndrome, a tendency to drift to the centre and take up as much of the Liberal centrist territory as they could conquer, only returning to the political right at rare intervals to bring forward a policy here or a proposal there?
Will we have conservative government from Stephen Harper? Or will we just be less Liberal, and govern from an agenda of least confrontation? What does the country want, and what do we as conservatives want?
I believe we should be objective, and to some extent pragmatic. This country was never ripe for a philosophical revolution towards the right, as were the UK in 1979 and the USA in 1980. Lib-left politics and social values remain dominant even after Harper's victory, but there has been an erosion of their dominant position. So far, the "undecided" voters, the people who could change to the right, have only bought into one of Harper's many arguments against the Liberal establishment, namely, the charge of corruption. Other charges, such as arrogance, over-reliance on socialist templates, and anti-Americanism, remain "out there" on view, not entirely accepted or more likely under review, not more than partly assimilated. This not only applies to the undecided voters in the centre, it applies to many conservative voters as well. We will see these divisions arising even in the caucus over time.
For the social conservative, patience is still a virtue. It is a relief to think that this government will at least slow down the pace of social change, some of which has been poorly thought out, inadequately discussed by the society at large, and driven by an extremist judiciary in alliance with a Liberal cabinet full of undeclared radical socialists.
It's still basically the same Canada, but it reminds me of a ship that was sailing dangerously towards uncharted waters under the control of a captain who said, "I know what I'm doing," whether it seemed that way or not. Having Svend Robinson as first mate, in terms of the philosophical guidance of the ship of state, was even more unsettling. You could smell the ice, even if the fog shrouded it.
Now we have a new captain and the ship is looking for a new course. But you have to wonder, are we actually in the middle of the icebergs? Does it matter very much which way we go now? Should we proceed with extreme caution, in small incremental changes, or should be set our course for the equator and sail as fast as we can to what we know are safe waters?
Let's hope that the captain has a capable guide of his own.
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