Trump script a dead-end for Canadian Tories
Stephen Harper spent the better part of two decades hammering Preston Manning’s Reform Party into a shape that could be palatable to a plurality of Canadians, in all regions of the country. His crowning political achievement was the Conservative majority victory of May 5, 2011.
The Canadian Trumpist movement, led by the charisma- challenged Kellie Leitch, the oleaginous Steven Blaney and soon the trashtalking Kevin O’Leary, is unravelling Harper’s life’s work by the day. The electoral effects promise to be devastating. Curiously, there’s little the party can do to prevent it.
You may recall how, in the summer of 1991, Manning — with policy advice from a bright, ambitious young man named Stephen Harper — made a concerted push into Ontario, establishing riding associations and identifying potential candidates.
Some of those early meetings were marked by what later became known as bozo eruptions; antiimmigrant, anti- Quebec, sexist or otherwise intemperate remarks that painted Reform in a xenophobic light.
Manning, who is anything but a xenophobe, worked hard to excise that element from his movement. But in a grass- roots party such as Reform was, the filter is limited. If you liberate speech you’re going to get some nuts, as more than one early Reformer put it to me at the time. There were electoral consequences. Though Reform broke through in the 1993 election, taking 52 seats, only one was east of Manitoba.
This was a Western protest party. It would remain so, de facto, until a decade later when, renamed the Canadian Alliance, it merged with what remained of the Progressive Conservative party to form the Conservative Party of Canada. The principal architects of the union, Harper the Albertan and Peter MacKay the Maritimer, were emblematic of the regional and political synthesis they led. Together they ended the march of majorities won by the Jean Chrétien-Paul Martin Liberals in the elections of 1993, 1997 and 2000. In 2004, with the Martinled Liberals reduced to a minority, Harper began his ascent.
The history is relevant because it reminds us of the important ideological shift Harper made on his road to lasting power. He not only learned French, but became fluent. He set aside Reform’s one-size-fitsall constitutionalism in favour of, in 2006, recognition of the Quebecois as a nation.
Though reportedly an evangelical Christian himself, Harper repudiated any religious-conservative drift in the party, most notably tamping down efforts to revive the abortion debate. Excoriated by his critics as a warmonger, it was Harper who wound down the Canadian war effort in Afghanistan, beginning in 2010.
Most important, from an electoral standpoint, Harper and his “Minister of Curry- in- a- Hurry,” Jason Kenney, embraced new Canadians. That effort, chronicled by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson in their 2013 book The Big Shift, was critical to the party’s winning key Greater Toronto Area seats in 2011, delivering the majority. In that sense the party’s most controversial gambit of the 2015 election, an attempt to capitalize on resentment of the niqab, the veil worn by some Muslim women, was not only reckless and opportunistic, but out of character.
In 2015, new Canadians in Ontario shifted en masse back to their old home in the Liberal party.
Which brings us back to Leitch and Blaney. It would be unfair (to Conservatives) to suggest these two represent the mainstream of Conservative opinion in Canada. But Leitch, in particular, has consumed much of the oxygen in the party’s leadership race, to be decided in May, due to her positions on immigration. She wants to test immigrants for Canadian values and make them pay for the test. Blaney wants to ban the niqab. Translated from the dog whistle, these are naked attempts to ride Trump’s coattails. O’Leary (who has yet to officially enter the race but is expected to within days) is pro-immigration and an avowed pluralist. But his flame-throwing, brash, outsider style is all Trump.
O’Leary seems to believe that, if he talks enough trash about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the global populist wave will carry him up. The net effect is to draw attention and money away from other candidates much more in line with the principles of Harper- era conservatism; pro- free trade, fiscally conservative, socially progressive or neutral, pro- immigration. This list includes Maxime Bernier, Michael Chong and Lisa Raitt, among others.
Here’s the problem this presents for Conservative supporters, in a nutshell: The electoral topography of Canada hasn’t fundamentally changed. Liberal support in the aggregate remains at close to 44 per cent, according to poll aggregator ThreeHundredEight.com, with the New Democrats at just above 15 per cent.
Even assuming the existing firstpast-the- post system remains in place in 2019, the Conservatives will need to move from under 30 per cent, to close to 40 per cent, for a win. The quest for those votes will lead them directly back to the new Canadians in the GTA they so assiduously courted in 2010 and 2011, and whom Leitch and Blaney are casually tossing overboard right now.
This may be the era of the Brexit and Trump. In Canada, electoral math is still electoral math.