NO ONE LIKES CBC, AS A WHOLE, AS IT CURRENTLY EXISTS.

however, a proper battle for the sanity and the soul of the Conservative Party of Canada has taken shape. Michael Chong reminds party supporters that a fiscally conservative party that claims to want to fight climate change should support market-based tools to get the job done — the simpler the tool (i.e., a carbon tax), the better. As leader, Chong could credibly hold a Liberal government to account for its less-than-pure commitment to carbon pricing and its inevitable failure to meet emissions targets.

Maxime Bernier reminds Conservatives that in 10 years, the party did almost nothing about Canada’s insane supply management systems. There is a constituency “more programs about science, history, or religion.” He proposed a funding model like NPR and PBS, which rely heavily on private and corporate donations.

Leitch and others in the party assailed him for not calling to dismantle Mother Corp. outright, and those are defensible positions — just not credible ones, I don’t think, considering the Tories did basically nothing about CBC over the course of a decade. Even modest budget cuts yielded them shrieking headlines portending the end of Canadian culture; no Conservative PM is likely to spend the requisite political capital blowing up CBC, especially when its news department produces so much useful fundraising material.

But reforming it? That’s something a Liberal PM could certainly pull off. And conveniently for Bernier, an association of non-partisan journalism types calling itself Public Broadcasting in Canada for the 21st Century almost concurrently issued a similar call to action. “Requiring our public broadcaster to apply the practices of the private sector to its civic and cultural mission has not resulted in the creation of a large body of distinctive, informative and inspiring social and cultural capital for Canadians,” they wrote in a letter to the Minister of Canadian Heritage. “It has turned CBC English television into what its own executives have described as a ‘publicly subsidized commercial network.’”

Shorter version: no one likes CBC, as a whole, as it currently exists. The Liberals, ostensibly champions of public broadcasting, promise only to give it more money.

Much of Harper’s legacy can fairly quickly be undone by a government willing to borrow heavily or raise taxes. But the Conservatives did slay at least two sacred cows: the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopsony and the longgun registry. They genuinely despised both; they had very defensible ideological and practical reasons to do so; their opposition was shared by many who supported other parties; both had fanatical supporters; and yet, tellingly, the Liberal government now faces no significant calls to resurrect them.

There are many ways in which the next Conservative government should strive to govern differently from the last one. But ridding us of indefensible policies no one will miss once they’re gone is a mission they should keep. Canada’s expensive, benighted dairy counters and CBC’s bloated unpopular mandate should be at the top of the list.