Chong set to shake up Tory race
Michael Chong is remarkably cleareyed about his chances of winning the Conservative leadership.
“We don’t have a broad path, but we do have a path to victory,” he said this week.
Even that is a more optimistic take than many of those handicapping the race would give him. One manager of another campaign said at this stage it would take a “blockbuster” deal between Chong, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole to stop Maxime Bernier from winning the leadership.
“That’s not coming from our campaign,” said Chong. “Quite simply, I don’t believe in backroom deals to block another candidate. It’s up to the party members and I trust their judgment. They’ll make the right decision and I respect their intelligence.”
That is magnanimous in the extreme, given the lack of respect shown to him in this race by many party members.
At one leadership debate, he was greeted by a hooting throng of Conservatives over his support for a revenueneutral carbon tax — berated by some as a Liberal-lite who is not welcome in the party he joined nearly 30 years ago.
“That’s not fair and frankly, it’s a smear job,” Chong told me. “It reminds me of how Jean Chrétien was called a ‘vendu’ — a sell-out — because he took a strong position in favour of federalism in Quebec. It was the right thing to do but he was accused of betraying the Liberal Party. I’ve taken a strong position — a Conservative position — on the environment, based on free markets and smaller government.”
Chong has also been at odds with other leadership candidates by refusing to flirt with the nativist wing of the party that used the debate over the Islamophobia motion in Parliament as an excuse to indulge in thinlyveiled Muslim-bashing.
“I do worry about the future of the party,” said Chong. “As the kids of immigrant parents myself, I felt that rhetoric from some campaigns was damaging to our party and was, frankly, antiimmigrant and bigoted.”
Chong is the son of a Hong Kong-born doctor and a Dutch-born nurse, both of whom died in car accidents two decades apart at the same intersection in Fergus, Ont. We met in the Canadian War Museum, a place dear to Chong’s heart given the Canadian military fought in defence of Hong Kong and the Netherlands. He has made much of his empathy with new immigrants and the idea of a “new Canada rising.”
“We worked hard under Mr. Harper and Jason Kenney to reach into immigrant communities but we lost that, not just in the last election, but since then.
“In a country where 40 per cent of Canadians are foreign-born, or are born to foreign born parents, then you cannot play the anti-immigrant card and win.”
He said the Conservative tradition in Canada is to speak for the “downtrodden, for the dispossessed, for minorities.”
Chong has been out-of-step with the political mainstream since quitting Stephen Harper’s first Cabinet over his disquiet with the Québecois nation motion in 2006.
He made a decision to adopt a carbon tax and not to pander to intolerance, even though both have hurt his chances of becoming leader.
It is fair to say that the Conservative Party’s members have not come around to Chong’s way of thinking on a carbon tax — a point he acknowledges.
“I think the party will eventually come around to my position. There is clearly a lot of opposition in Conservative circles to a revenue-neutral carbon tax but there is also growing support.
He compared his plight with that of John Crosbie, the former Mulroney-era Cabinet minister, a proponent of free trade during the 1983 leadership campaign when it was unpopular in the Conservative Party. By the 1988 election, the party had reversed itself, adopted Crosbie’s position and won an election on the issue of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.
He said the election of Donald Trump hastens the need for a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would be imposed on consumers “like an enhanced GST.”
Chong said revenue from the carbon tax would help pay for income and corporate tax cuts aimed at keeping Canada competitive with its southern neighbour.
“This issue is going to fundamentally shape everything in the next decade. To me, if we get it right, we can have economic growth, create jobs and reduce emissions. That’s why I feel so strongly that we have to re-think our position,” he said.
Chong realized that to depart from the Conservatives’ traditional ideology on the environment would mean fighting the forces of conformity within his own party. It is to his credit that, having stood on principle, he ran on principle and did not walk away from his defining political cause, even when it became clear it was wounding his campaign.
“I did say I didn’t want to tilt at windmills. We do believe this has attracted considerable support, particularly among millennials. But this is the time to have the debate . ... A leadership race is where you have to have these debates.”
History suggests he will, ultimately, be vindicated. But it is likely to be long after his party has chosen a new leader who is not Michael Chong.
It is grimly ironic that few leadership candidates are as well versed in the history and traditions of the Conservative Party; that even fewer are as outspoken on their commitment to individual liberty and freedom of religion, expression and conscience.
For now, though, Chong remains a stranger among his own people.