High stakes for party and country
No political leadership contest is ever just a competition among substantive policy visions. Context, character and charisma, strategy, caucus support, cross-regional appeal, luck — all of these inevitably play a part. The variables at work in the crowded Conservative leadership contest, which will conclude on Saturday, are particularly complex.
The party’s convoluted system for picking a leader, involving points per riding and a preferential ballot, plus the multitude of contenders, makes the recipe for success especially difficult to identify and the result perilous to predict.
But while vision may not ultimately decide the victor, it could hardly matter more for a party that has lost its way and for a democracy that relies on strong opposition.
The choice made by Conservatives, more of whom have voted this time around than in any previous Canadian leadership contest, will shape public discourse in the years to come and influence, if not eventually steer, the direction of government.
The outcome will determine whether we have much-needed debates about the role of the state, about the right balance between public and private, individual and collective, Ottawa and the provinces — or whether we are distracted from these pivotal issues by dangerous faux nationalism and scapegoating.
There is no doubt plenty of cause for concern. Too often in this campaign it has been hard to see the substance beyond the kind of nativist pandering that contributed to the party’s undoing in the last election. Kellie Leitch, of course, was the most cartoonish purveyor of this politics of exclusion. Her explicitly Trumpist array of rights-violating solutions to largely non-existent problems garnered a disproportionate number of headlines, though by most indications, thankfully, not a great deal of support.
But while Leitch has been the emblem, she was by no means alone among the 13 candidates in experimenting with dog whistles.
Asked in March what to do about the recent influx of asylum seekers in Canada, Maxime Bernier and Kevin O’Leary, who eventually dropped out of the race to back Bernier, competed to propose the most draconian means of expulsion.
At around the same time, not wanting to be excluded from all the excluding, Brad Trost announced through a spokesperson, apropos of nothing, that he is “not entirely comfortable with the gay thing.”
Steven Blaney has promised to restore the Harper government’s ban on niqabs at citizenship ceremonies, which the courts overturned as unconstitutional; while Trost peddled a Trump-like immigration ban on people from countries that “harbour terrorists or Islamic extremism.”
Perhaps most troubling, all candidates but one (Michael Chong) opposed an anodyne Liberal anti-Islamophobia motion on such blatantly spurious grounds that it was hard not to imagine more problematic motives, political cowardice least bad among them.
One truly wonders what busted political calculus underlies all this. The Harper Tories’ turn toward fear and division in the dying days of the last election campaign proved politically disastrous, just as Pauline Marois’ nativist values-charter gambit did for the Parti Québécois in the 2014 Quebec election. It is not clear that the audience for fear and hate in this country is sufficiently large for that kind of politics to succeed. No politician should be working to change that.
The Tories — and especially whoever becomes their next leader — ought to cut it out. After all, it has nothing to do with — indeed, is a betrayal of — the long, rich tradition of principled, rights-preserving Canadian conservatism.
That tradition can be restored. The current leadership campaign, despite its distractions, has displayed glimmers of hope for those who want to see a real debate about how to tackle the problems we face.
Bernier, concerned about the cost to consumers of government protectionism, has proposed to kill the supply-management system for dairy and poultry and open the airline industry to foreign ownership.
Chong, the Red Tory to Bernier’s libertarian, has advocated a set of democratic reforms to rehabilitate our coarsened politics and outlined a conservative plan to fight climate change.
Erin O’Toole wants to use the tax system to improve the economic lot of struggling millennials, while Lisa Raitt and Andrew Scheer have proposed traditionally conservative low-tax, small-government alternatives to the Liberal government’s more activist promises.
Are these good ideas? With a few exceptions, as we have repeatedly argued, not at all! But these candidates have offered legitimate policy options that seek to address real challenges. If this seems a low bar for praise, let that be a testament to the sad state of our political discourse.
The Trudeau government has yet to face an opposition party with a permanent leader pushing a well-articulated counter-agenda. Who the Tories choose on Saturday, and thus what their agenda will look like, matters a great deal for both party and country. Let us hope they put divisive distractions aside. Democracy benefits from clear choices and governments are sharpened by real tests.
We reserve the right not to do so in future, but on Saturday, we wish the Tories well.
Vision could hardly matter more for a party that has lost its way and for a democracy that relies on strong opposition