On Canadian values and Tory candidates
Most of Canada’s Conservative party leadership candidates are relatively unknown and modestly obscure.
And from my perspective as a political participant and observer of 60-plus years standing, one candidate who has attracted strong Conservative Party membership support, Kevin O’Leary, is totally obscure.
Certainly I have never heard of this fellow and gather he has some television persona. Indeed, I understand he may live somewhere in the U.S.
Credible candidates, for example, those with demonstrable and active public policy track records (the other 13 leadership candidates) have fallen beneath the shadow of this O’Leary fellow.
Perhaps I live in a sheltered world but I have never seen nor heard of Kevin O’Leary before he was being whispered about as a prospective Conservative Party leadership candidate. I searched his leadership website and experientially that is like trolling in a pond of platitudes, generalities and cynical verbiage.
I understand that he posits himself as a bit of a macho Rambo type.
Some suggest his appeal as similar to that American Trump travesty. I’m not entirely certain that North America could accommodate and endure two narcissistic leaders with overblown egos and limited intelligible vocabularies.
If civil society is to sustain in both America and Canada we will need leaders who respect rights, courts and self-esteem. Rule by twits tweeting scarcely suffices for serious public policy.
Until Kevin O’Leary oozed upon the Conservative Party leadership race we had only that other strange and often pathetic Kellie Leitch stridently waving a paranoid flag of Canadian nationalism. She managed to garner attention for her leadership campaign with her Canadian Values immigrant filtration proposal.
I have loved and travelled this country my entire life. By birth I’m from B.C. but my heart is as entrenched in Ontario, Newfoundland, Alberta, Quebec and Nova Scotia as it is in B.C. In other words, I take being Canadian very seriously and do value some of the characteristics which make this country quite unique. (Note: I have also lived in eight other countries for modest durations.)
I am very proud of our bilingual and bijural political and legal systems. I am grateful that we do not worship firearms for our personal self-defence. I respect our judiciary and generally our police forces. While historically and as a people we have made many racist judgments, nevertheless I am proud of Canada’s ongoing struggle to define itself as a globally respected nation which seeks to correct those historic aberrations.
I am also proud of friends and relatives of First Nations origins and others who by their race, gender, language and religion often have been peripheralised.
Thus, I’ve sort of outlined my broad stroke set of Canadian values. But surely, many will have other broad stroke variations of Canadian values and who but a petty autocrat would wish to impose a single set of “Canadian values” upon an entire population? Worse, perhaps, who but a remarkably insensitive person could imagine that immigrants or refugees could effectively be screened for Canadian values for which they would not, in principle, have any familiarity?
Nor, might it be added, even if Canadians could agree on those values would it not be incredibly presumptuous to assume immigrants from almost anywhere in the world would have a modest appreciation of those values?
Canada’s Conservative Party has some interesting and serious leadership candidates. In my opinion, neither Kevin O’Leary nor Kellie Leitch are fit to carry the luggage of several other leadership contenders.
Assuredly, both the Conservative Party and Canada deserve better than cliché ridden banalities of the O’Leary-Leitch parody of Canadian values. And, surely that indeterminate array of core Canadian values — however individually perceived — will “out-Trump” those who would drag us backwards and down.
Who but a petty autocrat would wish to impose a single set of “Canadian values”