Culture war could split Tories
You have to give Kellie Leitch, previously a long shot and now an insurgent long shot to lead the Conservative Party of Canada, this much: she’s got brass.
Since their drubbing last Oct. 19, Conservatives in Canada have been like deer in the headlights. A succession of party stalwarts, Jason Kenney chief among them, have backed away from the race to succeed Stephen Harper. They’ve suddenly discovered much more important business to occupy their time.
Kenney was last seen piloting a pickup along the back roads of Alberta in his new quest to become premier of his home province. Peter MacKay, who left politics in the spring of 2015 while leaving the door open to a return, appears paralyzed by indecision. Lisa Raitt has been testing the waters — and testing, and testing. James Moore is out for family reasons. John Baird is happy in the private sector. Michelle Rempel isn’t interested. And on it goes.
But Leitch is good to go, as are Tony Clement, Maxime Bernier and Michael Chong — none of them among the top tier in Harper’s firmament, save Clement to a point. It is as though — perish the thought — those with the best chance of defeating Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2019 have decided they can’t, and are content to let another take the fall.
Even among those now declared, Leitch was a controversial candidate, not least because she — with Chris Alexander, the former diplomat and immigration minister who lost his seat last year — had been a poster child for the “barbaric practices tip line” miscue that sent last year’s Conservative campaign into the ditch.
The tip line, a transparent bid to stoke a fight with the Liberals and New Democrats over the “reasonable accommodation” of immigrants, undid in a day much of the good work done by the party to welcome new Canadians. In April on CBC’s Power & Politics, Leitch teared up while professing regret. That put the matter to rest, seemingly.
But apparently, as far as Team Leitch is concerned, a new wind is blowing — a nativist wind, ripe for the harvest. Last week it was reported that a Leitch campaign survey had posed this question: “Should the Canadian government screen potential immigrants for anti- Canadian values as part of its normal screening for refugees and landed immigrants?” A furor ensued. Leitch upped the ante. “Canadians can expect to hear more, not less from me, on this topic in the coming months,” she said Friday.
Sunday, speaking on CTV’s Question Period, interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose disavowed the idea of an “anti-Canadian values” screen. Monday Bernier did the same. Ergo, there are now two Conservative parties — one hostile to immigration, one not. The leadership race now shapes up as a battle between these poles. The likely beneficiaries? The Liberals, naturally.
And there’s more than electoral math at stake. At issue is the Conservative party’s history of embracing immigration under Harper and his Red Tory predecessor, Brian Mulroney. Canada routinely takes in about 250,000 immigrants a year. That influx accounts for two thirds of the country’s population growth, according to Statistics Canada, which in turn fuels economic growth, such as it is. This trend is expected to accelerate as the baby boom generation ages. Harper himself, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2014, attributed his majority in 2011 to its success in courting new Canadians.
Why did Leitch decide to go all-in? One objective seems plain: donations. Last month it emerged she’s taken an early but significant lead in fundraising, accounting for about 60 per cent of the $376,377 raised by three then-declared leadership aspirants (Leitch, Chong, Bernier) in the second quarter, The Canadian Press reported.
The Conservative base is loyal, fiercely partisan and famously driven to donate by hot-button issues. What alienates swing voters in a general election, in other words, may have the opposite effect on populist social conservatives primed for a culture war by months of saturation coverage of Donald Trump and the Brexit.
The take-away is this: Leitch doesn’t care about upending the pluralist tradition of her party, or about how her latest gambit will surely be used by the Liberals to paint all Tories as xenophobes. Nor does she care about the evident risks in broaching a culture war, witness the career-ending losses of Harper last year and Quebec premier Pauline Marois in 2014. Leitch cares, it seems, about filling her campaign coffers.
It may pay off for her, fundraising-wise — while kneecapping the party for the bigger battle to come. Given current support for the Liberals at 48 per cent, according to poll aggregator ThreeHundredEight. com, it’s hard to discern the looming nativist revolution in Canada, just yet. But perhaps we can now begin to speculate feverishly about a centrist pivot for future Tory leader Leitch, as was once posited for Trump, sometime in 2018?
Well, sure. Sure we can.