Some Tories sick of Trump wannabes
The deadline has passed for contenders to sign up new members to vote for the next federal Conservative leader. Numbers are being thrown around by various leadership camps in a bid to sound like they are front-runners. Kevin O’Leary says he got 33,336 members. His perceived competition, Kellie Leitch, claims she signed up 30,038 new members.
It’s not clear if any of them are telling the truth. The Conservative party won’t release official membership numbers until later this month, with the leadership vote on May 27. And really, those numbers don’t mean much anyway. In leadership races, touting membership sales is about sabre-rattling and intimidation.
On that score, O’Leary and Leitch seem committed to out-Trumping U.S. President Donald Trump. They both have used alarming rightwing rhetoric about immigrants, border security and socially conservative issues that many mainstream Tories abandoned long ago.
In the midst of all this noise is an ever increasing sound coming from the more centrist members of the party, people such as former Tory cabinet minister Tom McMillan, who recently published “Not My Party: The Rise and Fall of Canadian Tories from Robert Stanfield to Stephen Harper.” McMillan is calling for the progressive element to return to the Conservative party. He’s joined by Conservative columnist Scott Gilmour, who wrote in Maclean’s this week: “The Conservative leadership race has been hard to watch, unless you support the Liberals or any other political party in Canada – in which case it’s been a laugh a minute. But for people like me, I am left wondering how I ended up in a party seemingly dominated by xenophobic, economically illiterate, populist buffoons.” Indeed, it would seem that the most obnoxious element of the Conservative party is dominating the leadership campaign to the exclusion of the centrists. Centrists such as Michael Chong. Most Canadians don’t know much about this leadership candidate but for those who have paid close attention to federal politics, Chong is a soothing alternative to O’Leary and Leitch. Chong has made a reputation for himself as a principled politician. He stepped down from a cabinet position under then-prime minister Stephen Harper in 2006 because of Harper’s motion on Quebec. Chong stood in opposition to what he called ethnic nationalism.
But it’s his Reform Act of 2014 for which Chong should be remembered. He worked tirelessly with opposition members and the public to put together a private member’s bill that would have shifted the balance of power between caucuses and party leaders. It was supported not just by the Conservative party, but by opposition leaders at the time, as well as backbenchers. This is an example of a leadership candidate who can work across party lines, who has principles, who has something to say rather than just creating noise and spectacle. Perhaps Chong, or someone of similar ilk, is just the antidote for those within the Conservative party who also feel like the front-runners seem only to stand against, rather than for, anything.