Conservative race remains idea-free zone

Show your work on prescription drug coverage

This is not a moment in history at which many Canadians are likely to be envious of American politics. Few of us are fans of the current president, and the nearly 80 per cent of us who would prefer any Democratic candidate to Donald Trump — that’s according to an Abacus Data poll conducted last year — are now faced with a difficult hypothetical choice.

Conventional wisdom would hold that centrist, jovial Joe Biden is more electable. In a recent Gallup poll, only 47 per cent of respondents overall and only 59 per cent of Democrats said they would be willing to vote for a socialist for president, making pinkos like Bernie Sanders even less popular than atheists and Muslims.

The problem with Biden, of course, is that he is a fantastic weirdo: a mobile gaffe dispenser, an incorrigible purveyor of BS, and a self- described “tactile politician” with a long history of suspect behaviour towards women. Biden can’t hold a candle to Trump on any of those charges. It would just be nice if there were no comparison to be made.

Many Canadians on the left will understandably be excited by the notion of a Bernie Sanders presidency. But it certainly doesn’t augur a return to the relative calm of the pre-trump era. If Sanders were somehow in a position to try to implement his objectively astonishing agenda, his opponents’ heads would be exploding just as Trump’s opponents’ are now. This platform would make your average Canadian New Democrat run up a tree.

Free school meals for everyone, free university, wipe out all student debt. Ban fracking, wind down nuclear power, transition to “100 per cent renewable energy.” Take a hatchet to the defence budget, pull American troops out of the Middle East yesterday. Nationwide rent control. Abolish the Electoral College.

Sanders’ “extreme wealth tax,” topping out at a whopping 8 per cent on wealth over $10 billion, is supposed to raise $ 4.35 trillion over 10 years. This would go toward “Medicare for All”: a “single- payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone … with comprehensive health- care coverage, free at the point of service,” including “dental, hearing, vision, and homeand community- based longterm care, … prescription drugs, and more,” with “no networks, no premiums, no deductibles, no copays.”

Whatever you think of it, it’s remarkable that such a man, with such an agenda, could be as close as he is to the White House.

Meanwhile, north of the border, Conservative leadership candidate Marilyn Gladu has a rather more modest idea to ensure all Canadians have prescription drug coverage. She would simply have the federal government pay the provinces to bring the uninsured in out of the cold under their existing plans.

It has the virtue of simplicity, but in a visit to the National Post editorial board on Thursday, Gladu could not even ballpark how much it would cost — a rather key piece of the puzzle. ( A 2019 C.D. Howe Institute paper by Rosalie Wyonch estimated anything from $ 340 million a year for “catastrophic” coverage to $ 5.4 billion for more comprehensive coverage.) Yet she holds it up as one of her unique selling points, along with her climate plan, which involves meeting our Paris Accord targets — but not through any form of carbon pricing, which she insists does not work. She claims experience in emissions reduction during her time as a chemical engineer at Dow (which calls itself “one of the pioneer companies” in using internal carbon pricing for business planning), but there is nothing in her plan — carbon sinks, micro- nuclear, subbing out Canadian LNG for Chinese coal — that really sets her apart from her opponents.

Asked directly what does set her apart, Gladu mostly speaks of branding: she’s a “fresh face,” not associated with the Stephen Harper years or burdened with Peter Mackay’s “baggage”; she’s “balanced,” whereas Erin O’toole wants to “move further to the right.” As evidence of the latter she cites “social compassion” — of which she offers a single example, which is extending the Guaranteed Income Supplement “to cover any senior living below the poverty line.” That’s on the margin of the periphery. There’s no reason to believe O’toole won’t propose the same.

Gladu says grassroots members have told her “that having a woman at the helm is going to be better for rebranding the ( party’s) image.” And they might be right. But if Gladu truly believes she’s the third choice between the prohibitive favourites in O’toole and Mackay, it boggles the mind that she wouldn’t have anything more unique to offer.

It wasn’t long ago that Maxime Bernier very nearly won the leadership promising to end supply management, aggressively balance the budget and pay down debt, encourage provinces to commit various health- care heresies, sell off Canada Post and nuke the CRTC from orbit.

From his narrow loss to Andrew Scheer, and Scheer’s desultory loss to Justin Trudeau in October, the party brain trust seems to have somehow concluded they dodged a bullet: best to retreat to the middle and hold a battle of the brands. Canadians naturally cluster around the political centre more than Americans. But it cannot be healthy, surely, that there’s more ideological diversity within the Democratic Party than there is in our entire political spectrum.