REUNITE THE RIGHT! CORCORAN,

On the wall at the entrance to the National Post's Toronto newsroom is a reproduction of the newspaper's first edition from Oct. 28, 1998. The main headline: “Klein backs unite-the-right movement,” a reference to Ralph Klein, then premier of Alberta, who announced his decision during an interview with a National Post reporter. “The simple fact is that unless there is a united conservative alternative, the Liberals are going to be in power for a long time to come.” The Tories, added Klein, will remain in “deep trouble” until the two so-called right-wing parties — the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform — merged.

In the wake of the weekend Liberal party convention, fawningly reported by the media as the forerunner to a slamdunk election victory over a hapless Conservative leadership, maybe it's time to try that unite-the-right strategy again.

Along with the NDP, the Liberals form a coagulating mass of statists eager to use climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic as reasons for big government power and spending, and to bring controls into every nook and cranny of Canadian life. Clear opposition from the right is the only option.

It took six years for the ideologically incompatible agglomeration of social conservatives, squishy libertarians, fiscal tightwads and other political wranglers to create the Conservative Party of Canada under Stephen Harper, and another half decade before they formed a government in 2011.

Under Harper, the Conservatives were branded by the left as Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher extremists who brought “neo-liberalism and the freedom agenda” to Ottawa. Unfortunately, that's not quite what happened. But that's another story. It's time for a new unite-the-right strategy.

Leaving aside the leadership question, an abundance of issues are ripe for a real freedom agenda, from pandemic economic policy to the looming fiscal shambles, from taxation to climate policy. All are major Liberal vulnerabilities, although there is one that offers great potential: climate change.

Backed by a supportive cadre of columnists and reporters, the Liberals have been able to portray the Conservatives as loopy climate-denying nutbars because a majority of party members voted at their convention to reject a motion to recognize that “climate change is real.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined the mockers last Saturday. “How disconnected do you have to be,” he asked attendees at his Liberal convention, “to refuse to admit climate change is real, even as people's basements flood and wildfires tear

AND LET'S START WITH CLIMATE CHANGE.

through communities?”

Here's a startup question for a Conservative unite-theright counterpoint: “How disconnected do you have to be to present as fact the claim that climate change is causing floods and wildfires that are ripping through communities?”

Neither floods nor fires are raging in Canada or elsewhere. According to the National Forestry Database, the number of forest fires in Canada has declined over the past 30 years. The NASA Earth Observatory reports a global drop in fires. On floods, a paragraph from a new Canadian Standards Association report on floods states that while climate change-induced run-off has received a lot of attention regarding floods, “the impacts of uncontrolled intensification may actually be more severe.” In other words, it's mostly urban intensification, not climate change, that is flooding the Liberal basement.

Instead of putting their heads down in guilt over the media and Justin Trudeau's false statements about floods and fires, Conservatives should not shy away from taking on the climate issue. There is much evidence that large numbers of Canadians have more of a grasp of climate change “reality” than the Mark Carney-driven exploiters of climate change and the net-zero 2050 carbon emissions target fantasy.

A note last week from Blacklock's Reporter cites government polls that suggest Canadians are not obsessively preoccupied with climate change. Asked to rate top-priority issues, 45 per cent of Canadians picked health care, 35 per cent jobs, and only 24 per cent cited carbon emissions, just slightly head of funding the armed forces. In mid-2020, a Privy Council poll asked 14,700 voters to pick the issue that should receive the greatest attention of government: only 2.4 per cent picked the environment and climate change, way down the list behind the coronavirus, health care, the economy, jobs and senior care issues. Zero voters supported carbon taxes as a priority.

There's always the fear that Conservatives will be branded climate change deniers if they tackle the subject. But there is nothing morally wrong in raising questions about how to respond. In fact, there are many solid reasons — economic, political and scientific — to entertain doubts about the extreme climate policies now being pressed by the Liberals and other governments (and corporations) around the world.

Critics of climate policy (and science) abound. “Climate change is real,” says Swedish scientist Bjorn Lomborg in his book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, but we need to “stop exaggerating, stop arguing that it is now or never or that it is the only thing that matters.” A new radical documentary, Bright Green Lies: Clean Energy has a Dirty Secret, based on a book, seems set to rock the climate policy-making community, especially Ottawa's net-zero green planners.

Rather than follow the Liberal pack on climate, Conservatives should see it as an opening — along with deficits, pandemic policy, taxes and many social issues — in a new push to Unite the Right. The alternative is the current divided right, which is heading nowhere.