Who’s changed more since 2004 — the Tories, or Canada?

The Conservative party’s journey from 2004 to the current election can be measured in five simple words: “To heck with the courts.”

In the 2004 federal election, those five words helped kill the Conservatives’ hopes of winning power. In the 2015 campaign, they’re virtually a campaign motto, especially on the divisive, hot-button debate over religious face coverings.

So what has changed? Is it Canada, the Conservatives, or both?

First, let’s travel back to the 2004 election, when the new Conservative leader, Stephen Harper, saw a real chance to take power away from the Liberals.

Even though the Liberals also had a new leader, Paul Martin, the party had been in office for over a decade and there were real signs of erosion on their reputation and popularity.

But in mid-May that year, a gift arrived on the doorstep of the Liberal campaign — an interview given by a Conservative MP to a filmmaker doing a documentary on same-sex marriage. The MP was Randy White, who had been representing the B.C. riding of Fraser Valley West ever since the first wave of Reform party members came to Parliament in 1993. In the documentary, White declared some provocative views about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Calling the charter a “crutch” for social libertarians, White suggested that conservatives should be more willing to use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to rein in overly liberal court rulings.

“Well, the heck with the courts. You know, one of these days we in this country are going to stand up and say, the politicians make the laws and the courts do not,” White told independent filmmaker Alexis Fosse Mackintosh.

White’s remarks became powerful fuel in a renewed Liberal effort to cast the Conservatives as scary and socially regressive. Conservatives didn’t win in 2004. White would also be used as Exhibit A in future arguments for muzzling MPs and candidates during election cam- paigns — a dictate still in force today.

Today, one suspects, Conservatives wouldn’t get into much trouble at all if they talked openly during a campaign about reining in the courts on charter rights.

This is, after all, the essence of the Conservatives’ battle over wearing the niqab at citizenship ceremonies. Two court rulings have cleared the way for that practice during this campaign, and Harper and his Conservatives have said, basically, to heck with the courts.

To be clear, then, within the space of 11 years, a politically incorrect statement is now seen as an entirely explicable “wedge” issue in a tight election campaign.

It does make you wonder what would have happened in 2005-06 if Conservatives had launched a broadside against the niqab — or if they had warned voters that crusade was coming in the future. Would they have won the election that way? Probably not. Today, this sentiment has helped revive Conservatives’ hopes of re-election.

Conservatives might argue that they’ve had a chance to prove in the past decade that they’re not that scary, and that they’ve shown Canadians that all the Liberal fear-mongering 11 years ago was overblown.

Critics of the Conservatives, on the other hand, are likely saying “told you so; don’t say you weren’t warned” and that the veil, pardon the pun, has finally been lifted on Harper’s hidden agenda. It’s undeniably true that Harper has more openly cast himself as a foe of the courts in recent years, most infamously when he snapped at the Supreme Court of Canada for rejecting one of his appointees to the bench.

Again, it’s worth standing back and taking a look at how far we have come since January 2006, when Harper, coasting to imminent victory, reassured Canadians that the courts, the Senate and the public service would keep him in check. Having eroded all those checks during his years in power, Harper clearly could not offer us those same assurances today.

So, the question: is he less scary now, or is Canada a scarier place?

It’s a conversation you may want to have around the Thanksgiving dinner table this weekend, when the pollsters tell us that many Canadians will be talking politics and settling on their voting choices.

Meanwhile, whether or not you believe that Canada has changed, there’s no question that Randy White has.

White disappeared from public sight after announcing his retirement in 2005; his five-word bombshell is now a faded memory.

But White did turn up in this election campaign — in August, at a New Democratic Party rally in Parksville, B.C., White told CTV that he was “not happy” and that “a lot of people are looking for change and I’m thinking about change myself.”

This week, as we head into the final days of the election, a lot of us are thinking about change, too, particularly this question: has Canada really changed its views that much on the politics of rights and the courts?

sdelacourt@bell.net

Saying “to heck with the courts” once cost Tories votes. Now religious rights are a wedge issue