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COMMENTARY
March 23, 2005
Strategizing Tory
I didn't make it to the Conservative policy convention in Montreal though clouds of my friends went there. I am anyway not a political "joiner" -- my reader will guess I support the Conservatives in Canada mostly by default. (I find the other three parties even more appalling.) I have never taken membership in any political party. But it does not follow from this that I'm not intensely partisan. My vote in an election is still pretty safe. Those Conservatives could say a lot of things to offend me and I would still "hold my nose" and vote for them. The priority in my view is to sink the Liberal Party and send in some new clowns who can at least make a start at cleaning Canada's Augean stables. A party split was avoided on the vexed procedural matter of weighting constituency representation. It makes no sense whatever to split the Conservative Party again no one should go there. The way forward is for genuinely "conservative" people to capture the party just as the conservatives captured the Republican Party "by the grassroots" in the United States during the 1970s and '80s. This takes time and unflagging patient effort and involves selling one's ideas to the public along the way. After Montreal it is at least clear that Canada's "conservatives" have bought into the new Conservative Party. Politics is politics: give and take and we should forget who did what to whom yesterday. Political vendettas never make sense. We study the past in order to understand more fully the circumstances we must deal with now. We cannot fix the past. We cannot fix the future either; only try to fix the mess as it lies before us now. And that mess has broadly two dimensions: fiscal and moral. On the former we are overtaxed and overridden by big arbitrary corrupt and incompetent government in almost every area of our daily lives and there is broad agreement across the Right that we must try to shrink the Yeti's footprint. The problem is essentially administrative: the perpetual expansion of an already bloated arrogant self-serving bureaucracy. There is a moral dimension to this too (as to everything): that no free people can live with the malignant cancer of what the Austrian economists called "omniscient bureaucracy". As Reagan put it We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfilment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. So far as I can see Conservative policy on all the practical questions came out of the Montreal convention pointed a little better in the right direction. Vastly expensive and intrusive empty gestures such as the Kyoto protocol or the gun registry are worth trying to shoot down. Things like the missile shield are worth putting up for the sake of our own neglected national defence. Across the board on these practical issues the 3000 delegates seemed largely to share in good sense. The differences among delegates as expected were on the social legal moral questions. Faced with an implacably hostile bureaucratic media and academic establishment who are in love with their latest project to redesign the traditional family the party is timid. Overwhelmed by the "culture of death" (of nihilism and narcissism) in our Canadian elites they do not even dream of opposing late-term abortions. This is where the Conservative Party fails Canadians at large. For unless an articulate and courageous fight is waged to maintain or restore the key moral values in our society the people at large begin to give up on them. The moral values of the people themselves require leadership and vindication in politics for a society to hold together. Notwithstanding the delegates made the stand against "same-sex marriage" a little less ambiguous; and for all the cowardice on the matter of abortions we heard Elsie Wayne's fine clarion call: "I do not believe that the majority of our people at this convention are in favour of killing babies." God bless that woman. I must also say the level of malice among the liberal media reporting the convention was much lower than I expected. Stephen Harper's posturing has much to do with this for he continues shrewd if uninspiring in leading the party from the rear. Smarts alone will not finally win the battle but may help neutralize a few obstacles along the way. One significant development which I think is happening over the longer term. Traditionally Catholics in Canada voted Grit Protestants voted Tory. After the convention I'm more confident in saying that the Conservatives can now present themselves as the more Catholic-friendly party; although the Liberals keep their hold on the numerous Catholic apostates. And more generally the Conservatives become the Christian-friendly party in a system where all the other parties are more and more explicitly anti-Christian. Thus the vote may yet begin splitting the Conservative way in the future. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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