The federal Conservatives are holding their policy convention in Halifax this week, and looking over the assembled policy resolutions that they will be voting on, I am struck by the absolute paucity of ideas being put forward.  With twenty-nine pages of resolutions being debated, I think there was one that could be considered something new or novel and that's even a fairly loose definition because it's something that was advanced during the leadership campaign, so this is just bringing it forward to the broader party membership for policy inclusion.  For a party that is looking to reclaim power in just over a year's time, are there no new ideas?  Or are they so sure that everything was just fine during the Harper years that they are simply looking to recreate them?

Policy conventions are supposed to be the opportunity for new ideas to come to the party from the grassroots.  Party members bring forward these ideas, debate them at the local level, and advance them to the national level for more debate, discussion, and hopeful inclusion in the party's policy platform.  In this way, parties are supposed to act as a bottom-up system that bring fresh ideas and policies in a democratic way.  As leadership contests in Canada started acting more and more like presidential primaries, and when they began offering full policy suites as a "platform" to run on something that belongs to the grassroots and not the leadership the value of grassroots policy conventions has been in decline, much to the detriment of our Westminster system.  Add to that, when the Liberals abolished their party memberships in favour of "supporters," it centralized the policy system within the leader's office, and while sure, they put on a good show about consultation with these resolutions, much of the bottom-up process has been lost within that party.

Looking at the resolutions from the Conservatives, I'm struck by how reactionary most of them are.  There are scores of resolutions about undoing the work of the Liberal government fair enough, I suppose, as a partisan exercise but they don't actually seem to advance any arguments or try to say that hey, maybe not everything that happened under the previous government worked out and we can try to find better ways of doing things.  And sure, you have a couple of resolutions around simplifying the tax system (easier said than done), but you have even more resolutions calling for more tax credits, so there's a point for debate.  The party's traditional respect for the rule of law seems to be fading as they entertain calls to not compensate victims of torture (dressed up in the language of the Omar Khadr settlement) or ousting irregular border crossers without due process.  And more than a few grassroots members have been listening to the likes of Jordan Peterson, as they are concerned about "compelled speech" and "made-up pronouns" for transgender Canadians as being some kind of great infringement on their rights (never mind that there are no laws around either in place).

There's also a lot of social conservatism in the package, whether it's around income splitting, attempts at rescinding the party's established position not to support any legislation to regulate abortion (which, granted, is a perennial resolution), support for the "lawful use of self-defence," restriction of Medical Assistance in Dying, and regulating assisted human reproduction in order to avoid discarding unviable embryos.  Probably most concerning is the resolution to replace the word "women" with "Canadians" in the policy concerning the equality of women (though it does mention "girls" only as it relates to gender-selection abortion).  If you were looking in this package to find proposals from a party that espouses free-market conservatism, then you've come to the wrong place.

So what was actually new in there?  Implementing a CANZUK Treaty that is, between Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand for free trade, labour mobility, consumer protection and security considerations.  This was one of Erin O'Toole's platform promises in his leadership campaign, but it's a policy that doesn't make a lot of sense beyond some nostalgic feelings about Rule Britannia and a rose-coloured view of the economic relationship we used to have with the Mother Country that didn't really exist, not to mention the fact that none of these are the kinds of rapidly expanding markets that you'd think we would want to get in with.

This all having been said, I did find more interesting proposals around amending the party's constitution, because many of them were concerned with taking powers away from the leader and giving them to the National Council, so that they would be a far more empowered body rather than just a rubber stamp for the leader's office.  This is something that should probably happen, if nothing else, as a stopgap measure to take some of the power away from our overly-powerful leadership system, but unless and until we can restore the leadership process to one of caucus selection and removal, it can only ever be a stopgap.

While the Liberals didn't have a lot of innovative policy resolutions in their own booklet of proposals before their convention earlier this year, they did have a few concrete resolutions for advancing files and issues, whether it was on the environment, or on governance (such as the creation of a seniors' ministry which Trudeau did go ahead and create in the latest shuffle, despite my misgivings about its usefulness).  But whether with the Liberals or the Conservatives, the paucity of new ideas should be alarming to Canadians because it means that the party grassroots in either party either doesn't feel like it can contribute innovative ideas, or that they're being marginalized in the process of bringing them to convention because they don't want anything that will provoke too much debate, or show too much division in the ranks.  Without any new ideas coming forward, we're left with the impression that the parties are becoming intellectually bankrupt, and that can't be good for democracy given all of the challenges we're facing.