As the Conservative leadership race firms up, we're seeing what passes for policy statements out of several leadership candidates, but I find myself questioning whether there is any intellectual heft within the party ranks. The last election was run, as Paul Wells so eloquently put it, like a cargo cult that hoped that just one more tax credit would make the big shiny bird appear again. What the most prominent leadership contenders have been offering is largely doubling down on this suite of policies that didn't work for them in the election, devoid of any particular logic, reason, or even ideological backing as to what kind of conservatism they are putting on offer. It seems that "owning the Libs" is the only driving force, and I have to question whether that is something that they actually hope could carry the country in a general election.
The most prominent thing we've seen in this race is everyone climbing over one another to declare that they are the "true blue" conservative, while the social conservatives dismiss the two frontrunners as "Red Tories" something that we have seen little evidence of in the modern sense of the term as it relates to being socially progressive while fiscally conservative. Peter MacKay has been trying to burnish his Reform/Alliance credentials as gleefully going along with every bad idea that Stephen Harper proposed, O'Toole has been trying to paint MacKay as "Liberal Lite," which is odd and bizarre. O'Toole has also been winking and nodding to the social conservatives over things like saying he would allow free votes on abortion bills, like the one currently tabled by MP Cathay Wagantall, though it seems like they're currently not falling for it (even though the calculation is for them to put him above MacKay on the ranked ballot). What we term "Red Toryism" is absent from the ballot in this race entirely.
And then there are the pronouncements of the candidates themselves. At a rally in Edmonton on Thursday morning, MacKay stated that his vision for the party rested on three themes: rebuilding a sense of opportunity; rebuilding a sense of obligation; and focusing on what's fundamental protecting rights and liberties, and "safety on our streets." I'm not quite sure what he means by a sense of "obligation," but I suspect that his sense of "opportunity" is largely limited to oil and gas prospects, while his record around "safety on our streets" is abysmal, most of his signature tough-on-crime legislation having been struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada for being blatantly unconstitutional.
While his speech was largely a lot of disingenuous blaming of the federal government for the cancellation of certain energy projects that weren't economically viable, in the question-and-answer portion of his speech, he stated that he supported regressive policies like income splitting (championed by social conservatives because it incentivizes women to stay out of the workforce), and stated that he wants the country to be "energy independent" in five years. That's quite incredible, because he's talking about creating the National Energy Program 2.0, where, even if pipeline capacity could be built across country in that period, it would mean Alberta either taking a $10/barrel discount on the oil it sells to the Maritimes, or the Irvings being forced to pay that $10/barrel premium, and no doubt the government subsidizing the construction of new upgraders and refineries capable of handling heavy crude, to the tune of billions of dollars all at the start of the era of rapid decarbonization.
And because MacKay has repeated the anti-carbon price dogma the party espouses in the face of it actually being a market mechanism that is cheaper and more efficient than imposing regulations, he stated that while he believes in climate change, he would rather see the country "embracing some of the existing technologies that remove greenhouse gases don't tax it." Because you know what makes companies embrace technology? Price signals. He also insisted that the government should "stop talking and just do it" with regard to clean drinking water on First Nations reserves, as though it's not a complex problem that the government has been hard at work at for the past five years, and has measurable effect on many of the affected First Nations.
Most bizarre, however, was MacKay complaining that you can't find large manufactured equipment made in Canada, which makes me wonder if he's not actually running for the NDP leadership and not the Conservatives.
O'Toole, however, is no more coherent or logical. On Thursday he not only put out a tweet saying that Canadians should "blockade foreign oil," (apparently also ignorant of the basics of energy economics in this country), but a press release that recapped his own key ideas like defunding the CBC and cancelling the $600 million media bail-out, passing a (likely unconstitutional) Freedom of Movement Act to "bring down illegal blockades," and negotiating a CANZUK trade deal with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (yet not mentioning either Australia or New Zealand). He also handwaved the notion of "fixing equalization" without saying how; invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to impose even more mandatory minimum sentences (thus advertising that they are unconstitutional); allowing foreign competition to make airlines and mobile phones cheaper (wait until your protectionist constituencies start to threaten you); "fixing" the Safe Third Country Agreement (as though the American government had any interest in doing so); and "making industry pay" for climate change, which significantly disadvantages Alberta if you look at a simple graph of where the emissions are coming from.
Absent in any of this is anything that resembles an articulation of what it means to be a Conservative in 2020. They rail against the supposed bedrocks like the free market, and they know that going hard into social conservatism isn't going to win them the country, so I have to wonder just what exactly they plan to offer. Given how much they have built a brand around anti-intellectualism, the fact that there is no intellectual heft remaining in their ranks is now apparent, and this leadership contest lays that bare. If politics is supposed to be about the competition of ideas, and when no actual ideas present themselves, what does that mean for our politics moving forward? It's a bleak future if we stay on this path.
Photo Credit: CBC News
