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Author: redding

By now it should be quite obvious that the PC Party of Ontario regards its own base with suspicion at best and hostility at worst, as much of a threat to their hopes of forming government as Kathleen Wynne herself.

This attitude has informed the kind of behaviour we've seen from the party during the Ottawa West Nepean nomination controversy and countless other kerfuffles, flipflops and screw-ups over the course of the long sad period in which they've spent in opposition.

The pattern is always the same.  Someone feels like they're getting the short end of the stick.  The party stonewalls and implies that that person is not being "part of the team".  The person, who has invested significant time and effort in the cause, has a public freakout.  Complications ensue.  Rinse and repeat.

The party laments aloud that their allegedly impossible to please base makes it hard to trumpet their successes, such as a historic by-election victory in Sault Ste. Marie, or to torment the government with fowl puns about the quack-mire that arose when friends of a feather goosed the Ontario Liberals with a DuckTale (woo-hoo) about a giant yellow rubber bath toy costing in excess of 100K which in an additional flip of the bird was alleged to be counterfeit.

But no matter how many times this sad wheel turns, nobody has been bold enough to allege that the party is deliberately shooting their own foot soldiers.  Except me, of course.

The evidence is right there, even if nobody wants to acknowledge it.

First we have the well-worn Flanaganite maxim that it is a good thing to have the more "radical" elements of your base in open revolt against you, because this is somehow supposed to convince moderate voters that you aren't as crazy as you seem.

Tom Flanagan never advocated deliberately kicking these beehives, but this is just one of the many examples of the CPC turning a successful strategy into a dead horse, just like the over-reliance on boutique tax credits and Harper pounding the ivories every time there was a spare moment to do so.

Another misapplied lesson from the Harper era is the heavy handed approach to nomination meetings, to the point where it seems to be standard operating procedure.

Conservative parties in Canada have good reason to be concerned about wing nuts spouting off and hurting the party's chances.  But even when Harper was at his most controlling we weren't getting reports of egregious bigfooting every other month the way we are with the PC's.

Which brings us to the other bit of recent rough news for the PC's the end of Jack Maclaren's tenure with them as an MPP.

If Patrick Brown had simply wished Maclaren well in his new role as a sitting member for the Trillium Party, he could have remained above the fray and made the controversial ex-Landowner look like he was taking his ball and going home.  That's certainly what Harper would have done.  Heck, it's what Harper did.

Instead, Brown came off as if he was desperately seeking the approval of Liberal voters and that firing Maclaren at this point instead of at the first opportunity like they would have wanted would somehow get them to toss him a bone.

P-Bizzle may have wanted to whip his voters and MPP's in line, but all he did was give the impression that he considered them disposable.

This is doubly clear given that he's not nearly as aggressive towards Kathleen Wynne as he is to those within the PC fold that he perceives to be disloyal.

But the clearest bit of evidence that the party establishment is deliberately targeting its own members is that the members are allowing them to do it.  Though they complain, they accept the premise, promulgated by the party and the Liberals, that if they speak out, they are disloyal and are responsible for any subsequent misfortunes the party suffers.

It's also why so many other PCPO "loyalists" are willing to excuse the party's behaviour.  Like their "disloyal" comrades, they "know" that the only thing standing between the party and sweet, sweet power is loose Tory lips.

Here's the problem, though: If Patrick Brown excommunicates everyone who he sees as disloyal, and he STILL loses, what then?  Who will the party blame for its failure?  The media?  Third party groups?

It would, of course, be "disloyal" to suggest they need to look in the mirror, but when has that stopped me before?

Written by Josh Lieblein

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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Premier Kathleen Wynne got up on her high horse last Friday to squeak about how President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was "appalling!"

Wynne blowing hot air over Trump pulling out of a non-binding, ineffective, economically disadvantageous "deal" was an especially rich dish of foie gras served up from the unprecedentedly unpopular premier.  The giant ducky in the room while Wynne was scolding a pragmatic Trump was last week's earlier development of her government's debacle in blowing over $120,000 to rent said ducky to celebrate Canada's sesquicentennial.  Besides the bright yellow bird in no way representing Canada, this latest showing of utter contempt for the taxpayer perfectly encapsulates how Wynne's Liberal government has practiced the art of the wheel and deal steal when acting as banker of the public purse.

In contrast to Trump's puffery in retelling how his father used to tell people that everything his son touches turns to gold, everything Wynne touches seems to turn from glimmering promise to blackest despair.

From dooming Ontarians to outrageous hydro bills through green energy schemes, which gave her Liberal-connected friends way-above-market-value contracts, to selling off 60 per cent of Hydro One, a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year revenue-generating golden goose for the province, Wynne has done truly appalling action after appalling action while at the helm of this province.  And don't get me started on the radioactive provincial debt expected to soon become completely unmanageable.

Wynne continues to plumb new depths in her shameless pursuit of self-preservation at any cost.  Just look at some of her most recent announcements.  The "Fair Hydro Plan" refinances the energy debt to reduce power bills by 18 per cent this summer — but now it's been revealed through leaks to include the caveats of throwing away at least $21 billion in additional interest payments and still allowing rates to skyrocket again in four years' time.  Then there's Wynne's rash decision to up the minimum wage to an unrealistic $15 an hour by 2019 which will result in thousands of layoffs, increased inflation, and many businesses going out of business.

Wynne doesn't seem to give a damn what happens to the province down the poorly paved road — in the literal sense as well, since she rewarded construction companies with more contracts for botching jobs — as long as they remain the rulers over their own increasingly fiscally hellish Ontario.

They say the devil comes with a smile and the knockoff, Dutch-designed, ripoff duck is just the latest allegorical recrudescence.  A replica of the original cheery giant duck could've been bought from the artist for a tiny fraction of the overall $200,000 rental cost, but the government gave the grant and the festival paid the fee to a copycat without question.  It wasn't their own money after all.  So this giant rubber ducky will be inflated with a bunch of air and look impressive to onlookers for a few days' time.

But after the fanfare is over the government will have ultimately wasted $120,000 on a lame duck.  This duck symbolically represents all of the Liberals big announcements over the years that go from over-inflated expectations to deflated disappointment and dejection.

Personally I hope this giant duck blows up — like one literally did in Taiwan â€” in Wynne's face in July, for all the horrible deals she's cynically made to feather her own nest politically.  But at the very least, as her premiership circles the drain, this 13,500 kilogram rubber ducky deserves to be placed squarely around her neck, like an albatross, for the many appalling sins she's committed against our dear but greatly wasted homeland.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

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As the furore over the nomination of Madeleine Meilleur for the position of Official Languages Commissioner enters into its third straight sitting week, we are reminded of the pattern that outrages follow in this parliament.  The fact that this is playing out in rote fashion is starting to get mighty tiresome, and yet here we are, and it's like none of the parties can help themselves.

The pattern begins with the Liberals deciding that they've had enough consultation and making a move, whatever it may be, and it blowing up in their faces.  It was with trying to get government business (and most especially the assisted dying bill) passed last spring with Motion 6, the Electoral Reform committee's composition and eventual report, Bardish Chagger's "discussion paper" on modernizing the practices of the House of Commons, and now Meilleur's nomination for the post.  To an extent, it's also played itself out with other scandals-du-jour, like the allegations of so-called "cash for access" fundraisers (which really wasn't cash-for-access in any recognizable sense where it has been a legitimately abusive practice in many provinces).  Usually these moves happen with some manner of ham-fistedness, such as not having actually had a legitimate conversation with the opposing parties about it, but rather deciding that whatever discussions had been done were enough and they were going to take action.  That was certainly the case with Motion 6, or the way that the Liberals on the Procedure and House Affairs Committee decided to prioritize the discussion paper, or with Mélanie Joly not really consulting the party leaders opposite about the short list for a new Commissioner just asking them about Meilleur.

From there, we get the opposition outrage.  The government spends weeks giving banal talking points about how great the idea is, and frustrating the issue without actually addressing any of the problems or perceived problems.  They don't come up with some actual or effective responses until weeks into the outrage, by which point it's too late.  The opposition meanwhile manages to torque all of the issues beyond all semblance of logic or reality, spinning vast conspiracy theories based on the most disjointed threads and coincidence that build the finest tinfoil hats that Parliament has ever seen.  At the same time, they start in on the procedural rulebook with dilatory motions, interminable privilege debates, and play out the theatre of the absurd (recall Niki Ashton's complaints that Justin Trudeau created an unsafe working environment for women in the wake of The Elbowing that stemmed from juvenile gamesmanship around the Motion 6 debacle, or David Christopherson's concern trolling that the RCMP would hold MPs hostage in their offices in order to ensure that they  missed votes, as articulated during the latest round of privilege debates made in protest of the discussion paper).  Throughout it all, the particular hypocrisies of the Conservative positions are exposed, their own time in government having usually done far worse, but this is a parliament where irony has long-since died, and there is no shame on either side in how each and every imbroglio inevitably unfolds.

In the end, weeks of the sitting calendar are consumed, nothing gets done, and Parliament as a whole looks worse for it all.  And the Liberals?  They eventually climb down from their position after suffering through weeks of trying not to look weak on it.

Every.  Single.  Time.

So with this pattern now having firmly established itself in the 42nd Parliament, what strikes me is that the Liberals have consistently brought these issues on themselves.  The fact that there is this constant need to try and bring these issues to fore in the most ham-fisted manner possible, whether it was either Dominic LeBlanc, Bardish Chagger, Maryam Monsef or Mélanie Joly at the centre of it, seems to imply that there's a bigger problem with the party's leadership that is driving these particular unforced errors.

A good part of the constant wailing and gnashing of teeth is the fact that there is a need to pounce on the Liberals' high-minded promise to "do politics differently."  The reality, however, is that most of the changes any government can make are really at the margins.  Because politics is partisan at its core, there is only so much that one can do to try and work around it, and the Liberals, for as much as they may try to show that they are doing things differently than Stephen Harper's Conservatives, are limited in just what they can do.  That the opposition is cynically looking to "prove" that the Liberals aren't living up to the promise of doing things differently has nothing to do with the fact that they are being utter hypocrites in criticizing the very things that they themselves did the Liberals promised to be different and that's all that matters.

There is also an issue that Paul Wells raised last week over Twitter, which is that there is growing evidence the Liberals don't see other Liberals as partisans, so when they bully through an issue like Meilleur, this particular cognitive dissonance that they suffer from can help to explain why they are so tone-deaf to why there could be a problem in the first place.  That they rationalize and prevaricate without actually acknowledging the concerns that are raised (before those concerns spin out into conspiracy theory territory) and their digging in their heels drives the whole situation into the same outrage cycle which they could stop at any time if they played their hands differently, but they don't.  And while the politicization of Meilleur's nomination (by both sides, mind you) will taint the position of Language Commissioner and the "open, transparent, merit-based" appointment process, we will see whether they have their inevitable climb down when the tumult reaches toxic levels.  Regardless, in a few weeks, we seem doomed to repeat this all over again with the next Liberal blunder, unless a grown-up somewhere can talk some sense into them.  But I'm not holding my breath.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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When people ask me if I think Premier Kathleen Wynne is toast in the 2018 election campaign, I readily reply "no".  Why?  Patrick Brown.  He's on a roll lately, but his support is a mile wide and an inch deep.  Who is he?  Well… buckle up.

Patrick Brown is a panderer.  He is willing to say whatever you want to hear in the hopes you will vote for him.  He is a weathervane.

On three key issues — sex education, political fundraising and climate change — we've seen in recent months how the relatively unknown politician has flipped and flopped so many times, it's a wonder he can keep his current positions straight to himself.

As a backbencher under former prime minister Stephen Harper, Brown bragged about his perfect rating from the Campaign Life Coalition.  He voted to repeal equal marriage legislation for same-sex couples.  He voted against trans rights.  He voted to reopen the debate over a woman's right to choose.

Then he ran for leader of the Ontario Conservatives.  Brown spoke at rallies featuring homophobic epithets, and celebrated the endorsement of the most right-wing members of the Conservative caucus at Queen's Park to court social conservatives.  But then, once he became Conservative leader, he decided to march in the Toronto Pride Parade.  He claimed he now supported same-sex marriage and sex ed.  It was a welcome evolution — I praised him for it.

But then, his chief of staff was caught working up an open letter for his boss promising to repeal the sex-ed curriculum as a means of pandering to so-con constituents in a by-election.  Suddenly, it seemed Brown hadn't evolved on issues of LGBTQ equity.  He's stonewalled press enquiries on the matter ever since.

This winter, another former leadership campaign co-chair boasted behind closed doors that social conservative issues would be a priority, but only once in government.  Again, Brown admonished him.  But when your tenure as Conservative leader is defined by flip-flops on the major issues, taking a professed change of heart on human rights at face value is a risky leap of faith.  It happened again — he just turfed his former leadership campaign co-chair, Jack Maclaren, from the party, for admitting to a secret so-con agenda on tape.

Not convinced?  Well, take the months-long scandal on political fundraising.

Brown admonished Premier Kathleen Wynne for her fundraising practices repeatedly — even as Wynne sought to amend the legislation and forbade her MPPs for engaging in "cash-for-access" and declined to capitalise on the "by-election loophole" whereby corporate and union donors could essentially reset their donation limit to give even more to the Party.

Yet, as Adrian Morrow from The Globe and Mail noted, "Mr Brown has regularly criticized the Liberals over cash-for-access, but has maintained it is not wrong for him to engage in it".  In fact, just check Brown's twitter timeline: he seems to have held a fundraiser a day all year, where a handful of well-connected insiders, corporate interests and Conservative partisans could buy access to the man they expect will be premier in a little over a year.  He boasted that he raised more money than the governing Liberals last week, but he did it through cash-for-access practices he'd decried.  It seems what's wrong for the Liberals is A-OK for Brown.  So, where does Brown stand on political fundraising?  Depends when you asked him.

Likewise, on climate change, Brown ran as a Harper Conservative in 2006 and 2008 on a plan to introduce a cap-and-trade system.  We forget about this fact, but the Conservative platform in both elections was expressly for cap-and-trade.  Brown ran on this platform.  (Aaron Wherry traced the Tory's stances on pollution pricing here.

In other words, Brown was presumably in favour of cap-and-trade from 2006 to sometime around 2015, when as Ontario Conservative leader he came out against Premier Kathleen Wynne's cap-and-trade plan in concert with Quebec and California.  Conservative MPPs had petitions up on their websites decrying cap-and-trade, conflating it with a carbon tax, arguing against pollution pricing at all — right up until a few days after Brown suddenly announced at a party conference that he now supports a pollution penalty.  He was booed.

In summary, then: Patrick Brown was in favour of cap-and-trade before he was against it, and against a carbon tax before he was for it.  Just like he was against LGBT rights before he was for them before he was maybe against them before he was for them…

On these three issues — three of the main issues debated at Queen's Park of late — Brown has shown something worse than being an empty suit.  He's shown a dizzying inconsistency.

Love Premier Wynne or hate her, you know where she stands.  Even the far right acknowledges as much: "Liberal politicians like Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau are actually more honest than the weasel-y Brown, who is willing to adopt virtually any position he can and promise any group of people whatever they want", writes the Campaign Life Coalition.

With Brown, you have to wonder if Brown knows where Brown stands.  The man is a human multiverse.

The next Ontario election is not until spring 2018.  I for one will be counting how many more contradictory positions Brown chooses to take on the issues that matter.  Ontario voters should too — the premiership is too important a role to risk on a politician who doesn't know his own mind.

Photo Credit: Global News

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The New Democratic Party of Quebec is being reborn from its ashes.  Very slowly, but surely maybe, the work begun by activists following the Orange wave of 2011 continues to inch forward.

As a result of that historic election, some wanted to take advantage of the popularity of the NDP brand in Quebec to resurrect the provincial party.  There was much debate amongst New Democrats about it.

A reminder; the Quebec NDP was first founded in 1963, following the creation of the New Democratic Party of Canada.  Several renowned Quebecers were on board: Robert Cliche, Gérard Picard, Fernand Daoust, Charles Taylor and many others.  The party was mostly active as a section of the federal party.  Still, the Quebec NDP ran a handful of candidates, on and off, in the Seventies.  It was not until the mid-80s that New Democrats attempted a real breakthrough in Quebec.

At the time, not unlike today, New Democrats saw a political vacuum in Quebec, with many orphaned voters, left behind by both the PQ and PLQ.  In 1985, with former Ontario MP Jean-Paul Harney as leader, the NDP ran 90 candidates in the Quebec election.  The NDP received a disappointing 2.42% of the vote (which remains, to this day, a high mark!)

But the activists persisted and continued to believe.  Buoyed by the popularity of federal leader Ed Broadbent and by the division that consumed the PQ at the time, the Quebec NDP was polling reasonably well, at around 15%, with a peak of 22% in October 1987.

Despite promising polls, the federal NDP failed to breakthrough in Quebec in the 1988 election.  The Quebec campaign was marked by divisions in the ranks, notably about the issue of language.  Before the 1989 provincial election, the Quebec wing broke off from the federal party.  Subsequently, the party struggled, changed its name in 1995 to become the Party of Democratic Socialism.  The PDS joined the coalition of the Union des Forces Progressistes in 2002, along with the Rally for the Progressive Alternative and the Communist Party.  The UFP merged in 2006 with Option Citoyenne to create Québec Solidaire.  Québec Solidaire is therefore the great-great-great-grandson of the NDP!

The current situation does not satisfy everyone and many New Democrats want to be back on the provincial scene in time for the 2018 Quebec election.

The interim leader of the Quebec NDP, Pierre Ducasse, did a lot of the work upstream, but recently announced that while the party will run candidates, he will not lead them in the campaign.  The party held a general assembly on April 30th to elect a new executive.  Among them, two former federal MPs: Denis Blanchette as President and Djaouida Sellah as vice-president.

Why revive the party, you may ask?  The theory is that there is a significant number of orphaned voters who would like to vote for a progressive federalist party.  Voters too progressive to continue voting for the Liberal Party.  Voters who have zero interest in supporting the right-wing CAQ.  Voters for whom separation is not relevant or that is no longer topical and which prevents Quebec from moving forward.  Exit the PQ, bye bye National Option.   That leaves Québec Solidaire.  QS has recently been flirting with the PQ and negotiated a secret pact on Quebec's independence with other separatist parties.  QS has also expressed its willingness to become the unifying force of Quebec's independentists.  This all makes Québec Solidaire less attractive.  QED: Quebec needs the New Democratic Party.

But it's not all that simple.  After the 2011 Orange wave, a majority of Quebecers were saying they were interested in voting for a then non-existent Quebec NDP.  Where are we today?  On the federal scene in Quebec, the NDP is the second political force behind Justin Trudeau's Liberals, with 16 MPs.  However, looking at the example of the Conservative Party of Quebec, there is no guarantee that the federal votes will automatically transfer to the provincial sister party.

It is likely that a Quebec NDP could indeed both pull votes away from the progressive parties and from the Liberal Party.  But how many?  Launching a new party is quite a challenge.  You need to build your base and local associations.  You must find not only the candidates (and a leader!), but also the people who will surround them.  You need to find the funds to conduct a credible campaign, or even a pre-campaign, so that voters know that the party exists elsewhere than on the ballot.  And, quite importantly, you have to convince voters that the arrival of another party will not actually help the Liberal Party by splitting the vote.

Finally, you need oxygen.  And media sunlight.  A lot of sunlight.

And, at the moment, the political landscape is quite full and it will be difficult for the Quebec NDP to get much sunlight.  On the left side of the spectrum, it is clear that Québec Solidaire is on a roll.  The kind of momentum that allows the Solidaires to say no unequivocally to the sovereignist convergence of PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée.  For the leader of the Yes party, it's quite the slap in the face.  For QS, it is water at the mill, wind in the sails, in short, momentum.

And this momentum has three letters: GND.

The arrival of former controversial student leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois as spokesman for Québec Solidaire gave a good bump to the party in the polls.  While the party remains largely under 20%, it has almost doubled its support from the last election, since Nadeau-Dubois' arrival.  As soon as his intentions were announced in March, more than 5,000 new members joined the party in a few days.  Another wave followed after his election as co-spokesperson the Quebec Solidarity Congress.  This enthusiasm among the activists was never aroused by the serene leadership of Françoise David.

Whether the media likes or dislikes GND, no matter, they talk about him abundantly.  Nadeau-Dubois is young, he is photogenic, he makes controversial statements, sparking debates and controversy.  Great clickbait material!   GND's media presence is therefore disproportionate for the "leader" of a 4th party at the National Assembly.  In fact, according to Influence Communications, Québec Solidaire was the party with the greatest media exposure last week.  That's saying a lot.

The degree of hatred and love that Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois generates is spectacular.  Those who denigrate him do with with exaggerations and red-baiting insults.  This, of course, only motivates GND's supporters.  Just like when Sun TV raged against Justin Trudeau.  Or like when the big American mainstream media cheerfully mocked Donald Trump.

So who in the NDP world could compete with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois?  Let's exclude the current federal MPs from the outset.  There is no upside for them to give up their job and their advantages for such a risky adventure.  Also, several of them, including Mulcair's Quebec Lieutenant Alexandre Boulerice, are quite close to Québec Solidaire and do not necessarily see the arrival of a provincial NDP as a positive development.  As well, several federal NDP activists are already in the camp of Quebec Solidaire at the provincial level, particularly in Montreal.  Furthermore, a poor performance by a Quebec NDP could harm the federal party and their chances of reelection.  And, in all likelihood, there would probably be irreconcilable policy differences, notably on energy issues.

Many former MPs however, are looking for a new political project.  Among them, the name of Raymond Côté, former member for Beauport-Limoilou, is the one that emerges most often.  A very friendly guy, Côté does not have the notoriety of Nadeau-Dubois.  This notoriety will go up a notch when he makes his entry in the National Assembly, after being elected Monday in the Gouin by-election.  And no matter who becomes leader of the brand new Quebec NDP, the media will not give him or her the same oxygen at the outset as they did with Nadeau-Dubois.  Without oxygen, it is difficult to survive.  Or to even be born.

Photo Credit: Montreal Gazette

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If you were pleased with Stephen Harper's conservative principles, you will have little reason to be displeased with new Conservative leader Andrew Scheer's

TORONTO, Ont. /Troy Media/ Here's an amusing trivia question.  Who was Andrew Scheer's only media endorsement for the federal Conservative leadership?

Me, according to a master list compiled by Wikipedia.

What do you know?  The old war horse still has it!

I'm just having some fun.  I've made some good political predictions and some bad ones over the years but this is one of my best.

There's a flip side to my (somewhat) finely-tuned soothsaying skills.  Although I felt Scheer was the best candidate, I wasn't confident he had enough support to beat Maxime Bernier.

The general feeling was Bernier would win comfortably if he was above the 30 per cent threshold after the first ballot.  When the results came in on Saturday, the Tory MP and former cabinet minister was only at 28.89 per cent.  Scheer, a Tory MP and former Speaker of the House (2011 to 2015), was close behind at 21.82 per cent.

Over the course of 12 ballots, Scheer chipped away at Bernier's lead and finally beat him on the 13th ballot by a minuscule margin of 50.95 to 49.05 per cent.

How did this happen?

Several factors were at play.

Kevin O'Leary's decision to drop out and endorse Bernier didn't produce the effect many observers expected.  The controversial businessman was the acknowledged frontrunner when he unexpectedly pulled the plug on his bizarre campaign, but it clearly hadn't translated into strong numbers beyond first-choice supporters.

Hence, the love-hate relationship that many Tories had with O'Leary didn't disappear when he shifted his allegiances to another candidate.

Bernier's libertarianism hit a wall with the party faithful.  His fiscal policies, including opposition to corporate welfare and phasing out supply management, resonated with Canadian conservatives.  His social liberalism, including support for abortion and gay marriage, may have appealed to millennial voters and Red Tories but turned off the vast majority of party supporters.

While there's been a recent global trend to choose leaders with fiscal principles and centrist social values, Canada's Tories bucked the trend to an extent.

The party's social conservative wing, which is about one-third of the membership, flexed its political muscle.  They didn't like Bernier's social views, so they supported other candidates.  This enabled former Tory MP Pierre Lemieux to finish seventh with 7.67 per cent (only 0.07 per cent behind Kellie Leitch), and Tory MP Brad Trost to finish a surprising fourth with 14.3 per cent.  Many of them would eventually park their votes with Scheer, a fiscal and social conservative by political persuasion.

If you actually think social conservatism is dead in Canada, think again.

Scheer's sensible conservative vision was correctly viewed as the natural continuation of former prime minister Stephen Harper's political legacy.  The new Tory leader believes in small government, targeted tax credits, scrapping the carbon tax and cracking down on crime.  He takes a balanced approach on social issues, respecting the views of all party members and opposing the need to re-open debate related to abortion and gay marriage.  Finally, he wants to re-establish a more muscular foreign policy, and get Canada back into the fight against the Islamic State and radical Islamic terrorism.

In other words, if you were pleased with Harper's ideas, there would be little reason to be displeased with Scheer's.  While there are some policy differences, both want to create a positive, forward-thinking and inclusive conservative vision for Canada.

Scheer has a challenging road to electoral success.  He isn't a well-known political figure, and needs to increase awareness of his name and policies.  His political rivals are already trying to paint him as the purveyor of some sort of (wait for it) hidden agenda.  As well, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remains a popular leader in the eyes of many Canadians.

Fortunately, Scheer has time on his side and a chance to make political history, and his own place in political trivia, in 2019.

Troy Media columnist and political commentator Michael Taube was a speechwriter for former prime minister Stephen Harper.

© 2017 Distributed by Troy Media

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The election of Andrew Scheer as Conservative party leader has been described as many things over the past few days, from an sign of social conservative resurgence, to an openness of the diversity of opinion in the party, or a hostility to new ideas, but the one thing that I haven't heard is just how much of a blow it was to those free market conservatives that are in the party.

We often think of the Conservatives as the party of free markets, but under the leadership of Stephen Harper, that faded away in favour of populist policies designed to win votes rather than adhere to sound economics something that one might find strange considering that Harper trained as an economist (though he never actually worked as one).  Whether it was cutting the GST when the better economic advice would have been to cut income taxes instead, or whether it was selling a swath of targeted or "boutique" tax credits instead of broad-based tax simplification, the Harper years were marked with a lot of policies that made many economists tear their hair out.

Scheer's election is a retrenchment of that move to a party defined not by free market ideals, but rather one of right-flavoured populism.  By focusing his messaging on staying true to the Harper vision of the party but with a smiling face and a nicer tone, Scheer's underlying narrative was that everything was just fine during the near-decade that the party was in power, and that there wasn't a better way of being the "free enterprise" champions that they proclaim themselves to be.  While it has been described as an "incrementalist" approach by Harper, what it amounts to is a collection of tax credits for everything that the party deems ideologically worthy, and for other, more problematic areas, a burdensome regulatory approach that betrays its supposed commitment to less red tape.

In Scheer's particular case, promises he made on the campaign trail promised yet-more boutique tax credits, specifically geared toward things like parents homeschooling children or sending them to private school something that he takes particular interest in given that he sends his children to private Christian schools and to make parental benefits tax-free.  He also promised to remove the GST on home heating a promise that was actually something that was first proffered by the NDP under Jack Layton, and is something which economists will swear up and down is a useless gesture because it doesn't actually help with affordability and disproportionately benefits the wealthier who have larger houses.  Those kinds of distributional effect tend to be more common with the kinds of boutique tax credits that Scheer's populist policies follow because these credits are non-refundable, meaning that families need to be able to pay sufficient income tax to claim them, they benefit wealthier families who can afford to spend the required amount rather than those struggling families that the party says they are trying to help make life more affordable for.

Scheer's particular animosity toward carbon taxes is another sign that the party he helms has moved away from free-market principles, given that carbon pricing is a way to use free market principles to achieve emissions reductions in the most cost-effective ways possible because it forces companies to innovate to reduce their emissions in order to lower their carbon tax burden.  This was something that Michael Chong kept arguing, but was drowned out by the likes of Scheer, beating the drum beat of "tax bad, Hulk smash!"  What does Scheer propose instead?  While he had a policy around tax credits for environmental innovation, in post-victory interviews, he only mentioned a need to come up with a credible policy that will attract urban voters.  If he continues to follow the Harper-era policies of trying to address GHG emissions by way of regulation rather than a pricing mechanism, he would continue to favour a system that is the costliest and least efficient way to reduce emissions.  (Incidentally, Scheer has also been somewhat economically incoherent in attacking carbon pricing, calling it a "cash grab" despite the fact that the federal government is not keeping any revenues and provinces have the option to recycle them in any way they wish, such as by lowering income taxes as BC does.  Scheer has also accused the CBC of being Liberal propagandists because they refer to carbon pricing instead of carbon taxes, as though all carbon pricing mechanisms were taxes which they aren't and because his trying to brand it all as a tax benefits only his narrative).

The fact that Michael Chong, who was best representative of the free-market conservatives in the race, came fifth, is a signal of their marginalization in the broader party ranks.  The fact that he ranked below Brad Trost also sends a signal as to the kind of influence that free-market conservatism ranks with relation to social conservatism in Scheer's calculus of the policy direction of the party.  I should also note that despite the fact that self-described libertarian Maxime Bernier came in second, I'm not sure that there is actually a strong libertarian presence in the party, but that his levels of support were more likely have been indicative of someone who the grassroots felt could best beat-up Justin Trudeau once Kevin O'Leary exited the race.

While Scheer has spent much of the race wrapping himself in some of the trappings of free-enterprise, his embrace of economic illiteracy for the sake of populism should be a warning that the appeal of the party to free-market conservatives is on life-support if it's not already dead.  This while the Liberals are making moves on things like tax simplification, coherent market mechanisms for reducing GHG emissions, and ensuring that families are getting direct cash transfers rather than tax credits, thus benefitting those who are on the lower end of the income scale.  Will this attract those free-market conservatives to join the "blue Liberal" ranks instead of sticking with a party that has grown hostile to their economic interests?  Time will tell.

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This weekend, social conservatives flexed their muscles and got their second-choice elected leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.  In Alberta and Ontario recently, their first-choice candidates won.  Andrew Scheer, the baby-faced father of five and former Speaker, squeaked to a victory on the thirteenth ballot, propelled by the second and third choice votes of a surprisingly strong social conservative B-team.  He's a bit more circumspect about his social conservatism than some of his defeated rivals, but Scheer has a perfect rating from the Campaign Life Coalition.

We've seen this movie before, in Ontario, where Scheer's former colleague on the backbench, Patrick Brown, parlayed his own stellar rating from the Campaign Life Coalition and helped whip up a homophobic backlash to a new sex-ed curriculum to become Ontario Conservative leader.

Since becoming leader, Brown has flipped and flopped back and forth on his social conservatism, saying he now supports gay and women's rights, but also running a strident teenage so-con in a by-election, distributing flyers pledging to scrap sex ed, before walking the comments back, and running an all-male slate of candidates in Ontario's five recent by-elections, against a nearly all-female slate of candidates from the governing Liberals.

Brown has certainly said the right things about spurning his past life as a so-con of late, but what he's said for the past two years of his career pales in comparison to what he's done for the first two decades of it (he's been in politics since his early twenties).  To quote a first-century Rabbi, "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.  You will know them by their fruits."  Brown is a social-conservative wolf wrapping himself lately in sheep's clothing, but we know his true colours by his voting record for a decade in Ottawa.

Jason Kenney, the new Conservative leader in Alberta, makes no apologies about it: he's thoroughly anti-women's rights, anti-LGBT rights and proud of it.  He's even proposed to out LGBT kids and allies to their parents if they attend a school-based Gay-Straight Alliance club.

Scheer seems to be somewhere between Brown and Kenney's approach: he's a social conservative, but he might prefer to follow the Stephen Harper playbook of leaving the big debates alone, and settling for what his supporters perceive as lesser fights.  That's not to undermine the damage he could do; we still don't have a trans rights bill passed, thanks to Conservative backbenchers and senators.

Progressives cannot become complacent. In Alberta, the spectre of Kenney's radicalism and a united right seems to be corralling progressives of all stripes behind the centre-left NDP government.  There's been a policy inertia with the Trudeau Liberals lately, but the Party organised its largest Day of Action this weekend to coincide with the Tory leadership vote, and that felt like a shot in the arm against complacency.

In this era when we see what happens when progressives get complacent south of the border or in the UK — when watching The Handmaid's Tale feels too much like verisimilitude — Canadian progressives cannot let down our guard.  We can't just show up to make sure we have a progressive federal government; cities and provinces matter, too, if not more.  Donald Trump's win began in the state houses of North Carolina and Wisconsin, with their attacks on workers' and voting rights.  Conversely, the Resistance to Trump is shepherded by Democratic governors and mayors.

Ontario is first up; this time next year, the battle will be underlined by Premier Kathleen Wynne, the first lesbian head of government in the English-speaking world, versus a young Tory whose entire career until now has been spent ingratiating himself to those who would take away her rights if they had the chance.  I for one am not prepared to be complacent; we've seen were that can lead.

To again quote that same first-century Rabbi, "Wake up!  Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished".

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There's a wide disconnect living in Europe between how Justin Trudeau is covered by Canadian media and how Europeans look to him as an exemplar, a poster child for tolerance, modernity and the kind of leader to envy.  I've had a Spanish customs agent at the airport and her colleague respond to my passport saying, "Your prime minister—just such the right attitude, and so handsome."  I've had a Somali cabbie in London talk my ear off about how wonderful he thinks Trudeau is, especially in comparison to British rightwing populists.  Even my law professors can be a bit gaga about JT.

I'll admit one of the benefits of being out of the country is being able to enforce the self-discipline necessary to avoid the kind of lowball partisan bickering that so fascinates the Ottawa bubble.  I didn't realise the Conservatives are still banging on about Trudeau taking a vacation on the Aga Khan's Caribbean island, or that apparently the foreign ministry made some posters of Trudeau and that's a huge scandal, or that the NDP are mad he appointed the former Ontario attorney general as commissioner for official languages.  Canadian scandals — especially when compared to what's going on in the White House or Whitehall these days — seem almost laughably quaint.  Or — as More and Richie Cunnigham would say — humdrum.

This week, things seemed to come to a head on this disconnect, as Trudeau was in Europe for the NATO summit, but back home various commentators were openly musing about the need for a "reset" of his seemingly stalled agenda.

Trudeau's first budget did a fair bit, reversing Harper-era cuts and giving more money to low- and middle-income families.  But there's a persuasive argument that he's drifted since, boxing himself out fiscally with the deficit and the scandal-mongering about his every misstep is starting to take hold.

With the Conservatives finally about to elect a new leader, and the NDP race heating up, Trudeau needs to pivot to what's next.  His political raison d'être remains focused on helping the middle class and those trying to join it.  That's a sound economic credo for today's inequitable times, especially given the rising spectre of nationalistic populism.  But he needs to add more meat to the bones.

I took flack from Liberals in Ottawa for writing a column during the last election for saying Trudeau wasn't offering enough on healthcare.  Well, he wasn't then, and his recent, truncated healthcare negotiations with the provinces revealed an alarming hands-off approach.

Now, I'm both a fan of and a friend of Jane Philpott (and her son), and she's a very capable minister, with a strong vision for the healthcare sector.  She needs to be given the tools so she can finish the job.

One obvious area where Trudeau can reinvigorate a stalled agenda and stay on his broader theme of help for a struggling middle class is in healthcare.  He should do what he essentially did the last time Ontario threatened to "go it alone" on a social policy innovation: step in and do it bigger and better with the power of the federal government.  He did it on CPP, fulfilling the promise of the (now defunct) Ontario Retirement Pension Plan.

Trudeau should do it again, and bring in a true national pharmacare programme across the country.  It's the right thing to do morally: people shouldn't go broke to pay for drugs.  It's the right thing to do politically; it has even seemed to revive Premier Kathleen Wynne's faltering poll numbers.  And it's the right thing to do for his brand: it plays to his stated goal of helping the middle class in a tangible, lasting way.

"The greatest Canadian" is the founder of our healthcare system.  (There's a statute to the founder of the National Health Service near my flat in the UK, too.)  Trudeau could earn some ink in the history books by being the guy who brought in the biggest national expansion to healthcare in a generation.

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Jagmeet Singh carries himself as a man thoroughly comfortable with his old world heritage, a devout Sikh who conceals his never-cut hair beneath a turban and carries a kirpan wherever he goes.  Doubtless many members of the NDP — the party he's now running to lead — will feel supremely enlightened when they cast a ballot for this striking symbol of Canadian multiculturalism: the first non-white, non-Christian to have a credible shot as a prime ministerial candidate.  Should he become head of the party (which seems likely, given the extraordinary charisma gap between him and his opponents) one imagines the world will soon be bombarded with headlines about how only in hyper-tolerant Canada could such an ostentatiously exotic politician be welcomed.

Singh's political fortunes have obviously yet to fully unfold, yet if he is embraced as widely as expected — not just as NDP leader, but a symbol of something unique and special about Canada — it will occur in spite of any genuine diversity a man of his background might be expected to bring to our politics.

On the surface, what would seem to make Singh most politically interesting is the tension between his socially conservative faith and the secular-progressive worldview of his party.

Sikhism is a strict and organized religion with more than a passing resemblance to Catholicism.  It purports the existence of a single judgmental God, acknowledges the authority of a church hierarchy — the highest-ranking figure being the head of India's Akal Takhat temple, which literally translates to "Throne of God" — and offers an explicit code of morality, through the archived teachings of its past gurus and the Sikh Rehit Maryada, an even more utilitarian guide to righteous living.

On the host of what we now refer to as "social issues," Sikhism offers answers little different from those of conservative Christians.  Human life is said to begin at conception, and God is said to have created two distinct genders who exist to marry and procreate.  Though the faith purports gender equality, men are tasked with unique leadership responsibilities women are not.  Drugs and adultery are considered extremely grievous sins.

No one honestly expects Jagmeet Singh to incorporate any of this into his political agenda as New Democrat leader.  To the extent he'll be allowed to hold conservative beliefs about gender, human life, sexuality, or marriage, they'll be expected to be deeply private opinions never articulated in public — not even if prefaced by "while I may personally believe…" Indeed, if most secular-progressives are honest with themselves, they'd probably say they don't really want Singh opposing gay marriage or abortion when he's sitting alone with God in a moment of quiet spiritual reflection, either.  What they want is for him to march in Toronto's pride parade and call abortion a woman's "right to choose" — which is what he's already done.

For that matter, no NDP member wants Mr. Singh to have a unique perspective on aboriginal or French-Canadian rights informed by his experience as a first-generation Canadian whose family has only been here a few decades.  The bigotry he experienced personally, and his family's lack of continuity with the Anglo-Canadian "settler" class, must not detract or moderate his engagement with the white establishment's view that the historic victimization of Canada's French and aboriginal populations outrank those of all other groups, and must therefore enjoy a permanently preeminent place in the national hierarchy of suffering.  Singh demonstrated fluency with such expectations in his inaugural campaign speech, where he spoke of learning to appreciate the "parallels" of his own community's struggles to that of the French-Canadians, and listed "reconciliation with indigenous peoples" as one of his four policy priorities.

What progressive voters really want and what Singh seems eager to offer, in sum, is a candidate who while visibly "diverse" offers no perspectives, opinions, or priorities that substantially differ from that of a standard white, urban, irreligious liberal Canadian.  This is diversity of the easiest kind — the sort that requires no real tolerance to embrace, since you're not being asked to tolerate anything new or challenging.

As I've said before, I believe Singh has the potential to be a formidable force in Canadian politics.  His ardent progressivism (wherever it originates), coupled with a desire among many liberal voters to support a nonwhite prime minister, have strong potential to fracture the left and erode Justin Trudeau's electoral base.  But all this ultimately reveals is the superficiality of political diversity in modern Canada: a rainbow of faces with identical minds.

Photo Credit: Toronto Sun

Written by J.J. McCullough

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