Patrick Brown is taking a lot of well-deserved flack for his utter lack of conviction and backbone since taking control of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.  Brown won the leadership race in large part by courting social conservatives, even being endorsed by the Campaign Life Coalition, an organization advocating for traditional family values and against euthanasia and abortion.  But once sworn in, previous oaths were forgotten.  Brown decided to divorce himself from his conservative base and subvert the party into the Ontario Progressives.

As the leader of the rebranded Progressive Party of Ontario, Patrick did a one-eighty, turning his back on the people who put him in office, all for supposed political expediency.  Sure, marching in the Toronto Pride Parade was probably seen as benign enough by his so-con supporters, and it was a savvy move to disprove the stigma that conservatives are anti-LGBTQ.  But when he rashly decided — during the Scarborough-Rouge River by-election — to flip-flop a day after his party sent out Patrick Brown-signed letters promising to scrap the Liberals' controversial sex-ed curriculum, making ingratiating mea culpas on a media circuit, Brown demonstrated shallow opportunism.

Brown's outright defection from his fellow so-cons was confounding.  He could've easily borrowed from Trump's bag of tricks: "Repeal and replace."  Brown could've conceded that sex-ed curriculum in Ontario had needed revamping for the 21st century, but that the Liberal's new curriculum, with input from former and notorious deputy education minister Ben Levin (convicted on child-pornography-related offences), was too radical of a document.  This nuanced approach would have appeased voters across the spectrum, or at least ruffled very few feathers.  Instead, Brown panicked as soon as the press coverage turned negative.  Folding a day after taking a stand had the adverse effects of making his base feel betrayed while simultaneously tarnishing his trustworthiness with the electorate at large.  The Liberal press didn't ease up on him because of his obsequiousness, only grilling him harder for his hypocrisy.

Now Brown runs the risk of causing a civil war within his party.  So-cons revolted in the by-election of Niagara-West Glanbrook, nominating 19 year-old Sam Oosterhoff.  Brown, matching Trudeau, is trying to control the outcomes of future "open" nomination processes to ensure no more inconvenient so-cons are elected into his party.  Furthermore, Brown — perhaps suffering from Stockholm Syndrome — is whipping caucus to vote for Wynne's controversial legislation and agrees with her "revenue neutral" carbon tax.

All of this has the potential of fracturing his party before the 2018 election, allowing a scandal-ridden and embattled Liberal party to win yet another four years in power after 15 years in which they've run up a whopping $305-billion-and-counting deficit, made the province noncompetitive for business and made hydro rates skyrocket.

Brown needed only to have taken a middle of the road approach.  Challenge the Liberals on their erasure of mother and father in recent legislation.  Denounce government-funded late-term and sex-selective abortion, while also making it clear Ontario PCs aren't interested in reopening same-sex marriage debate.  Sure the media would have been sent in a tizzy of outrage, but a principled and well-reasoned approach would've only made their hyperventilating look ludicrous.  By the time the 2018 election rolls around, these already-discussed positions would pale in comparison to the dire economic picture.  Mimicking your opponent's policies and ignoring your colleagues' and voters' concerns only spells disaster.  The Toronto Star et al. are not going to help you come election time, no matter how much you stress you are a progressive, and abandoned conservatives will likely abstain from voting for a turncoat.

In stark contrast to Brown, federal conservative leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch (albeit with the advantage of having not yet led a party) is showing how taking a principled and conservative stand on issues works in a leader's favour.

Leitch has risen above her rivals by taking principled stands on issues the majority of Canadians are in agreement upon.  Her announcement that she would screen immigrants for "Canadian values" was a win-win-win stance.  The Laurentian elite in the mainstream media reacted with delusional and phoney outrage, and decried her as a race-baiting opportunist.  They gave her endless unfair coverage in the hopes of quashing her campaign.  However, this only had the ironical effects of relaying her resonating message to reasonable voters across the country and raising her profile in a crowded field (some estimates record her getting about 50 per cent of all CPC leadership race coverage).  Finally, the melodramatic media's incredibly biased coverage of Leitch hasn't just given her legitimacy, but also undermined the credibility of the press.

When so-called feminists of the press, in a blind fit of rage, dismiss Leitch's proposal that women should be allowed to legally carry mace for self-defense, Kellie Leitch wins.  When pundits maliciously attack, with low blows like "your claim to political fame is a toxic snitch line and discovering Jim Flaherty's dead body…", but don't similarly attack another politician's claim to fame — sharing his father's surname and beating up a native — Kellie Leitch wins.  When the CBC claims attacks on a corrupt Hillary Clinton are sexist, but then the same CBC spitefully mocks Leitch's way of speaking (her impersonator making her sound like she has a speech impediment), Kellie Leitch wins.

The CBC only further supports Leitch's bold call for dismantling it when the tone deaf state broadcaster asks taxpayers, many struggling just to make ends meet, to fork out another $400 million a year so it can go ad-free.

Kellie Leitch continues to dictate the CPC leadership conversation and lead the pack of contenders, demonstrating how a conservative wins by remaining steadfast in their convictions, challenging and defying the liberal media's outbursts.

Patrick Brown should duly take note and follow suit.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

The Trudeau Foundation scandal is a fascinating thing given how many pathologies of Canadian politics swirl within it. It's a damning study not just of the cloistered, transactional culture of Ottawa high society, but the failed god of campaign finance reform.

Justin Trudeau and his brother Alexandre were the inaugural leaders of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation when it incorporated back in 2001, shortly after their father's death. Justin apparently abandoned his official duties sometime in late 2014, but the Trudeau Family still holds constitutional authority to appoint two of the outfit's 18 board members, which only makes sense, given it's their legacy on the line.

To the extent Justin Trudeau has ever held any hard convictions about politics, ensuring people think forever fondly of his father has been his most consistent. In that regard, he's long had common cause with much of the Ottawa establishment, whose selective memories and rank partisanship have turned the late Trudeau into a deified figure. Buried in its many tiers of "leaders," "members," "scholars," etc., the Foundation is a veritable who's-who of bigshots past and present, including two sitting premiers, Phillipe Couillard of Quebec, and Wade MacLauchlan of Prince Edward Island, Elizabeth May, a woman who considers herself one of Canada's major party leaders, and a handful of high-profile journalists, including Jeffrey Simpson, Chantal Hébert, and Susan Delacourt.

Obviously not everyone who's played some role in the Foundation over the years is automatically culpable in any unethical or illegal shenanigans it may turn out to have committed, but if the present scandal has any legs, one imagines we'll soon hear an awful lot of important people offering hasty clarifications of the exact terms of their involvement.

The scandal in question has been solidifying for some time, and centres around allegations the Trudeau Foundation has descended into an influence-peddling racket designed to subvert this country's campaign finance laws. While current law forbids individuals from giving more than $1,500 to the politician of their choice — or corporations from giving anything at all — the Trudeau Foundation, as a private charity, is governed by no such stipulations.

So something smells a tad fishy about the fact that "money began to rain on the Trudeau foundation" — in the words of the National Post — at the convenient moment when Justin Trudeau became head of the Liberal Party. And if that's too subtle for you, the Post also reported that for at least a year and a half after Justin ascended to the job, the Foundation made pitches to donors promising access to its prime ministerial candidate-in-residence for anyone willing to fork over $50,000.

Since 2014 the Foundation has received funds from at least five corporations lobbying Ottawa for something-or-other. And since Trudeau's election as PM last fall, at least two donors have received favourable government action. Google gave the Trudeau Foundation $25,000 in 2014, and in April of 2016 were cleared of anti-competitive charges by the federal competition board, while in a story that made headlines last month, an official from Beijing's Communist government gave $200,000 to the Foundation shortly before a Chinese bank chain in which they had an obvious interest was authorized for Canadian operation.

All this gives the opposition parties and press plenty to play with, and damning details continue to drip. Yet beyond tarnishing the Prime Minister's holier-than-thou image — already fast muddied by his similar-yet-distinct cash-for-access scandal — I suspect the outrage will lead nowhere productive.

Thanks to the bipartisan effort of both the Chrétien and Harper administrations, big money has been legally choked out of Canadian politics via bans on corporate and union donations and the $1,500 cap for individuals. This, at the expense of free speech and fundraising efficiency, was supposed to exorcise moneyed influences from our politics, though it predictably did not; it just made them manifest in more creative and undetectable ways.

Caught on the defensive, Trudeau's Liberals will face enormous pressure to do what Liberals do best — pass a law for its own sake. Ideally something that showily seeks to further curtail "opportunities" for money to cast its corrupting dark magic on our political process without actually curtailing corruption itself, which, as a moral failing, is beyond government's capacity to ban. This might involve reviving the idea of publicly financed political parties — an odious practice abolished by Harper in which parties fund themselves with taxpayer cash.

In their drive to shame this government, conservatives must resist unproductive policy appeasements. The only true check against political sleaze comes at election time.

Photo Credit: J.J. McCullough

Written by J.J McCullough

The PC Party of Ontario has had some pretty embarrassing scrimmages over candidates and nominations before, but Glengarry-Prescott-Russell hopeful Derek Duval getting the shaft a few weeks ago because someone- apparently not him- ate some poutine off a hockey stick in a video and some PC Party apparatchik mistook the poutine for a hamster may be the silliest yet.

I will give the party credit for at least giving a creative reason for punting Duval when someone else was clearly favoured.  But this is just the latest example of what I've been saying for months: The Ontario PC's keep trying to look good and hide their domestic disputes, and it's just making them look ridiculous instead.

The entire nomination process, for example, is and always has been clearly rigged for the purpose of nominating candidates that satisfy the party mandarins' notion of what is socially acceptable and what isn't.  Everyone who doesn't have a vested interest can see this.

But a nomination process is useful for the purpose of raising money, identifying "supporters" who can be harassed constantly for money, and for giving people who would otherwise have nothing to do something to occupy their time.

So the charade continues, and it is healthy, occasionally, to point out that it is a charade.

But the same party officials can never handle the truth, because if the truth became known and widely accepted rather than something we don't acknowledge because it's not polite to- they would have to work even harder to convince "905 voters" that they're not a bunch of socially conservative yahoos.

Except there are already plenty of socially conservatives and other controversial figures deeply entrenched within the party, and it defies all credibility for anyone within the party Patrick Brown included- to pretend otherwise.

Chatham-Kent MPP Rick Nicholls is well known for speaking out of turn.  He's been disciplined for saying he doesn't believe in evolution and for attacking lobbyist and PR/GR specialist Lisa Kinsella.

So when Brown had to order him to retract his views recently for saying that social issues "were very, very important" to the PC Party but went no further, was anyone really shocked?  Does anyone really believe this will solve the problem?

Then we have the buzz around MPP Monte McNaughton.  Ask people who is next in line if Brown flops, and you will hear John Baird's name tossed around, but McNaughton is certainly not standing idle.  Are we really expected to believe that the man who shot to prominence by taking a stand against the province's sex-ed curriculum is just going to walk away from all that?  Does Brown really want him to?

Brown's own personal weirdness- his confirmed bachelorhood, the fact that he doesn't EVER drink or smoke, the fact that he functions on four hours of sleep- invites uncomfortable questions as well.  Then you have the assortment of campaign managers, longtime activists, former Party Presidents, executive members and MPPs, all with skeletons in their closets and rumours swirling around them that you don't dare mention publicly for fear of being on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

The PC Party of Ontario is old and storied and holds its share of interesting secrets.  It's packed with colourful characters.  There's nothing wrong with that.

But for them to deny people their shot at running for elected office for silly reasons is not only hypocritical, it shows they aren't really comfortable in their own skins.  That they care more about their own reputation than showing that they have a few flaws.

Ontario is in sharp decline.  It has been for a very long time.  And the governing Liberals spend far too much time papering over the province's very real problems in the hope they will go away already.

If Brown really does want to win as badly as he says he does, he can't offer Ontarians the same sort of superficial, impression-managed government they've already been getting.

If nothing else, being a little less calculated and a little more heartfelt would help the party connect to those vaunted "905 voters" a lot more than announcing support for a carbon tax would.

Written by Josh Lieblein

McCarthyism is alive and well in Canada.  But instead of conservatives performing inquisitions on hapless individuals over blusterous accusations — with little regard for evidence or due process — it is instead intolerant "liberals" embracing this insidious method.  Much of the Canadian zeitgeist has been indoctrinated by cultural Marxist zealots who believe in a hegemonic white patriarchy where the world is simply made up of the oppressors and the oppressed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a devout follower of this postmodernist doctrine.  An incredible amount of doublethink is required when listening to the PM's convoluted beliefs.

He believes Canada is the first post-national country devoid of ugly nationalism, yet he then goes on to brag about how great Canada is as a nation and that others should emulate Canada when giving hoaky speeches at the UN.  Trudeau claims to champion the LBGTQ community, marching at three Pride Parades this summer.  However, by late fall Trudeau is eulogizing Fidel Castro, a tyrant who imprisoned and tortured gays.  On other days, he gives Islamic countries a pass on murdering gays.  Furthering his hypocrisy towards Islam, Trudeau forgets his sweet nothings on feminism when he visits mosques, leaving the religion's intrinsic misogyny unchallenged when he does a call out to his segregated "sisters."

With all of this sanctimonious political correctness prattling from the PM, one would expect him to be mocked mercilessly by the press.  But alas, much of the Canadian lapdog media feel a kindred spirit in the PM and his progressive moral relativist antics, so they box him with kid gloves.  On the other hand, when it comes to conservatives, comedians and journalists bare knuckle brawl.

Preferential treatment due to personal progressive ideological affinities is played out throughout the Canadian media landscape.  Right now there are three conservatives heretics the Canadian mainstream media is actively persecuting.  The three dissenting freethinkers are Conservative Party of Canada leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch, nascent and youngest ever Ontario MPP Sam Oosterhoff, and University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson.

Kellie Leitch, under the guidance of her cunning campaign manager Nick Kouvalis, is actively being bombarded with bad press.  Kouvalis, who basically wrote the book on how to take (from the media's perspective) controversial stances that are in actuality very popular with the electorate when he ran Rob Ford's successful mayoral campaign.  He has also perfected the art of taking an aggressively adversarial approach to the media in order to get a candidate lots of free press, without destroying their candidacy.

Now Kouvalis has Leitch making supposedly bold and bigoted policy positions, like screening immigrants and refugees for Canadian values and dismantling the bloated and antiquated state broadcaster.

Her Canadian values stance received intense blowback from much of the press, despite polls showing that well over 60 per cent of Canadians want newcomers to respect Canadian cultural norms and almost 75 per cent support more screening of immigrants from the Middle East.  Although getting herself on the cover of Maclean's for her position, many journalists decried this as "dog-whistle" politics devised to gain support from racists.  Nevermind the overwhelming support for the policy, the media didn't like the principle of standing up for Western values.

The media's branding of Leitch as merely a race-baiter and pleading with other conservatives to oppose her is absurd when she is simply voicing policies the majority of Canadians agree upon.  The fact that Middle Eastern countries tend to have more extremists than America or the UK doesn't somehow make the proposed security policies racist.  Joining the Leitch lynch mob, the mainstream media have published a chorus of melodramatic headlines (I have a list of about 50 negative headlines).  Yet, for as much as the media has done everything to destroy Leitch's candidacy, it only seems to have backfired and given her more name recognition and support.

Similarly vilified by the Canadian media for having unorthodox views to that of progressives, the newest MPP, 19 year-old Sam Oosterhoff is being hounded by the media.  The Star ran the headline "Sam Oosterhoff … says he's 'absolutely not' a homophobe" after they discovered he posted articles saying homosexuality is a sin.

I am not a social conservative, nor do I believe homosexuality is a sin, but I am open-minded enough to accept that the religious believe the act of gay sex is a sin.  (Many of them also believe sex out of wedlock is a sin, too.)  This doesn't necessarily mean they hate homosexuals or are homophobic.

It's quite pathetic that bigoted (which means intolerant and ignorant of others' beliefs) reporters so doggedly grilled Oosterhoff for ten minutes, a backbencher for Pete's sake, because of this and his pro-life belief, instead of continuing to focus all their attention on Premier Kathleen Wynne, and her government's $305 billion dollar provincial deficit they allowed to happen under their watch.

Finally, a brief look at the third apostate in Justin's "because it's 2016" Canada.  Psychology professor Jordan Peterson has been facing intense backlash for refusing to adopt gender-neutral pronouns and take the new mandatory training that goes alongside it at the University of Toronto.  Peterson doesn't believe in the bizarre notion that one of his opponents, a transgender studies professor, asserts: there are no biological differences between the sexes, and that this belief is the scientific consensus.  (Somehow these radical ideas are perfectly okay to be taught as truth in an academic institution, as if it's acceptable to teach 2 + 2 = 5.)

Peterson is bravely standing against the totalitarian left of Canada and their absurd legislation of the Ontario Human Rights Code, as well as proposed Bill C-16 at the federal level.  Peterson is prepared to defend free speech by facing trial at the Ontario Human Rights Commission, willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court, as well as being fired from his tenured position.  Peterson knows the absurdity of the kangaroo courts that make up the provincial Human Rights Commissions, which mudraker and media entrepreneur Ezra Levant so soundly eviscerated in his book, Shake Down.

During an interview with Joe Rogan in LA for the celebrities immensely popular podcast (Peterson has grown a large following himself since taking his principled stand against the PC zealots) he explained why he isn't overreacting — and his comments apply to the other two dissidents, too.

"They mean every single bloody concept.  And you can marry that with postmodernism and throw in a nice dash of marxism… They produce political activists and their goal is to restructure the patriarchy.  Well, what's the patriarchy?  Well the patriarchy is Western civilization.  What does restructure mean?  That's easy.  It means tear it down and destroy it.  Why?  Because it is a brutish system and it's predicated on nothing but oppression.  It's nothing but a tyranny in the eyes of the women studies types.  Heterosexuality, that's a tyranny.  Capitalism, that's a tyranny.  Democracy — well that doesn't even exist, and even if it did it would be a tyranny.  Everything is a tyranny."

Photo Credit: The Simpsons

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

The very worst thing that ever happened in Canadian politics occurred the other day — or at least that's what I've learned from reading the papers. At a rally at the Alberta legislature last weekend, a group of anti-NDP protestors chanted "lock her up" a few times in reference to Premier Notley. Former cabinet minister and current Tory leadership hopeful Christopher Alexander was present. He apparently smiled at one point.

The horrors of this episode have spawned a thousand think-pieces across the land. Does Minister Alexander "not believe that those who aspire to leadership positions have a responsibility to draw the line at what constitutes gratuitous abuse versus legitimate debate?" asked the Toronto Star's Chantal Hebert. "We seem to be heading into the dark American world where truth is defined by the intensity of anger and emotion, not by fact" agreed Don Braid at the Calgary Herald. These chanters "must be denounced by all" The Globe and Mail editorial board thundered in their lead editorial(!) in Monday's paper.

Do I oppose chanting "lock her up" in regards to politicians? I guess, but I have to say, if you're traumatized by the idea of people calling a politician a crook, you really need to get out more.

Specifically, you should have gotten out to the protests that consumed the urban centres of this country last year, when our-then Conservative government was in the process of passing Bill C-51, the Anti-Terrorism Act, which strengthened security measures in various ways a lot of people really hated back then but don't worry about much these days. If you open up your internet machine to Google Image Search and plunk in "bill c-15 protest" you'll see all sorts of colourful things.

You'll see people accusing the Prime Minister of establishing a "police state," for instance. Or practicing "state terrorism," which is a phrase referring to what military dictatorships do when they turn their guns on their own people. Thomas Mulcair attended an anti-C51 rally in Montreal where a lot of people were waving these sorts of signs, including a small child who had one that said "C-51 is an act of TERROR."

Across the country, many protestors held signs that made analogies between the government of Stephen Harper and Adolph Hitler, whose fascist regime killed 34 million people. In this photo, for instance, we see Manitoba Grand Chief Derek Nepinak, who is quite the media darling, posing happily with a sign that explicitly analogizes Bill C-51 with Hitler's Germany. There were Harper/Hitler posters at a protest in Edmonton, where two NDP MPs spoke. A guy wearing a giant swastika sandwich board with Harper's face in the centre was present at a protest in Halifax attended by several NDP politicians.

There was a big anti-C-51 protest in Toronto where yet more NDP MPs spoke, as well as Elizabeth May. Many people in that crowd held signs bearing photos of Prime Minister Harper with the word "TERRORIST" slapped across his face. At a Vancouver protest, which was attended by yet more NDP politicians, there were signs calling to "DESTROY" Harper.

I might have missed it, but I do not recall these protestors inspiring a groundswell of outraged editorials across the land. On the contrary, since the media was near-unanimously opposed to the Anti-Terrorism Act, they purposefully ignored the madness of the protestors who also opposed it, since their existence could be incorporated into a helpful narrative that the bill was provoking grassroots public revulsion every bit as rational as their own.

But the distaste was obviously not rational, like so much opposition to the Harper Conservatives. Many people on the Canadian left — let's call them the alt-left — genuinely believed Stephen Harper, middling, boring, democratically-elected—three-times Stephen Harper, was a monstrously evil man, a terrorist, a dictator, a fascist, a man salivating to jail his opponents, criminalize dissent, and establish a white supremacist Nazi regime. They said so very loudly and openly, and were encouraged to do so, either explicitly or through silence, by this nation's vast network of progressive politicians, journalists, and NGOs.

Their actions were not morally equivalent to some angry Albertans who said, in the silly way ordinary people talk about politics, that they'd like to see their Premier go to prison for the mess she's made of things. They were much worse.

The voters of Canada are not as dumb as the people who write our newspapers. One hopes they will remember this appalling double-standard come 2019.

Photo Credit: Edmonton Sun

Written by J.J McCullough