Now that the federal Conservatives have set the ground rules and the dates for the leadership convention to replace Andrew Scheer, it’s time for Tory supporters to do some good hard thinking.
Think hard about the next election.
Think hard about what just happened in the last federal election.
And make a better choice — not just for the party leadership, but for the direction of the party as a whole.
Because, regardless of what party you back federally, as a country, we need more viable and electable parties.
Otherwise, we can watch our democratic system rot.
A better solution, of course, would be the election promise that the Liberals broke the first time Justin Trudeau was elected: the promise to change our electoral system away from first-past-the-post to something that more effectively captures and values the votes of all Canadians. That way, we could vote our convictions and have that vote mean something, instead of simply holding our nose and voting against a party we fear or don’t like.
Having won two recent elections under the old system, it’s pretty clear the Liberals see no pressing reason to risk changing the status quo. That’s a shame and, frankly, a disgrace.
But if the system isn’t going change, something else has to.
Trudeau should have been on the ropes in the last election, and yet he’s still in the Prime Minister’s Office. Sure, he’s holding a minority, but the Liberals are in control of government spending and the direction of legislation for as many years as the minority holds up.
Political administrations that don’t feel electorally threatened … have a long history in this country of believing their own bullshit.
The problem with Trudeau’s lame duck minority win is that it is likely to engender exactly the belief that past Liberal administrations seemed to have plenty of: that, barring catastrophe, the Liberals are the nation’s natural ruling party and they hold enough of the middle ground to stay in government.
The sad part is that it might be true. Voters have already signalled they’d pick hands-dirty Liberals over scary hidden-agenda Tories.
And that makes for sloppy, entitled, self-serving politics. Political administrations that don’t feel electorally threatened — that don’t have their feet to the fire — have a long history in this country of believing their own bullshit. It leads to bad, careless decision making, and to coteries of hangers-on who are there for the tasty pork-barrel scraps that drop from the government table.
It’s more, of course, than the Tories simply picking the right leader. The Tories also have to find a way to make their political tent bigger, and a lot less frightening for more Canadians. (Not only to get past the Stephen Harper administration shudders, but to actually change. Harper won government for the Tories by bringing in a much broader base and by being able to rein in the hard-core right wing faction at the party’s outer edge.)
And that means some fundamental compromises that hard-core conservatives might find hard to take: believable guarantees that issues that are already pretty broadly accepted — abortion rights, same-sex marriage and LGTBQ rights, cannabis legislation, reasonable firearms legislation, sustainable immigration numbers — are not only not going to be reversed as part of the Conservative party platform, but they won’t be handled through the back door by private members’ bills either.
In other words, that there really are issues that will be off the table completely.
It may well be that there is a block of Tories for whom that may be an anathema. It may be completely against what they stand for — the problem is, that may also mean their party ends up standing somewhere other than in government.
And if the Tories don’t have a reasonable chance in the next election, I think we’ll all suffer from the flabby, sloppy, self-entitled result.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@thetelegram.com — Twitter: @wangersky
