A Plan for a Canadian Conservative Revival
By David Solway
It is an open secret in Canada that the Conservative Party is dead in the water or, at any rate, in total disarray. Its last two leaders, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, were political duds who would not recognize a conservative principle if it held a gun to their heads, and both had to resign in disgrace for scuttling the Party’s electoral chances.
Over the last two electoral cycles, the Party itself has posed no threat to the governing Liberals or to their petulant, adolescent leader Justin Trudeau—whom Jordan Peterson aptly called a “teenager”—a prime minister who, though triply vaccinated, tested positive for Covid while hectoring others to get vaccinated. The contradictions escaped him perfectly. The Conservatives had as little to say about this glaring instance of mental scotoma as they did about the fact that the nation’s leader went into hiding rather than face the truckers’ Freedom Convoy when it arrived in Ottawa. (Trudeau only recently emerged from his bunker.)
The Conservative Party was not in opposition but in cahoots. Every Liberal measure, whether the imposition of a carbon tax or, in the words of John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, the legislating of Bill C-8 prohibiting what is called conversion therapy “and making it a criminal offense for parents to help their own gender-confused children,” or most significantly, the two-year suspension of the country’s Charter rights, passed with barely a whisper of protest. The Conservatives became a national joke.
Related: Trudeau Gets Clown-Slapped in Canada’s House of Commons, Sits Down and Pouts