Andrew Coyne isn't riding to the defence of Erin O'Toole but he says it'll take a lot more than a new leader to fix the rot inside the Conservative Party.
The party has much deeper problems than strategy and tactics – or its leader, for that matter. The problem, rather, is that it is divided: divided, not on the basis of ideology or region, but between, as one might say, the grownups and the adolescents: between those with some elementary moral and practical judgment, and those with none; between those who live in the realm of facts, and those who seem increasingly to inhabit a fantasy world. In a word, the party’s problem is extremism, which though it does not define the party as a whole is enough to taint the remainder.
These are not mere differences over policy. There is room for debate over how best to deal with climate change. There is no serious dispute that it is actually happening. Whether vaccine mandates are wise policy is likewise a matter on which reasonable people can differ; whether they are akin to Nazi experiments on Jewish prisoners is not. This is what makes the party’s extremists so toxic to the public: not so much the substance of this or that position, as the generally unhinged quality they exude.
...Whatever Mr. O’Toole’s failings, nothing he has done or not done adds up to a firing offence. What Pierre Poilievre, Candice Bergen and Andrew Scheer have done in recent days, on the other hand, is. Their decision to ally themselves with the pseudo-Trumpian grift known as the “trucker” convoy – organized and led by documented racists and QAnon-style nutters, unrepresentative of the vast majority of truckers and indeed having little to do with truckers or even vaccine mandates – is not just a moral disgrace, but will do lasting damage to the party.
...Publicly criticizing the leader should not be grounds for expulsion; neither, certainly, should dissenting from party policy. But associating the party with known racists, tossing around incendiary rhetoric about other party leaders, indulging in discredited conspiracy theories – it is long since time Conservatives stopped tolerating this.
If that splits the party further, so be it. A house divided against itself cannot stand. But a house filled with lunatics is an asylum.
The Canadian Conservatives are on track to repeat what happened to the Republicans in the USA.
ReplyDeleteA fractured Conservative/GOP vote gave Trump his victory.
Such is the fate of hate.
The, US, divisive, Trump, second term gave the world a lac lustre Biden.
History repeated itself in Canada when a divided Conservative party gave us the lac lustre Trudeau! second term.
We live in a world that is without compromise and incapable of forewarn thinking.
Winner takes all!!
A tough time to be socialist or Green.
It's a time to fight over the last tree or fish.
TB
"It's a time to fight over the last tree or fish."
DeleteWhat was once our possible, dystopian future has become our everyday present reality.
Preston Manning brought the fringe to Parliament Hill with the Reform Party. They were safe so long as they didn't embarrass the party. Manning did nothing to proactively weed them out.
ReplyDeleteManning was bumped off by Stockwell Day, another social conservative redneck. Day gave way to Harper who harboured and promoted Republican policies wherever possible. From Harper it was Ambrose, then Scheer and, finally, O'Toole with a caucus divided, one group thoroughly Trumpian. Quite the Rogues Gallery.
Jean Chretien won majority governments with plenty of help from the divided right. JC was pushing on an open door as the PC/Alliance civil wars continued.
Today's Tories run a rough approval rating of 30 per cent. That translates into maybe 9 million eligible voters. A recent survey found there are some 6 million Canadians who support Donald Trump or Trumpism, mostly across the Prairies. The radical rightwing comprises a big chunk of the Tory base.
Pierre Poilievre knows the value of the fringe. Without it the Tories, faced with Bernier's PPC nipping at their heels, are left floundering. Coyne nailed it when he wrote "a house filled with lunatics is an asylum."
There must be an aweful lot of lunatics between BC and Ontario?
ReplyDeleteDangerous times.
TB