The wheels start to come off the Conservative project...
A number of profiles of the national Harper Conservatives have noted that it has an aim to "shift the country to the right" with a fundamental realignment.
Two events yesterday highlighted how this is not happening -- and how it's as a result of self-inflicted wounds.
The first was the unexpected defeat of the Wildrose Party in Alberta; much of this has been attributed to the negative feedback from a couple of social conservative candidates who were, um, too honest about their views on sexual orientation and ethnicity, combined with the fact that their libertarian leader wouldn't rein them in / disown them. (Harper undoubtedly has members of his caucus who agree with them, but he's got such a degree of control that it's worth their political life to speak out of turn, even on much less flammable issues. This doesn't bode well for the CPC once Harper departs and they have a less extreme control freak in power.)
The second was the Liberal/NDP agreement which will put off an election in Ontario and shift the overall tone of the budget slightly (ever so slightly) to the left. Despite the fact that the budget was ideologically a fairly (small-c) conservative document, with dominant themes largely similar to the National CPC budget (restraint, cutbacks -- it took a lot of arm-twisting to get McGuinty to agree to a minor tax-the-rich provision, and even then it's a temporary surtax aimed at paying down the deficit), the PCs rendered themselves irrelevant almost instantly by simply refusing to have anything to do with it. Hudak's version of combining electoral opportunism (backing local control except when he doesn't over things like, oh, subways) and refusal to work in a compromise mode is pushing the provincial policies further away from the right (only minimally, though -- I'm sure the Tories will be happy to back the government in confrontation with the teachers' unions.[1]), or, at least, ensuring that the government is going to be defining itself as "centrist against the right" rather than "centrist against the left".
Toronto has the most right-wing executive in decades, and they can't get their act together. (The first budget was the easy one: I predict that given the greater weakness of the Ford administration and now that the relatively low-hanging fruit has been taken, next budget will end up with far less in the way of belt-tightening.) Of course, much of that is Ford's peculiarly self-neutering approach to governance, but he's not helped by allies like Mammoliti and Holyday who manage to emit utterances which are guaranteed to alienate anyone not already in his base.
There's an argument to be made that the gap between "mainstream" Canadian opinion (even in Alberta) and that of the core social conservative base (largely rural) on which the Conservatives depend has become wide enough that (as in the US) there are almost two different consensus realities in play. The national conservatives have managed to get into power by putting these differences on display only in ways which don't get a lot of play in the way that explicit statements do (see: long-form census, climate policies which don't actually involve outright denial but favour Big Oil, immigration reform which can be described as "adverse effect discrimination" without showing outright explicit bigotry, cutting support for "fringe" players in the NGO arena such as environmentalist groups or KAIROS, changing SSHRC and NSERC grant policies, etc.); but they're a constant limit on their appeal in the urban core of Canada where the majority of the population lives.
It's a little bit like the problem that long-term governments have of being "in the bubble", except that Smith and Hudak aren't in government, and the reality they live in imposes critical levels of blindness through their own choices.
[1] Who supports the government against the Doctors is another question. That might actually have a more NDP/left populist appeal.
Two events yesterday highlighted how this is not happening -- and how it's as a result of self-inflicted wounds.
The first was the unexpected defeat of the Wildrose Party in Alberta; much of this has been attributed to the negative feedback from a couple of social conservative candidates who were, um, too honest about their views on sexual orientation and ethnicity, combined with the fact that their libertarian leader wouldn't rein them in / disown them. (Harper undoubtedly has members of his caucus who agree with them, but he's got such a degree of control that it's worth their political life to speak out of turn, even on much less flammable issues. This doesn't bode well for the CPC once Harper departs and they have a less extreme control freak in power.)
The second was the Liberal/NDP agreement which will put off an election in Ontario and shift the overall tone of the budget slightly (ever so slightly) to the left. Despite the fact that the budget was ideologically a fairly (small-c) conservative document, with dominant themes largely similar to the National CPC budget (restraint, cutbacks -- it took a lot of arm-twisting to get McGuinty to agree to a minor tax-the-rich provision, and even then it's a temporary surtax aimed at paying down the deficit), the PCs rendered themselves irrelevant almost instantly by simply refusing to have anything to do with it. Hudak's version of combining electoral opportunism (backing local control except when he doesn't over things like, oh, subways) and refusal to work in a compromise mode is pushing the provincial policies further away from the right (only minimally, though -- I'm sure the Tories will be happy to back the government in confrontation with the teachers' unions.[1]), or, at least, ensuring that the government is going to be defining itself as "centrist against the right" rather than "centrist against the left".
Toronto has the most right-wing executive in decades, and they can't get their act together. (The first budget was the easy one: I predict that given the greater weakness of the Ford administration and now that the relatively low-hanging fruit has been taken, next budget will end up with far less in the way of belt-tightening.) Of course, much of that is Ford's peculiarly self-neutering approach to governance, but he's not helped by allies like Mammoliti and Holyday who manage to emit utterances which are guaranteed to alienate anyone not already in his base.
There's an argument to be made that the gap between "mainstream" Canadian opinion (even in Alberta) and that of the core social conservative base (largely rural) on which the Conservatives depend has become wide enough that (as in the US) there are almost two different consensus realities in play. The national conservatives have managed to get into power by putting these differences on display only in ways which don't get a lot of play in the way that explicit statements do (see: long-form census, climate policies which don't actually involve outright denial but favour Big Oil, immigration reform which can be described as "adverse effect discrimination" without showing outright explicit bigotry, cutting support for "fringe" players in the NGO arena such as environmentalist groups or KAIROS, changing SSHRC and NSERC grant policies, etc.); but they're a constant limit on their appeal in the urban core of Canada where the majority of the population lives.
It's a little bit like the problem that long-term governments have of being "in the bubble", except that Smith and Hudak aren't in government, and the reality they live in imposes critical levels of blindness through their own choices.
[1] Who supports the government against the Doctors is another question. That might actually have a more NDP/left populist appeal.