Maybe they should just stop being idiotic a-holes but what do I know ..
Andrew Coyne: Conservatives need rebirth before they can rebuild
The “Conservative century” would seem to have lasted less than a decade. Monday’s provincial election in Newfoundland brings to precisely zero the number of nominally Conservative governments in the country, following earlier defeats in Alberta, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and of course the federal Conservatives’ dismal showing in October.
Manitoba’s Conservatives may break the string in next year’s vote, if they can finally shed their habit of handing victory to the NDP, but elsewhere Conservatives, and conservatives, seem destined to spend some considerable time in the wilderness. Conservative parties in Atlantic Canada control barely a quarter of the seats in the region’s legislatures. Alberta’s Wildrose party did well to come back from the dead in this spring’s election, but will have to wait four years for a shot at power.
It isn’t just that there are no Conservative governments anywhere in the country, for the first time since 1943. There aren’t even any conservative ones. British Columbia’s Liberals and Saskatchewan’s Saskatchewan Party are sometimes identified as such, but they are more defined as not-NDP than anything else.
There is nothing resembling a conservative party in Quebec — the closest thing to it, the Coalition Avenir Québec, holds just 22 of the province’s 125 seats — nor it seems in Ontario, where new leader Patrick Brown presents himself as an almost perfectly blank slate.
It would be too much to blame all this on Stephen Harper. However toxic the Conservative brand may have become federally, provincial politics has its own rhythms and concerns. Still, if the proposition, heard until quite lately, was that Harper had brought about a fundamental realignment in Canadian politics, that he had not only made the Conservatives contenders for power but discernibly moved Canadian public opinion in a conservative direction, there is scant evidence of it.
Quite the contrary. Only four previous governments in our history have gone down to worse defeats, measured either by the percentage loss in seats or popular vote. And while those previous defeats can be explained either by terrible economic conditions (1935, 1984, 1993) or profound social divisions (1921, the first election after the First World War and the conscription crisis), the Conservatives’ present plight seems wholly self-inflicted.
Electoral defeat, moreover, is only the half of it. Conservatism is not just losing elections. As a political movement, it has — let us not mince words — ceased to offer a coherent or attractive alternative. On the most pressing questions of the day, from the environment to social justice, it is either unwilling or unable to present any serious answer to the prescriptions of the left, or even to offer much resistance.
At best it can hope to profit from the left’s miscues, but even in power it lacks the self-confidence to define an agenda, let alone pursue one. The nastiness of the Harper government may have been peculiar to it, but in its aimlessness and timidity, its unwillingness to invest political capital or confess to an ideology, it has its counterparts in conservative parties across the country — in sharp contrast to the robust self-confidence of the left.
Andrew Coyne: Conservatives need rebirth before they can rebuild
Andrew Coyne: Conservatives need rebirth before they can rebuild
The “Conservative century” would seem to have lasted less than a decade. Monday’s provincial election in Newfoundland brings to precisely zero the number of nominally Conservative governments in the country, following earlier defeats in Alberta, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and of course the federal Conservatives’ dismal showing in October.
Manitoba’s Conservatives may break the string in next year’s vote, if they can finally shed their habit of handing victory to the NDP, but elsewhere Conservatives, and conservatives, seem destined to spend some considerable time in the wilderness. Conservative parties in Atlantic Canada control barely a quarter of the seats in the region’s legislatures. Alberta’s Wildrose party did well to come back from the dead in this spring’s election, but will have to wait four years for a shot at power.
It isn’t just that there are no Conservative governments anywhere in the country, for the first time since 1943. There aren’t even any conservative ones. British Columbia’s Liberals and Saskatchewan’s Saskatchewan Party are sometimes identified as such, but they are more defined as not-NDP than anything else.
There is nothing resembling a conservative party in Quebec — the closest thing to it, the Coalition Avenir Québec, holds just 22 of the province’s 125 seats — nor it seems in Ontario, where new leader Patrick Brown presents himself as an almost perfectly blank slate.
It would be too much to blame all this on Stephen Harper. However toxic the Conservative brand may have become federally, provincial politics has its own rhythms and concerns. Still, if the proposition, heard until quite lately, was that Harper had brought about a fundamental realignment in Canadian politics, that he had not only made the Conservatives contenders for power but discernibly moved Canadian public opinion in a conservative direction, there is scant evidence of it.
Quite the contrary. Only four previous governments in our history have gone down to worse defeats, measured either by the percentage loss in seats or popular vote. And while those previous defeats can be explained either by terrible economic conditions (1935, 1984, 1993) or profound social divisions (1921, the first election after the First World War and the conscription crisis), the Conservatives’ present plight seems wholly self-inflicted.
Electoral defeat, moreover, is only the half of it. Conservatism is not just losing elections. As a political movement, it has — let us not mince words — ceased to offer a coherent or attractive alternative. On the most pressing questions of the day, from the environment to social justice, it is either unwilling or unable to present any serious answer to the prescriptions of the left, or even to offer much resistance.
At best it can hope to profit from the left’s miscues, but even in power it lacks the self-confidence to define an agenda, let alone pursue one. The nastiness of the Harper government may have been peculiar to it, but in its aimlessness and timidity, its unwillingness to invest political capital or confess to an ideology, it has its counterparts in conservative parties across the country — in sharp contrast to the robust self-confidence of the left.
Andrew Coyne: Conservatives need rebirth before they can rebuild
