Andrew Coyne: First fix for the Conservatives — their psyche
“We got the big things right,” Jason Kenney was saying the other day. “We got the tone wrong.”
A lot of Conservatives have picked up on this theme. “It was very clear at the doors,” former international trade minister Ed Fast told the Globe and Mail, “that the tone and style of how we governed had lost the support of a large number of Canadians.”
That’s certainly true. It’s just not the whole truth. No doubt the Conservatives’ habitual secrecy, authoritarian excesses and relentless partisanship gave people lots of reasons not to vote for them. But as important in their defeat was that they gave people few reasons to vote for them: not in the course of the campaign, not in the years that led to it.
I’m not sure what the big things were that Kenney thinks they got right, but they mostly amounted to things they didn’t do: raise taxes, for example, or institute a national daycare scheme. Yes, they get points for digging out of the deficits they created, for cutting the corporate tax, and for negotiating several big free trade deals.
But in the main what characterized the Tories’ 10 years in power was timidity, mixed with inconsistency. They took few risks, invested almost no political capital, articulated no broad vision. Where they did act, it was as often as not by stealth: important measures would be found buried four hundred pages deep in an omnibus bill, or parsed from some throwaway remark by the prime minister at a conference in Switzerland.
And with each about-face, broken promise or abandoned principle, from corporate subsidies to foreign investment to deficit spending, from the rights of MPs to the discussability of abortion to Quebec’s nationhood, it became harder and harder to understand just what principle or philosophy was guiding Conservative policy — other than blind obedience to the leader.
Andrew Coyne: First fix for the Conservatives — their psyche