So far the 2005 federal election campaign bears no resemblance to the one that took place last year. Last year Paul Martin and his Liberals got off to a fast start portraying Stephen Harper and the Conservatives as being right wing ideologues complete with a hidden agenda. If the Conservatives were to from the government, Canadians were told that they would see the end of state run health care, our jails would be filled with women who had sought abortions and every albertan would be walking around with a concealed 357 Magnum. Concentration camps would be constructed to hold gays and lesbians. If Stephen Harper was elected Canada would have american-style this and american-style that. Life as we have always known it would cease to exist.
Martin's strategy worked in 2004. The Tories had not yet held a policy convention and the lack of policy that they were able to communicate bolstered the accusation that they did indeed have a secret agenda. Harper spent the entire 2004 campaign playing defense.
This year's campaign is in stark contrast to the one that took place 18 months ago. Harper came out at the start of the campaign with a number of substantive policy platforms including reducing the hated GST and a proposal to fund daycare. Paul Martin, who no one has ever accused of having a quick mind, looked weak as he struggled to counter the various Conservative policy announcements.
The reality is that the Conservative Party is far from not only being not scary but is a long way from being a true “conservative” party. It never was and as proof you only have to look at Belinda Stronach. What was shocking about the auto parts heiress was not that she bolted across the floor to become a Liberal cabinet minister but the fact that she was welcomed into the Conservative Party in the first place. Right from its inception the Conservatives had the vision of being a “big tent” organization, welcoming anybody and everybody. This made them nothing more than a Liberal-lite party. In the Liberal Party all you have to believe in is power. Other than that you can be a good Grit and believe in tax cuts or tax increases or believe or oppose same sex marriage.
You wouldn't catch Gilles Duceppe welcoming federalists into the Bloc Quebecois or Jack Layton welcoming an evangelical Christian who opposes same-sex marriage candidate into the NDP. Yet it was never a requirement that a member of the Conservative Party to be conservative or believe in anything in particular.
Now, even that great bastion of Liberalism, the Toronto Star, is acknowledging what the Conservatives truly are. In a column last week, entitled, “Harper puts progressive back into Conservative”, columnist Chantal Hbert wrote that the party bears more resemblance to the Mulroney Tories than they do to the Reform/alliance. Hbert uses the same sex marriage issue to make her point. She writes that holding a free vote in Parliament to revisit the issue of same sex marriage is something that the old PCs would have done as they did on the issues of capital punishment and abortion. a Reform or Canadian alliance party would have merely used the notwithstanding clause to reverse the legalization of gay and lesbian marriages. By offering to hold a free vote, Hbert argues that the party is doing nothing more than appeasing its right wing members.
Paul Martin did have a point after Harper announced his policy that a Conservative government would beef up the military in the north to protect Canadian sovereignty. Harper's announcement followed the revelation that a U.S. submarine had travelled through Canadian waters without permission or even notifying Canada of its intentions. Martin argued that Harper had not costed his northern policy and he appears to be right. Should a Harper government wind up in power, we could very well see a return to the deficit spending of the Mulroney PCs.
While there is no major political party in Canada that has true conservative principles, the election of a Stephen Harper government would not be a bad thing. all other things being equal, and that appears to be the case, the corrupt Liberals deserve to be thrown out of office. and if Canadians, especially the squeamish in Ontario, begin to understand that the Conservative Party really is similar to the old PCs as Hbert argues, Stephen Harper will be the next prime minister of Canada.
a lot of voters won't believe that Stephen Harper is a centrist in the vein of the old Progressive Conservatives. But maybe they'll believe the Toronto Star.
Scary Stephen - RIP.