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I don’t want to give a certain right-wing politician any more ink than he deserves, but I must say a leadership review speech is certainly the place to find out what the conservative base is thinking.
A Campaign Speech
We must be fair and realize that this speech is designed to get the speaker votes of confidence in a leadership review because of a lost election. In other words, we expect him to tell the delegates what they want to hear. Which makes it all the more valuable to those of us with the stomach to listen to it. So I listened for a while. Given the state of the world at the moment, it was quite sobering, and the jubilant response of the crowd was frightening at times.
Blind Self-Interest
It was like listening to a teenager telling his parents how easy it is to manage their finances so that he can drive a new car and get a free education and have a good time. It’s also a shopping list of the 1970s enthusiasm for easy money that got us into the climate change crisis that it ignores.
Let’s cash in on our reserves quickly before oil becomes the next used-to-be fuel. Let’s spend a whole bunch of government money on pipelines that will soon be obsolete. Let’s put more people in jail, even if they’re on remand and haven’t had a trial yet. (A small detail: the “three strikes and you’re in jail forever” laws were tried in California in the 1990s and failed because of high costs, overcrowding, and disproportionate application to those who didn’t deserve them.) Ownership of assault weapons will be okay, with new laws to allow you to use them on other Canadians.
In general, a definite slew of society towards our southern neighbor.
The Post-Nationalist State
Last year’s catch phrase was that Canada was a “broken country” where nothing worked. That didn’t cut much ice in the election, so now it’s the “Post Nationalist State” we are to be afraid of. I doubt if many of the delegates at the convention had much idea what that means, but it serves to raise their fears of anything that attacks their old ways of doing things. Which, at the end of the day, is one of the main drivers of the social conservative bloc.
Sacrifice
I don’t really expect someone making a “pie in the sky” speech to draw this distinction, but I must note that there was a whole lot of talk about the sacrifices of those that came before us, ignoring the fact that our present situation is guaranteed to require the new generations to make perhaps more difficult choices.
What Differences?
The scariest section of the whole speech depends on a definition. The Conservative criterion for immigrants is that they leave their differences back in their old countries. The narrow and acceptable interpretation means warfare. Immigrants from countries that are at war with each other whould refrain from continuing their hostilities on Canadian soil. But I doubt if that’s what got the roar of approval. For the right-wing base, “differences” include everything that makes “them” different from “us:” language, culture, religion, beliefs, skin colour, you name it.
I have never heard a Canadian politician make a more racist, bigoted, or downright frightening statement.
And That’s All, Folks
And at that point I’d had enough. I’m only willing to put up with a limited amount of nausea for the sake of my readers. The picture I got from the speech was of a party of greedy bigots who don’t care anything about Canada except for what it can give them. Right now.
The Bottom Line
Nothing new, just scarier than usual.
The present Conservative leader is the choice of 87% of a couple of thousand carefully selected party faithful who could afford the $1,000 ticket cost and a trip to the Conservative stronghold of Calgary. It’s going to be interesting to find out the effects of the speech on voters outside Alberta and the Conservative base. My guess it’s going to scare a lot of them away.