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Turning Canada conservative means leading them that way

Go Reagan on ’em, in a word.

According to the latest Ipsos-Reid poll, the Titanic Grits are making no headway with Liberal Frenchman Stephane Dion at the helm.  Now that the Conservatives have proven they can amply mimic a Liberals’ budget in addition to lots of other key vote-getting nuggets like the liberal-left’s daycare ideas and singing in the ever-so-trendy enviro religion’s choir, there’s even less need to vote for the Liberal Party today.  Far be it for the Conservatives to dare to build a nation of conservative-thinking principled people. Easier to simply cave and join the choir.

Then again maybe that’s the point.  And maybe they’ve just figured that out.  Like most Canadians, many new “Conservatives” have been not so much “conservatives” as simply “Team Not Liberal” (for myriad good reason), and the Conservative budget massaged their loins nicely, as did their other recent decisions on daycare and the environment and pumping money back into the liberals’ women’s centers, for example.  So what I’ve coined Liberal Party Too could form a majority, much to Team Not Liberal‘s sporty satisfaction. 

March 23 2007 Ipsos-Reid poll

Conservatives – 40 percent
Liberals – 29 percent
You’ve got to be kidding party – 14 percent
Greenuts – 7 percent

Moreover:
Conservatives now have a 10-point lead (43 to 33 per cent) over the Grits in Ontario
And now nearly tied in Quebec, 26-25 for the Grits.

Source

Many Canadians—and this is due largely to decades of liberal-left governments with their always-media-reported specious talk; the very liberal-left biased job the liberal media has been doing generally in informing this country for decades; and to the liberals that dominate our academia in our public schools, educating Canadians so poorly in this regard—are so unsophisticated about politics that most Canadians literally watch it unfold like they do a sports event—a hockey game, cheering for and sticking with their team no matter what.  It’s about teams and their team winning.  Just as in team sports, it doesn’t matter one whit what their team is fighting for or what their inner principles or goals are —aside from winning.  It just matters whether you can ultimately beat the opposition or not. That’s it.  And if I understand today’s liberals correctly, ultimately it would be best if “everybody was a winner” in the end.  And furthermore, after all of that, winning the big shiny cup makes absolutely no difference in the whole scheme of life, in this game.

For them, the Conservatives’ budget being just like a liberals’ budget is perfect.  Public policy-wise, and fiscally, Canada moves no further from the left than it has been stuck at for years, and yet their Team Not Liberal wins the next election with a majority.  How fun!

Thinking people and people who are forward-looking and serious see things differently of course.  It doesn’t matter if the Conservatives win a majority if all that’s going to do for our nation is to turn us into a nation led by Liberal Party Too—and to proceed to hold us (and coddle us nanny-state style, and cater to the left’s demands for more and bigger social programs, and generally allow our society to slip further into the morass of post-modern liberalism, and so on)… exactly or nearly exactly like the other liberals did before them. 

Winning an election is the easiest thing on earth to do in this country provided you have a half-ass good party structure and leader:  raise corporate taxes, lower or maintain income taxes except raise them on “the rich”, increase spending on social programs and create new social programs that sound benevolent to the simpleton, talk lots about your desire to leave Afghanistan “at the earliest possible opportunity”, never say a thing about tough issues like gay marriage and abortion, build a national daycare program, promise more funding for the healthcare system, issue directed tax credits at neat-sounding things, and most importantly this year, say trendy things about the environment and promise to spend “government” money on the environment so (as in every facet of life in post-modern liberalist Canada today) individual Canadians won’t have to do anything themselves, just as the left has always promised.  Guaranteed majority.

Liberal Party Too may say the right things on some law and order matters and on the international stage (and by the way, this Harper government has been an object lesson in this regard, in effective national leadership and in demonstrating just how effective it can be—how easy it is—to do the most important thing: to convince Canadians to think like actual conservatives on the basis that we’re right).  But in honesty, the “real” Liberals could do that too, given the right leader and the right polling, for as we know only too well they love their polling and they bend and flex like rubber bands that way.  What gets missed by the Team Not Liberal is that if the foundational principles of the parties are essentially the same, the outcome for our nation will very likely be nearly exactly the same.  The main path our country is on will remain the current beaten path—the path to abject Godless post-modern “progressive” Euro-liberalism —and so then what’s the point of it all, really?  Just to employ teams for sport as a sort of hobby for fun? 

The past two latest major polls—both taken after the Conservatives’ March 19 2007 budget—confirm the suggestion that the Conservatives are maintaining their lead and might even be able to form a majority. 

Someone wrote an email explaining how I (through PTBC) was wrong to denounce the Conservatives’ budget as I did over the past week (and as most other conservative people and organizations did too), and offer polls such as the latest two as proof.  “See?,”  they ask, “this budget that PTBC denounced… is going to yield a majority for the Conservatives.  We were right and you were wrong!” 

Well, sorry to burst your little Team Not Liberal bubble, but the fact that Canadians, largely still drunk on paternalistic liberalism, endorse the Conservatives’ budget, gives me little comfort. 

The idea that even now, after what the Liberal Party did to this country (even just in terms of corruption to say nothing of bad leadership);  and after the Conservatives proving themselves—showing effective leadership for over a year now; and even caving to the liberal-left in many key areas and coming out with a liberal-friendly budget, the Conservatives aren’t polling at 70 or 75 percent, is testimony to the fact that Canadians still aren’t getting what they’re actually looking for. 

The idea that the budget was such an easy sale to all Canadians and most of the liberal media is not an endorsement for your “team” as much as it is for “team realistic”—my team.  I would have welcomed a budget that was “tough sell”—one that would once again require the leadership skills of Stephen Harper—so that we could further advance the principles of conservatism. 

Worse still, some “conservatives” have suggested to me that the Conservatives must wait until they get their majority before unleashing all the “conservativeness”.  Oh lovely!  Fantastic!  Great thinking!  If I understand correctly, then, even amongst “conservatives”, the Conservative Party does in fact have that famous hidden agenda then—and they can only win if they hide in liberalism until they sucker Canadians into voting for them.  They’ll fake out Canada—even me!—until they get a majority, and then change their spots suddenly or even slowly.  Great strategy!  Include that little morsel in Chapter 666 in your manual called “How to Destroy Any Chance for an Actual Conservative Party in Canada, Once and For All”.

I hold out great hope for this Harper Conservative government.  They’ve demonstrated themselves to be principled and resolute on many fronts—mostly the international stage (Afghanistan, Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian matter…)— and in law and order matters in particular, and in being such good leaders in this regard, have, I think, actually turned normal Canadian team sports enthusiasts into Canadian conservatives and Conservatives.  So I hope they get their majority.  But the great problem they face in caving to liberals simply in order to get a majority is that moment the Conservatives (the Conservatives in particular, mind you) get one, and only then change their spots and start acting like conservatives as some suggest they will, they will be hung out to dry like underwear, be torn to shreds by the dogs, chewed-up and pooped out the other end, and in that form, they will not be electable for yet another few decades. 

I like and support Stephen Harper.  He has shown himself to be a great strategist and has allowed glimpses of the effectiveness of being a good strong leader in some issues and persuading Canadians to “think right”, as I contend is so important.  But just as all parties now see the value in balanced budgets (a conservative trait if ever there was one), these things can be done in or out of power.  I’d just as soon see them in power because they could do more.  But again: doing “more” is only a plus if the “more” is right.  Not left.

 

Joel Johannesen
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