
Feature, Musings —01.28.2025 10:08 AM
—My latest: not every conservative is equal
CALGARY – There are different types of conservatives. In Canada, all will be facing big tests very soon.
All of them get categorized as conservatives. But in personality and style, they could not be more different.
There is Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party, which was previously known as the Progressive Conservative Party. When the party’s name change happened in 2003 – via a merger that was more of a take-over – those conservatives still on the progressive side of the spectrum fretted about what would happen to the party of Mulroney and Stanfield.
Stephen Harper mollified them for a decade. While Harper would sometimes employ the rhetoric of his Reform Party antecedents, his actions, in power, were decidedly centrist. Ominous predictions that he would end gay marriage and abortion – including by this writer – never came to pass.
Harper mainly abstains from commenting on current affairs in Canada. A few days ago, however, he gave an important interview in which he excoriated Donald Trump, saying that the newly-installed president was neither a friend nor ally of Canada. Harper, then, is a conservative who knows the lexicon – but embraces a kinder and gentler approach when it counts.
Poilievre, on the other hand, favors bumper-sticker articulations of policy – which arguably works well in the Internet age, when everyone is competing for attention in a cyber-space filled with a trillion channels. But it’s a style that has aroused suspicions that Poilievre favors simplistic solutions to complex problems. And, perhaps, it has contributed to a significant recent slide in Conservative support in Ontario, which he needs to win majority power.
It is a puzzle, because Poilievre can give thoughtful answers when he is in the mood – during a recent tour in Atlantic Canada, for example, his plan to respond to American tariffs was more comprehensive than anything heard to date by federal Liberals. Then, a few days later, Poilievre actually accused a Zionist Jewish Liberal MP of favoring Hamas. It was disgusting, and it was the sort of thing of which electoral defeats are made.
Trump, of course, is who he is: no one can accuse him of hiding the flavor of conservatism he espouses. He is a conservative in the mold of former president William McKinley, an empire-building conservative Republican who once admitted he couldn’t locate the Philippines on a map – but seized it anyway in 1898.
Trump’s military threats against Panama, Greenland and Denmark – an actual NATO ally – eerily recall McKinley’s manifest destiny madness. Canada, which has also been repeatedly threatened by Trump, would be unwise to dismiss Trump’s McKinley-style expansionism. (Trump, meanwhile, would be wise to avoid McKinley’s fate: an anarchist assassinated the 25th president in 1901.)
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There’s nothing conservative about Trump. It’s just a game he’s been playing because he sees Republicans as easier rubes than Democrats.
Sean,
Agreed.
Sean,
I also agree
Luck, not wisdom, will save Trump from an assassin’s bullet Warren.
If wisdom were the answer, he would be dead a thousand times.