01.25.2011 09:21 AM

Timmy Hudak: keeping that Reform Party spirit alive!

…Hudak and his caucus were conspicuously absent from the annual dinner of the Canadian Tamil Congress over the weekend. Five McGuinty cabinet ministers showed up, along with a couple of New Democrat MPPs, for the biggest Tamil event of the year. So are the Tories keeping a calculated distance from a community once linked to the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s civil war?

The CTC’s David Poopalapillai told me he’s hoping they’ll eventually come round: “Tim Hudak, we invited him, he was supposed to come, but at the last minute he didn’t.”

Not surprising, perhaps, when you remember that Tim Hudak’s troglodytes plan to gut human rights protections in Ontario.

10 Comments

  1. Nick says:

    Who else thinks Michael Keaton could play Tim Hudak in a movie about his life? Furthermore, what would the title of that movie be?

  2. Michael Behiels says:

    Readers will better understand the New Right in Canada, as represented by the Harris Regime and the Harper Reformatories, if they read a little American history.

    Please begin your political education journey by reading Allan J. Lictchman’s “White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement.” 2008

    The American Conservative Movement has its roots back in the 1920s. It was White, Protestant, anti-Catholic and anti-semitic and highly nationalistic. The New Right thrived on the Cold War and its anti-communist crusade until the 1980s but then turned inward to address social and economic issues brought about by the social, cultural and political transformation of an increasingly pluralistic American society between 1960 and 1990.

    White, Protestant Americans set out to regain control of their country. They joined forces with right-wing Catholic and Jewish Americans and redefined, once again, the agenda of the American Conservative Movement by forging a Christian nationalism based on very conservative Christian social values.

    Then Ronald Reagan, fresh out of wacky California where the New Right was born, became President and the contemporary American cultural wars, based on a revitatlized Judeo-Christian nationalism, got underway big time.

    There are strong parallels with Canada.

    The modern Canadian Conservative Movement has its roots back in the 1930s when the highly anti-semitic Social Credit Movement was born in 1934-35 in Alberta and held power until 1971. It was led by William (Bible Bill Aberhart until 1943) and then by Ernest C. Manning, Preston Mannings father, who ruled Alberta with a one party dominance until he retired in 1968. Peter Lougheed replace the Social Credit Party and government with his inclusive Progressive Conservative Party and Government.

    Preston Manning (who worked in California) and Stephen Harper created their national Reform Party in 1987-88 based on the very successful American Conservative Movement and its political party, the Reagan and Bush Republican Party.

    Most of the undercurrent fueling the Harper Reformatories and the New Right is based on White Judeo-Christian Canadians who are determined to retake control over their Canada and then turn back many of the social and cultural changes that have occurred since the 1960s. Christian Nationalism is alive and well in Canada today much in the same way that Protestant Social Gosple Movement was organized after 1890 in order to dominate Conservative Party politics and agenda until the end of WW I. Then the Liberals were returned to office and the movement died.

    • PoliticalPundit says:

      Gord, it is even more complicated than you make out! Do your reading, the literature is very extensive!

      The history of religion in Canadian politics, federal and provincial, is far more central than you might think. Unfortunately there are not as many well researched monographs as there should be. Read Marci Macdonald’s The Armaggedon Factor!
      The close connections between American Christian churches and their organizations and Christian churches and their organizations in Canada go back to the late 18th Century.
      Given what has and is happening in the U. S., the new right in Canada is deliberately playing down these connections for fear that anti-American sentiment will undermine Harper’s Conservative coalition of Christian values Conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, democratic populists, and Quebecois nationalist conservatives.

  3. Lipman says:

    Hudak Flashback: (another historical example of why Mike Harris’s disciple is not -and will never be- ready for primetime)

    Copyright Southam Publications Inc. Mar 29, 2002

    “Ontario’s tourism minister staged a bizarre stunt Thursday to attack the federal government’s air security fee, which takes effect April 1.

    The event featured an actor playing a bumbling federal tax expert who couldn’t explain the new measure, intended to help pay for security initiatives in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

    “We wanted to point out the arbitrariness of this tax and the concern we have with the confusion in the implementation of the tax,” Tourism Minister Tim Hudak said after the presentation was met with stunned silence from the press gallery.

    Hudak said he has asked that the tax be revoked on behalf of provincial tourism ministers across Canada. The tax places a $12 flat fee for a one-way journey or $24 for a return trip within Canada.”

Leave a Reply to Nick Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.