Turn right? Turn left? Straight ahead?
The Conservative Party of Canada has a big decision to make in the coming months if it wants to take control of Parliament in the next federal election and help kick the hated Trudeau to the curb.
The division between social conservatism and fiscal conservatism doesn’t always come up, but seems ever more important with the former garnering more media attention (including here).
In fairness, while it’s the mainstream media that often asks questions about abortion and same-sex marriage, now candidates themselves are bringing these things up. Maybe because most Conservatives have such similar enough fiscal conservative policies that distinguishing one from another is tough.
So five months away from the party’s June 27 leadership election in Toronto, here is the question: Are the Conservatives too socially conservative or not socially conservative enough?
That depends on who you ask. After the federal election, Andrew Scheer was caught in the middle, teetering atop a fence with wolves on both sides looking for meat.
Leadnow.ca, a non-partisan (if clearly left-wing) organization, called Scheer “Harper with a smile” and a social conservative who was against abortion, equal marriage, transgender rights and assisted suicide.
“While Sheer says he’ll keep his radical, social conservative views to himself, there’s reason to think that he could be a Trojan horse for the anti-choice and LGBTQ movements,” the group said after he was elected leader. “He owes a sizable part of his win to the social conservative base, and they aren’t going to let him forget it.”
Nearly two months after the election and after Scheer resigned, Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), an anti-abortion lobby group, didn’t forget it, and welcomed his resignation.
“CLC believes the Conservatives lost the election because Andrew Scheer betrayed the Party’s socially-conservative base, and essentially ran on a socially liberal platform, thus suppressing the party’s ‘small-c’ conservative base sufficiently enough to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”
The CLC is looking for a “pro-life champion” to be the new leader.
So who is in the race? As usually happens, there are about a dozen names being tossed around, as of this writing 10 declared with more to follow, but they will need deep pockets. With a $200,000 non-refundable entrance fee, many outliers may not have the stomach to get to the start line.
The good-looking elephant in the room is Peter MacKay, a former senior cabinet minister and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada at the time of merger with the Canadian Alliance. “Progressive” is not a word social conservatives will want to hear. Like the CLC, MacKay was critical of Scheer’s run in the federal election, but for the opposite reason.
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MacKay suggested Scheer missed an open net on a breakaway. He said no one wanted to talk about abortion or same-sex marriage, yet Scheer went there.
“That was thrust onto the agenda and hung around Andrew Scheer’s neck like a stinking albatross, quite frankly, and he wasn’t able to deftly deal with those issues when opportunities arose,” MacKay said at the time.
The CLC say Scheer didn’t go there enough. CLC leadership wants the next leader to address those issues head on, and MacKay sounds like he’s not interested.
To defeat the Liberals and Trudeau, Conservatives need to decide if they should be a little bit more like Trudeau than Scheer, or should they be more Scheer than Scheer?
When MacKay recently Tweeted that he wants to march in the Toronto Pride Parade either as a private citizen or as leader of the Conservatives, you could hear the collective groans from the social conservative wing of the party.
Pride parades are important. pic.twitter.com/5D43zwOrDY
— Peter MacKay (@PeterMacKay) January 28, 2020
“I hope all Conservatives will consider joining me,” he concluded.
That’s not going to happen.
But that type of move to the middle might just be what the party needs to do to defeat Trudeau.
Do you have something to add to this story, or something else we should report on? Email:
paul.henderson@theprogress.com
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