Rescuing Canada's Right

Caught the two authors of Rescuing Canada's Right, Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah, on the Michael Coren Show this morning, and I found it to be a mixed bag.

First, they made a number of suggestions in analysing the Liberal party that I think are a little facile. To suggest that Liberals look to the state to fix every problem in society is incorrect, and to say that Liberals advocate equality of result instead of equality of opportunity is also a myth. What I think is more accurate is to suggest that Liberals believe in using the power of the state to assist certain groups in order to build what I would call "clientism" in order to form a winning coalition.

I don't think that David Emerson or Ken Dryden or Scott Brison, to take three prominent examples, are looking to the state to solve society's problems. Each of these individuals are extremely grounded in business. I don't think they care a bit about the role of government in eradicating poverty or what have you. What I think they do care about, though, is getting into and retaining power, and they realize in order to do so, the party that they joined has traditionally played up to ethnic and cultural communities, the aboriginal industry (yes, it is an industry), Quebecers and other parts of Canadian society to build a winning coalition. Sometimes, this means that you focus the ability of the government to certain ends. It doesn't mean that you look to the state to solve society's problems. It just means you know how to play on the issues of identity, culture, language and immigration. Cynical, but it works.

This is what separates Liberals from Tories. They have built-in constituencies and pander to them in order to retain power. The Tories tried to do the same thing to the same groups in the 80s and it failed. Liberals are also a lot better at identifying potential clients and getting in there early. Witness day care, for example. I think a lot of women, even in Western Canada, would love to have cheaper day care. What Tories need to do are to find their own constituency groups. One that they have in their pocket are the Bible thumpers. Fine, that's one. But they need to be able to marry these groups in a way that the presence of one doesn't exclude any others, by definition. Coren got into this with Daifallah and Kheiriddin a little bit when he asked them how you marry Alberta's social conservatism with Quebec's libertarianism. They really didn't have an answer to that question. This is the fundamental issue. They need to look at what coalition they need to build to win, and play to those groups while identifying new ones to capture.

I was also disappointed that these two standard bearers of the "new wave of Canadian conservatism" (if that even exists) hadn't thought about a conservative position on the Iraq war. The war on terror is the defining issue of the West right now. They also had not thought about Third World debt. These are issues that the Liberals have thought of because they know it has constituency with some of their clients (cultural groups). Conservatives, at the very least, need a response.

What the appearance of Kheiriddin and Daifallah showed is that Canadian right wingers have a long way to go. I know a lot of right wingers who find their political home in the Liberal party because they have accepted certain realities and are comfortable in doing so in order to govern. This shouldn't be happening. Conservatives need to take a long hard look in the mirror and instead of being defensive, blaming the media, whatever, they need to admit that they leave a lot to be desired.

This doesn't mean moderation, this means finding better ways of doing business. And that means identifying and building a coalition rather than just hoping beyond hope that this tactic or that is going to work this time around. It won't.