What I said at the end of my last post sounds like a miracle. Is it possible to satisfy everyone’s interests when these interests are so diverse? My answer – not only possible but also necessary. Without it, we will never win a lasting victory, since the pure demographics works against us. And it is getting worse. The baby boomers – our main support base – are gradually leaving the scene. The destruction of the industry also destroys the SOW forces in our country; and let me tell you, this is the reason why the Liberals and NDP fight so hard against the industrial development. The new generations, taught in schools in profoundly Liberal ways, either don’t care about politics at all or vote the left-wing parties. The immigrants pouring into our country in unsustainable numbers are also leaning to the left. A few more years like this, and the CPC will lose even the influence that it has now.
Does it mean that we will have to become Liberals – a centrist party that tries to garner votes by appeasing people left and right, while having none of their own position? Not at all. During the last leader election, the three other contenders bashed Peter MacKay for being a sell-out to Liberals as soon as he stepped even a small half-step away from the hard-line Conservative platform. This will not fly. We need to learn to be flexible in policies while being firm in our principles.
We need to realize that different groups of our society indeed have different needs and require different laws and policies. The policies we have been proposing work well in the West, in the stronghold of the SOW. We need to support the small business and the industrial development. We need to implement tariffs and create incentives to produce goods inside the country, rather than import everything. We need to break the barriers inside the country and enable moving the goods freely. But we need to do it not by using force that Conservatives have been so inclined to do (this is a political suicide in Canada) and not by pitting one province against another. Rather, we need to promote dialogue and make it mutually beneficial for them to collaborate.
For example, Quebec doesn’t want to allow Alberta’s oil to flow through its territory to New Brunswick’s ports. Their Premier says that there is no social acceptance for dirty fossil energy in their province; rather, they want to sell their “clean” hydroelectricity. Take this as a hint. The federal government should champion talks between Quebec and Alberta for a reciprocal agreement to sell Quebec’s energy on the West in response to the passing rights for the Alberta oil to be sold abroad. How simple is that? This is what we as Canadians have always been great at!
Now let’s talk about the groups of people that the Conservatives are having a hard time garnering support from. The greatest problem is the big cities. In the 2019 federal election, we lost at 0% in all major cities except Calgary and Edmonton. People in the cities are mostly in office work and services and could care less about the economy and pipelines. They also typically make too little money to be concerned about taxes. What can we offer them?
I would say this. No one likes the bullshit. People in the cities also support the core values, integrity and transparency of the government. People want job security, protection of their livelihood (for how long has the EI not been indexed?), improved access to health care and education. Once you realize the people’s needs and start thinking the way they think, they will turn to you. People in the SOW need to be just left alone to do their thing; those in the OW need protection and assistance in their personal development, so they can feel empowered to improve their life – the one right the Liberals have denied them. Improved access to credible, dependable information about the world events is also key for them.
Another difficult group of people to find the road to is the youth. The traditional CPC platform mostly appeals to the working class of older generations. What can we offer to the young people – educated, computerized and mostly living in cyberspace? This is Trudeau’s breeding ground. Even in Alberta, the Conservatives are chronically unable to regain the one seat in the university district of Edmonton.
The millennials are too little interested in politics and not able to raise their future without help. The ones who try to get educated are beset for many years by student loans, lack of job placement programs, unavailability of assistance with building their own life from scratch. We as Conservatives want them to step on the right track, to be welcomed to the world they are entering. Incentives to the business owners to hire the young people are badly necessary. They are also looking desperately for the honest information about the big world, which is truly hard to find amid the turbulent waters of the Internet. Topics like climate change and social justice need to be discussed in an honest, serious, non-bullshitted way.
One more big problematic group is the immigrants. So far, the CPC has made little contact with non-Anglo-Saxon population. In 2017, out of the 14 Conservative leadership candidates, 11 were Anglo-Saxon and Irish, one French from Quebec, one Chinese and one East Indian, who was eliminated in the first round. This year, of the four candidates there was one Jamaican, others were of British origin. This does not represent the demographics of the modern Canadian society in any degree.
Trudeau the Elder, with typical Liberal light-mindedness, proclaimed the “cultural mosaic” policy in the late 1960s. This was just a catchy slogan with no idea how this will work. Immigrants poured in from all the different cultures and ethnicities of the world. It is now hard to find a nationality that would not be represented here.
Now, 50+ years later, we know how it works. It doesn’t. People from the different nations live beside each other but not together. Anglo-Canadians and immigrants of the European origin (except French, which consider themselves a minority and stay a tightly knit group) do their best to open their embrace to the newcomers. Other cultures, especially from Asia, don’t even try. The Chinese, Filipinos, Mideasterners living in Canada still consider themselves parts of their original national group. They are not trying to assimilate into the Canadian culture and stick to their own values, sometimes very distant from the values that this society is based upon; even more distant from the Conservative values and principles.
Trying to raise support among these groups, we may notice that the Chinese, while of a very different culture than the Western one, are very hard workers and very disciplined. They don’t like bullshit. They also have a high entrepreneurial spirit, ready to work tirelessly to build their lives and achieve social prestige. This group is a good potential support group for the CPC.
The Filipino are also culturally hard workers and are very steeped in Christian values, which makes it easier to find the common grounds with them. They also have a good potential to become CPC supporters.
The Arabs and Indians, on the contrary, are a difficult group to raise the support in. They come from a society with a very strong hierarchy, hence they naturally belong to the Organized World. They are usually not keen on hard work and rely more on the “soft skills” and interpersonal relations to advance in their social status. The offensive slogan of LinkedIn: “It is not what you know, it is who you know” was conceived in this environment. They stick exceptionally well together and readily advance to managers in the corporate world, which is based on similar principles nowadays.
The mentality of this group is totally at odds with Conservatism. Jasmeet Singh, the leader of the federal NDP, is but one of them, and is so left-winged that even Rachel Notley seems a Tory next to him. It is easy to notice, while driving around during an election period, that Arabic and Indian names mostly appear on Liberal and NDP signs; almost never on the Conservative. Knowing this, Trudeau has been recklessly increasing the immigration quotas for this region. This concentration is seriously affecting the values of the society they live in, and needs to be put under control if Canada wants to remain a Western country.
To summarize: we should stop relying on democracy as simply trying to outnumber our opponents. In a split society, it really doesn’t matter who has a little more votes, who has a little less. We will only win steadily if the entire society endorses us, if we find a way to the hearts of everyone, all the way remaining Conservative in the way we speak and act.
On the world stage, the Conservative Canada of the future will need to adopt a new, modernized foreign policy. In my next post, I will discuss what this foreign policy entails. . .