1450.
This is the number of messages I received in 2020 from the Conservative Party of Canada asking for donation.
800.
This is how many messages I got from the contenders for the post of the Party leader outlining their policies and platforms, and also asking to fund their campaign.
$87.
This is how much I actually donated. This includes the $15 membership fee. Clearly, the effectiveness of the party fundraising has been very low (speaking only for myself right now).
Why so? Let me assure you that covetousness or shortage of funds were not the factors. Rather, it was frustration with the party’s lack of leadership, lack of comprehensive policy, failure to learn from its past losses, which programs us to repeat these losses again, and again, and again.
The lengthy leadership campaign left me devastated. The four candidates talked so much but said so little, failing to present any new ideas on how to lead the country to a better future, other than a typical Conservative playbook that is repeatedly rejected by the majority of Canadian people in one election after another. The result of the election was even more devastating. The victorious leader lost on the first ballot, and only the three-against-one collusion of the remaining unsuccessful candidates propelled him to victory. One of these endorsers has already got the taste of Mr. O’Toole leadership, being expelled from the caucus after the first signs of disagreement with the boss. As for me, he wasn’t even on my ballot, not this time, not in 2017.
Clearly, this reinforces my opinion that our party does not have a strong and respected Leader to take charge at this point, and no amount of donation can change this. This party has strong supporters; time and again we beat all other parties in fundraising. Sadly, this does not translate into election victories. You cannot buy your way to Parliament Hill. It is high time to undertake a general review of the entire party political platform, to see what keeps going wrong and what we can do better.
What struck me the hardest last summer was the absolute misery of ideas in all four candidates. Here, I’ll give a brief synopsis of the essence of their proposed policies:
- All four campaigns were very intense and negative. Canadians don’t like it! The easygoing ways of Trudeau appeal lots more to their heart. My son’s fencing coach always kept saying that to succeed in any activity, besides the hard training and good spirit, you must not forget to have fun while doing it. The four candidates in 2020, and the fourteen candidates in 2017, never had fun! They kept bashing Trudeau and each other, thinking that alone will elevate them to power. Trudeau being bad does not automatically make you good! People know very well the true value of Trudeau and still prefer him to any of you – that should tell you something. Rather, spend the extra effort developing and promoting your own platform.
- All four candidates, except possibly MacKay, tied themselves to social conservatism. This is a kiss of death to our electoral prospects! While this resonates strongly with hard-liners and old-timers, I call this “preaching to the already converted”. These people vote the CPC already. But this same policy will strongly avert others, whose votes we need to sway the scale.
- Surprisingly for the Conservative party, very little was said about the economic development. The four candidates all proclaimed themselves “champions of job-creation” but hardly elaborated much on how they planned to keep the people working. Most of the announced job creation plans revolved around oil & gas and pipelines. This will resonate in Alberta but nowhere else. Alberta already votes Conservative; but try to sell this idea in Quebec or coastal BC!
- The platforms of all candidates were pathetic when it came to foreign policy. All of them sided strongly with NATO and the USA and vowed to turn a cold shoulder to the Communist China. It sounded like a hammer on a gong: Communist! COMMUNIST!! COMMUNIST!!! Yes, they are Communist. No, this is not a crime yet. And no, they are not asking us for approval of their system. Our Western-style democracy is not the only one possible or acceptable type of a political system. How can we elect a patent anti-Communist to be our Prime Minister? China is a very important trade partner for us, potentially the greatest one outside of the very volatile US. Your “cold shoulder” will get us into big trouble on the international stage. This is totally not our business to dictate to other countries how they should govern themselves. Leave it to the US to be the world gendarme. We are not. That’s not to say that this rhetoric immediately strips us of the support of 1.6 million Chinese Canadians. Smart, eh?
- All four candidates spoke vigorously against the “cancel culture” instilled by the left. Especially Sloan raged that the right of free speech must be held paramount; anything that does not violate Canadian law must be able to be spoken freely. It didn’t even cross his mind that the Canadian law already has rather significant restrictions of free speech, starting with the famous rejection of the so-called “hate speech”. How do you picture it – we can love but we cannot hate? How does one exist without the other? And who is to judge? This one law is enough to shut down any unwanted expression – I’ll give examples below.
- The juiciest carrot the Conservative candidates offered to the electorate, now and in 2019, is keeping the taxes low. This again shows how much they are out of touch with people’s lives reality. This promise has already been mocked down by Trudeau who said in 2019, with his trademark cynicism, that few Canadians make enough money to worry about the taxes in the first place. This again caters more to the relatively wealthy, to the upper middle class, and turns away the rest of the electorate. Indeed, with all this as a platform, unless you are a middle-aged, white, male Alberta business owner, why bother voting for the CPC?
Emerging from the CPC’s leadership woes, we should take a critical look at the world around us, its leading tendencies and driving forces. I will discuss this in my next post. . .