What is needed today is radical insight into contemporary Canadian reality, in order to clarify exactly how precarious the situation is for ‘small-c conservatives,’ as well as for left-wing dissidents, from current-day, out-of-control technology and capitalism.
The context today is of a Canada ever closer to becoming a post-democratic “one-party dictatorship” of the Liberals. One hopes the realization of the critical shape Canada is in today will finally enable the Canadian Alliance and federal Progressive Conservatives to be brought together. Stockwell Day should promise not to contest the leadership of the new party (thus bringing back the Alliance dissidents) and Joe Clark should likewise resign and allow a real merger to take place.
There must be a willingness to embrace one centre-right party to preserve some semblance of true democratic choice in Canada. A democratic system where there are no significant differences between the major parties, or where one party or political orientation maintains an almost perpetual hammerlock on power, is no democracy. David Orchard and his followers should leave the federal PCs to become the nucleus of a new, national-level Green Party, which would valiantly fight for ecology and against consumerism and economic globalization. This would widen the options that will be offered to voters in future election campaigns.
It is the radicalism of the insights stated here that leads one to embrace a truly possible course of moderate, practicable reform. The federal Liberals, as Canada’s “natural governing party” have grown too accustomed to indulging in the various perquisites of power, and to conducting almost unlimited social and cultural experimentation upon Canadian society. The various social and cultural stresses on the Canadian system have encouraged a weakening of the true welfare state.
There has been an undermining of benefits, such as old-age pensions and unemployment insurance available to the population as a whole (as opposed to the funding of special interests and-or friends of the Liberal Party), combined with a push towards economic and fiscal conservatism. To introduce some checks on the headlong rush into social liberalism (and the concomitant weakening of the true welfare state) will almost certainly require, at some point, the actual election of a centre-right majority government at the federal level. There is now an acute need for a new centre-right party uniting the Canadian Alliance and theTories, as a vehicle for such a victory.
It is to be hoped that this new party, in its policy deliberations, will take into consideration the importance of both social conservatism (its conservative and Reform side) and of maintaining the true welfare state (its progressive and “true Tory” side). This would, indeed, make it a real alternative to the Liberals.
