Richard Decarie
Special to The Interim
Richard Decarie has been pilloried for his socially conservative stances.
As you know, over a year ago in January 2020, I launched my campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). With a guiding intuition of what was to come– and is still coming – I was committed to saying out loud what too many of us honest Canadians have been keeping silent about for decades now. As the truth sets us free, my intention was to expose the liberal stranglehold on the CPC – the party I helped found with Stephen Harper, and restore its policies to its truly conservative roots.
You will recall that my mere presence at the time helped reveal the level of liberal corruption not only within the CPC, but among nearly all of its MPs. Traditional pro-life and pro-family MPs like Pierre Poilièvre, suddenly declared themselves pro-abortion and anti-traditional family, while other high-profile candidates like former Québec Premier Jean Charest and former Minister Peter MacKay publicly proclaimed their newly asserted liberalism, attacking the CPC’s large social conservative base in the process. A strategy which did neither of them any good, as both candidates were later defeated by those same grass root members.
In February 2020, under media pressure from the CPC caucus, the party establishment, illegitimately denied my candidacy, providing no reason for such refusal, and thus violating its own party bylaws. In fact, only one MP and leadership candidate denounced this unjustified action, Derek Sloan, while another one remained complicit after excoriating me on social media outlets: Erin O’Toole.
It was therefore clear that the Conservative Party of Canada – the result of the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive-Conservative Party of Canada, was experiencing an unprecedented identity crisis since its founding in 2003.
The social conservative wing of the party – with a relative weight of nearly 40 per cent of its members – helped elect leader Erin O’Toole over Peter MacKay, who awkwardly attacked social conservatives even before the leadership campaign began.
In anticipation of the March 18-20 party convention, I submitted my candidacy for one of Québec’s seats on National Council – the party’s governing council. The candidacy of three social conservatives – one in Ontario and two in Québec, including mine – were illegitimately rejected. The Ontario candidate later sued the party and won in court, the judge thereby forcing the party – two days before the convention, to respect its own rules! However, the short time frame did not allow for the election of those three Social Conservatives.
During the convention, delegates voted to abolish the principle of equal weighting of all 338 electoral district associations (100 points each), a condition absolutely necessary for the integration of Québec into the Canadian Conservative tent, as Stephen Harper established himself during the party founding.
As if the obvious expulsion of social conservatives from the party, coupled with the loss of Québec’s relative weight in the regional balance of power within Canada were not reasons enough to cancel my CPC membership, Erin O’Toole declared on March 22 that “the debate is over” regarding climate change, thereby illegitimately overturning the duly democratic vote of 54 per cent of Conservative delegates against such party policies.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Mr. O’Toole reiterated his message that his party can only win by modernizing, broadening its base and attracting women and LGBTQ+ communities. This is a fundamental shift towards liberalism, which goes against the grain of traditional conservative philosophy.
In good faith, I participated in the successful strategy to mobilize some 1,100 sympathetic voting delegates to its cause. But the suppression of social conservatism from the party was exacerbated by the deliberate flushing of all resolutions on core social issues such as abortion, from the convention floor. Erin O’Toole has been publicly congratulating himself on this coup ever since.
Although Erin O’Toole does not own the party, in my humble opinion, the damage is now irreparable for me to retain any active membership within it. I am therefore cancelling my membership to the Conservative Party of Canada.
As I have been doing since I was ousted from the party’s leadership campaign, I invite you to sign up for free, to ConservativeUNION.ca, a political movement for true conservatives wishing to influence the political arena at both federal and provincial levels.
In taking the time to join the email distribution list, you not only help us build a critical mass of influencers like yourself, but ensure we remain connected in this ever-increasing cancel culture. Facebook and Twitter can be shut down at any time! So, consider making this the one political action you take today.
A version of this article was sent out today as an email by Richard Decarie to his supporters.
