Honest Conservative is an Oxymoron in Canada

 Way back in the 90s, Preston Manning admonished Reform party candidates as follows:  "Don't tell voters what you really believe, get yourself elected first" (this is a paraphrase).  That has become a mantra among conservatives since then.  

Federally, the CPC under Harper had a significant "values" caucus (read: social/religious conservatives) who badly wanted to legislate against abortion, gay rights, and women's rights.  Harper would throw them the odd bit of "red meat" - allowing a private member's bill to move along for a while - until it became apparent that if it actually got passed, the political price would be too high.  Policy books were carefully curated, and unless you had a good eye for "dog whistle" language, most people would assume that the CPC was less radical than it actually was.  Since Harper's departure in 2015, that mask has dropped, and the radicalized wing of the party has become increasingly powerful.  

Provincially, the picture is similar across the country, with some truly egregious examples emerging in the western provinces.  In Alberta, the UCP has undergone two internal coups, resulting in a party that has become increasingly radical and is legislating in a manner completely at odds with the platform they ran on in 2023.  Nobody in 2023 thought they were electing a party that would spend political capital on attacking minority rights and separatism, yet here we are.  Smith to this day denies that the party is in fact a separatist party.  

Then we come to B.C., and the crumbling edifice of a "unified" conservatism under the BC Conservative banner.  Two years ago, John Rustad led the BC Conservatives to a hair's breadth of attaining power.  When he booted Dallas Brodie from caucus for comments that most people would describe as racist, that led to the formation of OneBC, and put his leadership under threat from factions of the party who apparently felt he wasn't "conservative enough".  Eventually that led to his ouster and replacement by Kerry-Lynne Findlay after a lengthy and bitter leadership fight. 

Findlay set about engaging in one of the most blatant purity purges any conservative party has ever witnessed, resulting in the collapse of her leadership in a record setting 112 days.  This isn't an accident, and it isn't an aberration - it is exactly what you would expect when a party is made up of factions that simply don't see eye to eye on much.  Sooner or later, the most radicalized faction will agitate and organize to seize control. 

Which leads us to yesterday's revelation that the B.C. Conservatives are "in talks" with OneBC.  Now, in itself, this is not surprising - parties often discuss what they might do in scenarios where together they might be able to seize power from a rival either through cooperation or even merger.  

However, B.C. Conservative leader Lorne Doerksen made the following statement which I can only describe as ominous in the context:  

Asked about the discussions Tuesday, Doerkson said there had been “nothing formal,” while reiterating his party’s commitment to embracing conservative values.

“That’s not up for conversation,” Doerkson said at the time. “We will bring conservative values, for certain, to the people of British Columbia.” (emphasis added) 

What precisely does "conservative values" mean here?  OneBC is, to put it kindly, on the extreme end of social conservatism, with distinctly racist, anti-2SLGBTQ policies permeating the party's policies.  Lorne Doerksen's own comments should make anyone who isn't themselves a social conservative incredibly nervous: 

I was supportive of the LGBTQ community. Always have been and always will be.

SOGI [Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity education resources] has been a lightning rod for division in this province. I think that SOGI has to be removed.

and ...  

I've had friends that attended residential schools, and I have heard many stories from people that have survived those schools.

I'm absolutely supportive of our First Nations in this province.

If there has been a crime committed, then there needs to be an absolute, formal, deep investigation into what has happened here because I think all Canadians need to understand that better so that we can move forward on a better path

So, in short, anti-2SLGBTQ (because let's be honest, anyone who is bitching about SOGI is doing so because it includes that community and that gives them the squickies), and nothing like a little "soft residential school denialism" to show us the underlying racism.  Does Mr. Doerksen not recall the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its final report?  We've had that investigation already.

Now we have the BC Conservatives playing footsie with OneBC?  That should make anyone nervous - because OneBC was formed out of "the BC Conservatives weren't radical enough for us" thinking.  

I'm not going to claim that the MLAs who left caucus under Findlay are the "reasonable ones" - I think they are the ones who were targeted by Findlay's purge for one reason or another, or they saw the political fallout of staying with Findlay on the wall and decided it would be better for their future prospects to depart.

Prior to the collapse of her leadership in September, there were already rumours of OneBC being invited to return to the BC Conservatives ... largely because KLF was already aligned with OneBC - and she was making that clear. 

Doerksen is trying to play "the reasonable one" here, while tacitly signalling to the hardliners that he's on their side.  That's the whole problem - conservatism in Canada is not a singular movement with a coherent set of beliefs.  It is a collection of groups, all with distinctly different beliefs and values fighting for control over the "blue flag".  The claim that there is "something in common" is a fantasy - the goal is power, and "leaders" emerge who will do everything they can to cobble together some kind of "alliance", only to have it fall apart in real time as they discover how radicalized some of the participants really are. 

I've watched this script play out so many times since the 1990s that the first question I ask when someone tells me that they are "a conservative" is "which faction do you follow?".  The least honest are always the ones with the most unelectable ideas. 

Calgary-Shaw By-Election: Don't Get Too Confident

 First, congratulations to newly-elected MLA Kyle Campbell.  The win was decisive enough to not need a judicial recount, and to some degree sent a message to the United Conservative Party (UCP).  

This is not the overwhelming victory that it should have been.  Voters did not turn out in large numbers, and while a 500 vote margin is large enough to avoid a judicial recount, it's not anywhere near what should have been the case if people were actually paying attention to what is going on in Alberta politics. 

You can fully expect the UCP to argue a few things here: 

1. It's a by-election, and the turnout is so low as to really mean it was just angry NDPers who came out in numbers.
2. The vote was "split" because the Progressive Tory Party (PTP) garnered nearly 1,000 votes - stealing victory from the UCP

It's the latter argument that is more insidious because it presupposes that the existence of the PTP is invalid, and they should all be part of the UCP.  They will use this to attempt to undermine the PTP between now and next election. 

The logic will be something along the lines of "voting for the UCP will ensure the continuance of the conservative dominion over Alberta", and that "voting for the PTP is essentially voting for the NDP, and we cannot have the NDP in power ever again".  

Unite The Right Logic

The error in that logic is the supposition that conservatism is somehow a monolith.  In reality, as we are seeing in both BC and Federally, the language of "unite the right" is really a code phrase for a "takeover from within" of a party by its most radicalized socially conservative fringe groups.  

Federally, it's been a long, slow burn with the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC).  The "unite the right" campaign began in the late 1990s and culminated in the merger of the Reform Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties under Stephen Harper's control.  I say control because while Harper was leader of the CPC, he was very careful to keep the social conservative wing carefully constrained so that the public wouldn't freak out at some of their more radical policies.  Since Harper stepped aside after losing the Federal Election in 2015, we have seen the CPC move ever further right, with increasingly radical socially-conservative policies become part of the policy book at each convention, and leaders that seem more willing than Harper to adopt those policies themselves.   That's a long burn - 25 years - but it was only that long because of Harper's tenure at the helm - had a leader with less focus on power been in charge, I would probably have been writing this kind of argument by 2015. 

The BC Conservatives have been speed running this same script.  The BC Conservatives ejected Rustad after the party narrowly lost the 2024 election.  The first half of 2026 was a leadership campaign which ultimately led to the election of Kerry-Lynne Findlay - who has made it very clear she is aligned with the more radicalized socially conservative wing of the party.  Rustad was already aligned, although somewhat more careful about what he said, Findlay is far more direct about it.  The BC Conservatives went from at least seemingly mainstream to radicalized in less than a year.  Since becoming leader, 9 MLAs have departed the BC Conservative caucus.  

The UCP suffers from a similar problem, with internal coups having resulted in the party going from "newly united" to radicalized in less than 10 years.  COVID no doubt played a role in that, but it's not hard to look at the party as it was in 2017 and what it looks like now and see that Danielle Smith is clearly beholden to a small, but organized and vocal group of radicals.  

In short, the "united front" of conservatives is not really what it claims to be.  It's a front for the movement's most extreme beliefs to take precedence.  

Upcoming Electoral Moments In Alberta

The Referendums

In just over a month, Alberta voters will vote in a series of 10 referendum questions - all of which are basically separatist propaganda questions.  If current polling is any indication, these questions should all go down to a pretty nasty defeat.  Of course, that supposes that a significant percentage of eligible voters actually vote.  It is not clear to me at all that will be the case.  

I fully expect Smith to ignore the results of the referendum and simply forge ahead with next steps.  Not because she has any mandate to do so, but because her career depends on that happening.

2027 Election

Next year's election is another matter entirely.  First, this fall is when Smith's second "Electoral District Commission" will release its revised electoral map.  Expect this to contain a significant amount of "gerrymandering" in the form of ridings on the edges of major urban centres being carved into "rurban ridings", and ridings where the UCP sees themselves at risk being creatively rearranged so that they are absorbed into safer ridings.  

Additionally, the UCP will probably step up its campaign against both the PTP and the NDP. 

Closing Thoughts 

The upshot here is that while the by-election in Calgary-Shaw is a definite win for people who are angry with the UCP, we need to recognize that we are not dealing with a party that cares one whit about "democratic mandates", and will push through whatever it feels like.  

Opponents of the UCP and the separatist movement in Alberta need to continue to organize and get their message out there.  Not just during campaign periods.  

The Shambolic Nature Of Government

Government, at the best of times is a chaotic creature, it's even more so when the party in power is driven not by a coherent philosophy, but rather by whatever happens to anger its base the most.  Nowhere is this more visible than in Alberta under Danielle Smith's UCP.  

The Smith-led UCP government stumbles from one issue to another with seemingly no intelligible strategy.  

One of the first things the UCP government did was slam the brakes on the deployment of renewable energy sources like wind and solar in Alberta, and subsequently issued a stack of regulations that more or less killed investment in that sector of Alberta's economy.   At a time when climate change is moving rapidly from urgent into crisis, this seems on its face one of the worst possible decisions to make - certainly not one which benefits Albertans in either the short or long term.

More recently, the UCP has become infatuated with attracting "Data Centres" (basically huge warehouses of servers designed to support "Artificial Intelligence" processing).  Now you can make this out as an effort to "diversify" Alberta's economy.  To an extent, there is a legitimacy to that argument - even if I personally think this is a poor way to go about it.  The problem I have with "Data Centres" as "engines of economic growth" is that the blunt reality is that very few actual residents of Alberta will end up with long term employment at those facilities.  Most of them run 24/7 with a small handful of technicians on hand to make repairs when a piece of hardware fails.  The actual monitoring of these facilities can be done from someone's desktop in another country ... and one person can monitor a handful of data centres at a time. 

If you will, as a business model, I'm sure data centres can be hugely profitable - they're basically leasing out compute time to companies that are running huge AI projects.  Short term, these Data Centres are profitable, but their marketability depends on how up to date their hardware is.  The problem that arises is that different generations of hardware have radically different cooling system requirements - so a data centre built for one generation may not be able to be used for whatever generation hardware comes next.  On top of all that, the hardware changes at a very high rate - so by the time the first generation hardware is amortized out, the cost of upgrading the existing building to accommodate new cooling systems may well exceed the value of the building itself - leaving Alberta with a bunch of abandoned warehouses in 5 years.

Now, what comes out this past week, but the lurching thinking of the UCP when faced with the issue of how are these data centres going to be powered.  Of course the UCP, being thoroughly in the thrall of the Oil and Gas sector, jumps to natural gas fired generation.  Do data centres need power?  Absolutely.  Should they be obliged to furnish their own power sources?  Also, yes.  

The first sign of a project not being truly viable is when "derisking" the project involves having government take over substantial aspects of what that business needs.  In this case, the UCP starts musing about forming crown corporations to ensure that natural gas is delivered to these generation facilities.  Think about that for a moment - the UCP thinking actively about forming a Crown Corporation - a party that is so far to the right that if you had suggested a Crown Corporation for any other purpose would have laughed you out of the room.  (Look at what they are doing to health care in Alberta - literally tearing it apart to sell it off to various private interests). Now, since then, Smith has said "no, I'm not going to do that" ... of course, it's Danielle Smith - you take her at her word at your own peril. 

The only thing consistent about Danielle Smith's government is her allegiance to big oil, and to Donald Trump.  Beyond that, this is a government that lurches from one crisis to another, devoid of any kind of coherent philosophy or strategy.  Smith has been described as a "political magpie" by Thomas Lukaszuk, and that seems an apt description.  She has no vision beyond the current matter that has her attention - and for Alberta, that's disastrously bad news.

Pieces Falling Into Place For Canada's Air Force

 I have suspected for some time that the decision around which direction Canada was going to go in terms of its next generation Air Force has been made, if not formally announced.  

The latest brick just fell into place, with Stephen Fuhr being appointed to head up the new Defence Investment Agency.  Fuhr has been critical of the F-35 for a long time, so I can suspect that will play _a_ role in where things are going next.  

While I have my own personal opinions about the F-35 vs Gripen discussion, this is more about the political game that is playing out.  

First, consider that Canada has decided to purchase the Saab GlobalEye surveillance aircraft.  The GlobalEye just happens to be based on the Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft, giving a boost to Canadian manufacturing as well as providing a fairly obvious level of cover as Saab and Bombardier would need to ramp up collaboration.  This provides reasonable cover for setting up the supply chains for Gripen manufacturing with Bombardier leading the effort.  

Then add to that Saab's very generous terms for the Gripen which would essentially serve as a restart of Canada's military aerospace program - creating jobs as well as providing a decent aircraft that appears generally well suited to Canada's needs.  

Meanwhile, the F-35 is a high cost aircraft with remarkably poor availability and high maintenance requirements, and Canada looking down the business end of increasing expense just to acquire the F-35, it's not hard to understand why Canada might just decide to pivot towards spending the same money on a platform that will create jobs and industry here in Canada.

My guess is that the Gripen decision has been made, but not announced.  Saab and Bombardier will be quietly setting up the needed manufacturing infrastructure in parallel with the setup needed for the GlobalEye program.  

The one major "fly in the ointment" here is the Saab using a license-built engine designed by GE, which theoretically could mean that the US could veto any sale to Canada through that license agreement.  However, this is potentially offset by Saab adapting the Gripen airframe to accept a slightly more powerful engine from Rolls Royce, bypassing the American veto entirely. 

Politically, the Carney government has shown us that it has both the internal discipline to take on a project like this without telling anyone who doesn't need to know about it, and the political will to do it even if it angers the current occupant of the White House. 

Personally, at this point in time, if the US wants to make everything transactional and volatile, it would seem to me quite reasonable to walk away from the F-35 program even if it is a technically superior aircraft.  I'd rather have an aircraft that meets Canada's needs without being dependent on the mood in Washington.  

Of Trade Deals, Foreign Interference, and Conservative Leadership In Canada

We talk a lot about "foreign interference" in Canadian politics, but we don't very often talk about the single biggest source of interference in Canada's political discourse:  the United States.  For decades, we have quietly accepted the presence of American ties to various political groups and lobbying efforts, either turning a blind eye, or out of some naive belief that the US and Canada are much the same and therefore it's not really interference when there is cross border collaboration between various politicians and parties. 

Conservatives in particular have taken advantage of this, appearing regularly at US conservative conferences and networking events like the CPAC conference or the "Prayer Breakfast" events.  These connections are well documented, and sustained by events like Danielle Smith travelling to Mar-a-Lago, or former PM Harper's 2018 visit to the White House.   Visits like Smith's and Harper's are not mere social calls - they are very much "kiss the ring" moments where a "client" leader swears fealty to a more powerful leader.  That's important to recognize.  

American influence in Canada's politics is everywhere - it's so pervasive that we often don't think about it or give it the consideration it deserves.  The events of the last couple of weeks should give Canadians pause and motivation to reconsider that.  Let me draw you the picture I see emerging.

Conservative Desperation?

 So, the last week have been quite a whirlwind of activity from conservative circles in Canada, and much of it looks concerningly desperate:

1. MP Dean Allison is creating a "panel" to "investigate vaccine injuries"

2. Preston Manning has been dragged out from retirement to bolster Alberta separatist grievances

3. This morning, Poilievre held a press conference (on a Sunday?) 

The SCC Ruling In Democracy Watch

At the end of July, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its ruling in Democracy Watch v. Canada (Attorney General).  This ruling has enormous implications for governments across Canada.

One of the key issues in the Democracy Watch case was the presence of clauses in the relevant legislation that foreclosed appeal to the courts.  This all stems from the Federal Ethics Commissioner's investigation and ruling in the WE Charities debacle.  I want to be clear here:  I am not about to engage in a re-examination of the WE Charities debacle - I have many thoughts about it, none of which are really relevant to this ruling.  

The underlying issue in this case is S66 of the Conflict of Interest Act (COIA), which reads: 

Orders and decisions final

66 Every order and decision of the Commissioner is final and shall not be questioned or reviewed in any court, except in accordance with the Federal Courts Act on the grounds referred to in paragraph 18.1(4)(a), (b) or (e) of that Act.