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Alliance party convention

superquad1968

Lucifer's Assistant
Nov 26, 2003
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Hell. Where Else?
www.terb.ca
red said:
Mackay and harper are heading for break up
I thought it was Mackay and Stronach. I didn't know Stephen was so open-minded. Must be going after Myron.
 

red

you must be fk'n kid'g me
Nov 13, 2001
17,572
8
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superquad1968 said:
I thought it was Mackay and Stronach. I didn't know Stephen was so open-minded. Must be going after Myron.
he is on the rebound
 

red

you must be fk'n kid'g me
Nov 13, 2001
17,572
8
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bbking said:
Nah they kissed and made up. I heard it was a French Kiss.


bbk
thats what those westerners are like with their permissive ways
 

Keebler Elf

The Original Elf
Aug 31, 2001
14,572
203
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The Keebler Factory
The new Conservative Party will not be a force to be reckoned with until it gets a leader who hails from the east. Until then, Canadians in the east will continue to view the Conservatives with distrust as a party that (rightly or wrongly) fronts underlying racism and westernism.

While I personally would consider voting Conservative (depending on the platform), I won't so long as they continue to look like the Alliance-in-sheep's clothing...
 

red

you must be fk'n kid'g me
Nov 13, 2001
17,572
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Winston said:
You and most other people east of Manitoba.

Harper is in doo doo. He has softened his stance on a number of issues, and that is causing rumblings in the old Alliance wing.

From my perspective, both Haper and McKay need to take a step back, and become back benchers. Until the new merged party picks a leader that is not so clearly identified as being from the Reform or PC Party, there will be rumblings of "they have taken over our party".

Harper clearly understands that his form of social conservatism does not attract the votes in the east that it does in the west, but that Ontario has a larger electoral base than Alberta.

If it was not for Prime Minister Dithers, Harper would be 12 points behind in the polls.
maybe if stopped wearing sheeps clothing they would be taken seriously
 

Svend

New member
Feb 10, 2005
4,426
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Rumblings within the party? :D

There was plenty of opportunity for anyone to run against Harper last year. The most serious challenge was an inexperienced Belinda Stronach?
He got 84% support from the party members over the past weekend with few peeps of discontent. This from 2 parties that were at each others throats just a few years ago.
I'd say he's home free at least until the next election, same with each of the other leaders.
 

slowpoke

New member
Oct 22, 2004
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Toronto
Svend said:
Rumblings within the party? :D
...He got 84% support from the party members over the past weekend with few peeps of discontent. This from 2 parties that were at each others throats just a few years ago.
I'd say he's home free at least until the next election, same with each of the other leaders.
These "between election" votes of confidence are, without exception, extremely pragmatic in scope. Do you seriously think that either party would repudiate their leader at this stage? Not a chance! These votes of confidence are just the mandatory rubber stamp. A chimp could get an 80% - 90% vote of confidence at this point in the process!
 

Svend

New member
Feb 10, 2005
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John Diefenbaker, Joe Clark (twice), Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and Jean Chretien would disagree. Each was forced out because they didn't have enough support from their parties to carry on at the end of the day.
Each had strong campaigns against them within the party, Harper doesn't.
That could change after the next election though, who knows if a strong contender will arise from the Progressive wing of the party.
 

Keebler Elf

The Original Elf
Aug 31, 2001
14,572
203
63
The Keebler Factory
Winston said:
From my perspective, both Haper and McKay need to take a step back, and become back benchers.
I'll go you one better and state that they need to take a backseat permanently and find a new leader, b/c they ain't it! ;)
 

islandboy

New member
Nov 14, 2004
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Keebler Elf said:
The new Conservative Party will not be a force to be reckoned with until it gets a leader who hails from the east. Until then, Canadians in the east will continue to view the Conservatives with distrust as a party that (rightly or wrongly) fronts underlying racism and westernism.

While I personally would consider voting Conservative (depending on the platform), I won't so long as they continue to look like the Alliance-in-sheep's clothing...

Its looks that way from the US as well. While I do not know about racism, it looks as if the tone of western conservatives is so dominated by unsupportable populous notions (not that all are unsupportable) that its hard to think of them in power without taking a bigger view of what it means to govern and the implicaitons of some of their mantra's.
 

G_Bouchard

New member
Aug 20, 2001
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Translation: The West does not matter. The country can be run from the East . Right ?

You owe the western Canadian an apology, Mr. Eastern Snob !

Keebler Elf said:
The new Conservative Party will not be a force to be reckoned with until it gets a leader who hails from the east. Until then, Canadians in the east will continue to view the Conservatives with distrust as a party that (rightly or wrongly) fronts underlying racism and westernism.

While I personally would consider voting Conservative (depending on the platform), I won't so long as they continue to look like the Alliance-in-sheep's clothing...
 

Peeping Tom

Boil them in Oil
Dec 24, 2002
803
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Hellholes of the earth
Here's an article examining the party from an outside perspective.The history is a bit sketchy but they make a number of observations.

The Great Right North?
Conservatives may finally be getting their act together in Canada

JOHN O’SULLIVAN

If you had swallowed the general view of the Canadian news media, the national convention of the (relatively) new Canadian Conservative Party in Montreal was likely to be a sad and solemn wake. Unfortunately, nobody told the corpse, who got up and danced a decorous Canadian reel. About 2,900 Tories had gathered in Montreal — a pretty large gathering by Canadian standards and, as the Tories kept emphasizing, somewhat larger than the national convention of the ruling Liberals two weeks previously. Despite the urgings of the media that they should split back into the two hostile parties whose merger had created the CCP less than two years ago, they showed a firm determination to settle their disagreements within a unified party. And they gave off strong whiffs of enthusiasm, combativeness, and momentum.

Maybe, like Rick in Casablanca, they were misinformed, for Canada’s political terrain is pretty inhospitable to the Right in several ways. In the first place, the Tories are living in a pre-Goldwater country — namely, one in which an essentially conservative population lives under the hegemony of liberal institutions, a liberal political culture, and liberal elites. As in the U.S., the major cultural institutions, the media, and even business corporations are solidly liberal in their leanings. They shape a political climate of liberal orthodoxy that inevitably distorts both the opinions and the allegiance of the voters. Thus, some perfectly respectable policies, such as regulating abortion, become more or less unthinkable because they run counter to the strong convictions of the liberal elite.

What makes Canada still more inhospitable to conservatism is the 1982 adoption of a new constitution with a Charter of Rights written by Pierre Trudeau. That subjected Canada’s traditional parliamentary sovereignty to a written constitution interpreted by the courts. It thereby entrenched liberal policies against conservative electoral victories. The courts, for instance, are currently in the process of introducing gay marriage through constitutional interpretation. So Canadian liberalism enjoys political as well as cultural hegemony.

Indeed, Trudeau invented a new Canadian national identity designed to make conservatives feel uncomfortable and even alien. He replaced Canada’s two national traditions — the French and Anglo — with an ersatz Canadian nationalism of his own in which the main foci of loyalty are Canada’s landscapes and its welfare state (both allegedly superior to those in the U.S.). Insofar as this curious ideology of “soil and bloodlessness” has taken hold (in fact, only shakily), it puts principled conservatives in the uneasy position of looking anti-national — at least to the liberal establishment.

The second obstacle is Quebec. That is historically odd since Quebec was a bastion of conservatism, both religious and political, until the “quiet revolution” of the ’68ers transformed it. It is now the bastion of a secular and socialist nationalism (whose dire consequences are brilliantly depicted in the film The Barbarian Invasions). The Tories, seen as the main Anglo party, are weak in the province. But a group of Quebec conservative intellectuals based around the magazine Egards is seeking to reverse the quiet revolution, beginning inside the local Tory party which has accommodated itself to it.

On top of the obstacles to power raised by others, the Tories added one of their own. Until two years ago, they were split.

An Australian observer at Montreal made the point that in his country and other English-speaking nations, conservatism tends to generate both a party and a movement. The movement wants principle, the party power; the movement tends to the right, the party to the center; the movement dislikes compromise, the party inevitably embraces it. These tensions can be kept in check as long as the party and the movement do not go too far in opposite directions. That happened in the early ’90s, however, when Brian Mulroney’s efforts to appease Quebec alienated his conservative base in western Canada. Disillusioned Tories joined with western social conservatives to found the Reform party. The incumbent Tories crashed in the 1993 general election to holding a mere two seats in parliament. Reform became the major conservative party in parliament — but one lacking much, if any, support in Ontario and Atlantic Canada. And the Liberals enjoyed the prospect of stable political hegemony indefinitely — with only 38 percent of the popular vote.
 

Peeping Tom

Boil them in Oil
Dec 24, 2002
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Continued

A UNIFIED CONSERVATISM
National Review’s own David Frum had a distinctly proprietorial air at the reception thrown by Canada’s new conservative magazine, the Western Standard, for delegates to the Montreal convention. Frum had some reason to feel a sense of ownership, for he was one among the relatively small number of people who over the previous decade had helped to revive a unified Canadian conservatism.

It began with the movement rather than the politicians. Nine years ago Frum had brought together activists and intellectuals from what were then the mutually hostile Reform and Progressive Conservative parties at the “Winds of Change” conference in Calgary. There was general agreement in Calgary that unity was a political necessity. But the bitterness between the two parties was still too strong to permit an electoral alliance, let alone a merger. Still, a start had been made.

Two years after the Calgary conference, Conrad Black founded the National Post, a national newspaper, to bring some ideological diversity to the suffocating liberal conformity of Canadian journalism and to unite the still-divided Right. Frum was a regular columnist on the Post; Ezra Levant, now the publisher of the Western Standard, was hired as an editorial writer on it; the incomparable Mark Steyn was the newspaper’s star columnist; and it was edited by Ken Whyte, probably the most talented and innovative newspaper editor in North America. (Full disclosure: I had arrived at the “Winds of Change” conference as an observer, been instantly promoted to “keynote speaker,” and found myself thereafter treated as an expert on Canadian politics. Partly as a result, when the Post was founded, I became in effect its editorial-page and op-ed editor. So I had a ringside seat at these birth-pangs of a new conservatism.)

The Post’s impact was enormous. Within a short time it had reached a circulation of 360,000 — equivalent to a U.S. circulation of more than 3 million — and was altering the cultural and political landscape. In particular, Whyte’s insistent message of “Unite the Right” pushed a not unwilling Preston Manning, then the Reform leader, into an attempted merger between his own Reform party and the remnant of the Progressive Conservatives. The birth of the so-called Canadian Alliance was, unfortunately, premature. “Red Tories” (who are more statist than most Liberals) still had enough clout to prevent more than a handful of their party from defecting to an organization they despised as both redneck and principled. Another election defeat was required to persuade most Tories that they had no independent future.

Eventually, two new party leaders — Stephen Harper for the Alliance and Peter MacKay for the Progressive Tories — negotiated a merger and established the Canadian Conservative Party. Harper was elected leader of the joint party, which almost at once had to fight a general election last year. It did agonizingly well. If the election had been held one week before, the new party would probably have won an outright majority. Last-minute gaffes, however, frightened the voters. In the end, the united Tories increased their seats to almost 100 and the Liberals barely survived as a minority government.

Nothing since then has gone right for the Liberals under Paul Martin, the prime minister. His government has been rocked by an ongoing financial scandal, serial incompetence, rows with Washington, and the decline of Martin’s personal reputation into “Mr. Dithers.” But the Tories have benefited hardly at all from these setbacks.

So the party convention — meeting to pass judgment on Harper’s leadership, to discuss a new policy platform, and to test their new fraternal relations — might have been a shambles. Canadian journalists were largely hoping for just that — they thought that the movement would break with the party. In fact they got a demonstration of movement-party unity. Such old opponents as Brian Mulroney and Preston Manning buried their hatchets and spoke as, in effect, joint patrons of the new organization, and Harper’s leadership was reaffirmed with a massive majority.

What now? Well, the new party is on track to emerge from the next election as a minority government. Harper expects an increased Tory vote, but he is relying ultimately on the antipathy of the left-nationalist Bloc Québécois for the Liberals to put a minority Tory government in power. The price the Bloc asks might well be some form of devolution.
 

Peeping Tom

Boil them in Oil
Dec 24, 2002
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Continued

THE NO-RISK STRATEGY
Appeasing Quebec may be the only risk he takes. Harper is a genuine conservative intellectual and even a policy wonk. But he is also the most cerebral and detached party leader since Richard Nixon. He makes his calculations and then watches how they pan out. At present his calculation is that the Liberals will self-destruct and that the Bloc Québécois will give them a helping hand. The Tories should therefore avoid taking risks — which means not advancing controversial policies unless absolutely necessary.

Of course, as Nixon found in 1968, a strategy of taking no risks is a high-risk strategy. Harper will therefore keep in reserve a handful of bold policy positions for the actual election campaign — probably economic rather than socially conservative ones — in order to counter Liberal claims of a “hidden agenda.” In power he might also seek to reshape Trudeau’s anti-national nationalism to make it more genuinely inclusive and more reflective of actual Canadian traditions. In the meantime, however, Harper’s watchword is caution.

But the party is not the sole custodian of conservatism. There is today not only a party, and a movement, but also a conservative counter-establishment. Ken Whyte is about to take up the editorship of Canada’s national magazine, Macleans. Mark Steyn is now established as the country’s leading columnist at home and abroad. Ezra Levant is the publisher of the Western Standard. Another National Post alumnus, John Williamson, runs the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. And the National Post itself, though owned by the liberal Asper family, remains a serious, conservative national paper, even if slightly less buccaneering in tone. These are major inroads into the cultural hegemony of Canadian liberalism. And they will help a future Conservative government to resist any tendency to appease the establishment.

Meanwhile, grassroots social conservatives are organizing in Ontario and Quebec as well as in western Canada. Party managers at Montreal were surprised at the number of “so-cons” who turned up in provincial delegations that were supposed to be the preserve of liberal Progressive Tories. To everyone’s surprise, Quebec voted 53 to 47 percent against gay marriage in a vote that rejected it by 75 to 25 percent overall. And the passage (by 55 to 45 percent) of a motion rejecting any regulation of abortion was greeted with Machiavellian satisfaction by one social conservative. “A Pyrrhic defeat,” he explained, “that will result in more volunteers joining the party in districts that are now in the few hands of a few Red Tories.”

Canadian conservatives, in short, are on the march. They have just reached 1968 — the 1968 not of student revolutionaries but of the post-Goldwater Republicans who had absorbed their 1964 defeat and were now on the way to capturing their party, their culture, and eventually their country.

In Canada’s case, however, it will definitely be a long march.
 
Ashley Madison
Toronto Escorts