The conservatives have mutinously toppled their leader to install a more hardline politician who’ll better represent them on LGBTIQA+ issues and vaccine mandate protests.
No, it’s not a crystal ball prediction into the future of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s tenuous grasp over his fractured Coalition party — it’s the state of Canadian politics at the moment.
The Canadian Conservatives are in opposition and the party is at civil war, toppling their leader Erin O’Toole 73 to 45 last week because O’Toole had moved too far left.
O’Toole had a Trumpian quality in vying for the party leadership in 2020, promising to “Take back Canada” when he became leader of the Conservatives, who are three-time losers at the election.
After ascending to the leadership, the moderate Toronto politician showed his stripes, binning promises to put rifles back in hands and actively distancing himself on party views on abortion and LGBTIQA+ rights.
The simmering party frustration began to boil in January when O’Toole said he supported Prime Minister Justin Trudeau banning conversion therapy — angering the hard-right religious factions. O’Toole urged fellow lawmakers to consider “is the legislation going to address that harm that we all recognise in a way that helps people affected, helps the victims and prevents new victims from being created?”
It’s a statement that has more than a whiff of this week’s tussle in Canberra over the religious discrimination bill, which won partyroom support yesterday despite an amendment allowing schools to expel transgender children.
Several Coalition MPs have openly objected to the bill, but none stronger than Liberal MP Bridget Archer who was “horrified” that it may “risk lives” in mandating discrimination. The Coalition turmoil over the bill is happening against the backdrop of the Convoy to Canberra protests, now into day eight. The protest is an apparent offshoot of Canada’s Convoy to Freedom trucker protest that is demanding an end to vaccine mandates.
The Canberra protesters are still hoping to meet with Morrison, but independent Bob Katter and Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick have both sworn they’d pass on their list of demands to the PM.
Careful who you vouch for
It was Canada’s protest that was the final nail in the coffin for O’Toole — he chose not to publicly support the trucker protests, an obvious snub to his voter base, instead leaving that to his more-than-willing deputy Candice Bergen.
Bergen, who met with protesters on the Hill, says “they deserve to be heard and they deserve respect”, continuing there were “good people on both sides”, a haunting echo of former US president Donald Trump.
Comments from Bergen, who is the interim Conservative leader while they work out who’s next, didn’t age well — a state of emergency over the trucker protesters has since been declared in Ottawa, the capital, with residents fleeing their homes amid the escalating situation.
And it’s not like other Conservatives are doing the Lord’s work either — another MP was interviewed while a protest flag bearing a swastika waved in the background (he later apologised).
Soon the Canadian Conservative Party will have a new leader, for the third time in five years. It’s the type of leadership turmoil that’ll feel familiar to anyone still feeling whiplashed by the 2010 decade in Australian politics that saw Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Shorten on one side and Turnbull-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison on the other.
Confused how Canada, the kindly uncle of the world, can have such an aggressive conservative base? So is the party. Just like the Coalition, the Canadian Conservative Party is breaking into two: the stuffy old-school conservatives and the fiscally conservative liberal thinkers (O’Toole, like Malcolm Turnbull, was the latter).
O’Toole’s outgoing advice to his broken party rings true Down Under, particularly as News Corp begins waving its magic wand for a Liberal Party leadership challenge. “This country needs a Conservative Party that is both an intellectual force and a governing force,” O’Toole says. “Ideology without power is vanity. Seeking power without ideology is hubris.”
“… an aggressive conservative base? So is the party. Just like the Coalition, the Canadian Conservative Party is breaking into two: the stuffy old-school conservatives and the fiscally conservative liberal thinkers…”
If only they were stuffy old-school conservatives. This is a common but deeply misleading use of the term ‘conservative’. In the modern politics of Anglophone countries the conservatives are heading to extinction. They believe in tradition, family, personal responsibility, law and order and preserving the institutions of state. They have been replaced by a radical anti-state libertarians who want might-is-right unfettered bandit capitalism with strong dashes of nihilism, xenophobic nationalism and white supremacy. These are absolutely not conservatives. Those conservatives who choose to link arms with them are making the same mistake Von Papen and his colleagues made in Germany in the early 1930s.
I agree, SSR. The Bergenists in Canada, like the Trumpists in the US and the Palmerites in Australia, are not particularly after maintaining the status quo, other than keeping the state power for middle aged white guys and their crumb maidens. They are after unfettered power, and that means destroying the institutions (such as democracy, the courts and the public service) that old school conservatives would have protected. Call them neo-neo-conservatives, or something far blunter.
Along the same lines, British conservatives were once staunch supporters of royalty and convention. Making whoopee the night before a royal funeral? A hanging matter!
And they are currently in charge of what is still officially the Conservative and Unionist Party; but they are doing their damnedest not only to shatter the Union by driving away both Scotland and Northern Ireland, but also encouraging independence for Wales, which was never a united independent nation before it was conquered by the English several centuries ago. It would be more accurate to rename the Tories the English Nationalist Party, though that fails to capture its deep dependence on Saudi, Russian and other finance of equally dubious origins.
Film “The Spiders Web: Britain’s Second Empire” – 2018 production, used to be on YouTube shows how secretive banks and lawyers have kept tax havens for the elites. Recommended viewing.
Go the blunter. Reactionaries for meeja. Dinosaurs for colloquial. Pseudo-conservative has too many syllables.
I agree, they are not ‘old conservatives’, or even conservative at all. They are reactionaries, at best, and I wish the distinction could be observed and explored in the media and elsewhere.
Cheers, most coherent and articulate description of these oddballs.
Freedumb! The LNP in Canberra and most sates has already moved to the hard right. Cynicism and opportunism ramped up. Menzies and Fraser would not recognise the new “Liberal” Party.
An interesting essay there Em. Thanks for that.
I have been reading the odd articles about Canada in The Washington Post in recent weeks. I am both surprised and disappointed at the direction in which Canadian politics is going. However, when one takes a few steps back and tries to look at the political situation in the so-called ‘Western Democracies’ around the world, what we see is not pretty.
We, (quite rightly!) criticize our own conservative ‘Liberal’ party and its duplicitous leader, but we could be doing worse, much worse. Think of the Republican Party in America, describing the January 6th 2021 riots in Washington as “legitimate political discourse”. It seems that America is where this extremist political tendency has originated and it has, not surprisingly, spread to its northern neighbor (and to some extent, across the Pacific and into the southern hemisphere).
The growing tendency towards right-wing extremism needs to stopped before it really takes hold in countries like Canada, New Zealand and Australia. I think that it is probably already too late for the Americans to deal with it.
My take on that, and the situation here, is that it is a very deliberate attempt by far right American groups to break down systems in two countries which have so far been resistant to their politics. I don’t think it’s any mistake that these protests happened at the same time in both countries, and I don’t think the protest here is following Canada. I think they have the same organisers who hope for the same outcome of destabilising countries which are far more stable than than the US. Canada has the bad luck to be right next door, meaning that agitators from the US have better access. Maybe we shouldn’t be so fast to open our borders….
I would not disagree with anything you say in that post VJ. In fact you raise some very good points. Personally, i certainly wouldn’t be in any hurry at all to open up our borders for all sorts of reasons.
Cheers.
One of the reasons why these groups get away with virtually no opposing demonstrations is because they take on the police. The left, especially the young left, have ACAB burnt so badly into their brains that they seem to have a ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ attitude about these people, despite the fact that they are mostly self proclaimed f******* and N****. I don’t know if anyone saw that there was a bit of furore about Craig Kelly taking visitors into Parliament House, one of whom was a well known far right thing who calls himself the Aussie Cossack. He is well known for making youtube videos where he antagonises the police, presumably in the hope that he will get a reaction and make more money. He is taking the lead from sov cits and first amendment auditors in the US who do this. You would expect that the left in Australia might have something to say about this but, no. Crickets.
The Canadian ‘conservatives’ like elsewhere should be organically walking elections into victory, due to sheer numbers of ageing demographics easily accessed/conditioned by legacy media, but still struggle on an even playing field, why?
Because Anglosphere conservatives have been compromised or nobbled by unpalatable imported US radical right libertarian and nativist policies.
The Cafe con leche Republicans, like George Bush recently, have warned ‘conservatives’ i.e. the GOP, that changing demographics will not be kind to them i.e. with decline in ‘Anglo-Saxon (&/or Irish)’ cohorts into the future (hence, efforts for more gerrymandering and voter suppression).
The Cafe con leche Republicans referred a decade ago directly to Steve Bannon’s muse i.e. deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton, proponent of ‘the great replacement’ (old eugenics trope) referring to immigration and demographic change, whose network became embedded round the Trump White House and within the GOP (Tanton’s Network is also well embedded in Oz).
They called this out as not a sensible electoral strategy but nativist ideology, now it’s how do ‘conservatives’ wriggle free to become mainstream again for diverse electorates emerging?