Federal
Tory leadership candidate Kellie Leitch wasted little time in
praising the outcome of the most horrid election campaign we've seen
in living memory. Donald Trump, as silver spooned an elite as ever
there was, threw out the elites in Washington to become the next U.S.
president.
Fellow
elite on the Canadian side, Leitch, says it's an example that needs
to be followed in Canada.
“Tonight,
our American cousins threw out the elites and elected Donald Trump as
their next president. It’s an exciting message and one that we need
delivered in Canada as well,” Leitch, a former cabinet minister and
practising orthopaedic paediatric surgeon, says in a report in the
National Post.
“It’s
the message I’m bringing with my campaign to be the next Prime
Minister of Canada. It’s why I’m the only candidate for the
leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada who is standing up for
Canadian values.”
Leitch
is proposing that the 250,000 people wanting to immigrate to Canada
each year should be screened in special face-to-face meetings for
Canadian values. That would be about as easy to implement as building
a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border
Just
the same, would an admitted sex abuser and known liar, a misogynist,
and racist individual who doesn't pay taxes who has stiffed his
workers on their wages and who is currently facing numerous legal
suits against him pass Leitch's test? Just asking.
From
her elite position, I wonder if Leitch herself wonders if the sort of
campaign she wants to drag into Canada would have happened as it did,
if Trump's competitor not been a woman.
You
can bet Sandra Jansen and Donna Kennedy-Glans have stared that issue,
right in its ugly face. Both were running for leadership of the
Alberta Conservative Party, and both quit on the same day after
experiencing that unique kind of harassment reserved for female
politicians. And much of it in Red Deer.
I
don't know how many death threats have been sent to other Alberta
premiers, or how many violently sexualized comments have been
directed to her predecessors, but Rachel Notley has certainly gotten
her share. As if one example would not be too many.
She
says the reports of harassment against the two candidates is
“troubling.” Um, yes ... troubling.
"If
a party or a campaign cannot conduct itself in a way to ensure the
most basic of rules around inclusivity — for instance
anti-harassment — then quite frankly that party or that campaign is
not equipped to govern the province," Notley told reporters at
the legislature Wednesday.
But
then again, Donald Trump was widely viewed as unfit for office, too.
We're
told this kind of thing happens in politics everywhere. The point
today should be: why do aspiring politicians normalize it? Because
the politics of dividing and dehumanizing people seems to be a
winning formula, that's why.
Alberta
got an NDP government, not because the good folks in Wild Rose
Country suddenly woke up and found themselves to be socialists. It
was because voters were tired of the moribund and corrupt Tory party
that had been in office for as long as most Albertans have been alive.
Canadians
got Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, not because we woke up one day
with a Sunny Ways disposition, but because we had ceased to trust the
current leadership of the federal Tory party.
The
difference today is that both provincially and federally the
rank-and-file of Conservative persuasion seem ready to double down
on the politics of division.
If
you don't like big-tent Conservatism, with all its compromises and
accommodations to larger society, you now have licence to demonize
and harass those Conservatives you don't like. If those Conservatives
happen to be female, all the better, and all the easier.
Alberta
leadership candidate Jason Kenney, as partisan a Tory as anyone
needs, wants to unite the right in Alberta, and merge with the Wild
Rose.
The
Wild Rose, the larger and richer party of the two, doesn't see the
advantage in merging. Historically, Alberta's pure-blue Conservatives
have been much more to the centre, than the Wild Rose.
Well,
today, perhaps not so much. At least Wild Rose at one time had a
female leader, as did the Alberta Conservatives.
And
look what happened to them.
