A number of Conservatives have expressed their
misgivings about the Conservative campaign. The tone seems to be: if we lost,
it’s our fault.
I won’t deny that the Conservative Party has part of
its responsibility in its election loss.
But I would like to underline another important reason
why we lost:
The conservative base isn’t big enough.
There are two major left-wing parties in this country.
And one right-wing. If our base were sufficiently large, we should have won.
But we didn’t. And the voter turnout only had to increase by 10% for that to
happen.
I hate how the Conservative party spends its time
trying to convince a large number of non-conservatives to vote for it. In order
to attract votes, it has to dilute its message and put off doing what
conservatives really want to do: combat union influence, reduce the size of
government, reduce government regulation, cut subsidies to business, etc.
Even when Conservatives get into power, all they can
do is nibble at the edges of liberal institutions. Conservatives are forced to
pay lip service to notions like gender-based analysis and funding the CBC
because if they said what they really thought, there would be an outcry.
I often feel like conservatives act like Canadians are really conservative deep down, they just have to tap into
conservatism.
So here’s the wake-up call conservatives: it’s not
true. Canadians are mostly liberal. And that’s why you have trouble advancing
your agenda.
I’ve often talked about the need for a conservative
culture—conservative media, movies, television, etc. And that’s all well and
good.
But we might even need something more basic than that.
We need to educate—evangelize if you will— on basic economic principles,
freedom, and human nature.
We need the conservative version of Catholic Answers,
complete with tracts on every conceivable topic and objection. Then we need to
post these tracts to every facebook discussion group and hand them out to every
high and university student in the country.
When you have powerful institutions like education,
academia, unions, and media pushing for liberal values, you have to counter the propaganda. People think kids
eventually grow out of their socialist views when they get mortgages, but clearly, the vote results
show not all of them do. If we want to win elections, we can’t just assume
common sense will prevail. We have to educate people (in between elections) why
conservative values are better.
