Where did all of Canada’s Conservatives Go?

Right now, like Republicans in the United States, Canadian Conservative politicians should be seizing onto this political opportunity created by the overbearing government response to COVID-19 to promote the upholding of Canadian rights and freedoms.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott have greatly raised their own popularity from directly contrasting themselves to the double-masked wearing Biden administration, and deeply Democrat states like California and New York.

In Canada on the other hand our Conservatives have essentially staked their claim to being Conservative by pursuing the same restrictive lockdown policies that the Liberals and NDP advocate for.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Quebec Premier François Legault, and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who are all supposedly Conservatives but have arguably been the most aggressive in their locking down of their provinces. They have hollowed out much of their provincial business communities, spiking unemployment, and causing harm to residents by restricting mental and physical healthcare that isn’t directly related to COVID-19.

Ford and Kenney especially have very overtly dropped their commitments to bringing back fiscal responsibility to either of their provinces, with Ford even going so far as to brag that he had spent more than the Ontario Liberals did in his first two years in office than they ever had before.

On top of abysmal “Conservative” rule on the provincial level, on the federal level, the Conservative Party under the centre-left leadership of Erin O’Toole is dedicated to not criticizing both Trudeau’s, and provincial Conservatives’ draconian lockdown policies. Instead, the CPC simply pushes the federal Liberals on their slow vaccine procurement, among a couple other rather bland observations that the economy is bad, without ever laying a glove on the contribution the counterproductive lockdowns have had to the poor Canadian economic performance.

Indications are even coming out that the federal Conservatives are even moving further to the left than they already have. On top of their own carbon tax O’Toole announced a couple of months ago to the chagrin of dedicated Conservative members, they also seem to be playing with the idea of rolling out their own plan to support a universal basic income. 

Conservatives in Canada are becoming an exact reflection of the British Tory joke about their own very often centre-left Conservative Party. No matter how left-wing the policy position they take, the joke reasoning being, ‘because we’re conservatives’. 

O’Toole reached that level of parody when he embraced his own carbon tax, claiming it wasn’t a tax in the same fashion Trudeau had when he first introduced his own during his first term, pitching it as somehow related to fiscal conservatism. 

Why did his caucus go along with that plan? Well ‘because we’re conservatives’.

It is truly telling that the most conservative and principled Member of Parliament, Derek Sloan, now sits as an Independent MP after O’Toole removed him from the CPC caucus with a nonsense planted scandal, in order to undermine the more principled Conservative movement Sloan had been trying to create inside the party.

Principled Conservatives MPPs like Belinda Karahalios in Ontario and MLA’s like Drew Barnes in Alberta, among others who have made a point of standing up for civil liberties over the past year, have also been removed from their own supposedly “Conservative” parties.

Of course there are still some bright spots within the CPC and the various provincial Conservative governments, but they are becoming very few and far between. 

Voters have rewarded the Conservatives for their lack of principles all over the country through their recent mediocre polling results, likely only helped by just how terrible the Liberals and NDP also are.

So where did Canada’s Conservatives go? Well, they went chasing after the success Trudeau has had in exchange for any semblance of being principled, and Canadians will be worse off for it unless a new movement can quickly dethrone them all before the next elections around the country.