Now that the federal Conservatives have lost two back-to-back elections they should have won, the time has come for some honest soul-searching. And it starts at the top.
Neither the previous leader, Andrew Scheer, nor Erin O鈥橳oole, the present 颅incumbent (recumbent would be a better term), was up to the job.
The root of the problem is the 颅over-hefty role that social conservatives play in 颅defining party platforms. To say that adherents of this philosophy understand, or care, how their beliefs are seen in the rest of the country would fall well short of the truth.
It was this blindness to political 颅consequences that brought about the Reform Party, in the process splintering the 颅Conservative movement, and gifting the 颅Liberals four elections in a row.
And now, unless something is done about it, we are headed for a rerun. The Grits already have three successive victories to their credit, and this under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, the weakest prime minister since Joe Clark.
Worse still, while polls during the 颅campaign showed that undecided voters had no affection for the Liberal platform, nor for Trudeau, they considered the Tories beyond the pale.
What, then, can the Conservatives do to make the party more widely accepted?
First, decent and honourable as O鈥橳oole is, he has to go. It will take a politician with far more firmness of step to impose the reforms that are needed to regain the trust of voters.
Second, the party needs a Sister Souljah moment.
During the 1992 presidential campaign in the U.S, an African American political activist called Sister Souljah was quoted to the effect that 鈥淚f there are any good white people, I haven鈥檛 met them,鈥� plus lots more of the same.
The Democrat contender, Bill Clinton, saw this as an opportunity to distance himself from such thinking, and remarked that 鈥渋f you took the words 鈥榳hite鈥� and 鈥榖lack,鈥� and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.鈥� Duke, of course, was a one-time Ku Klux Klan leader.
It took courage to do that. Clinton was heavily criticized by the Black community, a group whose support the Democrats need in order to win. Yet win he did.
This is what the Conservative leadership must now do, and do convincingly. The 颅dead-on-arrival views of social 颅conservatives must be read out of the party, and in terms that leave no room for doubt.
If this can be accomplished, the Tories are then free to campaign on ground more 颅suitable to them 鈥� rebuilding the economy and taming massive debt run-ups.
Britain鈥檚 Tony Blair accomplished this kind of seismic shift when, after Margaret Thatcher and John Major had trounced all opposition, he remade his party as New Labour.
By weeding out the far-left schemes that had made his party unelectable, he put Labour in a position to campaign on its strengths, and finally sank the Tories.
All of this is easier said than done, of course. The Tory diehards will rise up, and rubbish the party as a sell-out to wokery and liberalism.
And time is short. We might see another election in a year or two.
The good news for the Conservatives, however, is that after running the same campaign three times in a row and losing, it shouldn鈥檛 take a political savant to see the need for change.
