You know how in the The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the East gets squished by Dorothy’s falling house? Well, today the hopes and dreams of Canada’s conservative movement are in pretty much the same flattened condition as that unfortunate witch. Basically all that remains now is for a Munchkin coroner to examine what’s left of conservative aspirations and proclaim, “they’re not only merely dead, they’re really most sincerely dead.”

Time of death: April 23, when Alberta’s conservative-leaning Wildrose Party, after being swept up high on the winds of the polls, came crashing down to Earth with a disappointing thud. What made this event the equivalent of an ideological house crushing is not so much the result of the vote, but rather how that result is being interpreted. Experts are blaming the Wildrose loss on its conservative agenda. They say Wildrose was just too radical to win.

[. . .]

Of course, such theorizing is now academic. In politics, perception is reality and right now the perception is that conservatism won’t sell in Canada. That means other provincial conservative parties in places such as Ontario will move to the “centre” so as to avoid Wildrose’s fate.

The perception will also severely undermine efforts by small “c” conservative MPs in the Conservative party caucus to push the federal Tory government to the right. And so the Harper government will continue to offer Canadians more big spending, more big government and little in the way of ideological or fiscal conservatism.

If you have any doubts left there are only four more sleeps before the end of the Progressive Conservative Era in Alberta, look no further than the video and website called “I never thought I’d vote PC.”

Whether or not the PCs under Alison Redford had anything to do with this vain effort to encourage hip, edgy young people to vote for the clapped out Conservative party in a last-ditch effort to prevent a Wildrose Apocalypse, there could be no surer sign of the imminent demise of the once mighty Tory dynasty.

I mean, really, telling young voters you understand why they’d “rather gouge their eyes out than vote Conservative” in an effort to get them to vote Conservative is just … embarrassing.

[. . .]

After this pathetic excuse for a Tory campaign, the tattered remnants of the Alberta Conservatives have less dignity left than Saddam Hussein when he was hauled out of his hidey-hole in Tikrit by the soldiers of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division! This little video squib is just the final excruciating evidence before our eyes notice that the moribund Conservatives’ best-before date has passed.

I’m not kidding about the quality of the video — I couldn’t make it past the first minute before feeling too humiliated on behalf of the folks who made it and I had to shut it off. If you want to watch it in all its cringe-inducing glory, David has it embedded on his site.

It’s pretty self-evident that prime ministers reveal a lot of their own character in the content of their budgets, but it may be particularly so for Stephen Harper. The guy is an economist, after all. Messing around with graphs and figures was what he planned to do with his life, if seizing control of the country’s government didn’t work out. And since we know he’s a bit of a micro-manager, it’s probably safe to say there’s at least as much Harper as there is Jim Flaherty in the nitty gritty of the latest budget document. So let’s use it to figure out what Stephen Harper believes — really believes — when it comes to running the country.

We know what he says he believes in: smaller government, fewer bureaucrats, restrained spending, less intrusion, an end to taxpayer-financed welfare for businesses and governments. Accountability, prudence, fairness. Individual responsibility rather than the smothering embrace of the nanny state. No more currying favour with every special-interest advocacy group that captures the attention of congenitally correct.

Maybe on some plane he does honestly hold those values dear to his heart. But we all profess to believe in ideals we never quite get around to displaying. Mr. Harper has been Prime Minister for six years, and since last May has had the majority needed to have his way with legislation. Yet, as Andrew Coyne has so clearly demonstrated on more than one occasion, Mr. Harper’s actions habitually belie his words. If he were applying for membership in the True Conservative Believers Club of Canada, they’d turn him away as unqualified.

I do not doubt that conservatives are, in their heart of hearts, jugheaded buffoons who simply want to will away inconvenient truths by plugging their ears and covering their eyes when faced with cognitive dissonance. I’m confident that they argue from authority when it serves their purpose and then are muy skeptical when confronted with authority they don’t like. I’m metaphysically certain that many are repllent and repulsive and altogether awful and that they tend to love dogs and cats in the abstract more than their fellow human beings. In all this, I suspect, they are incredibly similar to liberals and, alas, libertarians and everyone else.

Nick Gillespie, “Why Don’t Conservatives Trust Scientists Like They Used To? Are They Just Anti-Evolutionary, Anti-Global Warming Jag-Offs or Could There Be Other Explanations?”, Hit and Run, 2012-03-30

I have a confession to make. I have not been following the robocalls “scandal” with all the fervency it calls for.

It’s possible my inability to get excited results from six years … oops, make it seven … of the Liberals leaping to their feet every 18 seconds to accuse the Conservatives of plotting to pervert Canadian values, undermine democracy and display their contempt for the laws of the country. There’s this old morality tale about a kid who cried “wolf” too many times, so when a real wolf showed up, no one believed it any more. Maybe that’s why I have a hard time believing this is the real wolf.

It could also be that I find the premise hard to accept. To wit: a top-level conspiracy of Conservative grandees to steal the election by disrupting the vote, sending voters to incorrect polls or discouraging them from turning up at all. This would indeed be a major scandal if it was true, but think about it: Would a nation-wide exercise in disruptive phone calls have any chance of going undetected? Does anyone really believe (outside the fetid confines of the Toronto Star) that the senior ranks of any sane government would take such an extreme risk going into an election it expected to win anyway?

I could see some local bozos getting it into their heads that robocalling the opposing candidate’s supporters might be a great idea, but your cynicism has to be a lot deeper than mine (which would take some doing) to believe anyone could get to be Prime Minister, or his national campaign chairman, and still be either dumb enough, irresponsible enough or reckless enough to sign on to such a plan

Update, 15 March: In the comments, Saskboy strongly disagrees with my lack of excitement over the robocall scandal, and he’s been covering the story on his blog (that’s one of several posts on the topic).

What I believe in are a set of principles having to do with the freedom of the individual, the usefulness but not infallibility of markets, and the legitimate but limited role of the state. There are, in brief, a few things we need government to do, based on well-established criteria on which there is a high degree of expert consensus. The task is simply to get government to stick to those things, rather than waste scarce resources on things that could be done as well or better by other means: that is, government should only do what only government can do.

As I say, these ideas are not novel, or controversial. Indeed, you would find support for them, to a greater or lesser degree, across the political spectrum.

Nevertheless, there was a party, once, that believed in these things, to a somewhat greater extent than the other parties. That party called itself conservative, whether with a small or a large C, so I suppose you could call the things it believed conservatism. But you are no longer that party.

For example, that party favoured balanced budgets. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how your decision to add $150-billion to the national debt saved the economy.

That party favoured cutting or at least controlling spending, after the massive spree of the Liberals’ last years. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how you have increased spending by 7% per year — $37-billion in one year!

That party favoured a simpler, flatter tax system, that left people free to decide how to spend, save or invest their money for themselves. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of the many gimmicks and gew-gaws with which you have festooned the tax code.

That party favoured abolishing corporate welfare. But you are not that party. In fact you boast of the handouts you make, often accompanied by ministers or indeed MPs bearing outsized novelty cheques. In some cases, you even put the Conservative logo on them.

The story of the last decade is how the rock-ribbed small-c conservatives of the old Reform Party were tamed, neutered, and blinkered into becoming a blue-painted Liberal Party. It worked, in the sense of getting their hands on the levers of power, but their souls were tainted, corrupted, and eventually disposed of in the process.

The people who want to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air are not assuaged or persuaded by his apology over the weekend. They say he was not sincere: He only apologized, for calling a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute,” because of pressure from advertisers.

Well, of course he wasn’t sincere. And of course he was only apologizing to pacify advertisers — who were getting pressured to pressure Limbaugh by these very critics. Oh, there might have been a political calculation, too, that he’d gone too far for the good of his ratings or his celebrityhood. But any apology induced in these circumstances is almost by definition insincere. You can’t demand a public recantation and then expect sincerity along with the humble pie. If they wanted a sincere apology, Limbaugh’s critics would have had to defend his right to make these offensive remarks, and then attempt to change his mind using nothing but sweet reason. Go ahead and try.

[. . .]

Of course, the insincerity is on both sides. The pursuers all pretend to be horrified and “saddened” by this unexpected turn of events. In fact, they are delighted. Why not? Their opponent has committed the cardinal political sin: a gaffe.

A gaffe, as someone once said, is when a politician tells the truth. This is a bit imprecise. The term “politician” covers any political actor, certainly including Rush. And the troublesome statement needn’t be the truth, as it certainly wasn’t in this case: more like “the truth about what he or she is really thinking.” The typical gaffe is what they used to call a “Freudian slip.” But, with all due respect to Freud, why should something a politician says by accident — and soon wishes he or she never said, whether true or not — automatically be taken as a better sign of his or her real thinking than something he or she says on purpose?

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

What’s happened to my country? I went away for a couple of weeks and all hell broke loose. I came back to find that someone named Poutine stole the last election. At first I thought this was a typo, that they meant Putin. But no. It turns out that Russia is a shining beacon of democracy compared to Canada. Apparently, our country has been hijacked by “the most comprehensive electoral fraud in our nation’s history” (Pat Martin, NDP critic). Voter suppression — lying, cheating and general chicanery — has driven us into “uncharted waters” (Bob Rae, Liberal Leader).

I certainly don’t wish to make light of voter fraud. But this fraud seems to have been engineered by the Keystone Kops. Not a single voter claims to have been prevented from voting. No ballot boxes appear to have been stuffed. Nobody was fraudulently elected. There weren’t even any hanging chads. Elections Canada says 31,000 Canadians have complained, but the vast majority of these complaints (“somebody called me at 10 p.m.”) seem trivial.

The dirty trickster at the heart of this evil scheme turns out to be someone with the nom de plume of Pierre Poutine (real identity unknown). Mr. Poutine and his henchmen were not personally directed by Stephen Harper but are widely thought to have been channelling him. In Guelph, Ont., they engineered a bunch of robo-calls that directed people to show up at non-existent voting stations. This tactic was evidently intended to discourage people who didn’t support the Conservatives from voting. It was so effective that the Liberal candidate won by a margin of 11 per cent.

I agree with the point Andrew Coyne made in these pages earlier, that the Conservatives (I’m paraphrasing) have situated themselves to fit these types of accusations. Their browbeating style and defensive righteousness to almost every challenge, or serious question, is a hallmark. That attitude offers them little shield when, as on occasion they must be, they are ill-done by. They play tough and hard and close to the boards, and when a story that fits that broad category, like robocalls, is pushed upon them, it seems to fit. In other words, their brittle style has a cost.

The headlines detailing opposition outrage over robocalls is just the latest instalment of the Conservatives losing all control of what might be called their agenda. They blundered Old Age Security. On Internet surveillance, they surely blundered the “with us or the child pornographers” messaging. And now they’ve been hauled off whatever road they might want to be on by a “scandal” from an election nine months ago. Since the House opened, it’s been one mess after another.

Naturally, the opposition parties are at some advantage in all of this, but not quite as much as they might figure. No one is going to look back on the last week, or the last month, and remember big speeches on the big questions — either energy policy, the country’s fiscal health, or foreign affairs. Instead, it’s been the usual rattle of stones in a tin can that passes for Question Period.

If you want to hear from someone who unmistakably understands the profound impact of America’s founding and believes there is still time for its citizens to take hold of its bureaucratic laden government and return it back to the will of it’s founding, then you must hear this speech from Daniel Hannan. You’ll appreciate America all the more afterwards, I assure you.

H/T to John Ward for the link.