Quotulatiousness

October 18, 2013

Republicans and conservatives

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

In The Atlantic, Molly Ball looks at the split between the GOP establishment and the increasingly angry conservative base:

On his radio show recently, Glenn Beck urged his listeners to “defund the GOP.” Sarah Palin has threatened to leave the Republican Party; Rush Limbaugh calls it “irrelevant.” The Senate Conservatives Fund has targeted mainly incumbent Republican senators for defeat. Erick Erickson, one of the right’s most prominent commentators, wonders if what’s coming is “a real third party movement that will fully divide the Republican Party.”

Conservatives have declared war on the GOP.

Tired of feeling taken for granted by a party that alternately panders to them and sells them down the river, in their view, Tea Partiers and others on the right are in revolt. The Republican Party itself is increasingly the focus of their anger, particularly after Wednesday’s deal to reopen the government, which many on the right opposed. Now, many are threatening to take their business elsewhere.

“Conservatives are either going to split [from the GOP] or stay home,” Erickson, the influential editor of RedState.com and a Fox News contributor, told me. “They’ll first expend energy in primaries, but if unsuccessful, they’ll bolt.”

Erickson, a former Republican elected official in Georgia, stressed that he wasn’t advocating such a split, only foreseeing it. “I think the GOP is already splitting,” he said, with grassroots activists feeling “played” by elected officials’ unfulfilled promises to defeat Obamacare.

The calls for a split mark a new, more acrimonious chapter in the long-simmering conflict between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. Steve Deace, an Iowa-based talk-radio host, said his audience has never been angrier. “They’re tired of electing a bunch of Republicans who care more about what the media thinks about them than what the people who elected them think,” he told me. “Why do I care whether John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House? Why do I care whether Harry Reid or ‘Ditch’ McConnell is the Senate majority leader? What changes? Nothing changes.”

Of course, most of this is froth and fuming — they won’t split the party or form a new one. Why is that? It’s because the GOP and the Democrats have got the system rigged so that only those two parties ever have a real chance at getting candidates elected to state or federal office. In some states, third parties have to petition for ballot access every election for every individual candidate. This doesn’t sound too unreasonable, except the threshold for gathering signatures is incredibly high in many cases (or time-limited, or rigged in other ways), so that without an active, fully staffed party organization only the top few positions can be realistically contested. Only GOP and Democratic candidates are included in polls, debates, and other electoral events covered by the media, so as little “oxygen” as possible is given to outsiders, independents, and third party candidates. Stories like this recent one in Reason happen just about every year in most states.

Having done their part to make the existing duopoly the only game in town, the conservative faction of the Republican party may gripe all they want, but they’re not seriously going anywhere.

October 17, 2013

The internal struggle for the Republican party

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Drew M. explains why the struggle within the GOP won’t be over quickly:

Part of the on-going GOP vs. “Tea Party” civil war is an insistence by the GOP that the tea party needs to focus more on Democrats than conservative “purity tests” […].

This illustrates one of the big problems in the current battle, Republicans still don’t get the nature of the insurgency movement. The “tea party” isn’t about going after Democrats, that’s the job of the GOP, conservatives are increasingly focused on policing the GOP.

For too long the GOP has wooed conservatives by talking tough but acting very moderate when elected. I think you can trace it back to George H.W. Bush breaking his “no new taxes” pledge. Conservatives rallied around the elder Bush and put aside their distrust and dislike of him mostly out of respect for Ronald Reagan only to find out he was exactly who he thought they were.

Last night on the podcast we talked about how a lot of these differences were papered over during George W. Bush’s tenure. I argued to a large extent that was a result of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. I said during the 2004 elections that had it not been for national security I would have wanted W. to face a primary challenge from the right and I think he might have been.

Conservative voters are feeling neglected betrayed and unappreciated by the GOP (and I think for good reason). Instead of telling conservatives to suck it up and fight Democrats, Republicans are going to have to treat conservatives as voters they have to woo. Maybe instead of telling conservatives to shut up and fight Democrats they should spend sometime telling conservatives what the GOP has done for them (and, “but the Democrats really suck” isn’t good enough). If the GOP has been so good for conservatives (and I mean small government conservatives here), it shouldn’t be hard to come up with a long list of positive achievements. Of course, there will be an alternative and likely longer list of GOP actions against small government conservative interests.

August 12, 2013

Replacing Tim Hudak

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Richard Anderson looks at the racing form to try to determine just who the Ontario Progressive Conservatives might look to as a replacement for current leader Tim Hudak. The pickings appear to be rather slim:

Christine Elliot — A sometime leadership candidate and long-time wife of Jim Flaherty, the federal minister of finance. Considered too moderate by the red meaters and too old by everyone else. About as close to an establishment candidate as you’ll get in any potential leadership race.

Randy Hillier — The party’s designated “crazy libertarian.” It would be nice to have a premier who uses the word “freedom” without it getting stuck in his throat. It ain’t happening. At 55 he’s getting into the “old range” in the political world. His record of activism would also be an issue. Leftists can have all sorts of activist skeletons in their closet. Right wingers can’t. Even if that activism was merely to defend their own property.

Frank Klees — While certainly the most plausible leadership candidate, having the required polish and gravitas, his 62 years and record as an ex-Harris cabinet minister are huge liabilities. His previous leadership bids, and odd attempt to become speaker in 2011, have likely generated a fair amount of bad blood in the Tory fold.

Lisa Macleod — Young, feisty and reasonably photogenic. Not too well known outside political circles, she could probably hold her own in a debate with Andrea Horwath. She might also be able to hold the slippery Kathleen Wynne to account. Downside: She sometimes comes across as shrill and is, how to put this delicately, a tad overweight. I know that’s a stupid thing to say, but unfortunately larger women are considered slovenly in our culture. There is also, of course, a double standard. An equally well insulated man would probably curry somewhat less disfavour. Visuals matter in politics, even when their stupid.

Jim Wilson — A Mike Harris-era retread, it’s likely that the unions recall his efforts as Health Minister in the mid-1990s. It’s also likely that they recall those efforts in an extremely negative light. The last of the relatively senior ex-Harris ministers in the legislature, now that Elizabeth Witmer is comfortable ensconced over at WSIB, Wilson would likely be dismissed as a relic..

While Hillier would be a fascinating choice as replacement leader, I doubt he has much support in caucus. Elliot is my local MPP, but I don’t know how her chances stack up either. The others are pretty much unknown to me. Anyone whose political career includes any kind of association with former Premier Mike Harris is automatically a media pet-hate. The Toronto Star and other media outlets have spent a lot of time and energy painting the Harris years as our local experience of brutal dictatorship, famine, plagues of locusts, and all the horrors of Revelations.

August 10, 2013

CBC notices social conservative group is critical of the government

Filed under: Africa, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

This is probably the most attention the CBC has paid to REAL Women of Canada since … well, ever:

REAL Women of Canada, a privately funded socially conservative group, says Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is imposing his own views on Uganda, Kenya and Russia when he criticizes those countries for passing legislation targeting homosexuals.

The group, which describes itself as a “pro-family conservative women’s movement,” issued a press release Wednesday decrying what it called Baird’s “abuse of office” and his awarding of a $200,000 grant to “special interest groups” in Uganda and Kenya “to further his own perspective on homosexuality.”

REAL Women also lambasted Baird for admitting he worked extensively behind the scenes to persuade Russia not to pass laws restricting foreign adoption of Russian children by gay couples and cracking down on gay rights activism to control the spread of “homosexual propaganda.”

Finally, the press release states, “Mr. Baird’s actions are destructive to the conservative base in Canada and causing collateral damage to his party.”

It’s not often that the CBC can find this kind of anti-Harper criticism coming from a group they would identify as being “core” Harper supporters, so it’s not surprising they give it the full treatment it really doesn’t deserve.

H/T to Brendan McKenna for the link.

August 8, 2013

Canadian think-tanks

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

An interesting article in Forbes charts the rise of Canada’s distinctive collection of think-tanks:

Think Tanks in Canada have been developing policy analyses and advocating market oriented solutions for decades. Some of the oldest think tanks and advocacy groups, such as the C.D. Howe Institute, founded in 1958, and the National Citizens Coalition, NCC, founded in 1974, are still active. The idea for NCC developed from the success of newspaper advertorials.

The first one published by Colin M. Brown in 1967 pointed out that despite not being engaged in the Vietnam War, Canada’s federal government spending in the early 1960’s rose at a faster rate than government spending in the U.S. Canadian civil society took notice and reacted. The Fraser Institute was founded in Vancouver, B.C. in 1974, and its success and generosity in sharing its expertise led to a gradual but almost steady investment in think tanks across the country. Lest we forget, Canada is a big place. It is the second largest country in the world. The longest distance from east to west is 5,514 km — similar to the distance from New York City to London, or from New York City to Lima, Peru. Canada has six separate time zones and its provinces have considerable cultural and political diversity which call for a multiplicity of regional think tanks and policy efforts.

The “2012 Global Go To Report” devotes a section of its think tank rankings to institutes in Canada and Mexico. A growing number of Canadian free-market think tanks are appearing among the top.

Fraser Institute takes the lead. It received more mentions (10) than any other Canadian think tank and ranked first in Canada and 25th in the world. It is well known for its motto: “If It Matters, Measure It.” Many of its products, like the “Tax Freedom Day” and its economic freedom indices, have been replicated across the globe. Think tanks all over the world look at Fraser’s research as a guide in developing their own programs.

Brian Lee Crowley, the co-author of The Canadian Century, founded the Ottawa-based Macdonald Laurier Institute in 2010. It ranked third in the world in the category of best young institute. As it hit the ground running with great policy products, it also managed to rank ahead of other older think tanks, including the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) in Nova Scotia, founded in 1994. Crowley was also the founding president of AIMS. AIMS itself an organization that produces interesting work on market reforms in Canada’s maritime provinces — a part of the country that typically prefers big government as opposed to market-oriented solutions.

The Montreal Economic Institute deserves special mention for working in one of the most challenging cultural environments. It publishes in French and English, and is the only think tank in Canada to focus its efforts entirely on Quebec. The institute was founded in 1985 but became consolidated when Michel Kelly-Gagnon, a talented intellectual entrepreneur, became its leader in 1999 and restructured the organization. Kelly-Gagnon’s expertise is in high demand also outside Canada, and his team has produced tremendous materials advocating specifically for reforms to government-controlled health care.

July 10, 2013

“Neocon” as an all-purpose term of abuse

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:02

May 24, 2013

Is this Stephen Harper’s tipping point?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

Paul Wells talks about the terrible week Stephen Harper has had:

A government is like a shark. If it stops swimming, it drowns. Harper has lasted 11 years as a party leader for two reasons: He was never alone and he had a plan. Indeed, it’s the plan that has often helped keep him from being alone, because his are a loner’s instincts. He reached out to the Progressive Conservatives in 2003 after battling them for 16 years because he knew his Canadian Alliance was too slim a platform for a man who aspired to govern. He made serious concessions to Quebec nationalism after mistrusting it all his life. After he united the Conservative party, he reached outside its bounds to attract Liberal MPs — David Emerson, Wajid Khan — and then, through Jason Kenney’s ethnic-outreach efforts, he took away an ever-growing bite of the Liberal voter base.

At every moment, he could afford such bold moves because he was secure in his leadership of the Canadian conservative movement. Harper’s critics tend to describe him as a loner, a brain in a jar created by mad scientists toiling in underground laboratories at the University of Calgary. But in fact he has expressed a broad cultural conservatism in the land. Millions of Canadians have been happy he is their Prime Minister. Knowing he had a base, he could build beyond it through decisive action.

And now? He is increasingly alone and isolated. Look across the country, across the border, around the world, and even within his own caucus.

[. . .]

In private conversations with reporters, Conservatives were calling for Harper to provide far more detail about the Duffy-Wright deal than he did on Tuesday. He let them down, as he has often done in this drama. Duffy was Harper’s choice for Senate. Wright was Harper’s chief of staff, working under Harper’s nose. When their plot was revealed, Harper’s response was to make a great show of reminding his MPs to keep their own noses clean. It’s like a neighbourhood kid who sends a baseball through your living-room window and then comes over to lecture you on your clumsiness.

All of this would matter less — to Conservatives, to the country — if it felt like a distraction from an “active and important agenda.” Of course, some of this government’s activity is well-known and broadly popular among Conservatives. Since the 2011 election, Harper has shut down the Health Council of Canada, the National Council of Welfare, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Rights and Democracy, the First Nations Statistical Institute and the National Council of Visible Minorities. The Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Council for Canadian Unity and the Canadian Council on Learning were shut down a little earlier. The end of the mandatory long-form census was only the beginning of sharp cuts at Statistics Canada.

May 12, 2013

Modernizing the “rules for radicals”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

James Delingpole suggests that the Saul Alinsky playbook needs a bit of updating for the current radicals (that is, not the broadly left-wing radicals of Alinsky’s day):

Why do we need some new rules? Because the old ones were written in the 70s by a Marxist community organiser called Saul Alinsky. He had some useful ideas, many of which we can steal or adapt. But some of them are ill-expressed or incoherent. Eg Rule 10 “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” I think he could have omitted that one, don’t you, without jeopardising his place in history as a great revolutionary thinker?

Who are we? Not the same as the radicals of Alinsky’s generation, that’s for sure. Alinsky’s radicals were broadly on the left: Che admirers; Black Panthers; communist revolutionaries; hippies; communitarians; environmentalists; radical feminists. The hegemony which they were trying to destroy was, very loosely, a conservative one.

Today, though, the positions have reversed. We new radicals are broadly — but not exclusively — of the right, not the left. Many of us would describe ourselves as conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, UKIPers, Tea Partiers. Revolutionaries, yes, but in the traditions of Burke, Wilkes, Cobbett, and, indeed, the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers, rather than of Marx and Lenin. Some of us might not even think of ourselves as righties, but that’s OK, it’s the direction of travel that matters not the labelling.

We’re against: arbitrary authority; big government; high taxes; overregulation; corporatism; cosy stitch ups between the banksters, the lawyers and the political class; the EU; the UN; identity politics; eco-fascists; elf-n-safety; wind turbines; quantitative easing…

We’re for: empiricism; sound money; free markets; liberty; small government; low taxes; deregulation; cheap energy; rigour; meritocracy; integrity; equality of opportunity, perhaps, but most definitely not equality of outcome.

We’re on the right side of a culture war which currently we’re losing. Why are we losing? Not because we’re bad people. Not because we don’t have all the truth, all the logic, all the arguments on our side. We’re losing because, thanks to Alinsky, the enemy has a forty-year head start on us. They’ve got the techniques. All we’ve got is the moral high ground — except, the way Alinsky’s acolytes have brilliantly spun it, we don’t get to enjoy the benefits even of that.

April 30, 2013

Tory (and media) fear of UKIP can be gauged by the level of abuse directed at them

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

Patrick Hayes on the vitriol being sent UKIP’s way by the Conservatives and by the mainstream media:

Nutters. Nutcases. Loonies. Morons. Crackpots. Cuckoos. Oddballs. Fruitflies. Fruitloops. Fruitcakes. When it comes to slang used to suggest that members of the right-wing libertarian UK Independence Party (UKIP) are mentally ill, mainstream politicians and the media have lobbed the entire urban dictionary at them.

UKIP’s latest diagnosis came at the weekend from polo-necked Conservative minister Ken Clarke. In light of the upcoming local elections, Clarke dismissed UKIP as a ‘collection of clowns’, full of ‘waifs and strays’ not sufficiently ‘sensible’ to become local councillors. His comments echoed UK prime minister David Cameron’s oft-quoted remarks from 2006 when he dismissed UKIP as a bunch of ‘fruit cakes and loonies and closet racists’. Cameron has refused to retract these comments, adding earlier this year that he still thought UKIP was full of ‘pretty odd people’.

Almost since its launch in 1993, politicians have chosen to paint UKIP as the successor to the Monster Raving Loony Party, full of — as Michael Howard, Cameron’s predecessor as Tory leader, put it — ‘cranks, gadflies and extremists’. The message is clear: on no account should UKIP be taken seriously as a political force. It deserves only ridicule. After all, how could any party that calls for the abolition of the smoking ban, or for the UK to leave the EU, be considered to be of sound mind? If you support UKIP, you need your head examined.

April 29, 2013

Boris: Don’t panic about UKIP eating our lunches … there’ll be plenty of time for that later

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:08

London mayor Boris Johnson tries to find the positive side of the rise of UKIP and the resulting uncertain election fortunes of his Conservative brethren:

We Tories look at [UKIP leader Nigel Farage] — with his pint and cigar and sense of humour — and we instinctively recognise someone who is fundamentally indistinguishable from us. He’s a blooming Conservative, for heaven’s sake; and yet he’s in our constituencies, wooing our audiences, nicking our votes, and threatening to put our councillors out of office. We feel the panic of a man confronted by his Doppelgänger. Omigaaaad, we say to ourselves: they’re stealing our schtick! And we are tempted to do a Nicolas Cage — to overreact, to freak out, to denounce them all as frauds or worse. I think there may have been a few ill-advised insults flying around in the past couple of days.

Well, I would humbly submit that there are better ways of tackling the Ukip problem, if indeed it is really a problem at all. The rise of Farage and Ukip tells us some interesting and important things about what the electorate wants — and it is by no means bad news for the Conservatives. It tells us that the voters are fed up with over-regulation of all kinds, and especially from Brussels. Well, who is going to offer a referendum on the EU? Only the Conservatives — and the trouble with voting Ukip is that it is likely to produce the exact opposite: another Labour government and another five years of spineless and unexamined servitude to the EU.

[. . .]

Rather than bashing Ukip, I reckon Tories should be comforted by their rise — because the real story is surely that these voters are not turning to the one party that is meant to be providing the official opposition. The rise of Ukip confirms a) that a Tory approach is broadly popular and b) that in the middle of a parliament, after long years of recession, and with growth more or less flat, the Labour Party is going precisely nowhere.

You’ve got to admire the quality of his whistling, don’t you?

April 28, 2013

Reason.tv: Why the GOP Should Embrace Science

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

“What has always alleviated our scarcity? What has always alleviated our environmental problems? Technology. What breeds technological dynamism? Economic success,” explains Joshua Jacobs, co-founder of the Conservative Future Project, a new pro-science, pro-technology organization that’s trying to get the Republican Party to embrace an open-ended future filled with driverless cars, stem-cell research, and private space exploration.

If that sounds like a tall order for a party whose leading presidential candidates in 2012 waffled on whether they believed in evolution, you’re right. But Jacobs argues forcefully that the GOP is no less anti-science than the Democrats and actually has a long history of pushing scientific and technological innovation.

Nick Gillespie sat down with Jacobs in Reason‘s D.C. studio to talk about how conservatives might stop standing athwart history yelling stop and march boldly into the future.

The “first sin of conservatism”

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:18

In yesterday’s Goldberg File email, Jonah Goldberg talked about making a speech at Washington College the night before:

During the Q&A a very attractive girl who’d spent much of my talk rolling her eyes and chatting with her friend, asked me a pretty typical question. She asked, more or less: How can you expect the Republicans to have a future if you go around antagonizing liberals, who are half the country, the way you did tonight?

I responded with a few points. First, I did my “Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield.” Then I did “dog pointing at water fowl.” I followed up with “Billy Hayes furiously pointing at Rifki in Midnight Express.” And I closed with the crowd pleaser “Bill Clinton pointing out his nightly selections from the intern pens.”

Once I was done with my interpretive dance “points,” I adjusted my form fitting unitard and made some verbal ones.

I explained that I was not there as a Republican and that I don’t speak for the Republican party. The GOP is simply the more conservative of the two political parties and as such it gets my vote. I speak for myself, for conservatism as I understand it, and — it should go without saying — the riders of Rohan.

Second, liberals — as in people who actually call themselves liberals — make up only about 20 percent of the electorate, while people who self-identify as conservatives make up 40 percent of the country. So even if I was speaking for Republicans, the idea that the key to Republican success lies in avoiding antagonizing liberals is just plain weird. Besides, liberals have had a great run of late antagonizing conservatives. Shouldn’t that mean liberals are doomed?

I made a few other (verbal) points. Deep Space Nine, much like Brussels sprouts and Swiss armed neutrality, is underrated, etc. But here’s the interesting part (“We’ll be the judge of that,” — The Couch). A central theme of my speech was that conservatives should spend less time demonizing liberals and more time trying to understand why so many people find the liberal message of “community” appealing.

I suggested that maybe what she took for my “antagonizing” could more plausibly be described as me offering “hard truths” she didn’t like hearing. This made her quite angry. One might even say it antagonized her. And that’s fair enough. No one likes being told that their anger stems not from being wrongly insulted but from being rightly told that they’re wrong (“Gimme a second; I’m still trying to follow that” — The Couch).

Still, I find this representative of a lot of campus liberals. They seem to think that the first sin of conservatism is disagreeing with liberals, as if it is simply mean-spirited to think liberals are wrong.

Facts, Horrible Facts

Second perhaps only to the glories of women’s prison movies, this was one of the earliest themes of the G-File, going back to the ancient origins of National Review Online, when I would personally tattoo this “news”letter on the back of a dwarf and have him run to each reader and take his shirt off. It was really inefficient.

What was I talking about? Oh right, the “meanness” of disagreement. Without getting into the weeds of the immigration or gun-control debates, there’s a certain liberal attitude that disagreement is just nasty. If you point out that background checks or “assault weapon” bans won’t work, the response is anger and frustration that you just don’t get it.

That’s because, as Emerson once said, “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” Whenever I talk to liberal college kids, I think of this line, because when I disagree with them it hurts their feelings (I would say their tears are delicious, but even I recoil at the image of me running out into the audience and licking the cheeks of weepy college kids).

April 3, 2013

QotD: Conservatives and Progressives

Filed under: Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 1924-04-19

March 10, 2013

British Tories float the notion of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

It’s not a declared aim — yet — but when a senior government minister even mentions this as an option, you have to assume it’s being discussed:

The Conservatives would consider leaving the European Convention on Human Rights if they won the 2015 election, the home secretary has said.

Theresa May told an event organised by the ConservativeHome site the party would also scrap the Human Rights Act.

She said it restricted the UK’s ability “to act in the national interest”.

A private poll by ex-party treasurer Lord Ashcroft, meanwhile, suggested the party would lose 93 marginal seats to Labour if the election was held now.

The BBC understands Mrs May was putting forward ideas for the next Conservative manifesto, and such a move was not current government policy.

[. . .]

Mrs May told the gathering she was sceptical whether the convention limited human rights abuses in other countries and suggested it restricted Britain’s ability to act in its own interests.

“When Strasbourg constantly moves the goalposts and prevents the deportation of dangerous men like Abu Qatada, we have to ask ourselves, to what end are we signatories to the convention?” she said.

“Are we really limiting human rights abuses in other countries? I’m sceptical.”

She said that “by 2015, we’ll need a plan for dealing with the European Court of Human Rights”.

“And yes, I want to be clear that all options — including leaving the convention altogether — should be on the table.”

November 10, 2012

“We’re here, we’re queer, and that shouldn’t really matter”

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:51

A profile of Conservative activist Roy Eappen:

You’re not really gay.

That’s a phrase that Roy Eappen hears quite a bit.

“I’m a gay Tory. That’s apparently not acceptable,” he says between giggles. “I find it kind of funny.”

Eappen is a bit of a curious case. Indian by birth, he now lives in Quebec, where he splits his time between advocating for a new centre-right consensus in the province, stumping for the federal Conservatives and hobnobbing with Republican heavyweights down south. A quick Google search will turn up pictures of Eappen alongside George W Bush, Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan.

But he’s becoming increasingly known for his parties.

Recently, Eappen was in Tampa for the Republican National Convention, where he helped organize for conservative gay group GOProud. Before that, he started the Fabulous Blue Tent party for the Conservative convention here in Canada. “It’s a funny little secret that Tory parties all over the world are full of gay people,” he says.

Eappen’s recent 800-person party in Ottawa was met with accolades and positive reviews from partygoers and pundits. It attracted Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and MP Rick Dykstra, as well as staffers from all parties. Even Laureen Harper was supposed to come, but she couldn’t make it.

He laughs again. “She’s an Evangelical Christian, and she’s cool with us.”

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