It has, in recent days, become fashionable in some circles to blame Conservative MP’s such as Cheryl Gallant, Randy White, and Scott Reid for the failure of the Conservative Party to form government in the recent General Election. “If only,” the theory goes, “they’d kept their mouths shut about social issues, the Liberals wouldn’t have scared away moderate voters in Ontario and we’d have won.” Frankly, I think that’s doubtful. If those three were so repellent to voters, they wouldn’t have re-elected all three of them by overwhelming margins. Randy White managed to win 61.3% of the vote in a riding where immigrants make up a quarter of all residents, hardly what the Eastern Establishment would consider ideal Conservative ground. Cheryl Gallant won in a riding which had, previous to her election in 2000, remained Liberal even through the debacle of 1984, when the Liberals were reduced to just forty seats across the entire nation. And she won with 55% of the vote, running twenty-four points ahead of the party in Ontario as a whole. Frankly, there’s some evidence to suggest that the problem with the Conservative campaign wasn’t that it failed to drive people like Randy White and Cheryl Gallant away, but rather that it failed to embrace them and the formula which brought them victory.

Dick Morris, who skilfully managed President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, later explained how, in designing the themes for that campaign, he looked for what he called “60% issues” for Clinton to push. These issues, which polls showed that more than 60% of the public agreed with Clinton on, were then deliberately pushed to the front of the campaign. Typically they were micro-issues: such as violence on television or volunteer service. They were, in short, the sort of things which wouldn’t really upset anyone and were hard for Republican challenger Bob Dole to oppose or counter. It is my opinion that this is the sort of campaign that the Conservatives sought to run nationally: a campaign which would work to convince the public that the Conservative Party was not, as the Liberals would surely charge, “extreme” and could be trusted. The problem with this is that the resultant campaign left the public with very little idea of what the Conservatives would actually do and, therefore, left them extremely vulnerable to Liberal charges of a “hidden agenda.” In this sense, and this sense alone, did Randy White and the others harm the campaign in that, when the higher-ups in the campaign sought to muzzle them, they confirmed in the public eye the impression that there was a hidden undercurrent of something beneath vacuous Conservative promises of more money for public health.

What, then, would have been the solution? Simple: embrace social conservatism and try to sell it directly to the public. While some may say to that, “well, Canada isn’t a socially conservative country,” I’d simply point out that it doesn’t have to be in order to elect a socially conservative government.

As a thought experiment, let us suppose that roughly 40% of the Canadian population might be described as socially conservative and 60% as socially liberal. Well, if one assumes that the Conservatives have the social conservative side of things essentially to themselves, while the social liberals in the country are divided amongst the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc, and now the Greens, it becomes entirely clear to me that the Conservatives ought to and, indeed, must articulate a socially conservative position if they are ever to have a shot at forming a government. The road to 24 Sussex doesn’t depend upon a Conservative Party whose platform calls for implementing Liberal Party policy in a less-corrupt fashion then the Liberals; it depends upon a Conservative Party which is capable of inspiring the people with an alternative vision of Canada.

Remember, in Canada, all you need to form a majority government is about 40% of the vote. But, since only about 60% of the people actually bother to vote, you really only need the support of about 24% of the people to win 40% of the votes and, potentially, 100% of the power. Once you have the allegiance of that quarter of adults, you pretty much don’t have to care about or listen to anything which anyone else says which, upon the whole, ought to be considered a good thing, seeing as neither the Liberals nor the NDP have ever had a single good idea in the entire history of either party.

Some may say, “Well, Reform and the Alliance tried to do that and failed.” The answer to that is this: no, they didn’t. Once campaign time rolled around, Reform in 1997 and the Alliance in 2000 promptly ran away from or hid most of the Conservative positions they held (the best social conservatives ever got were promises of referendums on various issues) and tried to tell everyone how, really, they were just as far to the left as the Liberals.

We don’t want 60% issues designed to inspire warm feelings. The Liberals already cornered the market on “Canadian values” a long, long time ago. What we need are “40% issues”, the sort of issues which would motivate social conservatives to crawl over broken glass to vote for the right. Some might say that such a campaign and strategy would be “divisive”, and so it would be. But why should that bother any of us? The left slimes us in one dirty campaign after another and we’re still sitting back and worrying about hurting the feelings of our enemies? To hell with them all.

See, even though we’re outnumbered among the population as a whole, social conservatives have one great advantage. Think about it for a second. When you picture a “social conservative”, who do you picture? I see a woman like Elise Wayne or a man like Stockwell Day. Middle aged, gainfully employed, and generally reliable. When I think of a social liberal, I think of a twenty-one year old community college student reading the latest issue of Maxim Magazine in a dilapidated basement somewhere. Which of the two is more likely to vote if properly motivated? The ranks of the social left are greatly inflated by a vast collection of largely useless debris who, in many ways, are more of a liability than anything else.

Instead of dissembling about gay marriage, Stephen Harper should have said something like this:
“The Conservative Party supports the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. If elected, we will withdraw the Liberals’ reference to the Supreme Court on the issue and pass a new law affirming the traditional definition. We hope that the Supreme Court will respect the independence of Parliament and the democratically-expressed wishes of the Canadian people. However, if they do not do so, we will be left with no choice but to use the Notwithstanding Clause in this matter.”

This would have been a brilliant strategic move, not only because it would have solidified support among social conservatives, but also because it would have divided the Liberal Party between supporters and opponents of gay marriage. Given the divisions within that party the Liberals, when faced with such an unequivocal statement, would be left with little choice but to make a series of vague pronouncements on the subject, leaving a major opening for the NDP on the left. I doubt if it would have cost the Conservatives more than a handful of the votes they won, as the Liberals fear campaign pretty much convinced everyone who could be convinced that a Harper-led government would do just that anyways.

Similarly, the Conservative campaign should have made the reinstitution of Capital Punishment a central theme in the campaign. The death penalty, we’d explain, would only be used for the worst offenders: people like Clifford Olsen and Paul Bernardo, but it would be used. Hard-core death penalty opponents were never going to vote Conservative in any case, and making such an issue central to the debate would cast the other parties in the uncomfortable position of being the defenders of Robert Pickton’s right to life.

Law and Order, in fact, should have been a central part of the campaign. Take a look at Chuck Cadman, the only MP elected as an Independent. What cause is he primarily identified with? In one word: justice. Short of becoming an advocate of public be-handings for shoplifters, it’s pretty much impossible to be too tough on crime.

For example, in the week before the election, we began to hear (though not on the campaign trail) the story of Martin Fraser, a thirty-one year old criminal who has already been convicted of sixty offences, including six rapes, who once claimed his ambition is to become North America’s greatest serial killer, who has been declared an “incurable psychopath” and who, by the way, is about to be released from prison despite the fact that his release is opposed by his own mother and the fact that the local Chief of Police is so certain he’ll reoffend that he’s assigning police offices to watch him around the clock. Why the Conservatives failed to exploit this case (and others like it) is simply beyond me. If I were in the Conservative war room, I’d immediately have had a television ad cut (and rushed to air) that went something like this:

STEPHEN HARPER: The Liberals are at it again, trying to convince the Canadian people that I and the new Conservatives are too “scary” to be trusted with power. Well, I’ll tell you what’s really scary.

CUT TO: Picture of Martin Fraser

STEPHEN HARPER: This is Martin Fraser. He’s thirty-one years old and, at this point in his life, has already been convicted of more than sixty crimes, including six rapes.

CUT TO: List of Fraser’s crimes scroll down a black screen quickly.

STEPHEN HARPER: The prison doctor calls him in “incurable psychopath” and he says that his ambition in life is to become the greatest serial killer in the history of North America. Even his own mother says he belongs in jail. And, you know what? Our Liberal justice system is about to put him back on the streets to threaten our communities and children. That’s what’s really scary in this country, not Conservative tax cuts for families or the rebuilding of our armed forces, but Liberal justice.

CUT TO: Text which reads “On June 28th, protect your family: Vote Conservative.”

Frankly, there were a few other good issues which popped up near election time which the Conservatives should have run with and didn’t, probably out of fear of offending “moderate” voters. For example, a few weeks before the election, it was revealed that Canada is allowing people to obtain refugee status in this country simply on the grounds that they are homosexual and homosexuality is not as favored in their country as in this one. Many of these people were infected with HIV but, because they entered as refugees, they were allowed to bypass our laws against people with AIDS immigrating to this country. In other words, we let in foreign homosexuals to serve as a one or two decade-long drain upon our already-strained medical system.

This is not the hour for retreat, if we have any chance at winning. Either we must stand on principle, and hope for rewards, or it is time to give up the ghost and move on. The coming months will tell.