This is not a message of defeatism, whatever the title might be. I do not believe, unlike some, that we are certain to lose this election no matter what. I believe that voters in Quebec and Ontario are persuadable. But I also firmly believe that the polls are correct and that, as of this moment, we are losing this election – that we are probably even losing momentum – and that, without a drastic course correction, we are certain to lose this election in almost exactly the same fashion we lost in 2000 and 2004.

The fundamental problem is an obvious, yet seemingly unrecognized one: in a game where victory depends upon taking and holding ground, a faction in a minority position cannot triumph through a defensive strategy. The Tories cautious make-no-mistakes-don’t-say-anything approach would excellent if we were sitting on a twenty point lead but for a party which is, at a minimum, ten points off of where it needs to be it is self-defeating, if not downright suicidal.

When we play the defensive and adopt crypto-Liberal positions on the issues, we do two things. First, we make the election about issues which are favorable to the left. Second, we feed into the idea that we have a “hidden agenda” because a cynical public, seeing the degree to which our message is at odds with our image assume that we are lying (as, indeed, I suppose most ardent Conservatives hope that we are). We gain ourselves no advantage in essentially adopting the Liberal Party’s view of the world (that the Charter is sacrosanct, that private health care is evil, that child care should be subsidized by state action).

It seems to me that our leaders have fundamentally misjudged the nature of the task before them. The purpose of this election is not to make the Conservative Party universally adored across the land. It is not to win the endorsement of the Globe & Mail. It is to win the support of enough voters to form a government. For us, that means about 33% to win a minority and 38% of a majority. Our goal should not be to take positions which will be seen as acceptable or moderate by the majority of voters – it should be to stake out the ground and do the things necessary to get 40% of the people to show up at the polls and vote Tory.

This “40% solution” is the path to power for the Conservative Party. We need to recognize and understand that even if the Liberal Party’s values are those of the majority of this country – they are not the values of an overwhelming majority and, indeed, that majority itself is split between the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens, and the Bloc in Quebec. We should not be aiming to gain the support or affection of the ‘moral majority’ in Canada which supports gay marriage, legalized drugs, soft laws, and unlimited abortion. Instead we tailor our message to resonate with that strong minority of Canadians – a minority strong enough to form a majority government if they were united – which believes that their country, they country they knew or heard about from their parents, has been stolen from them by a bunch of soft-headed Trudeaupian socialist-hedonists.

All of this is a very simple set of facts which seem to be missed by virtually every single member of our political class. Even if 55% of Canadians believe that gay marriage is wonderful, that means that there are 45% who don’t. Given that there are many voices in support of gay marriage and only a single voice opposed to it, in an election fought on the issue the odds are that the minority position would emerge victorious, just as the Tories won in 1988 even though a strong majority of Canadians voted for parties which were aligned against Free Trade.

The way to win this election is to take bold, but sensible, small-c conservative positions and to stick to them in the face of whatever the Liberals throw at us while running a knock-and-drag campaign to ensure that every voter hears our message and responds to it.

“That’s great,” some will say, “but that’ll only secure our base.” I disagree. Beyond our core base of about 30% of the electorate, there are a great many Canadians out there who are Conservatives, but just don’t know it. We know this, because it shows up in polls. There is roughly 10% of the population who, when polled, would agree with the majority of Conservative positions on the issues, but still vote Liberal. They vote Liberal simply out of habit or as a result of surface prejudices – or because of what they’ve heard in the media. These are the people who can get us from 30% to 40%, if we can reach them.

People, especially Canadians, are rarely raised to become conservatives by our parents or our schools. Most of us can recall a moment, like that described by Arnold Schwarzenegger at the 2004 Republican convention, where we heard or read something which we agreed with absolutely – where we finally heard someone else say exactly what we had long been thinking, in defiance of conventional wisdom, someone who explained why taxes should be low, government small, criminals punished, morals upheld, or something else.

If we are to win, we need to become just that: the party which says what people think, but are afraid to say. If we want to win, we need to stop playing the game that the Liberal-Media Axis wants us to play and, instead, to adopt common-sense positions which a great many Canadians - possibly not a majority, but certainly enough – will see as both sensible and practical.

On crime we need to respond to the Liberals’ nonsensical handgun plan with an alternative approach: lock the criminals up, deport them, or don’t let them into the country. “Guns don’t kill people,” the old saying goes, “people do.” In this case, the people in question tend to be people that Liberal polices let out of jail, let into the country, or let stay in this country. Indeed, I have three simple policies which, I think, would probably be enough to win the election on its own.

We should begin by overhauling sentencing guidelines to abolish conditional sentencing, to double all minimum and maximum sentences, and to set mandatory minimum sentences for all crimes against persons – including drug crime. But we should not end there.

We should follow this up with a second proposal to alter the basic structure of sentencing in this country by allowing for consecutive sentences and for a “life means life” law, ensuing that criminals sentenced to life in prison actually serve life in prison.

Finally, we should propose to abolish the wasteful and useless gun registry along with other stupid liberal programs (such as “harm reduction” programs for drugs) and to use the money to hire more RCMP officers and build more jails.

More than anything else, Stephen Harper needs to go out there and tell the self-evident truth: that it isn’t right that people don’t feel safe walking the streets of their own cities and that something will be done about it if he becomes Prime Minister.

Second, we should be honest enough to say what everyone already knows about health care: that our system is broken and can only be fixed by the introduction of a parallel private system as exists in Europe. This will, of course, cause virtually everyone on the left to scream like a detoxing junkie – let them, I say. When the Liberals hurl the “American-style” epithet at us, we can point to France, Britain, Australia, and any of twenty other countries whose health care systems work far better than ours while offering universal coverage, often at a cost far lower than that of our system.

We’ll win this election if we deserve to. We’ll deserve to win it if we stand by our values. It’s time that Conservatives stop acting ashamed of the things we believe and present an honest case to the Canadian people.

And, if we are doomed to lose as some believe, let us at least lose like men.