I have hitherto avoided comment upon the whole David Emerson fiasco for much the same reason that I avoided comment upon the Harriet Miers fiasco: I have little patience for self-destructive internal battles and, in general, my instincts are to – in the absence of outside information – trust my leaders. That being said, I’ll further add that I’m a supporter of Emerson and I hope that he stays on – I believe that he’ll be good for British Columbia. However, I don’t think that is what shall happen here. I mentioned Harriet Miers earlier – watch for history to repeat itself. I doubt if Emerson will still be in the Cabinet a week from today.

I’ll note here that – as in the case of Miers – it is not the opposition of the left-media axis that is significant. As it has been said, in politics, it’s your friends who can kill you. The Emerson appointment has brought together into a single conflagration a discordant and dissonant coalition of elements within the Conservative Party who have been waiting for their chance to strike – disillusioned Reformers and ambitious Red Tories without portfolio alike feel that they have reason to feel themselves aggrieved and little reason to restrain themselves (save common loyalty and decency). They want a scalp and I believe that they will soon have it.

In any case, it’s not of Emerson of which I wish to speak. The general hysteria aside, this is simply this week’s news – here today, forgotten tomorrow. The only way that it will be remembered in the future is if Harper fails as Prime Minister, in which case it will be seen as a dark portent of what was to come. If he succeeds – and past evidence suggests that he will (eventually) – this will be less than a footnote.

Amid this debate, we are forgetting the core question: how do Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party turn a minority into a majority?

For a long time, I’ve said to my Conservative friends, “I can see how we win a minority but I have a difficult time envisioning what happens the day after that.” It’s like the end of The Candidate. We win and then we ask, “Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

There’s his big five promises, of course, and they’ll help a little. None of them are particularly objectionable to anyone save extremists. But none are exactly soul-stirring either. For all that we can say that Harper has accomplished, we also are faced with the stark and simple fact that, for now, all this thing is another one of those generational interregnums which arrives when some percentage of the people decides that the Liberals have grown too corrupt to rule and, in a classically Canadian move, dispatch them to the penalty box for either a two minute minor or a five minute major.

Why is this? Why do the Liberals keep on winning? It’s not because their policies are so overwhelmingly popular – a great many of their policies are, in fact, not all that popular with a large percentage of the people. Witness, for example, their inaction on crime and the Armed Forces. Recall their fervor in the cause of homosexual marriage. They don’t win because they believe popular things.

So, why do they win? In reality, it’s all very simple: they win because the Liberals have constructed a Canadian world-view which seeks to convince people that the values of the Liberal Party and the values of the people are one and the same – that they are united and indivisible. Louis XIV said, “I am the state.” For the Liberal Party it is, “We are the state.”

Orwell’s remark that he who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past is trite but true. From the 1960’s onward, the Liberal Party have treated the Canadian nation as a Tabula Rosa, wiping away our past and replacing it with a series of crude pastel-colored sketches of long-forgotten men, of crappy shorts of Indians proclaiming the country’s name and women in front of the House of Lords. They took our flag; they took our Army, Navy, and Air Force. Their minions have sought, like poor Winston Smith, to sanitize our history to fit their utopia.

One of the saddest moments of my life – when I first knew that something was gravely wrong with this country – came as I sat in an Elementary School history class. Asked to identify what makes up the Canadian identity, all the students could come up with was Medicare and that fact that, by accident of history, we are not Americans. Eventually, the teacher informed us that there was, in fact, no Canadian identity on account of our diversity – that we are not only a community of communities, but also an identity of many identities. Alas, schizophrenia is no more pleasant an experience for a nation than it is for an individual.

Canadian nationalism is out of fashion these days – and little wonder, when it’s only practitioners are elderly and shabbily-dressed David Orchardites, shuffling along in their dirty Tennis Shoes through the halls of run-down community centers, eagerly and earnestly awaiting their moment to be pains in the assess of the sane and the normal. Such as it is commonly felt by the body politic, nationalism in Canada today consist of a vague feeling that one is only authentically Canadian if one believes in universal health care, universal day care, entitlement programs that provide silicone butt implants for impoverished transsexuals, and a universal oil change program which will ensure that every Canadian gets new oil in their car every six or seven years, depending upon funding levels. John F. Kennedy sought to inspire Americans by asking them to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. Liberals try to snare Canadians by asking them what their country can do for them with their neighbor’s money.

Yet, if Harper wishes to create be more than a Regent – awaiting the coronation of Justin Trudeau, Bob Rae, Ken Dryden, Scott Brison, or some other twit that the Liberals manage to drag out of some closet – he must rediscover and reignite our pride in our country. There are a thousand tangible reasons why Canadians ought to vote for the Conservative Party – he needs to provide an emotional reason and an emotional attack.

I firmly believe that, at the core of this, the reason why so many Canadians have such a difficult time imagining the Conservatives with a majority is not that our policies are so objectionable but that, deep down, they believe that the Tories are Bushian neo-con agents of influence. And while, in the vast majority of cases (excepting my own), that’s not true – the impression that Conservatives are somehow less “Canadian” than Liberals or New Democrats sticks with a great many people.
And, let’s be entirely honest, there’s more than a little bit of truth to that. While the overwhelming majority of Canadians are absolutely loyal and loving Canadians, there are a substantial number who have come to regard the Canadian nation with the sort of disgust that a stereotypical “homophobic” father might regard a gay son. We still love the country, but we despise what it does and what it has become.

For Harper to truly win, he must bridge that gap. He must articulate a New Nationalism for this country – one which can win back the disenchanted and disillusioned while also convincing the great majority of our unswerving loyalty. We must begin this nation anew – with a new definition and a new idea of what it means to be Canadian – by recapturing our past.

This is a country with a glorious history – particularly in the last century. Our people served with great honor and distinction upon the battlefields of the Earth. We were brave, unstinting and uncompromising soldiers in the defense of liberty. The graves of young Canadians – who accepted the call to defend the lives and freedoms of their fellow men – circle the globe. When the call came, we were the first to fight. Often we were unready, often unprepared – but always ready to stand for what was right.

Somewhere (in the 1960’s, I would say) we lost our way and forgot our history. Yet, though the past is forgotten, it is not yet gone.

When Ronald Reagan providentially ascended to the Presidency in 1981, his most difficult task was not the management of the economy or the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Rather, it was making Americans – battered by defeat and recession – ready to be heroes again. It was about reaching back to a glorious past to paint a brilliant future. Reagan simply forgot the America of the 1970’s – the America of Jimmy Carter’s malaise – and instead reached back to the further past – to the glorious America which smashed the Axis powers – to remind Americans of exactly why is was they were and remained a great people.

Canadians are a great people too. We seem to have forgotten it – perhaps we were too modest to ever admit it. But we were and are as well. When I think of this country’s past, I don’t think of faded Indian Chieftains – I think of my Great-Grand Uncle, who fell upon the field of battle at Passchendaele during the Great War. Or I think of my Grandfather, who fought his way across Europe, was severely wounded in the process, and lived to tell the tale. Those men didn’t fight because they had to – they didn’t fight for any Earthly reward. They fought because they knew, in their hearts, that it was the right thing to do. And they are our history.

It’s time for you, Prime Minister, to remind the Canadian people that we are the volunteer nation – the country which provided more volunteers for combat than nations which were actually invaded provided conscripts. We are not a nation of warmongers – but neither are we a nation of wimps. It is time that we remind the people – and the world – of that. We are a nation which stood, fought, and died for freedom before – and we are a nation which should do so again.

If we want to create a lasting majority, then we must throw out the present definition of what it means to be Canadian and, by reaching in the past, define ourselves anew. Let the people – and the world – recall that we are a fierce and proud nation. Let the word go forth that we are, once again, a nation to be reckoned with.
What does this mean in terms of policy, other than launching a major history education initiative?

Well, it means rebuilding the Armed Forces. Truly doing so, not simply throwing a few billion at the problem. We need to, at the very least, double the size of the military – and then we need to equip and train it for war. We should recreate the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force – and we should make our creations the pride of the nation.

Why should we do this? To become American stooges? Hardly. When the Americans are right, we will fight alongside them. When they are wrong, we will not. When they refuse to stand for liberty, we will. Note that last point.

In the Great War and the Second World War, we fought before the Americans did. In World War Two, had Britain fallen, we would have carried on the struggle against Nazi tyranny. There is no reason – beyond a refusal to think outside of the box – that we should fight only when America does, or deploy only on behalf of the United Nations. As we have done before – we should stand for freedom. With our friends where possible, alone when necessary. The New Canada should not stand by quietly while the next Rwanda or Sudan happens. We are a tough nation and a compassionate one. No longer should we be sanctimonious bystanders on the world stage, shouting in the echo chamber of the United Nations. Instead, we should become active participants in the cause of human freedom.

Canada is a middle power which, in the circles of international power, no longer counts even as an afterthought. We ought to not only count – we ought to recognizably punch over our weight, like Israel or Australia.

This wouldn’t be as expensive as some might think. The mighty American military machine costs around $400 Billion a year. For a fraction of that – say $40 Billion a year (or a mere 3.5% of our GDP), we could have a military at least 1/5 as powerful as the US Armed Forces – something which would probably place us among the top five military powers in the world. We might, easily, be even stronger than that.

Why? Simple: we wouldn’t build the same kind of forces that the United States does. The United States builds, in addition to the light forces which fight modern wars, the sort of heavy forces (like large Aircraft Carriers, ICBM’s, and so on) necessary to fight wars between great powers. We can, I think, ignore that stuff – in the event of a great power war, we could assist the United States by freeing up their forces and taking over their duties in various parts of the world. Instead, we could build a robust and powerful force of sixteen Brigades (or about four Divisions) and the equipment necessary to move, supply, and support them. Such a force could move in to virtually any trouble spot in the world, destroy the enemies of freedom, and restore order.

If we are to pull this thing off, we must cast off the shackles of the conventional. We will be liberated and victorious when we embrace the new, the unpredictable.
We will not win with GST cuts. We will win when we undercut the belief that the Liberals are the state,