What the GOP can learn from Canada’s Conservatives>>> Canada held an election last Monday and the result was anything but boring. It amounts to something like a revolution in Canadian politics and has lessons, I think, for those of us south of the border.
The headline story is that the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has headed minority governments since 2006, won an absolute majority of seats, 167 of 308, in the House of Commons. It was a result practically no Canadian pundit or psephologist predicted. >>>
But the installation of a majority government by itself is not a political revolution. The biggest changes in Canada were indicated by the devastating defeats of two of the opposition parties.
The Bloc Quebecois was reduced from 50 seats to only four. Formerly it represented most of Canada’s second-largest province. Now it represents a tiny rump. >>>
The third huge development is the humiliating third-place finish of the Liberal party, the pre-eminent party in Canada since its first election in 1867. Liberals headed governments for 70 years in the 20th century and have provided most of Canada’s well-known prime ministers — Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. >>>
The Conservatives’ triumph offers a couple of lessons that may be relevant to U.S. Republicans. One is that smaller-government policies, far from being political poison, are actually vote winners.
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We are in a war and are (presently) losing. Pawlenty, Romney, Daniels, et al will be a slower pace over the cliff as there can be no reform under (hands across the aisle) moderates. A pox on all houses that bash Palin and Bachman, Cain and West, and others who believe that there is no hope in moderation when the enemy is evil. We can and must turn this war around.
