Tories don’t have hidden agenda, just an ugly one
Winnipeg Free Press September 10
The Conservative agenda isn’t hidden. It’s in plain view, thanks to a University of Calgary political scientist. And contrary to the intent of the Conservatives’ election framing question, it makes a Conservative vote the real risk.
University of Calgary political scientist and key Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan says the Conservatives aren’t content to defeat the Liberals. They want to destroy Liberals — and then liberalism itself.
If they succeed, the Liberals will be the second traditional Canadian political party to fall to the U.S. Republican-inspired Conservatives. Five years ago, they absorbed and abolished the party of Sir John A. Macdonald, which founded the country.
University of Toronto political scientist Stephen Clarkson says the destruction of a political party “undermines and breaks up the consensus on which Canadian politics has been so happily based for a good century.” Canada’s “political consensus about the role of government, with variations left, right and centre, is replaced with civil war.”
Conservative insider Ezra Levant says Flanagan and Prime Minister Stephen Harper are “symbiotic partners.” They’re so close, Harper calls him “Don Tomaso.” He’s “the master strategist, the godfather, even of Harper,” continues Levant.
A charter member of the neo-conservative Calgary School, the Illinois-born political scientist writes commentaries for The Globe and Mail that uncannily predict Conservative policy and strategy.
In an Aug. 1, 2007, article under the headline It’s time for Conservative minority brinksmanship, Flanagan — like Harper a year later — blamed the fixed election date law for preventing the government from getting its agenda through Parliament.
Given the Conservatives’ new law, Flanagan continued, “the government may have to resort to different tactics… By using confidence measures more aggressively, the Conservatives can benefit politically.” Either its legislation is passed or it gets the election for which it is best prepared.
The last parliamentary session followed the Flanagan playbook. Every bill, however minor, was made a confidence matter.
The Liberals, disunited, broke and fearing an election, were forced to immolate themselves time and again by either supporting the government or keeping all but a corporal’s guard of MPs away from the endless stream of confidence votes.
In “war to the death politics” the strategy was a smashing success, leaving the Liberal party in turmoil and an object of national ridicule.
It’s one thing to temporarily exploit a political adversary’s self-inflicted weaknesses. But it’s another to scheme to permanently erase it from the electoral map.
Yet, on Aug. 28, Flanagan laid down yet another game plan for the Harper Conservatives, one that should revive all voters’ fears of a Conservative hidden agenda.
Under the headline The Grits won’t die — they’ll just fade away, Flanagan compared the Conservatives’ planned annihilation of Liberal/liberalism to the three-stage Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. In the final Punic War, the Romans “defeated Carthage totally, razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would ever grow there again.”
The 2004 election pushed the Liberals down to minority. The second, 2006, gave the Conservatives a minority. The Oct. 14 election, even if it only returns a Conservative minority, would launch a “prolonged war of attrition” ending with the destruction of what Flanagan calls “the Evil Empire.”
Canadians will recall Harper’s soothing words of the final days of the last campaign, assuring nervous voters his government would be constrained by the courts, the senior bureaucracy and the Liberal-dominated Senate from going on a neo-conservative tear.
Right on cue, Flanagan’s 2007 book, Harper’s Team, provides the genesis for that false assurance. Echoing Margaret Thatcher and Karl Rove, he cites lifting those constraints as the chief objective of achieving a permanent conservative majority.
“If you control the government, you choose judges, appoint the senior civil service, fund or de-fund advocacy groups and do many other things that gradually influence the climate of opinion.”
American historian and journalist Thomas Frank proclaims that exact neo-conservative goal in clear, compelling language in a recent article in The New Statesman.
“The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room — of an ‘end of history’ in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves,” Frank writes. “The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it… The end was capturing the state and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher… ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul,’ she said, echoing Stalin.”
To put all this in context, even the most favourable Conservative polls so far this election show that 62 per cent of Canadians want no part of a permanent small-c - or large-C - Conservative majority.