Photograph by: Chung Chow, Delta Optimist

The BC Conservatives have gone nearly two years without a leader, but even before their new one has been anointed he’s almost become damaged goods. John Cummins, a 69-year-old former Reformicon, left his job as federal Conservative MP in order to revitalize the politically irrelevant provincial Conservative Party in B.C. But he was forced to apologize Sunday for controversial remarks he made about homosexuality on radio that left many people aghast.

Cummins, who will be sworn in as party leader on May 28, suggested during a CFAX radio interview last week that sexual orientation is a choice that does not require specific protection under the Canadian Human Rights Act.

“I’m not a scientist [but] some of the research tells me that there’s more of an indication that that’s a choice issue,” he said, adding that he voted against adding sexual orientation protection for homosexuals during his time as a federal MP.

The statement he released yesterday not only backtracked from the suggestion homosexuality is a choice, it took an about-face:

“My comments on CFAX radio this past Wednesday may have been misinterpreted and may have offended some. I apologize for that. To clarify, my use of the word “choice” was unfortunate, because it confused the meaning of my statement, which was that I believe anyone can live their life in the way they want.”

Before I continue, I just have to say that I agree, in general, that there doesn’t doesn’t need to be specific protection for homosexuals under the CHRA. I think the laws are sufficient and clear enough, and have been since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was implemented, to protect anybody from every walk in society. When Cummins says everyone should be given the same opportunities and protections, regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, I’m in agreement.

It’s difficult, however, to infer that Cummins meant anything other than what he said in the first instance, that he actually believes homosexuality is a sexual preference. It’s even worse that Cummins made this error during a critical juncture when the people of B.C. are just beginning to learn about the political party and its new leader.

It’s also one thing to apologize for the mistake, but to then suggest he actually meant that sexual freedom is a choice, not orientation, reeks of damage control PR. It’s fairly clear what he meant when he said what he said, and the unfortunate thing about that is the defunct Reform party continues to make mainstream Canada uncomfortable.

That’s why Stephen Harper had to unite the federal elements of the rightwing movement in Canada, mainstream the social issues into a more liberal focus, and extinguish any socially conservative agenda. Strangely, it was the fiscal confidence Canadians have in Harper that gave him his majority, but the fact he didn’t scare Canadians with socially conservative issues also played a part.

It isn’t even that Cummins’s comments are socially conservative either, as the mentality that homosexuality is a choice is a fringe opinion even within the conservative movement itself. For evidence of this one need look no farther than the revulsion and shock among supporters of the party in the province.

This is the last thing the party needs as it attempts to present itself as a serious mainstream alternative to BC Liberal members who don’t like their new leader Christy Clark.

Few enterprises have imploded as quickly as Quebecor’s attempt to launch an alternative conservative TV station. I doubt even the most avid leftwing activists believed they could slay the dragon so effortlessly. Yet the departure of Kory Teneycke signaled an end to whatever vision was initially promised to conservatives.

I’m not going to lie to you. I contacted Teneycke back in June to congratulate him on his ambitious project and received a casual job offer myself. I was taken aback at first, but we sent a few emails back and forth and was informed SunTV would be hiring in August or September. I was sure I wasn’t anywhere near the top of the priority list so I stopped emailing.

Sure enough Teneycke soon stepped down as Quebecor executive following a deranged leftwing campaign to discredit him for the crime of having worked for the Conservative Party. It would appear that Teneycke made a string of halfhearted and genuine job offers to people all over the country. The following blog entry and its second part are riveting reads:

People don’t contact you, meet with you, share their vision of a groundbreaking television station, and invite you to be part of it if they aren’t sincere. What kind of organization does this and then – a few months later – shrugs and mumbles that it was all a practical joke?

Surely you didn’t think we were serious? When a senior executive with our company said we wanted you to challenge David Suzuki how were we to know you’d order copies of his books at your own expense and then actually read them?

I can sympathize with Laframboise, particularly in having her hopes dashed second-hand, as it were. The sad part is that SunTV has given every indication that, even if it can get off the ground, it will not be as the brash and confident Teneycke advertised when he left his role as CBC token conservative to become a Quebecor executive.

One clue is they hired Warren Kinsella, a man who repulses conservatives on an atomic level. The second is the hiring of Krista Erickson, a former “designated traveller” for MP Lee Richardson whose claim to fame is feeding questions to a Liberal politician. It’s a safe bet that the visual medium was a factor in her hiring [as Laframboise alludes to by dropping 10 pounds].

I’m getting the sense that Canada’s hot-tub-sized media pool doesn’t really have room for the kind of alternative media Teneycke envisioned.

h/t BC Blue

Well worth the listen: seven days a week, 2100-0100 Eastern Time, “Listen Live” top right here.  No callers, just discussion with single guests or panels covering things American, international, political, economic, etc.  Certainly a strong conservative view (not from all guests), but sharp and witty rather than bashing and bruising.

“On-Demand” here, sample from Monday, Aug. 23 to give an idea of the show’s range:

Batchelor 9pm

GUESTS: Camilla Webster, Forbes.com; Salena Zito, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review; Elise Viebeck, The Hill; Tunku Varadarajan, DailyBeast.com; Reva Bhalla, Stratfor.com

Listen or Download this show

Batchelor 10pm

GUESTS: Co-host Camilla Webster, Forbes.com; Jim McTague, Barron’s Magazine; Aaron Task, Yahoo! Finance; Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index; Peter Coleman, author of Memoir of a Slow Learner; Arif Rafiq, ForeignPolicy.com

Listen or Download this show

Batchelor 11pm

GUESTS: Hugo Restall, AWSJ; Gordon Chang, Forbes.com; Brian Stelter, The New York Times; Andrew Shearer, national security advisor to John Howard; Mary O’Grady, WSJ

Listen or Download this show

Batchelor 12am

GUESTS: Graham Bowley, The New York Times; Kenneth Chang, The New York Times; Ed Kohn, author

Listen or Download this show

Mr Batchelor’s personal website here (motto: “Known Unknowns”) with posts and commenting.

Anyone remember Cousin Brucie?  And, upstate, Joey Reynolds?  “Sports! Sports! Sports!  New York 6, Cleveland 4, Boston 8!”  A lot depended on atmospherics in those days.

Mark
Ottawa

Publius’ hero, as seen by another great writer:

Quote of the Day

This judgment goes to the heart of Kipling’s character. He was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

Evelyn Waugh

Mark
Ottawa

Tasha Kheiriddin, who appears to have become a regular contributor at the National Post, writes about the Manning Centre’s report on Canadian values in today’s Full Comment. Conducted by Canadian pollsters Allan Gregg of Harris/Decima and Professor André Turcotte of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, Ms.Kheiriddin writes that the results suggest that Canada’s definition of the political centre has moved to the right [I would report on this myself, but the report isn't available to the public yet].

The findings aren’t initially surprising. Of the 1,000 Canadians surveyed, 65% described themselves as centrist. Of these, 47% admit voting for the Conservative Party in 2008. Since the actual voter turnout for the Conservative party was only 36%, the survey is already slightly skewed in favour of a conservative viewpoint. This important consideration should not elude anyone.

On moral issues, Ms.Kheiriddin reports, 89% strongly agreed with the statement “nothing is more important than family.” And if that kind of social conservatism is a little ambiguous, she writes that 67% believe in the definition of marriage of being between a “man and a woman”. 60% strongly agree that abortion is morally wrong.

This certainly seems at odds with other polling results that suggest Canada is still a fairly socially liberal country. According to an Angus Reid survey from September of 2009, 61% of Canadians agree with same-sex marriage, while a further 23% agree with civil unions respecting all legal rights of coupling for homosexuals. That’s 84% of Canadians who, in some way, want to validate homosexual marriage.

As for abortion, Angus Reid held a poll on the issue in June of 2008, which found that 49% believed in the unfettered right to access for pregnancy termination. A further 42% agreed that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances. So, again, that means 91% of the country are open to the moral ambiguity of abortion rights. Hardly a ringing endorsement for social conservatism in Canada.

But as Ms.Kheiriddin explains, perhaps that’s because the Manning report found that only 31% of Canadians, less than one third, believe government should play any major role in regulating moral quandaries.

Turning to economics, and again with a large grain of salt, considering 47% of the respondents voted Conservative, 61% feel the government is doing the right thing on the recession, with an equal number supporting its profligate spending.

Does this report make a convincing argument that Canadian values have shifted to the right? I’m not certain it has. If anything, the Conservative Party has moved the spectrum to the left, shifting the centre along with it. This is a continuing part of the Conservative strategy to usurp the Liberal Party in the centre and become the “Natural Governing Party” by adopting Liberal policies and then slowly squeezing the Liberals out of the centre by getting voters to adopt the Conservative brand.

The Conservatives have already used aggressive marketing tactics to fund-raise involving mainly uninspiring themes along the lines of, “well, at least we’re not the Liberals, right?” And although it seems to be working, there’s little evidence that this means a shift in Canadian adoption of conservatism.

Stephen Harper is a Big Government Conservative, after all, and that hardly fits with most fiscal conservative supporters. The massive deficits which will lead to record debt, with the increased bureaucracy, bloated civil service, and creation of regional development agencies and crown corporations, is not at all shifting Canada to the right. Add in the market interventionism, stimulus, and increased spending on social programs, and you wind up with a party that spends like Bob Rae’s Ontario, but cuts taxes like Mike Harris’s. And that still doesn’t make it more conservative.

OMG! Another instance of plagiarism! Photo: Jeff Knapp, 2004

I find myself shaking my head more often than not these days, not just because of the many senseless things the Conservatives manage to do [like deciding to change the wording of the national anthem in an apparent display of political correctness on steroids], but because of the things the opposition actually decide to complain about.

If they’re not calling for a public investigation into whether Helena Guergis made airport workers cry by turning into she-hulk and threatening to squeeze the goo from their puny human heads, it’ll be some other completely ridiculous and irrelevant story that may as well have been pulled from the pages of Ibn Fadlan’s diary.

Take, for instance, the recent controversy over whether or not Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney removed sections from the Canadian Citizenship Guide that pertains to “gay rights” and “same-sex marriage”. Please give me a moment to state the obvious: So what?

Does it matter if he did or if he didn’t? And what does it accomplish, finding out the editorial preferences of the Minister? Will it prove to anyone who doesn’t already have a partisan bias, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jason Kenney is a homophobe?

It doesn’t change the laws protecting homosexuals in Canada under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, nor does it deny homosexuals complete equality under the law, and blindness in adjudicating matters unrelated to their sexuality. It doesn’t change the fact that homosexual marriage is completely and wholly a legitimately recognized union between two people of the same sex, equal in both law and recognized by the same government that employs Mr.Kenney. And it doesn’t, as the outrage would seem to imply, have any affect, whatsoever, on whether immigrants who are homosexual should choose to come here or not.

Then there’s today’s latest Brouhaha about the title of the Throne Speech, called “A Stronger Canada; A Stronger Economy; Now and for the Future.” The Liberals say that this was lifted from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s 2004 election platform: “A Stronger Economy. A Stronger Australia.”

A “stronger economy” is the contentious plagiarism? Isn’t that like accusing someone of plagiarizing a cliché? Do we really expect our politicians to deal with titles more original than “stronger”, “better”, and “brighter”? I mean, these are the basic adjectives for politics and political writing. It isn’t as though John Howard ran an election platform called “A Supercalifragilistic Economy. An Expialidocious Australia”, and then Stephen Harper came along and used the same obscure words today.

No, he used the word stronger. If you could think of a more generic, basic, common motto for a post-recession government, you’d be hard pressed to find it. And here’s a news flash: Barack Obama’s “hope” and “change” wasn’t very original either. Being hopeful, wanting change, and being stronger are all extremely banal descriptions of human ambition.

The continued profligate spending, out-of-control programs, bloated bureaucracy, soaring debt, are all concerns that the Liberals could raise, and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid in defence for the Conservatives. But the above manufactured controversies really belong in some low-ratings reality TV show. On CBS. At 2:30 in the morning. Sponsored by Ashley Madison.

Photo: MP Helena Guergis is questioned by reporters, September 17, 2009. Pawel Dwulit / The Canadian Press.

This is too much, even for unabashed partisan Liberals, to handle. Are we now expected to go on a 24-hour Helena Guergis rage watch, just over one incident? It has been 11 days since the Minister for the Status of Women flew into a rage at Prince Edward Island airport. Stay tuned for breaking news and mounting casualties.

I mean, really, what could be more pointless? It has now been 14 years since former Prime Minister Jean Chretien put his mittens around a protesters neck and began choking the life out of him. You don’t see the news reporting stories like this:

“Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien was at a Liberal fundraiser today to give a speech meant to rally the party around Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. Mr.Chretien managed to get through the entire speech without once choking anyone from the audience.”

But if the Ottawa Citizen is guilty of flogging a dead horse, the Liberals are just as ready with the whip. In the CBC today, the Liberal party has announced its intention to call for a “formal investigation” into the temper tantrum thrown by Ms.Guergis on February 19. Sadly, I’m not making this up.

The Liberals are so interested to get to the bottom of the airport rage incident, they have filed an Access to Information request to acquire copies of the security video. For what purpose, or how it pertains to the job of holding the Conservative government to account on its record, is a complete mystery.

The Liberal critic for the Status of Women, Anita Neville, said Ms.Guergis could have violated Canadian aviation regulations with her argumentative and belligerent behaviour that could have put passenger safety at risk.

Boy, if that isn’t stretching the fabric of truth to the physical limitations of science, I don’t know what is.

There’s no question that the minister acted inappropriately, and that she caused embarrassment to herself and to her party. But to say that she violated “aviation regulations” and put passengers at risk is more than just a little over the top. It’s like asking someone to step down from their job because they got angry and argued with a policeman for issuing them a speeding ticket.

You would think with the current Liberal agenda of changing the rules of prorogation and getting the detainee committee back together, that a personal outburst in an airport would rank fairly low on the priority list. But as this party has demonstrated with “Wafergate”, the aboriginal body bag incident, and of course bathroom breaks during G8 photo-ops, there’s nothing too insignificant for the Liberal Party to demand an investigation for.

Now, if Stephen Harper really believes that the incident has damaged the reputation of the office for the Status of Women to the extent that Helena Guergis needs to be removed, I’m sure that will take place in the next cabinet rotation. Or better yet, they could save $25 million and axe the whole ministry in the name of balancing the books. But all a formal investigation is likely to prove is that Helena Guergis is a human being, and like all human beings, not immune to making mistakes.

It appears that Mr.Keddy has had more than his share of the negative spotlight in recent months. First it was those rather impressively large Conservative logos on novelty stimulus cheques. And now he’s gone and told a bunch of Haligonians [which is, apparently, the name of someone who lives in Halifax] to get a job.

I don’t think it can be overstated enough how damaging such comments can potentially be to a political party, and to the conservative movement in general. Mr.Keddy made an off-the-cuff remark on Monday that sent the news traveling so quickly across the country, that he was forced to apologize in the House of Commons.

The comment in question occurred when Mr.Keddy told the Chronicle Herald that Nova Scotia farmers need migrant labourerers because regular Nova Scotians don’t want to work hard:

“Nova Scotians won’t do it — all those no-good bastards sitting on the sidewalk in Halifax that can’t get work,” he said.

The result was that his comment met with a mix of emotions from those who read about it. Indeed, there are those who fairly praised the man for his honesty.

Of course it’s possible that Mr.Keddy was making a correct observation. It’s true that many Canadians wouldn’t do the kind of labour that Canada brings in seasonal migrants to do. Not because the work is hard, necessarily, but because the wages are traditionally low enough to make the experience altogether unprofitable. The reason migrants are able to to do it is that the money they send back to their own countries is worth a lot more there than it is here.

But that’s not really the point. Deep down, a lot of conservatives really believe that some unemployed people remain unemployed because they’re too lazy to do anything about it. On that point he’s probably right. Although the number of people in society unwilling to get a job, no matter how destitute their circumstances get, is incredibly low, those kinds of people do exist. I suspect that many conservatives would even value the honesty of making such a politically dangerous statement.

Be that as it may, Mr.Keddy’s statement is most certainly dangerous, because it goes against what the federal Conservatives are trying to accomplish with their entire stimulus spending plan. They have cultivated an image that they are trying to help the unemployed during the recession; trying to shed the image of the dispassionate conservative. Indeed, Mr.Keddy fairly plays into the stereotype.

The comments are not without precedent, of course. In December of 2001, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein showed up drunk to a homeless shelter in Edmonton and berated the people there for not having jobs. He threw some money on the floor and left. Although many people considered the act contemptuous, some conservatives felt it was the right thing to do. He even gained respect in the eyes of many people who believed that his actions were based on an emotional response to seeing people bring about their own misfortune.

Unfortunately for Mr.Keddy, I suspect that the incident will not endear him to quite enough people to overcome those he has now alienated. In the end, he certainly did the right thing by promptly apologizing.

“The remarks I made regarding the unemployed in Halifax were insensitive and unkind and I apologize for them,” he said.

“What I meant to do was simply defend farmers in Nova Scotia and across Canada who rely on temporary farm workers because of local labour shortages. Without these workers, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crops would not be harvested and farmers would have to cease operations.”

Much ado about nothing then? Perhaps. But there’s no question that it reinforces in the minds of many voters in Canada that all Conservative politicians think this way, and not just one. It’s a perception they’ll have to erode if the Conservatives want to continue to build on that lead in the polls.

Posted in canada Tagged: Gerald Keddy, halifax, Nova Scotia, Ralph Klein