Conservative Party Of Canada Quotes

I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people [people at Tea Party rallies, ed]. It's never been just political, it's personal. I'm not convinced anyone in this country except the kinds of weenies who thought student council was important really cares about large versus small government or strict constructionalism versus judicial activism. The ostensible issues are just code words in an ugly snarl of class resentment, anti-intellectualism, old-school snobbery, racism, and who knows what else - grudges left over from the Civil War, the sixties, gym class. The Tea Party likes to cite a poll showing that their members are wealthier and better educated than te general populace, but to me they mostly looked like the same people I'd had to listen to in countless dive bars railing against "edjumicated idiots" and explaining exactly how Nostradamus predicted 9/11, the very people I and everyone I know fled our hometowns to get away from. So far all my interactions at the rally were only reinforcing my private theory - I suppose you might call it a prejudice - that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It's the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also account for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized - Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just di further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo.

Sixty years ago, Austin Ranney, an eminent political scientist, wrote a prophetic dissent to a famous report by an American Political Science Association committee entitled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.”4 The report, by prominent political scientists frustrated with the role of conservative Southern Democrats in blocking civil rights and other social policy, issued a clarion call for more ideologically coherent, internally unified, and adversarial parties in the fashion of a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy like Britain or Canada. Ranney powerfully argued that such parties would be a disaster within the American constitutional system, given our separation of powers, separately elected institutions, and constraints on majority rule that favor cross-party coalitions and compromise. Time has proven Ranney dead right—we now have the kinds of parties the report desired, and it is disastrous.

The stars aligned for Justin Trudeau in the last few weeks of the campaign. "Ultimately, voters opted for a change of government. If the Liberals hadn't done all their work. the NDP would have won the election. Anyway, the strongest desire felt by voters was to get rid of the Conservatives," says pollster Jean-Marc Leger. In Quebec, Trudeau exceeded all expectations by winning 40 of the province's 78 seats. Vote-splitting by the NDP and the Bloc handed victory to the Liberals in several Quebec ridings. The last time the Liberals had made that many gains was in 1980 when Pierre Elliot Trudeau won 74 of the province's 75 seats. The Liberals swept the four Atlantic provinces, a historical first. The party won all 32 seats there, in strongholds where the Conservatives were well established. The Liberal game plan - whatever its shortcomings - had what it took to get the Liberal Party of Canada from third place to victory in a single election. This was another historical first. "To turn a situation like that around the way Trudeau did is exceptional," says Jean-Marc Leger. "There was a desire for him to succeed, and he did succeed." For Justin Trudeau, the Trudeau name had long been both an asset and a liability. The son had inherited his father's old party but now he had rebuilt it in his own image. He had run his campaign his way. This was his victory, and his alone.

Canada’s diplomacy is hugely different under Harper,” Heinbecker responds. “The neo-conservative idea of foreign policy is about flexing military muscle. It’s about free-trade deals. It is a reversal of our history. We used to be advocates of constructive internationalism, we used to work hard to make that work. That’s why our advice and our particular insight were so sought after by other countries. Now we are a country with baggage. Those invitations to counsel others and to take part in that international meeting of the minds don’t get issued.1 We have become outliers. We are seen as more American than the Americans, more Israeli than Likud.

In their enthusiasm to oppose Mr. Harper and the Conservatives, I think they’ve been getting the big things wrong about this country. For example, Canada’s prosperity depends upon our ability to develop our natural resources and get them to world markets. Every prime minister in our history would agree with that. Today, that means we have to create more environmentally sustainable ways of getting this job done, but it serves nobody to suggest that western Canada’s resource wealth is a “Dutch disease” that weighs down the rest of the economy. My party learned that painful lesson under my father’s leadership. Using western resource wealth to buy eastern votes is a strategy that, ultimately, impoverishes all Canadians.

All capitalist parties - conservative, liberal, social-democratic - have moved in the same direction, at varying speeds.

actions of the Harper government remain inexplicable for most rational, thoughtful Canadians, though some have looked for an explanation in the evangelical fundamentalist religious bent of the Harper Conservatives’ support base, particularly early Reform Party supporters. For this group, science itself is heresy, promoting the theory of evolution which they see as a threat to the concept of creation outlined in the book of Genesis.