George H. W. Bush said it best: “I am a conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.“
You can picture Jean Charest and Peter MacKay and Brian Mulroney saying the same thing, can’t you? Those men were (and are) conservative, but they were a kind of conservative that is increasingly rare, these days.
Those men (and those women) weren’t nuts. They did not venerate greed or extremism. They didn’t regard compromise as weakness. They had boundaries.
Boundaries are in pretty short supply, these dark days. These days, the likes of Messrs. Bush, Charest et al. are regarded as inauthentic conservatives. They’re sneered at, and labeled “liberals” or worse.
Even though this writer is a charter member of the Elites and Gatekeepers Society, even though I once battled those above-noted men from my various Liberal war room perches, I miss those sorts of conservatives. They were decent. They were sane.
Not that long ago, I would appear on Danielle Smith’s Calgary radio show. Even though she had been the leader of the defunct Wildrose Party, I found her to be pretty reasonable. She didn’t at all seem to be, per President Bush, “nuts.”
Well, that was then, and this is now. Smith is now seeking the leadership of the United Conservative Party (UCP) in Alberta, and — by many accounts — she has a good shot at winning. She’s attracting a lot of attention, too, with her positions on various issues, some of which are kind of nutty.
Science, vaccinations — and reality, really — she’s apparently against all of those. iPolitics’ Graham Thompson clinically documented all of Smith’s views on modernity, recently, and found her to be against it.
Wrote Thompson: “Smith is running a leadership campaign that’s not just anti-establishment but anti-science, anti-vax, anti-law and overall anti-reality. It’s a campaign based on anger, grievances, half-truths and conspiracies.”
To get around federal vaccination requirements for travellers, for instance, Smith wants to declare everyone on a plane a “diplomat” for Alberta and therefore exempt. She’s gone to court to push for the use of veterinary drugs on humans with COVID-19. Oh, and on COVID, which has killed 4,639 Albertans to date, she claimed there was a “cure” in a tweet. After a backlash, she deleted that gem.
On the law, Smith has a unique position: she doesn’t think it should apply to stuff she doesn’t like.
So, Smith wants to pass a law to disregard the law. She says it would be called the “Alberta Sovereignty Act,” and she would invoke it whenever the federal government did something she didn’t like.
Speaking to an enthusiastic gaggle of folks in Airdrie recently, Smith said: “When Ottawa acts in a lawless way, it’s up to us to restore the law!” That is, The Law of Danielle Smith. Not the law the rest of us observe.
Smith’s disinterest in the Rule of Law went too far, even for some UCP types. The one-time Principal Secretary to Jason Kenney — who Smith is campaigning to succeed — called her Alberta Sovereignty Act “deeply unserious” and “nothing but a sideshow scam.”
But Alberta conservatives, mainly represented by the UCP, seemingly don’t care. They like sideshow scams. They are rallying behind Danielle Smith.
Why should any of this matter to a non-Albertan audience? Well, because Pierre Poilievre, like Danielle Smith, has similarly expressed a disinterest in science, tolerance, and law and order. And he could be soon passing those views into law, across Canada.
Donald Trump blazed an anti-science, anti-decency trail through our politics, reckon Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre, so why can’t we? So that’s what they’re doing, and everyone is wondering if they can win with it.
Personally, I don’t think they can. Most Canadians (and Albertans) believe in science. Most Canadians are vaccinated. Most believe COVID is real. Most believe we have laws for a reason, and are law-abiding. Most are decent, regular people.
They’re not nuts, to use President Bush’s words.
Which some conservatives, increasingly, are.
— Kinsella was raised in Alberta and taught at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law.
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