The Charlie Brown's football analogy strikes again, now for the conservative voter (yes, the "Small C" not the "Big C") who votes for a leader of a "Conservative or PC" party only to get a Red Tory in Opposition and the Liberals in Government. The most recent example: when many of us were convinced to go with "socially conservative" Andrew Scheer and reject the obviously really severely conservative Maxime Bernier. Then we got a milk carton-toting, budget-not-balancing, I'm not sure how great Canada is-ing Dweeb who could not even convince his own Grandma that he was better than one of the worst PM's ever.
Another example: we voted for Leader of the PC party in Ontario a man we thought would be an even smarter version of his Gravy Train-hating brother. When he won a massive majority after the Red Tory Albany Club scuzzees told us he would be a disaster and never win, we finally celebrated thinking we had finally got a conservative avatar and soulmate in power. But we forgot that our Hero was already saddled with a classic Wet Suicide Note in the form of the Platform agreed before he became Leader which simply tried to out-Liberal the Liberals. He has governed accordingly.
And who told us to do all of these things that have resulted in defeat or not conservative government? Why, the Lucy in this sad story, the Red Tories. Every time we follow their advice, we lose elections, lose all moral authority in power and/or lose power. The history of Red Tory locustry goes back as far as Stanfield in the 70's whom they told to go for wage and price controls for God's Sake and lost badly to Trudeau (who did it any way like any good socialist would). Clark promised to cut taxes and do a range of other conservative things to win a minority government only to be advised to raise taxes and lose power the next year.
Mulroney was finally finding his feet as a Thatcherites tax cutter, free trader and privatizer only to leave a gutted party when he decided to bring in the GST, hate on the West and mollycoddle Quebec nationalism.. The Common Sense Revolution was going great built on true conservative values that won two large majorities and rescued a PCO that had lost its way due to its Red Tory masters until its father abandoned it and its values and the Martian McGuinty Liberals were elected (this time ironically after promising for once to be as conservative as the Conservatives!). Ralph Klein led a similar conservative triumph in Alberta only to abandon it in a spending spree that did not stop until the PC's were kicked out after 44 years of power by the NDP as electors concluded that there was little difference between the two.
On the federal level, in the 90's the Red Tory was there to tell us not to merge with the Reform or the Canadian Alliance. "Let Charest and Clark lead us out of this mess" they urged. Too many of us listened, the conservative vote was split and we got 10 years of Liberal government as a result.
Then, the Prize. We elected Stephen Harper as Leader of the new merged "Conservative" not PC Party, chair of the NCC, Reform Party Right Hand Man and Friedmanite Economist and in just 3 years he was PM. 3 election victories and one majority later we saw Harper abandon all of his conservative principles and make as his greatest feats an enormous deficit, tax tweaks and an auto bailout. By the time, Canadians did what Albertans did - vote for the real Liberal instead of settling for the pretend one, the Red Tory takeover was almost complete to be completed when they got their Clark clone as leader in 2017.
All of these sad tales of political woe were chiefly architected by the Red Tory. Sometimes the Leader or prominent ministers or MP's are to blame. Almost never is it the membership of the Party that is usually more conservative than their leadership. But more often than not, the culprit is unelected, maybe appointed to some admin post and unknown to any of us poor soiled wretches in the front lines. Every time we listen to them, they're wrong. They were horribly wrong about Scheer, who they wanted badly to provide a respectable vessel for their real goal - to deny a true conservative thinker from taking power. Now they beg us to listen to them again and double down on their inane, pointless, amoral slow death march to socialism by voting for a Charest or a MacKay to replace him. If we fall for Lucy's Football once again, we will have truly devolved from Harper Conservative back to Clark Conservative in less than a generation after all the painful work we did trying to evolve from Clark PC to Harper Conservative in the painful generation before.
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