Written for TammyBruce.com: “A Warning From Canada for the GOP”

Inspired by the Republican Party primary process, the regime of Barack Obama, and the words of Sarah Palin, here is my latest piece written for TammyBruce.com, which you will find here at its original location: “A Warning From Canada for the GOP”. Listen every weekday at 1pm Eastern to two hours of uninterupted independent conservative unruliness, streaming here at Talk Stream Live.

UPDATE: Click here to listen to Tammy Bruce discuss this column on her nightly podcast (5:45 clip).

A Guest Post by Canadian TAM Flaggman

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing these past few days among Palinistas over the former V-P candidate’s apparent defense of Donald Trump’s machinations and Ron Paul’s fanatical followers. These two positions are clearly harmful to the Republican Party, which makes it clear to me: Sarah Palin sees the GOP itself as the problem, not the solution, in this election cycle. When she warns the GOP against isolating Trump and the Paulites, she’s not endorsing a Trump independent run or a Paul presidency per se. What she is doing is firing a shot across the bow on behalf of the Tea Party, saying to the establishment: don’t you dare go dismissing constituency groups within the Republican Party. If it’s Trump and Paul now, it’s the Tea Party next, and that is simply not acceptable. This gives us pause to reflect on a little Canadian political history to see what can happen when the grassroots of a what is supposed to be a conservative party are ignored, humiliated, and isolated.

The 1970s and early 1980s in Canada were run, essentially, by Barack Obama, in the person of the America-hating incompetent-socialist demagogue leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. When he finally got tired and walked away in 1984, he left the country pining for a conservative renaissance, and Brian Mulroney rode that sentiment to leadership victory in the Progressive Conservative Party, and a landslide in the polls later that year. Despite running as a conservative warrior, Mulroney was the ultimate insider, foisted on the party membership from the Toronto-Montreal legal establishment, and rather than peeling back the Trudeau experiment, he expanded upon it by further nationalizing the health care system, adding a 7% tax-on-everything, and leaving us with crushing deficits that led Canada to the edge of credit rating downgrade. In the 1993 election, with the Conservative-in-name-only Mulroney abandoning ship, and the socialist Liberal Party running on a platform to the right of the Progressive Conservatives, the results came in: the PC Party, the purported conservative side of what was essentially a two-party system, was destroyed. It held on to just two seats in Parliament, and never recovered. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in Canada today is a result of the gutting and scuttling of that party by small-c conservatives in the ensuing years, forming it eventually into today’s ruling Conservative Party of Canada.

How does this relate to Palin’s comments on Trump and Paul? The key is what happened from 1984, when our McCain-Romney figure (Mulroney) took over, until 1993, when his party essentially disappeared. On two fronts, Mulroney ignored his base. In Quebec, Canada’s second-largest province, the big-government federalist encroachment so enraged the French-majority voters that they left to start their own separatist party that nearly ripped the country apart via referendum in 1995. In Alberta, Canada’s energy-producing behemoth, the big-government encroachment so enraged the rugged individualists of the West that they founded a new party, the Reform Party of Canada, which was essentially our Tea Party movement of the 1990s. (Not coincidentally, Stephen Harper was a founding member of the Reform Party after abandoning Mulroney’s PC’s.)

The splintering of the PC party, a direct result of the establishment placing a higher priority on centralizing federal power than on promoting the will of the grassroots, led to 13 years of corrupt and aimless Liberal Party rule, while the grassroots worked tirelessly to organize and establish itself as a viable national alternative under Harper. But now that a principled conservative party is in charge (not that it doesn’t have its share of RINOs, but that’s for another day), we have a principled government in Canada that, with the majority mandate earned in the 2011 election, is finally beginning to peel back the layers of federalist socialist intrusion into the lives of Canadian citizens.

So don’t dismiss Palin’s apparent defense of Trump and Paul-bots as nonsensical rantings or bitterness. The splintering of the Republican voting base could open up the danger of another decade in the wilderness, and Palin knows this. It’s not so much the loss of Trump-ites (of which there are few) or Paulites (of which there are a few more) she is concerned about. It’s the attitude of dismissiveness by the establishment that could ultimately result in the loss of the Tea Party constituency – and that would be a disaster for the Republicans. And the implication is this: if the Republican establishment tries to force an American Brian Mulroney on the grassroots, the Republican party will be be no more. And the rebuilding under a different name could begin at any time.

-Neil Flagg is a Toronto-based businessman, blogger, Conservative Party of Canada member, and TAM. You can follow him on Twitter @NeilFlagg

Share your Prorogue Horror Stories Here!

As the great Prorogue disaster of 2010 winds down, I’d like to ask you, my dear readers, to submit your best Prorogue horror stories of this lamentable gap in Canadian Parliamentary life.

For me, it had to be that night when I woke up at 3:30 am in a cold sweat and foaming at the mouth from a nightmare: I was being chased through the center block in Ottawa by my Liberal MP Ken Dryden (wearing his original 1970 goalie mask) in nothing but my underwear, clutching a proclamation of congratulations for the Boys and Girls Club of Timmins on their successful fundraising bingo for seniors, and not being able to stop and ask Mr. Speaker for the floor, before running straight into Libby Davies.

Or was that reality??? Whoo-ha-ha-ha-ha! In any case, it took me 11 minutes to fall back asleep, and I spent an entire minute the next day tortured by the thought of Libby Davies being in my dreams. Can it get any worse than that?

I know, it’s been hard on everyone. Please, share: how did the prorogue make your life a living hell for the past few weeks? Best story wins a collector’s-edition Patrick Chan Cheerios box. Second place gets an invitation to run through the streets of my neighborhood displaying the hysteria that this period has provoked in us all.

Michael Ignatieff: Another Disastrous Liberal Mistake

As long as Stephen Harper refuses to expand his PR image beyond “competent” and “safe”, he will fail to attain his much-desired majority government. If he can put forth a coherent, positive, aspirational vision for the country – whether it be with a hard conservative edge or not – he will get it. And now may be his opportunity, as he has once again combined strategic mastery with a bit of luck to buy himself at least another year as Prime Minister in a minority parliament, with an opposition in absolute disarray.

The latest work of strategic mastery? The 2009 budget, presented yesterday, unloved by everyone today. How can a document that has been panned across the ideological spectrum be considered a strategic masterpiece? 1) It pays lip service only to the irresistible force of the Keynesian “stimulus” nonsense fad dominating the world right now, projecting an inflated budget deficit that will never actually take place thanks to a neat poison pill (a provision that releases infrastructure funds only when matched dollar-for-dollar by provinces or municipalities – dollars that simply don’t exist) that will ensure most of the infrastructure billions announced will never be spent. This allowed Harper to gain Liberal support and earn NDP/Bloc wrath – wrath directed mostly at his true rivals, the Liberals, once again fracturing the left into little pieces; and 2) It avoids the “third rail” that conservative politicians must never touch – tax increases – and actually offers, in difficult times, small but tangible tax savings for most.

As for the luck? That happened in December, when the Liberal Party inexplicably decided to cancel its leadership race, and install “The Czar”, Michael Ignatieff, as its instant, permanent replacement for the hapless Stephane Dion. “Hey, he’s brilliant, he’s dashing, he’s worldly, he’s respected – he’s our Obama”, the pinheads in the party must have been saying. But what arrogant Liberals have failed to learn is: a coronation hands its recipient a poisoned chalice. The public at large will always be suspicious of a leader who did not earn his position. Paul Martin, Kim Campbell, and John Turner all learned this in the most humiliating way: each was utterly rejected by voters after being handed the Prime Ministership on a silver platter. I guarantee, the vast majority of non-political-junkie Canadians who watched the news tonight had the same opinion of this performance: who the hell is this guy, and who does he think he is, putting the government on “probation”?:

Iggy is everything the Liberals should have avoided: an arrogant-sounding, elitist, Toronto-centric, prickly, inexperienced, cold, humourless, hard-edged, bitter-looking opportunist, whose every public word makes him sound like an actor pretending to be a politician. While Stephane Dion had even worse flaws, at least he seemed genuine. As I have contended for two years now, there’s only one Liberal leadership candidate who was in the running that the Conservatives were scared of facing off against, and that was the very dangerous, very destructive Bob Rae. Further, there’s only one Liberal who could have peeled away the Conservative base and led them back to government quickly, and that would have been John Manley. But, as luck would have it, the Libs, panicked by their ill-conceived runaway-freight-train coalition experiment and their precarious financial position, took the worst possible choice in the worst possible manner.

Bad choices come with bad costs. Now, we’ll see if Harper can seize the opportunity, and move from being a competent caretaker to an inspirational leader.

Harper, Cannon: Unrelenting in Support for Israel

From Sunday’s press release out of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, addressing the increase in hostilities between Israel and Hamas:

“We urge renewed international diplomatic efforts to achieve a sustainable and durable ceasefire, starting with the halting of all rocket attacks on Israel. Canada maintains that the rocket attacks are the cause of this crisis.”

Once again, God bless Stephen Harper. To the opposition leaders (and Lizzie May) who can’t bring themselves to call a spade a spade and support Israel against murderous thugs: enjoy your adulation at the next big fascist Hezbo-rally, you cowardly, despicable losers.

Liberal Party of Canada: When it comes to the public trough, there’s no compromise!

They will write books some day analyzing the political genius of Stephen Harper. This move was audacious, stunning, bold, and absolutely right from a small-c conservative point of view: through his Finance Minister’s economic update, he has announced the end of the outrageous system of public financing of Canada’s political parties imposed by the Chretien Liberals. Read about it in Kelly MacParland’s fine column. Quite simply: a system in which the Bloc Quebecois receives over 80% of its operating funds from the very Federal Government it wishes to dismantle, is a system that must go. Grabbing this post-election opportunity in which the official opposition is at its weakest to scrap the system is the type of hardball politics that conservatives usually end up on the butt-end of! Finally, we have hardball players on our side.

What makes this incredibly entertaining is the bluster and sabre-rattling of the opposition parties. Both NDP leader Jack Layton, and Liberal leader-in-waiting Bob Rae, have called the move “undemocratic” – an Orwellian inversion if there ever was one. All opposition parties are threatening to vote against the measure, which would trigger a snap election. Check out these quotes from Joan Bryden’s evening report:

Ignatieff: “I’m utterly unintimidated and undeterred by this stuff and the caucus is in the same mood . . . . (Harper) has misread the mood if he thinks that the Liberal caucus is going to cave on this matter. No way. No way.”

Similarly, Rae said the Tories are “deliberately creating a political crisis in order to avoid dealing with an economic crisis.” He said there’s “no public policy benefit at all” to the move to scrap public subsidies for parties.

“It’s just absolute bloody-minded meanness that’s motivating them and it can’t be allowed to stand.”

So, after two years of abstaining on every key issue put forward by the Conservatives – from war, to justice, to taxes, to economics – we now know where the line in the sand is drawn for Liberals. Deny these pigs their seat at the public trough, and it’s war!

Dignity, thy name ‘aint Lib.

The Rae-avoiding gambit: Stephen Harper, doomed Dion, and the Election call

Welcome, Canada, to the issueless election campaign. On October 14, 2008, we will elect a new Parliament that will, most likely, return either a strengthened Conservative minority, or a slight Conservative majority, to Ottawa. The Conservatives’ justifications for abandoning in spirit, if not in letter-of-the-law, their own fixed election date legislation that called for an October 2009 poll, have been weak at best. They have offered no discernible agenda to the public, and seem happy that the fascinating, supercharged U.S. campaign will relegate our own campaign to page-two status.

Calling an election without losing a confidence vote in Parliament comes at a cost to Harper. It chips away at hard-earned reputation as a principled, do-what-you-say politician. And, it means he doesn’t get to define an election campaign on a key issue of his choosing (as he attempted several times last year – Afghanistan, the budget, the Senate – only to have the Liberals walk out and abstain rather than force a writ.) But this cost was certainly calculated in by Harper’s strategy circle, and was determined to be worthwhile.

Why was it determined to have been worthwhile? Because, in the end, no one believes the public will vote the Liberals into power simply because the election was called a year early. So, the question becomes: what is the potential gain to be had here, to make the blow to the reputation worthwhile? The answer, I believe, has to be something more than simply a hail-mary shot at getting a coveted majority in Parliament. I think it also has to do with the tenuous status of Stephane Dion’s leadership, which, unless a miracle happens, will be coming to an end shortly.

My guess is this: word got out that, if the Liberals showed poorly in the now-cancelled September by-elections, Steffi would have been dumped, and Bob Rae would have been installed as leader, with nearly a year in the position ahead of himself to prepare for the guaranteed October 2009 showdown. I’ve been saying it for nearly two years now: the only Liberal that the Cons fear is the slippery, slick media darling, Bob Rae. A one-year campaign of personal destruction against the Conservatives, combined with a one-year Obama-esque deification of the former Ontario premier, was the nightmare scenario that Harper did not want to face.

With a new mandate earned this October, the Dion dumping will be delayed at least a month, and the next election will likely be delayed far beyond October 2009 – in the case of a majority, the delay will be as much as four years. Methinks this issue-less, agenda-less election call is all about the Dion-Rae dynamic, and an attempt to pre-empt a showdown with a re-energized Rae-led Liberal Party, and extend this period of Liberal decline to span a generation.

Does it bother me that the Harperites are shrewd political calculators? No, not in the least. Why would one NOT want their party to understand how to play the game? Without obtaining and maintaining power, there’s no way to make positive conservative gains. Further, there is every reason to fear Bob Rae – a man with the financial means, rhetorical skills, and unprincipled opportunistic nature, to make a serious run at Harper’s job.

All that bothers me is that Harper’s Ontario-Harrisite inner circle seems to be of the faulty mindset that social conservatives are holding the party back from earning a majority; that, somehow, if the Conservatives are positioned as tough on crime, tough on the International scene, fiscally sound, and, like Liberals, absent on social issues, the media and Toronto elite will somehow fall in love. Whether or not this is the case is irrelevant; social conservatives are an equal “leg” of any successful conservative “stool”. Without them, fiscal conservatives and security hawks always eventually fall flat on their faces.

Toronto Star’s Allan Woods makes disgraceful attack on Harper at Auschwitz

First, the good: PM Stephen Harper shows once again that he is a class act, a statesman, and a leader beyond what we have come to expect as Canadians. While touring the Auchwitz Nazi Death Camp memorial in Poland yesterday, he remained silent and reverent, and refused to use the visit to the sacred site to make political points. He declined to talk to the tag-along press contingent about it, and left this beautiful, thoughtful message in the guest book at the memorial:

“We are witnesses to the vestiges of unspeakable cruelty, horror and death. Let us never forget these things and work always to prevent their repetition. Lord, bless the souls of those who suffered and perished here and deliver them from evil.”

Now, the bad. Here is a screen shot of The Toronto Star’s disgraceful attempt to use this visit to Auschwitz as an attack on Harper:

1. The Star chooses an angry-looking Harper file photo from Parliament to set the tone for the story, rather than an image from the visit to Auschwitz. The photo used here is completely unrelated to the story, and could only have been chosen for the sole reason of connecting Harper’s supposed “mean” personality to his visit to Auschwitz.
2. The story leads with: – “Prime Minister Stephen Harper uttered not a word of reflection to the Canadian public following his visit to Auschwitz yesterday.” Third sentence: “He didn’t speak after kneeling before a red-and-white wreath at the camp’s Death Wall memorial, where thousands of prisoners were executed, though he did appear to be moved.” Fourth sentence: “He didn’t speak after emerging from the claustrophobic gas chamber and crematorium, the lethal machine of Nazi terror. He left just one reflection of three sentences, written in blue ink in a leather-bound memorial book.” The implication: Harper was indifferent to the horrors of Nazi Germany. The reality: Woods & company are so utterly ideologically against Harper that they’ll use the PM’s completely appropriate and heartwarming response to the depravity of the Nazis, as an opportunity to repeat the long-discredited phony charge that Harper is cold, mean, and harbouring a “hidden agenda”.

Shame on you, Allan Woods and The Toronto Star. You spit on the graves of dead Jews by your obscene actions.