Just a note to say that my blog, which was never exactly a hotbed of activity, has been resumed after about a year of dormant neglect. I have been quite busy commenting on free speech and related issues on various Canadian forums and blogs, but incredible as it may sound, I have somehow found myself an outcast even there … is there anyone that I cannot somehow manage to offend? Apparently not.

I suppose it comes with the territory of being a voice in the wilderness.

If you are tracking me down here in the wilderness, I have recently (Nov 16, 2009) posted a message that you can select from the menu of my various articles below the header … and where’s that picture, you ask? Looking west from a windy point just west of Victoria in Sooke Regional Park. Go there now, and feel the ocean wind on your face.

As the days march on and the global festival of excess draws ever closer (I mean the Winter Olympics,  not Festivus), I will perhaps have a few things to say about developments. If you care to converse with me about those, so much the better …

If not, then I can practise talking to myself as preparation for the Gulag years that are sure to follow.

Cheers and shalom,

– Peter O’Donnell

Each party learned one important lesson in this campaign, in my view.

The Green Party learned that enthusiasm and zeal are rather limited political assets compared to sheer street smarts and timing. There was never any sensible reason for their leader to run against a political heavyweight like Peter Mackay when there must have been twenty ridings in Canada that might have seen it as an honour of some kind to have the Green Party leader represent them in Ottawa. Now, why these same ridings would not bestow the honour on a supposedly lesser mortal is another question the Green Party might wish to ponder. Given that they have not noticed how much the climate has chilled in the past two years, I don’t hold out a lot of hope (fear?) that they will notice this important point — outside of the media and a few university campuses, people are just not tuning in this party or its alarmist message.

The Bloc continues to lurch along in its twilight world where nobody really wants separatism but nobody really wants federalism as currently defined either in Quebec outside Montreal. They just keep on trumping the two main federalist parties despite having almost no useful political platform besides grousing about how bad things are. It would seem that we are overdue for another explosion of federalist support in Quebec, but clearly Harper does not have his finger on the pulse there. It is one of the few factors that argue for a rapid ascent for Justin Trudeau, or perhaps Maxime Bernier who seems like a pretty nifty vote-getter (tie a ribbon round your finger though).

The NDP gave it the old college try, but that’s the whole problem, they appeal automatically to 18% of the population, repel automatically about 78%, which leaves them 4% to court at each given election. I think they almost maxed out their possible support this time, and although Jack Layton is obviously a skilled campaigner, the problem is the outdated policy perspective. Most people just don’t look at the world the way the NDP does, not because they need education, but because they’ve had education in the school of reality. Sure, corporations are sometimes nasty, possibly even evil entities, but then, so are individuals, wild animals and the sports teams which unkindly pummel one’s favourites. I think there is a certain beating of the dead horse going on with this party, and a long-overdue call for them to modernize the outlook, because as this campaign revealed, if they can’t even top the Liberals for progressive votes under these conditions, then where will they be if the Liberals recover their game?

And that leads to the Liberals and their game — simply a second-rate political performance that was in danger of going third-rate before some control was restored from almost beyond the grave. Dion may choose to put a brave face on it, but he is done, I would imagine — and so are Kyoto politics for the time being. So, while one might lament that we would be losing a less loathsome leader on the personal scale than the Liberals often drop at our feet, we do face the possibility of Michael Ignatieff who is equally non-threatening but probably a good deal more competent at leadership politics. I can’t see Bob Rae doing better than he did in the earlier leadership contest, and most of the others won’t have the money to try again, or the stomach for it. Ignatieff vs Harper in the House would be a sure recipe for low ratings on CPAC, but we may actually then have a meaningful policy debate in the next election.

The Harperites may have learned something too, although it is their style to teach rather than learn. What they might discover is that they have approached the high tide of this version of conservatism. It is neither progressive enough to excite the chattering classes, nor conservative enough to bring out the rank and file in all their glory. It is, in a word, economic conservatism to a fault. When the Harperites stray from this familiar area of expertise, they are off balance and out of their element. This is the drawback of having such a tightly controlled party under the leadership of a strongman figure who is really not a natural strongman in any case. Conservatism is by its very nature unruly, subject to the interplay of many points of view, and based primarily on personal freedom in creative tension with social order. Good luck getting all that right, especially when you’re obsessed with only one thing, the economy.

What will become of the Conservative Party now that they have secured another two-year breathing space that some might inflate to describe as a mandate? One fears that they will just stumble on in the vacuum they have created, where never is heard a discouraging word, until they run head-on into a much more formidable opposition rebounding from a historic low — and then this era will abruptly end and the fragile party unity will come under further strains, especially if the west at that point feels alienated from Ottawa.

Or, there could be a sort of miracle in which CPC brass develop (evolve?) the ability to listen and a form of recall that includes memory of their roots in conservative populism. They may have some sensitivity to this in their zeal to restore law and order, but history teaches us that law and order in the absence of much interest in free speech is a disturbing indicator of political trouble ahead.

The free speech agenda has been ignored long enough. I hope the main lesson of this campaign will be that time is running short in the suppressed issue of the cultural war in Canada, the war between the common sense of the heartland and the political correctness ideology of the elites. Somebody is going to have to take this challenge on, and if not Stephen Harper, then who? The most likely candidates for this are clearly not present in the House.