Meanwhile on the Left Coast

Is it Quebec or British Columbia that's the distinct society?

A bizarre western-style video by a former B.C. Conservative MLA candidate who says he will not be cowed is now whizzing around the Internet.

Entitled “Mischa Popoff will not be bullied,” the video starts out – no bull – with the dumped Conservative candidate addressing the camera behind a fence, wearing a cowboy hat, with a very friendly bull nuzzling him repeatedly from behind.

Beyond words.

There are moments, surveying the dull mediocrity that is Ontario politics, that I yearn for just a bit of pizazz. Not truth or decency, those are hard enough to find in the private sector. Just a little amusement to pass the time before the barbarians find a way through the Alps. This video certainly qualifies.

Mischa Popoff is the fourth candidate to be fired from the BC Conservative Party so far this election campaign. The election will be held on May 14th so there's still plenty of time for more "bozo eruptions." I'm not describing Mr Popoff as a "bozo." The MSM is. That's why the BC Tory chieftain John Cummins, a Reform '93 alumnist, fired Mr Popoff. His crime? Saying that we should be discouraging single parenthood.

I'm guessing Mr Popoff is unfamiliar with the Iron Law of Canadian politics: You cannot say or do anything conservative while being affiliated with a Conservative Party. Liberals can declare martial law, slash spending, invade foreign countries, pass anti-terrorism laws and still be considered kind and compassionate. A modestly right-wing politician makes passing remarks about how it's rather unwise to start a family without two parents and he's banished like a plague victim.

Had Justin Trudeau made exactly the same comments the CBC would be hailing these as brilliant observations. The Fifth Estate would launch an expose on how the Harper Tories are undermining the two parent family. The Toronto Star would swiftly proclaim several editorial edicts that single motherhood is the result of ruthless capitalist exploitation, albeit in language vague enough that most of the Star's drowsy middle class readership would miss it. The NDP, not be out done, would call for an inquiry.

It's now an ancient cliche to complain about how the MSM is horribly biased against right-wingers, yet it is still important to make note. Not in a defeatist sense but as a reminder that we are at war and we should conduct ourselves accordingly. Most conservatives and libertarians are not really interested in politics. They're interested in some other aspect of the human experience, raising a family, starting a business or studying some obscure academic discipline, and find that politics intrudes upon their life. You might not be interested in government, but government is always interested in you.

Reluctantly the right-winger enters the political fray. He usually, and it's usually a he, gets clobbered. There are certainly professional partisan conservatives who don't get clobbered, but most are not really conservatives. Instead their manufactured and blow-dried creatures like Tim Hudak. If an actual conservative thought has ever passed through Timmy Hudak's head it's because it came straight from Mike Harris' mouth when the former was in the latter's cabinet. The sincere conservative gets sideswiped because his mentality is out of step.

In most aspects of life honesty and reliability is a positive character trait. Not so much in politics. A certain moral flexibility is exhibited even by the best of the lot. Careful students of the careers of Churchill and Thatcher will recall instances when those two giants side-stepped, waffled or dodged in order to pursue other objectives. That requires a certain skill set that is hard to pick up in mid-life. Harder still if you're an entrepreneur.

Then there is the naivety of the sincere conservative. He imagines that politics is about policies and ideas. It is to a certain extent. It is mostly about perception. The vast majority of the electorate in any advanced liberal democracy is either too stupid, too bored or too self absorbed to pay attention to politics. The engaged citizen is largely a myth confined to textbooks and Norman Rockwell paintings. Those who are deeply engaged tend to be either rent seekers or ideological fanatics. Because they do politics for a living they, over time, become professionals at. In politics, as in life, nothing beats professionalism.

Look at the Liberal Party. From Mackenzie King through to Jean Chretien it was one of the most professional and efficiently managed political parties in the western world. They usually won. When they lost it was mostly out of exhaustion or boredom from the electorate. After a brief break of a few years the Grits would return to power, a listing of lobbyist, bagmen and patronage appointments firmly in hand.

And what have we got? Tattered copies of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman? That's nice. The electorate gets bored of 30 second news clips and you're quoting thousand pages tracts. Hmmm. Did we mention this was a war?

Ah yes. The war aspect. We are engaged in a cultural war in Canada as in most of the English speaking war. There was a cultural war in Europe in the decades after 1945. Whatever pro-freedom elements remained on the continent lost and so Europe is sliding back to penury, collectivism and petty authoritarianism. It's what they do. Unless we want to follow we need to keep in mind that in war truth is usually the first casualty.

 

Comments

[Cytotoxic]

This is why Cody Wilson is a hero. Defense Distributed will do more for freedom than any party ever could.
I have to say it again: the big reason we are losing the culture war is because of losing the intellectual war. And that is because of 'conservatism'. As long as fight with oxymorons like 'conservative principles' you can't win. It's like fighting a war with backward guns made of construction paper.

PS Cummins is a huge tool and has single-handedly ruined whatever chance the BCCP has. Need Danielle Smith clone army.

[nomdeblog]

“His crime? Saying that we should be discouraging single parenthood. ...I'm guessing Mr Popoff is unfamiliar with the Iron Law of Canadian politics: You cannot say or do anything conservative while being affiliated with a Conservative Party.”

That should read “you cannot say anything SOCIALLY conservative...”

That’s because we’ve handed our 6 year olds over to the NDP for half a century. Thus cultural issues now belong to the left unless we as a party are prepared to fund and organize a full throttle attack on social issues that we’re prepared to die on the hill for.

I recall several years ago some MP candidate in Alberta when asked by the CBC if he thought abortions should be discouraged with young people who had not properly “Planned Parenthood”. His response was that they should be offered counselling as to the pros and cons of abortions. The CBC immediately turned that into a Sandra Fluke type of conservative “war on women”.

We simply don’t have the resources to take on the left wing media and academia and all the institutions lined up against us unless we have a well thought out game plan beforehand.

The above issue in Alberta caused the Conservative party to be bogged down for weeks defending itself instead of campaigning on its platforms and thus wasting millions of dollars of campaign funding to try to get back on track. But if the Liberals had done something similar “the CBC would be hailing these (counselling ideas) as brilliant observations.”

In short these cultural issues cannot be changed by bozo eruptions. They are engrained in our society over decades. Politics is downstream from culture. We should not waste 10’s of millions of conservative Party money trying to change the culture.

“We are engaged in a cultural war in Canada as in most of the English speaking war.”

Right! Again, we should not fight that with Party money. We should do that by joining social clubs like the Rotary Club and fighting for our social views there. This will take decades. Although some young people who I talk to are starting to question the brainwashing they’ve been handed by academia and the MSM.

[Cytotoxic]

"Politics is downstream from culture. We should not waste 10’s of millions of conservative Party money trying to change the culture."

It flows both ways. When the state is as big as it's gotten, it influences culture. And even if the CPC money were totally wasted that would still be an improvement over its current use which is to erode Canadian freedoms. May as well throw it something like this.

There can't be a 'game plan' for bazillions of politically disparate Canadians. There needs to be an intellectual movement that conservatism can't provide.

[John Chittick]

Party politics always trends to being under the thumb of spin doctors, not unlike corporations. I would much rather the constitution limit all aspiring politicians to one term per elected office and risk that legislatures be populated with numerous single-term Mischa Popoffs than well lubricated creatures continuously pimping through re-election cycles. The very notion of re-election is a conflict of interest and repugnant(and this is coming from someone who did a nine year stint in municipal office).

Better still, why not eliminate elections and appoint at random for staggered six month stints like Jury duty with a PM and cabinet elected from within. I think it was WFB Jr who postulated that he would rather be governed by the first 500 names from the Boston Phone Book than the faculty at Harvard (I would extend that to include the average career politician).