Conservatives ponder how to 'meet the moment'
National Post, 13 April 2025
Federal election top of mind at annual Tory conference
“How do we meet the moment?” Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta asked the Canada Strong and Free Network (formerly Manning Centre) conference in Ottawa this week, calling for a patriotic groundswell to defend a Canada “worth fighting for.”
But sometimes the moment meets you, as Smith and others — notably Liberal Leader Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — are discovering.
The CSFN was launched some 20 years ago by Preston Manning as part think-tank, part practical training school, but not directly engaged in partisan politics. Manning is no longer involved and he did not attend his year, as he used to do as a benign patriarch. He has got his own conference to organize next month, a sort of Reform Party redux, aimed at firing up the western populism of 40 years ago.
The CSFN serves as an annual omnium gatherum of Canadian conservatives. Conservative premiers often attend, and last year Poilievre spoke.
This year it was all very Trumpy, and Donald Trump is a very different kind of conservative, if conservative at all. The program included three former Trump administration officials, various crypto and vaping advocates and, most improbably, had Imperial Tobacco introduce Patrick Deneen, the political philosopher-cum-guru to Vice-President JD Vance and quondam thesis supervisor of U.S. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth at Princeton.
Premier Smith was certainly the lead attraction, a packed hall giving her a rapturous reception, while poor Prof. Deneen had a scattered few listening to an erudite condemnation of liberalism (both the progressive and conservative strains) root and branch. His advice to read George Grant’s Lament for a Nationwas a singular paean to the Red Tory tradition in Canadian conservatism.
The assembly, preoccupied with the federal election, was on balance discouraged that Poilievre may lose. He may not, and in these tumultuous few months in our politics, nothing should be assumed to be inevitable. But he is not cruising to a mammoth majority. It happens. Recall that in 2003, a biography of Paul Martin was published entitled Juggernaut. There was wide talk of a historic majority in the offing. He won a minority in 2004 and was out in 2006.
Smith herself knows something about the moment meeting her. In 2014, she abandoned the leadership of the Wildrose Party to cross the floor to join the Progressive Conservatives of Jim Prentice. It went very badly and in 2015 the New Democrats ended the 44-year Tory dynasty in Alberta. Smith bided her time and returned in 2022 to takeover the leadership of the United Conservative Party.
The UCP had been put together by Jason Kenney from the wreckage of 2015. That impressive coalition of PCs and Wildrose came asunder when the pandemic drove a piercing stake between the two principal wings of the coalition, urban and rural, establishment Tories and grassroots reformers, elite business interests and populist disrupters. The moment had shifted and even Kenney’s mighty majority win in 2019 was not sufficient to resist it.
Another figure at CSFN was John Baird, Stephen Harper’s foreign minister. Baird got his start in elected politics in the 1995 Ontario election won by Mike Harris, who had run as “The Taxfighter” in 1990. He came in third as Bob Rae’s New Democrats surprised everyone. By 1995, Ralph Klein in Alberta had slashed government spending and Paul Martin had done the same in Ottawa. The moment had shifted. The moment met Mike Harris, who was more or less the same as he was five years earlier.
Has another moment arrived? Poilievre was riding high five months ago. He was the same then as he is now.
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