How Canada’s Conservatives Can Bounce Back
When the prime minister failed to gain provincial consent to move toward an elected Senate, he asked the Canadian Supreme Court whether he could abolish the Senate outright. Unsurprisingly, the high court told him that abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Frustrated by these rebuffs, Harper simply refused to make any new appointments to the body, accumulating 22 vacancies that will now be filled by his Liberal successor.
.. Pierre Trudeau bequeathed Canada a new constitution that is defective in many important ways, yet also very difficult to amend. It’s one of many blots on Trudeau’s record. It’s also a political fact that politicians must accommodate.
.. Former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour likes to say that in politics, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Constitutional reform is not Canada’s main thing.
.. Party activists yearn to “return to principle” because they participate in politics for reasons of self-fulfillment. They integrate issues into larger patterns of political belief, and their political beliefs in turn are crucial to their conception of themselves. Politics endows their lives with meaning and purpose. In other words: Activists are starkly different kinds of people than less active voters, whose consent is crucial to gaining political power. A lifelong political practitioner once advised me, “To ask the typical voter to name his or her most important political issue is like asking them to name their favorite prime number. Their minds just don’t function that way.”