Former prime minister Jean Chretien might very well be the best thing that ever happened to Canadian conservatism.

When it comes to the ongoing resurgence of Canadian conservatism, one has to give a big hand to former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien.

When you start to enumerate the ways in which he laid the groundwork for the ongoing success of the Conservative Party, it almost takes your breath away.

Jean Chretien was the right man at the right time. A thuggish man by nature, his success had less to do with his charisma, and more to do with the split on Canada's right.  A man who ought not to have been prime minister for more than a term instead won three majorities -- by default.  And to think people praise him for that.  It's congratulating someone for tripping.  Still, that stroke of dumb luck gave us the following:

• Donation limits.  Put into place after he announced he was giving up politics, the limits on donations was designed to benefit the Reform Party and punish his own Liberals.  Why?  Just to screw Paul Martin.  And every single Liberal leader since then has had to struggle with the donation limits, even as the Conservative Party continued to vacuum up money.
• Liberal corruption in spades.  The best example, of course, was Adscam, in which the Liberal Party was caught red-handed dishing out taxpayers' money to friendly ad firms only to have a portion of that money returned to the party in the form of donations.  Jean Chretien was never accused of wrong-doing, but the Sponsorship Program was his creation.  The full story of Adscam has yet to be told.  His immediate successor, Paul Martin, paid the price for it.
• The crapulence of Kyoto.  Canadians are well aware that Jean Chretien's knowledge of global warming is, well, nil.  Looking only to his own reputation, the target to which he committed Canada was based entirely on being one percentage point better than the Americans.  Of course, he then ignored the accord completely.  Stephane Dion was the Liberal leader who paid the largest price for this piece of Chretien idiocy when he tried to fool people into thinking that Jean Chretien's party could somehow be truly environmental.

This is a small sample, but it highlights just how Chretien's legacy has affected each of his successors, allowing the Conservatives to incrementally improve their standing. 

Is Michael Ignatieff cheated of his share of Jean Chretien's legacy? Not at all.

For Michael Ignatieff we have the long gun registry.  An absurd idea on the face of it, the registry would compel owners of hunting rifles to register their firearms.  Supporters say the police use that information to know what to expect when entering a suspect's home.  What a piece of crap.  Every police officer assumes a suspect is armed to the teeth until proven otherwise.  Even the auditor general didn't buy that line.  The real purpose of the registry is to...well...actually it's hard to pin down what it's for.  I suppose it's a vote winner in some places, but then people who are so enamoured by the the gun registry that it would actually affect their votes are hardly likely to vote Conservative on any other issue anyway.

Basically, the registry was a gift to Liberal supporters of the sort who like the notion of massive government intrusion into private lives.  But what started as a gift is now a liability.  Why?  Because no one likes to have their gifts taken away.  And it will be taken away, because, gift or not, it's a piece of garbage.

The incompetence of Chretien's government resulted in the long gun registry being a utter failure.  Promised to be a break-even operation, it became a sinkhole for cash, with $2 billion spent on a broken database. 

No one pretends that the long gun registry is something to be proud of. 

The Conservatives are on the verge of eliminating this absurdity once and for all:

According to my own informal survey of rural opposition MPs, it looks like Candice Hoeppner's bill to abolish the long gun registry is well on its way to becoming law.

The vote on second reading is scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 4.

And because C-391 is a private member's bill, it'll be a free vote. That means MPs are freed from the usual requirement of voting along party lines.

[A] number of Liberal and NDP MPs from rural ridings say they're in favour of ending the registration of all shotguns and hunting rifles, as well as destroying the records of roughly seven million people who had previously registered their non-restricted weapons. 

Among those supporting Hoeppner's bill are New Democrats Nathan Cullen, Dennis Bevington, Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton, and Carol Hughes, and Liberals Larry Bagnell, Wayne Easter and Anthony Rota.

By the time January rolls around, the Senate will have tipped to the Conservatives, and this bill could well receive royal assent.

Gun-control advocates (or is it just "control advocates", guns just being the the convenient bogeyman?) like Wendy Cukier warn that the Conservatives could pay a price at the polls.  Well, this private bill would have been squashed by the Conservatives if that were true.  I'm guessing that the party has polling data that shows the pickups in rural Canada far outweigh the losses in areas that are already Liberal strongholds.

But what about those ridings in between?  Here is where the gift from Jean Chretien enters into the picture.  The Conservatives are just doing what the Conservatives have always promised to do.  People who supported that promise will be pleased and will have one more reason to vote Conservative, and those who like the registry so much that it is a vote breaker already abandoned the Conservatives because of that promise.   A net shift to the positive for the Conservatives.

The mushy middle, however, aren't excited about the registry itself.  They are watching Stephen Harper and the Conservatives fulfilling a promise, and Michael Ignatieff losing control over his party.

That will shift some votes too, or cement existing voting intentions, all in favour of the Conservatives.

But Michael Ignatieff will also pay a price in those Liberal strongholds, even if the Conservatives won't win any votes there.  Michael Ignatieff will be blamed for abandoning the long gun registry, especially if, weak in the polls as he is, he makes no effort to take a stand on the issue. 

If the registry is dismantled, it won't be coming back -- not after the cost overruns the first time around.  Michael Ignatieff will be tagged as the Liberal leader so weak that he could not prevent a minority Conservative government from dismantling Jean Chretien's long gun registry. 

And it gets worse.  If and when the bill gets passed by the Senate, it will remind everyone that it was Michael Ignatieff who abandoned the coalition, and who then couldn't figure out how to organize a election to defeat a government fighting a recession, setting the stage for Stephen Harper to turn the Senate from Liberal to Conservative.

How many thousands of Liberals will simply refuse to donate to the party, and will decide to stay on home whenever the next election happens because they see Michael Ignatieff as yet another failure?

Like Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff would be labeled a failure because of one of Jean Chretien's ideas.

So thank you, Jean Chretien.  Another one of your stupid ideas has turned into shot under the waterline for the Liberal Party.  I've heard people say it would take a decade or more to undo Liberal influence in Canada, to erase the notion that the  Liberal Party is Canada's "natural government party".  It's been six years since Jean Chretien quit, and his legacy has been a significant in fueling that transformation for all six of those years. 

Thank you, Jean Chretien.  Conservatives could not have done it without you.

Posted by: Steve Janke at 11:54 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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