Why I’m voting Conservative

I’ll start off by admitting that the CPC was wrong.

Wrong to suggest that Justin Trudeau was “just not ready” to govern four years ago. In reality, it was Canadians who were just not ready for him.

You may have heard the joke that Trudeau makes two types of promises: the ones he breaks, and the ones you wish he would break. Over the past four years, Canadians have had to endure the chaos of pipeline protests, carbon tax cram-downs, abortive attempts to change our voting system, pointless foreign policy fights and messy Liberal family feuds.

Liberal partisans do not understand that their ham-handed attempts to transform Canada are not welcome. They have abused the trust that Canadians placed in them four years ago.

Today, the only people impressed with this government are foreign journalists, ex-Presidents and celebrities who don’t understand Canada or Canadians–and even they are beginning to ask questions.

It’s pretty clear that centrist Canadians voted for a fresh coat of paint in 2015, not a revolution.

A government that was basically competent while looking good would have been just fine. We got- maybe-  one of those two things.

On a bad day for the Liberals, we get neither.

Stephen Harper’s mostly cautious approach is looking a lot better these days by comparison. And it’s going to be a long time before Canadians dare to dream big again.

The CPC policy platform, campaign and leader are not flashy. And that’s the point. It’s a plan to repair the damage caused by Trudeau, and get Canada back on an even footing. It recognizes that Canadians are, understandably, a little wary of big plans right about now.

They want to restore the competence and stability that the Liberals have squandered virtue-signaling to the world instead of governing. They passed precious few bills, just so that their leader could make it on magazine covers like Rolling Stone.

The Liberals hate to admit it, but their carbon tax is only popular in theory. Canadian voters do not want to actually want to pay for expensive carbon initiatives.

Canadians have been consigning carbon-tax friendly provincial governments to the graveyard one after another ever since Trudeau took office. That’s why the CPC want it gone, and why they want to let provinces figure out how to deal with climate change.

If you look beyond Liberal spin, you’ll find a few practical environmental initiatives in their platform, such as ending the practice of dumping raw sewage into waterways, and improving technology for monitoring and managing wildfires. Canadians notice the Liberals’ inaction on these close-to-home environmental concerns much more than grand plans to fix the climate change crisis.

Diehard Liberals blame their poor electoral fortunes on a rising tide of populism. It’s ironic because Trudeau was supposed to be the guy who protected Canada from Trumpism and was in large part voted in from left-wing populism–Trudeaumania 2.0.

The Liberals own policies–a handgun ban, offering government-backed loans to homeowners and jacking up the deficit–are populist positions, not informed by sound and responsible research. This isn’t going to help curb polarization. It’ll only make things worse, because they won’t actually address poverty, illegal guns predominantly used in crime or crippling national debt.

The CPC will go back to the drawing board by getting the country’s balance sheet in order, boosting the Registered Education Savings Plan and helping to bridge gaps in health care coverage.

Incredibly, the CPC is the only party that’s taking the issue of affordability seriously. They’re taking the GST off of home heating bills, relaxing the mortgage “stress-test” for Canadians looking to buy their first homes, and restoring tax breaks for transit passes.

It’s certainly not the kind of slash-and-burn Conservative extremism the Liberals are telling you about, just a curtailing of overspending.

Speaking of extremism, look no further than the People’s Party of Canada.

These guys have got no environmental policy to speak of, want to massively slash immigration, a boon to this country, and think getting rid of supply management will create jobs but can’t be bothered to tell us how.

The mostly-online PPC seem to think that there’s a constituency in Canada for their policies. There isn’t. There never has been with the vast majority of Canadians.

Good luck to them building a pipeline in Quebec, or ripping up the Indian Act, or replacing the entire system of federal health transfers. Max Bernier can barely find enough people in his riding to support these ideas, if polls are any indication.

Right-wingers who try to lure Canadians with false promises are no better than Trudeau. They’re playing to an international populist movement, much like the Greens, and then they turn around and label the other parties “globalists”.

Why is it that with all the controversy that People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier has stirred up, he can’t get above single digits in the polls?

Not everything the PPC says is overblown and ridiculous. The PPC will tell you that they exist because the CPC isn’t conservative enough. I believe them, and I also say, “Thanks for coming out,”  because–like the Liberals–they are making the CPC look absolutely glorious by comparison.

The CPC recognizes that refugee claimants shouldn’t be able to just walk across the border at Roxham Rd. And they want to help immigrants learn official languages and get their credentials recognized.

They’re going to increase health care and social transfers, while cutting handouts to big corporations. Taxes for lower-income Canadians will be lowered, and it’ll be harder for social media giants to mine your data under a Conservative government.

Instead of frustrating small businesses and tangling them up in red tape, the CPC will repeal old regulations and simplify the tax code.

How anyone could think this CPC are a bunch of extremists with these kinds of policies is a mystery to me.

Canada, like the United States, sorely needs a return to bland, common sense normalcy. That’s what the CPC is offering.