Talk:Conservative Party of Canada

There seems to be some belief, maybe due to NAFTA and the common pressures on North America, that Canadian politics outside Quebec is converging into a form more like US politics. The Conservative Party of Canada looks disturbingly like the Republican Party at the moment. Certainly it's strongly aligned with US positions on foreign affairs questions, much more so than the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada ever was (it being Diefenbaker who rejected nuclear weapons acquistion, and Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney who held the line against Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on apartheid and issues in Latin America).

Meanwhile, the Liberal Party of Canada is going for the same "big tent hegemony" image as the Democratic Party always has, and trying to cast itself as the "least worst" by comparison to the Conservatives, just as the Democrats always by demonizing Republicans.

In both countries, the Greens (and in Canada also the New Democratic Party of Canada) are sidelined at election time by the bogus debates that these big parties stage against each other, defining their own issues by a sort of polite refusel to talk about anything important.

Only in Quebec where it's a choice between separatist Bloc Quebecois and federalist Liberals is it difference, maybe because they have their own media that doesn't care what the US or English Canada thinks is important.

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This could actually be a case study:

There was propaganda and disinformation involved in the formation of this party on every level, from Peter MacKay's pledge not to dissolve the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (the basis of a deal with David Orchard which MacKay reneged on and which denied Scott Brison the leadership), to the Canadian Alliance takeover by buying up memberships in the PCs just before the vote on whether to merge, to the constantly repeated claim that "only one national alternative party" could challenge the Liberals (drowning out those calling for deeper electoral reforms).

Since the formation of the party, the spin around Stephen Harper, whether this is really the Canadian Alliance in disguise, association with views of David Frum (and by extension Perle), and Joe Clark's loud noise against the new party, has actually turned into even more of a disinformation exercise.

Apparently Canadians are watching CNN and "learning" something from it. ;-)