If there’s anything more ridiculous than the name of Centre Ice Conservatives, it’s their goal to allegedly move the Conservative Party of Canada to the centre or centre-right, whatever that means..Alberta businessman and former federal party leadership candidate Rick Peterson recently founded the group in obvious reaction to MP Pierre Poilievre (CPC-Carleton) and his front running status in the Conservative leadership contest. .Let’s get this straight from the beginning: The Conservative Party under former leader Erin O’Toole moved so far to the left it was indistinguishable from the Liberal Party of Canada. Every time some well-meaning or nefarious Red Tory argues the CPC needs to move to the centre and be more like the Liberals, it loses support and crushes its voter base..So many of these half-wits call themselves party strategists, but they couldn’t get a football past the goal posts (to keep with the sports analogy). Firstly, Conservatives need to reach out to those who don’t vote because they're frustrated and fed up with all the parties spouting the same moronic talking points about climate change and LGBTQ inclusivity..That’s why Brexit passed in the U.K. It wasn’t the traditional Conservative voters who rescued Britain from the E.U., it was the voters who found a reason to go to the polls because they were told this time they'd make a difference..Secondly, Poilievre is not an extremist candidate. He's a centrist candidate. It's the Red Tories who left the centre and left the voters. Poilievre is talking commons sense policies that work for people. .So, who's behind the Centre Ice Conservatives?.Well the chairman is Dominic Cardy, who is also New Brunswick’s minister of Education and Early Childhood Development. He’s also a former provincial NDP leader and he endorsed former Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest in the CPC leadership contest. Well, he’s certainly got all the party bases covered!.“This is not a group that is Pierre Poilievre-friendly. Let’s leave it at that,” Dino Mazzone, a Quebec lawyer who briefly served on Centre Ice’s advisory board, told the National Post..Then there’s Tasha Kheiriddin, Charest’s national co-chair. She’s also on the advisory council. Kheiriddin used to know what a conservative was, but she’s so firmly in the Red Tory camp now that I haven’t got the time of day for her. I will never forget how she went into ecstasy when Ontario Premier Doug Ford backed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Emergencies Act because it was time to show those little people who was boss..Putting the Freedom Convoy in its place seems to be a common denominator among the group. Former Senate Conservative leader Marjory LeBreton is also on the advisory board. She recently resigned as a member of Poilievre’s Carleton constituency board of directors because the MP supported the Freedom Convoy. .So it seems clear that this is an anti-Poilievre, pro-Charest group that is clearly hoping to hobble the conservative, populist forces in the party and put another irrelevant liberal in charge of the party so he can lose to whomever the Liberals put out front in the next election. Even if that’s still Trudeau..When will the Red Tories learn being conservative is different from being liberal? When will they discern being conservative is a positive thought phenomenon, not a negative one? President Ronald Reagan sold conservatism so successfully because he told people why it could make their lives better, more positive, more prosperous, more free..He always made the left-wing Democrats look like the ones with the negative message of state control that robbed people of their liberty, their hard-earned wealth and their freedom to speak and believe as they chose..Charest is an insouciant figure with the sort of bonhomie that characterizes so many successful career politicians. But his policies will not be that different than what we already have under Trudeau and right now we need someone like Poilievre to energetically move the pendulum back from the far left position it's been lodged in for some time. .If Red Tories want to insist Poilievre is too extreme for Canadians, I would suggest they no longer understand either the depth of the ideological divide in Canada or Canadians themselves who are tired of being over-regulated, overtaxed and over-wrought by an increasingly authoritarian government that neither listens to nor cares for it citizens.
