Nobody embodied positive conservative values better and more efficaciously than US President Ronald Reagan. In 1980, he asked voters if they were better off after four years of then-President Jimmy Carter and he described America as that shining city on a hill with its commitment to the economic freedom of capitalism. .Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Pierre Poilievre needs to ask Canadians that question if there’s an election in 2023. .Think there won’t be an election in 2023? Well, as the Western Standard reported yesterday about half of Canadians want an election next year and that number climbs to almost two-thirds among the 18-34 crowd. .Well, askin' ain’t gettin', but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already put his caucus on notice that there’s a good chance of a Spring election. .He knows there is more economic malaise on the horizon and he thinks the federal NDP vote has collapsed after its leader, Jagmeet Singh, signed a devil’s pact with the Liberals. .The results of the recent byelection in Mississauga-Lakeshore must have scared the paints off of Singh. The NDP candidate secured less than five percent of the vote and was left fighting for the scraps with the Green Party and Peoples Party of Canada. That riding could well be microcosm of the next federal election with many socialist voters deciding to go with the Liberals, since Trudeau has pushed the party into NDP territory. .But there is another lesson to be learned from that byelection for Conservative voters and for is leader, Pierre Poilievre. Liberal Charles Sousa won that contest with 51% of the vote while his Conservative challenger garnered about 37%. But only 26% of the electorate turned out to vote. That’s low, even for a byelection. .So what’s the lesson for Conservatives? If you don’t get out and vote, the Liberals are going to win the next election. I can almost guarantee it.I have watched Trudeau navigate his way through one financial scandal after another and even get off the mat after the blackface scandal that should have finished any politician who has a nasty habit of lecturing everyone about their imagined racism. So don’t count this clown out just yet because he knows many voters have a short memory and will have forgotten that they have continued to elect a teenager in an adult body who continues to embarrass Canada while he runs the country as an ego-boosting exercise. .We need to see a lot more of Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre than we need in the Mississauga byelection that could have been a Tory victory. .The Conservatives also need to present a platform of positive ideology. Not just four weeks of Trudeau bashing, as tempting as that is (and as frequently as I do it on these web pages.) .Poilievre will be encouraged to “moderate” his policies by a liberal legacy media that will immediately declare he is too “extreme” for Canadian voters. They will say he needs to get with the mainstream and status quo and stop talking about privatizing the CBC. .But that’s precisely what he needs to be talking about and he needs to start now. Canadians are sick of a Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) that looks and sounds like the Liberal Party of Canada. It’s been Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum for too long now. What excited people during Poilievre’s leadership race is that he actually sounded like a real conservative and not a Liberal facsimile. .Poilievre needs to explain why tax cuts are good for you; why slashing regulations will grow jobs; why free speech is integral to our democracy; and why climate change fanatics are irrational, unscientific and anti-life – they want us to live on insects and inside caves. .The Conservatives can also benefit from the collapse of the NDP. Many blue collar workers are attracted to the CPC under Poilievre. They are sick of the social engineering of the NDP and its obsession with pronouns and identity politics and want to talk about good jobs. They are some of the same people who supported the Freedom Convoy this year and who were sickened when the NDP walked away from those truckers, got behind Trudeau’s vaccine mandates, and then supported the invocation of the Emergencies Act. .As I said, if we have a 2023 election, Poilievre needs to ask Canadian voters if they’re better off now than they were four years ago — or even two years. And he needs to tell them how a Conservative government can make them better off, not through more government spending and interference, but by a new birth of freedom.
