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After boning up on events at the weekend gatherings of Liberals and Conservatives, I’m left … confused.

It’s as if the clock had been turned back a decade. Today’s Conservatives are bent on following the path of yesterday’s Liberals. The Liberals are intent on tracing the route set out at the dawn of Stephen Harper’s leadership.

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Harper invented today’s Conservative party. He forged it in partnership with the Progressive Conservatives, but once he became Prime Minister it took on his identity. Throughout the latter years of his time in office, Canadians were regularly told that Stephen Harper and the Conservative party were one and the same thing, so complete was his domination. The big concern was whether the party could survive his departure, so tight had his grip become.

Liberals decried his overarching control, dismissing lesser Conservatives as mere minions. Hand on heart, they declared that such a thing would never be allowed in the ranks of the Big Tent Liberals, where diversity and inclusion are all. Yet, just seven months into its new mandate, the party is already so overwhelmingly identified with its leader that Harper must look on with a sense of awe.