OTTAWA

They are midway through a majority term, have ruled the country for seven years and for the first time in a generation control a majority of all legislative seats at the provincial and federal level.

They flood the airwaves with ads, control the country’s purse strings and have the luxury of a split opposition.

Yet the close to 1,000 Canadian conservatives who gathered for The Manning Centre’s two-day examination of their future still see enemies around every corner, plotters in every Twitter feed and evil in the halls of academe and the media.

They were warned by their patriarch Preston Manning that they better green and try to claim the environmental high road in a hurry. Manning also gave a full-throated endorsement of immediately shooting the wounded, those who “cross the line” and damage the conservative family’s credibility, fingering his old friend Tom Flanagan without actually naming him.

There were three separate spheres worth studying at this gathering — who was there, who they listened to, and who really mattered.

The hallway and auditorium were populated by members of the government caucus, former Stephen Harper ministers, the old Reform gang and conservative thinkers from both the fiscal and social schools.

They listened to the relentless call of looming Armageddon by the failed presidential candidate Ron Paul, former diplomats, a former prime minister, American analysts and British maverick Nigel Farage, the leader of the e UK Independence Party.

It was an eclectic and somewhat puzzling guest list, one that Rick Smith, executive director of the rival Broadbent Institute, labelled outside the mainstream and a sign that Canadian conservatives were headed for a cul-de-sac.

But if anyone was really looking to the future of the Conservative party — cap C — there were only two men to watch over the two days.

Tony Clement and Jason Kenney were the only two Stephen Harper cabinet ministers to spend both days at the family gathering, meeting, greeting, backslapping and speaking to some of the movement’s most powerful figures.

If Harper decided to pack it in tomorrow, Clement and Kenney, two ministers with Reform-Canadian Alliance roots, would immediately be placed on any leadership short list.

Kenney, in fact, with his list of IOUs from coast-to-coast-to-coast and a legion of young, savvy Jasonistas across the country, would start any race with everyone chasing him. If he chose not to run, he could crown the eventual winner.

The two men have something in common beyond those roots and their seats at the government cabinet table — they are both practiced in the art of the party’s puzzling sense of victimization.

If may be that they cannot shake those days of Manning and Stockwell Day when they had reason to rail against the central Canadian media and those on the left who successfully branded the party a bunch of dangerous western rubes.

But midway through a majority government, more than a decade removed from those days, it must be getting tougher to conjure up the scary left-wing bogeymen.

Kenney, in a Friday address on growing the Conservative brand, put forward a strategy that can only be characterized as hug an immigrant and smash an elite.

For every shout out he gave to the hardworking first generation Canadians who share good-old common sense Conservative values, he would pick up a hammer to pound at the Plateau-Glebe-Annex cabal, the urban elites who spit out his name with disdain.

For every intersection of Conservative family values and the entrepreneurship of new Canadians, there was a shot at the “talking heads” and the columnists who live in a different world than real Canadians.

Clement warned a workshop that Conservative opponents are “trying to soak up the online universe.”

Conservatives have been blocked out of the mainstream media for many years, Clement said, an extraordinary statement coming less than two years since every large mainstream media outlet except the Star endorsed his boss for prime minister.

There is no sign that Harper will resist the temptation to go one more time in 2015, but that doesn’t mean the jockeying behind the scenes isn’t picking up speed.

Clement has been successful in raising — and shaping — his own profile by the way he uses social media, making himself less of a “cardboard cut-out” as he explained at a workshop.

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He has 29,000 Twitter followers, to Kenney’s 20,800, but Kenney follows only 642 others meaning the immigration minister uses Twitter to broadcast. Clement follows 25,700 persons, meaning he uses Twitter to dialogue.

If the race were to begin tomorrow, Kenney would have the chits to cash and Clement the social media advantage, but with an eye to the future both knew where they had to spend part of their weekend, fighting invisible enemies and tilting at dark conspiracies.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca

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