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These are my own views, of course. But I like to think that I’m also speaking for that great swathe of Canadians who have existed all of their lives as centrists, or even leftists, but now find themselves denounced as alt-right heretics because they dared to speak aloud one of the above-listed beliefs. The only politician I’ll be excited to support in the next election will be the one (of whatever party) who isn’t afraid to say such things aloud.

Photo by Blair Gable/Reuters

That didn’t include Andrew Scheer, who lost the election in part because he couldn’t decide if he was a truth-teller or a bromide peddler. On some issues (though admittedly not all), he got lost betwixt and between, and fell back on a default strategy of vacuous anti-Liberal sloganeering. This was often a turn-off. There are plenty of us, me included, who think Trudeau actually got many of the big issues right (including the biggest: handling Donald Trump and the existential threat to the Canadian economy posed by U.S. protectionism), even if we suspect a Conservative government could do better.

Several of the candidates in this leadership race — including MacKay — are old enough to have passed through the Canadian conservative realignment of the late 1990s and early 2000s. They need to remember that many of the leading issues from that period are dead, and that conservatives and liberals are, in substance, actually much closer than they were in the era of Jean Chrétien and Preston Manning. None of the young Canadian conservatives I meet these days opposes gay marriage. Few look to the U.S. economy as a model for our own, seek to tear down our highly regulated banking oligopoly (which saved us from the 2008 mortgage meltdown), substantially undercut our universal health-care system, starve our welfare state, or bring back capital punishment. If it’s important to make lists of truths that need telling, it’s also important to tick off policy areas that will simply turn people off.