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It’s become a fixture on the Ottawa political calendar — the Manning Conference takes over the biggest venue in town, the Shaw Centre, on the last weekend of February.

It’s not just a right wing schmooze-fest; it’s also a platform for ideas and an occasion for reflection. The theme for Manning 2016 — “Recharging the Right” — is timely.

Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose is the guest at the opening cocktail reception on Thursday, and she represents both generational change and a more positive tone. Six would-be leadership candidates are also on the dais. Kevin O’Leary will square off with Kellie Leitch on Friday. Tony Clement, Max Bernier, Michael Chong and Lisa Raitt will close the program on Saturday.

Preston Manning will be there, offering a reminder that there is life after politics. Once a failed leader of a divided right, he has successfully re-invented himself as a thought leader — perhaps the role he was meant to play all along. It suits him, and he clearly enjoys playing the gracious host.

Conference topics include ‘Conservatives on cannabis’ (seriously), cities, ‘green’ conservatism, the aging population and the future of the oil and gas industry. That last one is pretty fundamental to the future of the Conservative heartland of Alberta. There’s also a session on democratic reform, and whether first-past-the-post is behind us.

In the corridors and hospitality suites, there will be conversations about lessons learned from the election loss last October, and about finding a way forward in rebuilding the Conservative brand.

The bottom line on the election is the Conservatives got beat — deservedly so — after running a wretched campaign that was completely out of touch with modern, mainstream Canada. It was their turn to lose anyway, after three terms and nearly a decade in office. No one since Sir Wilfrid Laurier has won four elections in a row. But what began as a time-for-a-change election became a throw-the-bums-out election (one bum in particular).

As veteran Conservative strategist Geoff Norquay put it: ‘The party needs to develop a more moderate approach.’ That means moving away from the shameful identity politics that doomed the Conservatives in 2015. As veteran Conservative strategist Geoff Norquay put it: ‘The party needs to develop a more moderate approach.’ That means moving away from the shameful identity politics that doomed the Conservatives in 2015.

Stephen Harper missed an opportunity to move on before the election; he very much needs to do so now. He needs to resign his seat in the House, clear out his fourth floor office at the back of the Centre Block, and leave town. There shouldn’t be any more sightings of him at movie matinees in Ottawa, as there was at a showing of The Revenant a few weeks ago, where Harper was spotted slouched under a baseball cap and accompanied by his former chief of staff, Ray Novak.

The party can’t re-build with his ghost in the room. The good news for the blue team is that it has time on its side. The Liberal majority means there will be no election before 2019, and thanks to one of Harper’s legacy pieces, the Fixed Elections Act, the Conservatives know the exact date — the third Monday of October, that being October 21, 2019.

In the normal course of events it would take two elections for the Conservatives to defeat the Liberals — or rather, for the Trudeau Liberals to defeat themselves. Four $25 billion deficits in a row might help reduce the Grits to a minority in 2019. That would be a best-case outlook for the Conservatives.

The lessons learned and the way forward are really part of the same conversation. Consider the shellacking the Conservatives took in Canadian cities and suburbs last October. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Greater Toronto Area, with its 54 seats. On a stand-alone basis, the GTA would be the third largest province in the country. In downtown Toronto, area 416, where the Conservatives held nine out of 23 seats in the last Parliament, they went zero for 25 in the new House. In suburban 905, where the Conservatives swept 21 out of 22 seats in 2011, they won only four out of 29 seats in 2015. (Maybe closing the campaign with the Ford brothers was a mistake.)

Altogether, the Conservatives won only three cities — Quebec City, Calgary and Edmonton. The rest all went massively Liberal.

The Conservative party also needs to re-connect with multicultural communities. For a decade, Jason Kenney went to every ethnic banquet hall, newspaper and radio station in the country. But if you want to see the face of multicultural Canada, look at the Liberal cabinet class photo from their swearing-in — or just turn on question period.

In urban and ethnic Canada, there was one turning point and one tipping point in the campaign. The turning point was the niqab, which worked for the Conservatives in Quebec, but not in the rest of the country. The tipping point was the barbaric practices snitch line.

In multicultural communities, voters asked themselves if they’d be next on the Conservative hit list. And with their slice-and-dice tactics the Conservatives also turned off the Red Tory wing of their own party, which migrated to the Liberals. These were the Progressive Conservatives who filled the ballroom of the Royal York in Toronto last November for Brian Mulroney’s Albany Club speech. They were adamant that night that they meant to take their party back from the Harper crowd, and wanted nothing further to do with them.

As veteran Conservative strategist Geoff Norquay later put it: “The party needs to develop a more moderate approach.” That means moving away from the shameful identity politics that doomed the Conservatives in 2015. It also means, suggests Norquay, stepping up on issues “such as urban transit and the environment.”

The good news for the Conservatives in the election is that their base delivered 31.8 per cent of the vote and 99 seats. With the Liberals consistently outflanking the NDP on the left, there is room for the Conservatives to grow their brand on the centre-right of the spectrum. The Manning Conference would be a good place to start coming up with some new and more inclusive ideas.

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of five books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.