So if everyone is against a real conservative platform, including the Conservatives, why can’t anyone stop talking about it?

As Canada’s worst election ever staggers toward the finish line, a theme has finally emerged. Despite the best efforts of the party leaders to say nothing coherent or true at any point, we know what it’s about. Everyone is running against the Tories. Including the Tories. Makes you wonder what they’re so afraid of.

Jagmeet Singh let the cat out of the bag about the theme when he confessed that yes, should his party unaccountably fail to win a majority of seats for the 18th straight time since its 1961 founding, he would consider a coalition with … Oh come off it. We all know the answer. Another of the three social democratic parties in this election, trading ferocious rhetorical barbs over trivial differences.

Distroscale

The NDP, Greens and Liberals are basically similar people ideologically and even sociologically, especially since the NDP’s old CCF religious Prairie populist wing flapped off to join the Tories. Truth be told, the Bloc are similar, too. The separatist thing is a bit awkward but not fatal, as Stéphane Dion’s hapless Blunderall coalition proved. Besides, who among us wouldn’t pander to Quebec?

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Photo by Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters

The main thing, for all four, is that big government is the answer to everything. As recently as Chrétien the Liberals saw themselves as the party with a heart and a brain. Unlike the Tin Man Tories and Scarecrow NDP, the Grits would bring in compassionate solutions while keeping the private economy humming along too so there’d be enough money to spread about among likely voters, I mean worthy recipients. (Chrétien also despised separatists.) But since about 2004 they’ve been reckless enthusiasts for every PC social justice meme going.

The NDP you know all about. So in a way the Greens, not the Bloc, are the oddest member of this ideological and possibly political coalition. Supposedly they aren’t just socialists who like camping. They claim to bring a fresh organic, holistic, transformative perspective to everything.

Product, alas, may not be exactly as shown. They could have built a bridge between current right and left pillboxes, combining the left’s environmentalism and compassion for all beings with the right’s appreciation for the evolutionary dynamism of free markets and the sanctity of life. Instead they’re just another left-wing party, as committed to forced unionization and high-tech abortion as the NDP, Liberals or Bloc. It’s weird, if you ask me. But they don’t.

Photo by Stephane Mahe/Reuters

Obviously the People’s Party of Canada are also running against the Tories. But from the other side. And not only because Andrew Scheer sold his free market principles for a mess of dairy cartel votes, high-volume low-IQ Tory jeering about Bernier the sore loser notwithstanding.

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Bernier may be an imperfect human being and a flawed politician. It happens. But whatever his blemishes, his party exists because the Tories abandoned their beliefs and their base long before 2017 on every important conservative issue from free markets to traditional social values to strong national defence. Which brings me to the Tories, if I can catch them as they flee over the horizon.

Obviously the People’s Party of Canada are also running against the Tories. But from the other side

They, too, are running against the Tories. Whenever cornered and asked to say something substantive, rather than the vacant appeal to selfishness that somehow became their official slogan, they deny that they will do anything conservative. Oh no, no cuts here, just slower infrastructure spending. No public sector layoffs. We believe in global warming and Paris. Abortion is a settled issue. Balanced budgets on the 43rd of Octember.

It’s kind of weird when everybody is running against a straw man, including the straw man. Aside from occasional ritual denunciations of the PPC as taboo, the social democrats are denouncing a Tory program the Tories are also denouncing. And not just Andrew Scheer’s; as my colleague Chris Selley just wrote, it’s amazing how many people bogeyman Doug Ford has offended with his cuts while increasing spending.

Photo by Ellwood Shreve/Postmedia News

So if everyone is against a real conservative platform including the Conservatives, why can’t anyone stop talking about it? Because they all know in their hearts that government is overextended, doing too much in too many areas very badly at insupportable cost.

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The state is on the handout treadmill Anthony de Jasay warned of, unable to keep up without collapsing or get off without smashing into something hard. And voters won’t be pleased, oh no, not pleased at all, if told to stop demanding free stuff and get busy pulling their own weight. Let alone that disintegration of the family is causing a host of social evils including rampant bullying.

Everyone is denouncing things no one is proposing because deep down they’re listening for a door-knock not from some glad-handing snake-oil person of sales but from Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings. They’re running against reality.

If you think that race is tawdry, wait till you see how it ends.