I don’t know whether it’s due to social media, a growth in the number of accessible media outlets, or simply greater political consciousness (all of which we can thank the internet for), but very recently we have seen people expand their interests in politics to areas beyond their own borders and as a consequence people are learning more about Canadian politics than ever before. For those who are unfamiliar with the domestic politics of Canada, I will begin with a short description. Canada’s federal government uses the Westminster parliamentary model, the same model that the United Kingdom uses. Canada is divided into 338 electoral districts that each send one representative (called a Member of Parliament or “MP”) to Ottawa. The leader of the party with the most MPs becomes Prime Minister and their party is said to “form government”. The Prime Minister and their cabinet picks are all MPs themselves, so in simple terms, the executive and legislative branches of our government are fundamentally connected to a degree that isn’t found in the United States. The leader of the party with the second highest number of seats is the Leader of the Opposition and their party is known as the Official Opposition. Canada has four major political parties at the federal level. The Liberal Party of Canada, as most are probably aware, currently controls the federal government. The Liberal Party of Canada is colloquially known as Canada’s natural governing party due to the fact that they managed to form government for 74% of the 20th century. The Conservative Party of Canada is a decidedly right-leaning political party that emerged following a merger of the staunchly right-wing Canadian Alliance Party and the slightly right of centre Progressive Conservative Party. Aside from their sporadic successes, the Progressive Conservatives functioned as the main opposition party for the majority of our nation’s history. Stephen Harper, leader of the relatively new Conservative Party of Canada, managed to maintain his position as Prime Minister for an impressive 9 years straight before being finally ousted by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015. While Canada has two dominant parties, there are more than two major factors in the equation. Canada currently has two smaller, but very influential, left-of-centre parties. The New Democratic Party of Canada is a nationwide social democratic party who have had successes at the provincial level (the Alberta NDP led by Rachel Notley currently forms government there) and became the federal official opposition from 2011–2015, when under Jack Layton’s soaring leadership they managed to send more than 100 MPs to Ottawa. The Bloc Quebecois is a regional separatist party who only run candidates in (you guessed it) Quebec, yet they actually managed to be the official opposition from 1993–1997. In addition to the four major parties, we have a variety of minor parties who run candidates across the country and whose names (unlike the major parties’) are pretty self-explanatory. These parties include the Green Party of Canada, the Libertarian Party of Canada, and the Christian Heritage Party (think Faith Goldy’s Rebel Media videos).

Despite the fact that we, at least in theory, have so much choice, countless Canadians I’ve talked to in person and online feel politically homeless today. Hardly the most minor factors in this feeling of homelessness are the ongoing NDP and Conservative leadership races. Stephen Harper had for decades been regarded as one of Canada’s staunchest (mainstream) conservatives, and this especially rang true when Rona Ambrose took over to be the party’s interim leader. Rona Ambrose, a self-described feminist who employs populist rhetoric, has been by every metric a masterful Leader of the Opposition, hammering Justin Trudeau on every slip-up, flip-flop and moment of hypocrisy. While I have my disagreements with her, it was hard to not feel proud of her when she valiantly and successfully fought to bring Yazidi refugees to Canada. But just as Rona replaced Harper, she too is set to be replaced, and those set to fill her shoes are not exactly what the majority of Canadians would call appealing. Businessman Kevin O’Leary, who lives in the United States and can’t speak French, recently dropped out of the race. Okay, now that that distraction is out of the way, let’s look at the real candidates who actually want to lead. Of those who could feasibly win (they use a ranked ballot system and estimations are difficult) the only moderates are Lisa Raitt, Michael Chong, and Erin O’Toole, all of whom have been mostly ignored in favour of more radical candidates or wannabe extremists. Maxime Bernier, who currently leads the polls, is a stopped-clock libertarian with no workable plan to implement his policies without amassing enormous debt and/or making deep cuts to popular social programs. Andrew Scheer, who is second in the polls, is a social conservative who could be best described as our own little Paul Ryan with a fake cultural libertarian-twist. Kellie Leitch, who has consistently been in the top echelon, is a desperate Trump wannabe who has based her entire campaign on inane wedge-issues. It’s like we’re witnessing the Republican primaries all over again.

Early in the 2015 election cycle, the New Democratic Party led by then Leader of the Opposition Tom Mulcair was actually leading in the polls. Ultimately though, Stephen Harper baited Mulcair on a Niqab-related wedge-issue which lost Mulcair his support in Quebec, which consequently lowered the NDP’s polling and resulted in voters switching over to Trudeau in a strategic effort to “STOP Harper”. What happened was pretty clear to any politically literate person and despite a crushing loss Mulcair still managed to pull off the second best election result in the party’s history. Unfortunately, only one of the candidates running to replace Mulcair, a man by the name of Guy Caron, understands what happened. To understand what is happening in the New Democratic Party one must understand Tom Mulcair. Tom Mulcair is considered by everyone to be a moderate New Democrat. This characterization of Tom Mulcair is totally fair, and it’s actually the reason I was as confident as I was voting for him. In a soundbite, Tom Mulcair is a radical centrist with a great beard. Mulcair ran on a pragmatic platform that involved raising new revenue by closing loopholes and giving the corporate tax rate a wee raise. According to his plan the new revenue would be used to invest in infrastructure, work towards a national subsidized childcare program, and balance the budget. He also ran with some archetypal libertarian positions such as reigning in corporate welfare and repealing the unconstitutional Conservative/Liberal approved “anti-terror” bill, Bill C-51 (which the NDP voted against). Everyone in the ongoing leadership race seems to be trying to be the NDP’s Jeremy Corbyn because they falsely believe that they lost in 2016 because they ran a moderate, a centrist who, for a time, was killing it in the polls like no prior NDP candidate. While very civil, 2017’s NDP debates consist almost entirely of bashing bogeymen and making unrealistic proposals that they would probably be unable to fulfill (and not to our detriment). The most likely candidate to win the leadership race is probably Charlie Angus, but I have serious reservations about his political viability and vagueness. I wanted to love Charlie, but I’m sorry, he has the political views that I did before I started actually challenging myself and I really don’t think he’s electable. For the sake of full disclosure, I personally would have a hard time voting for any NDP candidate in the next election as there’s no way I’m going into my first real job after years of paying tuition only to have my family and I start paying for other people’s free tuition. Is this position self-interested? Absolutely, but tell me you don’t make political decisions based on self-interest and you’ll be lying, whether you are conscious of it or not. In my opinion, the candidate with the best chance of picking up seats for the party is Guy Caron, a Quebec MP who is an economist by training. Simply put, Guy Caron is French, very French, and not only is he French but he is open to a debate about the Niqab. The NDP cannot get anywhere without Quebec and I’d be damned if Guy Caron couldn’t sweep Quebec. Unfortunately, Caron is at the bottom in terms of popularity, being overshadowed by the likes of Niki Ashton, who is working on her PHD in millennial feminism and thinks BLM Toronto is just swell. In so many ways, candidates like Niki Ashton could not be more different than Tom Mulcair, a man who takes a pragmatic, situation by situation approach to pipelines and trade deals, and is on video talking about how having government everywhere will not solve all our problems. I know it sounds sappy, but seeing the NDP spit on Tom Mulcair’s legacy after voting to dump him as leader doesn’t merely isolate me politically, it breaks my heart. That isn’t to say however that he was perfect or that the party does not have persistent issues. The NDP’s economic policy for years has been too anti-consumer for my liking and there are people in the party’s ranks, particularly at lower levels, who are, for lack of a better word, total SJWs. For all of you who didn’t stop reading the moment I said “SJW”, I am planning to write another article that will touch on that more extensively, I promise it isn’t just a catch-all ad hom attack for anyone to my left.

Okay, you’re thinking, if you want centrism, why not vote for Trudeau and the Liberals? The idea that the Liberals are a principled centrist party that pursues the kinds of policies that actual centrists want, is one of the most pervasive lies in Canadian political life. The Liberal Party is and always has been a brokerage party, which is very different than a centrist, radical centrist, or “third way” party. The goal of a brokerage party is to maintain power by creating as large a tent as possible through a process of combining different policies in a calculated way that can win elections. In theory, this could result in taking the better policies of the left and combining them with the better policies of the right, but the Trudeau Liberals have done the opposite, creating an incoherent mess of consistently awful policy. Let me cut through all the international headlines and give you an idea of who Trudeau is. Trudeau constantly touts how much of a feminist he is, yet his government sold 15 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, a country that can only be rivaled by Iran as a global supporter of radical Islam. He also, smiling like a moron, chose to attend an event at a gender-segregated mosque where women were forced to stand at the back. To put the Saudi arms deal into perspective, Canada selling them 15 billion dollars’ worth of weapons at the time would have been, proportionately speaking, like America selling them 150 billion dollars’ worth of weapons. His idea of fighting climate change is implementing a gradually increasing 10–50 dollar per tonne carbon tax on top of all the taxes we already pay. Make no mistake, carbon taxes are a proven way of reducing emissions cheaply, but with no tax cuts to offset them they can take a serious toll on people’s finances and the economy as a whole. To make matters worse, it’s not even like his policy would get us anywhere close to meeting our Paris obligations, according to experts we would need the carbon tax to be far higher in order to have enough of an effect, if any significant effect at all, on emissions. Once you get the facts it doesn’t take much political keenness to see Trudeau’s carbon tax for what it is, a tax. Given how out of control these Liberal budgets are, it makes sense that they’d need a new tax, but what has many of us far more concerned is what we’re not paying for. Thanks to this Liberal government we are on track to not see a balanced budget until the middle of the century at which point we will have accumulated at least one and a half trillion dollars’ worth of debt, meaning we’d have a similar debt to GDP ratio to what America has today. We are not in a recession; there is no tangible reason to be going into the amount of debt we are going into. And to address the skeptics, yes debt is bad; it is expensive to service, unsustainable and can drive up interest rates. Throw in yet another massive no-strings-attached bailout for Bombardier, a “corporation” who right after receiving the bailout decided to lay off thousands of workers and give their top execs massive bonuses, and you have another good reason to want this government gone. If we had to invest public money in Bombardier we could have at least attempted some kind of noble effort to restructure the company (possibly into some system of equity ownership) instead of using taxpayers’ dollars to maintain a status quo that the market has rejected time and time again. After the bailout, where execs got massive raises, Trudeau had the audacity to say that the raises were okay because he believes in the free market and he also said something about how the bailouts were to help the middle-class. Trudeau says idiotic things like this all the time. Despite his unintentionally hilarious overuse of the words “middle” and “class”, you could easily count the number of ways Trudeau has tangibly helped the middle class on a single hand.

As something of a footnote, it occurred to me that I haven’t even touched the ridiculous faux-progressive bills and motions the Liberal government has passed, with of course, the help of the NDP and the odd Conservative MP. Despite the impulse to disregard opposition to these as Conservative hysteria (of which there is plenty), Bill C-16 and Motion M103 are both truly astonishingly poorly crafted and have real implications, but that’s a whole other beast to tackle.

The feeling I so often feel these days is just short of political despair, yet I am constantly reassured when I speak to other Canadians who feel the same way. I was ecstatic when I heard about a recent meeting in Toronto organized by Scott Gilmore for people who feel alienated by the current state of our parties. The turnout mostly consisted of Conservatives but apparently included some Liberals and New Democrats too, who hate Trudeau’s deficits and are tired of campus PC culture. Should they be unable to win influence in an existing party, this group of people were toying with the possibility of forming a new political party, pitched as a centre-right party that is pro-gay and pro-climate action. This ideology is not too different from that of Conservative MP and leadership candidate Michael Chong. And you know what? I would be down. In the current political climate you’d be hard pressed to find a place for Canada’s Red Tories, classical liberals, moderates, or radical centrists. These groups may seem diverse, but when you get down to it these people generally want the same things: sensible climate policy, respect for individual freedoms, better real wages for workers (be them white-collar or blue-collar) and a thriving, appropriately-regulated market economy that will allow us to responsibly fund the social programs we as Canadians take pride in. This party can reject the sloppy political correctness of the Liberals and New Democrats while also rejecting the scare-mongering of the Conservatives. This new party could embrace the smart climate options that seemingly all other parties are keen to ignore. This party should join the Libertarian Party’s respectable opposition to bailouts, while also recognizing the ways in which we benefit from sensible regulations and social programs. This party should properly comprehend Canada’s role in the world and act in accordance with our values. This new party would commit itself to balanced budgets, a cleaner tax system and inclusive growth. This party should understand that every worker is also a consumer and that every consumer is, or relies on, a worker.

The truth of the matter is that every party has members who they are making no effort to keep. This new party would drain support from every major party with the exception of maybe the Bloc Quebecois, and thus could easily gain a plurality of the vote in dozens, if not hundreds, of districts across the country. Even if the party failed to form government, its existence would force political realignments. With their moderate supporters siphoned off, the Conservatives would become something of a Trumpian Republican party, the NDP would represent the left, and the Liberals would become increasingly irrelevant. After all, who would need the Liberals if there was a version of them that wouldn’t drown our country in debt and embarrassment? There is huge untapped demand in this country for a serious, grown-up, centrist party with high ethical standards and a focus on results.

We’ve got the numbers; this thing is ours if we want it.