The Monstrous Cons and the New Old Racist Game

It's the kind of thing that can ruin your evening. You come home, you turn on the TV, and there's Michelle Rempel, the new take no prisoners/ don't f**k with me Rempel, auditioning for the part of Canada's Marine Le Pen. 

It doesn't get much worse than that. 

But Rempel's performance yesterday was actually quite entertaining, when she suddenly announced that the Cons had a new immigration plan.  

Only to derail her own launch by going after Maxime Bernier. 

But then who can blame her?

Mad Max is on a rampage.



With just one day to go before the Con convention opens, he's not just going after "extreme multiculturalism." 

Or stoking the fires of white supremacy.

Now he's going after Andrew Scheer.


And sounding crazier by the minute...



You might think that Mad Max would have been fired long ago, before he turns the convention into a Nuremberg rally in Halifax, or a madhouse.

But the problem for Scheer is that a lot of Cons support Bernier. 

Former leadership candidate Maxime Bernier is facing a showdown with fellow Conservative MPs for publicly commenting on issues of diversity and immigration without the party’s blessing, but there appears to be significant grassroots support for keeping him within caucus.

“I don’t think you’re going to find that a large percentage of the party disagrees with what he has to say,” said Marjorie Nielsen, president of the Markham-Stouffville riding northeast of Toronto.

So Blandy Andy is scared to expel him from the Con caucus. 

Not just because he's widely considered a coward, as Martin Patriquin points out here. 



One of the prevailing narratives as to why Maxime Bernier remains in the Conservative Party caucus despite his xenophobic spleen venting about the alleged ills of “extreme multiculturalism” begins and ends with Andrew Scheer’s fortitude. 

Unlike his predecessor Stephen Harper, the current Conservative Party leader has none. Bernier can run roughshod over the Conservative narrative at will as a result, comfortable in the knowledge that his boss is a Cuckservative at heart and in his Twizzler-like backbone. This very well may be true.

But also because for Scheer, Rempel, and many other Cons, Bernier is a useful idiot. 

Perhaps Bernier remains nestled at the bosom of the Conservative Party because his only offense, according to Scheer, is that Bernier explicitly spelled out what Conservatives have been pushing for the last 18 months. That is to say, the stream of migrants arriving in Canada is nothing short of a “crisis” fomented by the current Liberal government.

In short, Bernier is only saying out loud what many of his colleagues have long whispered. For Scheer, that’s hardly a firing offence.

Which is of course is the really bad news. 

For it means that the Cons will almost certainly use racism to try to win the next election.

And this is just a re-run of a really bad movie...



Except that this movie is running in the Age of Trump so it could do a lot more damage to this country and its values.

And even Andrew Coyne is forced to admit that the Cons are playing a dangerous game.

Legitimate questions are one thing. But Conservative rhetoric on what they insist is a “crisis” is so monomaniacal, so out of proportion to its actual significance, that no one should be fooled.

There is nothing wrong with the desire that a society should have some common ideals, ambitions and yes, values to hold it together. But when this is bound up in conspiratorial suggestions that certain parties are attempting to subvert or destroy these, and even more when this is attached to immigration, as the instrument of this supposed campaign, the argument veers onto dangerous ground.

Not that the Cons care, because that's who they are.

And so is this. 

CTV News has obtained audio of a robocall made on behalf of a Conservative riding association that tried to pitch party memberships by citing a Liberal MP’s cancer diagnosis.

Great eh? 

You know when Lisa Raitt once declared that "cancer is sexy," I thought that was something only a Con could say. And I wondered whether they would learn from that ghastly mistake.

But they haven't, they haven't learned a thing. They're still the same dirty old Cons.

And if we don't finish them off in the next election, they will set this country on fire...