The Editor:
According to my friend and adviser Mr. Webster (college edition), we find the word conservative means “tending to conserve” or “tending to preserve established traditions or institutions and to resist or oppose any changes in these policies.” or, “open to moderate change.”
This definition definitely does not describe Mr. Harper’s one-man wrecking crew over the past 10 years.
My understanding is that most people who consider themselves Conservatives do so under Webster’s definition. Conservative was never meant to mean total conversion to global capitalism.
Traditional Conservatives are not motivated exclusively by power and wealth. They have been, and still are, the reeve, the mayor and the Legion members. They are the service clubs and they sat on the local health board and school board. They are the preservers of our society. They share the backbone of social conscious in most communities and are respected for it.
Mr. Harper has taken this understanding of Conservative and tried to twist it into something ugly to destroy our society and the living environment of the Earth that we know is necessary to sustain life.
His undemocratic Prime Minister’s ship has thrown us into an ocean of change, uncertainty and impending doom without a life-jacket. Behind closed doors he has signed international trade deals that gives predatory multi-national corporations more power than our own governments. The World Trade Organization (WTO) whose board members are part of the corporate elite, has the power to overturn protective domestic policy based on the conditions of these international trade deals Harper and his Liberal predecessor Jean Chretien have signed.
On May 31, 2003 at the Progressive Conservative leadership convention, the corporate elite represented by their minion, Peter McKay, stabbed the king-maker of the day (David Orchard) in the back with a knife that was so large it was seen from coast to coast to coast. The contract for Orchard’s support was that the PCs would never amalgamate with the Alliance Party, a deal which was immediately broken with McKays’s rise to leadership of the PCs. Since then, the so called Conservative Party actively destroys conservativism and everything that stands in the way of its corporate agenda.
At the time of the transformation of the Reform Party to the Alliance and before they confiscated the Conservative brand, the minions floated the idea of calling themselves the Canadian Reform Alliance Party until one of their brighter handlers figured out the acronym was CRAP. My opinion is that the acronym fits Harper’s party better than any traditional meaning of conservative.
Greg Chatterson
Green Party candidate for Regina Qu’Appelle
