In the shadow of Parliament, the chance for generational election betrayal looms large

"None of us are asking for too much. As our own coalition, but of common-sense actors, we want to get a hold on inflation, return immigration to previous norms, make housing more affordable..."

New from my day job in the Western Standard.

The team from the National Citizens Coalition is in Ottawa this week at the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference, the largest conservative gathering of its kind east of the Calgary Stampede, and to describe the mood as tense might be an understatement.

With less than three weeks until Election Day, the more trust-worthy polls tight, and the Liberal-paid push-polls showing them lapping the field, business leaders, broadcasters, third-party advocates, and energy champions such as Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe have made the trip to put in vital advocacy and organizing hours, to ensure the clock is able to strike midnight on a lost Liberal decade.

“We need the third-parties to step up,” we’ve heard from inside the war room and the board-rooms of Canada’s great energy companies and manufacturers, and on that, a real ‘Team Canada’ effort has emerged, not the fraudulent one on witness from Liberals looking to wag the dog on each and every policy failure they have supported over the past nine years.

Here at the National Citizens Coalition, we’re out to market in great publications like the Western Standard, we have video ads targeting voters and being viewed in the millions, and we just debuted a powerful radio campaign in the battleground Greater Toronto Area, which far too often decides elections for everyone outside of Canada’s pretend centre of the universe.

And yet, the concern is that may still not be enough. Even with a growing army of support from terrific advocacy groups like the Canadian Coalition of Firearm Rights, former Liberal MP Dan McTeague’s Canadians for Affordable Energy, the Taxpayers’ Federation, the CCMBC, and many more, enough of a left-wing coalition, sheltered from the wreckage of their own policy, directly benefiting from increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots, may have just enough to deny millions of Canadians the relief they so desperately seek.

None of us are asking for too much. As our own coalition, but of common-sense actors, we want to get a hold on inflation, return immigration to previous norms, make housing more affordable for our future generations, build pipelines and terminals to grow our economy and get our energy to friends and allies around the world, and to keep violent criminals behind bars.

That such asks, such bare minimum requests, are still too much for the caretaker in power, who is directly benefiting from unprecedented conflicts of interest and foreign interference, and who threatens to overstay his welcome, says it all.

That leaves everyday Canadians, occasionally averse to causing a scene and at times too timid for their own good, with but one choice: to gather en-masse, much like the 15,000 in Edmonton, every chance and everywhere they get.

When your opponent is rewriting headlines on Chinese interference, claiming Carney is the “target” instead of “being directly helped,” when the new left is suddenly able to get behind a central banker who runs his businesses through tax havens, who would have been their very enemy not three months ago if he was wearing a different coloured jersey, you get those ‘elbows up’ for real.

You make it too big to rig.