GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Saturday, October 31, 2015

How The Conservative Can Avoid Another Beating...

Here is my latest article in iPolitics.

Friday, October 30, 2015

Finally - someone paying attention to Justin Trudeau

National Post and Ottawa Citizen columnist Terry Glavin is clearly paying attention - surely somebody in the opposition should have noticed this as well, no?
For the millions of Canadians who voted for Justin Trudeau in the hopes of a break from the past, the appointment of the grizzled mandarin Peter Harder to lead Trudeau’s transition to power doesn’t look like a harbinger of a fresh new start.

Harder, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs and trade, comes straight out of the cohort of Liberal party grandees that Trudeau assured his party recruits and leadership-race supporters would no longer be running the show in Ottawa.

For starters, Harder is president of the Canada China Business Council (CCBC), a powerful group of corporate and bureaucratic strivers that is functionally indistinguishable from the old and discredited Liberal party establishment that Canadian voters unseated a decade ago.
We can now expect to see a very pro-China government and that will mean more takeovers in the oil patch by Chinese State-Owned Enterprises. Interestingly, not one word about China came up in the debates during the election.

 

By the way, here is what Terry Glavin had to say about my book, Conservative Confidential: Inside The Fabulous Blue Tent:

Thursday, October 29, 2015

The Conservatives Told Lies - to Themselves...

There are still many people in denial. Today, in Facebook, a friend of mine wrote that:

The Liberals won this election not by proving to Canadians that they could do a better job but by convincing low information voters that Stephen Harper is the devil incarnate.
And, here is my reply:
If you really believe what you have written, then the Conservatives are in a pile of trouble. The Conservatives ran a horrible campaign with no ideas, let alone the fact that they squandered a majority government doing....what, well, nothing at all. No big plans, no big thinking, no philosophy, no nothing...the harper Conservatives were timid conservatives...and they were nasty. Their spokespeople were completely vapid - Paul Calandra made Pierre Poilievre seem Churchillian...and Poilievre was pretty bad. The Harper conservatives deserved to lose, and if there is not some major introspection, then we can look forward to opposition for many years.
The Conservatives were the ones telling lies. We were fooling ourselves by saying we were the principled party - when in fact, we were just nasty and vindictive. We were the ones who enaged in negative advertising and we changed the rules to allow for more spending...just because we had more money. Who was fooling who? We fooled ourselves.

Please go out and buy my book. I write about a lot of this and I have a way forward for Canada. Plus, I also go after the left.


Tuesday, October 27, 2015

A New Vision for Canada

In my book, Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent, I outline a new vision for Canada in the 21st Century. All prospective leadership candidates should read this section of my book.

As the United States retreats from the world, it is high time that Canada steps up to do more. No, we cannot replace the US, but we can play a bigger role in the world.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Whatever happened to Conservative policy?

The poor campaign by the Conservatives wasn't the only reason why they lost the campaign. Whatever happened to conservative policy?  Every since the five major priorities of the 2005-2006 campaign, the Conservatives have been running on empty. Take the CBC.  In nine years of office all they did was one minor budget cut.  They did nothing to change how the CBC operates.  Or the military. They started off strong, but there was no commitment to improving the military and now the ratio of military spending to GDP is at a 30 year low.

The policy on prostitution was ridiculous. Yes, try banning prostitution. 

In my book, Conservative Confidential: Inside The Fabulous Blue Tent, I talk about how I felt the Conservatives were timid  in that they would not address conservative issues like equalization, the merit-principle, fairness for men in family law, bilingualism, supply management, corporate welfare, flattening the tax system, etc. And, yet besides being timid - they were also arrogant.

I mean what party with any intelligence would use Paul Calandra as its main spokesperson?  He knew little about the issues and could only repeat the given talking points. I would cringe when he was on the 5 PM political shows. Yet, the Conservatives thought he was the right person.

Perhaps part of the problem for the Conservatives is that there are very few conservative think tanks in Canada. The Fraser Institute does some very good work, but who else is there. The Manning Centre does almost nothing and that leaves the MacDonald-Laurier Institute as the other really good conservative think tank.  That's it....

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Stop the Denial.....

You can just read the comments on my last few postings to see the incredible delusion that has overtaken many Conservatives in this country. We didn't lost because of the biases of the CBC (and yes, it is biased), or the rantings of Craig Oliver at CTV (yes, he does rant against the Conservatives), or because of the Obama administration.

The Conservative loss in the election was self-inflicted. We ran a lousy campaign tempered with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment. Before you go all bat-shit crazy on me, I should add that I am personally against women wearing a niqab during citizenship ceremonies. But, the Conservatives over-politicized the issue - my god, if this issue was important, they had nine years to bring legislation before the House of Commons. Harper make it worse by casually mentioning on the CBC that perhaps we should ban the niqab in the civil service. But, no women wear the niqab in the civil service....so why is this an issue.

The Conservatives strung a number of issues together - the bungling of the Syrian refugee crisis, the niqb, the citizenship issues regarding people convicted of terrorism, the barbaric practices hotline - that made them look anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant. A totally unforced error on the Conservatives' part. And then, to top off their horrible campaign, they showed up with the Fords' in Toronto.

Let's hope the Conservatives conduct an honest appraisal of what went wrong.

In the meantime, don't forget to order my book, Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent, which shows how the Harper government was arrogantly timid.




Saturday, October 24, 2015

Conrad Black Nails It Again

Conrad knows why the Conservatives lost.
 Harper salvaged and reconstructed a coherent political option and built it through four elections, but could not renovate a tired government and chose not to make way for someone who would. He decreed an over-long campaign, and then offered no incentive to vote for his government’s re-election except excessive denigration of his opponents and a dismal series of distractions about a woman wearing a niqab at a citizenship swearing-in after identifying herself privately to authorities; hypothetical dual-citizen terrorists; and protecting the country from the spectre of “400,000 Syrian refugees,” arriving by an as yet unimagined method of inter-continental travel.
The whole reelection campaign of what was a generally successful government was a pastiche of contemptible low-balling and fear-mongering. Stephen Lewis’s statement on election night that he was proud that Canadians had not approved such a campaign and such a high-handed government, even though his party was not the beneficiary of its failure, resonated. It was an undignified and self-inflicted end that combined elements of hubris and nemesis both with the merely banal and with Harper’s heroic faith.
Don't forget to go out and purchase a copy of Conservative Confidential: Inside The Fabulous Blue Tent.



Thursday, October 22, 2015

Why The Tories Deserved to Lose....

Here is my appearance this week on NewsTalk 770 in Calgary talking about why the Tories deserved to lose.

Don't forget to buy my new book, Conservative Confidential.




Saturday, October 17, 2015

Where the Conservatives went wrong..

Here's a link to my first article in The National Post...

Like most other Canadians, what struck me about the photograph of that little boy washed up on a Turkish beach, and the revelation in the National Post that his family had been hoping to find asylum in Canada, was the way it brought home, in a very personal and vivid way, the horrific tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis.
But instead of turning to questions about how Canada could, and should, play a much bigger role in alleviating Syrian suffering, Conservative partisans chose to spread the vilest of lies about the Kurdi family specifically and about Syrian refugees generally. The Syrian refugees are people who desperately need our help and yet Conservative activists took the opportunity to flood social media with hysteria.

One of the most bizarre conspiracy theories was based on the falsehood that one in 50 Syrian refugees is an ISIL infiltrator. Just because so many of the asylum seekers had cell phones and were well-dressed, this was supposed to prove that they weren’t refugees at all. And the disingenuous questions: Why are so many of the refugees men? Doesn’t this prove that Europe is facing a Muslim invasion? It didn’t matter that young men were the natural choice for refugee families to send into harm’s way, or that the sky-high refugee numbers were still only one-four-hundredth of the population of Europe.

It was ugly and the Conservative party is not helping matters by using the niqab issue to energize a faction of the Conservative activist base that deliberately conflates Islam, the religion, with Islamism, an aggressive political ideology. This is causing deep divisions in Canada about Muslims and it is contributing to the alienation of Muslim Canadians from the rest of us.

Thursday, October 08, 2015

Great Review of Conservative Confidential in Ottawa Jewish Bulletin...

Here is a link to a great review of Conservative Confidential: Inside The Fabulous Blue Tent, in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

Please visit our web site for more information.

If you haven't bought your copy yet, what are you waiting for?