Feel the love

Got back from a friend/colleague’s wedding up in Muskoka yesterday (congratulations to Marni and Richard, by the way) to find a rather full inbox. Admittedly, this wasn’t a surprise. Sometimes, I’m caught off guard by the response I get to a column; with Friday’s, it was pretty well a given.

Naturally, most of the correspondents furious with my suggestion that conservatives convey a dislike for Canada proceeded to outline the reasons they dislike Canada. Or maybe some of them weren’t really furious with me, and were sincerely letting me know I was right (using their angriest, most paranoid voices). It can be hard to tell.

Representative of the somewhat more lucid (but no less hostile) responses is this blogger’s take.

I’ve never actually met this person, so far as I know, which may explain why she’s greatly overestimated my clout. (“Guys like Radwanski are part of Ottawa’s connected crowd … part of that network of people who know all the people, who are the people who decide what matters. He speaks for them.” Good on me, considering how little time I spend in Ottawa.) But more importantly, she seems to have joined most of the others frothing at the mouth over this column in somewhat missing my point.

I’m not suggesting conservatives actually hate Canada – not most of them, anyway, and certainly not Monte Solberg. My point is that the bitter, frustrated way they go about their communications conveys that impression, and that it hurts them in the court of public opinion. I’m not sure why this is so hard to grasp.

I’m also not entirely clear on why I keep being accused of unfairly casting an isolated quote from one MP as indicative of a common message from conservatives (of both the big- and small-c variety). For those who started writing their screeds before they got to this part of the column, here’s that handy description of Canada’s evolution courtesy of Stephen Harper, back in his pre-leadership days: “a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.”