Tuning into the radio during the routine traffic crunch a couple of mornings ago, I caught the tail end of an interview with a bisexual drag queen from Toronto. This wasn’t your ordinary run of the mill drag queen either. As things would have it, Enza (as he likes to be called) is running for the leadership of the most bisexual drag queen-friendly party in Canada. Yup, the Canadian Alliance.
Blasphemy! It’s outrageous! How, in good conscience, can they allow someone from Toronto to run for the leadership of this "national party?" Well, allow it they will because Enza has quite a political track record. He ran for Mayor of Toronto in the most recent election and snagged a respectable 13,000 votes. He’s currently collecting the 300 signatures and $25,000 required to enter as a full-fledged candidate in the Alliance leadership race.
I applaud what Enza is doing. He is trivializing a party which is nothing more than that, trivial.
The Alliance would have you believe they are a national party with a grassroots backbone taking shape in Ontario and the Maritimes. In reality, they represent Western values, which happen to include right wing economic policies, and as a result they lasso primarily western voters. Many central and eastern Canadians agree with conservative economics, evident from the number of votes given to the Tories in the latest Liberal sweep. However, the Alliance isn’t right wing in only economics, but in all aspects of governing, something which doesn’t play well across the nation. Their conservative social policy is written by, and in effect for, westerners.
Which brings up another interesting point in the upcoming leadership race. All of the candidates, save Enza of course, are based in Alberta. Thankfully, Enza’s running has diversified the candidates race greatly-geographically as well as sexually.
What sort of national party has four leadership candidates from a province of three million and the only other candidate is a drag queen from Toronto? A pathetic one. This leadership race, and the party for that matter, doesn’t even register as a blip on the national political radar screen.
If the right is to be saved, the Alliance must disband or merge with the Progressive Conservatives. This can happen in two ways.
If either Stockwell Day or Enza are chosen to lead there will be an internal collapse of the party right into the waiting lap of the PCs. If either Grant Hill or Diane Ablonczy are victorious, the right may be united peacefully. Either choice is preferable to the status quo, for those who lean right would much rather have a compromised conservative party than an unending Liberal dictatorship.
This weekend the candidates are engaging in their first all-candidates debate. Enza, who is still going through the early stages of hormone replacement therapy for his imminent sex change, hopes to make a strong showing by presenting his quasi-serious platform. Even if he doesn’t, he’ll have succeeded at one thing: showing the Alliance for what it is-a mockery of a national political party, unable to represent the views of Canadians, coast to coast.
Enza should be given a chance to destroy the Alliance. After all, Stock had his chance, and he came close, but he couldn’t quite finish the job.
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