Seven Oaks Magazine.

The "new" Conservative Party of Canada chose its "new" leader this past weekend. The convention featured little to no suspense, as Stephen Harper, the "former" leader of the Canadian Reform Alliance, won easily on the first ballot. It's likely that only right-wingers, and perhaps die-hard fans of CBC's Don Newman, tuned in for the wall-to-wall coverage. But the rest of us would be well advised to keep close tabs on the massive marketing campaign currently underway to rehabilitate Canada's other ruling party.

Paul Martin's Liberals, the juggernaut party of power for more than a decade, are becoming harder and harder to sell to Canadians. Their market share, as reflected in the polls, is plummeting. And the conservatives, the tacticians of that other faction of Canada's business class, are salivating. In the March 19 Vancouver Sun, a giddy Norman Spector penned a column titled "Harper offers good chance to kick out the Liberal rascals."

Commentators on the Left have pointed out, critically, that Harper and the Conservatives are being "re-branded." Spector, in all his cynicism, celebrates this crass re-packaging, and seeks to frame the coming election as a two party (or two brand) race, asserting that "Harper will take a united party under a great brand name (Conservative) into the next election against a soiled brand (Liberal)." As a nearly omnipresent talking head, Spector himself will play a key role in framing the coming election in these terms. The only way that "Conservative" could possibly pass for a "great" brand name in Canada is if servile intellectuals like Spector remain silent on the corruption and lies of the Brian Mulroney years, during which time Norman the neutral analyst was Canada's ambassador to Israel.

And so the delicious, greasy scandals of the Reform-Alliance years will be banished to obscurity, including, in a very, very partial list: a sitting MP's assertions that homosexuals can and should be "reformed," another party member's flippant description of immigration from Asia as an "Asian invasion," former leader Stockwell Day's assertion that dinosaurs and humans lived side by side and, most recently, Harper himself sending a congratulatory letter to the First Nations of Canada on the anniversary of India's independence.

Indeed the main reason for re-branding is to distance a party from its own past transgressions. Maybe right-wingers are just less sentimental, and don't mind ditching a name and a logo once it has been tarnished, but the re-branding of the political machine is nothing new to shrewd pragmatists pursuing their material interest to hold power. In British Columbia, we have the recent example of Gordon Campbell and company taking over the B.C. Liberals in the early 1990s, after the Socreds of premier Bill Vander Zalm had imploded terminally. That scores of former Socreds hold positions of power in Victoria today goes almost unreported.

Some will object to the implication that Canada is a two-party state, but in terms of holding power, that is the country's history. Conservatives and Liberals, Tories and Grits. The phenomenon, of course, is much subtler than, say, in the United States, where the vicious hegemony of the two (or twin) party system is reflected in today's anti-Ralph Nader hysteria.

In Canada, we have the NDP (formerly the CCF), a mass labour-based party that grew out of socialist and populist traditions in English Canada. In Quebec -- where resistance to national subjugation has always proven a thorn in the side of those aspiring to a stable, capitalist state -- sovereigntist and deeply-rooted social democratic traditions produced strong support for the Bloc Quebecois, a party which has shifted considerably leftward since the advent of Gilles Duceppe's leadership. It's worth noting that no matter how slick the marketing, Harper's Conservatives will prove a very tough sell in Quebec, outside of west Montreal. After all, many Reform-Alliancers would probably love to run Don Cherry and Conan O'Brian's Triumph the Insult Dog as candidates.

But the more overt racists will be kept on a tighter leash as part of the big marketing campaign to sell Stephen Harper as the next Prime Minister of Canada. The new Conservative slogan, "Building a National Alternative" -- actually plagiarized from Jack Layton and the NDP, who had to reprint their campaign leaflets after the appropriation -- requires at least pandering to nominal Canadian values like multiculturalism.

And so when Stephen Harper gave his last leadership stump speech on the convention's opening night he had, behind him up on stage, a veritable United Nations of children and young adults. But when the camera panned to the crowd, it was so white you might have had to adjust for the glare. Marketers, I guess, can take the progressive out of the conservative, but they can't, it seems, take the Reform Alliance out of Stephen Harper's party. No matter how the spin doctors try to sell it to us, both of the "national alternatives" will rule only for those white guys with the money. That, after all, is the way it has always been in Canada. Hopefully, someday soon, we will all stop buying it.