Tories' Chance to Live Up to Their Name

On who will get that vaunted minister of amateur sport gig and Andrew Coyne's fantasies becoming reality.

The Conservatives, still beaming with post-electoral glow, will soon have to get down to the business of governing. First up for Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be filling out his cabinet, a task which L. Ian MacDonald picks apart for the Sun chain. “Cabinet-making is at once a prime minister’s most powerful prerogative and the loneliest part of his job, one involving painful choices that make some careers and break others,” writes MacDonald.

Filling the vacated Foreign Affairs portfolio might be the most prestigious (MacDonald, and many others, have fingered minister of everything John Baird for the gig), but Harper also has to appease his much increased Ontario contingent, since they were instrumental in delivering his majority. MacDonald figures that former diplomat Chris Alexander, surgeon Kellie Leitch, and Dean del Mastro, one of the party's top public faces, ought to end up with a promotion and a pay raise, which bodes poorly for Bev Oda, who's all but certain to be booted the International Development portfolio. Insert obligatory “not” joke here.

Maclean's Andrew Coyne, almost palpably giddy over the opportunity, gets to lay out his vision of what a right-leaning goverment should do with a majority. “No one signed on for a revolution, but a consistent, incrementalist nudge in the conservative direction need not prove unduly alarming,” writes Coyne. After all the platform planks are fulfilled, Coyne suggests the Tories focus on three areas: the economy (finishing free trade agreements with India and the EU, trimming subsidies and taxes); fiscal federalism (giving the provinces more freedom to cope with looming health care issues); and democratic reform (adding 30 new seats, reforming the Senate, ending the per-vote subsidy).

“A government that accomplished even half of these reforms could make a fair claim to have earned a second majority,” says Maclean's national editor. But if this idealized Coyneada, a land free of the partisan vitriol, cultural clashes and disrespect for democracy that were the hallmarks of the past two Parliaments, comes to fruition, what on earth would he write about anymore?