I was catching up on my reading last night after we put our 48-page Best of Regina issue to bed. It hits the streets on Thursday, but in last Saturday’s Leader-Post I found this curious amalgam of text and image addressing the future of the Conservative Party of Canada.
On one hand, you’ve got a column by Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne that reads, in part, like a PhD thesis on the history of conservatism in western society. You can read the whole column here, but here’s an excerpt:
By “conservative,” of course, I mean “conservatively liberal,” for we are all, right or left, inheritors of the Western liberal tradition. And while there are divisions within the conservative strain of that tradition, what unites them, it seems to me, is a belief in the need to limit arbitrary power.
The Burkean might put more emphasis on the constraining wisdom of tradition, the libertarian might stress individual choice and autonomy, but what is common to both is an unwillingness to assign great or discretionary power to some over others: whether such power is concentrated in state or private hands, whether its purposes are malign or benign – perhaps especially if its purposes are benign, for people do the worst things for the best reasons.
Then to illustrate the article you’ve got what can only be described as a glamour shot of newly appointed interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose dressed in a black leather something-or-other standing against a black fabric background of some sort with dramatic lighting. I’m not sure under what circumstances the photo was taken, other than that, as the caption notes, it was at a Toronto hotel on Friday.
Anyway, it just seems like a curious juxtaposition of visual and textual messages. But I suppose in our current political/media climate anything is possible.
