Like a blizzard of the century, the COVID-19 pandemic has stormed though our common life, stripped away the superficial, obliterated the familiar and revealed our fundamental values.
A few older readers may remember the terrifying blizzard winters on the Great Plains in Saskatchewan in 1947 and the American prairie and foothills states in 1948.
The Red Cross fed more than 8,000 westbound train travellers in dozens of small prairie towns where people opened their doors to the stranded.
Cattle and wildlife froze to death by the thousands in open fields, on river banks and by road sides.
The highways and roadways were choked with snow drifts seven metres high.
Some of the fatalities lay frozen in their snow-buried cars until April.
We live in different times, and circumstances, but we are being marked and changed by the pandemic.
The physical and psychological impacts are on the virus patients, the impacts on their families and care-givers, while still in the early stages, are devastating.
The social changes so far are measurable by cancellations and vacancies. These are early days.
Major League Baseball’s 2020 season was scheduled to begin recently, but the 15 opening-day games were postponed.
On the same day, the Conservative Party postponed its leadership campaign and the June 27 date when the party was to elect its next leader.
The party has asked candidates to suspend fundraising and campaigning.
Four candidates met the March 26 deadline to meet the conditions and became verified candidates.
Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis, former cabinet minister and current MP Erin O’Toole, former cabinet minister and longtime MP Peter MacKay and current MP Derek Sloan are the only four to have submitted the qualifiing $300,000 and 3,000 party member signatures.
Three of these – Lewis, O’Toole and Sloan – are from Ontario and MacKay is from Atlantic Canada.
The Conservative Party Council had rejected a delay in the June 27 vote.
At the final meeting before the deadline, the council’s president, Scott Lamb, ruled a motion to postpone the date as out of order but after the deadline for candidates to qualify, reversed that position.
Conservatives, including failed candidate leadership candidates, have pounced on the party’s governing council for being tone deaf to the pandemic’s impact on national politics.
However, with Canada as a minority government, the Conservative Party is the official Opposition and will not be election-ready without a new leader.
This can’t wait. The COVID -19 pandemic is a national crises and the official Opposition should be at the cabinet table of a unity government as they were during First World War.
Only a new Conservative leader can make the case in 2020 for a unity government to deal with public policy issues that the pandemic has created.
The new leader must also guide the party’s process of defining Canadian conservatism for the first half of the 21st century.
So it’s time to chose between the four candidates and equip Parliament to prepare for the next stage of COVID-19 pandemic crisis.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
