TORONTO, June 7, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — That Jason Kenney supported removing the Conservative Party’s policy calling for legislation defining marriage as between one man and one woman should not dissuade pro-life and pro-family advocates from backing him in the future, says Campaign Life Coalition.
The leading social conservative and possible Tory leadership contender has “an impeccable vote record on life and family bills and motions,” Jeff Gunnarson, vice president of CLC, told LifeSiteNews.
“CLC trusts that he is committed to his pro-life and pro-family principles and has no reason to discourage anyone from supporting him in future nominations, elections or leadership campaigns.”
Some Conservatives are concerned that Kenney is following the path of Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown, who also had a fully pro-life and pro-family voting record in the federal Parliament before running for provincial leader, but since has openly endorsed same-sex “marriage,” marched in Toronto’s Pride parade, and promised not to address abortion.
However, both Campaign Life Coalition and a Conservative staffer who has worked for Kenney tell LifeSiteNews that Kenney’s support for removing the marriage policy is not tantamount to endorsing same-sex “marriage.” Unlike Brown, Kenney is known as a devout Catholic who is committed to his Church’s teachings, specifically those on life and family.
“It seems pretty apparent that Jason’s comments were not about marriage itself as an issue,” says Christopher Mahon, a former aide to Kenney who currently works in Tory MP Garnett Genuis’ office and was a delegate to the policy convention. Rather, Kenney’s comments “referred to the fact that the previous policy language was originally adopted prior to the marriage debate in Parliament a decade ago and had not been updated to reflect what has happened in the intervening ten years.”
What Kenney said
The motion on marriage sparked controversy within party ranks and a frenzy of media attention when Conservative delegates at the Vancouver convention passed it 1,036 to 462.
It deleted an 11-year-old policy that read: “We support legislation defining marriage as the union of one many and one woman.” The party kept its policy recognizing the right of faith-based organizations to refuse to perform same-sex unions, or facilitate events contrary to their beliefs.
When Rosemary Barton, host of CBC’s Power and Politics, asked Kenney at the convention if he thought the party needed to evolve in its position on same-sex “marriage,” the Calgary MP replied: “The country has evolved, the law has evolved.”
He added: “I think the language in the current policy declaration is obsolete. It does not reflect the new law or the social consensus, so my advice to my fellow Conservatives is, you know, we should focus on issues that are actually relevant and not seek to re-litigate old issues.”
“Let me add this: I think one of the reasons some people feel defensive about maintaining that language is, they don’t accept the characterization of anybody who ever supported the traditional, opposite-sex definition of marriage as being unjust or bigoted in their attitudes,” said Kenney. “Every politician of every persuasion in every Western democracy, in fact, in every country, maintained the same definition.”
Socons fear the ‘Brown effect’
While CLC maintains a green light for Kenney, at the same time, his “comments on traditional marriage being deleted from the Conservative Policy Book are not comforting,” said Gunnarson.
“Our supporters and many other so-cons who voted for Patrick Brown are still stinging from his 180 degree turn around on life and family,” he noted.
CLC backed Brown — formerly a three-term Tory MP for Barrie with a perfect voting record on life and family issues — in his successful May 2015 bid to lead the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party.
But social conservatives have since become disillusioned with Brown for his stated intention to keep the status quo on abortion, and his enthusiastic support of the LGBTQ lobby — which Gunnarson says represents the interests of three percent of the population.
“Given the Brown effect, it would be understandable that pro-life people will be nervous with Jason’s position,” Gunnarson told LifeSiteNews.
Kenney, a 19-year veteran MP who held several prominent portfolios, including defence and immigration, in the Harper government, has said he will decide over the summer if he will run in the Conservative leadership race.
Kenney elaborates
When LifeSiteNews requested a clarification of his remarks, Kenney responded with the following statement:
My use of the word “obsolete” referred not to marriage, but to the Conservative policy declaration language. Whether people like it or not, the change in the definition of marriage has become settled, irreversible law in Canada as a result of Charter decisions by the judiciary, and free votes in Parliament. I supported the inclusion of the marriage definition in the Conservative platform when the party was created in 2004, and critically it's commitment for a free vote in Parliament under a Conservative government. The Harper government kept that commitment, put forward that free vote in 2006, and lost. I believe it would be illogical and imprudent to retain language that does not reflect settled law and social custom.
Though Kenney maintains the Harper government kept its promise to hold a free vote on marriage, many social conservatives were displeased with Harper’s handling of the issue.
Paul Tuns, the editor of The Interim, Canada’s pro-life and pro-family newspaper, argued in a January 2007 article that Harper was merely whipping up support from his pro-family base when he promised the vote during the 2006 election. Tuns wrote: “It seems Harper somewhat cynically promised to revisit the SSM issue during the last federal campaign. He knew it would energize the social conservative grassroots supporters of the party. And it appears he was only doing the minimum – bringing forth a problematic motion that asked Parliament to re-open the marriage issue – without expending any energy on it.”
Mahon, who himself supported keeping the marriage plank at the convention, told LifeSiteNews that the motion “adopted at convention does not endorse same-sex marriage; it merely removes the older language from the party policy document. The Conservative Party welcomes Canadians who believe in traditional marriage just as much now as it ever has.”
“Many respected social conservatives in the Party had reasonable prudential differences about how to handle this particular motion,” he added.
And these are…
Notably, Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost vigorously opposed the motion.
“If you believe … in traditional marriage, and you ratify what’s been throughout history, then you don’t even have to fall back and defend that,” Trost told LifeSiteNews in an earlier interview. “You’ve already drawn your line in the sand and you just go ahead and defend it all the way through.”
“I said then, and I will say in the future, I will always stand for the traditional definition of marriage, even if the vote on that issue never comes up in the House of Commons,” Trost said. “We should not be embarrassed of things we’ve stood for … just because things take some time doesn’t mean you abandon core principles.”
Fellow Saskatchewan MP Andrew Scheer, on the other hand, told CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen the resolution was “more just a recognition” of the status quo.
“It wasn’t the Conservative Party taking a new position on marriage, it was just deleting a clause that in the minds of many had become a little anachronistic,” the Catholic MP said. The 37-year-old father of four has yet to confirm or deny persistent rumours that he is considering a leadership run.
Scheer also noted that “so many other parties start off these debates by excluding anyone who has an alternative view. You’re not even allowed to hold certain view in the Liberal Party, in the NDP.”
By contrast, the Tories say: “Buy a membership go to your EDA, get elected as a delegate, come to the convention, have your fight, have your say, and then respect the result,” he said. “And I think that’s what we saw.”
Conservative policy on abortion
But others saw something less by-the-book — including REAL Women and delegate to the Vancouver convention Cecilia Forsyth.
The Conservative Party Policy Declaration now reads: “A Conservative government will not support any legislation to regulate abortion.”
A resolution to delete that policy from the books “passed at the different riding levels, and it had one of the highest rankings at the Ideas Lab, which should have meant it would automatically go to the Vancouver convention,” Forsyth told LifeSiteNews.
But as The Interim’s Tuns reported shortly before the convention, the party’s interim leader Rona Ambrose advised the policy committee to nix that resolution, allegedly because it could negatively affect the leadership race.
Tuns also reported that the policy committee asked Calgary MP Michelle Rempel, formerly Stephen Harper’s representative on that body, for advice, and Rempel, an advocate for abortion, also told the committee to bury the grassroots-supported pro-life resolution.
Deleting that policy would have effectively made the Conservative Party Policy Declaration silent, and therefore neutral, on the issue of abortion legislation, the same way it is now neutral on marriage, argued Forsyth.
Free your policy
She supported a “Free Your Policy” constitutional amendment from the floor, which called for resolutions with 100 votes from 100 of the 338 constituencies to make it to the convention floor, circumventing the policy committee. That amendment was voted down 249 to 196 in the break-out sessions.
Mahon points out that “social conservatives had a number of victories at the Conservative convention. For the first time ever, the Party condemns a form of abortion by name as abortion” in its resolution on sex-selection abortion as discrimination against women.
And the Conservative Party constitution “now explicitly upholds ‘a belief in the value and dignity of all human life’,” he said.
“Overall, we won more than we lost,” Forsyth agreed, “but the two losses were big losses: the one on marriage and the ‘Free your Policy’ amendment.”
While it is true that the Conservative Party did not endorse same-sex “marriage,” the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman “is the basic foundational principle of society and culture,” Forsyth told LifeSiteNews, adding that people told her they would leave the party because the policy defining marriage was deleted.
“I think that, especially coming from Jason, is the biggest shock of all,” Forsyth said. “In my mind, why can’t we recognize this historical, universal definition of marriage?”