Monday, May 30, 2005

How many social conservatives does it take to change a light-bulb?

Only one. But while he's doing it, the others pray that the rest of us will see the light!

Just kidding. Let's try it again. How many social conservatives are there in Parliament, in the CPC, and/or the country? And how many will there be following the coming election?

In several earlier threads we tried looked at MPs' voting records. There are at least fifty Conservatives in Parliament whose voting has been perfect from the perspective of the Campaign Life Coalition, a prolife advocacy group; there are about a dozen Liberals. There are ten or so socons who can be identified among CPC nominees and more no doubt in the future. But not all these will be elected, and some of them are replacing retiring MPs who might be socons.

So how many are we talking about? After the dust settles after the following election there will probably be roughly 75 socon MPs, or about 25% of Parliament. Is that too many? Perhaps for some. But I suspect that something in the order of 25% of Canada's population hold similar views. So my guess is that there is not much to see here.