Kellie Leitch, We Hardly Knew Ya, Thank God

Attention everybody: Kellie Leitch is not going to run for MP again in 2019. Stephen Harper’s last Minister for the Status of Women will instead return to private life as a foot surgeon for children.

Making life better for Canadian children is the common thread of Leitch’s political career. She first came to national prominence in 2015, when she helped then-immigration minister Chris Alexander launch the “barbaric cultural practices hotline,” an extremely not-racist project meant to help concerned citizens snitch on anyone they suspected of denigrating “Canadian values.”

Leitch later apologized for her role as the public face of a program established so that Canadians could call the police on brown people. “We weren't talking about race, we were talking about kids,” she tearfully told CBC in 2016. “But that message was completely overtaken and I regret that, and I regret that it occurred, and it shouldn't have been done.”

But Leitch was unphased by her brush with PR disaster, and became the first official candidate for the Conservative leadership race to replace Stephen Harper. She was also the first candidate to turn the race into a flaming pile-up of clown cars when she made screening immigrants for “Canadian values” the key plank in her campaign. Despite her emphatic protests that this was in no way meant to specifically target racial and/or religious minorities such as Muslims, Leitch was denounced as a dangerous heretic by the Conservative party establishment and panned by most of the national media.

Instead of backing off, the Hon. Kellie Leitch, P.C., O.Ont., M.D., M.B.A., F.R.C.S.(C), doubled down and declared war on the Canadian elite. She inhaled the pungent fumes of Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 election victory and named herself the champion of the common Canuck. Let the hippies and cucks and college professors piss and moan all they want; she was going to lead the “revenge of the comments section,” her endearing term for the internet brain pollution excreted by the bitter and semi-literate Boomers she was now courting for a base.

Leitch eventually explained how all of these nonsense ideas worked in a marvellously hallucinogenic video. Unfortunately, it did resonate with the public.

Despite her best efforts, neither the Conservative party nor the Canadian people were ready for the Kellie Leitch Experience. She placed sixth overall in the leadership vote last May, and was promptly excluded from new leader Andrew Scheer’s shadow cabinet.

Before Dr. Leitch becomes an obscure footnote in Canadian history, the tangly trajectory of her life in politics deserves one final reflection. Here is a person who saw the frothing cultural madness in the United States and said: yes, this is the good thing Canada needs. There was a brief moment when we all wondered if she would be Canada’s Donald Trump; whether it was going to be a pediatric orthopedic surgeon who would finally set loose the festering racist id within the “Old Stock Canadian” brain.

As it turned out, she was not. The Kellie Leitch Canadian Values Campaign appears in retrospect largely as a brutishly cynical power-play from a brutishly amateur politician. She sold her soul for a distant sixth place finish, and all she got in return was an immolated and humiliating exile from serious Conservative politics. When Canada’s Donald Trump finally does arrive—which they will, almost inevitably—Leitch will be forgotten to Canadian history altogether. If our dark future ever does come to pass, her only contribution will be setting the bar so low.

So with that, I sincerely wish Kellie Leitch the best of luck on this new stage of her career. Whatever project she takes on next, it will be a much nobler endeavour than whatever it was she was trying to do with Canada.