politics@roanoke.com / Preston Bryant

Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

QUEBEC CITY, Quebec -- A few days ago, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail had two stories on its front page. One was on that which has turned Canadian politics on its head – the merging of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party – and the other was on the perils of microwaving broccoli and other vegetables.

For anyone whose first love is politics, and who’s leisurely eating a yogurt-and-granola breakfast in this wonderful old French-speaking city, it doesn’t take long to find a common denominator in these two seemingly dissimilar articles, and to then draw some conclusions about back-home Republican politics.

First, a bit of background on the shake-up in Canadian politics. The Liberal Party is the dominant one on the national stage. Brian Mulroney was the last long-serving Tory to serve as prime minister. He ascended to that office after leading his conservatives to a landslide parliamentary victory in 1984, and he left it nine years later after the Progressive Conservative Party had split into factions. Western conservatives formed the Reform Party in the late 1980s while Quebec conservatives formed the Bloc Québécois in 1990. Such conservative splintering has allowed the Liberals to rule the Canadian political roost since 1993.

The Reform Party achieved great success, becoming the major opposition party in the late ’90s. Several years ago, the Reformers and many provincial Progressive Conservatives moved to unite the two conservative factions by forming the Canadian Alliance. They were relatively successful, but not wholly so, as the federal PCP refused to officially join.

Last week, there were more merger talks, and the Canadian Alliance and the PCP did indeed agree to merge. The new conservative party will be called the Conservative Party of Canada.

Now, finally, the Tories will have a fighting chance to take on the ruling Liberal Party.

Or will they?

You see, there are still some hard-core, diehard PCP faithful, including former Tory PM Joe Clark, who served briefly as head of government about 20 years ago. Clark, still an influential conservative, is a leading skeptic of the merger between the country’s two conservative parties. He wants to remain true to the traditional PCP, even though in federal elections the party barely registers as a blip on the screen.

And this is where the broccoli story comes into play.

It seems a recent study demonstrates that microwaving broccoli zaps out about 97 percent of the veggie’s flavonoids, a substance in this and other green vegetables that has proven effective in reducing risk to heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. So while microwaving broccoli is a quicker way to prepare it, you’re dilutin its nutritional value.

The juxtaposition of these two front-page articles side by side begs the obvious political question, one that perhaps Clark is asking: What price is paid for expediency?

This is not simply a question that’s to be asked of those behind the week-old Conservative Party of Canada. It’s asked inevitably of every political party the world over that from time to time debates how best to keep its platform current with – and relevant to – the social and political changes going on around it.

All of this is not to say that today’s decision by a party to engage in what some might call “political expediency,” which might necessitate some short-term sacrifices, might not lead to longer-term benefits. Indeed, a leap-of-faith move that a party might take today to keep its appeal to voters fresh and progressive might well lead to the masses having greater confidence in that party as its preferred, responsible government leaders.

Such is what the new Conservative Party of Canada hopes. It’s their belief that this bold move will energize the party faithful who’ve been in the wilderness for most of the last half-century, save Clark’s and Mulroney’s relatively short runs.

All of which brings us to thoughts on Virginia’s GOP, which, as everybody knows, has a long history of frictions and factions. In much of the 1990s, though, Republicans seemingly got their act together. George Allen’s ’93 gubernatorial campaign – and his subsequent victory and populist four-year reign – united the party. Everybody rallied around him. Current U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes also did a good deal to keep the party united in the mid- to late-90s, when he served as party chair.

It was during the last two years of Gov. Jim Gilmore’s term in office, however, that the GOP returned to infighting. The result, as we all know, was turning over the keys to the governor’s office to Mark Warner, a Democrat.

Those internecine battles are again on the wane, but they could certainly be reignited. Attorney General Jerry Kilgore is quickly emerging as an Allen-like gubernatorial candidate around which the party will unite. His recent push to have Kate Obenshain installed as the new GOP chairman offers up some evidence of his unifying powers of persuasion among party elders.

But that which could again return Virginia Republicans to interparty skirmishes are the tough decisions facing the ruling GOP in the 2004 General Assembly session – the necessity of tax reform, balancing another tough budget, and staving off a downgrade of the state’s historic triple-A bond rating by wary Wall Street analysts, all of which are intertwined.

Virginia Republicans are now at a spot in the road resembling the one just passed by Canada’s conservatives. The question to be asked is how the state GOP will maintain the faith of grassroots activists while making hard decisions to meet the budgetary and infrastructure hurdles facing the Old Dominion, thereby reassuring the broader public (and the statewide business community) of its governing prowess.

Put more succinctly, will Republicans be willing to sacrifice a little bit now, if necessary, to prove that it can responsibly govern a high-tech, sophisticated state with equally high-tech, sophisticated challenges in this new century?

Such is the political conundrum that can be ginned up over breakfast and too-strong French coffee, and contemplated further on a walk along the banks of the mighty St. Lawrence River.

At the heart of it all is broccoli. Either you love it or you hate it.

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