Canadian prime minister should be role model for GOP

Mainstream Republicans who fret about the rogue tea party Cruzaders shouldn’t be looking to the heavens for guidance, they should be looking north.

That’s the message from Dennis Lennox who, in his column this week, writes that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper should serve as a conservative role model for the GOP.

Writing in the Mount Pleasant Morning Sun, one of our sister papers, Lennox points out that Harper’s Conservative Party has staked out a reputation as the party of workers and the middle class, not big business.

The prime minister’s party also succeeds in wooing ethnic Canadians, unlike the Republican failure to gain Hispanic support and its slide among Asian-Americans that is “particularly concerning and largely unreported,” according to Lennox, a GOP activist.

Most importantly, Harper, 54, has established a Canadian track record on policy initiatives that is impressive, whether the issue is jobs, fiscal restraint or financial soundness.

Here’s a portion of Lennox’s piece:

“The Harper experience is an excellent case study for Republicans who get that a new strategy for electioneering – not new technology for campaigns (a favorite crutch for losing Republicans) or substantive policy reverses – is needed to win in the 21st century.

“… The Canadian lesson is necessary for conservatives who actually want to govern and not engage in circular firing squads.

“Since Harper’s party formed minority governments …in 2006 and 2008 before winning a majority in 2011, the Conservatives have been relentless in shifting focus from preaching to the choir to winning the unconverted.”