As someone who now lives in Albertastan, I can confirm. This is not the old Progressive Conservative Party of Bob Stanfield, Joe Clark or Brian Mulroney, it is the Reform Party, the Western grievance party. As soon as the rednecks took over, the party was essentially doomed because a majority of Canadians (the ones who live in Ontario and Quebec where the votes are) will never warm to a party that far on the right. And thanks to the polarization created by social media, the kooks on the far right will never warm to a party that tries to move one iota to the left for any reason. They are cursed now. They either double down on their Western alienation trope and fade into insignificance, or move toward the center and alienate the hard core fascists who will splinter and draw votes away from them. Their only hope is that, in a Parliament with 4 or 5 parties winning seats (and potentially a 6th if the PPC ever wins a riding) that they can maybe squeak into power for one term. But since they have no ideological allies in Parliament save for maybe the Bloc on one or two issues, they would never retain power for very long without a clear majority. But they're never getting that. Not today or any day.
That party either cleans house, purges the hillbillies and rednecks from its leadership and becomes the Progressive Conservatives again, or it's going to be out of power about 80% of the time. Canada is not the US. We are more left leaning, more socialist. The kind of scare tactics that US conservatives use to great effect down south just provoke laughs up here. In Canada, "socialism" isn't a dirty word (outside of Alberta, of course)
