Canadians are watching with a keen eye as candidates for leader of the Conservative Party declare their intentions. This includes pro-life Canadians who want to know what a future leader is willing to do about Canada\u2019s complete lack of abortion restrictions.<\/p>\n

Generally, it is assumed that this means they are carefully scrutinizing each leadership hopeful for whether they are \u201cpro-life\u201d or \u201cpro-choice\u201d, but the time has come for the pro-life movement to view things a bit differently.<\/p>\n

What do we mean by that?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

<\/p>\n

It means that we don\u2019t necessarily need a leadership candidate to champion the issue, or even be identified as pro-life. Pro-lifers who are involved in the Conservative Party shouldn\u2019t automatically dismiss a candidate who isn\u2019t personally pro-life. Pro-life Conservatives should be less concerned about whether a future leader looks like them and more concerned about whether he or she realizes that pro-life conservatives make up an integral part of the party\u2019s base.<\/p>\n

The pro-life movement was instrumental in Andrew Scheer\u2019s successful leadership bid, and has the potential to play a large part in the upcoming race. We are motivated, organized, and politically engaged. Through the work of organizations such as RightNow and Campaign Life Coalition the pro-life movement has become very efficient at nominating and electing candidates. A successful leadership candidate needs support from the pro-life movement. Pulling out tired lines like \u2018not re-opening the debate\u2019 or claiming that abortion is a \u2018settled issue\u2019 in Canada could be detrimental to a leadership campaign.<\/p>\n

With Canada\u2019s brokerage party system, the likelihood of a leader in a mainstream party who is willing to introduce abortion legislation is not very high. It\u2019s understandable that a potential Prime Minister is not going to run on this issue. What we as the pro-life movement should be looking for is a leader who understands that the abortion debate is ongoing and who will allow individual MPs to introduce bills or motions that address the current legal void around abortion.<\/p>\n

The Conservative Party of Canada has pro-life MPs, pro-life staffers, pro-life volunteers, pro-life members, and pro-life donors. Leadership hopefuls cannot ignore them if they want to unite the party or win the next election.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadians are watching with a keen eye as candidates for leader of the Conservative Party declare their intentions. This includes pro-life Canadians who want to know what a future leader is willing to do about Canada\u2019s complete lack of abortion restrictions. Generally, it is assumed that this means they are carefully scrutinizing each leadership hopeful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3014,"featured_media":4043,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[284,282],"tags":[79,219,882,883,834],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3014"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4042"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4045,"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042\/revisions\/4045"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.weneedalaw.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}