During his decades of involvement in Canada’s conservative movement, Gerry Nicholls has seen the right lose cultural influence and suffer more electoral losses than wins. Yet even as leftist smear-and-fear campaigns reach new heights of slander, Nicholls is heartened by this month’s big victory for the united right in Alberta, and hopeful for a larger conservative political and cultural renaissance in Canada and beyond.

Like most cultural trends, it took a few years for the conservative revolution that made Ronald Reagan U.S. president in 1980 to migrate to Canada. One of its most influential, yet least known, emissaries was Republican political genius Arthur Finkelstein. He came north to teach the National Citizens Coalition – then one of very few serious conservative advocacy groups in Canada – how to raise a right-wing ruckus, and money. Eventually his lessons would be learned by NCC president Stephen Harper, lessons that helped him become prime minister. To mark Finkelstein’s recent passing, former NCC V-P Gerry Nichols reflects on his important contributions to Canada’s conservative movement.

It’s time for Canada’s conservative movement to stop focusing on what’s wrong and to start making things right. And I make that plea as someone who fully understands that for those of us who believe in free enterprise, smaller government and individual freedom, lots of things are going wrong.