Canadian Conservatism Needs Introspection
The Lack Of Solidity Killing A Movement
It’s now been *checks notes* less than 3 weeks since Danielle Smith was elected of Alberta’s UCP, and about 6 weeks since Pierre Poilievre won the Federal leadership. In a sense, it’s been a very busy period of time – Smith has engulfed herself in roughly 1804940 scandals, all of her own making, and Poilievre has been making news for reasons both intentional and not – but in another, it’s been a waste. Why? Because we still have no idea at a basic level what Canadian conservatism stands for.
And that, at its core, is the conversation Conservatives have been ducking for the last decade – and the one that they need to have if they want to win again federally.
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Why did Canadian Liberalism almost die in the early part of the 2010s?
The answer to this is in some ways very easy – they picked two bad leaders back to back! – but at a more fundamental level is much harder. The actual answer isn’t just about leaders, it was about values – and the fact that liberalism meant nothing in the period post-Martin and pre-Trudeau. To be a Canadian Liberal then was to either be signed up to an agenda in 2008 presented as both a document of radicalism designed to solve a crisis but also an attempt to suggest that for most people, things would be mostly the same.
In 2011, Ignatieff tried to rail against a Government that he has propped up and whose legislative accomplishments he had voted for, while offering the most limited actual policy differences from Harper. It was a platform of accentuating the smallest differences and then praying that those tiny differences would both not scare off any suburbanites who didn’t think Harper was the devil while inspiring those who think he was. (It didn’t work, but that was the goal.)
The modern Conservative Party is a bad marriage – we all know this, I won’t repeat the metaphor – but the problem isn’t about Poilievre and his contempt for moderate MPs, or Smith and her treatment of the Kenneyites. The problem is that there’s no fundamental underpinning of their politics, and therefore there’s nothing to keep the project together in hard times.
Rallying around unpopular, left wing governments is easy, because everyone has something they hate about it, right? McGuinty/Wynne was easy to hate – the wealthy, urban and suburban left of the Ontario PCs hated the government because it was tax and spend liberalism with costs for them to pay for services for other people, and the social conservatives hated the sex ed curriculum. Rural voters hated the way the government catered solely to the cities, and the outer parts of Toronto felt like the government was “too downtown”.
The problem for the PCs once they won was clear – you had people whose whole purpose in politics was the preservation of social conservatism, for whom abortion and sex ed were the only things they cared about. For others, it was fiscal conservatism. The Ford Government was in rocky waters pre-pandemic because they didn’t know what governing coherently actually looked like. They ended up winning, yes – in large part because their opposition was shit, but also because (most of) the party could unite around COVID policy.
The federal Conservatives have used hatred of Trudeau to mask their many divisions, just as Danielle Smith is using “Ottawa” as a way to keep her troops united. The problem is, it might be a salve to try and keep together a Parliamentary Party, but at the end of the day, Pierre Poilievre will have to go into an election and he will have to have an actual platform for government. And for the life of me, I don’t know what it will be.
When David Cameron took over the UK Tories 17 years ago, he did so explicitly on a manifesto of new Toryism, of moderation. He was explicit about the type of party he was seeking to lead and why it was necessary, and so when he did in some ways absurd things to highlight the break from the past – hugging a husky, biking to work, and changing the party’s logo – everyone understood why he was doing it and where he had the authority and mandate from to do it. There were plenty of people in the Conservative Party who disliked Cameron and Cameroonism, but they stayed inside the fucking tent – even through a Coalition Government many of the Tory right hated – because Cameron had won on an explicit promise of moderation.
For the Canadian Tories, their three leadership races since 2015 have at times looked like they might be about policy, but it’s never really come. Bernier versus Scheer was certainly about two different philosophies, but the problem was, Scheer basically just ran as “normal conservative” against Bernier’s libertarianism. 2020, to the extent it was about anything, was about MacKay claiming he could win and the Conservative base going “yeah, we don’t believe you”, and then 2022 was really less about Poilievre articulating any real message outside of COVID and more the fact that the best the Tory left could do was nominate Fancy French Jeb! Bush.
They will inevitably win government again at some point – I am on the record with my skepticism it will be Poilievre, but undeniably, the Conservatives will not be locked out of power forever. What would rapidly speed up that process is any form of internal fight about what brand of conservatism they want to be offering.
One of the reasons people don’t like therapy despite the belief that it would be beneficial over the long term is the correct belief that it gets worse before it gets better. It does – I’ve often referred to my therapy as breaking me to rebuild me, and while it is intellectually appealing, nobody actually enjoys the process by which they get broken. It’s a process that you look back at with an amount of fondness when it’s done (or, when you’ve started to see the benefits), but the actual hard yards of figuring out what caused the crisis are hell.
For political parties, it’s similar – figuring out why you lost an election is hell, and so you want an easy answer, and to avoid the hard conversations inherent in a proper rebuild. The Liberals did this twice after Martin’s defeat, before Trudeau actually brought in a party with a vision – a properly left wing manifesto and prospectus, and a full throated argument for radicalism. The Tories best chance at governing any time soon would be a similar commitment to their beliefs, but the refusal of the current CPC to articulate these views in a coherent way is holding them back.
To be clear, I don’t think the best path back for the CPC is some red Tory, mushy middle, Liberal-lite bullshit – it’s a form of Fordism, or Boris’ Red Wall strategy. The next Tory government is going to run through places that have in some cases never voted Blue before, and the way to win those voters isn’t to just blindly pander to socially liberal voters who care about tax cuts. But their current path is designed to fail on all fronts.
The Conservatives latched onto the Convoy for this reason – it felt like a thing that they needed to support, but there was no longtermist thinking beyond the idea that they hated Trudeau and the Convoy hated Trudeau so therefore they were allies. They need the votes of people who think like those who came to Ottawa – people distrustful of Government and who generally view “Ottawa”, “Liberals”, and “elites” with the same distain, without shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly by supporting a Convoy that was frankly a fascist funhouse on Wellington.
Will the Conservatives figure out what they stand for? For the sake of my predictions, I hope not, but if they want to win the next election, they can’t just rely on a common hatred – it’s just not enough.
Political liberalism began changing in the mid-eighties when Reagan, Mulroney and Thatcher changed the political and economic landscape (most manufacturing began migrating offshore in the 80s - those "good middle class jobs" that lasted a lifetime or until one's pensionable years went away). Trickle down ideology started being sold as the panacea…I’m old, I remember consultants hired to sell this bullshit to workers losing their jobs. By the early 90s, all main political parties were a little further right.
Justin Trudeau, in some respects, is less of a trickle-down neoliberal than his predecessors Chretien and Martin; but not by much. The NDP - in provinces where they have governed - are not Jack Layton socialists and fulfill few to none of the promises Jagmeet makes at the federal level. In policy, they are more like the federal Liberals than a Jack Layton era party. The Conservative Party is wholly owned by reformers who clearly value strong man leadership. Scheer and O'Toole were regarded as wimps. Harper and PP are revered by the membership.
The Conservative Party has no progressive element left in it. Doesn’t matter that Michelle Rempel periodically reassures the gays and women she’s with them; she’s on the dust heap now. PP did not include her in his shadow cabinet. Ed Last is another one thrown away. Stephen Harper continues to be the party’s role model and who are his role models? Orban in Hungary who is well on his way to establishing a dictatorship. Bolsonaro, another fascist and Meloni, Italy's newest fascist. They admire and seek to emulate their populism in the hope it will be palatable to Canadians. But most importantly, the Conservative Party is aligned with US Republicans and US right wing lobby groups. And we know what they are doing.
What do conservatives stand for? Nothing they can explicitly admit if they want to get elected. All reform leaders have had to fake it until they make it. O’Toole demonstrated this when he pivoted from his “take Canada back” leadership campaign to supporting the carbon tax during the election campaign. He told the party it would need to modernize if it wanted to win. The party shunned this idea. His successor Poilievre has decided to go full hard right and campaign like an Orban/Meloni/Bernier populist. Lie through his teeth, repeat the lies every day, shout empty slogans and rage against taxes (never prices and profits), call experts “elitist” and pretend he is a working-class hero. Where Harper would never have given anti-abortionists like Lewis a cabinet post, PP has no problem with it. He is taking a gamble his hard right populist strategy will sway voters.
Is Poilievre a different conservative today? When PP was a Harper foot soldier, he crafted an elections act that weakened Elections Canada and sought to make voting difficult. The legislation didn’t succeed because of the public backlash, particularly in the Globe and Mail which hammered it in repeated editorials. But his Orwellian named Fair Elections Act is something he would certainly resurrect. The party is dominated by social conservatives who fraternize with and court white supremacists and misogynists. Poilievre hired Jeff Ballingall, a professional ratf*cker, to increase his social media following. #MGTOW and #Shapiro were not mistakes.
Know them by who they admire and emulate, who they support in a crisis like COVID (antivaxxers and white supremacists), who they congratulate around the world (neofascists), who they welcome as members, who they approve to run in elections.
Gawd please don’t let a monster like Pierre win. That liar is pathetic little bully. He says nothing about policy because his plans are horrifying. Taking away the federal senior pensions and taking away EI means no Maternity leave, no illness help and seasonal workers are screwed and so are those that lose jobs. Canada does not need a fascist regime like these reformed conservatives ever. They attacked my life, they are cruel stop jinxing Canada we don’t need a Trump like Pierre. He’s a actor he hates people so I pray your wrong.