Conservatives’ Lack Of Intellectual Renewal

On Underrated Conservative Problems

Pierre Poilievre’s facing a push to fire his longtime political advisor (and ex-girlfriend, which is still just fucking hilarious) Jenni Byrne, which is one of those things that should happen and won’t solve any problems. The problems with Byrne’s campaign are real, but giving Hamish Marshall the keys wouldn’t have won the CPC the election. And Poilievre was never going to hire Fred DeLorey or Kory Teneycke, two people who actually could have won him government.

The problem for Poilievre is that it’s entirely possible he was the man for a moment that’s gone, and that efforts to be the man for this moment will sink him. Politics is as much a question of circumstances as it is anything else. There’s famous good and bad luck in this process, and Mark Carney undoubtedly benefited from it. But as we get further from the election and closer to the start of the next government, it’s clear to me that the Tories are going to have to at least somewhat radically change their approach to politics to avoid becoming a party that only can win when the Liberals are so tired and so damaged there’s no other option.

The Conservative movement in this country has been hollowed out over time, and they’re now in a place where they’re accepting failure as the price of doing business doesn’t say much good about them. The fact that the conservative movement in this country isn’t producing any intellectuals of the calibre of the Calgary School is an indictment of modern Conservatism, and if they want to start winning without needing vote splits they should take this problem seriously.

I’m not going to rehash all of the realignment stuff that I have done ad nauseum on this site before, but a Conservative coalition where they sweep Windsor and get swept in Mississauga and Halton is not exactly a Harperite one. That’s a value neutral judgement, and while there are comparisons - namely strength with ethnic Canadians - the Poilievre Conservatives have traded upper income white voters with socially liberal views and a love for tax cuts for working class Canadians who have seen the NDP abandon their working class roots and don’t always share socially progressive values. And yet, the policy platform was downright Harper. Tax cuts, tax cuts, and tough on crime. Hell, with all that David Herle was in the news (or, at least, his podcast) it was like 2006 was happening all over again.

The problem for the Conservatives is, that’s not good enough. They’re going to need answers they don’t currently have, and their intellectual base is atrophied. There hasn’t been a new Conservative revolution of ideas, no general of the intellectual underpinnings, no coherent thinking about Conservative answers at a time when their voter base and key seat matrix is totally different.

Conservative MPs now represent seats like Skeena and Campbell River and Powell River and Nanaimo, places where access to health care isn’t great. The decision of Stephen Harper to cut health transfer growth rates and require minimal compliance to ensure dollars were going to health care have hollowed out many rural and regional areas of good and reliable health care. What’s the Conservative answer beyond spending more money, whether in the form of retention bonuses and higher pay for doctors who stay in the regions? How are these new Conservative MPs going to zealously represent their constituents interests when the needs of many of those seats is more money for decaying infrastructure?

The lack of modern Conservative answers is not in and of itself shocking - the Liberals don’t have great answers on what the post-progressive moment we’re in looks like either. We have to chart a new and more reasonable approach forward on climate and crime, let alone a need for a renewed growth agenda. The difference is the Liberals are seemingly - at least in rhetoric, which might be worth nothing but could mean something - talking a decent game on learning the mistakes. Outside of Poilievre’s new Economic Growth commission, they’ve got nothing, and the forces that used to buttress ideas are dying.

The Canadian Taxpayer Federation now just bitch about stupid expenses like Queen’s Funeral hotel bills in a neverending quest to make us the cheapest country alive, the Fraser Institute hasn’t put out an original idea in a decade, and once Tom Flanagan decided to freelance on child porn laws for a second time in 2013, the mantle of intelligent conservative intellectual is being held up by Boessenkool and basically nobody else.

One of the things the Liberals need to do is prepare to run against a considerably smarter Conservative Party than the one they faced last month. I don’t think they’ll actually face one with an ability to move off of lame centrality of tax cuts as the only solution, but they might. And we need to be prepared. The Conservatives absolutely left meat on the bone for us, and we need to be prepared to get to a higher level if they push us there.

But it’s also the case that I don’t get the lack of Conservative renewal. The fact that there isn’t, to my knowledge at least, any Conservative trying to have conversations about the state of the Conservative Party or the conservative movement in public like the ones I have for the Liberal Party and progressive movement is odd. I don’t get why ambitious people on the right are seeing the vacuum that’s been left. I’ve often said this site’s success is the product of failures, and I mean that sincerely and without any hint of self doubt. There should have been more people having these conversations in public, working through these complicated questions in public, and that should have been happening from people with existing public stature. But the failure of others to engage these questions left the market open, and I walked right in. I’m surprised nobody’s trying to do so on the right.

Until the Canadian right has answers to what it means to be a Canadian Conservative in the time of populism, they’ll suffer. If the Liberals fuck up, they might still win, but they won’t win on their own merits until they finally embrace intellectual renewal.

(As we ramp up coverage of the Carney era, national unity threats in Alberta and Quebec, and attempt to use whatever influence I have to influence this new government, consider a paid subscription. All work will remain free but a paid subscription is a way to support my work and enable me to continue to do what I love.)