My latest from the Guelph Mercury (16 April)
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Canadian conservatism has always been an uphill kind of thing. From the MacDonald-Cartier compromise to Diefenbaker’s we-can-win-without-Quebec strategy, to Mulroney’s appeal to Quebecois nationalism and right up to the subsequent divide between progressive conservatism and the Canadian Alliance, Canadian conservatism has always struggled to provide a coherent alternative to Liberal rule.
Indeed, the commentariat seem to have concluded that in the life cycle of Canadian federal politics, conservatism has again crested and will again crash. Admittedly, their belief isn’t baseless.
The Mulroney-Schreiber affair has made life difficult for Conservative insiders and opinion-leaders whose loyalty to the former prime minister’s legacy has been cruelly tested against the so-called discipline of power.
Conservatives are equally disenchanted with their own party’s hypocritical embrace of big spending in the good times and reckless spending in the bad.
And perhaps most troubling for Tories was the political miscalculation late last year which nearly resulted in parliamentary defeat. Learning that the prime minister is politically fallible has tested the iron discipline Mr. Harper has maintained since January 2006.
That is just to say that the new conventional wisdom – that Canada’s conservative coalition is cracking – is not totally invalid. The coalition is indeed being tested along old PC-Alliance lines, along pragmatic-ideological lines, and even along parliamentarist-populist lines.
But this time, Canada’s conservative coalition is going to survive. Not only is the party’s organisational infrastructure better than it’s ever been – even during the Mulroney ascendancy the federal party leaned heavily on provincial political machines, particularly in Quebec – but after spending so long in the wilderness, the Conservative Party’s different factions know good and well they must either tolerate one another or embrace irrelevance.
In a recent speech to a conference of the Manning Institute – a conservative advocacy group in the ideological tradition of its namesake – Mr. Harper said that what ultimately binds conservatives together is their belief in faith, family and freedom.
Setting aside that ‘faith, family and freedom’ was Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s boilerplate slogan during his 2008 bid for the US Republican presidential nomination, this trifecta is more than rhetoric; it really does explain Anglo-Saxon conservatism in a profound way. Especially the faith bit, which informs the rest.
Conservatives, sometimes unwittingly, consistently affirm basic Christian principles in the majority of their policies. Their resistance to gay marriage, their promotion of the nuclear family, their tough approach to justice issues and even, on a different level, their commitment to a strong military, all stem from a basic understanding of human nature.
Conservatives believe that, though created for and capable of good, human beings are weak against their passions and ultimately need to be stewarded by strong institutions and societal norms. The church, the family, and the state should mutually re-enforce basic morality and social structures conducive to moral and social order.
And on a global scale, conservatives believe that the world is anarchic, dangerous, and that it will always be that way. Good guys can’t stop building planes and training soldiers just because they’d rather be sending aid money to Africa; civilisation needs to be actively defended.
These basic assumptions – that societies require order based upon traditional practices and civilisations need to be strong to survive – bind all conservatives together.
And so in the Canadian political context, conservatives of different stripes put up with each other’s pet policies because they share a basic worldview.
For example, red tories may dislike blunt, Alliance-style rhetoric on social issues, though they surely agree that government must not be used as an instrument of the elite for the purposes of social engineering.
And in the same way, social conservatives may not share the obsession of fiscal conservatives on the need to keep public spending low, but they do agree that stifling freedom and initiative is dangerous because it weakens incentive for productive, socially beneficial behaviour.
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Ultimately, the federal Conservative Party is an imperfect machine. It hasn’t done a great job at building a communicable political vision for the country; it continues to be the subject of inter-faction rivalry, and there can be no doubt that each of the party’s major wings will try to wrest control of the leadership after Mr. Harper steps aside.
But having worked so long and hard to win power, Canadian conservatives know by now that division means defeat, and defeat means allowing an alternative worldview to dominate Canadian policy-making both on the domestic and international level.
And they won’t lose sight of the big picture this time. At least not yet.
