My friend Doug Musk is a Conservative Party member living in a rural part of the Niagara West riding. He and I often have insightful discussions about the future of conservatism in Canada, so I thought it might enjoy reading an extended, week-long email dialogue between us.
JJ: Hey Doug. I wanted to begin with a fairly open-ended question.
Without getting into any idealized definitions of what a Canadian conservative “should be,” how would you define Canadian conservatives as they exist right now? What sort of people are they and what do they believe?
DOUG: The short version: they seem to be a hodgepodge group of interests that stand in opposition to the Liberals — Trudeau most specifically and “the Left” more generally.
The longer version is more complex. I’d say they’re a group of divergent interests with some overarching core areas of agreement, but those areas of agreement are poorly articulated by the base itself, the leadership of the party, and the broader Canadian conservative movement.
Canadian conservatives seem to be an amalgam of social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, more “practical” (as in, consequentialist) libertarians, and some other forces, e.g. rural Canadians, all of whom are upset with the massive changes they’ve experienced in Canada over the last 50 years (or their lifetime — whichever is shorter).
There is also another element which is kind of hard to describe, a part of Canada that just doesn’t like the Liberals for reasons they can’t really articulate in ideological terms. They basically see Liberals as as effete and elitist. Justin Trudeau in particular is viewed as a particularly egregious figure, both because he’s seen as owing his job to his dad and an ultra-friendly media, as well as his general cadence and feminine mannerisms (his seating posture is the most visceral example I can give) — all of which just “rub them the wrong way.” This isn’t polite to say in public discourse, which is why these sorts of criticisms are usually reserved for more batty comment sections (or people like me, who are too blunt for their own good).
I think Canadian conservatives have become too obsessed with certain pet issues, which we could get into. I think there’s been a particular tendency to lean into what I call “economy cultism” — a focus on esoteric economic issues that most Canadians don’t understand, care about, or support. The constant harping on deficits is one example — I sympathize with it, but at the same time, if Canadians were really concerned about debt levels we probably wouldn’t be amongst the most personally indebted people on the planet.
Social conservatives have a similarly laser-like focus on certain narrow issues to the exclusion of all others. Sex-ed in Ontario, for instance. Because they fail to properly articulate their underlying core values they just come off as sanctimonious.
Many of these problems have been temporarily papered over by tribal partisan types — the kind who respond to criticism of the right wing parties with cries of “who are you going to vote for — the Liberals!?” It’s the last line of defence for some of the really weak or incompetent provincial leaders like Brown and Baillie.
Uniting this potpourri of groups are some overarching principles, of course. All conservative Canadians seem to share a basic belief that “delayed gratification” is important. They want to preserve a certain hard-earned societal order from perceived threats. It would be nice to have these values articulated better, but the Conservative movement in Canada seems to ignore the forest for the trees. The parties’ Facebook pages seem to reflect this — it isn’t the larger vision or ideas that are shared, but reactions to whatever the ultra-specific issue du jure is.
There are also some simple demographic observations that should probably be made. The Conservative base leans male (I saw a poll a few months back that had Trudeau’s approval at -4% with men but +32% with women, if I recall correctly). They are more likely to be white, east Asian (Chinese, Korean, etc.), and older, as well as more religious — specifically protestant and Jewish. I don’t see anything wrong with this, in fact I’ve argued in favor of driving up this vote rather than chasing down the votes of demographics I consider a lost cause.
JJ: I think you hit on something very important when you spoke about the visceral dislike of Trudeau and “the Left” many otherwise not-terribly-ideological people have. I think one of the most complex tasks in modern politics is ideological political parties learning to manage a voting public whose strongest beliefs are animated by mostly non-ideological instincts and identities. They need to figure a way to turn those people into adherents of a more narrow and specific philosophy, and then get them to back an even more specific and narrow policy agenda. I think one of the reasons Canadian politics is quite bad, and seems like an increasing hustle, is because our parties are skipping more and more over the philosophy part, expecting people to leap straight from temperament to backing a policy agenda. To go straight from “I just don’t like that Trudeau” to “we must have free trade with Europe!”
“Economy cult” is a great phrase that I think both captures the psuedo-religious loyalty some conservatives, mostly elite-level ones, have to a rather narrow set of free-market policies, as well as the dogmatic faith they have that these issues, and these alone, will be the saving grace of any politician who champions them. A lot of that I think reflects some of the sociological stuff going on with conservative intellectuals — intellectual life is the sort of thing you do from within a university, or a think tank, or a media job or whatever, and these are overwhelmingly urbanite careers. And because urban centres have generally more left-wing, secular, materialistic cultures, a sheltered resident will naturally assume the flavor of conservative politics that works in those places is the sort of conservative politics that works best everywhere. Though I’m not sure if “economy cult” stuff even works that well in big urban cores. Conservative parties in this country already try to run the most perfectly secular, non-threatening, economy-focused candidates in city ridings and they still usually flop.
A big narrative of the current Tory leadership race has been the need to keep all the various members of the conservative family united under a “big tent,” and I think we’d probably be in agreement that’s a rational course of action. The question is how you unite them, though.
Harper was relatively good at it, because he was a man from a deeply ideological background who I think understood the base well enough to both make credible appeals on the sort of “overarching themes” you talked about (particularly in 2006, when he really articulated the idea that the Liberals had been exposed as morally unsupportable through their corruption) and through targeted policy appeals that seemed to offer a little something for every faction (we’ll abolish the wheat board for the farmers, we’ll stop funding overseas abortions for the so-cons, but we’ll still refer to LGBT rights as a centerpiece of our foreign policy agenda to appease secular urbanites, etc.).
But I also think Harper was a very sui generis character, the sort of ideologue who are dime-a-dozen in American politics but we seem to have only a handful of in Canada. Without his personal credibility, which was built up over such a long time, to keep everything together, I think the very transactional coalition-building his much less ideological successors are engaging in feels more phony and nakedly political, in the crudest sense of the word. The leadership “sun” of any new conservative solar system in Canada is going to have a quite weak pull, which I think is also the trouble with most provincial conservative parties these days.
What’s your sense of conclusions about Canadian conservatism we can draw from the post-Harper age so far?
DOUG: When I stop chuckling over “free trade with Europe” I’ll attempt a coherent response. It’s true though, isn’t it — the conservative parties are always plopping “you need to be outraged at Trudeau for-such-and-such” stories in the media, and through their outreach networks, then at the next moment are advocating some obscure policy we’re all supposed to get excited about without telling us what it has to do with conservative principles. I think a deep discussion of “economy cultism” and the unpopularity of fiscal conservatism might be worth getting into down the line, but for now I think you’ve hit the nail on the head in noting that much of it stems from the circles Conservative Party operatives and MP’s emerge from.
I wonder if some sort of feedback loop is being created here: the party demands people foam at the mouth at some real or perceived problem, the base responds in kind, and then the elite faction of the party (and elite society as a whole) “cringes at the dummies,” despite the fact that they created them in the first place by underestimating both the intelligence and overarching values of their own supporters.
Social media could be playing a role here as well. Some of the sites, particularly Twitter, are just not reflective of the demographics the party actually has to deal with. With others, like Facebook, the people most likely to respond to provocation are going to be those already most upset, or those with a vested interest in whatever niche issue is being discussed. I’d love to see someone from the Conservative Party post an interview with William Gairdner or Roger Scruton on social media so we could engage with “first principles,” but I guess that wouldn’t drive instant donations or traffic in the same way.
This practice of Conservatives skirting around larger issues is probably a traumatic legacy of their 2004 election loss, given that was a race where every off-colour comment by every obscure CPC candidate or campaign activist was brought up by Paul Martin and his media sycophants in a truly “scorched earth” campaign that allowed them to salvage a minority government. I think a lot of modern-day Conservative timidity stems from that defeat.
I’m not sure how much we can conclude so far from the post-Harper era. You had a great column recently about how deeply entwined Canadian conservatism had become with him, and how without this avatar the whole movement now seems rather aimless and confused. I think part of this was a byproduct of Harper’s own personal eccentricities, particularly the fact that he seems to have been an utterly terrible judge of the character of others. He failed to give enough responsibility to some of the brighter lights of the movement while simultaneously making some truly horrible appointments.
The current leadership race itself seems to be a weird mix of those running away from the Harper record alongside a handful defending their time in his government. Chong is essentially celebrating his opposition to Harper’s entire agenda. Bernier is half running against his own record as a cabinet minister (which, incidentally, highlights the perils of running a puritanical “economy cult” campaign). Some of the others say we need to go further right than Harper, e.g. Trost, Blaney. Only Scheer, and perhaps O’Toole to a lesser extent, have seemed comfortable portraying themselves as solid heirs to the Harper legacy, though I get the hint that in O’Toole’s case this is more a product of his advisors. And even Scheer has the cover of having been the apolitical speaker of the House for much of the time the CPC was in power.
Aside from Brad Wall’s party in Saskatchewan, I think we can equivocally say that all the provincial conservative parties are complete disasters, either mired in terrible polling numbers or running away from conservatism so fast and hard they can’t be even put into the same ideological category as their supporters. I know things are so bad in your province you don’t even really have an option for your upcoming election (though admittedly I’m also leaning towards sitting at home or voting fringe rather than supporting the Ontario PC in 2018).
JJ: I’m glad you brought up B.C. since British Columbia’s election is quite revealing. The official narrative of the press, and even many in the federal Tory Party, is that the B.C. Liberal Party is “centre-right.” I think this is dumb. Premier Clark herself has explicitly said she does not self-identify this way, and I think any objective analysis would conclude her party’s ideological agenda has been conventional big-L Liberalism (they were the first government in Canada to implement a carbon tax, for instance). But the election is nevertheless unfolding as a traditional left-right tribal thing: Mr. Horgan, the NDP leader, is running a fairly one-note campaign against rich people, whose interests Clark is seen to embody, while Clark is running as a cypher of middle class normality, in a campaign that has been likened to Harper’s last one. There is no real philosophy clash or contrasting policy appeals, just “whose side are you on”-style base pandering.
That’s the ironic thing about Canadian politics — you can have very empty debates that are nevertheless very viciously partisan. There was a poll in B.C. recently that said over 20% of NDP voters believe the Liberal Party is “far right.” That’s just objectively insane, but we know it doesn’t mean anything literal, it simply means “I think the party I hate is the worst version of thing I hate.” The right obviously does this too, which is why words like “socialism” have lost all meaning, except as insults.
This reality makes it kind of easy to understand why a party might not necessarily have much interest in becoming more principled or ideological. It suggests ideological coherence is probably a net neutral. To evoke Donald Trump for the first time, his leadership of the Republicans is a particularly sharp example — there have been all sorts of polls suggesting that Republicans will change their minds to support whatever Trump does, presumably because Trump elicits such strong tribal loyalty and trust. I’d like to think that if a Michael Chong or Kevin O’Leary type became head of the CPC it would foster a deep cleavage in the base, and possibly a new party, but maybe that’s a bit naive. I certainly think the base would get over O’Leary’s ideological heresies very quickly because he’s such an effective channeler of tribal anger at Trudeau. Chong might be more problematic just because he “reads” as Liberal in a cultural way. You can be an ideological deviant or a cultural one, but probably not both.
All parties everywhere have to do a bit of a balancing act between ideology and marketing, but I think what frustrates me about Canadian conservative politics is that it increasingly seems like it’s all marketing. In America, it can often be fairly ambiguous as to whether the Republican base is more ideological than the politicians, or vice-versa. It’s ambiguous because there’s a lot of pressure coming from multiple places. Not only the immediate, direct pressure of the Republican electorate — which can be exercised through America’s system of open nominations and primary challenges — but also the voices of the vast American conservative media industrial complex.
In Canada, by contrast, the “conservative movement” seems a lot more ossified because there aren’t these sorts of strong institutional and cultural checks and balances to keep things evolving, dynamic, responsive, and democratic. Since only an extreme minority of Canadians are Conservative Party members, nominations and even leadership contests are a bit of a fraud — they don’t reflect a broad or representative conservative electorate. Conservative media, to the extent it exists here, is either too deferential to the party on the basis that the-left’s-enemy-is-my-friend (The Rebel), or too haughtily aloof about partisan interests altogether (The National Post), while our “right-of-centre” think-tanks are all probably too far off in “economy cult” world to be compelling to Canadians whose interests transcend the hobbyhorse issues.
It’s almost enough to make me want to respect Scott Gilmore. Awful as I find his politics (his perception that the fundamental problem with the Tory party is that it’s too far-right is nuts), he’s at least expressing displeasure with the status quo — which is something few conservatives from any other corner have been willing to do quite so openly and aggressively.
DOUG: I think you’re right that O’Leary would (what a difference a week makes!) have found a way to unify most of the Conservative vote behind him, especially with Trudeau as the target of his attacks. The Chong campaign, however, is bizarre — it almost seems to exist as a way of easing his defection into the Liberal Party. I think it’s possible to critique the direction of your party, even from the “left,” but Chong comes across as a sort of sermonizing preacher, proclaiming the whole party and movement as sinful. I really have no idea why he’s a CPC member, let alone an MP and leadership contestant. I have to think it’s simply because that’s what he had to do to get elected in his rural riding.
We could go into this in more detail, but what the high-profile conservative “dissidents” like Chong, Gilmore, Coyne et. al. are actually arguing for is another liberal party, not a conservative one. Anyone who reads their complaints with even the slightest tinge of knowledge about ideology will recognize they’re simply arguing for a party of “classical liberalism.” Its their poor understanding of “conservatism” combined with a genuine desire to sabotage the current Conservative Party that leads them to imagine they’re attacking the party from within “the right.”
Why aren’t these guys attacking the Liberals for being too socialist or too obsessed with identity politics? Why isn’t that regarded as an equally severe threat? It’s because that would be a critique of the left, and in the media these days it’s only fashionable to attack the right for not being left enough — never the left for being too left. Virtually all analysis of the Tory leadership race has taken the form of concern trolling from the left (your column on the narratives surrounding the new Tory leader is already starting to take form).
Speaking of the think tanks and “thought leaders,” I have a great example from the B.C. election. I came across a Manning Centre Facebook post the other day which I think encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the “right” in this country — and it isn’t one of Gilmore’s critiques. The post (April 12, 2017) read as follows:
B.C. election decision summed up:
a) Vote for Christy Clark & economic growth
b) Vote NDP & host the latest stop on their tour of economic destruction
What an absolutely idiotic and asinine thing to post. One, it’s a false binary — you could easily vote for one of the fringe parties on the right, or the Greens on the left, or stay at home, or spoil your ballot etc. But even leaving that aside, there are more fundamental problems with this argument.
The Manning Centre is an organization whose mission statement declares itself to be “dedicated to building Canada’s conservative movement — by strengthening the knowledge, skills, ethical foundations, and networks of political practitioners.” How on earth is a post like this accomplishing that? Where is the Manning Centre on forming a viable B.C. Conservative Party instead of instantly endorsing a pack of Martinite Liberals? Why would Christy Clark even bother appealing to conservatives if she knows she has their vote in the bag?
The Manning Centre should be holding her feet to the fire with statements like, “we might endorse the B.C. Liberals in this election if we really like their plan on this-or-that,” or “while we can’t endorse the B.C. Liberals as a whole, here are some specific candidates we feel are right enough on the issues to earn our endorsement.” Instead they instantly play their hands. You have absolutely no power over someone if they know you will back them at any cost. At least make her work for it! Or make her sweat a little by only dropping the endorsement at the very last minute of the campaign.
Instead B.C. conservatives are given the usual binary choice nonsense (which is especially ironic coming from an organization named after Preston Manning), and the usual reduction of Canadian politics to a bizarre contest over who can put another, what, fifty dollars in your pocket at the end of the year? It’s utterly uninspiring nonsense, and yet these types of think tanks also claim to be worried about low voter turnout? These are our supposed “thought leaders.” Their entire Facebook page is littered with terrible arguments, partisan blather that belongs on flame-throwing meme pages, and articles shared from the hardly conservative-friendly Canadian mainstream media on the rare occasions when they happen to agree with “the right”.
The problem is that these organizations are loaded with professional communications people or students fresh out of university who’ve developed an odd form of conservatism based around reading Hayek and Friedman while skipping out on Burke, Scruton, Eliot, etc.
There are likely logistical explanations at play as well — the salaries for these types of positions are okay, but private sector work is usually far more lucrative. And of course think tanks in the rest of the English-speaking world can easily scoop up good Canadian writers and thinkers. The viciousness of the Canadian media to contrarian voices also surely plays a part — look at the response to your latest column! — and often even sources on the left are attacked in the same manner. Canadaland, pieces for example, are often raked over the coals for not proclaiming everything in Canada to be perfect.
JJ: I’ve never understood why classical liberals of the sort you mention — the sort who are always loudly complaining about feeling alienated by the Conservative Party — aren’t just big-L Liberals. Because here’s the thing: these sorts of people always articulate their classical liberalism in a way that’s completely compatible with the political priorities of the mainstream Canadian left.
So they’ll say things like, “I want a fiscally responsible party that also supports climate science and gay marriage.” They’ll never lead with something edgier like “I want a party that supports gay marriage but will also abolish the CBC,” or “I want a pro-choice party that will also crack down on disability fraud,” or “I want a party that supports immigration but will also scrap the Indian Act.”
There are numerous aspects of the Ottawa status quo that should be deeply offensive to anyone who believes first and foremost in individual rights and small government, but the problem is many of the most glaring offenses also revolve around things — including aboriginals, Quebec, immigration, heavily-subsidized “Canadian culture” — that are deeply sanctified and sentimentalized by Canada’s media-political-bureaucratic-academic establishment. I think this is part of what you were getting at when you mentioned the general hostility to “contrarian” ideas — there are a lot of issues in this country that get you quickly branded as a crank for talking about in any way that doesn’t presume the status quo as broadly correct. So the Chongites/Gilmorites steer clear of anything genuinely provocative or challenging in favor of making “the conservative case for carbon taxes,” and so on, which only serves to reenforce the idea that there exists a universal intellectual consensus for the progressive governing agenda. And thus encourages suspicion that all these people really want is a conservative party that won’t embarrass them in front of their progressive friends.
It’s taken me a while to fully appreciate the role that class plays in self-identified conservative political identity as well. There are still a lot of people kicking around who think of the Tories as the “rich people party” — and not in a pejorative way. They view it as the party of wealth and success, of big business and capitalism and nice suits and fancy dinners, while seeing the parties of the left as the parties of poor losers.
I think the phenomenon is less pronounced here in western Canada, where we have more of a history of right wing populism, but it can’t be underrated as an explanation for certain factions of conservative dissent. After all, if you came to the party on a certain pretense (this is the rich successful people party!) and then find that pretext betrayed (what?! This is actually a party of redneck rubes!) then you can understand feelings of betrayal and alienation.
Whenever I meet young, “professional” conservatives — people working in the think tanks or the parties or whatever — I find a lot of them arrived at the party from a sense of class affinity. They’re from wealthy families, and went to good schools, and want to be successful and powerful — or at least sit in close proximity to those who are. They feel they will receive the least amount of judgement or resentment for their privilege from the Tory party, as opposed to the parties on the left, who they see as sort of jealous and Bolshevik-like (I think hatred of communism is, even now, another underrated motive of conservative self-identification).
I think this is a pretty bad misreading of the culture of the parties as they exist today, at least in the sense that the Liberal Party is quite obviously a party comfortable with wealth and status (four of their last five leaders — Trudeau, Rae, Ignatieff, Martin — have all been children of extreme privilege), though I think perspectives can be badly warped in university, where “the left” is likely to be embodied by people like Marxist professors and anti-war protestors who are not really that representative of things outside the college subculture.
I think we have covered a lot of ground here and should probably bring things to a close. Any final thoughts on the state of conservatism in Canada, Doug?
Doug: Well, I think you’ve touched upon something profound with your question about why Gilmore and friends aren’t big-L liberals. To get into it briefly, I think it’s because the classical liberal views they hold actually represent a very unpopular ideology amongst the masses (classical liberal parties across the globe tend to be poorly supported, and can usually only survive by morphing into something more socialist, e.g. the Canadian Liberals, or more conservative, i.e., the Liberals in Australia), but one that is nevertheless given disproportionately large breathing space within our broader discourse because its few adherents lean elite and wealthy. In order for classical liberalism to gain support from the public at large, it thus has to “eat itself” in a way, and hijack an existing party and try to bend it towards those views. I think many classical liberals realize the progressive movement is taking the left off a cliff, but they don’t realize it was many of their own ideas that provided the spark.
T.S. Eliot’s critique of classical liberalism in Idea of a Christian Society nails this succinctly, I’ll post part of it here because I think it’s very valuable to my argument and is written more eloquently than I can possibly match.
That liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
This is something I worry about a lot with the Conservative Party of Canada — that its upper echelons are actually much further to the left, or much more classically liberal, than the party as a whole. Or are at least deeply culturally out of touch with it, in that “look at all these rubes!” way you mentioned. I think the elitism of the CPC has helped cost us seats in Atlantic Canada and places like Northern Ontario, Manitoba, interior B.C. etc., that often go NDP or Liberal.
The fear is that Conservative Party members are treated as — to put it in wrestling/carnival parlance — marks, from which donations can be easily gathered, with the leaders of the party then getting together with Liberal friends at Ottawa cocktail parties and apologizing profusely that their riding hasn’t embraced the latest radical social progressive idea.
I find the whole “we have to win the 905” arguments to be an encapsulation of this. I think much of it is naked self-interest from elite-types in Canada who just selfishly expect parties should appeal “to them,” or at least their area, because they see their city and community as embodying their preferred idealized version of “what Canada should be” (an assumption I could easily tear apart with data on external migration, levels of public trust, etc.). It might also just be a flat lack of imagination from the types who tend to gather in Canadian politics.
The fact is, it really doesn’t matter where a party wins seats, all that matters is that you win over 170 of them and form a majority government. They can be gathered from anywhere, yet no one talks about how parties “must win” Northern Ontario, or the Cote Nord/Saguenay Region of Quebec, or the 10 ridings of New Brunswick, etc. I could easily assemble combinations of seats in regions of this sort and get to numbers equalling those of suburban cities around Toronto. They might even have less volatile demographics and thereby allow the party to form a larger, more loyal base that turns out more consistently.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy to go around saying “the 905 is important” if you target it ad nauseam while neglecting other regions of the country. You once had a great line about how Canadian political parties view safe seats as a sort of “cheat code” as opposed to an earned success that can be replicated elsewhere.
It’s much the same with demographic arguments. For example, the CPC has spent plenty of time saying “we need to appeal to women more.” While this isn’t false, you never hear the reverse argument — “we need to raise male turnout to the same levels as women.” Turnout amongst female voters was 68% in 2015, male turnout was 64 %. That doesn’t sound like much, but given women were more likely to vote Liberal than men, higher male turnout might have been enough to garner the CPC some swing seats. In 2011, the gap was only +2.5% for women, so it’s easy to ague that extra 1.5% last cycle cost the Conservatives some close ridings. This is just an example off the top of my head, but it would not shock me in the slightest if this has literally never come up in CPC strategy planning sessions.
I find it frustrating that Conservatives are supposed to win “moral” election victories with seats representing some perfect balance of demographics and regions. But it shouldn’t matter — what matters is winning 170+ seats, which usually entails 38-42% of the vote per riding, depending on splits. Heck, you can actually run against a part of the country if you want given our electoral system — that is essentially what Trump did with the Electoral College, he not only wrote off California but attacked it. I know evoking Trump and cynical election strategies won’t be popular with left-wing readers, but many other politicians have done this too. Pierre Trudeau essentially ran against “the West” in his later victories to the delight of some Quebec voters who then broke for him in massive numbers.
I think I’ve trashed the movement enough for now. Readers should know my attacks are directed against those who are leading the Conservative Party astray, or have become stale in their ideas and arguments. I’m not complaining about the party’s core voters, most of whom (aside from a few angry trolls), are salt-of-the-earth types, and very much the engine of Canada. I’m tired of the CPC, the provincial parties, and think tanks who are largely doing a poor job of representing and arguing for them
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