Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution

By Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah

Canadians everywhere are asking: what's wrong with the Conservative Party? The Liberal Party of Canada has held power for 70 of the past 100 years—a feat unrivaled by any other political party in the Western hemisphere. This dominance has caused a great deal of frustration on all political fronts, especially on the right, and the long-awaited merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives has not achieved the results many were expecting. In Rescuing Canada's Right, the authors examine the problems facing the Conservative Party and the broader conservative movement, and offer concrete solutions on how to fix them. Rescuing Canada's Right will be a hard-hitting and groundbreaking work that will introduce new ideas and a passionate call for change for 21st century Canada.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781443430104

Book preview

Introduction

We’re Here, We’re Canadian, And We’re Conservative

If you are trying to change the world, you better be willing to take a few risks.

—Michael Walker, founder of the Fraser Institute

Proclaiming oneself a conservative in Canada today is (check one):

a. unusual

b. a lonely endeavour

c. political suicide

d. all of the above

Unfortunately, in most parts of the country the answer is d. North of the forty-ninth parallel, the word conservative has become as much of an epithet as liberal has in the United States. The latter was no small feat, mind you. It took years of stigmatizing the causes and ideas of the Left by the well-funded American Right, along with the immensely successful presidency and personal popularity of Ronald Reagan, to make liberal a dirty word. In the 2004 election President Bush didn’t even need to invent a synonym—he simply called Kerry a liberal innumerable times, especially in campaign ads.

In most parts of Canada, it’s the reverse. Out yourself as a conservative at many a Toronto cocktail party and you can feel the air suddenly grow thinner, as if you’re being sucked into a giant social vacuum tube. Otherwise sensible people will exhibit one of two reactions: either back away and make for the bar, or start berating you for taking bread from the mouths of single mothers. Which is enough to make you need a drink too, or contemplate moving to Calgary. Either way, both temperatures and liquor consumption rise, with the conservative no further ahead in advancing his or her ideas.

Theories abound as to why conservatism has failed to make a significant impact in Canadian federal politics. Some say the general Canadian attitude of mind, as a whole, is not now, and has never been, conservative. Others claim the resources available to conservatives here, in terms of financial and human capital, rank far below those in the United States. Others point to Canadians’ obsession with the national unity issue, and the Conservative Party’s failure to gain ground in Quebec.

In fact, much of the blame for the state of the right lies on conservatives’ own doorsteps. Throughout their history, Canada’s federal conservative parties have failed to develop a coherent ideology, to build an infrastructure to support and market that ideology and to provide inspiring leadership. They have also failed at another key task: making conservatism cool. In an article entitled Conservative Cool, published in June 2005, Rick Petersen, founder of the Vancouver-based Conservative Council, laments that the party is going nowhere fast, and could remain stuck in a rut leading over a cliff, and that [i]n our biggest cities, Conservatives have an image problem, especially with women and younger voters.¹

No kidding, Rick! Since fashion-forward Belinda Stronach swanned across the floor to the Liberals in May 2005, the party’s already tepid coolness quotient has plummeted to Hadean depths. Name a cool conservative. We defy you. Peter MacKay briefly flirted with coolness by dating Stronach; Rahim Jaffer, one of the few Tories with any semblance of fashion sense, can be spotted at establishments that pass for cool nightclubs in Ottawa. Sadly, these shining Armani moments are quickly cancelled out by persistent memories of Stephen Harper sporting a too-tight golf shirt and Ken doll haircut, and then defiantly proclaiming that he doesn’t believe in makeovers.²

Unfortunately for conservatives, the epitome of political cool in this country remains the late Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau wore sandals, told the separatists where to shove it, did a pirouette behind the Queen’s back and dated Barbra Streisand when she was at the top of her game. Trudeau is etched in an entire generation of Canadians’ minds as the ultimate politician, and is the closest thing Canadian public life has ever had to a rock star.

But Trudeau is history, you say? Not so fast. His Trudeauvian coolness has been reincarnated in sons Justin and Alexandre, who have graced innumerable magazine covers despite the fact that by their early 30s their collective works span a couple of films and documentaries, a spread in Maclean’sand a nice eulogy. As we write this, you can bet the Liberals are preparing to anoint one or the other prime minister in the next decade.

More significantly, the policies put in place by their father continue to shape Canadian society in almost every way. Trudeau’s quest to fight Quebec separatism and impose his vision of a Just Society produced a country where government is so deeply embedded in our lives that, in the words of political scientist Alan Cairns, Our very identities are transformed … The public and the private are intertwined.³We have gone well beyond the well-worn the personal is the political slogan of the feminist movement to a situation where, Political calculation occupies an ever-increasing significance in the pursuit of individual goals … Political preference becomes an alternative to market performance in the pursuit of economic survival and profitability.⁴

As a result, Canada’s political status quo is not liberal, conservative, right-wing or even classical liberal—it is statist. Statism, as defined by the Acton Institute, is a program or viewpoint that looks to the state for resolution of social and moral problems, rather than to individual effort. Specifically, a condition where the nongovernmental institutions of a society develop an overextended and unhealthy reliance upon political structures for the solution of problems.⁵

The Perils of Statism

Statism is anathema to conservatism. It leads to citizens placing an increased value on government not only as a means of solving social problems, but as being the preferred means of attaining social status. Think for a moment about the (mostly self-appointed) Canadian elite, particularly its public intellectuals, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-statist among them. All the members of the CBC cocktail circuit—Adrienne Clarkson, John Ralston Saul, June Callwood, David Suzuki, Margaret Atwood, etc.—have either been employed by government or advocated intervention of the state to solve our problems.

In the words of Toronto financier Duncan Jackman, Canada has become a government-sponsored abstraction.⁶It matters less how smart, accomplished, entrepreneurial and able you are, but who you know in Ottawa and whether you qualify as a potential beneficiary of a government grant. This makes for a perversely elitist class distinction which prefers mediocrity to merit and favours opportunists over those who create opportunity.

The ultimate outgrowth of this corrosive attitude is the Liberal sponsorship scandal. Spending $355 million of public money was deemed the solution to solving the separatist problem in Quebec. Only the federal state, it was reasoned, could counter the force of the sovereignty movement. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into sponsoring festivals, distributing free flags and even unveiling a plaque in San Martino, Italy (former Public Works Minister Alfonso Gagliano got to personally perform that one). Today, all this money is down the drain, and separatist forces are stronger than they have been in a decade.

Worse yet, as Cairns notes, [i]t is far from evident that the major beneficiaries of modern state activity are the poor, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged and the helpless: the real winners are people who have political and organizational resources and the money to deploy them.⁷In Canada’s case, that makes the Liberal Party the chief beneficiary of the ballooning size of our national government. The losers? Not just conservatives, but everyone who values democracy, freedom and a strong marketplace of ideas. By equating statism with nationalism, Liberals have made the expression of any dissenting view appear un-Canadian. This has not only helped keep them in office, but stifled the national debate on everything from culture to health care. Any voices that call for the removal of state monopolies, an end to corporate subsidies or privatization are seen as heretical, treasonous, or worse yet, pro-American.

Sadly, federal Conservative parties (in their various incarnations) have done little to counter this propaganda. None has fundamentally questioned the role of the state in our lives or attempted to roll it back. The Progressive Conservative Party under Brian Mulroney may have enacted the Free Trade Agreement, repealed the Foreign Investment Review Agency and tinkered around with various government programs, but it also doled out huge corporate subsidies, ran up massive deficits, continued funding a host of left-wing interest groups and failed to limit increases in both taxes and spending. And the new Conservative Party isn’t faring any better. As columnist Andrew Coyne lamented after the party’s inaugural convention in March 2005: There is no longer any party at any level of government that has any intention of leading public opinion, or making changes to the status quo—not, that is, in the direction of smaller government or greater personal freedom. The choice, rather, is between parties that are eager to expand the state, and parties that will do so reluctantly.⁸

If conservatives are to ever end the Liberal march toward what Mulroney once called the Swedenizing of Canada, they must borrow a page from the gay rights movement, start standing up for themselves and launch their own pride parade. This parade won’t march down the Main Streets of Canada’s cities, but down the Main Street of public opinion. It is incumbent on conservatives to make their beliefs non-threatening, welcoming—and even cool. And to do that, they have to invest money, time and energy on a scale not seen before in this country. They have to take a page from the experiences of conservatives in Britain and the United States. The U.S. did not morph overnight into a society prepared to elect an ideological conservative like Ronald Reagan, as it did in November 1980. As we explain later in this book, it took a fifteen-year concerted effort to create the conditions in which a conservative Republican could take the White House.

Moving Forward

So—how do we rescue Canada’s right? It’s a question we’ve asked ourselves many times over the past year. Based on exhaustive research, interviews with countless conservatives and an examination of other countries’ experiences, we have arrived at what we believe is the answer, and laid it out on the following pages.

This book is organized into three parts. The first is an overview of the Conservative Party and its history. Be forewarned: it is a little depressing. Through all its incarnations, splits and revivals, the Conservative electoral record at the federal level—and the Tories’ performance the few times they have actually held office—has been less-than-inspiring.

If you haven’t lost hope after reading Part One, Part Two lays out a plan of action to make things better. First we examine how, in the past forty-odd years, the federal government has promoted and entrenched statism as the dominant ideology in Canada. Much of this has been done without the knowledge of Canadians, and we suspect you’ll be as shocked as we were by what we learned. But fear not: we’ll also tell you how we can reverse this trend by building a conservative infrastructure encompassing all aspects of public life, from the media, to the courts, to academia. We’ll explain how conservatives can appeal to New Canadians and to the next generation. Even in Quebec, the least conservative province in Confederation, there is hope to entrench a more conservative culture.

Part Three of the book is devoted to policy. Although policy discussion is interspersed through the first two parts of the book, we thought it would be useful to focus on four areas where conservatives could be more innovative: the family, health care, the environment and federalism. Going over bread-and-butter conservative positions such as the need for tax cuts, less wasteful spending and a more principled foreign policy is not necessary—that’s already the party line. What’s needed is a new vision that incorporates those policies but goes further in addressing other concerns.

Big C v. small c

You will notice that we use the word conservative quite a bit, sometimes with a capital C and other times with a small c. This is not meant to confuse you. It is intentional. We are small-c conservatives, meaning we are believers in the ideology of conservatism. We broadly define conservatism as the belief in smaller government, lower taxes, individual freedom and personal responsibility. We are notmembers of the Conservative Party. In fact, we hold no party memberships. So when we talk about Conservatives with a big C, we are talking about the Conservative Party or its members. When we use the word conservative with a small c, we are referring to the ideology or someone who espouses conservative ideas. The distinction is key. Yes, the Conservative Party has small-c conservatives in it. It also has many people who share some conservative ideals but who call themselves by different names, such as Red Tories, centrists, libertarians, social conservatives, populists and others.

Some people or organizations that we call conservative in these pages might not be happy with this label. Many prefer other terms, like classical liberal. Libertarians, for example, hate being lumped in with conservatives. Others aren’t fond of political definitions of the liberal-conservative axis at all. Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, for one, has never liked the terms left and right. But to make narrow ideological distinctions in every case would be confusing and take up much of the book. So for the sake of simplicity, we use conservative widely to mean those who are more or less situated on the centre-right of the political spectrum; that is, those people and groups who advocate non state-driven solutions to matters of public policy.

This book has three intended audiences. The first is, of course, conservatives—both big C and small c. We hope they will agree with our findings and adopt the ideas and suggestions presented for bringing the conservative movement forward. The second is corporate Canada and the business world in general. With luck, it is they who will step forward with the financial resources needed to build the infrastructure that will reinvigorate the Canadian political debate. They will be instrumental in developing institutions to challenge statism. And the third audience is regular, non-partisan, civic-minded Canadians. This project is about more than advancing conservatism and its ideas; it is about returning balance to the national dialogue by introducing new ideas that will compete with the platitudes of the past.

With regard to the last group, we need to address the issue of whether Canadians are currently willing to elect truly conservative Conservatives. There are two schools of thought about this. Some believe a mass of small-c conservative voters already exists, just waiting to be tapped into by the right leader and the right set of policies. Others think Canadians, by and large, simply are not conservative and that we are starting from ground zero.

We believe a bit of both. History shows Canadians will vote for a modern conservative party at the provincial level. Witness the two Mike Harris majorities in Ontario and Ralph Klein’s victories in Alberta (during the early years, at least). Consider also Sterling Lyon’s Conservative government in Manitoba and Bill Bennett’s Social Credit government in B.C. For a plethora of reasons—among them weak leadership, poor election campaigns, the theft of some conservative ideas by the Liberals, the inability to penetrate Quebec and just plain bad timing—the national level has seen no such success. While a base of conservative voters exists, more Canadians must be exposed to conservatism and convinced of its merits before we can create an enduring small-c conservative coalition at the federal level.

That’s not to say conservatives haven’t made progress in the battle of ideas. We’ve come a long way. Nobody is talking about nationalizing industry anymore. The federal Liberals continue to cut some taxes. Polls show Canadians are more and more open to private health care options. And conservatives have won the argument on monetarism and balanced budgets. Organizations like the Fraser Institute, the National Citizens Coalition, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, the Montreal Economic Institute and others do a tremendous job educating and advocating for more freedom and less government in Canadians’ lives.

But it’s not enough. Too many people still assume that advocating for positive social change means moving Canada to the left. Most Canadians would probably agree with Toronto artist Daniel Borins, who, when confronted by Tasha’s self-description of conservative activist at one of those deadly cocktail parties, laughed out loud before sheepishly backpedaling, Well, you don’t usually think of activists as ‘conservative.’

If Canada’s right is to be rescued, that kind of thinking must change—and soon. We don’t want to seem alarmist, but this book is motivated by a certain sense of urgency. The Liberals have now been in power without interruption for nearly thirteen years. As time goes on, the tentacles of socialism and statism will become tougher to dislodge. It is conceivable that at some point it may be too late to reverse the damage.

So the time to get down to work is now. We know Canada can do better. We love this country, and it is heartbreaking to see it not living up to its full potential in a wide range of areas. We are a better country than one whose sole raison d’êtreis to squabble about national unity and stand to the left of the U.S. on social programs.

We realize the changes we propose will not happen overnight. Building institutions, not to mention moving opinion, takes time. But if you’re doubtful, remember that in the 1970s some of the world’s most respected thinkers believed the Soviet Union would win the Cold War. Things change, and they can change quickly. As columnist David Warren has written, all trends are reversible. Let’s get started.

Endnotes

1 Rick Petersen, Conservative Cool, June 7, 2005. www.conservativecouncil.ca

2 Stephen Harper, June 20, 2005, on Vancouver radio station CKNW.

3 Alan Cairns, The Embedded State: State-Society Relations in Canada, in State and Society: Canada in Comparative Perspective, ed. Keith Banting (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1986), 75 (hereinafter Cairns).

4 Cairns, 71.

5 Website of The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, www.acton.org/research/dictionary/#socialism

6 Author interview with Duncan Jackman, March 2005.

7 Cairns, 82-83.

8 Andrew Coyne Amidst the balloons, a white flag, National Post, March 23, 2005, A20.

PART ONE

The Past

Chapter 1

FROM JOHN A. TO JOE WHO: How the Conservative Party Failed to Lead Canada

The number of true believers in the electorate is diminishing. People don’t make commitments, they make judgments from time to time on which party, set of policies or person best suits them. So I’m not finding a lot of ideological talk in the [Progressive Conservative] party.

—Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, former PC leader

MANY political movements have the past to look to for inspiration. Not Canadian conservatives. It’s not that the federal Conservative Party hasn’t made some great contributions to Canada—quite the contrary. It was Conservatives who built the country. Sir John A. Macdonald, working in concert with Sir George-Étienne Cartier and George Brown, the founder of the Toronto Globe, formed the Grand Coalition in 1864, which led to Confederation. It was Conservative governments that gave women and native Canadians the right to vote. Prime ministers John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney were front-and-centre in fighting South African apartheid. Mulroney also gave us free trade, which despite rancorous debate in the 1988 federal election has recently been confirmed to have boosted Canadian productivity by up to 25 percent since its inception.¹(We won’t say we told you so.)

Sadly, there’s little else to highlight. The main reason is that the Conservatives have rarely held the keys to power in Ottawa: for 55 of the 138 years since Confederation, and just over 30 of the past 100 years. And when the Tories have formed the government, they haven’t been very illustrious. Just ask Canadian political historians. In a 1997 ranking of Canada’s Great Prime Ministers by twenty-five scholars, only one Conservative made the top category of great—Sir John A. Macdonald. One other, Sir Robert Borden, was deemed high average. All the rest were lumped in the categories average, low average, and failure. (Four of the five PMs in the failure category were Tories; dead last, no surprise: Kim Campbell.)²

Moreover, when the party has been in power, it has rarely done much in the way of implementing conservativepolicies. That’s with a small c. To us, small-c conservatism means a political philosophy loosely based on the ideas of classical liberalismas outlined in the writings of John Locke, Adam Smith and more modern thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek. It emphasizes free markets, individual rights over collective rights, limited government, private property rights, and personal responsibility. All that freedom stuff. Think Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and, on the domestic front, the first terms of provincial leaders like Mike Harris and Ralph Klein.

For most of Canadian history, no mainstream federal political party—including the Conservatives—has advocated small-c conservatism. At times, classical liberalism has infused people in both parties. On the other hand, you can say that classical liberalism is almost foreign to Canada, says historian Michael Bliss, one of the few academics we know who hasn’t spent his career beating conservatives over the head with a cudgel. Fundamental economic policies pursued by the government of Canada since Confederation have flown in the face of classical liberalism. The policies of both parties were expansionist.³ Now, this doesn’t mean that Canadian governments didn’t exhibit signs of conservatism—or perhaps more accurately, a reluctance to expand the size of the state. In several instances, which we discuss in Chapter 12, Canada was slower in moving toward statist policies than our neighbours to the south. Indeed, one could make the case that Canada’s national government was quite modest—even fiscally conservative—until the era of Diefenbaker and Lester B. Pearson.⁴But overall, federal governments, including Conservative ones, have been pretty dismal from a small-c conservative perspective.

Let’s start with Sir John A. Macdonald, one of the Fathers of Confederation and the party’s first leader. For all his faults (he was a drunk, corrupt and a patronage king), Macdonald remains the most politically successful federal leader of the Conservatives the country has ever seen, winning six out of seven elections he contested—all majority governments. With the exception of a single term (1874 to 1878) he served as prime minister from Confederation until his death in 1891.

Macdonald’s Tories were devoted British sujects, expansionist and non-ideological. (He even used the terms liberal Conservative and progressive conservative to describe himself.)⁵He exhibited no particular hostility to government spending: Macdonald felt, in Michael Bliss’s words, the more areas of government activity the better … so long as they seemed to be vaguely useful and the taxpayers did not revolt.⁶He was also a strong centralist, even thinking that eventually provinces would wither away altogether.⁷

Given that he presided over the birth of a country, a strong government hand was necessary. Macdonald brought three new provinces—Manitoba, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island—into Confederation. He created the North-West Mounted Police, which would later become the RCMP. Most famously, he built the transcontinental railway. Unfortunately, Macdonald accepted kickbacks from the man to whom he awarded the contract to build the railway, Sir Hugh Allan of Montreal.⁸The scandal caused him his only electoral loss.

Macdonald’s main policy legacy was the protectionist National Policy, which was introduced in 1878. This has led many observers to label Macdonald anti-American and anti-free trade. But according to McGill University economist William Watson, this policy was not Macdonald’s preferred route, but a reaction to American protectionism of the day. Macdonald initially attempted to negotiate a free trade deal, but was rebuffed by our southern neighbour.⁹

The National Policy slapped high tariffs on foreign goods in a deliberate attempt to force Canadian trade onto an east-west trade axis. Some feel this is the source of modern regional alienation, particularly in the West, where it forced farmers to pay more for equipment and closed markets. The National Policy also hurt the Maritimes by taking away their natural trading market in New England.¹⁰Macdonald used anti-American rhetoric to his political benefit: in his last campaign, in 1891, he cast himself as the great defender of Canada while the Liberals, then led by Quebecer Sir Wilfrid Laurier, would have sold us out to the Americans. He won.

Despite shorts stints in the prime minister’s chair by Tories John Abbott, John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell and Charles Tupper, the Conservative Party’s domination of federal politics was over for good with the election of Laurier in 1896. Since that time, the party’s story has best been summed up by legendary Liberal cabinet minister Jack Pickersgill: The Tories are the mumps—you get them once in a lifetime.

Sir Robert Borden became Conservative leader in 1901 and headed up her Majesty’s loyal Opposition for ten years before actually winning an election. Borden’s policies resembled those of Macdonald. He campaigned unsuccessfully in 1904 on nationalizing part of the CPR’s northern Ontario main line, and implementing full government ownership of the whole second transcontinental system.¹¹In 1908, Borden lost again essentially campaigning on a clean government platform, including merit-based public appointments, stricter rules against bribery and electoral fraud, tightening immigration, Senate reform, a publicly owned utilities commission and nationalized telegraph and telephone services.¹²

Sadly, it was on a resolutely anti-conservative platform, at least by small-c standards, that Borden made his breakthrough in the reciprocity election of 1911. Rallying Canadians to the nationalist call for high tariffs, Borden defeated Laurier and his plan for further economic integration with the Americans, thanks to an alliance forged with Henri Bourassa’s Nationalistesin Quebec. Interestingly, the West voted overwhelmingly for Laurier’s pro-free-trade Liberals.

In government, Borden had no qualms about the vigorous use of power by the state.¹³He extended free rural postal delivery, had government enter the terminal grain elevator business and offered grants to provincial governments to build highways and fund agriculture education. ¹⁴Borden won again in 1917, in the midst of World War I, on a coalition Unionist ticket. He joined forces with pro-conscription English Liberals to win support for the war effort. Borden won that election easily, but with