Tories move toward kinder, gentler approach

No reason why party can’t outgrow Harper

Is glasnost afoot in the Conservative party? As the first session of the 42nd Parliament gets underway, there are signals to that effect. If it holds, it will be both a testament to the impact of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “sunny ways,” and a threat to his longevity in power. That’s because, very simply, the progressive centre-right of Canadian politics is still up for grabs. It is a choice prize, too long neglected.

It was immediately apparent, after the shellacking they took Oct. 19, that leading Conservatives understood at least in part where they’d gone wrong. A succession of party grandees, including Jason Kenney, Peter MacKay, Lisa Raitt and Tony Clement, mused about inclusiveness and tone. Translation: stoking a fight over the niqab and “barbaric cultural practices” was a disaster and we never should have gone there. Correct, they never should have.

But that wasn’t the end of the discussion. Since the vote and the installation of interim leader Rona Ambrose, the Tories have taken a succession of fair-minded positions on issues as they’ve arisen. First was a potential controversy over looming multimillion-dollar renovations to the prime minister’s official residence at 24 Sussex Drive. The headlines wrote themselves: Dauphin to spend millions on childhood luxury home. But Ambrose wisely waved the long-overdue repairs aside as a no-brainer.

Next came the refugee question. Even after the government jettisoned its year-end deadline for bringing 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada, the Conservatives could have continued to make this an issue, opposing the bulked-up rescue on principle, dates be damned. That might have appealed to some in the party’s base.

Instead, Ambrose apparently opted for sunny ways. Immigration critic Michelle Rempel, no slouch when it comes to hammering Liberals, actually praised them. On Twitter, former immigration minister and uberpartisan Chris Alexander offered heartfelt congratulations, causing eyes to bug out across the spectrum. Then last week as Commonwealth leaders converged on Malta, the party struck another Mulroneyesque, Red Tory note, in a release by Clement. After first calling on the PM to strongly defend human rights by “pushing for an end to the intimidation and incarceration of political leaders and journalists, harassment of minorities, reported disappearances, and allegations of extra-judicial killings in some member states,” Clement asked whether the Liberals would “continue to support the strong stand taken by Canada on the decriminalization of homosexuality.”

Defending gay rights abroad was one of the few rays of outright progressivism allowed to shine in the ancien régime. Interesting that Clement choose to highlight this now.

This week, of course, it gets real, with the House of Commons back (albeit briefly). In an adversarial system such as ours there cannot be peace, love and grooviness in perpetuity. The opposition must oppose, as Ambrose and Raitt have done over the water-cooler brouhaha of the Trudeaus’ taxpayer-paid nannies. Had they given him a pass on that, one suspects, quite a few Conservatives might have begun to wonder whether they’d lost their stomach for a scrap. As the session unfolds, it will be a matter of picking spots.

Here’s why consistent, constructive opposition, punctuated by the occasional punch-up at centre ice, is just what the Conservatives need now: It’s not just that Trudeau’s open, gregarious style has proved a winner with voters. It’s also that these Liberals have allowed ample room for a progressive conservative party in the centre of the spectrum. Space once occupied by right-of-centre blue Liberals on foreign policy, for example, is now vacant, with the government pulling combat resources out of Iraq and Syria as Canada’s major allies put more in.

There’s a great focus in the new Liberalism on redistributing wealth — there will be more on that in Friday’s Throne Speech — considerably less emphasis, it would seem, on slashing import tariffs, furthering competition and enhancing productivity. By planning a string of deficits in an economy that grew 2.3 per cent in the third quarter, the Liberals have created another opportunity for the centre-right. Liberal strategists argue, quite rightly, that these are small deficits in a $2-trillion economy. They will further note Canada’s debt-to-gross domestic product ratio is now less than half what it was in the mid-1990s when Paul Martin made his bones as a fiscal hawk.

Be that as it may, politics is about symbols. In symbolic terms, the Liberals have ceded high ground they formerly held as tough-minded fiscal conservatives.

There is no reason at all, in other words, that the party Stephen Harper built can’t outgrow him, that it can’t begin to systematically carve out responsible, moderate centre-right policy, in terms that will be familiar to many Canadians who supported the Chrétien-Martin governments in the 1990s, while simultaneously reembracing the pluralism and environmentalism that characterized its predecessor party in the 1980s.

A reading of tea leaves suggests this is, indeed, the plan. Whether the Tories can articulate it in the House, where there will be ample temptation for them to return to their old, braying ways, remains to be seen.

A CONSISTENT, CONSTRUCTIVE OPPOSITION ... IS JUST WHAT THE (TORIES) NEED NOW...