How Trudeau has given Tories a gift

‘Stop spending our money’ should be their new slogan

The federal Liberals’ first budget gives their rival Conservatives a path toward a rebuilt party and a new Right. If the Conservatives seize that chance, the country’s politics will be the better for it.

Ottawa might as well be covered in banners announcing the return of Big Government. There’s a palpable sense of relief in much of this government town, but there are also more than a few justified grimaces about the price tag, and not only among Conservative partisans.

Justin Trudeau’s decision to dig the country deeper into debt should be a major ballot question in four years. If it’s not, the Conservatives will have failed so utterly that they might as well fold up the tent.

It starts now, since the Conservative Party of Canada chooses its next leader in 14 months. To set themselves up as the prudent fiscal alternative, the Conservatives will have to rethink their own notions about what small government means.

When Stephen Harper took a step that made government smaller, it was usually in an attempt to visibly curtail the powers of government, not out of a commitment to under-the-hood efficiency or economic ideology. Harper-style small government meant a government less able to meddle in the affairs of people and provinces. It was a legacy built on the emotions, if not the ideas, of the Reform movement: the deep desire to see Ottawa brought down a peg.

Harper had four kinds of voters to keep happy: the social conservatives; the common-sense adherents who mistrust elites; the libertarians; and whatever Red Tories were still around. Some of those groups overlap; some barely manage to be civil to each other.

The Harper Conservatives came up with a big-tent notion of small government. They let government act “big” to appeal to the familyvalues constituency: boutique tax credits; toughon-crime policies; supply management and other subsidies; gazebos and snowmobile trails. But they also cut program spending. To appeal to the common-sense vote, they cut the GST and mocked carbon taxes. The Conservatives were not interested in actually reshaping the machinery of government to make it more efficient.

By the 2015 election, this conservativism was such a hodgepodge of talking points that there was little to offer but fearmongering.

And now Trudeau hands the Conservatives a big, moderate chunk of the political spectrum they can occupy. They can be an alternative that some Paul Martin Liberals might find attractive, as well as lots of the people still moping around in that big Conservative tent. They only really need one talking point this time, a populist message without the ugly demagoguery. That message: Stop spending our money. As my colleague, David Reevely, has pointed out, the federal Liberal plan seems to be modelled on Kathleen Wynne’s approach in Ontario. So perhaps the federal Conservatives should look to the way Patrick Brown is framing his opposition. So far, he seems to be laying the groundwork for a Conservative alternative that respects voters’ intelligence. We’ll see.

I can’t say which approach might give the Conservatives a shot at winning. But after four years of Liberal grasshoppers running the show, plenty of voters may be ready to consider an ant. Harper’s broadest appeal was his sweater-vest incarnation: the boring but diligent numbers man still working at his desk after all the lights have been turned off.

In any event, a Conservative party running on a sound, thoughtful fiscal-prudence platform would give us two real alternative visions of what government is and what it should be, instead of trumped-up culture wars. It would make a change.

Harper’s broadest appeal was his sweater-vest incarnation.