Ideas to fore in Conservative race
New ideas add spark to dull leadership race
The early line on the Conservative leadership race — and it is very early, with the vote still nine months away — has been one of disappointment: yawn fest, gravitas gap, if only that dreamy Peter MacKay were running, etc. Certainly when your biggest name to announce to date is Tony Clement, there is little danger of the party succumbing to a cult of the personality. Maxime Bernier, Michael Chong, Kellie Leitch, Brad Trost — they may be described in many ways, but “future prime minister” is not the phrase that springs immediately to mind.
But there is an upside to all this mediocrity. Without a front-runner to crown, without much in the way of money, or name recognition, or charisma, the candidates have been forced to fall back on something else to make their case: ideas. The party that did its best to banish new or even old thinking throughout its long stretch in power, when it was at pains to reassure a skeptical public that, contrary to what they might have heard, it did not believe in anything, is showing signs of an intellectual rebirth in opposition.
I don’t want to overstate this. It may be that another, more presentably vapid candidate will get into the race, on the not unreasonable calculation that what the party wants is not long, boring discussions of what the candidates stand for but a winning smile and the right mix of region, race or gender, and this brief summer of wonk will be over.
Policy, after all, rarely decides these things, least of all in Canada. I can’t think of one thing that Lisa Raitt stands for, for example, though it is fascinating to imagine what an ideasbased MacKay campaign would look like. Or perhaps the race will go to a Patrick Brown type, with nothing much to say but masses of determination and organizational ability: Leitch, perhaps.
Still, for now it is still possible, if inadvisable, to hope. And in the wonks’ primary, the early front-runner is clearly Bernier. The former small business, industry and foreign minister has been staking out radical policy positions it seems every other day. He would deregulate telecommunications, opening the wireless industry to foreign competition. He would dismantle the system of agricultural quotas and import tariffs known as supply management. He’d break open Canada Post’s monopoly on first-class mail, and privatize the corporation. He’d allow foreign airlines to carry passengers between Canadian cities.
And in his latest and boldest shot, he’d use the federal government’s constitutional power over “trade and commerce” to force an end to interprovincial trade barriers, enacting an Economic Charter of Rights for Canadians and an Economic Freedom Commission to enforce it. What all these have in common is that a) they would lower prices to consumers, b) they have been advocated by economists and other experts for decades, and c) they are regarded as political non-starters. But then, so were deficits and tax hikes not so long ago.
The other declared candidates have not been as detailed in their policy proposals to date. But based on their statements and records, we have a pretty good idea of some of the ideas they are likely to advance. Chong has been explicit in his view that it is time the party came up with a better answer to climate change than the combination of foot-dragging and costly, heavy-handed regulation it offered while in power. Expect to hear him talk about carbon pricing — as the market-based solution, a more natural fit with Conservative principles.
Chong’s history of interest in democratic and parliamentary reform is also likely to surface in the campaign. And he has been dropping hints that tax reform will as well, in which a host of distortionary tax preferences and deductions would be erased in favour of broadbased cuts in rates: again, an area that Conservatives once owned, only to veer in the opposite direction under Stephen Harper.
As a prominent minister throughout those years, Clement wears much of that record. Nevertheless he’s long been known as something of a wonk, and it would be surprising if we did not see some interesting proposals from him. Like Chong, he’s talked about the need to apply Conservative principles in areas that have not been known as party strengths: not only climate change, but poverty reduction. As a teaser, he’s mentioned rethinking the CBC, surely long overdue in an age when not only the public broadcasting model, but broadcasting itself, as something delivered in continuous streams, on fixed schedules, to self-contained, specially purposed bits of hardware, looks increasingly antique.
Trost and Pierre Lemieux are the latest candidates to enter the race, both decidedly in the social conservative camp. We shall see what exactly that means: while there would seem little point in relitigating same-sex marriage, there is a legitimate position for conservatives to defend on assisted suicide and, yes, abortion, given Canada’s anomalous and unlegislated position as the only country in the democratic world without legal restrictions of any kind.
Social conservatives were not the only part of the Conservative coalition who were abandoned during the Harper years. Free-market conservatives, fiscal conservatives, democratic conservatives: the party served none of them well in power, when it was not actively silencing them. Now the leadership race promises each a chance to make its case, and it is good to see them taking advantage of it.