Why one conservative didn’t vote Tory
When you think of the typical right-winger, your mind might see a middle-aged Bible-thumper from rural Saskatchewan, or a suburban dot-com millionaire. Rarely do you visualize a young educated woman from downtown Toronto. And yet.
Freelance journalist Jess Morgan is 28 years old. She and her husband hold university degrees, live in the city, and have a household income well above average. She calls herself a classical liberal, which some people see as libertarian; a principled rightwinger who doesn’t sound one bit like Pierre Poilievre.
She didn’t vote Conservative in the last election, even though she’d planned to. It was the barbaric cultural practices tip-line that changed her mind. Having no other acceptable option in her riding, she abstained.
If she had her druthers, the welfare state would be drastically different. No, she doesn’t want the poor to somehow disappear; it’s the inefficiencies in the system she’d like to get rid of. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we spent more running welfare programs federally and provincially than we did on the assistance itself,” she says.
Her solution? Implement a basic guaranteed income in the form of a negative income tax, whereby people earning above a certain level would pay income taxes, while those earning less would either pay no income tax at all or get direct assistance from the government to bring them up to a certain guaranteed minimum. This, in her view, is better than a universal guaranteed income because the latter ends up sending money to people who don’t really need help.
Like many Canadians, she appreciates not having to pay out-of-pocket for health care in emergencies, but dislikes waiting lists. She would like us to do better in the health sector, especially by not limiting our conversations on that topic to the current Canadian or American models. “Compared to the rest of the world, both of our systems are mediocre at best. I would like to see us experiment with a public-private blend similar to betterranked systems in France or Germany or Australia.”
She’s in favour of immigration and of welcoming refugees, though she does not believe in setting arbitrary numbers for how many we should take in. She’s against the war on drugs and in favour of gay and trans rights, never having heard decent arguments against the latter. “I can respect religious objections to LGBT rights,” she adds, “but I don’t believe that public policy should be based on those objections.”
Morgan does not condone abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the mother’s life, but adds that, ultimately, “It’s none of my business. I’m hoping medical science will progress to the point that a fetus can be safely removed, raised in an artificial womb, and adopted by willing parents, if only so we don’t have to talk about abortion anymore.”
Morgan is not a fan of U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters. People have legitimate reasons to be frustrated: job losses due to technological changes, being ignored or mocked by coastal elites, illegal immigration, politicians who promise but never deliver, and so on. But none of that gives them the right to attack others for their race or immigration status. She is sometimes guilty of being harsh with Trump supporters online. But what gets her goat are overly emotional people who, “when confronted with policies they don’t like, seem to take them as personal insults, and it’s harder to argue in good faith with them.”
She suggests we should become more cynical about politics, as a way of detaching our political discussions from our emotions. “If a politician is ‘speaking to you,’ it’s more for their own benefit than yours. Expect little to nothing from your elected officials and you’ll be less emotional.”
She concedes she can sometimes be too argumentative, but says if she could change one thing about our current political discourse, it would be to ask people to take a little time to understand one another’s positions instead of lunging for the nearest insulting label. It’s important, she says, to remove yourself from discussions before they become acrimonious or nasty.
That could be a first step to start improving the tone of our public debate.