The right versus the regions

anada has too much geography and not enough

history,” lamented prime

minister Mackenzie King.

Geography, or region, is the dominant fact of Canada’s politics — much as race is to America’s, empire to Russia’s or class to Britain’s. Any political idea in Canada — from the lowliest government procurement to constitutional high politics — is inevitably forced through the regional nexus. Long after our ancient divides of religion, empire and even language have been eroded to a relative smoothness, the bare rock of region still commands the landscape.

The history of partisan politics in Canada can thus perhaps be seen as a struggle among imported political traditions competing to adapt successfully to this forbidding environment. The Conservative party rarely wins that struggle — between 25% and 40% of the time, depending on the era. Moreover, in the eyes of many conservatives, the two periods of dominance since Confederation — Sir John A. Macdonald’s and Brian Mulroney’s — saw an approach to governing that was indistinguishable from the Liberals’. Even when the party’s in power, the complaint goes, its ideas are not.

So, Canadian politics are regional and Conservatives do the losing. Is there a connection? Can the conservative project take hold in spacious federation made up of these regions?

Macdonald got off to a good start with a strategy of elite accommodation, building bridges between Ontario’s Protestants and their intense attachment to the Mother Country and Quebec’s bleu establishment, with its own fierce loyalty to the Catholic Church. With the hanging of Louis Riel and the Manitoba schools question, however, this straddle became untenable. The Conservative party, forced to choose, became principally the political expression of Canada’s British, loyalist and Protestant facts, with a dash of top-hatted business elitism thrown in.

For 60 years, Macdonald’s heirs refused to modify this starchy Britishness, thereby ensuring the dominance of a “ majority of minorities”: French and Irish Catholics, Westerners, in time Eastern and Southern Europeans.

Now, nothing in the Tories’ intellectual DNA required them to be anti-French or anti- Catholic. In fact, the conservative inclination toward a stratified social hierarchy should have fit well into church-dominated Quebec. So we needn’t seek out “root causes” of the mutual hostility between Conservatives and that province; The mastadons of the Albany and Beaver Clubs just preferred it that way.

A chance to equalize the political calculus came with the rise of Western Canada in the mid-20th century. John Diefenbaker’s Prairie populism gave the Progressive Conservative party a solid regional base, and the PCs infused the stiff upper lip of Ontario and the Maritimes with a Western twang of American heartland populism.

The party of Dief, Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark grew adept at working the regional nexus in English Canada. In the 10 elections that followed the watershed 1957 vote, the PCs posted a quite respectable record: four wins, one tie and five losses (two to mere minorities).

Under Brian Mulroney, they reached their adaptive apogee. Into the anglo/ populist conservative mèlange, the boy from Baie Comeau added long-awaited strength in francophone Quebec. He also spiked his coalition with a heady new ideological brew: the neo-conservative free-market doctrines of the Chicago school of economists and a brilliant generation of New York polemicists.

When the Mulroney coalition cracked, the stiff-necked hobgoblins of the conservative mindset — beaten down by Dief, Stanfield, Clark and Mulroney — strutted back onto centre stage. Bay Streeters decided that the deficit reduction effort was inadequate; Westerners rebelled against the brokerage politics of defence procurement; a new kind of “social conservative” evangelical activist asserted himself. General unelectability has ensued.

Looking ahead, we may well be headed for an emerging political structure based on urbanization, not region. But if the old game is changing, the Liberals may be learning the new rules first. They are currently strong in the big population centres, and weaker only in Calgary and the eastern half of Montreal — both of which can be seen as capitals of enduring regionalist tendencies. Conservatives are polling third in all cities of over one million people except Calgary; their strength is concentrated in shrinking rural Canada. As the country’s population continues to urbanize, the Liberals and their policy book are migrating in that direction.

Like a bad golfer who curses the game for being too hard, conservatives are prone in down times to grouse about region, as though it were the problem. They have a host of excuses for serial losing, the most self-serving of which is the argument that as a “party of principle,” they are bound to lose to those expedient Liberals. It is perhaps forgivable to cloak repeated political failure in the garment of unappreciated principle. The posture of spurned virtue becomes the austere, classical forms of conservative thought ( although it shows equally well on perpetually losing U. S. liberal Democrats). And blaming the regional character of Canada is a sub-species of the “party of principle” rap: “ We’re just too principled for this place. If only Quebec weren’t so ... Quebecish. If only Ontarians didn’t keep an eye on Quebec’s comfort level. If only we just gave all the money to the provinces and let them do what they want. If only the set-up were different. If only the hole in the middle of the green were big enough for me to sink the ball there.”

More thoughtful conservatives can searchingly argue that Canada has a governing tradition, rooted in the political culture of the St. Lawrence Valley, that is based on elite accommodation via the state. Moreover, they argue, the Liberals’ stock-in-trade is broadening the definition of that tradition to where it asserts a monopoly on the indigenous values of Canadians, and brands as un- Canadian any who challenge it. There is, to be sure, some relationship between the way a country structured like Canada is bound to work and the political methods the Liberals adopt to govern it. Much of this is attitudinal: There’s something about the structure of the country and the accommodations it makes that tilts in a direction toward which people who become Liberals generally find it easier to march.

But that said, it is difficult to argue that the regional make-up of Canada is intrinsically hostile to the conservative political project. Canadian conservatives have won elections. They have also racked up some impressive achievements in power, many of which are clearly in line with modern conservative thought. The United States and Germany, among others, have proven that federations can be sustainably governed by right- wing political coalitions. So Canada’s regional character certainly isn’t the main problem.

The most that can be seriously argued is that today’s Republican-derived conservatism is a tough sell in a country where 23% of the population lives in Quebec — a society whose mainstream resembles Western European social democracy. Go beyond that, and you’re mostly making excuses. In a democracy, having ideas that not enough people agree with can be a real challenge.