Harper exit, above all, brings relief

Conservatives gave Stephen Harper a respectful, even rousing reception at their convention Thursday night. They are genuinely grateful to the man who brought them from defeat and division to nine years in power.

And yet the rest of the convention could very much be seen as a repudiation of the Harper years, and of the secretive, controlling, harshly partisan style of Harper and his team. If there were a word that best described the mood of the convention, it was “liberated.”

The most remarked-upon sign of this was in the convention’s extraordinary openness to the media — extraordinary, certainly by the standards of the past Tory convention, the notorious Stalag Calgary event, for much of which reporters were kept penned inside the cramped press area, far removed from the delegates. Under new management, the Tories seem to have discovered that openness connotes self- confidence, where secrecy suggests the opposite. Even a sometimes stormy post- mortem on the past election campaign was held in open session.

But it wasn’t just the press who had been freed. It was party members. I can’t be the only journalist who had the experience of talking to a delegate, a former MP, who at the end of a highly indiscreet soliloquy reflexively looked about to see who might be listening, laughed, and exhaled: “I can’t believe I just said that.” The same spirit could be observed in the plenary debates. Nobody seemed concerned that their dissent might be equated with disloyalty, either by those within the hall or without.

But it was not just how they went about it that signalled a changing party. It was what they did. While most attention focused on the resolution dropping the party’s insistence that marriage was “the union of one man and one woman,” that was far from the only noteworthy decision of the convention. For the Conservative party to vote to decriminalize marijuana, to take but one example, would not so long ago have been unthinkable.

And while some might interpret this as marking a move to the centre or marginalization of the party’s social conservatives, that’s too simple a reading. The same convention, after all, also held firm to the party’s opposition to assisted suicide, while affirming the right of health-care providers “to refuse to participate in or refer their patients for abortion, assisted suicide, or euthanasia.” Another resolution dared to clarify that when the party condemned “gender selection,” it meant “genderselection abortions.”

Quite apart from the social issues, the party showed a new-found interest in pushing boundaries in other areas. While it should not be surprising to find a conservative party expressing support for paying down debt and simplifying the tax code ( though the Harper govern- ment spent most of its time in office moving in the opposite direction on both fronts), it was frankly startling to see the party vote in favour of legislation allowing “optional union membership,” or to open the domestic air travel market to foreign airlines, albeit “on a trial basis on select routes.”

If it seems odd to vote, on the one hand, to accept same- sex marriage, and on the other, for right- to- work legislation, the contradiction is more apparent than real. That either resolution was unlikely to have passed in the Harper years had little to do with any deep convictions he or his team possessed, as compared with their ferocious devotion to their meticulously assembled amalgam of precisely targeted micro-demographic groups.

What strikes me, rather, as much as the boldness of the resolutions, is their reasonableness. Social conservatives were not wrong to want to preserve the institution of marriage. They were wrong only to have thought that extending its benefits and responsibilities to gays would harm it. That was perhaps understandable in advance of its implementation — we remain one of the few places in the history of the world to legalize it — but a decade later, the heavens having neglected to fall, it is only sensible to acknowledge this, and move on.

What the party shows signs of understanding is that, if it wants to broaden its base, as it must, it will not be by abandoning its principles — for who would want to join a movement that does not believe in itself ? — but by adapting them to new challenges, in response to the needs of a changing society. Accepting same-sex marriage is certainly part of that. But if conservative parties want to make themselves relevant again, it will not be enough merely to acknowledge defeat, on those issues where progressives have had the better of the argument.

They will need, rather, to start setting the agenda themselves: to force their opponents to the left to respond to them, rather than allowing themselves always to be put in the position of having to respond to the left’s initiatives. Once, when the Conservatives were the party of such radical ideas as free trade and the GST, that was the case: though they eventually defeated the Tories at the ballot box, the Liberals were forced to embrace much of their legacy in government. But it has not been true for some time.

In truth, power was a devil’s bargain for the Conservatives. They won government, but gave up much else: not only their principles, but their freedom, and ultimately their self- respect. But the price need not always be so high. Liberated by defeat, the party’s challenge now is to discover a way to win power without repudiating its convictions; to find the overlap between what it believes and what the public can be persuaded of.

Politics, it is said, is the art of the possible. Not quite. Better to say it is the art of expanding the possible.