Why Tories should reclaim the Red Tory banner
If the phrase Red Tory comes up in a word association game, Canadian political junkies will likely feel the same neurons lighting up their brains.
Joe Clark. Jean Charest. Maybe Peter Mackay. An Albertan might look to recent history and conjure up Clark’s disciple, the former Premier Alison Redford.
Charest’s recent flirtation with a run for the leadership of the Conservative party was itself proof that a Red Tory has become “a catch-all phrase for those Progressive Conservatives who call themselves social liberals, but fiscal conservatives,” as Maclean’s magazine described the term in 1997.
After weeks building anticipation that he would run, Charest, formerly the leader of the defunct Progressive Conservative party, announced this week that he would not because the party was too fusty for someone as socially progressive as he is. “The Conservative Party of Canada has undergone deep changes since I left in 1998. My positions regarding a number of social issues are based on deep convictions,” Charest said.
As Charest indicated, Red Tory had even become a catch- all phrase for former PC members who were skeptical of the Albertan wing of the new Conservative Party and its social conservatism. For most Canadians, a Red Tory is just a squishy Conservative. It’s someone like Clark or Charest who talks about keeping the budget in balance but who is not entirely discernible from a Liberal in any other way. In Charest’s case, that caricature of a Red Tory is literally true, in that he was the Liberal premier of Quebec for nearly a decade.
Historically, though, a Red Tory has been something entirely different.
Ben Woodfinden, a PHD student and political theorist at Mcgill University, has been fighting a lonely battle in conservative intellectual circles trying to make this point and reclaim the Red Tory moniker.
In a recent essay for the Canadian journal C2C that spread like wildfire among conservatives, Woodfinden makes the case that the Conservative Party should go back to the old definition of a Red Tory. They should look more to Sir John A. Macdonald than Charest and Clark.
A real Red Tory, Woodfinden argues, is not actually a social liberal who occasionally pays lip service to fiscal responsibility. It is a conservative who is not afraid to use the robust power of the state in the interests of building a national identity and protecting and strengthening social institutions.
Sean Speer, a former senior adviser to Stephen Harper, said the essay touched a nerve with Canadian Conservatives because it told them a story about themselves that wasn’t solely reliant on American or British traditions.
“We’ve never had a domestic founding story or any framework that describes characteristics that set the Canadian conservative tradition apart,” said Speer. “I think, for a lot of us, there’s an instinctive draw to that.”
Woodfinden tracks the change in usage of Red Tory to the 1980s, when former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former U. S. President Ronald Reagan reconstituted conservatism under classically liberal values.
Thatcher had more time for Austrian economists who extolled the benefits of the free market than for the civil society institutions that held the social fabric together. Reagan, meanwhile, saw government as an impediment to the individual freedom that allowed people to flourish: “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he said.
In pursuit of this freedom, both leaders prioritized tax cuts and deregulation and many conservatives have been following that path ever since.
“Conservatives often talk about people as consumers, producers, and overwhelmingly as taxpayers,” said Woodfinden. “Instead of talking about people as economic entities, talk about them as parents, talk about them as teachers or friends. You’re changing the terms of the debate by literally changing the terms,” he said.
In that vein, there has been a growing contingent of conservatives who believe that government is a worthy tool for solving problems, rather than some voracious beast that must be starved. Canada’s history is full of these kinds of Tories, not the least of which is Sir John A. Macdonald who pursued nation-building projects like the Canadian Pacific Railway.
More recently, Woodfinden points to former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society program that tried to revitalize civil society institutions and solve problems caused by an increasingly disconnected and individualistic country.
In Alberta, Premier Jason Kenney has voiced his interest in the reform conservatism movement that doesn’t unwaveringly assume the market is always right, and sees a certain role for government in helping people who are continually failing to get ahead.
Woodfinden agrees that reform conservatism, especially the platform of U. S. Senator Marco Rubio, which promises to reorient capitalism toward the “common good,” is a worthy source of inspiration for anyone looking to hammer out Red Tory ideas.
There is a small group of former Harper advisers and Kenney acolytes who are enthusiastically discussing these ideas and in his book, Right Here, Right Now, Harper even pleads with conservatives to push tax cuts off the top of the agenda.
Woodfinden’s essay is mainly an argument along philosophical lines but, in an interview with the National Post, he identified some policy proposals that would be at home in a Red Tory platform.
For one, it would be a platform that promotes kids and families. Woodfinden says policies like the Canada Child Benefit and expanded parental leave would be obvious vote-winners and would likely attract support from voters of all kinds.
For Conservatives, it would also be an attempt to reorient “social conservatism,” away from opposition to abortion and same- sex marriage and towards support for families and voluntary service. Any platform that seeks to support civil society institutions will probably start with support for families, Woodfinden says.
This is not a new project for the Conservative Party. In 2003, Stephen Harper described social conservatism as “respect for custom and traditions, voluntary association, and personal self- restraint reinforced by moral and legal sanctions on behaviour.” In the same interview, Harper reiterated his ambivalence on abortion, saying his views were complicated, like most Canadians, and tried to drive the conversation away from culture war issues.
Drawing from Cameron’s experience, Woodfinden also pointed to Big Society Capital, an investment institution set up to boost front- line social sector associations. Programs like this are designed to help revitalize civil society organizations that have wilted over the last several decades. Woodfinden mentions the work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose 2000 book Bowling Alone documented the gradual decline of American civil society groups, from bowling leagues and Elks Clubs to church groups.
Putnam argued that a multi- decade trend, along with the decline of organized religion, has seen fewer “third places” for people to associate beyond work and home and many conservatives have pointed to this as the seed of many societal problems.
Another plank in the Red Tory platform would be economic “opportunity zones,” which would encourage investment in lower income areas. It’s a plan that has attracted bipartisan support in the United States and would look to bolster communities that have suffered a shock to the economic system, like the closing of an automobile plant, for example. Speer, the former Harper adviser, has also been a proponent of opportunity zones and of reform conservatism ideas in general.
Place-based economic policies would be one way to help smaller communities thrive, in a world where people increasingly see economic opportunities only in the big cities, Woodfinden says.
Some Canadians Conservatives are looking to the UK, where Boris Johnson recently swept up working class seats that used to belong to the Labour Party, as Britons disaffected with how the EU’S market policies had changed their lives took up Johnson’s enthusiasm for leaving the EU and charting a different path. The Canadian Tories are also hearing an echo of the 2016 U. S. election where Donald Trump won states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, which historically went to the Democrats. Some Conservatives wonder if a realignment like that is coming to Canada and others think — whether it’s coming or not — there are popular and useful policy ideas coming out of both countries that are worth borrowing.
There may be another reason that the essay is piquing the interest of so many conservatives. After every election loss, the party endures months of punditry arguing that for Conservatives to win, they simply have to be more like Liberals.
Woodfinden’s essay not only disputes the point that Conservatives can only get elected if they try to be a little less conservative, but it actually reclaims the term used to describe the Liberal-leaning Tories. Some Conservatives simply wish to never hear about Red Tories again, but redefining the term may be their next best option.
INSTEAD OF TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE AS ECONOMIC ENTITIES, TALK ABOUT THEM AS PARENTS, TALK ABOUT THEM AS TEACHERS OR FRIENDS.