Canadian Tories’ very good week
Bad week for CSIS, Liberal bosses
The formers were in fine fettle this week. The conservative outfit formerly known as the Manning Centre (now the Canada Strong and Free Network) held its annual forum in Ottawa and the opening act was two former prime ministers, Australia’s Tony Abbott and Britain’s Boris Johnson.
Colby Cosh recently commented here about survey data which show that progressive political types tend to be less happy than conservatives. Generally true or not, Wednesday’s event was rollicking good fun, with the audience buoyed by Canada’s Conservatives doing well in the polls. The fun that formers furnish — the late George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton took their joint show on the road for years — gave way in Ottawa to something akin to a rally.
The capital’s main news story this week was the current prime minister’s confession that he does not read his intelligence reports. Whether that’s in general, or just when they are reporting on Chinese communists — the tyranny he has long found “admirable” — is not clear. Yet the intelligence — in both senses — of the current prime minister highlighted the intellectual heft of the formers in town.
Bojo — as the universally called “Boris” is known, derisively to some, affectionately to others — has long perfected his brand of erudite buffoonery. The absurd hair is the costume for a mighty brain. His classically-educated clown show was on full display.
Defending his Saul-on-the-roadto-davos conversion on net-zero climate policy, he pleaded that he was not a zealot but merely made “Pascal’s wager.” That reference was lost on most of the Tiktok young politicos in attendance.
Blaise Pascal was the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher who, though agnostic, thought it a good bet to believe in God. If he was real, it was essential. If he was not, no harm done.
Abbott eviscerated Bojo on that, given that great harm can indeed be done by foolish climate policy. Ask the Germans who now buy natural gas from Qatar — hello Hamas! — after being refused by Canada. Abbott’s judgment of climate policy that inflicts massive costs on the homeland while enriching “rivals and enemies” was summed up in one word: “crackers.”
Nothing daunted, Bojo, in a later reference to Israel-hamas, argued that those who advocate suspending arms sales to Israel are — according to “Kantian principles” — favouring a Hamas victory. Kant is better known than Pascal, but neither resonated in the room.
Is the intellectual in politics an endangered species?
Both Abbott and Bojo are Oxford men; Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar and Johnson was president of the Oxford Union. Both offered in their time a populist-tinged politics, railing against elites, despite — or perhaps because? — of their intellectual pedigree. Both would likely agree with the late Paul Johnson, who argued in his eponymous book that Intellectuals have often wrought great mischief. After all, there was another Trudeau before the current one.
Nevertheless, there was something welcome in listening to leaders who read books and know the history of ideas. Abbott reached back to classical philosophy to provide a pithy prescription for the pathology of our time: “We have too little courage and too much prudence. We are dying of prudence.”
How many leaders today would know the cardinal virtues?
One such would be another former, Jason Kenney. He, like Abbott and Boris, won a thumping majority only to be defenestrated by his own party. My old friend was across the street at Cardus, the think tank where I am a senior fellow.
Kenney gave a tour-de-force address that ranged from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to the philosopher of esthetics Roger Scruton, all on the theme of “home.” Demonstrating that he has not lost his populist blue-pickup-truck touch, he explained how Pierre Poilievre’s “bring it home” slogan is about much more than housing affordability.
It’s a framing of the moment as a contest between what Scruton called the “oikophiles” — Greek philosophy, twice in one night! — and the “oikophobes.”
The first prioritize the home, the family, the neighbourhood, the church, their civic associations, the patria. They are, Kenney reminded us, what the Harper government called the “somewheres” — people who are rooted in a home.
Harper contrasted them with the “anywheres,” the rootless global elites of which Michael Ignatieff was the Platonic form. The “anywheres” are the oikophobes who look derisively upon the attachments of those they regard as their inferiors.
A Canadian oikophobe might regard the country as an excellent “hotel,” like celebrated author Yann Martel, or as a “post-national state” with no “core identity,” like the current prime minister.
Abbott prescribed a future path for conservatives, in Australia and elsewhere, as the party of patriotism; a country that prefers itself to its enemies, something that was not clearly in evidence at the foreign interference inquiry this week.
Poilievre himself took a turn at the Manning forum, offering what he called a politics of “hope and home,” perhaps appreciative that Kenney had given his platform a deeper foundation.
It was a good week for those who value ideas in politics, at the same time as it was a bad week for government intelligence.
HOW MANY LEADERS TODAY WOULD KNOW THE CARDINAL VIRTUES?