After Mulroney, are there any real Tories left?
A leader with the long view who gets trashed by the rabble in his day but emerges as a beacon of wisdom in the end is a wonderful thing.
Still, there was something a bit over the top about the praise heaped on former prime minister Brian Mulroney in the funeral orations, both political (from friend and foe alike) and editorial, seeing that the fellow, dogged by scandal, slithered out of office lower than a snake’s belly.
It was as though the mourning was not just for one man, but for the death of conservatism itself.
After all, the Progressive Conservative party disappeared after him in that infamous 2003 merger in which the PCS got suckered and swallowed by the right-wing Canadian Alliance. The word “progressive” disappeared under Stephen Harper and the party became one beholden to western oil and its corollaries: anti-environmentalism and authoritarianism (gagging federal scientists and all that).
Then it deepens. After several leaders get turfed, Pierre Poilievre emerges and thrives. Keep in mind, as some commentators have pointed out, that even Harper didn’t trust Poilievre, giving him no responsible jobs and keeping him on a short leash as an attack dog.
So now we have this Trumpthemed thing of social media-fueled paranoia, hyper me-firstism and — in the one concession to old-fashioned conservatism — a kind of swooning nostalgia. A telltale sign of all that is that Poilievre recently got endorsed by Alex Jones, the infamous American media conspiracy guy, who proclaimed him a rising star of the new Trumpist world order.
The upshot being that there’s no responsible conservative party to credibly critique the many sins, especially on the spending front, of a too-long-in-the-tooth Liberal government. “Everything is broken” and “it’s all Trudeau’s fault” are not coherent arguments.
All this raises an age-old question, and one of my favourite conundrums: What is conservatism?
According to sages of yore, conservatism is meant to “save the best and change the rest” (as opposed to liberals, reformers, revolutionaries and other pests who want to change everything — bringing to mind the Poilievre radicals).
By that idealized account, and depending on your definition of “the best,” the closest thing to a conservative party now in Canada would actually be the NDP.
Despite its original self-image as the party of sound mind and churchgoing fiscal prudence, Toryism in Canada has mostly been a wild ride. The country was founded by the Conservative Party under John A. Macdonald, which quickly revealed itself as a creature of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the worst scandal in Canadian history.
In his final election in 1890, John A. had an intriguing slogan: “The old flag. The old policy. The old leader.” The only thing lacking was “the old scandal.” One intriguing debate in the late 1800s was whether there was any difference between conservatism and “old fogeyism.”
The next major twist was unfortunate for the party. R.B. Bennett, born in poverty in tiny Hopewell Cape on New Brunswick’s Fundy shore, ended up as a Calgary lawyer and businessman and became prime minister in 1930 as a tough-talking millionaire just as the Great Depression hit.
His main solution was this familiar approach: get government out of business and let free enterprise do the job. As things quickly worsened, however, he did a very un-tory thing. He changed his mind, saying that government action is the only way out. He created the Canadian Wheat Board (which Harper killed) and the CBC (which Poilievre wants to kill).
He also proposed a “Canadian New Deal” like Franklin Roosevelt’s in the U.S. It was the most progressive plan in Canadian history until then: progressive taxation, unemployment and health insurance, regulation of working conditions and social reforms. Alas, the Supreme Court killed it for impinging on provincial jurisdiction. With little twists, it would all come to pass later in Liberal hands.
The Depression was unforgiving. Bennett retired to England, bitter and reviled, and dying without Mulroney class eulogies.
The Liberals under Mackenzie King won in 1935 and stayed in power for 27 years until the next Tory chapter under John Diefenbaker, which might provide a template for any Poilievre government. Unlike Poilievre, Dief had a real sense of social justice and represented real western and regional Canadian grievances but, as with Poilievre, the politics of bitterness and revenge were more important than anything. His historic sweep of 1958 quickly unravelled. So will any Poilievre government.
Tories and their radical descendants flaming up and melting down may be part of a natural cycle. Consider this from 1836, three decades before the birth of Canada.
Sir John Colborne, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, had provoked reform and rebellion with his hard Tory ways and was being recalled by London. The Bathurst Courrier commented: “Never did we see such an assemblage of long-visaged Tories. They appeared as if they were following the hearse of conservatism to the grave.”
Yes, but after long Liberal reigns gone bad, they tend to resurrect.