The two faces of the Conservative party
The party is struggling to resolve an apparent conflict: it’s open on trade, but closed on immigration
On some significant foreign-policy matters this week, the federal Conservatives and Liberals were in harmonious agreement.
Even before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau headed to Washington for his first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump on Monday, Conservatives declared that they were standing behind him.
Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose sent Trudeau an official letter in advance of the trip, offering bipartisan support for Trudeau’s efforts to kick off relations with Trump on a friendly note.
Around the same time that Trump and Trudeau were sitting down together in Washington, Ambrose was telling reporters back in Ottawa that Conservatives would be pitching in where needed to protect Canada-U.S. trade relations.
“We have a lot of battle-tested people on our side of the House that have fought these fights on trade irritants with the United States,” Ambrose said.
The next day, Conservatives joined with the Liberal government to pass the bill implementing the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Europe — the trade deal that Trudeau celebrated in a speech to the European Parliament on Wednesday.
The CETA deal, we might recall, was celebrated a few months back in the Commons with a rare hug between Chrystia Freeland, then the international trade minister, and Ed Fast, who held that same job in the former Conservative government.
So now we know what it takes for Conservatives and Liberals to get along — trade.
Yet all of this bipartisan peace, love and understanding was sharply at odds with another scene this week in Toronto. On the very evening that the Commons was debating a motion calling for a study of Islamophobia in Canada, four Conservative leadership candidates were at the Canada Christian College, railing against threats to freedom of speech. According to one report of this meeting, the Conservatives’ declared enemies were “political correctness” and “thought police.”
“Freedom is a Canadian value,” said Kellie Leitch, who has built her campaign pitch against “elites” and in favour of subjecting Canadian newcomers to “Canadian values” tests.
The former immigration minister, Chris Alexander, was also on hand to join in the fray.
“I have a lot of trouble with a motion that talks about hatred this, phobia that and doesn’t mention the No. 1 threat in the world today, which is Islamic jihadist terrorism,” Alexander told the crowd.
Leitch and Alexander, of course, were the two, now-notorious spokespersons for the Conservatives’ 2015 electioncampaign announcement of a “barbaric cultural practices” tip line. Though widely seen as a big political misstep in retrospect, Leitch and Alexander have clearly found some enduring value in seeking support from Canadians wary of Muslims and outsiders.
Here, then, is the picture of current conservatism as the party heads toward choosing a new leader in May: outwardlooking with the world when it comes to trade, inward-looking when it comes to immigration and outsiders.
It may well be in line with many Canadians’ thinking these days, especially those who see the world through the prism of jobs. Find the trade deals that create jobs, keep out the people who could take jobs away from Canadians.
But make no mistake: many of the sentiments being expressed at the Canada Christian College this week aren’t likely to do anything to rebuild the multicultural coalition that Stephen Harper used to boast as the key to Conservatives’ victories from 2006 through to 2011.
“The growth of Conservatism in Canada, our electoral support, has been large- ly, not exclusively, built largely by our penetration of immigrant voters . . . of so-called cultural communities,” Harper said in a 2014 interview.
When the Conservatives lost those voters in 2015, whether with their stands against the niqab or for “barbaric cultural practice” tip lines, they also lost the election. Jason Kenney, the former minister who almost single-handedly built that coalition, is gone now from the federal party, seeking the provincial Conservative leadership in Alberta.
Kenney, by the way, did take time out from that contest a couple of weeks ago to lob some tweets against Trump’s travel ban.
“This is not about national security. It is a brutal, ham-fisted act of demagogic political theatre,” Kenney wrote. “Now we are hopelessly polarized between the false choice of open-border naïveté and xenophobia.”
“Polarized” is a good way to sum up the Conservatives’ attitudes toward borders as they edge up to choosing a new leader this spring: open borders to trade, tightly sealed borders to newcomers.
No matter who wins the leadership in May, that’s an ambivalence hard to sustain. The biggest question for the Conservatives’ future might not be how they see Canada, but how they see the rest of the world: as trading friends or enemies of “Canadian values.”