Tories need a rebirth to rebuild
No alternative: Conservatism needs to decide just what it’s about
The so-called Conservative century would seem to have lasted less than a decade. Monday’s provincial election in Newfoundland brings to precisely zero the number of nominally Conservative governments in the country, following earlier defeats in Alberta, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and, of course, the federal Conservatives’ dismal showing in October.
Manitoba’s Conservatives may break the string in next year’s vote, if they can finally shed their habit of handing victory to the NDP, but elsewhere Conservatives, and conservatives, seem destined to spend some considerable time in the wilderness. Conservative parties in Atlantic Canada control barely a quarter of the seats in the region’s legislatures. Alberta’s Wildrose party did well to come back from the dead in this spring’s election, but will have to wait four years for a shot at power.
It isn’t just that there are no Conservative governments anywhere in the country, for the first time since 1943, there aren’t even any conservative ones. British Columbia’s Liberals and Saskatchewan’s Saskatchewan Party are sometimes identified as such, but they are more defined as not-NDP than anything else.
There is nothing resembling a conservative party in Quebec — the closest thing to it, the Coalition Avenir Quebec, holds just 22 of the province’s 125 seats — nor it seems in Ontario, where new leader Patrick Brown presents himself as an almost perfectly blank slate.
It would be too much to blame all this on Stephen Harper. However toxic the Conservative brand may have become federally, provincial politics has its own rhythms and concerns. Still, if the proposition, heard until quite lately, was that Harper had brought about a fundamental realignment in Canadian politics, that he had not only made the Conservatives contenders for power but discernibly moved Canadian public opinion in a conservative direction, there is scant evidence of it.
Quite the contrary. Only four previous governments in our history have gone down to worse defeats, measured either by the percentage loss in seats or popular vote. And while those defeats can be explained either by terrible economic conditions (1935, 1984, 1993) or profound social divisions (1921, the first election after the First World War and the conscription crisis), the Conservatives’ present plight seems wholly self-inflicted.
Electoral defeat, moreover, is only the half of it. Conservatism is not just losing elections. As a political movement, it has — let us not mince words — ceased to offer a coherent or attractive alternative. On the most pressing questions of the day, from the environment to social justice, it is either unwilling or unable to present any serious answer to the prescriptions of the left, or even to offer much resistance.
At best it can hope to profit from the left’s miscues, but even in power it lacks the self-confidence to define an agenda, let alone pursue one. The nastiness of the Harper government may have been peculiar to it, but in its aimlessness and timidity, its unwillingness to invest political capital or confess to an ideology, it has its counterparts in conservative parties across the country — in sharp contrast to the robust self-confidence of the left.
The most striking example of this — and the most glaring missed opportunity — is on the environment, and global warming in particular. Conservatives could have, if they chose, dismissed the scientific consensus as alarmist, which would have been nervy, but at least an argument. Or they could have accepted the science, and proposed their own, distinctly conservative solutions. In the event they did neither, publicly accepting the science but offering in response a melange of the most costly, regulation-heavy policies this side of Charles de Gaulle.
The tragedy of this, from a conservative perspective, is that it has been the left that has taken up the space vacated by the right. A generation of environmentalists has grown up fully versed in the potential for market solutions to be applied to environmental problems. Markets, they realize, are social institutions, like governments, each with its own proper sphere. Conservatives could have seized this opening and run with it. If you like what the market can do for you in the environment, they could have said to voters, can we interest you in what it can do for your schools and health care?
Or, having lost the marketbased initiative to the left, they could at least have criticized them for the inconsistencies of their approach. They could have insisted, for example, that any revenues from a carbon tax be used to cut other taxes. They could have protested that a carbon tax was the necessary and sufficient solution, that it should be used as a replacement for existing approaches, not a supplement. What, instead, do we hear from the right? It’s a tax on everything. They have, almost literally, nothing to say.
As indeed they do on too many other issues. It would be nice to see a principled conservative opposition to Liberal neo-Keynesianism, but having earlier embraced it themselves they can scarcely be credible. Conservatives might equally attack the Liberals for their propensity to subsidize corporations in pursuit of grandiose industrial strategies, but again that ship left long ago. They could insist on the need for sharp cuts in marginal tax rates as a spur to capital investment, or call for broader tax reform, had they done anything about either in their time in office.
Privatization, deregulation, opening up Canada’s cosseted telecoms, transportation and financial sectors to foreign competition, to say nothing of the farm price cartels — it has been a long time since Conservatives had anything to say about any of these. That the right needs to rebuild is self-evident. But it needs an intellectual rebirth first. It has, shall we say, the luxury of time before it next contends for power. It should use that time to figure out what to do with it.