Conservatives are living on borrowed time
In progressive Canada, woke ideas now dominate politics. That should set alarm bells ringing
Canada has re-elected a Liberal minority government led by prime minister Justin Trudeau, who will govern with the assistance of the Left-wing New Democratic Party.
As a Canadian who has lived in Britain for more than 25 years, it’s fascinating to be here during a federal election. Seeing things through the lens of an expat makes me realise that Canada is an exceptional country that represents one possible future for Western countries: progressive neoliberalism. Canada is setting the pace in two areas: globalism – openness to high immigration and rapid ethnic change; and wokeness – the sacralisation of historically marginalised identity groups.
Though pundits are consumed by short-term questions, such as the pandemic and leadership, perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this snap election – at least from an international perspective – is the fact that the combined Right-wing popular vote remained below 40 percent, a ceiling which has held since 1993.
Things were not always thus: the Canadian Tories won 50 per cent of the vote in 1984 under Brian Mulroney. Yet politics has changed since then. Partisanship matters more, Quebec separatism has faded, and, since 2013, the divide between Conservative voters and others on cultural issues such as immigration has widened greatly and solidified, as in the United States. Switching between the two parties is now less common than in the past.
As the nationalist-globalist cultural cleavage has emerged across the West, conservative parties rely more on culturally-conservative working-class voters while progressive parties court the young and highly educated. This trade has benefited parties of the Right, such as Britain’s Conservatives, who are better able to shift Left on economics than progressive parties like Labour are to move Right on culture. But this only holds if the electorate is sufficiently traditionalist.
Cultural progressivism is powerful in celebrity culture, universities, parts of the media and large organisations. Young people are often drawn to wokeness. However, the diversity of media outlets and national tradition provide a countervailing force in Britain and most Western societies, creating space for conservative politics.
Yet conservatives may be living on borrowed time. Ed West, for instance, argues that Britain’s education system and cultural institutions have succeeded in shaping the worldview of millennials, which will make conservatism unelectable. When progressive cultural mores reach a tipping point in the population, it becomes possible for Left-of-centre parties to win on an overtly woke platform. This is the case in English Canada, where Trudeau has leaned aggressively into wokeness, saying Canada has no core culture or identity and flying the flag at half mast in seeming perpetuity to apologise to indigenous Canadians.
The need to win over the progressive media and majority pushes all Canadian parties to the cultural Left. Conservatives dare not question the country’s level of immigration, which is running at a world-leading level of 1 per cent of the population, roughly twice the UK rate. Left-wing alarmists, who argue without a shred of evidence that the Tories will curtail abortion rights or move toward Texas-style politics on guns, are rarely challenged by the mainstream.
Trudeau’s virtue-signalling makes sense in a polity where culturally progressive parties win 60 to 70 per cent of the vote and many swallow catastrophising theories about the Right. In a progressive society, Liberals win by moving to the radical cultural Left. Though post-war history gave Canadian progressivism its head start, British Conservatives should look to Canada as a warning of what may happen if they are unable to change the direction of the culture.