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Source: Vancouver Sun

Canadians aren't buying the conservative message

Despite some recent successes by provincial Conservatives, voters across the nation aren't supporting either economic or social right-of-centre policies as enthusiastically as Americans are

Stephen Brooks
Special to the Sun

Saturday, August 06, 2005

When Seymour Martin Lipset visited Canada during the 1988 election campaign, he remarked that all three federal parties -- they were then the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats -- were to the left of the centre of gravity of the Democratic Party in the United States.

Lipset is perhaps the most astute observer of Canada-U.S. cultural differences of his generation. So although his remarks raised some eyebrows among his Canadian listeners, most everyone conceded that his judgment could not easily be dismissed.

As Canadians approach the near certainly of a 2006 election -- "near" because the smell of campaign bus diesel fumes hung heavy in the air only a few months ago, only to dissipate in circumstances that seem believable only in retrospect -- it seems that we are looking once again at a Canadian party system that is arrayed entirely to the left of the centre of the Democratic Party. A party system in which the torch bearer of whatever exists of Canadian conservatism, the Conservative Party of Canada, presents Canadians with only a tepid and tentative right-of-centre message, expressed cautiously, full of qualifications and reservations, and without much confidence or enthusiasm.

Messengers are blamed

It is pretty clear that the Conservatives would feel more comfortable with Liberal Party scandals as the issue in the next election, rather than red meat conservative issues like tax cuts or serious reform of health care.

Is it possible for an ideologically conservative party to be elected in Canada? We know that provincially it can happen.

The Common Sense Revolution demonstrated that, although the dismantling of all of the spirit and much of the substance of the Mike Harris era under Ernie Eves and now Dalton McGuinty suggests that Ontarians were less than fulsome in their support of that "revolution."

The "Alberta advantage" under Ralph Klein shows that it can happen. And we've seen it happen in British Columbia under Gordon Campbell.

National politics is, however, a different matter. I think it is fair to say that the last several Canadian elections have shown that conservatism in Canada is a flop. There is a tendency among many to blame the messengers. Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and now Stephen Harper: Each has been said to have some fatal flaw that made him an easy mark for Liberal campaign strategists.

Others say it's the message: Canadians are not receptive to the conservative message -- at least not enough of them. Canadians are more "European" in their political values and beliefs, more collectivist, post-materialist, progressive and so on than Americans. And so a message that can be sold in much of the U.S. just falls on stony ground in most of Canada.

I don't think that either of these explanations gets at the heart of the problem that faces conservatism in Canada. The "It's the messenger" explanation -- Preston Manning's voice, Stockwell Day's born-again image and Stephen Harper's apparent lack of warmth and humour -- I find to be particularly lame and superficial.

The political culture argument has to be taken more seriously. This is particularly so in the case of social conservatism. The World Values Surveys carried out in 1980, 1990 and most recently in 2000 show that the U.S. is very clearly off on its own when it comes to support for what we might call traditional religious values. Belief in sin, heaven and hell, and absolute standards of good and evil are all much higher in America than in other rich democracies. Church attendance and participation in unpaid church-related volunteer activities are also higher, generally much higher, in the U.S. than in other democracies, including Canada. Interestingly, Canada generally falls somewhere between the U.S. at one extreme and France at the other on most of these measures of social conservatism.

The lesson to draw from this? A socially conservative message, constructed on a platform of moral issues, is unlikely to take you very far in Canada.

What about economic conservatism? Here the story is different. Canadians are more similar to Americans than is often claimed by many, indeed probably most, of their opinion leaders. Surveys that compare Canadians to Americans on matters involving government regulation of business, the rights of private property, and whether they think freedom or equality is more important generally find a fairly small statistical difference of five to 10 percentage points. This has long been true, Lipset making the same observation on surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. Americans are consistently somewhat more supportive of economic and individual freedoms, but the difference between them and Canadians is not especially great, particularly when French-speaking Quebecers are omitted.

So the economic conservatism message is, I would argue, not the non-starter in Canadian politics that social conservatism appears to be. But it faces three formidable, perhaps even insurmountable, problems.

First, it has relatively few influential friends, but many powerful enemies among those who shape the public conversation. Recently I was perusing the table of contents of a new book on Canadian political thought. Of the 13 post-Second World War thinkers profiled in this book only one, George Grant, could be called a conservative. And of course George Grant's brand of conservatism belongs to the archeology of ideas, buried in a Canada that no longer exists.

Who are the idea champions of contemporary Canadian conservatism? David Frum, Andrew Coyne, the "Calgary School," the Fraser Institute, certainly. And after that? Compare this to the George Wills, William Buckleys, Victor Davis Hansons and Thomas Sewells, to name a handful, of American intellectual life, and to the dozens -- perhaps close to 100 according to a recent book -- of conservative think-tanks in the United States.

Ranged against the Canadian champions of economic conservatism are most of the social sciences and humanities professoriat of the country's public university system, much of the media, particularly the CBC, and an intellectual establishment whose current favoured sons and daughters include John Ralston Saul, Mark Kingwell, Naomi Klein and Michael Adams. What they have in common is their construction of an idea of Canada on the basis of anti-Americanism. This is a very old and very Canadian enterprise.

The last obstacle

Which leads me to the second problem that confronts economic conservatism in Canada. Those who seek to discredit it generally do so by associating it with what are portrayed as American values, policies, problems and stereotypes -- stereotypes that are often false, like the tired claim that American university students pay $25,000 and more per year for tuition, when in fact the vast majority of them go to public universities like Michigan State, where in real terms the tuition is about the same as in Canada. In the 1993, 1997, 2000 and 2004 elections, the strategy was always the same: They (the conservative Conservatives) have a "hidden agenda." They want to Americanize Canada. What they really stand for and where they really want to take Canada are not what Canadians and their country are about. Count on it, the play book will be the same in 2006.

The last obstacle is Quebec. The political culture of this province is significantly different from the rest of Canada in many important ways. Quebecers are even less likely than other Canadians to support social or economic conservatism. But Quebec still accounts for close to one-quarter of the seats in the House of Commons. So an ideologically conservative party has a dilemma. Either it writes off Quebec and tries to win a national election based on its performance at the polls in the rest of the country -- the arithmetic is daunting -- or it dilutes its message in the hope of attracting respected Quebec candidates and appealing to enough of the province's voters to win some seats.

All in all, the prospects for conservatism in Canada are not good -- at least not in the near term. And I think that if Seymour Martin Lipset were to return to Canada during the next federal campaign he would once again conclude that the most conservative thing about Canada's Conservative Party is its name.

This is an excerpt from a talk given by Stephen Brooks, a policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in Washington, D.C., recently.
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Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 12:07 pm Post subject:

Mr. Brooks is stuck in 1988. Canadoian Conservatives are not.
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Hall Monitor of the Shadowy Group^TM
The most effective way to stifle democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: activist judges, human rights tribunals, parliamentary committees, civil service bureaucrats and political party hacks.

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 12:08 pm Post subject:

What an awesome must read article Hurray

I agree entirely with its assessement of the current situation, but not with its suggestion that things cannot change. The fact that we don't have a truly conservative party is the problem. People are not going to embrace conservative ideas if those ideas are not presented to them. No wonder concepts such as parrallel private health care are so foreign to Canadians, when no federal politician will even debate the issue and defend a British style medical system (and I'm not suggesting that Britain has it perfect by any stretch of the imagination). But this article clearly shows that the CPC has bought into this notion that conservatism cannot sell and has tried to contort itsself into a bizarre amalgam of light socialism and statism, with a light sprinkling of capitalism and law and order to appease conservatives who truly don't have a real political home in this country. Razz

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 1:43 pm Post subject:

The solutions:

-Come front and centre with a conservative agenda. Take away the "hidden agenda" card.

-Write off Quebec. Try to rally the troops in the other nine provinces and win from those 233 seats. Past records in provincial and federal elections shows that a conservative agenda CAN be won in most other regions.

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 4:41 pm Post subject:

You never ask why something doesn't work in one place without also asking why it works in another place.

Modern american conservatism (post-nixon\ford) is based on drawing on the support of millions of lower-class voters with deeply held social and religious convictions. They support the republicans in exchange for their support of their social issues. They don't vote their personal interests, they vote their personal values.

You just don't find too many of these people in Canada, you couldn't build an American style conservative agenda without their foundation of support. The political re-polarization that occured in the US during the 80's and early 90's did not also happen in Canada.

The second issue in Canada, is that many eastern economic conservatives are not adaquately offended by the economic stewardship of the liberal government. I know it is painful for many to admit, but the performance of the Canadian economy is phenomenal. A satisfactory status quo is good enough for most, especially if they are uncomfortable with the alternitive for some reason.

A CA riding association president (who is still around, so will remain unnamed) put it best and said "We basically had two problems, the first is people like you (me) in the rest of Canada who probably support 95% of what we offically stand for but still won't vote for us. This is the result of the second problem, the deluded (explitives) who think Canadians want a culture war over gays, abortion, hanging and guns."

He would say recently, "Canadian conservatives should neither judge themselves against, nor try to implement an American conservative agenda. Sorry, there aren't enough angry white men."
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"complaints of liberal bias in the media are often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." –Bill Kristol

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 5:26 pm Post subject:

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 5:30 pm Post subject:

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 5:37 pm Post subject:

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Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 6:55 pm Post subject:

I have always said the CPC is the equivalent of the US Democrats.

What folks in Canada view as right of center, the US (and perhaps many other nations as well) views as left of center.

Canada needs a real conservative based party with a leader who has real convictions and a real platform, no wishy washy issues like the one the CPC has on pro-Life. It's either yes or no.

"One Nation Under God Indivisible"

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 9:04 pm Post subject:

Does anyone think that if the conservatives had a policy on Quebec of either sign on or go, that canadians would support it?

I think they might...

If the CPC took a tough stand on quebec, instead of trying not to talk about it, or taking the embrace quebec stance?

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 9:36 pm Post subject:

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 9:41 pm Post subject:

It's not an overwhelming trend or anything but the rise in CPC membership and the fund raising that the party has been getting says to me that things are improving. We are on the hill and climbing but slowly. As soon as we start getting some good news here and there we always get a healthy dose of derision and negativity to shake everyone up and create doubt in the minds of canadians. Real conservatism might sell better than what canada has had to date and it would be worth the try. If this next election goes poorly for us I think a radical change will be required. It will definitely be time to give ourselves a good look in the mirror and quit playing the same games that we lose time after time.

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 9:43 pm Post subject:

In the long run Canadians base their politics on "How'm I doing?" If they think they are doing all right, and if they believe that more Goodies will be coming to them 'soon', they are not inclined to rock the boat. Canadians are not gamblers; they won't go for what's behind Door No. 2 if they've got a nice prize in their hand right now. "Double or nothing" terrifies Canada. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" is the Canadian way.

A powerful and charismatic leader could move a province -- Mike Harris proved that -- but when people found out he meant to do what he said he'd do, the air went out of the balloons and the party began to die. Never mind that the province began to improve in every way -- Canada did not like the insecurity of changing things rapidly and radically -- and they began to lose their Goodies and that scared them most of all.

Canada is not a country that wants to deal with true conservatism. It wants a strong Nanny, a nice quiet life, and not to be thought of as American. Barring a large scale attack on a major city, I think there won't be much change any time soon.

Posted: 08/ 07/ 05 9:56 pm Post subject:

The thing is Kate, how much longer can the nanny state stay strong? We're reaching the breaking point on many fronts in the social program department. Will young people be able to continue to fund it and have anything left for themselves? I really think the future will move right because they'll have to.

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