The Same Old? The Morass of Canadian Conservatism

In the wake of the 2015 election and Andrew Sheer's inability to gain any traction with the Canadian public, Canadian conservatism has been in a tail spin. That spin has continued through Covid-19 as the federal Conservatives attempt to find some principled opposition to federal policy that also does not make them look completely insensitive to the desperate needs of ordinary Canadians. This problem has been complicated by the fact that their provincial allies have been working closely with the federal government and supporting (more-or-less) the same policies. Provincial conservatives in Canada (PCs, Sask Party, CAQ, UCPs) have also recognized that they cannot politicize the pandemic in a manner similar to what has happened in the US.  This means that the normal federal/provincial bickering has been shelved and given the federal Tories little ammunition to suggest that there is serious disagreement with the course on which the federal Liberals have set the country.

So ... where are federal Conservatives in Canada?  What is the state of Canadian conservatism? How have conservatives responded to Covid-19? Will they try to draw on a soft alt.right basis of support, the politics of discontented exaggeration that I noted in my last blog? What are the Conservative's options? 

In this blog I want to argue that the Conservatives (and their intellectual allies) have done things wrong. To be sure, they had a tough road to hoe. I will address that. But, they are also missing an opportunity to redefine conservatism in Canada and a potentially vital political program that offers an alternative to liberalism. The NDP is actually working hard on this from the left-wing of the political spectrum. They may succeed, or they may fail, but they are, at least, working to redefine what a progressive left-wing politics means as a political program that can be implemented. So far the Conservatives seem to have done little more than squander their opportunities. Let me start by asking why this matters and then turn to some first steps conservatives need to take. 

Why Conservatism Matters

I often feel compelled to note somewhere in blogs I write that I am not a liberal nor a member of the Liberal Party. I do that because conservatively minded people I know periodically say I am one and that, in their minds, provides a way to dismiss my comments. I think it is fairly evident that I'm not a conservative and I have little interest in nor support for the trajectory of the Conservative Party of Canada. I have also been deeply troubled by the New Brunswick PCs and their adoption of a soft anti-bilingualism as well as their support for hydro-fracking and I find some of the comments made, over the years, by Jason Kenney and Doug Ford, among others, odious. The decision of Kenney and Scott Moe, for instance, to double down on fossil fuel is, in my view, not just bad policy but shockingly short sighted. In even the short term, this approach -- and effort to force the feds to support a dying industry and coerce other provinces to do the same -- even hurts their own provinces. It looks to squeeze that last few dollars it can out of an industry that is past its best before date, as opposed to providing sound leadership to take their provinces into the future. Let me make this clear: I don't like these people and I don't like them -- much less Stephen Harper -- for a bunch of reasons that relates to what I will argue are clear and manifest policy failures. 

I still want to argue that conservatism matters both as an ideology and a political force and that is, I fully recognize, a tough argument to make. It is a tough argument to make because conservatives have not made it easy to argue that they should matter. I don't want to engage in nostalgia, but there was a time when politically and ideologically conservatism meant something in Canada and, most particularly, it meant a different way of seeing the country.  There were a lot of problems with that way. Canadian conservatism and the Conservative Party (which went by a number of names) was deeply implicated in colonialism. Its members were often xenophobic and it dragged its heals on a host of measure from LGBTQi+ equality, to women's right to control their bodies, to bilingualism. We cannot neglect these considerations because they are part of the history of Canadian conservatism and they part of the shadow from which Canadian conservatism needs to emerge. 

And, this is my key point. Conservatism cannot be simply the defense of the way things used to be. Whether it was a success or a failure, the kind of thinking that historically people like George Grant or Joe Clark did about conservatism and what it entails has been lacking. One might end up disagreeing with, say, Clark's "community of communities" or Grant's "public good" and rural organic society, but the important point is that they signified something other than opposition to the liberal policies of their day and a desire to freeze time. What does, for instance, social conservatism mean? It has come to mean opposition to LGBTQi+ equality and women's control over their bodies. Quite frankly, this is not social conservatism in the sense that it does not offer a vision of what a socially conservative society looks like other than rejecting the rights of different Canadians to control their lives, be equal in employment, make decisions about their own bodies, and not have to hide who they are. This type of perspective makes conservatism a small tent: it begins its entry into public discourse by rejecting the rights of others and this is a point on which it will not win ground because it is (a) wrong and intensely problematic from an ethical perspective and (b) stakes out a political and social space that the vast majority of Canadians cannot accept.  What it means is that to win election, conservatives have to convince Canadians that they, in fact, are not who they are claiming to me be or that other issues (say, the economy) outweigh the negative aspects of their politics. 

This matters not because I want conservatives to win or even agree with what they say. It matters for two reasons. First, on a simple level, because it shrinks the Canadian political spectrum.  There may be good reason for this and that can be a discussion for another day, but the failure of alternative political perspectives ultimately means that what we have as Canadians is a more limited choice of political futures. In effect, what the CPC offers Canadians is not a different vision of the future, but a less equal, less generous, less humane version of what the Liberals are putting on the table.  Second, and following from that, the morass into which Canadian conservatism has fallen legitimizes perspectives that never should have been legitimized. For instance, it tells people who oppose equality that they are not opposing equality (that is, being, quite frankly, bigoted) but guardians of an important ideology: social conservatism.  With regard to, say, opposition to Indigenous rights, it tells people that there is *no* conservative way to build positive relations between First Peoples and Canadians and that Canadians are legitimate in rejecting reconciliation as a meaningful goal for their country. Are these really messages we want to send? 

The Tough Road

Canadian conservatism entered this year in a mess. It was in a mess before Covid-19 and the pandemic has not been kind to it.  CPC leadership contender Peter MacKay called the 2019 election loss the equivalent of taking a shot on an empty net and missing. That is not 100% accurate but the metaphor captures some of the situation. In 2019, the CPC seemed to have the cards set in its favour. It had experienced candidates, they were facing a weak PM who had back-tracked on key issues, broad provincial discontent with the federal Liberals, disaffection among a significant section of the Canadian population, and what appeared to be little competition for Canadian votes form the NDP and BQ. Said in other words, the CPC could have done what opposition parties want to do: gain power by providing an alternative to the government that speaks to Canadians. 

This perception disguised a deeper level of malaise. Canadians never warmed to Sheer, the first past the post political system worked in the Liberals favour (and there is some irony in this in that CPC fought so hard to maintain it), and the CPC's association with some provincial conservatives became a liability.  Canadian conservatism appeared internally divided, hypocritical, and reactionary.  Sheer and his supporters seemed to have little direction and seemed to be trapped in their own base of support. They offered Canadians not a different future but a recycled version of a past that most Canadians had already rejected. 

For Canadian conservatives, there were other warning signs that they should have read and these are some of the things that conservatives will need to jettison if they want to provide a real alternative to the governing Liberals. First, disaffection with Trudeau was odd and gendered. The anti-Trudeau cohort and symbolism (particularly but not exclusively the gun lobby, big oil, and the carbon copy "yellow vests"), were the kind of votes the CPC felt they needed but also the kind of voices that sound good only in an echo chamber. The idea that the solution to Canada's problems lay in a dying carbon-based energy industry was simply difficult for Canadians outside Alberta and Saskatchewan to believe and should have been difficult for conservatives in those provinces to believe as well. 

Second, conservative parties have been colonized by the very industries that they have to regulate if they are in government. In particular, the Saskatchewan Party and the United Conservative Party often appear as little more than fanboys for the oil and gas industry. What if you have legitimate environmental concerns? The conservative answer is that the economy is more important and so you need to hold your nose and vote for them. When pressed on this issue on the news one day, I listened to a conservative commentator trot out Brian Mulroney era policies to explain since the feds had once done something for Quebec, they needed now to support oil and gas in Alberta and Saskatchewan come what may. Hard feelings die hard. It is true, but as I listened to him I wondered how many people in the audience actually knew about something that happened 25 or 30 years ago? What is more, this commentator missed a chance to do something profound. Instead of fanning regional discontent (which was what he did), he could have offered alternatives to address the economic problems of those provinces. For whatever reason, he chose not to. 

Finally, the conservatives need to get recognize that they need more than an election issue to win. In the absence of doing the hard work of figuring out what conservatism means in 21st-century Canada, conservative commentators and political figures have moved through Covid-19 as if they were ready to form a government. They might be, but it won't be a good government. They have desperately searched for an issue and settled on the idea that their route to electoral victory rests in trying to portray Justin Trudeau as "unaccountable." I expect this line of attack will continue and perhaps even accelerate with some comments built in about the need to control budget deficits. Why do conservatives need to ditch this line of attack? Because it is sound bite politics that cannot provide the basis for reasoned public discourse. 

The Bad News

The bad news for conservatives is that their intense dislike of Justin Trudeau keeps them focused on slagging him. Trudeau symbolizes everything conservatives hate, much in the manner that Hillary Clinton symbolized everything the American alt.right despised. But they need to get their attention off him. Will they? I honestly don't know but if I were advising CPC leadership contenders, this is what I would be telling them. 

Privilege and Protest: The Politics of Words

At least according to CBC's Power and Politics tweet, Andrew Sheer said this:

“These protesters, these activists may have the luxury of spending days at a time on a blockade, but they need to check their privilege,” said @AndrewScheer. “They need to check their privilege and let people whose job depends on the railway system...do their jobs.”

This is a disturbing quote, made more disturbing, for me, by the fact that it is not the first time I have heard this. There is, I've tried to argue, a problem -- an antinomy -- that lies at the heart of middle-class progressive politics, but no one should mistake this perspective for support for a more conservative position or for anything that Sheer might have said. Indeed, the politics of Sheer's quote is intended to do precisely the opposite of the comments I was trying to make. Here, Sheer is trying to call the wave of protests across Canada in support of Indigenous rights into question. He is trying to suggest that the protesters are somehow not authentic, that they are the modern equivalent of tenured radicals, and that they are not "people" who work but more or less wealthy lay abouts disconnected from the working world.

I'd be concerned about any general statement of this sort because it makes a pretension to knowledge that its speaker (whoever it might be) simply cannot have. In this case Sheer simply cannot know about the people on the protest lines. He can make some assumptions but he does not present his argument like that. He presents what he says as truth unadulterated. And, this is the first problem with this type of statement: its issues a truth claim that its speaker knows from the beginning he cannot confirm and so in its own way, it is dishonest.  But, there are some more problems with this and because I have heard these kinds of statements before, let me highlight a few of them. My aim, I want to say, is not to reject or push away people making these statements. Instead, I seek to engage them and ask them to be engaged and contribute to a new type of politics.

The second problem with this argument -- which may not apply to others -- is its hypocrisy. Sheer is as close to a person of privilege as you are going to get. His downfall as Tory leader was likely over-determined by its precipitating cause was Sheer's privilege: the party was paying for private school for his kids. I am going to argue that we need to think closely about privilege and what it entails and, in my view, I think we need to find another way of thinking about the contradictions of class positions. But, rank hypocrisy -- shooting someone else down for living the life you in fact live -- is not one I would suggest others follow. Sheer is trying to cast aspersions on the politics of support for Indigenous rights, but in the process he edits his own life out of the equation. He calls others out for privilege, whatever this might mean, but ignores his own.

The most significant problem is this type of argument proceeds from a false assumption. We might say that we can all agree with the first and second points I've tried to make. One should, for instance, try to proceed in a factually accurate way and not make statements about things one cannot know. Nor should one be a hypocrite. I don't think either of those points is controversial and if you want to know why people didn't like Sheer, well ... I suspect there is a big part of the reason right there. If he had not behaved in this way, he might still be CPC leader.

The more significant problem is what do people who are privileged in some way but who support the right cause, whatever this cause might be, do? That cause could be decolonization. It could be the need for action on climate change. It could be an anti-poverty campaign. Should one shoot down someone protesting against the mistreatment of Indigenous people or for support for the poor or for the state to take serious matters to address climate change just because that protestor might be wealthy (let's leave aside the question of what constitutes wealthy for the sake of argument)?

In my view: no. One might have a point to engage, a ground of discussion, some reason for starting a conversation, but a person's relative economic standing does not negate their politics simply and purely because of their economic standing. Imagine this scenario: outside of First Peoples themselves, imagine it was only white middle class people who supported Indigenous rights. Would that fact (the fact that white middle class people support Indigenous rights) mean that Indigenous rights claims had become illegitimate? Does it mean that the First Nations campaigning for their rights are wrong (and, you might notice, that Sheer here equates Indigenous activists with the "privileged" but let's leave this point off, too)?

I am arguing that it means nothing of the sort and this is where I disagree with Sheer. The campaign for Indigenous rights did not emerge from middle class or privileged people and we should not pretend or suggest that it did. Even if it did, however, would the fact that people want to support good causes be a bad thing? What, after all, would we think of the alternative? Imagine this scenario: you daughter comes home from college and has learnt about the problems of colonialism or how poverty negatively affects people or gendered violence. What would tell them? Gee, dear, I know there are a lot of problems with gendered violence but we're middle class so we ignore those things because we are privileged and so we will do nothing about them. Do we tell our kids: our privilege makes it wrong for us to support a good cause.

Is that a message anyone would feel comfortable in sending? If you said no ... the implication of Sheer's argument is actually precisely that: if you are middle class and see an injustice ... ignore it because you are privileged. I know I likely talk too much about my own life and I am not trying in any way to hold myself up as a model. What I will say is this: at my church, we spend a great deal of time telling people the exact opposite. If you see a problem, you should try to be part of the solution and ignoring it -- or, telling others to ignore it -- is not a solution.

Let me conclude on one other issue: positive go-forward politics must necessarily draw people together. I am arguing that we need to build connections between people and ignoring the chances to work together on good causes is a really odd way to think about society (again, think about it, did anyone's parents ever tell them that, hey ... here is a good cause. Ignore it. Don't work on good causes with other people who may be economically different from you.). If we are going to build dialogue and politics across socio-economic divisions, we can't tell people to stick to their own economic kind and not become involved in issues if they or their families happen to have a bit of money. It is by working with others that we can create a stronger and more engaged society with deeper and more meaningful social connections.

We have spent the better part of the last twenty years lamenting the fact that youth appear politically disengaged. Here we have a concrete example of youth being engaged, of taking a stand, and putting a lot of time and energy into it. Not one of the protesters caused this problem. It was caused by a number of factors but the most significant one was a raid on Indigenous territory by the RCMP.  If we want youth to be involved, if we want our citizens to be active and to treat their citizenship serious, if we want citizens to make commitments to important causes, we can't tell them that they are wrong when they do precisely that. The politics of protest is not always pretty, but the politics of the words being mobilized against them never is.

The Nobility of Right, or why discrimination and bigotry suck as rights

Somewhere, and I forget where, Joseph Heath mentioned a concept which he called something like "the nobility of right". It was not a key concept in his thinking but I want to argue that it should be. The idea is that rights reach their fullest potential and greatest effect when they are used to defend and promote noble principles and ideas. For example, rights become noble when they extend democracy, address marginalization, provide security, end bigotry. These is a nobility in working to promote a good cause that enhances life for citizens: that creates the circumstances in which an individual can live a fuller and more meaningful life. Conversely, rights lose their nobility if they are used to defend and promote the opposite of noble causes: if one uses rights to marginalize, deny equality, oppress or harm. Heath suggested, if I am remembering what he said correctly, that this distinction, in fact, might help us in determining whether we felt the articulation of a particular right was a good idea or not.

The ways in which some people have recently been using religious freedom to defend their bigotry against the LGBTQ community is an example of the un-nobility of right. In other words, it is a misuse of rights because it impoverishes the very idea and concept of rights. It is an instance where rights are being used not to advance equality but to limit it; not to promote inclusion in the body politics but to exclude from; not to ensure the security of the person but to endanger it.

A good example of this comes from south of the border: the Trump administration's initiative to allow medical practitioners to deny care -- that is to refuse treatment -- to people on the basis of their sexual orientation. What is upsetting about this is not that there people who want to discriminate against LGBTQ people. I knew that already and I strongly suspect you did as well. What upsets me is that they are doing so by using a noble right -- freedom of religion -- to try to argue that their bigotry is just an exercise of their rights. As a Christians, I might pause to ask WWJD in this instance and I'd urge anyone considering denying service to the same thing. In other words, I'd argue that denial of service is not a defence of Christian beliefs but a contradiction of them -- but we can save that discussion for another day. Here, I want to address the issue of rights and whether or not we have a right to deny medical services (a dangerous step, to be sure) to individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. I am arguing no. There is no such right, in an ethical and moral sense and, moreover, this ethics has implications for other debates that surround freedom of religion.

Let's start with some basics. The key point here is that Heath is trying to disaggregate the concept of rights. Rights talk, for a very long time, has set up the concept of rights as absolutes. A right is a right is a right and, in fact, that is what makes them rights. This approach to rights may have been created for good reasons: because the prevailing view, back in the day, was that not everyone had, or deserved, rights. Women, for instance, or racialized minorities, it was argued, were incapable of full citizenship and so they could not be accorded equality with white men (nor the poor with the rich, etc.). In an effort to guard against this, I suspect, the idea of rights as an absolute developed. You either got 'em or you don't.

In more recent times, as Michael Ignatieff noted, rights talk has come to dominate public discourse. Ignatieff is not sure this is good, not because he opposes rights -- indeed, it would be a deep disservice to him to suggest that he did -- but because he believe that as a society we have substituted the language of rights for other languages that are more apt. We can leave off that discussion, too, except to note that it in no way lessens the significance of rights but instead points to a confusion of language. Things that people might want to do or wonder about or whathaveyou, come to described as rights when they are really something else.

Heath's point is that we need to look at rights and without minimizing their importance recognize that rights are not a monolithic category. We often hear about conflicts of rights (say, individual versus collective, freedom of religion versus gender equality) when this is not really what rights are all about. There is, for instance, I explain to my students, a difference between a law that is *intended* to promote equality and a law that is *intended* to maintain discrimination. Intentions, in other words matter.

Don't believe me ... why do people apologize? Because we understand that intentions matter: a mistake is something different from an intentional act. My daughter, when she was 2 or 3 took something -- a small bottle of shampoo -- from a store. It looked cute and she had not idea what stores we all about. She was not thrown in jail because intentions matter. It is, in fact, a basic element of law: a crime (excepting negligence) consist of two parts: intention and action.  We all know that intentions matter and I'd go so far as to suggest that it is the opposite point -- that intentions do not matter -- that should be under scrutiny. What does it take to argue such a point? I don't agree with this but is this not what each officer involved in the shooting of a young Black man in the US has argued: it was not *my fault* that I shot him.

One can agree or disagree with the law. That is another discussion. For example, consider a law that is intended to promote equality. One can argue about its efficacy, its morality, its usefulness, etc. These can all be valid discussions to have. But, we cannot suggest that the promotion of equality is the same thing maintaining inequality, we cannot say that one's intent does not matter. They differ intent and effect (inclusion, equality v exclusivity and inequality).  To use an example: getting rid of racism is not the same as racism.

I make this point because some disturbing things are disguised by their association with rights. If someone says "I have a right to my freedom of religion," we tend to agree because control over one's spirituality is an important thing.  When we think of freedom of religion, we think of the need for it: for protection of religious minorities against oppression. Jews in Nazi Germany is an example that comes quickly to people's minds but we can with some thought all think of other examples: of places where "heretics" are executed or the Padlock law or the Inquisition. Freedom of religion was put in place in liberal societies in order to protect individuals and allow the free expression of spiritual beliefs, the association connected with it, and the assembly (getting together) that it required.

I want to be quite clear on this: freedom of religion was never about hate. It was not about refusing to help people. It was never about denial of care, that is turning one's back on someone in need. It was a positive right that allowed people to address something that is good about humanity: spirituality. Its recent recasting as a negative right -- as in, I have right to hate, to ignore, to leave in harm's way -- is a disturbing trend not simply because it, in effect, it says "some people are worth saving and helping and others are not" and claims that the right to make that decision falls not on reasoned dialogue or collective agreement but on an individual and his or her prejudices. It is a disturbing trend because it involves the recasting of rights as something that can be used to oppress and marginalize, to maintain biases, as opposed to circumventing them.

This is, I suspect, why even the alt-right is shy about saying precisely what they mean. No one, for instance, talks about the right to hate. Instead they say things like "the government should not tell me what to think." But, this is a bit disingenuous. The point of rights is precisely *not* to tell someone what to think but to guarantee protection, security, etc., the right to think. This policy of Trump's -- along with his policies viz the military -- say, in effect, you have the right to ignore a person in need if you don't like them. The reason most people -- excepting extremists -- don't talk about "I hate" because they recognize that they will sound horrible.  They sound horrible because their religion is about love (love of God, love of your neighbour) and because there is no right to hate. You might hate somebody or something. That is your business, but is this how you want to define yourself: as a hater?

In Canada, the situation is not nearly as grave but much of the evangelical opposition to the Trudeau Liberals is coming very close. There is more to say on this point but some evangelical Christians have argued that their rights are being infringed because they cannot use state funds to organize anti LGBTQ and anti-abortion programs or policies or institutes or campaigns or whatever it actually is.

What we can note is the same process. No one is saying "I want money from the government to promote inequality, to harm and marginalize, to recreate the conditions in which, say, gay bashing was normal." There is a reason why they don't say that: no one would be one their side. Instead, they say "I have a right to my views." You do, but is that the same thing as getting paid to subvert and endanger someone else?

I would argue it is not. A person will think what they will think. But, you do not have a right to get paid (or, to pay others) to subvert someone else's equality or safety.

Let me return to religion. I lament this recent turn in evangelical politics for another reason: it makes Christians look bad. We are not -- or, should not be -- about hate. We should not be about trying to find a way for the state to pay us to force gays and lesbians back in the closet. We should not be looking for the state to protect anyone's bigotry. Imagine the alternative: would you be OK if a secular group were funded to run an anti-Christian organization? I really hope freedom of religion has not been reduced to the right to hate because if it is ... the battle is already lost.

Bucking the Trend? Canada, Trump, Brexit, and French elections

By accounts I have read, the French right is running well in France's upcoming election. In fact, those who oppose the extreme right (the ultra nationalist, anti-immigrant National Front), my find themselves having to vote conservative to avoid an extremist government. Said differently, moderates, centrists, leftists, and environmentalists may have to start putting a heck of a lot of water in their wine. In fact, by the time they are done ... they may discover that they don't have any wine left. What's going on? It would be like Democrats supporting Ted Cruz to avoid Donald Trump. Yeah, you'd avoid Trump but ... would anyone on the Democratic side of the ledger really say that they could live with Ted Cruz policies?

I'm not going to answer that question because ... well ... just about everyone and their dog is trying to explain the resurgence of intolerant nationalism in "the west." Trump is, of course, but one manifestation. Former British PM's referendum strategy might be seen as an opening wedge: an effort to make peace with extremism so as garner those votes to stay in power. We know Cameron played with fire and got burned. Better and more insightful people than have already written more than most of us could read on the successes of Trump, Brexit, national walls along Hungary's borders, etc. And, in the myriad of ink that has been spilt on those issues, I doubt I have much that I could say that has not already been said somewhere.

Instead, a far more interesting question for those of us in Canada is this: is Canada bucking the trend? Where Trump, Brexit, Hungarian border walls, the National Front, etc., the success of anti-immigrant parties in Germany all point in one direction, the 2015 Canadian election seems to point in the other. Canadians were (more or less) confronted with the same issues and the same alternatives. The Conservative Party ran on a thinly disguised Islamophobia platform (complete with potential tests for Canadian values for immigrants and proposed "barbaric cultural practices" hotlines that would have allowed Canadians to inform on their neighbours regardless of what their neighbours were actually doing). The niqab was demonized, refugees were caste as terrorists, and violence was presented as the only alternative to ISIS hate. Yet, for one reason or another, Canadians -- it now appears and something we did not know at the time -- bucked the trend. Rather than affirming these values, Canadians elected a relative neophyte to the Prime Minister's office on what was, in retrospect, a pretty vague platform to increase taxes on the rights, welcome a significant number of Syrian refugees to Canada, and support for women making their own choices about what to wear.  Why was this? Is there something different about Canada? Is Canada really moving against an international trend toward extreme forms of nationalism?

It is difficult to make a definitive conclusion one way or the other. But, there is one significant factor that I would like to put on the table as a matter of potential concern to other moderates, reform-oriented, progressive political parties and individuals. The Canadian Liberal Party has a lot to *not* recommend it. It lacked experience in governing, its key figures had little name-brand recognition, it had been reduced to a third place finish in the previous election and seem to be just about over and done with as a political movement. What helped it regain power?

Some minor issues that may have had an effect:

1. Canada had -- unlike the US and UK -- a conservative party in power heading into the 2015 election. Thus, Canadians were well aware of what conservative-oriented policies looked like and a large section of the population had already reached the conclusion that they did not like them. In the UK and the US, by contrast, the electorate addressed centrist or leftist governments in power that were, among large sectors of those populations, seen as failures (or, perhaps, past their best before dates).

2. It is more difficult for Canadian conservatives to be isolationist and to oppose international trade agreements because of the degree to which Canadians perceive a need for these agreements. Whether this is 100% true or not is a matter of debate, but the general theory is that Canada has an export driven economy and so needs to be developing trade agreements. This might be particularly true for Canadian Conservatives because of their close tie to the Western Canadian oil industry. For this reason, the Canadian Conservative Party is far more likely to argue that international trade agreements or other neo-liberal economic reforms are needed and necessary than British or American conservatives.

3. Likewise, it is more difficult for Canadian conservatives to argue against immigration. They do, to be sure, particularly as it pertains to certain groups of people, but the simple fact that the Canadian economy needs people must always moderate this. The truth of the matter is that Canada's rate of natural population growth is so low that without immigration, Canada's population would enter a period of decline in the near future. But, the cultural issue is that a good hunk of Canadians -- in complex and contradictory ways -- see multiculturalism as a touchstone of Canada. And, the percentage of foreign born Canadians is much higher than foreign born Americans or Brits. Thus, running against too much against immigration is difficult for those interested in winning office (witness, one might say, Harper who crossed that line to his detriment in 2015).

4. There is also an older argument that Canadians are more moderate in their politics. Their are fewer bastions of extreme thought among the population, at least this is what Michael Adams polling suggests in books like Unlikely Utopia or Fire and Ice.  I remember reading Keith Davey's auto-biography Years ago. He was a Liberal Party rainmaker before the days of extensive polling and voter tracking. When reflecting on Liberal Party success he made the point that Canadians were really moderate and that the Liberal Party would continue to win elections as long as it stuck to centrist moderate positions.

In the US, something different had gone on.  Because the US lacks a left-wing political party, moderates -- the Democratic Party -- are associated with "the left" when in any other country, they would be centrist. Because Canada has the NDP, it is far more difficult for right wing parties or commentators to use that type of electoral manipulation.

There may be some other factors, too, that played in Canada bucking the trend -- if it is that -- but I think the big one relates to political alternatives. One of the problems that the proponents of the EU in Britain and the Democrats in the US ran into was that they did not find a way to articulate working class discontent with what we could call the economic insecurity of neo-liberalism. I'm not saying that the stands taken by the Democrats on any particular issue were bad stands but on economic issues, they embraced a globalized neo-liberal agenda which, it appears, simply has not played well in the "rust belt," Likewise, a lot of areas of traditional Labour support voted against the EU despite the fact that Labour supported the EU.

Should labour have abandoned the EU and argued against it? I don't want to armchair quarterback but let us read through the concerns that workers (particularly through unions) have expressed about international trade agreements. They argue that they are losing their jobs (seeing jobs go south, e.g., in the US). Is this true? A friend of mine pointed out that it really isn't. Mexico stole no jobs from the US. Every American company that chose to relocate to Mexico for cheaper labour (or, other) reasons was run by an American who made the decision to move jobs out of Ohio or Missouri or Wisconsin to Mexico. Mexicans did not steal these jobs. Rich Americans decided that they would rather be richer than to run companies that kept American workings.

In a similar sort of way, we need to reread opposition to immigrants. Some if it is bigotry: pure and simple. There is no way around that. The CPC's anti-niqab stand might be read in this way and might have attracted bigoted votes. But, some of it is disguised concern expressed in a bigoted language. That bigoted language is not an accident. It is there because of bigotry.

But -- and it no way to excuse it -- bigotry can also express a deep sense of economic fear. The issue here is not culture, but again economics. Again, I don't think it is true. I know that labour markets are fragmented and that different economic sectors have different labour markets. In other words, immigrants and the "born in" population don't usually compete in the same labour markets. The fact that this is not true, however, doesn't mean that people don't believe it and, it seems, a whole lot of people in Britain, the US, and now France, among other countries, see immigrants and trade agreements as threats to their economic livelihood and to the wellbeing of their kids. This is the same logic we hear when people reject concerns about the environment because of an economic rationale.

Said differently, and if you put it all together, economics stands at the centre (it is not alone, to be sure) of the vote against the EU, for Trump, and likely with regard to other elections, such as that in France. And, this is precisely where Canada was different.  What was different about Canada -- and, I think, one of the reasons the Liberal Party won the 2015 election -- was that moderate politicians -- centrists, in this case -- were able to articulate an alternative economic agenda. In the US and in Britain, the extreme right captured the economic argument, asserted moderate or leftist failure on this front, and they were aided in this by the fact that moderate political figures (and the "new labour" in the UK) had abandoned their opposition to neoliberalism and, in fact, embraced it. There was, in other words, no one articulating the economic concerns of middle and working class people in those countries. In Canada, the Liberals were able to do this.

Now, to be sure, the Liberals are not abandoning economic neoliberalism but they suggested enough modifications to it -- in terms of tax policy, infrastructure spending, postsecondary education funding -- that the anti-immigrant message of the Conservatives was offset. And, what is more, the Conservatives in Canada helped the Liberals in this regard. Unlike the extremists in the Republican Party and UKIP, the CPC is firmly committed to economic neoliberalism. It could not, therefore, articulate an alternative economic agenda and its bigoted anti-immigrant stand was left all by itself as bigotry. The got a lot of votes for this but ... without a connection to economic issues, it was not enough.

Canada has, therefore, not bucked the trend so much as offered a different perspective on the future of moderate reformist politics. The big comparative lesson for moderates and leftists to learn is this: don't appear to cosy  with economic neoliberalism. You didn't used to be. In fact, you used to have a lot concerns about it. Perhaps it is time to recover those concerns.

The Electoral Dilemmas of Conservatism

A quick follow up to my last blog. You can find Eric Grenier's interesting analysis of the electoral problems (and successes) of the Conservative Party here:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-conservatives-centre-1.3388778

We are coming at the same issue from different directions, but the points are about the same. Exactly how the Conservatives expand their vote with their base is not clear.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield: Bigotry and Conservatism

As the CPC and its intellectual allies grapple with their defeat, they have a number of options, two of which I have already highlighted. It appears that the Parliamentary caucus is ambiguously settling on a Tea Party like opposition mode, which is  both their right and their job ... in some ways. I'd advice them against it because even though it will play well with their base, I'm skeptical that it will play well with the rest of the country. I'm sure, of course, that this is not their only plan. I'm sure they have already worked out the details of a multi-pronged oppositional strategy that includes their own efforts to re-brand progressive policies in a negative way that casts them as political manipulation or corruption, in the same way that Republicans in the US seem to have convinced a large section of the US population that health care is actually not good for you and the US Government is evil for providing it.

Where the Conservatives run into problems, however, is in the loose mishmash that makes up their party. All political parties have core supporters. One becomes concerned about a party and its future only when -- or, well, seriously concerned -- you start to lose your core supporters. That is: the people who have hung in there, voted for you, put signs on their lawns, donated, come to meetings (or, perhaps protests), encouraged friends and family to turn out, etc. This core group is what carries a party through opposition or a minority position in Parliament or the legislature. One's core group is, by definition, not amenable to much change (hence, the term "core").  They are not easily swayed by the shifting winds of politics. They may or may not be a party members (my grandfather, for instance, was an on-again-off-again member of the PCs here in NB but whether or not he was officially a member, he always voted Tory) but that is less important than their votes and support.

When there is a shift in core supporters, that signals a wide change in what political scientists call "the party system." For instance, the demise of Social Credit in Alberta and the rise of the PC dynasty was such a shift ... of sorts. Likewise, the collapse of the Conservatives and, for a while, Liberals in BC (replaced by SoCred and CCF-NDP) is another example. And, a third might be the demise of the old PC party federally which, for a while, left the Liberals without any serious challenger as a national political party. Instead, the Liberals fought a series of regionalized battles against other parties (NDP and PC in the Atlantic, BQ in QC, Reform and then CA in the west).  Reform and the Bloc sucked away core PC supporters in their regions of the country, forcing the demise of the PCs as a viable political alternative.

Viability, as you can tell, is a key issue. Parties and independents periodically win local elections for a variety of reasons that can include the popularity of local candidates, the temporary demise of another political party (say, CoR's brief foray into NB politics), or isolated and localized support among a relatively small core group (Quebec solidaire in QC and the Greens in PEI, NB, and BC might be examples). But, viability means something other than winning a seat or a few seats. Joe Clark and Jean Charest no doubt helped win a few seats here and their for the old PCs as they struggled on after the 1993 debacle. But, that did not make the party viable as a national alternative to the Liberals because they had lost core support in QC and the west. To be a viable political party, you need to have people who you can count on to turn out and vote for you, sign your petitions, donate money, come to events, etc., time after time after time. This is what differentiates parties that have a brief moment in the sun (Bloc populaire, Cape Breton Labour, PANB ... well, almost) from even smaller parties with a core group of supporters.  Without this group, the party will disappear.

What does this have to do with the Conservatives and with bigotry? Or, even with my oblique Star Trek reference in the title of this blog? Bigotry is a dilemma for the conservatives and highlights, in fact, the problems of that party (all parties, of course, have problems). The CPC wants and needs the support of people who call themselves "social conservatives," or "traditionalists" or even "real Canadians." If it is going to win, it needs those votes. It needs the votes of people who want to ban the niquab, who want to restrict immigration, who would -- if they could -- turn back the clock on gay and lesbian equality, who want to find ways to limit women's control of their bodies, and who want to ignore environmental problems because deep down they don't really believe that there are environmental problems (its all exaggerated, etc.). Now, I hasten to add that I am not accusing anyone in the CPC or its Parliamentary caucus of holding such views. Truth is, I've not looked up all these people and likely will not since its not on point to the point I am making (and, would be incredibly time consuming).  What is on point is that these people (a) don't vote Liberal or NDP or Green and (b) have found a home over the years in various conservatives parties. The old Reform Party, you will remember, had a serious problem with bigotry when it started out (Preston Manning used the metaphor of finding bugs when you  turn over rocks to explain this away). They find their home there because (a) the conservatives recognize that they need these votes, (b) seem to share *some* of these views (Harper, as well know, encouraged Islamophobia through his bizarre campaign against the niquab, or at least what The Globe found bizarre -- see previous blog), and (c) other parties clearly will not have them (racists, I am guessing, would be quickly forced out of the NDP and Green Parties and I assume would be told to go away in the Liberal Party as well).

The problem with this group of people and their views is not that they have them or that they vote Conservative but that having them and having them in the CPC creates problems for other voters. More exactly, it creates problems attracting other voters. I met Reformers -- and CoR members! -- who just could not understand why their anti-Francophone rhetoric stopped French Canadians from voting for them. Just another sign, I recall one person say, of the problems with French Canadians. But, more astute conservative politicians understand the problem right away. I'll go out on a limb and state this bluntly: most Canadians don't agree with bigotry, most believe in equality, and most think that the state should not tell individuals what to do with their bodies (that is, that the regulation of the body should be as limited as possible). Most, it appears, want to help Syrian refugees; most believe that climate change is a problem, and most embrace diversity. What "most" means is fluid, but you get my drift. By themselves, the core group of CPC voters is a minority (larger than we might like but smaller than that core believes), not large enough to win elections -- except in unusual circumstances -- and the views of their core supporters drive away other potential voters who just cannot accept the views of core Tories.

One lesson of the 2015 election for Tories (whether they want to learn it or not) is precisely the above: core voters can stand behind you and be energized by your campaign, say the anti-niquab, but ... well ... its not a winning formula. In fact, its a recipe for defeat.

Over the years, conservative parties have tried a range of approaches to address this problem. The old Red Tories, for instance, in Canada simply exiled the bigots (this was Stanfield's approach, at least): you might have support but you are no longer welcome in our party. This is a principled and ethical stand. Others have simply accepted the fact of their eventual demise (CoR), perhaps railing against it but not really contesting elections. Some have accepted their place on the fringe (say, Christian Heritage), because they believe a bigger principle is at stake. The approach of Reform, the CA, and then CPC, however, was different. It tried to keep these votes but silence the voters.

Now, I've overstated that point. I don't think -- to give him his due -- Preston Manning  tried to silence anyone and Stockwell Day was incapable of silencing dissidents in his own party. The issue was not censorship but an effort to keep people who hold particular views quiet while disavowing their statements or chocking it up to internal debate, free speech, a "lone wolf," etc. Harper, for instance, did not impede discussion of anti-abortion laws but he simply said that the CPC under his watch would not bring forward such legislation (even if members of his party might support a private members bill ... that was their business).

Another strategy has been to try to recast particular views as good and noble and consistent with the best conceptions of freedom and democracy. Thus, Harper avoided actually talking about the fact that his campaign against the niquab was an instance of him -- as PM -- telling women what they could and could not wear. In this way, a policy aimed at limiting the rights of an incredibly small minority group was transformed into a campaign for women's freedom, an anti-Islamic stance was made to sound like "freedom of religion." Harper said that no women should be made to cover her face but the irony -- that he was involved in precisely the same activity (telling women how they should dress and threatening to make it a matter of law) -- seemed to be lost in the shuffle. Likewise, the opponents of gay marriage went to incredibly length to explain that they were not bigoted but merely "defending the family" (even though equality was not a threat and that there other important concerns -- say, daycare -- that should have been addressed if one really was concerned about the family).

The final strategy is trans-formative as well, but in a different way. It involves arguing that the issue that is being discussed is not actually the issue that is important. For example, conservative apologists tell us that they are not defending bigotry which, they assure us, they themselves oppose. But, they also reject "censorship" because it is a greater problem and so must, reluctantly they assure us, support the "rights" of bigots to campaign publicly to subvert the very rights they claim to uphold. (In fact, a few years ago we saw an odd group called "Journalists for Free Speech," or something like that, argue that if they were not allowed to stage offensive and racist public lectures on someone else's private property -- that is, on the property of a private institution, meaning that they were arguing that even private institutions should be forced to accept racist lectures; they have no free choice or ability to control themselves -- censorship was occurring!) It is an odd circular reasoning, to be sure, but the key problem is that it creates a stalking horse. It makes it seem like free speech is somehow under threat in Canada when the only threat that has really reared its head in recent years is the Conservative federal government itself.

There is a real problem, of course, with this reconstruction of bigoted views as somehow about democracy, freedom, etc. Well, likely more than one but one on which I will comment right now: what happens is that bigotry is given the veneer of respectability. Indeed, the CPC helps to create arguments that seem to make some level of intellectual sense (see my blog on the idea of a referendum) or which seem to be about higher principles, as opposed to the crass views they dress up. In this way, the CPC, may, in fact, be helping to perpetuate views that otherwise would be consigned to the margins as inconsistent with freedom and democracy. For instance, if the government came out and said "we are prejudiced against Mexicans and so are going to introduce new rules that make their entry into the country more difficult" ... well ... most Canadians would have pause. But, if we dress this up as "illegal immigration" or a "security threat" ... well, we have something else (because we all know that there is no way a Mexican got to Canada, legally, right?). After Harper began his anti-niquab campaign I heard more people who had never given a fig about women's rights -- and, to the best of my knowledge still don't -- talk as if they were defending women's rights. Ideally, of course, women's rights could be best defended by keeping "them" (aka niquab-wearing women) out, too.

To say this in different words: the CPC tries to walk a thin line. It does not want to lose votes it know it needs but it does not want the views of those voters to dominate party policy or scare off other potential voters that it also needs. This is the dilemma and the electoral implications of it. To avoid this dilemma, the party adopts a number of strategies that includes asking party members to stay silent (with, one presumes, the promise that something will be done in the future), transforming the issue from what it is into a point of principles (this is not about Islam, its about ... women's rights!), or distracting attention from the matter at hand by claiming that a greater issue is at stake (I'm not a bigot but I won't stand for censorship). The effect is twofold. First, the CPC has to deal with views that, sooner or later, come home to roost. Sooner or later, someone in the party will make manifest what it has been trying to keep silent, as Harper himself did in the last federal election. Second, the CPC becomes complicit in the perpetuation of bigotry. Its dilemma, in this way, feeds into and becomes another dilemma, but for all of Canada, and not just it.

Through the Mirror Darkly: Counterfactual History and Conservative Election Victories (Part I)

Among my favourite Star Trek episodes are those that focus on the Mirror Universe, a dark alternative reality where history has played out differently. First introduced on the Original Series, the mirror universe was picked up on DS 9 and then used again on Enterprise.  Rather than developing a peaceful democratic and humane (!) federation of planets, humans created an evil empire that subjugated other races, practiced slavery and torture, used assassination for career advancement, condoned corruption and graft, etc. Eventually, the human empire is overthrown and humans themselves are subjected to slavery. The point being, of course, a take on "what comes around goes around": the empire built on oppression and corruption and hedonism collapses only to enslave its former masters; the democratic and ideal-driven society committed to the public good survives.

I mention this because some conservative commentators seem to live in this mirror universe. They live a world where the Tories won the 2015 election ... or, rather, should have ... were it not for some simple twists of fate or mistakes on the part of the CPC. An example of this kind of reasoning can be found in this Globe editorial.  It is, in my view, interesting because it illustrates a different type of counter-Liberal discourse than that articulated by Rex Murphy and on which I commented in a recent blog. Instead, in this discourse, the Liberals did not so much win the election as the Conservatives lost it by failing to play to their strengths. Instead of fighting the election on economic grounds -- a supposed sure winner for the Tories -- they elected to fight it on cultural issues, guaranteeing their own loss. The upshot, if you've missed it, is this: Canadians did not really elect a progressive alternative to the Tories, marginalizing them with something like 30% of the popular vote. Indeed, Canadians, in this mirror universe, are still committed to conservative economic ideas and would have kept the conservatives in power *if* the conservatives had just not made a mistake or two.

Like Rex Murphy's extremist anti-Liberalism on which I commented in a previous blog (in which the Liberal Party is preemptively accused of subverting democracy and individual rights and promoting government sanctioned theft ... they haven't yet but just in case they do, best to get that accusation out of the way in advance and, if they don't, well heck, they surely will do something nefarious anyway so why not slag them with this?), The Globe's post-hoc rationalization of the Liberal victory serves to construct a pro-Conservative discourse, albeit in different ways. It is those different ways that interest me and that is what I am addressing in this series of blogs.

Before I do so, however, I should explain what I am trying to do. I am trying to understand, assess, analyse, how conservatives are responding to 2015 and what their project of nation -- their vision of Canada -- entails. How do they approach the issue of constructing an alternative government (one job of an opposition party)? What discourses do they enable that will enhance their position in the public sphere? How do conservatively-minded Canadians respond to progressive Canadians? What do they think is wrong with the country and with public life? In other words, my aim is to do something I might not be good at but this is a blog, after all: assess the discourses of Canadian conservatism using its response to the 2015 election defeat as a case study. In this blog I will back up and look a bit at the nature of conservatism in Canada today before shifting ground in the next blog to look more directly at the Mirror Universe of Conservatism.

Proviso: I am not trying to apologize for anything that the Liberal Party has or might do. I've offered, elsewhere, a critique of Canadian liberalism and I might offer more in the future. What I am interested in is how conservative Canadians -- supporters of the CPC, partisans, contrarians, anti-Liberals, traditionalists, neo-liberals, etc., are responding to the Liberal victory, and responding to something that looks a lot like a victory for a "progressive" vision of Canada. This is important, of course, because it is not just a Liberal victory to which The Globe and Murphy are responding. It was the overwhelming rejection of conservatism ... an ideology that has long had shaky foundations in Canadian public life and which fashioned a government out of the sponsorship scandal, twists of fate, moderated policies, and a particular cultural context.  Canadian conservatism, as I've also noted elsewhere in this blog, has become an odd duck.  At one point in time, it carried forward a fairly solid and cohesive ideology epitomized by the work of George Grant, among others.

This is not really the case anymore. Instead, the party and its supporters are an odd informal coalition of sorts that is guided by a mishmash of ideas that make for something much less than ideological cohesion. Part of this mishmash is the simple fact that even Tories recognize that they will never win election with a straight forward conservative platform. They cannot, for instance, oppose equality for gays and lesbians, consign women to the kitchen, and reverse immigration flows in a Quixotic effort to whiten Canada. They can't really limit women's control over their own bodies (at least they can't in much of the country) and they can't turn back the clock on a range of other reforms -- limiting prayer in schools, for instance -- that they might like. Thus, their policies lack cohesion, on one level, because they can't really speak their policies out loud. Every once in a while a so-called "social conservative" will express disappointment with the CPC and suggest that grave things might happen if the Tories don't respond to conservative evangelical demands, but most of the time even these people realize that they are on the losing side of history (a generous perspective, and one that I'd be inclined to take, might use a different language here and refer to the inherent difficult of fashioning ideologically consistent policies in brokerage parties. Thus, Reform, the old post-1993 PCs, and then the Canadian Alliance might have been more ideologically consistent but ... they had no chance of winning. A 'big tent" politics necessarily means some inconsistency as a party strives to unite disparate electoral communities into a winning party.)

But, another reason that this CPC lacks ideological cohesion is that ... well ... it simply lacks ideological cohesion. The people it attracts often have little in common with each other, a point made by people more in the know than I (I think here of Michael Beheils' review essay in the American Review of Canadian Studies published a number of years ago). The social conservatives who rail against changes in Canadian demographics or gender relations don't have a lot in common with the neoliberal anti-welfare state resource capitalist looking to get Keystone XL up and running. Small town Maritime traditionalists (of which there are fewer than one might think) don't have a great deal in common with free market advocates in the Fraser Institute or Quebec "soft nationalists" concerned about Islam (a minority position in Quebec, I hasten to add!).

What unites these different groups of people is that they all self-identity with a particular part of the political spectrum (the right) and all reject another part of the political spectrum, which they associate with the left, but which actually includes most of the centrist civic nationalism that formed the field of force in Canadian politics from the 1960s through the early years of the 2000s. Exactly what they dislike about it varies. Some don't like its commitment to individualism (which they see as introducing a wimpy "rights talk" and subverting the old fashion "stand on your own two feet" approach to life or which is associated with equality for gays and women and minorities). Some feel that the welfare state makes for bad economics. Some dislike the supposed secularization of Canadian society and what they see as the abrogation of tradition. What these different groups share, then, is not an affinity with each other but an antipathy to liberalism and the Liberal Party.

I'll give you an example: many evangelical social conservatives -- no matter what they might say -- actually have little problem with state involvement in society and the economy. As we've seen, for instance, evangelical universities in Canada (of which there are a few) can make just as much use of state money (not in volume but in the fact that they get it) as secular institutions. Evangelicals, in fact, often call *for* state intervention to limit access to abortion, as one example. Other  conservatives support such matters as income splitting, using the state to lobby foreign governments to import Canadian oil, aggressive foreign policy that includes the use of the military, restrictions on immigration, building new prisons (despite a lowering crime rate), and other like matters. In other words, the issue is *not* opposition to the state, but opposition to what they believe the state does. If it does different things, its OK. But, and this is my point, economic conservatives (neoliberals) might look at some of these things in a very different way and oppose the state on principle. I recall listening to an friend of mine (an economics prof) respond to a business person at a conference we host years ago. The business person was complaining about the limited market in the Maritimes and suggested the government needed to do something about this. My friend said "its not the government's job to find you customers." That is opposition to the state.

The other thing that these groups share is a belief not simply that they are right but that they represent "the people." What do I mean by this? Well, think about it this way: as I noted in my previous blog on Rex Murphy, Murphy distorts Canadian constitutional law, ignores the election act, seems oblivious to history, and seems unaware of how Responsible Government functions let alone Parliament but he does all this in the name defending "the people." The idea that the current government could somehow represent "the people" is rejected by Murphy out of hand. I don't have space to engage Murphy's odd argument but what is interesting is that in his calculus, everyone who did not vote Liberal somehow becomes an opponent of progressive policies, that is: a conservative. (Remember, the issue Murphy is opposing is making the Canadian political system more responsive to the electorate ... that was what he was taking his stand *against* and suggesting that it is a particularly nefarious theft of popular rights.)  It does not matter if you voted Green, NDP, BQ, or Conservative, a vote for any of these parties makes one, ipso facto, on the Conservative side of the ledger, thus Murphy can claim that 60% of Canadians do not support progressive changes designed to enhance democracy.

This is a very odd math, but it makes sense if someone thinks that their own personal views are broadly representative of majority views. (I will confess, as a Green Party supporter, I have never been able to harbour this particular illusion). I've told this story before but I'll give you a personal example. I once found myself at a party in a small Maritime town where I was the only person who believed in gun control. The 20 or so other people at the party (who were all nice enough) found it impossible to believe that a majority of Canadians favoured gun control because everyone they knew did not. They thus ascribed gun control to some soft of elitist lefty plot to rid ordinary folks of their cherished guns. You might have heard similar things from opponents of Syrian refugee ("no one wants them"), of opponents of women's control over their bodies ("no one believes in this"), of equality for gay and lesbian equality, etc.

Such ideological positions are difficult to disentangle, I will confess, and sometimes there is, in fact, a recognition that the views being held are not majority positions. But, at that point, the discourse shifts. I'll simplify to illustrate a point: real Canadians think X. This discourse is disturbing because it draws the type of cultural distinction that made many of us distrust the more radical separatists in Quebec. It seems to work through a discourse that creates perpetual marginalization for some people and rationalizes inequality. There are those of us who are *real* Canadians whose voices should count more than those people who are *not* real Canadians. These unreal Canadians could be ethno-cultural minorities, people of particular political stripe (feminists, for instance), people who speak a particular language other than English at home. The point, of course, is political. This discourse recognizes that conservative views are a minority perspective but explains this away by demoting other views and making them not count.

Why is this important? Am I involved in something other than a rant? I'll answer yes to both questions, I hope. It is important because, for conservative people, it creates a problem. If *real* Canadians are those that share particular views -- say who see refugees as a threat and want to exclude them or who feel women should be the primary cooks in a family or who oppose celebrations of holidays other than Christian -- then the 2015 election creates a particular problem, doesn't it? The vote did not go the way it was supposed to go. There is no way to disguise the fact that only about 30% of  Canadians voted  the way they should. That means that real Canadians are outnumbered 2:1 by unreal Canadians or ... it mean something else.

Likewise, economic conservatives -- people at The Globe, for example (neoliberals) -- need to explain why their ideas did not carry the day. I won't go through this thought exercise again because the point is obvious, but you can see where I would go. The punchline: if all good and real Canadians (perhaps those knowledgeable about the economy) support a neoliberal economic order ... how do we explain 2015?

The Mirror Universe -- to which I will turn more fully in my next blog -- is one answer.

Federal Elections and Canadian Studies

Elections are for pundits. They aren't really *for* them except in the sense that pundits love them. Their can be -- and is -- endless hours of meaningless speculation about who is doing well or saying what or who has gaffed, etc. Sports metaphors -- most unfortunately -- abound. There are, as well, endless polls on which to speculate, sometimes trials or data that can convolute matters, and all this occurs daily, as if what pundits said, daily, was important. But, if you were to ask these pundits why what was going on -- why is this election -- important, my bet is that most of them would stall out. And, what they would repeat to us is the standard stuff that a high school student might ape back on their civics test: democracy, choosing the prime minister, leadership for the next X years, where the country is going.

These are not inherently bad answers, even if they are trite. The problem is that they don't get us past trite and because of that, what might be important in this election is not being discussed, at least in the mainstream media. What I want to suggest is that there are several "storylines" (to use the jargon) that are important and are being under-reported, but to which we should pay attention because they signal a transition -- or, a potential transition -- in Canadian politics and public life. In addition, there are strong potential continuities that also bear comment and, potentially, concern. What are these storylines?

First, oil, taxes, energy and the environment. The Conservatives made hay again Stefan Dion by preaching the gospel of the tar sands. All Canadian federal governments have been, more or less, committed to the tar sands since their development started. The Liberals developed a practiced ambiguity that worried big oil and alienated some Albertans, but in practice they did nothing to stop the flow of oil from the Alberta tar sands to the US. The Conservatives hyped up this agenda by trying to build the northern gateway, lobbying relentlessly for Keystone, and sending the Minister of Natural Resources on tours of Europe to try to encourage European governments to not call tar sands oil "dirty oil" because this label would create (a) bad PR, and (b) potential lost sales. In other words, the Tories upped the Grits public indifference and practical non-interference policy to one of unmitigated support, branding anyone who suggested that the tars sands were anything but good as a wrecker of the economy, jobs, the future, family security, personal income, etc. And, this plot line was good enough to sway some voters and maintain a solid base of support in western Canada (well, more than solid) because unmitigated support for the oil industry could be rebranded as support for the west. To flip the old Reform Party saying: the west was finally in.

This plot line began to change some time ago, in slow almost unnoticeable ways. I think I noticed it on campus when it became evident that the Divest movement was picking up support and was going to eventually force serious rethinking of institutional investment priorities. It has not had this effect yet at Mount A, but it certainly has at other schools and, I think, eventually, even Mount A will realize that it cannot continue unethical anti-environmental investments (even if they do make money).

But, Divest was just a small sign. The bigger signs were the provincial elections in NB and Alberta. The NB election was about energy and, in particular, it was about fracking.  The provincial Tories focused on one issue and one issue only (in the process determining the scope of public discussion and making a mockery of an election in which there were other issues to discuss). And, they secured a certain amount of support through this focus. They argued this: environment be damned (although they said it nicer than this) because "we need jobs" and so we are going to frack regardless of what the science says and regardless of environmental harm and (as it turned out) regardless of whether or not that fracking is on aboriginal land. Acknowledging that the Tories were unpopular going into this election, what one can say is that this strategy did not work. The Conservative vote dropped by something like 13 or 14%, they lost government, and key ministers responsible for promoting fracking went down to defeat. The Green Party scored an historic victory in Fredericton and provincially captured something like 6.5% of the vote with strong areas of support on the Northumberland coast (where fracking would have occurred). In my riding, the Greens captured 15% of the vote. This followed a 2013 BC provincial election in which the Greens  took a seat and won over 8% of the vote (which was actually not an historic high) and preceded another historic win of a single seat in PEI.

Now, no one is about to argue that we are going to get Green governments. Here is what I want to point out. This movement in the vote is a minority movement. But, it has an effect because it is indicative of a broader trend -- just like Divest is. The easy acceptance of environmental destructive energy production/job creation is no longer so easily accepted. The Liberals won the provincial election in NB by maintaining the same studied indifference of their federal cousins in this election with regard to dirty energy production; that is: they were neither for it, nor against it. Instead, they proposed a moratorium on fracking that gave scientists time to study the issue and make better informed determinations.

And, that is good enough for most people because (a) it means that there will not be fracking in the short term and (b) the government (ideally) will be lead by science in terms of the effects of fracking (something rejected by provincial Tories who claimed that the scientific verdict was already in and that it was safe) and ignored by the feds, who pulled Canada out of Kyoto and made the country into an international laughing stock by virtue of their environmental policies.

What this shows us is a couple of things. #1) The times have changed. What worked four and eight years ago in terms of swaying votes with the promise of riches while ignoring the environment no longer works. Those people who are going to vote for parties that support environmentally destructive policies have already made that decision. They have already decided that short term profits are more important than long-term sustainability or they simply don't believe the science that they read with regard to environmental degradation. I suspect that this group was already voting Conservative.  Non-aligned voters who had been swayed by this argument no longer seem as easily swayed. They seem better informed about environmental issues, less willing to accept the idea that "disaster will fall" if environmentally destructive policies are not followed, and more willing to trust in the science of the matter, as opposed to ignore the science in favour of supposed economic gains.  What we have, then, is a better informed electorate -- or, what we might more accurately call a section of the electorate -- that is unwilling to easily accept environmental destructive policies and is looking for an alternative.

#2) The Tories have not realized this. It could be argued -- or, at least this is an argument I try to make in a course I teach -- that oil made Stephen Harper. It did not make him. He's not some Gollum called forth from the ground, but it clearly played a role in his victory  and he's reluctant to abandon it despite the signs that Canadians want some other policy. Hence, Harper and crew have stuck to their guns and ignored this plot line or tried to tell us that it does not exist. This is the reason that they have made war on the provincial NDP government of Alberta, a very new government. Harper's argument was, of course, silly and no one fell for it even if he and his followers (I have no doubt) believed it with every fibre of their being. His attack on provincial premiers -- particularly trying to blame ones who had been in office for a matter of months -- for economic woes that he himself was blaming on international trends went looked at federally seemed ... well ... let's call it ... odd. But, the attacks on the NDP make sense from the perspective of energy politics. They failed, and in this sense did not make sense, but they were consistent with federal Conservative views.

What was the Alberta NDP's high crime: to suggest that the oil economy had was now past its best before date. The Alberta NDP -- let us be clear -- is pretty darned far from a radical party. Its policies are basically centrist and that was the key, one might argue, to their electoral success. They went to Albertans and said "folks, we need to diversify our economy. There are a whole bunch of reasons why the oil economy is not good for us, including environmental issues, and because of this we really do need to get our butts in gear and do something about it. That is going to take a reorganization of provincial finances. It may involve changes in taxes, but if we don't do it, we really will just get ourselves deeper and deeper into both economic and environmental trouble." That was the message and, you know what, a large section of Albertans said "hmmm ... that might make sense. I didn't think that way a few years ago but now ... knowing more, looking at the instability of the oil economy, and  looking at the science of the tar sands ... well, hmm, this might be a step we need to take."

That was the crime and that was why Harper and crew were up in arms. The oil industry, they told us in the federal election campaign, hates the NDP. Canadians replied "we knew that already, but that does not mean that the idea that we need -- both economically and environmentally -- to do something about oil is incorrect." There is a reason why Harper and crew didn't get this message that is something, I think, a bit more than ideology and bit more than politics. I'll blog on that in the future. Right now what we can say is that the plot of energy politics changed -- a new storyline developed -- and that storyline is important for Canada.

There was a moment, early in the election campaign when I think I first realized that the plot was shifting. I think it was on CBC but it might have been CTV. I don't really remember which news network I was watching. Linda McQuaig, running for the NDP, very carefully and very precisely explained that Canada would likely need to leave oil in the ground if we were to meet any reasonable environmental commitment. The Tories  railed. They had, I suspect they thought, their smoking gun against the NDP, then doing fairly well in the polls.  It was, I think they thought, an "a-ha" moment, perhaps akin to Dion's carbon tax. A high profile NDP candidate had explained that full and complete development of the oil sands might not go ahead. Canadians would be ... well, I don't know what they Tories thought Canadians would be  but they clearly were not well prepared for what Canadians actually were: generally in agreement. The plot lines of this election runs through that moment. It runs back to the NB provincial election to Divest and the increased popularity (marginal though it is) of Green candidates. It will run forward past this next election.

Let us be clear: Canadians have not embraced the environment as their cause. They will elect one Green MP in this election but the discourse has changed. A larger section of the middle and working classes are better informed and less willing to sanction environmentally destructive policies. They may not vote Green but they won't vote Tory either. And this is a storyline to which we should pay attention because it is optimistic. Its a good news story ... unless you are a Conservative. Canadians don't know which way they want to go into the future, but they know which way the don't want to go. And that is one of the things we can learn from this election.

Causes of Dysfunction: "And the Trudeau surge? That's so last year."

Or ... so the story in the CBC read. I wanted to say something about this statement not because it actually says anything about the state of Canadian liberalism, but because it highlights -- perhaps, yet again -- problems with public discourse on Canadian politics.

There is some good commentary on Canadian public life but surprisingly little. In fact, most of what counts as mainstream media reporting and commentary is painfully banal if not misleading. It is, I think, one of the reasons that Canadians, in significant numbers, and particularly younger Canadians, have dropped out of public life and voted with their feet, at it were, to not vote. If we want to have a sincere commitment to addressing political alienation ... we need to address the sad state of public discourse on Canadian politics.

Let me take the above statement to illustrate what I mean. Its pithy and makes use of contemporary language: "that is so last year." The language is -- I think intentionally -- a bit stereotyped and actually out-dated, sort of in the manner of a parent trying to sound cool, but it has a pithy quality to it. The story goes on to explain that while the NDP is doing well in the polls "there's still four months to go."  It goes on to note that the decline of the Liberals in the polls may make it less meaning for the Conservatives and Liberals to battle each other. Instead, they may have to face reality and battle the NDP.

The legion of things that are wrong with this view are so many that it would be difficult to catalogue them all. It misses the point of why both Conservatives and NDPers train their sights on the Liberal party. And, in this sense, provides no serious political analysis. The story goes on to discuss the different political parties infatuation with the "middle class," but likewise fails to define precisely what this is or why it would be a politically important vote. But, most grievously, in stating that things were "so last year" suggests that politics is a matter of fad, vogue, and short term momentum. The real problem, of course, is that this can become true and ... create odd electoral situations where parties win power because of image and perception with little connection to their platforms, their own goals, or what might actually be the types of policy debates we need in the country. What is "so last year," I might, in fact, be so bold as to suggest, could be needed for this year.

Think about it. Have things really changed so drastically in the last year? Last year Canada began to grapple with the regionalized economic effects of declining oil production need. This year ... we seem to be grappling with the same thing. Last year, Canadians were amazed at the spending scandals that had beset the unelected Senate. This year ... hmmm ....  Last year, Canadian foreign policy was attempting to define a role with regard to the ISIS; this year ... wait, hmmm .... Last year, access to health care, university tuition rates, the state of Canadian democracy, sexual violence against women, were all key issues ... this year .... have any of these been addressed?

This is an instance in which vogue works against the type of sustained analysis and commitment we need to address the real problems that beset Canada. The environment, widening inequality, sexual violence, a dysfunctioning democracy, etc., all remain pressing issues that cannot so easily be dismissed as so much political surge.

Finally, these types of media reports complicate the job of creating a sustained engagement with politics in a twofold sense. First, they make politics about personalities as opposed to policies. Harper or Trudeau or Mulcair might be good, bad, funny, nice, etc., I don't know and, to be honest, I am not certain I deeply care. What I do care about is there policy options and the issues in which they want to focus. In connecting a surge to a person, as if it were a consumer brand, political commentary is misdirected and demeaned. Second, the idea that something can be last year speaks problematically to younger Canadians who are not voting in the sense that it tells them (a) you don't really have to pay attention to policy and politics because it will be here today and gone tomorrow and, in this sense, is about as important as last year's branded t-shirt to your life. And (b) it disguises the fact that some things are worth the effort.  This is something, I think, we need to tell Canadians and particularly younger Canadians: some things are worth the effort; they are worth the sustained attention you have to direct at them; they are worth the time and energy to read about, to study, to consider and to debate.

Media misrepresentations are not the only reason for a dysfunctional Canadian public life. They are, however, part of the picture and one that needs to be corrected if we truly want to make headway on democratic reform and political re-engagement. Unfortunately, I don't sense any desire on the part of media to play a role in these goals. Indeed, the opposite. I sense a lot of effort to avoid responsibility and simply enjoy pithy comments for their own sake.

The Power of Ideology or ... What Actually Are Conservatives These Days?

As I was driving home on Monday from a meeting in Fredericton, a friend and I spent a great deal of time talking about contemporary Canadian politics and its problems. We spent a bit of time thinking about each of the major federal parties and were, in some ways, stumped by the Conservatives. A recent CBC story about the increased possibility of an NDP federal government (which you can find here) echoes some of our thinking. What struck both of us about the Conservatives was how hard it was to place them, ideologically, within a tradition of Canadian conservatism. In short, neither of us felt that the Conservative Party of Canada, despite its name, was actually particularly conservative. They were right wing, but what that meant, to us at least, was not all that clear. It meant a general opposition to some things but this general opposition was also tempered by the need to conform to more moderate strains in Canadian political culture and by a complicated semi-worshiping relationship with American Republicanism.  So ... as we head into a federal election this fall ... what are Canadian Conservatives in this day and age?

This is not an idle question. For good or ill, I suspect that 30%+ of voters will cast their ballots for the Conservative Party this fall. For what are they voting? The fact that I am asking this question might lead some to say "OK, it is pretty clear that this guy is not a Conservative, if he has to ask what Conservatism is all about." And, that would be a fair statement. But, what I want to capture is what I see as a shift, drift, reformation of political ideologies in Canada. In my last two blog entries, I tried to grapple with the state of the independence movement in Quebec today. I tried to argue that the broad social-democratic movement that could see itself as a legitimate heir to the Quiet Revolution (although certainly not the only heir) and that linked independence with modernity and social democracy has fragmented. The PQ tries to discursively maintain this interconnection but it is increasingly at odds with its realities that have, in important ways, sought to make peace with a neoliberal Quebec, Inc., while broadening the popular base of nationalism cum independence in disturbing and prejudiced ways that are disavowed by the leftist Quebec solidaire and other progressive Quebecois thinkers.

Conservatism is linked to this history because it was the failure of the 1980s conservative project a generation ago that helped to fracture a resurgent Canadian conservatism that was already moving rapidly away from its roots to also embrace a  neoliberal agenda that dramatically scaled back on the state, embraced continentalism (described as globalization) and looked to connect Canada more directly to the project of American international hegemony under Reagan. In effect, conservatives were interested in demonstrating to the US that Canada was a faithful ally on whom they could count. This project bears strong similarities to Harperite conservatism today but it differs in key respects. The first is that 1980s conservatism in Canada still carried with it enough of an older collectivist tradition that there were principles at stake. While the liberals who had ruled the Canadian roost for much of the twentieth century embraced individualism, conservatives stood back from this idea, continued to talk about public and collective goods, and saw society as some sort of organic composite. Much of the weight of conservative opposition to liberalism, in fact, built, for right or wrong, on this ground. They saw liberal commitments to individualism, the free market, economic growth, as disorienting and potentially destructive of the institutional framework that maintained an organic community wedded to concepts of morality, moral and self-sacrificing leadership, social harmony through elite commitment to public good, the naturalness of nationalism, and other such things.

Brian Mulroney's 1980s conservatism was always a mishmash. It brought together various and sundry political and ideological perspectives that rejected liberalism -- particularly the Trudeauvian liberal project -- but that had little in common with each other. It attempted to embrace but redirect the progressive nationalism of post-Quiet Revolutionary Quebec, neoliberalism (that looked askance at the welfare state), the old "Red Tory" tradition I just detailed, and variants of western populism drawn into the Progressive Conservative party through Diefenbaker and his followers. This mix of perspectives did not work well. The movement both failed to refashion that Canadian constitution to remake Canada in its image, and lack staying power. Parts of its fell by the wayside and in 1993 voters deserted it in large numbers.  What was brought back together by Harper and Co. in the early 2000s was something different. It was a coalition but one in which Harperite "Tories", if they can even be called that, were ascendant.  There was, at the time, much concern about how well
Western Canadian populists and PC "Red Tories" could coexist again in party in which their only raison d'etre was opposition to liberalism. It turns out, this was the wrong question. The right question was: what shape would Canadian conservatism take.

On the surface, the answer to this question is seems to run something like this: it is not clear because the Conservatives have banded together a bunch of policies that are (a) out of date, (b) prisoners of their own ideology, (c) silly, (d) lack coherence. Few old time Red Tories seem at all operative in today's conservative party and I think it is safe to say that that perspective is dead as a political movement. But, equally importantly, few western populists seem to have any sway. Harper's government has moved painfully slowly, for example, to address key populists concerns about democratization. In fact, one could argue that the country is less democratic now than it was when Harper took power. So, what do today's conservatives stand for? Here is a short list:

• law and order 
• demonstrating that we are a faithful ally to the US
• hard power foreign policy 
• tax cuts
• opposition to legalized pot
• opposition to  environmentalism
• natural resources-based economic development
• "balanced books"

There are no doubts that some of these policy objectives strike at the heart of what a significant section of the Canadian population thinks, but nor are they particularly controversial in many instances and there is nothing inherently conservative in them. For instance, I don't know any leftist or centrist or environmentalist or feminist who thinks we should not have a justice system. And, I know all kinds of people who think one needs to balance economic and environmental issues. Heck, even the Green Party thinks this. And ... on down the line. What makes these conservative policies, it seems to me, is not the policy in-and-of-itself but the way in which they are presented, the chain of logic that accompanies them, and the extremism of  the degree to which Conservatives will go to maintain them. In other words, when we look at the way conservatives think about particular issues we can begin to isolate the central characteristics of contemporary Canadian conservatism. 

For instance, I know many people who think we should get tough on crime. The problem with this perspective, I keep telling them, is that the Conservatives have been in power for a long time and have been tough on crime. The crime rate, of course, was falling long long before the tough on crime approach, but if further toughness was needed ... why did the Tories not introduce it ages ago when they first came into power? As for, say, hard power ... how is that working? Is the world safer today than it was, say, ten years ago now that Canada is standing up and demonstrating to people that we are tough and willing to bomb others? 

I don't want to refute CPC policies, I want to point something out. They seem to function without recourse to what is actually going on. They involve things that people think "should" work. Getting tough on crime should lower the crime rate. Is that true? ... my point is that it does not matter because people think it "should". Likewise, getting tough with the rest of the world is supposed to make the world safer. What evidence do we have that that is the case? Pot is a plague that will destroy society. Hmmm ... I don't doubt the sincerity of different people's beliefs. What I am saying is that Conservatism operates through what we could call a politics of confirmation. Rather than proposing new ideas, it works with ideas that people have and confirms these and, in this way, serves to reaffirm itself to its supporters. 

It is possible that all political movements do this is in some way, but I am not so sure.  In fact, Conservative efforts to get "tough on crime," for example, seem to suggest that somewhere, deep down, Conservatives know that there is something wrong with what they are saying. They have, for instance, and as I just said, been getting tough on crime for a long time. Yet, the fact that they still feel that they have to get tough on crime suggests that, for them at least, their original get tough policies have not worked. Yet, they seem to avoid the logic of their own perspectives. For example, most people, at some point, might pause. They might say to themselves "gee, I said X. I did X but it did not improve things. Perhaps I should rethink whether or not X is actually a good thing to do." Instead, the Conservatives have done this: "I said X. Things have not improved, so what we need is XX." This is an odd perspective because it assumes that the original proposition is right in the absence of evidence. Tougher sanctions will get rid of crime. If we introduce tougher legal sanctions and crime still exists ... what this means is that we need to get even tougher. 

There is, too, a point at which toughness comes to be seen as a virtue in and of itself. There is an odd sort of masculinist politics to contemporary Conservatives that worships toughness in and of itself. We need to stand up and be tough in our defense of industry (come what may), we need to be tough in international affairs, we need to be tough against crime. What this perspective lacks -- and I think Conservatives see this as a virtue -- is sympathy. 

Consider an alternative to toughness. "Gee, I said let's get tough on crime. That has not eliminated crime and the longer term trends with regard to crime were going down anyway. I wonder if we might think about why people commit crimes in the first place and find out if that is a way to lower the crime rate?" Friends of mine dismiss this idea as weakness. You need to be tough. People will take advantage of you. You need to think about the victim and don't treat the criminal as if they were the victim. In fact, or so this argument runs, we should have no sympathy for the criminal at all. 

There is in this perspective a politics of othering in which criminals are cast as irredeemably other and also a case study that speaks to how conservatives conceptualize relationships. Othering:  the logic runs something like this: criminals are, once and forever, once they have been identified as criminals, something very different. How else can one reasonably explain the Conservatives efforts to keep Khadr behind bars. How else can one explain the degree to which the Canadian government pursued an individual who was a brainwashed teenager who found himself at 15 in a war zone and did things, as a result, that he clearly deeply regrets? How else can one explain the way in which the Canadian government called Khadr a terrorist over and over and over again. Consider an analogy. If, when you were 15, you once got drunk ... should you be considered a drunk (with all that that entails) for the rest of your life? 

Relationships is the other point that comes out of this example and it is something about which we don't think often or discuss often in our society. The question is this: how should we relate to each other. Different political movements have different answers. Separatists in Quebec, for instance, were fond of saying over and over and over again "you do not understand us; you will never understand us" when they spoke to Anglo Canadians. They saw culture as a barrier that did not simply impede relationships but, in fact, made them impossible. Conservatives have a particular take on relationships as well that is difficult to specify. They see the world as tough, relationships as fraught, tough masculinist self assertion as a good and necessary thing that allows you to accomplish your goals in the face of people who will take advantage of you ... if you let them. Culture, too, is an odd thing to conservatives that impedes bonds of common allegiance or even self respect. How else, for instance, can one explain conservative efforts to refashion citizenship tests and prevent Mexicans and Romi from coming to Canada? 

In this regard, and perhaps only in this regard, are Canadian conservatives really conservatives. Their answers are behind the times. The policies that they offer -- natural-resource based economic development, opposition to the medical use of pot, a lack of sympathy, othering and the sense that reform is not possible (people don't change) -- are underscored by a worldview that seems out of place today. When they first came to power, the Conservatives promised many things, democratic reform and accountability are the two big examples. They have not delivered on either count but I doubt that matters to their core voters because their core voters are not about accountability or democracy. They are about a masculinist worldview that sees toughness as an answer,  that sees human character as fixed, that sees sympathy as a problem, and that confirms its own perspectives  (and, hence, does not change ... at least easily). There is little place for democratic reform or government accountability in this worldview. In fact, it is irrelevant to it.