Exploding the Canadian Consensus

Canada’s short-lived experiment with radical American-style conservatism might be nearing its end.
The last four years weren’t the usual Liberal-Conservative and back again government, they were an aberration brought about by a major scandal and held open artificially by a weak Liberal opposition. Now that both factors have passed, Stephen Harper’s window is closing, and this chapter in our political life could likely go with it.
Harper’s Conservatism is a deviation from traditional Canadian conservatism, and probably won’t outlive his tenure. While all political parties undergo regular transformations – the Liberal transition from economic nationalists to free trade purists comes to mind – until recently the story of the Conservative Party had never ceased to be a distinctly Canadian one. The party, born of a coalition between French and English Canadians, gave us the first national railway and an early incarnation of the CBC.
While contemporary political discourse often neglects our history, Canadian conservatism sprung largely from the more collectivist strain found in British toryism, a 19th century political movement which believed in the values of tradition and community. As such, conservatives in the Canadian mould, as represented by Tories ranging from George Grant to John Diefenbaker and through to Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, never stopped believing in the value of the collective good.
Every modern Conservative leader prior to Harper has held fast to the values and institutions of the British strain, helping to form the contemporary Canadian consensus: universal public health care, official bilingualism and multiculturalism, protection of the environment, peacekeeping and promotion of human rights abroad, and so on. Many would be surprised to learn Brian Mulroney stood firm against efforts to curtail abortion rights and bring back capital punishment. He also campaigned vehemently against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and was recently named the “greenest PM” in our history because of his work on acid rain and climate change.
Canada’s political milieu is much more left wing than America’s. Canadian conservatism has more in common with contemporary British and European strains than the American version. European conservatives leaders David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, all of whom frequently disagreed with George W. Bush on the environment, the economy, defence and social issues. Harper, by contrast, regularly found himself in lockstep with the former President.
The reason for this is simple: Harper’s ideological brethren lie south of the border rather than across the Atlantic. The Reform/Alliance forces which arose from the West in the late 80s and early 90s were a foreign import inspired largely by the Christian conservatives in the United States. Before the creation of the new Conservative Party, the cabal of Alliance/Reformers currently in cabinet had consistently expressed views antithetical to those of the vast majority of Canadians. They opposed abortion rights, universal public health care, gay rights, affirmative action, feminist organization, state action in the economy. They were sceptical of official bilingualism and the science behind climate change. They were ambivalent on aboriginal rights, multilateralism and the United Nations. This is not your father’s (Progressive) Conservative Party. It is ruggedly individualist, fend-for-yourself, deeply ideological Republicanism of the meanest variety, and it is thoroughly un-Canadian.
And so it won’t last. Once Harper steps down, the Reform/Alliance strain will likely be overtaken by the Progressive Conservative wing of the party. Assuming the party can even withstand the transition to the opposition benches without fracturing into its constituent parts – since power is perhaps the only common thread binding them together at the moment – the Tories will swing back to their historical position at the centre of the Canadian spectrum, and the integrity of the Canadian consensus will be restored.