The Benighted right

It took a long time, and the sacrifice of at least three party leaders, to bring about a merger between the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties. Now that Stephen Harper and Peter McKay have torn down the wall, it might be smart to have a good idea of what to do with all the bricks that went into making it; not to mention the other bricks strewn around the scenery, the ones the two parties have so recently thrown at each other. Building something might be a wise use.

In the Canadian political mythology, 1990s edition, the Liberals were maintained in power not by voter approval, but by the unending division of the right-wing opposition into two parties, each with a regional base, each distrustful of the other, and each draining away the other’s support at election time. That cartoon was painted so brightly, and stuck in Canadian faces so often, that it became received wisdom. But it was nonsense: simple arithmetic shows that a vote split between the Conservatives and the Alliance gave the Liberals only a few constituencies in the elections of 1993, 1997, and 2000.

So the eruption of joy can wait: there is a lot of electoral work still to do if the Liberal hold on the Commons is ever to be broken. That said, poll results show that voters may be more ready to move to a single major opposition party, that two plus two may add up to more. Even if the effect is so small that the merger only brings the country a more effective Opposition in the next Parliament, it will have done the political landscape a great deal of good.

Getting over the internal distrust will be a big enough task. The two parties didn’t just dislike one another’s faces; for them, the Alliance was full of ex-Conservative turncoats, and the Conservatives were sellouts of easy political virtue. There’s a lot of baggage to be cleared away. And the comfortable view on the right that “real” conservatives will hew to a specific political agenda is a dream.

There is, first of all, the line between “economic” conservatives, often seen as socially liberal or libertarian, and “social” conservatives, frequently identified with Christian literalism. There will be no squaring the circle to satisfy both groups: what the new party will need is a way for the two to agree to disagree on social questions, while presenting a united front on other issues. It will not be easy.

Then there is the breadth of economic orthodoxy in the party, which sometimes sends right-wing purists into a frenzy. The villains in this view have most often been the “Red Tories,” identified as the centrists watering the Conservative wine in the attempt to appeal to the middle ground of voters. (Here, Alliance types are fond of inserting an Ontario, or even an Ontario-Quebec conspiracy for good measure.) That is to thoroughly misunderstand the beast.

The “Red Tory,” as originally defined by political scientist Gad Horowitz, is not a nearly-Liberal Conservative but “a conscious ideological conservative with some ‘odd’ socialist ideas . . . or a conscious ideological socialist with some ‘odd’ Tory notions.” The true Red Tory, at least in the 1960s when Horowitz put him under glass, was more comfortable with the New Democrats, and more comfortable still with the old Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, than with the Grits. Paul Martin is not a Red Tory, and will never be one.

It is consequently no coincidence that New Democratic leader Jack Layton made an explicit appeal to the remaining statist fringe of the Conservatives to come to his party. Unfortunately the New Democrats left the field of Red Toryism long ago, seeking instead the ideological comfort and intellectual conformity of the urban fern bars. There are a few nominal Conservatives, such as David Orchard, who may be seduced by trendy leftism, but they are well outside the tradition of Alvin Hamilton or James Macdonnell, Conservatives whose idea of government included having the state do what only the state could do.

Yet there remains an impression among many right-wingers that the Red Tories will find a congenial political home among the Liberals, and good riddance. A note to them: you don’t start a new political party with the intention of driving supporters out of it.

Instead, there are some building blocks for a united Conservative Party that might draw votes from “Red Tory” economic centrists, “social” conservatives, and the large bloc of disaffected non-voters.

The first is political nationalism, as distinct from the economic kind. Conservatives largely believe in the nation state as the vehicle for political action. This means drawing a line on provincialism, a constitutional novelty that never fit well with Canadian conservative belief anyway; but it need not mean abandoning the idea that local government is often in the best position to satisfy the governed.

It also means recognizing that Canadian sovereignty is best served by strength and not supineness, and that the country’s post-war love affair with the United Nations, for one thing, has been destructive to sovereignty and identity. We have no European Union threatening to make our self-government a joke, so at least we could stop making a joke of it ourselves.

A second is fiscal responsibility: the country’s most recent Conservative government paid plenty of lip service to it, but either did not or could not deliver. Many people make too much of the government’s ability to control the budget — a great part of revenue, and even a good part of expenditure, is not in the government’s control. We are bound to observe that it was the Liberal government that turned in the budget surpluses of the late ’90s; we are also bound to observe that economic growth put a fiscal wind at the Liberals’ back that had been denied to five previous governments.

But there may be a constituency out there among the voters ready to be treated like adults — adults with a knowledge of arithmetic, no less. A clear-eyed examination of what the national government does, and ought not to do, such as interfering in the marketplace and dishing out pork through agencies like Human Resources Development Canada, might actually gain the electors’ trust, and more than offset the loss of voters whose lives are made easier through handouts. In the end, that means smaller government, and an end to the scattergun funding of everything, particularly everything the provincial premiers want Confederation’s money for.

A third is respect for the law; and do not confuse this with law-and-order. There has long been a thread of permissiveness in the Conservative party — that good behaviour was any act you could get away with. An emphasis on clean and responsible government — one legacy a new party could be proud to inherit from the Manningite side of the Alliance — will resonate with voters, who are always ready to think the worst of politicians. (In this they are often right.) More than that, a government inclined to keep its own laws is better able to write its laws in its citizens’ hearts.

There is an opportunity for a new party; it is neither as big as some hope nor as remote as some others fear. It will be for the good of the country if the new party takes its very best shot at that opportunity.