Dem
51
GOP
49
Here is the question we put before readers last week:
B.L. in Hudson, NY, asks: What is "Canadian conservative"? How does this differ from American conservatism?
And here some of the answers we got in response:
M.V.E. in Kitchener, ON, Canada: I've been watching Canadian politics since I was a teen. At this point I may have more insight into American politics because there's so much more info out there: coverage, polls, pundits, attention... There's nothing I could find that really compares to this site for Canada, and the last blogger I did find long ago gave up his blog and joined one of the networks here and I never saw as much material from them again.
In a nutshell, many conservatives in Canada have been drinking Kool-Aid colored with red dye #45, so we lost one of our two largest functional policy center choices. I'm still bitter about the Liberal Party's (think Canadian Democrats) corruption having taken so long to clean up, and still saddened by the loss of Jack Layton (former leader of the NDP, our third choice, roundly leftist party). I liked a lot of things about most liberal prime ministers during my lifetime (though some were total duds), and I've liked the Conservatives ones very little.
All that said, I mourn the lack of decent balance on the right for policy positions that used to make their home there. Some left wing positions at the provincial level on education seem downright British-style nanny-state-ish in their extremism and probably need some opposition to find the best long-term compromise for the electorate. How that plays out at the federal level is usually a bunch of shouting at the wind (where the federal government usually has no business poking their nose), but foreign policy, pandemic benefits, climate change and many other things have been handled admirably in my estimation by the current government because the conservative alternative was nothing more than a gaggle of rage merchants with little real direction, just blind, mouth-foaming opposition.
Just like D.C. has seen in the last 10 or so years, we really need a return to normal business where everyone is pitching and committing to solutions, not just shouting at the wind.
D.J.M. in Salmon Arm, BC, Canada: A few years ago I was listening to an American speaker who declared his political views were "left of center," but not so far left that he was "woke." A member of the audience, who hailed from Europe, stood up and replied, "I do not think you understand what left of center means." Where he had placed himself on the political spectrum and how he defined "woke" was quite different than the people from away. In my view, conservatism in general falls across a spectrum that includes elements of adherence to tradition, fiscal frugality, and religious dogma. In Canada, this spectrum is the same as in the United States. The fundamental difference is in numbers and where they lie on the spectrum. We have far fewer people at the radical end of the spectrum. For example, while you have enough "right wingers" to ban reproductive choice or declare embryos are children, our "right wingers" of a similar persuasion occasionally gather to wave a flag or post a billboard.
I believe much of this shift is due to our forms of government. In the U.S., the election of the president by the Electoral College, the equal state representation and notion of seniority in the Senate, and the life appointments of Supreme Court justices favor the more radical end of the conservative spectrum. In Canada, the prime minister is chosen by the party, the Senate is appointed as a house of "sober second thought" and age limits (75) are placed on the members of the Senate and the Supreme Court. The system is not perfect and we still experience our own brand of scandal, incompetence (see the ArriveCan app fiasco), and provincial/federal disputes. However, in the absence of a filibuster or radical impediments such as the Freedom Caucus, progressive legislation such as universal healthcare, reproductive choice, pharmacare, etc., gets passed. As it turns out, conservatives like liberal policies, they just don't like liberals.
The elements of conservatism do not change, but the numbers do. Canadians are a bit more chill and it's not just the weather. Heck, we have no problem with homo milk or hosers, and we'd always welcome Vee and Zed for a double double, or my preference, some back bacon and a two four. Good day, eh!
M.F. in Burlington, ON, Canada: The answer isn't that straightforward, and has changed significantly over the past 50 years or so.
Like a lot of Canadian culture, Canadian conservatism is significantly affected by interaction with dominant American culture. Particularly in Atlantic Canada and Ontario (and to some extent Quebec), the bedrock of Canadian conservatism was the United Empire Loyalists, descended from refugees who fled (or were expelled) from the United States after independence.
Thus a great deal of Canadian conservatism was expressed in terms of loyalty to institutions, and in particular the Crown. But abiding suspicion of the United States was never far from the surface. Our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was adamantly opposed to reciprocity (or free trade in more modern parlance) and ran his final campaign (1896) claiming, "a British subject I was born and a British subject I shall die."
Through most of Canadian history, the Liberal Party was the party of warm American relations, reciprocity, and economic integration.
Unlike American liberal individualism, Canadian conservatism had a significant collectivist flavor, often described as Red Toryism. Thus the government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (1957-63) was willing to provide federal funding to support a hospital insurance scheme in Saskatchewan that became one of the building blocks of universal health care, and showed significant leadership in having South Africa suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations over Apartheid.
The shift towards a more right-populist conservatism in Canada actually predates the party shift in the U.S. (due to Nixon's Southern Strategy) by about five years, but took significantly longer. It really wasn't until the 1980s, under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (who passed away last month) that the then-Progressive Conservative Party embraced free trade. Mulroney assiduously aligned himself with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on economic issues. Even so, he led possibly the greenest government in Canadian history before or since, and like Diefenbaker, Mulroney showed significant leadership in the Commonwealth's opposition to Apartheid.
(I'll note here that the fact the Party was called Progressive Conservative was less a commentary on its ideology than the fallout of an amalgamation between the Conservatives and the former Progressive Party. The Progressives were a populist party with little consistent ideology. By the time of the merger, most left-leaning Progressives had already decamped either to the centrist Liberals or to the leftist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation which subsequently became the modern New Democratic Party.)
From the 1930s until the 1970s, there had been a right populist party based in western Canada called Social Credit. (There was a sister party in Quebec called Ralliement Créditiste, but they are largely irrelevant to this topic.) Despite having governed Alberta as recently as 1971 and British Columbia until 1991, Social Credit was essentially a dead letter federally and in every province except BC, and even there it was less a political party than a flag of convenience for voters from all the center-right parties to oppose the leftist New Democrats.
In the late 1980s, various western remnants of Social Credit along with disgruntled right-leaning Progressive Conservatives formed the Reform Party. Prime Minister Mulroney had become unpopular among western conservatives for his supposed favoritism towards Quebec, where Mulroney had ensured his majority by appealing to nationalist Québecois and Québecoise.
The former Progressive Conservative Party experienced a complete electoral collapse in 1993, winning just two seats in the House of Commons. They lost Quebec because the soft nationalists had abandoned them for the new Bloc Québecois. They lost western Canada principally to the Reform Party, and they lost everywhere else because Reform and Progressive Conservative vote splitting allowed the Liberals to come up the middle.
For the next decade, various attempts to Unite the Right failed, in large part because of the cultural disconnect between the traditional and institutional conservatism of the Progressive Conservative Party and the right-wing populism of the Reform Party and its successor the Canadian Alliance. When the two were finally brought together under Stephen Harper in 2004, and when the party formed a government in 2006, it was now largely a right populist party. While some former Progressive Conservatives remained, many others left for the Liberal Party, or to create minor vanity parties, or departed from active politics entirely. The two living former Progressive Conservative Prime Ministers, Joe Clark and Kim Campbell, have been openly hostile to the new party.
There are many parallels between the evolution of Canadian conservative parties over the past 50 years and the evolution of the Republican Party in the U.S. over the same period, but the starting points are significantly different and the process far more incremental.
R.K. in Cambridge, MN: I am not sure if this is directly applicable or not, but I'm thinking it is more true than false. In the fall of 1968, I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota. One of my classes was an introductory political science course. The instructor was a visiting professor from England. One day in discussing American political parties, he said, "In England we have a Conservative Party much like your Democrats. We just don't have a Nazi Party." I am thinking my Canadian neighbors are more like the British than us in this regard. (That same professor walked into the lecture hall with probably 200 hundred students the morning after the November 1968 election, stopped and looked up at the auditorium, shook his finger at us, and said, "All of you who couldn't bring yourselves to vote for Humphrey, you are going to learn a hard lesson...")
G.M. in Laurence Harbor, NJ: A Canadian Conservative is one of the group that demand that poutine never be exported to the U.S.
An American Conservative has no idea what poutine is.
T.C. in Stone Mountain, GA: The main difference between Canadian conservatives and American conservatives is their status on the endangered species list. Canadian conservatives are classified as "vulnerable" but in some areas they are thriving. American conservatives are currently classified as "critically endangered" and some political ecologists think they are now "extinct in the wild." The main problem attacking the American conservatives has been the invasive species "Trumpists." Trumpists may have their own problem due to their lack of genetic variation. That may cause a collapse of the Trumpist population and let Canadian conservatives invade the suddenly available genetic niche in the U.S.
That, of course, would be unacceptable and it is believed that experts at UCLA are working to prevent this catastrophe.
R.L.D. in Sundance, WY: Canadian Conservatism differs from its American counterpart in that it comes with a subtle whiff of maple syrup.
Here is the question for next week:
S.B. in Winslow, ME, asks: In your item "Biden Will Kick Off His Campaign Tonight," you listed several things he could speak about in the SOTU and on the campaign trail. Undoubtedly, what he does say will be parsed six ways to Sunday, but I wondered what the E-Verse would LIKE to hear discussed and debated this campaign season.
Submit your answers to comments@electoral-vote.com, preferably with subject line "Something to Talk About"!