Column: Conservatism to a Canadian Rhythm
By Charles Jeanes
Use all your well-learned politics
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste. – Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil
I support the left, tho’ I’m leanin’, leanin’ to the right
I support the left, tho’ I’m leanin’ to the right
But I’m just not there when it’s coming to a fight… – Cream, Politician
Introduction: Canadian Conservatives
Whatever “conservatism” means to you personally, this month in Canada the political class and commentariat will be chattering about the Canadian Conservative Party and its 87% approval of the Leader, Pierre Poilievre. This is the context for the Arc today.
(In March, it will be the turn of the NDP, a party choosing a new federal leader.)
Hypotheses: Politics is about power in human relations: Where there are two humans, there you find politics. Animal politics are instinctive, ours are learned, and are as variegated as human individuals.
Politics studies power — who has it, who exercises it, what is accomplished with it; if government does nothing for the governed and too much for the governors, that is a political crisis where democracy is presumed to work.
The Political Spectrum
Of course we ( I refer to Kootenay political sophisticates ) know that a two-dimensional line to describe political inclination, a “spectrum” from Left to Right, is no longer held in high regard by the advanced thinker, and a three-dimensional cube-space or spherical compass is now the favoured model.
I will not say much here now on the historical roots and growth of the political spectrum over the past few centuries of Western and European development. [Please see History section in the Appendix for more about the spectrum]
Canadian politics has a conservatism evolved over our unique history. This is appropriate and expected; I’ll try to trace specifics of Canada’s trajectory.
Canada’s exemplars of political and economic evolution
America, our mighty neighbour, underwent Revolution before France; it did so without French labels, using labels of ‘Patriot’ and ‘Tory’. The Patriots won. The British aristocracy and their allied Tory Americans lost their fight to maintain America in the empire in 1783. The French aristocracy and the Roman Church lost their fight to freeze France in its pre-modern mode in 1789-99.
England’s violent revolutions in the seventeenth century were parliamentary and military struggles to create the unwritten Constitution; England’s economic and political change thereafter evolved without such violent revolutionary events, unlike France. But industrial capitalism in the economy, and electoral democracy in its ancient Parliamentary monarchy, transformed Great Britain from 1750 onward. Religion was fundamental in British political evolution.
From these three great models of the West – England, France, and America – Canada invented and elaborated its own unique democratic political path. And Canada (as you know) is capitalist and wealthy. It is a constitutional electoral democracy, with formal parliamentary and monarchical institutions. It has never had a Revolution, but its models have had significant, world-historical ones. As with the US and France, and unlike the UK, Canada has a written Constitution. Like the US, we have a Senate, unlike the UK with its Lords.
Conservatism’s Foes: Socialism and Liberalism
Conservatives are opposed by those to their political left, liberals and socialists.
There is a very definite key difference between liberal and socialist, let alone communist, that is only explicable with a lot of nineteenth-century history as one’s foundation. I don’t wish to summarize the history, but will satisfy myself (if no-one else) by this simple formula: the liberal is a person unwilling to think of society other than as individuals-living-together, and the socialist cannot let society be defined without reference to equality and material measures of social equality. Liberals agree with socialists that humans must be Free – they are “humanists” in this – but liberals do not derogate capitalism as socialists do.
Capitalism as a system has never upheld equality as main goal or valued result of capitalist economic logic. Socialists combat that indifference. A value held high in socialist dogma is ‘collectivism,’ as opposed to capitalist individualism.
Liberals desire human liberty but insist privately-owned Capital — see Marx — must be freely used by liberated individuals, not interfered with by political act.
Socialists are ever-ready to interfere with Capital for their ‘higher’ purposes, i.e. social equality. The French Revolution preached liberty and equality. Socialists always, liberals less-dogmatically, demand The State promote a preferred and planned society. The State is for politics; it’s the power machinery over society.
[Two excellent essays on this topic, both long and deep:
https://dissentmagazine.org/article/socialism-and-liberalism-articles-of-conciliation/
https://www.joinexpeditions.com/exps/484-liberalism-and-socialism-a-common-core ]
Aristocrats and Noble Lords
Once, conservatism meant political action for landed aristocracy and noble blood, but not in the twenty-first century. Capitalized bourgeoisie – the ‘commoners’ of no land or ‘blood’ but with mighty capital (not so much landed wealth as other capitalist forms) – rule us now. Yes, there IS a ruling class.
All ruling classes rule by virtue of owning wealth others depend upon. [see more about class and power in the Appendix]
Aristocracy, it must be clearly understood, was the key system conserved by all conservative forces in history before capitalism. Noble blood and high “caste” are the key cultural ideas of rank that make aristocracy palatable to the ruled; patriarchal ownership of land was the material basis of this system. It endured.
Until 1914, landed aristocracy was dominant over the globe except in the US, France, the U.K.(where it was still semi-dominant in alliance with capitalists) and a handful of European republics – anywhere capitalist wealth was more significant than farmland. Japan, so modern by 1914, was still aristocratic.
World Wars: farewell to ‘Lords’
Canadians of settler culture have no history of aristocracy on Canadian land.
The twentieth century witnessed the death of aristocracy, in two global wars. This was an enormous rupture with the past human historical record, for so long social order and class distinctions had been integrated into economies of landed production and commerce but without industrial capitalism. Industrial cities, new, powerful sciences and technologies, and financial integration of the globe, meant landed aristocracy couldn’t dominate. (Patriarchy kept on and on and on. As Y.N. Harari notes, the enduring constancy of patriarchy is curious.)
Capital and capitalist took the primary dominant place at the top of the social pyramid, while land and the aristocratic nobility of blood declined – at various rates in different cultures – to secondary but not bourgeois levels. Politics of the Right came to mean something else. Old conservatism was lordly politics, the yearning of aristocracy and people of “quality blood” for their ancient privileges and power. The twentieth century changed the meanings. A new Right arose.
Religion was problematic for this new Right, since it was a conservative force but also opposed to hatred and violence. The Church is often equivocal in our politics. Canada had one lucid interval of a State-and-Church regime acting in effective alignment: when M. Duplessis ruled Quebec from 1936 to 1959.
https://secondaryhistory.learnquebec.ca/1945-1980/duplessis-era
No one can be Conservative and Marxist both. But there were politicians quite comfortable with the label “liberal conservative.” John A. MacDonald was one.
Today, liberals claim the political centre; earlier, they were seen as left-leaning. A label is of very small value when the context where it operated is unknown.
Fascism: a new conservatism and doctrinaire ideology
The new conservative Right was radically ideological, with Marxian politics its fiercely-antagonistic foe; it is personified in Leaders: Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, Salgado in Brazil, Hitler in Germany. (with their special titles: Duce; Caudillo; Fuhrer.) These men loved war and violence. They were popular. Their Parties drew much of their structural shape from Leninist parties, ironically, and they loudly proclaimed nationalism, racism, patriarchy, and militarism, as key Party values. An alliance of liberal democracy and communism defeated it.
https://education.cfr.org/sites/default/files/public/fascist-leaders-cards/index.htm
Let no-one tell you Fascism is easy to define; it has profound historical roots but is also capable of much adaptation to change, just as Marxian political theory is. For my purposes, there is little I need to say about fascism, for, in our good fortune, Canada has experienced no period when fascists ruled us. Its place in our history is tiny; that there are still fascists here is no surprise, but I feel no need to dignify it in an essay on Canadian conservatism.
Canada’s far Right is a vocal fringe: racists, misogynists, fascists, anti-semites. It might disguise itself within moderate conservatism, but Canadians have not been deceived by it. It’s been impotent, never exercising governmental power.
The Present Moment
Conservatism in Canada has a very difficult task defining itself, much more than Liberalism. Why? There are too many roots to this tradition, and the resulting branches not congruent with united purpose and political efficacy.
Here is my (admittedly-opinionated) summary of the ingredients of a partisan Conservative recipe for governing, and from it one might see the reason the Conservative Party does not often rule Canada — and why the Liberals assume their arrogant label “the natural governing Party of Canada.”
- Rural conservatism: the country mistrusts the town, and the small-town person distrusts the big-city sophisticate. This is a profound and heartfelt division, but it’s now not possible to build a winning formula for government upon a solely-rural constituency. Canada, like most of the world, is an urban nation. In our past, Canadians were a lot more rural and agrarian. Parties like Progressives, Social Credit, Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Wild Rose, United Farmers, Christian Heritage, are evidence of this pro-rural tradition. In Quebec, small farmers and RC clergy long kept premier Duplessis in power.
- Western alienation vs. the Centre [Ontario/Quebec]: Every Province west of Ontario has some history of anger against the wealth and privilege of the Old Canada – the Province of Canada in the Empire from 1840 to 1867 – which gave Quebec and Ontario a stranglehold on the economy and political power. Population, history and capitalism have conspired to make the centre strong. The Prairies, and BC, saw it, understood it, railed against it – but rarely have overcome the centre’s dominant weight in Canada. The rural parties listed above were strong in the West. Recently, Reform arose, so successful it forced federal “Progressive Conservatives” to merge and create (2003) the Conservative Party (Pierre Poilievre’s party). Reform began in Alberta; its ideology is potent.
- Libertarian conservation: for conservatives, freedom from State interference is fundamental, yet a State strong against foreign enemies and criminals is a tenet also. Faith in free individuals and markets aligns them with capitalists.
- Ideological special interest: conservative folks often like the past better than the present – I do, myself, on various measures – and hanker for things like: a “whiter” Canada (fewer Canadians from outside Europe’s gene pool); a social order where patriarchy is stronger, capitalism less-regulated, raw-material extraction (trees, fuels, minerals, electricity) makes the worker rich, as well as corporations; a religion is strong in families, and Family is not overseen by the State; a place where “progressive” values of equality lose out to “my Freedom”.
- Populism: when The People turn against corrupt elite government, the Right might benefit. Yet so might the Left. Populism is not consistently conservative.
[ two excellent essays on populism: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/a-deep-history-of-canadian-populism/
What would a Conservative government be?
These various ingredients do not make unity for Conservative parties easy.
The Crown and Christianity cannot be the solid base for the party — as before WWII and in the 1950s. Immigrants may be conservative, wanting to conserve as much of their former traditions as possible (e.g,. religious observance, work ethic, patriarchy, language) but their children seem bound to assimilate within the broader materialistic, secular Canadian Middle where all cultures integrate.
Claiming to be a party for the ‘working-class’ won’t help; worker-Toryism does not operate here as in the U.K. Canadians generally identify as ‘middle class’. [https://angusreid.org/great-canadian-class-study/]
Trump-Republican ideologies are too extreme – yet some conservatives here show leanings to a MAGA phenomenon; Maxime Bernier is that type of leader. Canadian nationalism, often anti-American in form, doesn’t help to unify the Conservative base, for the Liberals have as much claim to be patriots.
Fiscal conservatism is too narrow for a base; being pro-business is as much a Liberal as Conservative stance. Being against some lib/left idea is insufficient for building winning party platforms. Western alienation must ever be a bad, impossible base for a federal party. Quebec is unique, it’s not a model to copy.
What’s a Conservative leader to do?
Liberalism has been so successful in Canada because it has occupied the political middle ground with an expansive agenda that blurs with the soft left – the NDP – and with the right ( “red” Conservatives) on so many policy grounds that at any one time, no-one can be sure quite what the Liberal Party is. Mark Carney is so clearly not Justin Trudeau, but appears to have easily taken that party over. Trudeau policy gaffes are buried, the Liberals move rightward, the NDP collapses in the last federal election. Pierre Poilievre is not to be envied.
Conclusions: steady, as Canadians go
I think, frankly, that Canada under Conservatives would not be substantially different from its state under Liberals. Like Ireland – with two major parties, one of which has been dominant but the other not impotent – Canada is ruled by consensus politics of the centre. The middle class is numerous, and deep, and its values pre-dominate; I don’t recognize any significant force in ‘working-class’ political perspectives markedly unlike the middle’s aspirations. We are a materialist people, secular-not-religious, with a sense of our cultural identity.
Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney were Conservative leaders as different from one another as Trudeau and Carney. Harper claimed his victory in 2011 would begin a Conservative century in Canada, and was proven quite wrong in short order. Mulroney gave us Free Trade; it now looks like a poor strategic choice for Canada in the long term, making the US utterly dominant over our economic prospects. (I opposed Mulroney’s 1988 vision for exactly this reason.)
Personally, I know myself too liberal- and left-leaning ever to be pleased with a Conservative Party government. And, feeling definite visceral sympathies for a ‘conservation of older values’ from my own youth, I also am well aware that no single party has a monopoly on good ideas, and that “progress” is a false, feeble basis for the lib/left claim to superiority over conservatism.
To sum up: Canada is likely to hew to its historic path, preferring the centre and soft-left over the right, but with occasional invitations to the Conservatives to inject fresher ideas as the national government. Yet the party will never have a long term as the power in Ottawa. If it ever does, it will signal that cultural ‘revolution’ has occurred. It will mean Canadians have rejected a centuries-long tradition of moderated politics, materialist values, and middle-class identity.
Appendix
Two studies: Canadian social classes, moderation, and politics of wealth-distribution.
https://ppforum.ca/publications/don-wright-middle-class/
https://irpp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/aots5-banting-myles.pdf
History
Before the American and French Revolutions
For most of recorded history, the terms liberal and conservative were not in use for politics. But the words liberty and conservation possess meanings ready to adapt when modern politics evolved. ‘Liberality’ as generosity was admired; it lacked political significance. ‘Conservatives’ in politics might be generous or not but the word ‘liberal’ (and ‘libertarian’) was not in the political vocabulary.
For all of pre-modern politics, conservative values lined up with the interest of a minority of people in a society, people who most surely approved of hierarchy as the basic truth for human society, and who enjoyed a status high over the lowly, common mass of humans by virtue of “noble blood.”
In this perspective, humans were not created equal and the superior man – women were rarely considered in the calculus – was on top because:
- God(s) ordained it. Call it Providence.
- Nature intended it. Call it natural law.
- Science and Philosophy endorsed the hierarchy of humans in social order.
Or, any 2 together, or all 3 combined.
The conservation of order, the maintenance of status-quo levels, is the very essence of conservatism. Often this means looking to the Past for guidance.
The American Revolution
Canadians ought to know this, a basic fact of our history: we were the English (or British) who said ‘NO’ to the American Revolution. The canadiens, francophone Quebecois, also said NON. Loyalism was baked into the first Canadians after the Revolution. Love of the Crown was a badge of our identity. One could love monarchy and be a liberal here, as in the U.K. Therefore, Loyalism and monarchy were not, here, necessarily conservative. Republicanism was outside the pale of respectable politics, but early Canadians wanted democracy just as Britons did.
French Revolutionary labels: Marx, manifestoes, meanings
The modern era begins with Europe’s unity shattered by religious revolution, when Catholic Christendom – led by a single spiritual power in Rome, a pope – broke into first a few sects, then many more, after the fifteenth century.
Revolutions in politics were mightily and profoundly fused with big changes in Christianity, and the Dutch, English, Germans, and Scandinavians developed “Protestant” national identities and new politics. Canadians need pay attention only to the English, Americans, and French, for they gave us our political form.
Karl Marx put his prodigious mind to work writing a Philosophy of History to explain the French Revolution, and that revolution (1789-99) wrote the recipe for Left, Right, and Centre. Marx most definitely identified himself with Left, and his theory – Marxian ‘historical materialism’ – burdened us with Socialism and Communism in our vocabulary. The nineteenth century had an interesting evolution: the ancient regime of lords-ruling-commoners slowly melted away.
https://www.history.com/articles/how-did-the-political-labels-left-wing-and-right-wing-originate
https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/4807/4807.html
The meaning of conserve is plain enough; the term “reactionary” for the deep conservative is less so. Reactionary means extreme, rejecting any revolutionary social change. Those advocating progressive democratic change were liberal or radical. Progress is as integral to liberals as hierarchy to conservatives.
A person professing adherence to Marxian politics is a socialist or communist. The Master laid that down as his foundation; violent ‘class war’ was demanded by Marx’s historical materialism in order for socialism to eradicate capitalism.
[No one can be Conservative and Marxist both. But there were politicians quite comfortable with the label “liberal conservative.” John A. MacDonald was one.
Today, liberals claim the political centre; earlier, they were seen as left-leaning.]
Canadian parties with conservatism in their founding recipe [mostly Western]
Wild Rose (Alberta)
https://daveberta.ca/2014/12/wildrose-party-danielle-smith-jim-prentice-floor-crossing/
Progressives (federal party, in the 1920’s)
Social Credit (Alberta and elsewhere)
https://www.geni.com/projects/Social-Credit-Party-of-Canada/31473
Reform (Alberta)
https://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/article/view/570/495
United Farmers (west of Quebec)
https://fiveable.me/key-terms/history-canada-after-1867/united-farmers
Christian Heritage
https://grokipedia.com/page/Christian_Heritage_Party_of_Canada
Union Nationale (Quebec)
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/politics-and-government/quebec-sovereignist-movement-begins
People’s Party of Canada (‘populist’, with no regional base, quite recent, very unsuccessful)
https://grokipedia.com/page/People’s_Party_of_Canada
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