By Bruce Stewart
The Radical Tory
(Bruce Stewart of Vancouver, B.C. is a philosopher of history, futurist, management thinker, iconoclast. "A man who loves his life and who knows what enormous virtue — what discipline of thought, of energy, of purpose, of devotion — it entails, would rebel at the thought of letting it serve those who scorn it.")
One confusion lies at the heart of Canadians' reflexive thinking about their politics, and it is a reflex that led, from Mackenzie King's long run after 1935 onward, to the presumption of Liberals in power. This reflex is a confusion about where and what defines the "centre" of Canadian politics.
As often happens in this Dominion of ours, the confusion comes from our forgetting of our own past. Now, to come to know the past as it was is to begin to put the pieces into place to allow a change in reflexes to form. So, a little history is in order.
When the United States held its revolution, one of the outcomes was the purging, from American society, of most people who carried political strains other than the two dominant strains of European liberalism of the late 1700s — Whig and Jacobin. (Whig-style liberalism would be found in someone like Alexander Hamilton; Jacobin in someone like Thomas Jefferson; George Washington is an example of a Whig with a strong sense of noblesse oblige.)
These quickly deviated away from their European roots, without residual Toryism to help act as an opponent to frame their course. The Whig strain, of course, died out in the mid-1800s, to be replaced by a new party, the Republicans, whose first elected politicians came into power in the 1840s; Jacksonian ideas modified Jacobism to create the Democrats as we know them.
Since then, despite massive immigration bringing with it the 19th century rise of socialist and social democracy thinking, the American experience has been strangely (in world terms) resistant to new politics of any sort — the two liberal branches trade power back and forth.
There is no American tradition to compare to Canadian (or British) Toryism on the right, there is only a "favour the powerful and build the empire" right wing faction of liberalism in the GOP; there is no social democratic tradition in America to compare to the Canadian CCF/NDP or Britain's early Labour and modern Liberal Democratic parties or Australia's Labor party, there is only a "let's play favourites with interest groups" left wing faction of liberalism in the Democratic party.
Both the GOP and the Democrats believe that nothing is beyond change (there are only things that are easier or harder to change); both believe that you do things today and let tomorrow take care of itself; neither worries over much about whether what it is doing today is in any way connected to its own past (much less the nation's). In other words, they are ahistoric and anti-traditional (despite appeals to great figures of their pasts [Lincoln & Reagan; FDR & Kennedy] or great events and their programmes (free the slaves, bring down the USSR, the New Deal, civil rights, etc.) — never confuse branding with reality.
Never forget, too, that the American experience is one driven by a civic theology, one that one is to assimilate to (the melting pot approach). (This goes down to regional assimilation, as I experienced during my time living in the USA.) The system becomes self-reinforcing, which explains the current rigidity of the Demopublican politicial régime there.
Canada's politics has always been much wider in its strains. (People who look at Canada from outside almost immediately note how much more like Europe in this regard we are than are either the other settler Dominions Great Britain founded, or the United States.)
Our Toryism is the ideas of Richard Hooker from the 1550s, filtered through Anglicanism (rather than through a landed aristocracy), and with a healthy dose of monarchism (the expression in an institution of the bond between the past, the present and the future) at its core, coupled with a pre-Voltarian residue from les Bleus du Québec, again strongly based in historical and future-directed obligation.
Our liberalism melds the Clear Grit strain to les Rouges — a heady mixture of Whig ideas about the evolution of society ("change if necessary but not necessarily change") and an early sense of frontier continentalism (in this they shared the dominant impulse of the Americans in the 19th century).
Then we created, out of our immigrant communities, several left-derived responses: United Farmers, Progressives, the CCF, all of which, in one way or another, carried ideas of social democracy, just as Social Credit introduced a heady mix of socialism and corporatism (and, with a little less socialism and a lot more corporatism, la Union Nationale of Duplessis). Throughout, immigrants have not been asked to sign up to a Canadian civic theology, other than perhaps the wisdom of being "a little to the left of the United States".
In other words, Canadian politics spans a much wider spectrum of options, of which liberalism was just one such. One reason when the Federal Progressive Conservative party fell apart in and after the 1993 election that Red Tories could easily accommodate themselves to the NDP rather than the Liberal Party was found in this spread — both the Tories and the NDP share the notion of a community banded together over time, with obligations of stewardship for future generations and protection of the accomplishments of the previous ones.
The idea of "now" and only the needs of now being a subject for political thinking and action as found in the Liberal party as it had evolved over the years is anathema to such holders of the tradition of a community in time.
I said the Liberal party evolved, but of course they were not alone in this. It was inevitable that between all the cross-border relationships that Canadian and American families have, and the easy availability of information from the United States in Canada (not to mention all the years that Canadian educational systems used American texts!) that American ideas of what politics is made from would permeate Canadian culture.
Then, too, the takeover of our universities in the 1960s by American scholars — rapid expansion of tertiary education required more faculty than we could provide for ourselves, and mass hiring from the United States meant that departments would shift their intellectual emphases.
(Before the 1960s, Canadian departments of political studies were built around a study of political philosophies and the strains of them that made up a country; after the American hiring binge, they became departments of "political science" concerned with the ways power is exercised to make change, just as they had been for decades south of the border.)
In any event, back into the 1930s, American liberalism began to infiltrate both Canadian politics, finding a natural home in the Liberal party but also creating wings of right-wing liberalism in the Progressive Conservatives and of left-wing liberalism as the CCF morphed into the NDP.
Out of this has come the great Canadian reflex: we are, as a people, natural centrists — people of the radical centre, who recognized the value of a diversity of approaches and the need to mediate them, yet who, as a frontier nation divorced from the continued evolution of Europe, also became carriers of a certain idea of structured change to develop our share of this continent.
This is how, for instance, it comes to be that most of the great Canadian institutions and infrastructure have been projects of Conservative Governments: Conservatives not only linked the country coast-to-coast by rail, we gave our nation an east-west economic dimension against north-south "natural flows"; we built the CBC, we built the Bank of Canada, we provided the Bill of Rights (precursor to the Charter) and, when the time came, we reversed a century-old position and finally negotiated and won the day for a larger economic space in the Free Trade Agreement. These are not apparent "Conservative" issues, but they do reflect that principle of a community bound together in space and time that goes back to our Tory roots.
But our definition of "centre" has shifted, for now the centre is also occupied by those — on the official left, middle or right — who believe in change for change's sake, rewards for the here and now, and a lack of appreciation and even outright denial of our history.
This is what the Liberal party has almost wholly become — a vehicle to hold power "because stuff can be done" — and what great stretches of the CPC and NDP contain.
(The variability of "centre" that has evolved is nowhere more clear than in the provinces, where, for instance, in BC we have a party of right-wing liberalism that is thought of as "centrist" and in Ontario all three parties are resolutely moving to the left of the "centre". In Québec, of course, "nationalist" parties such as the Bloc and the PQ — and now the PLQ and ADQ to a lesser extent — are all "change for change's sake" parties, despite the pur laine rhetoric.) As long as Canadians believe that their historical radical centre rooted in tradition and stewardship is the same as the "centre of change", they will reflexively prefer Liberals as "the safe choice".
For Conservatives, then, this means that drawing out our history and showing that Conservative policies today do link our past, our present and our future together. Should the NDP survive, it, too, needs to return to its CCF roots and build from there. This will quietly and effectively begin to separate the twin notions of "centre" that form the reflex. From that, our own crippled "one and a bunch of second-placer" political system can begin to heal.
Will this happen? It depends on our leadership in the Canadian political spectrum being able to find their roots and then transform the impulses of left-and-right-wing liberalism (for social conservatives who take their lead from American examples, the rejection of the term "liberal" in this context is itself reflexive — but the desire to change a society not by slow evolution but by quick action is the essence of liberalism and I shall not shy away from the term!) into ones that fit into our long, distinct identity. Indeed, this is why the question of Canadian identity even exists. Dilute the influence of American liberalism on our richer tapestry of living, and the Canadian identity will be visible again.
Without it, you can be sure, Liberal theft of our heritage and distortion of who we are for their temporary advantage will continue on, interrupted occasionally, but essentially never gone. Let us banish this imported species back to being just one role in the Canadian ecosystem!
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