Conservatism in Canada

This review appears in the Winter-Spring 2011 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

It’s the Regime, Stupid!
by Barry Cooper
(Toronto: Key Porter, 2009)

Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values
by Brian Lee Crowley
(Toronto: Key Porter, 2009)

In 2006 the long-reigning Liberal Party of Canada was defeated at the polls and Stephen Harper, the leader of a transformed Conservative Party, became prime minister. Throughout the preceding decade the “Right” in Canada had been in a state of disarray as the western conservatives—especially those in Alberta (the Texas of Canada)—seceded from the traditional “Red Tory” party, the Progressive Conservatives. Harper showed great political skill in reuniting the Right, now with an emphasis on “Blue Tory” principles amenable to the West: a priority placed on individualism and the limiting of government, an effort to support traditional, especially family-based morality.

For many Canadians in the “East” this looked like the Americanization of the Canadian Right. As a consequence, Harper’s first two election victories brought him to power with only a minority government. With the election of 2011, however, no matter how unsettled Canadians may have been at first about Harper’s conservatism, they have now been moved to confer upon this “cowboy” with seemingly “un-Canadian” values a substantial parliamentary majority. The books under review seek to explain this change. However, what both take themselves to be explaining is not a particular election result but rather a sea change in Canadian political history.

Perverting the Canadian Ethos

Canada has in the past half century developed into something very like the social democracies of Europe. This is in contrast to the trajectory followed by the United States. While Keynesian economics and the rise of the welfare state were dominant in both nations following World War II, even by the 1960s Canada was beginning to expand public institutions and expend public funds in ways that were categorically different from American ventures. And while in the 1980s there was a reaction in the United States to the welfare state, Canada remained bound to its trajectory toward European political forms. Why did Canada follow this path?

The traditional account that Canadians (including this Canadian) tell themselves and others is that Canada is inherently more social-democratic than the United States because it was more conservative in its foundations. Canada consists of those colonies that resisted the siren call of revolution and retained their loyalty to the crown. The conclusion of the American Revolution had the effect of sending thousands of Loyalists north to Canada. As against the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the Canadian founding document was an act of the British Parliament and proclaimed as its object “peace, order, and good government.” Instead of a “Wild West” founded by pioneering settlers, Canada opened its West through the good offices of the Mounted Police, who arrived before any settlers to provide the aforementioned peace, order, and good government. Integral to the origins of the country was the undertaking, with the support of the federal government, of a continent-wide railway.

So collective action, for the sake of national unity, was foundational for the country. According to the usual account, precisely because Canadians understood that government preceded individuals, there was built into the Canadian ethos a tendency to look to and trust government to realize public goods. This trust made Canadians a decidedly less adventuresome and more orderly people than the perpetrators of the great experiment to the south. In this sense Canadians were more “European” in their attachment to the premodern. So with the rise of the welfare state out of the Great Depression and World War II, Canada was, like the European states, more amenable to social democracy.

This is the traditional account, and both Barry Cooper and Brian Crowley will have none of it. Cooper writes his critique of the current Canadian “regime” from the heartland of western conservatism and as part of the “Calgary School” connected (more or less) to Stephen Harper. Crowley, while originally from Vancouver, has for years lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia—a city with more genteel aspirations than Calgary. In spite of their different backgrounds and markedly different sensibilities, the two share a common thesis: contemporary Canada, the social welfare state, is not the fulfillment of an older Canadian ethos but its perversion, and a perversion—though established for more than half a century—that is coming to an end. Both argue that the election of Harper is the harbinger of this transformation.

Both Cooper and Crowley follow the work of Janet Ajzenstat and other historians who have sought to debunk the claim that Canada was inherently Tory in its foundations. Ajzenstat has argued through a series of studies that Canada’s foundation was based on principles of limited government and individual rights and liberties, largely indistinguishable from those of the United States. The whole point of the federal government was not to provide a national culture that united Canadians into a corporate whole but to act as a neutral forum to realize certain general goods (defense, law and order, governance of the economy) and not to get in the way of the provinces in their work of self-definition. As Crowley notes, a number of Canadian politicians prior to the mid-twentieth century criticized the United States for its openness to egalitarian populism, for its susceptibilities to a progressivism and collectivism antithetical to the traditions of British individualism. By this account the rise of the welfare state in Canada is a betrayal of its origins and as such needs to be explained.

It is here that Cooper and Crowley offer differing accounts. Cooper writes from a background in the study of political philosophy, especially in the context of the work of Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Crowley, on the other hand, writes from a background in political economy, especially the work of Friedrich Hayek. Cooper’s interest is in the influence of political forms on the souls of citizens—in questions of regime and myth as structuring and informing how the life of a people unfolds. Crowley, by contrast, looks to the ways that economic and political structures and principles affect not only demography and wealth but also the moral character of citizens. Cooper looks into the soul of Canada and shouts (to conflate Nietzsche with Bing Crosby) “give me air . . . open air, under starry skies”; Crowley is a policy wonk, analyzing the economic-demographic forces realigning the Canadian polity. On the face of it, these two approaches can be seen as complementary, and to a certain extent they are. But fundamentally the two books provide incompatible accounts of what Canada is and what the implications are for the crucial shift the country is undergoing. But before we turn to the disagreements between our two authors, let me briefly sketch their basic claims.

Cowboys and Losers

Cooper’s is a highly readable and splendidly unsettling rant in the tradition of western Canadian resistance. Its starting point is the sponsorship scandal or “Adscam” that came to light in 2004 and, in 2006, was crucial to the defeat of the ruling Liberal Party and the election of Harper as prime minister. For Cooper, Adscam was not an instance of financial corruption, nor simply the corruption that arises from one party holding the reins of power too long. Rather, it was exemplary of what is wrong with the post–World War II Canadian regime. Cooper describes this regime in various ways: it is the embedded state, it is the state of losers, and it is the state engaged in the leveling project of national unity. All of these perversions of good governance came together in the sponsorship scandal: for the sake of national unity, the federal (Liberal) government provided outrageous sums to ad agencies (with ties to the Liberal Party) to “sponsor” events in Quebec (that “special,” always-oppressed province) on behalf of the federal government. In Adscam, all the elements of Cooper’s account come together. Let’s take those elements separately.

First, for Cooper, the “embedded state” is simply the welfare state that “embeds” itself in all aspects of society, making all of society dependent upon it. Cooper agrees with Crowley that the social welfare state is wholly iniquitous in its effects upon character: dependency destroys productive, responsible freedom and instills the foundations for self-deluding fantasies of entitled forms of recognition. When rights become entitlements, moral capacity withers.

The second element of Cooper’s account is that the present regime in Canada is the regime of “losers.” He does a very effective job of showing how efforts by the more easterly parts of the country to define themselves—through stories of the Loyalist defensive posture in Ontario against the Americans (“the garrison mentality”), Quebec’s defense of its distinctiveness, and the Maritimes’ need for protection and support from the rest of the country—all position Canada as a country based on myths of the defeated. For Cooper, western Canada, and above all Alberta, stands apart from this “loser” culture, as a practical, can-do culture based on myths of self-reliance. Of course, another way of speaking of the loser mythos is as traditional conservatism, the stance that largely undergirded the “Red Tory” tradition that Harper has worked to expunge from the Conservative Party. If conservatism means the party of lost causes, Cooper will have none of it.

Finally, Cooper wants to reject the project of national unity that has beset Canada since the 1960s as it has sought to define itself apart from its older colonial relation to Britain. For Cooper, such a unifying project is both false and leveling: it simply seeks to transform the country into a nation of “losers” living in an embedded state—so, for instance, publicly funded Medicare or day care become the core of Canadian identity. To Alberta, national unity appears simply as a continuation of forms of colonialism that have too long defined the relation of the West to central Canada.

The heart of Cooper’s whole account rests on the distinction of winners and losers, Albertans and the rest of Canada. This is essentially a Nietzschean division of the strong and the weak. What determines reality is one’s existential stance, one’s mythos. Canada has pursued the goal of bringing about a nation of last men. But, by some twist of fate, Canadians have been induced to vote for Stephen Harper—so perhaps there is still some worth in us, if only we would all follow the Albertans into true “cowboy” culture. The problem with this account is that while it rightly sees the transformation in contemporary Canada as essentially moral and political in nature, its turning to mythos as the most basic level of explication actually leaves one without explanation or argument. Everything depends on one’s “strength” to face life in its fullness.

Mirror Image

In contrast, Brian Crowley does provide an explanation of both the rise of Canada as a social democracy and the expectation that this corruption is coming to an end. For Crowley, two things primarily induced Canada to develop such a powerful public sector and to create a culture of dependency: the huge demographic shift in post–World War II Canada, as the available workforce expanded enormously—as a percentage, markedly more than that of the United States—and, second, the rise of Quebec sovereignty. In fact, as a good Hayekian, Crowley cannot allow that the first reason was actually the true one—Canada could have absorbed the increased workforce without expanding the public sector, and the examples of the United States and Australia suggest this might be so.

It is, therefore, Quebec’s aspiration for sovereignty that explains the shift: the rise in the 1960s of Quebecois nationalism, the “Quiet Revolution,” produced a bidding war between the Quebecois government and the federal government for the loyalty of Quebecers. Because of federal principles, this burgeoning of the public sector in Quebec was universalized across the country at both the provincial and federal levels. Canadian social democracy thus became an exercise in bribing Quebec to stay in Canada. Crowley’s book is full of facts and figures about just how dependent Quebec’s economy has become. His data would certainly give new reasons for those English-speaking Canadians so inclined to hate Quebec.

In parallel with the rise of the social welfare state (the fearful symmetry of Crowley’s title), we can anticipate that with Canada’s demographic decline and the erosion of Quebec sovereignty, the tide is going out on Canada as a social democracy. With that, a recovery is at hand for Canada’s originally more individualist and limited-government principles. For Crowley, the crucial force transforming Canada is demographic: the developing work shortage in Canada and increasing numbers of retirees will simply force Canada to reduce what Crowley calls its “taking” aspects (nonproductive, welfare-dependent employment) and increase its “making” (productive) aspects. This, in turn, leads to a moral restoration that supports individual responsibility, the family, and limited government. As against Cooper, there is in Crowley an actual explanation of the transformation of Canada into a welfare state and an explanation for the hope that this state is experiencing its limits. Crowley does not operate at the level of myths and regimes but rather deals with the effects of demographic and economic forces. According to Crowley, numbers, not myths, determine reality.

The weakness in Crowley’s account is due to the somewhat reductive and accidental character that operates at this level of explanation. Is it really adequate to see the transformation of Canada since World War II as a result of some bad economic thinking and the effort to buy off Quebecois nationalism? Hermeneutically, as an explanation of how Canadians have experienced this history, this explanation fares no better than Cooper’s. This is the problem with telling the story as simply one of perversion, corruption, and error—something that both authors do. Certainly there is much that is deeply disturbing to conservative principles in this history, but it needs to be understood in a more Aristotelian way.

What Cooper and Crowley both deny is that Canada is or can be a proper state, a unity of ends. If the greatest evil is the social welfare state, one would have to make this denial: to avoid social democracy, the state must be limited to being only a means. But to limit the state in this way is precisely to deny conservatism insofar as it has a relation to a premodern, and above all Aristotelian, sense of the political. Certainly Cooper and Crowley are right to decry the dependency, the leveling and reductive character of Canada as a social democracy. The vision of Pierre Trudeau, of Canada as a nation of rights- and entitlement-bearing citizens living in bilingual, multicultural harmony is destructive of the truth of the country—both its history and its constitution.

Yet it was Aristotle who pointed out that truth is like a barn door—it is impossible to miss it, but also hard to hit all of it. That is, the developments that have happened in Canada are not simply accidental and retractable, simply the result of loser myths or buying off Quebec; real aspirations for truth and justice are at work. The problem is not what is wanted: that Canada be experienced, as a whole and in its parts, as a state, a living federation. The problem is that this was sought too immediately, too much at the level of desires and needs, of feelings and myths. Cooper and Crowley provide, then, not a truly alternative account of Canada but a kind of mirror image to the prevailing one: one myth to oppose another, one economic system to oppose another. The demand that faces Canada is to try to find a form of thought that is properly conservative, that places Canada within the whole development of the West. And in Canada’s context, that means recovering something of the thought of the original Loyalists. This thought was neither Tory nor Liberal, but Whig—as was Edmund Burke himself.♦

Neil G. Robertson is associate professor of humanities at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada.