The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part One

Re-Examining Canadian Conservatism in Practice

Image from Prospect Magazine

Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.

Today we have the first of a mini-series of essays re-examining Canadian conservatism in practice. The author is well known to Woke Watch Canada readers, but his pseudonym has changed. Regular readers will recognize the analytical and writing style of Mr. M. However, he has elected for a more normal sounding pseudonym: Scott Miller.

Mr. M was a fun pseudonym, and I’m sure we will all miss it. Maybe some day it will be safe for academics to use their real names when critiquing the status quo. One can only hope. Either way, it’s a new day, and it belongs to Scott Miller.

The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part One

By Scott Miller (Historian)

Preamble: The following essay series will shine a light on the weakness of Canadian conservativism, not because the author wishes to find weakness, but because this flaw is what presents itself to any sustained scrutiny. This weakness has to do with the failure of conservative party platforms in Canada to come to grips with the emergence of social politics in the 60s and back sensible social conservative responses to identity radicalism — case in point, when the Kathleen Wynne government built gender identity into school curriculum in 2015, the response of Ontario conservatives under Patrick Brown and later (under Doug Ford) was to placate socially conservative parents by promising to repeal the curriculum, to get elected, and then to flip-flop and retain or intensify progressive identity radicalism in schools (more on this is section 4.0). This essay is, therefore, an examination of weakness and failure but also a consideration of what strength might look like. The weakness of Patrick Brown and Doug Ford’s positions vis-à-vis the Wynne curriculum must be placed within the greater context of conservatism in Canada. The assessment of pundit Andrew Coyne offers a good starting point: “Conservatism in Canada now amounts to, at best, opportunism. They are in favour of whatever is unassailably popular, opposed to whatever is indefensibly unpopular, at any given moment: just so long as no one asks them to take a risk, a stand, or a decision, to outline a coherent governing philosophy or explain how it differs from the left’s” (Coyne, “Canada’s Conservatives Won't Start Winning Until They Know Why They Want to Win,” National Post, Feb. 7, 2018). To understand why the platforms of both Brown and Ford lacked any real place for a socially conservative reversal of the Wynne program, why, in both cases, the overture made to social conservativism was opportunistic and superficial and soon discarded, a study of the peculiarities of the Canadian conservative has to be made.

The following essay will dispense with any consideration of most of the factional division lines within Canadian conservativism, such as Blue Tory vs Red Tory or Tory vs anti-Laurentian (Woodfinden 2022). Instead, attention will be focused on the all-important division line that separates the Doug Fords from the Tanya Granic Allens (a social conservative with a backbone) of this world: that is the division between “traditionalist” Canadian conservatives and social conservatives. A traditionalist conservative is one who does not respond to the shift in the 1960s wherein social matters emerge as major political issues — according to these politicians, such matters as abortion rights, gay marriage, or the Wynne Sex Ed curriculum are not matters to be engaged with politically, or, in keeping with Canadian conservatives’ long-standing policy of “brokerage politics,” they find it more politically expedient to disengage with these issues (Farney 2009, 244; Farney 2012, 3); a social conservative, on the other hand, is one who engages with the changing socio-political realities brought forth by the successive waves of social radicalism which have been crashing on society since the 1960s. While Canadian social conservatives have tended to justify their opposition as a defense of tradition and religion (Farney 2012, 3), it will be put forward below that it would be more salient and compelling to frame this opposition in another way: as a principled liberty defending opposition to the socialist remaking of the world.

Section three will focus on the insights that proceed from Farney’s 2012 study of social conservativism in Canada: the Conservative Party of Canada resisted bringing social conservativism into its party platform, defining “social issues like abortion or gay and lesbian rights as moral issues that were improper subjects for political mobilization. This norm lasted from the emergence of social issues in 1968 until the collapse of the Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 election” (Farney 2012, 5). After 1993, this situation was changed, but only modestly: social conservatives won a presence on Canadian conservative party platforms, but their presence and influence have been faltering (see section three). Finally, section four will look closer at the politics and the particular party platform positions of Brown, Ford and Allen especially with regards to the Wynne Sex Ed Curriculum.

Section 1: What is a Canadian conservative?  In the final analysis, conservatism is “not a universal ideology in the way that other political ideologies are” (Woodfinden 2022; cf. Woodfinden and Speer 2013, 86). Conservativism, in the view of those who theorize it intellectually, is “context-dependent” (Woodfinden and Speer 2013, 86), and so it must be considered in tandem with the forces that oppose it. In the realm of modern politics, there are three ideological groupings that matter: liberalism (a set of fixed propositions), the collectivist family of politics (socialism, Marxism, and communism, which again contain fixed propositions) and conservativism; in the context of the anglosphere (the English-speaking world), the latter reacts to regulate liberalism and oppose socialism. As will be shown below, although this is not what conservatism has meant everywhere, it is what it means in English-speaking contexts for a very specific reason.

How did the conservativism of the anglosphere come to defend the proposition that society should operate on the basis and a citizenry endowed with individual rights and freedoms? After all, the most important person to put forward this proposition was the father of liberal politics, John Locke. In order to get closer to what it means to be a Canadian conservative, it will be necessary to give brief consideration to the history of the British Whig party (from which the Liberal Party in Canada descends), and to their opponents, the British Tory party (from which Conservative Party in Canada descends). The least that one needs to know is that, prior to the glorious revolution of 1688, the Tory party had originally acted to conserve the order of the time, opposing the upstart liberal program of Locke and the Whigs; however, when the Catholic king James II was deposed during the revolution, an event brought about largely by the Whigs, Whiggish (or liberal) politics became the new order of the day. From this point forward, the old Tory position was effectively moribund, and both major parties assume ideologically liberal policy positions; as Rod Preece documents, since 1688, the debate in the British Conservative Party “has been about the degree to which individualism should be curbed, not about whether individual freedom and responsibility are in principle to be approved. And, in Canada, the Conservatives have been at least equally libertarian since the nineteenth century” (Preece 1977, 11). And so, as Scruton stresses, we will understand modern conservatism as a political movement “only if we understand that some elements of liberal individualism have been programmed into it from the outset” (Scruton 2018, 17; cf. Farney 2012, 17). As a side note, the preceding points about the acceptance of civil liberty becoming a bipartisan position are not meant to imply that the British Tories immediately pivoted to popular sovereignty (the leader of a state should be chosen by the people); throughout the 1700s, many British Tories continued defend the notion that civil liberties should exist as something granted by the monarch (Scruton 2018, 19-24).

Although it is seldom emphasized in so many words, we might intuitively realize that both the Canadian Conservative and Liberal parties, as the British Whigs and Tories before them, operate on a shared foundation of liberal values: after all, we live in a liberal democracy and it’s not as though one side is making the argument that citizens should not have rights and freedoms — the debate is rather what those things should entail in practice. The ideology of conservative prime minister John A. MacDonald is reflective of this very point: it is the reason why he called his party the “Liberal-Conservative” party (for an exposition of the little noticed liberal aspect of MacDonald’s thought, see Woodfinden and Speer 2013, 81, 91–92, 95). All of this is to say that a Canadian conservative can, and should, base their political rhetoric on the defense of freedom and liberty knowing that it is intrinsically conservative, in the system of politics in question, to do so. This carries with it the requirement that the Canadian conservative is obliged, correspondingly, to oppose that system which seeks to impose the priority of equality over the priority of liberty.  

End of Part 1. Please return next week for Part 2: What is a socially conservative Canadian in theory and why should a Canadian conservative be socially conservative?

Bibliography:

Bottomore, Tom. 2002. The Frankfurt School and its Critics. Routledge, London.

Brown, Patrick. 2018. Take Down: The Attempted Political Assassination of Patrick Brown. Optimum Publishing International: Montreal and Toronto.

Farney, James. 2009. “The Personal Is Not Political: The Progressive Conservative Response to Social Issues.” American Review of Canadian Studies 39:3: 242-252.

Farney, James. 2012. Social Conservatives and Party Politics in Canada and the United States. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, Buffalo, London.

Graham, Peter. 2019. Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Goldstein, Leslie. 1982. Early Feminist Themes in French Utopian Socialism: The St.-Simonians and Fourier. Journal of the History of Ideas 43/1: 91-108.

Holmes, Kim. 2017. The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. New York, London: Encounter Books.

Kolakowski, Leszek. 1978. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (Vol. 3). Clarendon Press, Oxford. 

Manuel, Frank and Frietzie Manuel. 1979. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press.

McDuffie, Eric. 2011. Sojourning for freedom Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Duke University Press: Durham and London.

Preece, Rod. 1977. “The Myth of the Red Tory.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1/2: 1–28.

Scruton, Roger. 2018. Conservativism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. All Print Books: New York.

Sowell, Thomas. 1987. A Conflict of Visions. Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. Basic Books.

Woodfinden, Ben. 2022. “A Tory Impulse and Anti-Laurentian Ideas Drive Canadian Conservatism”, thehub.ca, accessed June 28, 2002: https://thehub.ca/2022/08/17/ben-woodfinden-a-tory-impulse-and-anti-laurentian-ideas-drive-canadian-conservatism/

Woodfinden, Ben and Sean Speer. 2013. “Canadian Conservativism and National Developmentalism: Sir John A. MacDonald’s Hamiltonian Persuasion.” In Canadian Conservative Political Thought, edited by Lee Trepanier and Richard Avramenko, 85–100. Routledge, New York and London.

---

Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

Follow Woke Watch Canada on X - @WokeWatchCanada

Or, by contributing to our Donor Box: