The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part Three

Re-Examining Canadian Conservatism in Practice

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(If you haven’t read the first part of this essay series, here you go: The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part One . Also, listen to Scott Miller discuss conservatism on the View Points podcast).

By Scott Miller (Historian)

Section 3: Why conservative politicians in Canada -e.g. Patrick Brown and Doug Ford- are weak and fail as social conservatives. Farney’s important 2012 study of social conservativism in Canada informs us of many important particulars, but to begin with, it also relays what we all intuitively understand: the essential fact that, unlike in the United States, where social conservativism emerged and became an integral part of the policy positions of the Republican Party, social conservativism has not found enduring party support from the Conservative Party of Canada (Farney 2012, 131-132).  

As Farney’s study makes clear, there are two fundamental types of conservative politicians in Canada. These two types typified conservative thinking before the 1960s made “the personal political” and they continue to typify the positions of federal and provincial conservative parties today: they are the “traditionalists” and the “Laissez-Faire” conservatives. Traditionalists had always maintained that social matters such as religion or the family were not matters for political action, were separate and autonomous concerns to be addressed in other ways. This position was maintained by traditionalist Canadian conservatives even after the onset of left-liberalism in the 60s (Farney 2012, 16). The other group, which became numerous after 1960, are the Laissez-Faire conservatives who emphasize the free market and are concerned about the growth of big government — the members of this group have been divided as to whether the sexual revolution should be encouraged as an outgrowth of liberalism or opposed as an unnatural imposition on society (Farney 2012, 17-18). Notably, the religious base of the Conservative party in Canada comes not from Catholic churches but from Protestant churches and, unlike catholics, protestants range from “ambivalent to cautiously supportive of the liberalization of legislation concerning divorce, homosexuality, and abortion” (Farney 2012, 83). This means that Canadian conservativism’s religious base is not at all optimized for social conservatism, another fact to consider when basing one’s social conservativism on religious objections.

Canadian Social Conservatism and the Gay Rights/LGBT Lobby: With this backdrop in view, it will be no surprise that the social conservative position in Canada has had little representation in its conservative parties, and political counteraction against left-liberalism has ranged from feeble to non-existent. With the legalization of abortion by Pierre Trudeau in the late 60s, the first concentrations of social conservativism in Canada appeared in the 70s in the form of pro-life movements mostly centered around the conservative rural catholics such as the Campaign Life movement; REAL Women of Canada is a socially conservative group that formed in 1983 to “to protest abortion and state support for feminist organizations” (Farney 2012, 90). Since the 1990s, REAL Women of Canada has dedicated significant effort to opposing the Gay Rights/LGBT lobby. However, although Gay Rights activism underwent a significant upsurge in the 90s, becoming the most hotly contested social issue of the 1990s/2000s, this provoked no meaningful response from the Progress Conservative Party of Canada (Farney 2012, 95-96, 106).

The first major divergence from this situation came with the policies of the upstart conservative party known as the “Reform Party” (1987-2000). This break-away party produced the first unequivocally socially conservative party policy statements on the matter of gay rights: while accepting that gay persons should be protected from discrimination, the party declared its support for “limiting the definition of a legal marriage as the union of a woman and a man” on the grounds that “the rationale for [family] benefits is generally related to the procreation and raising of children” (Farney 2012, 107). The position here taken by the Reform party was not ephemeral but consequential, perhaps in part because it could draw on popular support from the Canadian population: 52% of Canadians opposed gay marriage in 1998 (Farney 2012, 105). The Reform party, using its opposition to gay marriage, succeeded in building social conservativism into mainstream Canadian conservative party politics for the first time because “they could link such opposition to both populism and conservatism in a way that pro-lifers had earlier been unable to do” (Farney 2012, 113).

During the era of Stephen Harper (2006–2015) two tendencies assert themselves in the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada: i) the resurgence of the brokerage style politics (downplaying divisive issues to produce the appearance of a centrist party);  and ii) contrasting with the first tendency, social conservative politics now have a permanent place in the Conservative Party of Canada, although their lobbying positions may be alternatively emphasized or deemphasized (Farney 2012, 114–115). Harper himself departed from the previous practice of brokerage politicians in Canada by positioning the party on the socially conservative side of the same-sex marriage debate — in fact, Harper promised, and did, attempt to repeal bill C-38 which legalized same-sex marriage upon being elected prime minister in 2006 although the attempt failed (Farney 2012, 119, 125). As Farney observes, this era of significant social conservativism in Canadian party politics was on the decline almost as soon as it began; with the failure of Harper’s same-sex marriage repeal, “no longer do social conservative elites in the party feel it appropriate to articulate their views at any cost, nor do they see the articulation of principles as their primary purpose in politics. Instead, the vision they pursue is one that seeks incremental change in their favour, but only when the pursuit of that change does not endanger the party’s chances of staying in office” (Farney 2012, 127). In other words, the very late entry of social conservatives onto the stage of party politics is becoming less and less consequential as they cede ground to the brokerage politics of traditional Canadian conservatives.

In the final analysis, socialism and left-liberalism are not even the worst enemies of the family — that would be modernity itself. In every developed country, the ways of life brought on by modernization have caused reproduction rates to fall: currently, the reproduction rate is at below replacement levels (1.7 children per couple) in America and Canada. In South Korea, home of the world’s lowest birth rate (.68 children per couple), and a population that will face extinction in four generations if nothing changes, we see the most blatant example of how modernity itself is the number one threat to the family. The causal factors include: i) a mass migration from urban lifestyles to the cities as the nature of industry changes; ii) crippling housing affordability issues and cost of living rates making small family sizes more desirable; iii) these issues combine to necessitate long work hours and the obligation for both sexes to work full time jobs instead of producing children (source:).

These causal factors —massive industrial, technological and lifestyle changes— do not map onto any one political ideology, and there seems to be no political answer to these problems. And yet, in the face of the threat to the family posed by modernity itself, and the fact that our society is going extinct (albeit currently at a slower rate than that of the South Koreans), social conservatives would do well to oppose those forces compounding the problem by pushing anti-family policies rooted in delirious and utopian socialist principles.  

End of Part 3. Please return next week for Part 4: Patrick Brown, Doug Ford and Tanya Granic Allen

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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/

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

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