by Paul Wells
Was he referring to abortion? To capital punishment? Hardly. Even as he proposed a major strategic realignment in Canadian conservatism, Harper kept a keen eye on the battles that could realistically be won in the near term. So the example he gave the Civitas crowd that day was the Liberal war against … spanking.
Of course, the Criminal Code set out “legitimate limits” on parents’ use of force against their children. “Yet the most recent Liberal Throne Speech, as part of its ‘children’s agenda,’ hinted at more government interference in the family.” The Throne Speech in question, Jean Chrétien’s last as prime minister, had included a sentence promising to reform the Criminal Code to increase penalties for abuse and neglect.
“We saw the capacity for this abuse of power in the events that took place in Aylmer, Ontario. Children there were seized for no reason other than the state disagreed with the religious views of their parents. No conservative can support this kind of intrusion, and conservatives have an obligation to speak forcefully against such acts.
“This same argument,” Harper continued, “applies equally to a range of issues involving the family … such as banning child pornography, raising the age of sexual consent, providing choice in education and strengthening the institution of marriage. All of these items are key to a conservative agenda.”
A renaissance in Burkean conservatism would also help in foreign affairs “because the emerging debates on foreign affairs should be fought on moral grounds,” he said. The war on terrorism, “as well as the emerging debate on the goals of the United States as the sole superpower,” needed “conservative insights on preserving historic values and moral insights on right and wrong.” The Left (“with the exception of Tony Blair”) had no answers on such questions. But conservatives should. “We understand that the great geopolitical battles against modern tyrants and threats are battles over values.”
So how should conservatives go about amending their ways in a manner more consistent with social-conservative values? Carefully and subtly. “The social conservative issues we choose should not be denominational, but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths. It also helps when social conservative concerns overlap those of people with a more libertarian orientation.”
Second, the movement must be content with incremental gains, “inevitably” the only real ones. Rushing or attempting any kind of revolutionary upheaval “will certainly fail.”
Finally, conservatives must understand that adjusting their message would entail short-term losses as well as gains. “We may lose some old ‘conservatives,’ Red Tories like the David Orchards or the Joe Clarks. This is not all bad.” But there would be gains that should more than offset the losses. “Many traditional Liberal voters, especially those from key ethnic and immigrant communities, will be attracted to a party with strong traditional views of values and family.”
In less than an hour, Harper had given clues about his leadership philosophy that would remain valuable for a decade. For many years it had been fashionable to proclaim oneself “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” It was the easiest way for a liberal to claim a brain or a conservative a heart. But in Harper’s view, that was precisely the problem: any position that can be claimed by anyone cannot be defended. Harper preferred his positions with moats around them. He wanted Conservatives to go where Liberals could not follow. He believed what Clark and Mulroney never had: that there would be a voter constituency waiting for him when he staked out this new ground.
We can go further and state that forever after, whenever Harper infuriated the gatekeepers of the old consensus—the Liberals and their cheerleaders in the media and universities, to borrow his language—he would know he was on the right track. That conviction allowed him to view the loss of old-guard Progressive Conservative support with equanimity. He knew he could win support from unexpected quarters, including immigrants. This would permit the growth of a conservatism that would be the opposite of Mulroney’s. Not personal but cultural. Not charismatic but persuasive at a deeper, more atavistic level. Not temporary, but lasting, perhaps longer even than Harper’s own career.
All of this remains true even if we admit to ourselves that much of Harper’s argument was hokum.
Any competent high-school debating team could have picked apart any two consecutive paragraphs of Harper’s Civitas speech, starting with the bit where he said conservatives had spent the twentieth century fighting those notoriously connected impulses, “egalitarian redistribution” and “fascism.” Harper was lumping together antagonists as varied as Petro-Canada, the progressive income tax, Auschwitz and the Gulag. This put him on shaky ground to be criticizing anyone else’s propensity toward moral equivalence.
Later he promised to illustrate the modern Left’s “system of … moral relativism” and then announced that his opponents had “moved beyond … moral relativism to something much darker.” Well, was the Left guilty of relativism or worse? And how could it be worse than the old Left—which Harper had already depicted as the local affiliates of the Auschwitz gatekeepers?
To Harper the purest illustration of the Left’s moral bankruptcy was its opposition to the Iraq war. It’s worth noting that Harper would never mention that war again after 2006, except when pressed by the Liberals and their eggers-on in the media and the universities. One of the enduring questions about the man is how he can reconcile his certainty about Iraq in 2003 with his silence, punctuated by the briefest possible equivocation, afterward. Another question is how he could be so reliably shocked by moral inconsistency on the Left and so willing to indulge in such inconsistency himself. Perhaps the flip side of moral nihilism is anaphylactic moral shock brought on by exposure to even trace elements of one’s political opponents.
Many times since 2006 Conservatives have cited Harper’s Civitas speech as the best expression of the new conservatism Harper was seeking to build. I am giving it this much space, this early in my narrative, because I have indeed found it to be a handy guide to understanding so much of his political action. But Harper’s moral analysis is not a finer analysis than the Liberals’. It is merely a different analysis, appealing to a different audience. Perhaps that was all Harper would need.
Brimelow’s 1986 book helps us understand the motive for a new Western Canada–based conservatism, rooted in a pervasive sense of betrayal at the hands of Trudeau Liberalism and its pale Progressive Conservative imitations. Righting that betrayal was the mission that first sent Stephen Harper and hundreds of other activists into electoral politics. Reform had burned itself out as a protest party and botched its first attempted transition into a governing party. Harper’s Civitas speech indicated the mindset a new conservatism would have to adopt as a governing party: frankly social-conservative, with a strong focus on families, communities and crime-fighting, and with a “hard power” foreign policy.
Still another book from the archives can help us understand the operating philosophy of Harper’s conservatism. Beyond telling us how a Harper government would think, it offers hints on how that government would function. Appropriately, it was written by the man who would become Harper’s operational lieutenant after the 2006 election.
Ian Brodie’s Friends of the Court: The Privileging of Interest Group Litigants in Canada, published in 2002, is a highly unflattering study of one aspect of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy. But any serious politician learns from his opponents, and Harper later incorporated many of the techniques Brodie described into his governing style.
Born in Toronto in 1967, Brodie studied at McGill before taking his MA and PhD at the University of Calgary in the 1990s. He then accepted a post in the Political Science Department at the University of Western Ontario, but took a leave of absence a few years later to work for Harper after Harper became the Canadian Alliance leader. By 2005 he was Harper’s chief of staff. After the 2006 victory he became the new government’s chief enforcer of discipline. In 2008 he left to work in Washington.
The rise in judicial activism was matched by a rise in the sustained activity of interest groups: “groups representing feminists, civil libertarians, language minorities, unions, business and others” organized “to wage long-term battles in the courts.” Such groups often claimed to be politically disadvantaged, he observed. Which may indeed be the case, except that state funding has been crucial to their formation, survival and their frequent court victories. The main vehicle for this funding was the Court Challenges Program, which provided money to civil-society applicants so they could challenge laws on Charter grounds.
Eventually it becomes clear that Brodie is describing a loose network of interests congenial to broadly Liberal goals which extends well outside the government or the Liberal Party. He cites two leading Calgary School academics, Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff, who had written a study of what they dubbed the “Court Party.” This network included “social reform-minded professionals and academics in public interest groups, government departments, independent government agencies, the criminal bar, and the law schools.” Irving Kristol would have called it Canada’s New Class.
“Morton and Knopff’s central observation is that the Court Party is a political minority in Canada,” Brodie wrote. “Electoral politics is therefore not an advantageous arena for them. The Court Party prefers to advance its agendas through institutions that are insulated from electoral politics. The courts, quasi-judicial tribunals, and the administrative arms of government are arenas where the Court Party’s professional skills and abilities can make up for their lack of electoral support.”
Of course electoral politics was an advantageous arena for the Liberal Party through the first half of the 1980s. But the Liberals didn’t dare wear their activism on their sleeve. They had to look like moderates. In this Morton–Knopff–Brodie view, the courts served as the advance guard of what Brodie calls a “post-materialist” vision.
Harper made it clear he had taken Brodie’s argument to heart when he delivered an extraordinary news conference in the Centre Block lobby outside the House of Commons as opposition leader in 2003. Ontario judge Roy McMurtry had just handed down his landmark ruling permitting same-sex marriage. Harper argued that the Liberals had plotted for a very long time to produce precisely this result.
“They wanted to introduce this same-sex marriage through back channels,” Harper said then. “They had the courts do it for them, put the judges in they wanted. Then they failed to appeal, failed to fight the case in court.”
But, the reporters protested, McMurtry was a lifelong Progressive Conservative. He used to be Bill Davis’s attorney general in Ontario. He was appointed to the court by Mulroney. “Well, he’s a former Tory,” Harper said. “But whether he’s conservative or not is a matter of terminology.”
After a brief stint as a junior political staffer in the Mulroney government in the mid-1980s, Harper worked in a succession of opposition parties for nearly twenty years before he formed a government. He clearly had no trouble holding two simultaneous thoughts about much of what he saw along the way: “This is outrageous” and “This will come in handy someday.” The lesson he took from the behaviour of the Court Party was subtle. It wasn’t “Stack the courts.” It wasn’t “Use the Court Challenges Program to fund Conservative-friendly legal challenges.” One of the first things he did as prime minister was to cancel the Court Challenges Program. He pretty much gave the courts up for lost as potential instruments of ever-broader Conservative hegemony, and events would show he was right to have done so.
The lesson he did draw was “Work your networks.” A conservatism that operated only in the Prime Minister’s Office and on the government side of the House of Commons would be like a plant without roots. It could not survive or flourish. But over time he would identify the “back channels” he could work through. Long after he became prime minister in a minority Parliament, electoral politics would rarely be an advantageous arena for advancing his goals. He would find others.
Harper was a keen student of Liberal outrages and Liberal weaknesses, but he was also uncommonly aware of shortcomings on his own side and in his own actions. Like most successful politicians he would be loath to admit error. But many times, as he approached, won and held power, he would quietly take stock of his own errors and vulnerabilities, and adjust his course. One such moment came in 2002, during the final weeks of the Canadian Alliance leadership campaign. Ted Byfield’s little Report magazine, formerly Alberta Report, published a cover story that crystallized a glaring weakness in Canadian conservatism.
The headline on the story was “A Self-Hating Nation.” Its author was Kevin Michael Grace, a regular contributor, a bit of an ornery cuss and no fan of Harper’s. The story now reads as a period piece of immediate post-9/11 Canada, when shock over the World Trade Center massacre and widespread embarrassment about Jean Chrétien’s plodding response brought a host of Canadian insecurities to the surface.
Grace’s article opened with shock quotes from two prominent conservative writers. “When William Gairdner is asked for his opinion on the future of Canada, he chuckles—and then apologizes. ‘Pardon the laughter,’ he says. William Christian laughs too. ‘A short story, is it?’ he asks.”
While 9/11 had provoked a tide of patriotic indignation in the United States, among Canadian conservatives it had provoked disgust at the country’s perceived shortcomings. Canada was a den of terrorists. Canada was a politically correct hideout for the enemies of freedom. Canada was soft, weak, more worried about the White House than the Taliban. Grace’s insight was to wonder whether this critique of Canadian shortcomings was distinguishable from outright contempt for Canada. “It is arguable that patriotism, let alone nationalism, is in short supply on the Canadian Right,” he wrote. “A reliable source claims that a famous right-wing pundit, a star of the National Post, was heard to say, ‘The Post has a problem. It was started to save Canada, but Canada isn’t worth saving.’ ”
This raised a question, Grace wrote: “Does the Right hate Canada?”
While that issue of the Report was on newsstands, Harper became Canadian Alliance leader. He would discuss the Report story often with the people around him. Political parties everywhere wrap themselves in flags. The Liberals, who had built much of the apparatus of a modern Canada, did the same. It helped that they had designed the flag they were wrapping themselves in.
Harper had to take care not to make his contempt for the Liberal legacy read as contempt for Canada. Most opposition parties elsewhere didn’t have to worry about such a thing. “Nobody believes that the Democratic Party in the U.S. is not an American party,” one of his strategists said later. “In Australia, both of the major parties are recognized as legitimate parts of the debate.”
For the longest time, Harper simply had to protest that he did not, in fact, hate his country. Of course it was easy to imagine where somebody might have gotten the idea he did. In what was intended as a lighthearted 1997 Montreal dinner speech to visiting members of a conservative U.S. group, the Council for National Policy, Harper got off this thigh-slapper: “Canada is a Nor
thern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term.” In a bitter National Post op-ed after the Alliance lost the 2000 election, he wrote: “Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.” In 2005, when he began the campaign that would take him to power, the first question he faced from a reporter was whether he hated Canada. “We didn’t have a competing narrative,” the strategist said. “What are the symbols people talk about when they talk about Canada? Health care. The Charter. Peacekeeping. The United Nations. The CBC. Almost every single example was a Liberal achievement or a Liberal policy.
“We had gotten to a point in Canada where the conservative side of politics had been marginalized—where we weren’t even recognized as legitimately Canadian.”
Shortly after he became Canadian Alliance leader, Harper had even briefly considered adopting red and white as the party’s official colours. He finally decided the problem of patriotism wouldn’t lend itself to a quick fix. Building a competitive conservative vocabulary of Canadian pride would take time. “We didn’t have any illusions about displacing the Liberal vision and the Liberal narrative of Canada,” his strategist said. “But we needed to give the conservative side something to rally around.” Over time, Harper began to promote symbols Canadians could love even if they weren’t (yet?) Conservative voters: symbols his opponents had neglected. “It’s the Arctic,” the strategist continued. “It’s the military. It’s the RCMP. It’s the embrace of hockey and lacrosse and curling.” It would become much more than that. Eventually it would include the monarchy, the War of 1812, the rechristening of public buildings with the names of Conservative politicians and, by 2011, a campaign podium for Harper that would feature the word CANADA across the front, as though man and nation were synonymous. Every time critics would say he was going too far, he would tell himself the Liberals went further, for decades, in offering their party as a synonym for Canada. All he was doing, he would tell himself, was righting the balance.