Canada and the Impossibility of Conservatism
September 25, 2005 · By Tom Cerber
Robert Fulford has some depressing thoughts on the impossibility of conservatism in Canada (though he doesn’t put it that way) in Saturday’s National Post. Along the way, he does a decent job explaining why conservatives have traditionally had to transform themselves into Liberals (either in name or in deed):
Articulate Canadians tend to be believe that Canada has always relied on government for its existence and that improvements in our common life are most likely to come through government action. We consider government supervision more vital than individual enterprise, which makes us into a nation of regulators. When something new appears in the world, the American asks: How can money be made from this? The Canadian asks: How can we regulate it?
I would add that Albertans’ attitudes toward self-reliance and civil society (neighbors care for each other before the state needs to be involved) are an anomoly in this Canadian matrix, which helps explain why the rest of Canada is so threatened by it and why they regard us as “American.”
But Fulford overlooks one obvious conclusion to his correct view that Canadians by and large look to the state to glue it together. That only the state administration keeps a territory together indicates that there is society, no social glue beyond the actions of the coercive state. There is no republic because there is no public. There is no Canadian nation, just a Canadian administrative state. For other examples of this kind of rule, consider Great Britain’s former empire, the Roman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, or even the rule the Hudson’s Bay Company wielded over its territories.
Conservatives, if they’re to form a national government, must understand what the Liberals have long ago understood: Canada is an empire (a midget one, but still an empire) and not a nation-state.
Next question: when’s our Boston Tea Party?
Good analysis but I think it misses the point that empires are not necessarily unstable. With the right constitutional “pressure caps”, empires can be kept running for long periods of time; and Canada has survived for quite a while now. But for all intents and purposes, you’re right, Canadians are more aptly described as subjects not citizens. I just think that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, when subjects governed well.
If it is to survive, Canada must reconcile bad government with better ways of keeping government accountable through venting regional grievance. Over the last twenty five years, Canada has done a very poor job of finding this reconciliation; believing, by and large, that Quebec separatism had to be alleviated by finally birthing a New Canada, a nationalistic people. And this has proved to be nothing more than twenty-five years of constitutional tomfoolery—really annoying tomfoolery at that!
So separatist movements and republicanism could take off in Canada if Liberal corruption continues to go unchecked, especially if Western Canada fails to get the “pressure cap” it needs to stay in the country. However, I think this is a ways off! Canadians with regional grievances are not that pissed off yet, nor do they possess the hysteria to run for docks and push the tea into the harbour. And we should not forget, that even subjects are well aware that treason can carry severe consequences, if only in one’s own soul (i.e. the point of “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”).
So I suspect provincial rights, pushed federally with a Conservative government or provincially by rich Premiers, is now the real mantra of the New Canada. And given Newfoundland’s current horizon of newfoundwealth, compounded by a ground swell of young Newfoundlander pride, I suspect the West will have an aggrieved ally on the Eastern front as well!
But Boston Tea Party’s do have occasion, and the failure of Quebec and Ontario to get on board with the real mantra of the New Canada may very well present one.
Empires *may* be stable, or they may not be. For every Roman or British empire, there’s also an Austro-Hungarian, Athenian, and Japanese empire. It depends on factors beyond simply imperial control over territory. I like the Austro-Hungarian analogy because, like Canada, it actually tried to develop some sense of nationhood using materials that looked nothing like a nation. One of the twentieth-century’s most influential minds, Hans Kelsen, even wrote a constitution for it that went nowhere.
The limit of the imperial form of administration (I hesitate to call it “government”) is how well it can respond to crises. I think the provincial rights mantra you suggest would find its most likely source coming from Alberta. More specifically, it would be a *republican* one along the lines of the civil society argument I outlined in the post. In other words, Albertans have a fundamentally different view of constitutional politics than the rest of the government. This isn’t simply a right-left thing, as you find people on the left in this province make this argument occasionally as well. They don’t want a larger piece of the Liberal pie. Rather, they want a sense of self-government that runs down to the ability of the responsible individual to make fundamental decisions about his or her life.
This is not the vision of much of the rest of Canada.
“They don’t want a larger piece of the Liberal pie. Rather, they want a sense of self-government that runs down to the ability of the responsible individual to make fundamental decisions about his or her life.”
Yes, I think you are right, especially when you look at how speaking of Canada as “two founding nations” gets you no where in Alberta. Albertans just don’t get it, and this is how the Liberal pie is marketed and sold to chic Canadian nationalists.
However, Conservatives might get lucky! By that I mean they may be positioned to take over from a Liberal government exhausted of “enough” political capital in Central Canada to allow them to squeek in. And that would be a huge success on the part of Harper!
What would make it such a huge success is that any victory would effectively give the Conservatives government without having to sell out to the Central Canadian empire view of the country, the way Mulroney did. While Mulroney won a landslide, Harper doesn’t need that—he just needs to be Prime Minister. As Prime Minister, Harper could oversee a fundamental altering of the Canadian administrative state—decentralising vast sources of revenue and responsibility to the more localised provincial premiers. The public reaction to Harper’s altering of the Canadian administrative state would tell us, loud and clear, how alive civil society is in the rest of the country. And a Canadian Prime Minister giving Premiers what they decry every time their own administrations run amok, would tell us whether Premiers actually want more money and power out of Ottawa’s hands or whether they were just playing the blame game. I’m guessing, Canada is more open to localised government than most people now can see.
Heretofore, we have lacked federal leadership on decentralising the Canadian state, and we have seen a concerted effort by Central Canada to keep Harper out. But this story has yet to be fully told.
And Harper can’t lay all his cards on the table before he gets in power. This may keep him out of power because people say he has either no policy ideas or a hidden agenda, but we’ll see. Neither of these are true since everyone knows what Harper would do when he gets into power.
George - I think it’s wishful thinking to hope that Harper will pull a Ralph Klein style cut to the civil service. I think the political forces in the civil service are too powerful for that. Look how far Mike Harris got.
[...] Gunter’s argument is correct as far as it goes, but I think it misses an essential point. One of the reasons why religious conservatives don’t obtain wider support is that they fail to connect their socially and morally conservative message with the principle of liberty. While it’s true that they’re like preachers in the whorehouse, trying to preach moderation to an immoderate and hedonistic society. At the same time, they also need to do a much better job demonstrating that the immoderate and hedonistic policies that the other side supports undermines liberty. Too often they allow themselves to be portrayed as the enemies of liberty, when in fact the best arguments for social and moral conservatism sustain liberty understood as the “ordered liberty” of the responsible individual. Canadian social conservatives have never been good at making this argument, partly for reasons I indicated yesterday. But, unlike their American cousins, they lack a national commitment to individual responsibility, with the attendant virtues of the responsible individual, that would sustain their message. [...]
I’m not so sure it is wishful thinking; well, it is but not ludicrously so. I think when sold right as giving power back to the provinces, Harper might be allying with political forces not even the federal civil service can resist. With respect to Harris, provincial premier have a harder time making the case that the services their government now provides can be devolved to a lower order of government, justifying drastic cuts. For Harper, these cuts can come in the form of signing money sharing agreements with the provinces, citing traditional constitutional jurisdiction to back him up. And I think, if most of the provincial governments get on board, he may have a very powerful political will to transform Ottawa.
Again, this is contingent on the provincial governments getting on board with a provincial rights agenda. So far, we don’t really know how sincere the Premiers are when they decry Ottawa for not giving them enough money while being expected to do to much. Some provinces may very well be content with the status quo, with having a natural scapegoat in the federal government when their administrations bungle things up.
However, I think the safer bet is that with federal leadership, most provinces will get on board. The optics would be very much against them opposing provincial rights, and besides, I think most provincial governments in Canada really are expected to do too much with too little money. Everyone knows that the feds are the over-extended chunky monkey in the room when it comes to revenue!
Unfortunately, for at least 8/10 provinces, “provincial rights” means having Ottawa (and behind Ottawa, Alberta) pay for stuff without having to be responsible. Even Klein isn’t willing to risk confronting that way of thinking. Think how weak he’s been on healthcare.
That is a good point, although I’m not sure whether Klein’s hesitancy on healthcare is the result of fearing federal backlash on Alberta (a backlash most of Canada may support), or the result of having little imagination on what to do with healthcare to the contrary. There seems to be some evidence that Klein is just enjoying being King Ralph, and doesn’t want to do anything too bold. So I find the lack of imagination argument compelling, especially after it being announced that every Alberta will be getting a $400 dividend. In example, this a nice payout, but I think the money could be put to better, more imaginative use. And furthermore, it seems to be another cheap Klein trick when you consider that many Albertans don’t deserve any dividend since they don’t pay much for taxes in the first place. So why not a bold tax break of some sort? Why not a major contribution to the Heritage Fund to increase it’s interest earnings?
I hesitate to agree that “provincial rights” can only mean having Ottawa pay for stuff and the provinces avoiding responsibility. The wild card here is federal leadership on the issue! I am inclined to think that the reason there is such a concerted effort to keep Harper out of power is because it is pretty clear that revenue sharing would take a very different tone under his administration. Federal leadership on provincial rights would be unlike anything we have ever seen in Canada, a federal government determined to devolve more power back along traditonal constitutional lines of jurisdiction. Part and parcel of such devolution would be backing it up with revenue sharing agreements that devolve federal responsibility for always giving the provinces more money. A major federal give away on revenue, would not only tie the hands of the federal government, it would make it less easier for provinces to blame the federal government for their screw ups.
Optics wise, a federal lead on decentralisation would change the dynamics of provincial rights quite drastically. The federal government is bloated! Everyone can see this visa vis Adscam, gun registry, etc.! Harper just has to state the obvious, while making the case the the provinces need more revenue to do what they need to do. Under the current regime, the federal government has a far greater income that it really needs. So provincial rights has more to do with redressing a taxation imbalance (imbalanced because more is expected of the provinces than their revenue powers permit) than it does regional equalisation (giving money from richer provinces to the poorer provinces).
Canadians, in every region, are taxed to death—a salient argument in every part of the country. By extention, a Harper government would only have to point this out, arguing that most taxes go to federal coffers only to be wasted, so “provincial rights” becomes more about directing taxes to where they need to go. Provincial rights becomes giving Canadians more “bang for their buck” so to speak! And the current regime gets painted for what it is; terrific federal waste and corruption, too much money floating around for what Canadians actually expect from the federal government.
I guess the gist of our disagreement is that I think the differences in civil society and political culture arguments can go too far. I’m not convinced that Alberta is that drastically different from the rest of Canada. I think Alberta exceptionalism has proved to be a useful political strategy for Alberta politicians visa vis the rest of Canada, but when it comes to substantive differences of civil society, I don’t know if there really are that many.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Apologies for the grammatical errors in the above.
George: You right to raise the possibility that Alberta exceptionalism is more myth than reality. In many ways that’s true. Albertans are bourgeois inhabitants of a technological society as much as Ontarians. However, one should also consider the ways that Albertans conduct “civil society” sorts of things, like give to charity, organize charities, etc. In terms of giving, Albertans actually give less (per capita, and as proportion of income) than other Canadians including Manitobans and Newfoundlanders. On the other hand, they seem to be better at building and sustaining charitable organizations, which is likely connected with the philanthropic element among the Alberta business community. A good study is by Rainer Knopff and a few others in the Canadian Journal of Political Science about 3 years ago, in which they find higher rates of “social capital” among Albertans than other parts of the country. It’s been too long since I read it, so I can’t recall exactly what they looked at. But it’s a good place to start.