So You Say You Want A Revolution?

Two weeks ago former Reform Party leader, and founder, Preston Manning held a round table conference in Toronto to kick start the process of building a conservative intellectual infrastructure in Canada.  Pointing to similar efforts in the United States that dated back to the 1970s, Mr. Manning laid out his goals for the next decade in establishing such an infrastructure, which would be vital in a sustained and comprehensive reform of Canadian government:

What if the conservative leaders and candidates of today and tomorrow were supported – not just by the resources of their parties – but also by a well-developed conservative democratic infrastructure of the type we have discussed today? In other words, what if we had:

• Enough well-funded think tanks and links with academia to thoroughly cover every area of public policy in every region of the country – generating dozens of conservative-based ideas and policy proposals for the activists to use.
• Educational and training institutions and programs offering everything from a half-hour course on how to be a poll captain to graduate school courses on how to be a cabinet minister leading a department of government.
• Political orientation and training programs for faith-oriented Canadians with conservative leanings which would ensure that their political contributions are an asset not a liability to the conservative movement and a credit not a discredit to their faith communities.
• Sufficient conservative communications institutions and vehicles – a research institute, publishing house, journals, print and television capability, websites and blogs – to effectively communicate the right messages and images at the right time to every man, woman, and child in the country.
• Large, frequent, and well-supported gatherings of conservatives from all over the country in order to get the synergy and productivity lift which comes when people of the same general persuasion really get to know each other and work together.
• Frequent, well-run, and well-financed issue campaigns on issues of importance to conservatives and to Canadians – raising the profile of and support for health care reform, spending and tax reduction proposals, conservative environmental positions … whatever … to higher levels than have ever been achieved before.

What if the conservative leaders and candidates of today and tomorrow were supported by infrastructure of that scope and depth? Would they not be in a far, far better position to consistently win electoral support than they are today?

Simply put, it is the goal of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, in partnership with others, to facilitate the creation of such infrastructure within the next decade.

The underlying premises of Mr. Manning's efforts, powerful ones often missed, or misunderstood, by those who are broadly sympathetic to large and small "c" conservative ideas, is that change is possible and must be undertaken slowly.  One school of thought, held by some of the more bitter conservative sympathizers of all ages, as well as most academics and members of the MSM, is that Canadians are inherently large and small "l" liberals.  If one understands modern liberalism as the party and ideology, however loosely organized and understood, of statism, of those who see big and bigger government as key to solving or managing social problems, then the claim is demonstrably false.  The only major modern welfare state entitlement which existed at the time of Confederation was public education, which all colonial governments supported to a greater or lesser extent at all levels of education.  Even in the area of industrial policy the Canada of the 1860s limited its interventions largely to the railroads.  Socialized health care, massive subsidies for a whole range of industries, state financed and tightly regulated media and a whole army of controls, programs and policies financed by  confiscatory tax rates are all products of twentieth century Canada. 

How We Got Here

The comparatively laissez-faire approach of the Canadian governments of the late nineteenth century was challenged and overturned by decades of intellectual struggle, a struggle fought and won first in our universities and intellectual salons, or their backwoods equivalents.  It moved forward into the political arena where figures as diverse as Emily Murphy, J.S. Wordsworth, Frank Underhill and Tommy Douglas espoused an interventionist agenda which was usually, though not always, dubbed socialism.  The modern lie that Canadians are inherently statist, and thus reform impossible, is matched by the lie that Canadians are inherently "moderate."  The concept "moderate" is meaningless outside of its narrow understanding, something between two extremes.  The issue in Canadian history, and the history of every nation to have a functioning public debate on social and political issues, is not who defines what is considered moderation, but who the extremists are and what they are fighting for. 

For all the electoral success of the Liberal Party of Canada, from Mackenzie King onward, it is a party with few original ideas on public policy.  From the 1920s forward King stole, partly because of the immediate necessity of staving off opponents, partly because of long term strategic goals in cultivating a set of core supporters, the bulk of his ideas from the Progressives, a statist populist party based in western Canada, and later on the CCF (forerunners of the NDP).  Until the 1970s it was the far left in Canada that defined the political agenda.  That they failed to get everything they wanted demonstrated a basic suspicion on the part of the majority of the Canadian people as to the long term goals of the CCF / NDP.  The cry of communist front may not have been a deal breaker for those who voted Liberal, but sympathized with the NDP, but a tinge of authoritarianism, however benevolently intended, remained about the party and its leaders.  It is one of the reasons they have never formed a government at a national level and only sporadically at the provincial level outside of Manitoba, Saskatchewan  and B.C.

If there is a continuity in Canadian political tradition it is the image of the prudent manager.  This is particularly so of Ontario.  Oliver Mowatt, James P. Whitney, Mitchell Hepburn, George Drew, Leslie Frost, John Robarts, Bill Davis, David Peterson and Mike Harris all projected images of managerial competence.  Not men of grand ideas, though not necessarily men without any ideas, but "sensible men," nonetheless, at the helm of public affairs.  The diversity of policies and beliefs enacted and held by these men suggests that gradual change, competently administered, with due respect to the public finances, are the main qualities desired by the voters of Ontario.  With certain regional qualifications, such as Quebec's focus on language and culture, this can be applied to most parts of Canada. 

We've seen so far that Canadians are not inherently statist, inherently moderate or stubbornly incapable of change.  We do, however, like our leaders, and their policies, with a certain sensible grayness.  Indeed Bill Davis may be the ideal Canadian politician, though he perhaps has too good a sense of humour to fit the role perfectly.  Generally we still follow Burke's invocations for gradual and organic change (recall that Burke's focus was the nature of change and less so on the nature of the changes involved).  Even the sweeping reforms of the Pearson-Trudeau years, seem but pale evolution compared to the social and political revolutions of the Labour government of 1945 in Britain and the New Deal in the United States.  Going in the other direction, Britain had Mrs. Thatcher and America Reagan.  We had Brian Mulroney.  Michael Bliss' often quoted remark that Mulroney would have made an excellent mayor of Boston around 1900, is not exactly accurate, but it captures the limited horizons of even some of our more adventurous leaders.  Even Mike "the Knife" Harris considerably slowed the pace of his reforms after 1997.  We do like change, but slowly, please.

Why We Cannot Expect Radical Change Quickly

Mr. Manning seems to understand this, though he may perhaps still harbour dreams of a "decisive" breakthrough, which leads to the forming of a fairly radical government, similar to the experiences of the 1980s in Britain, America and to a certain extent Australia.  Such a breakthrough, however, seems unlikely at a national level.  A Canadian Prime Minister must play the part of a regional power broker in a way an American President, or a British and Australian Prime Minister does not.  This role often means that ideologically driven policy must make way for regional political considerations.  These other nations, also, have inter-regional tensions, none, however, threatens to be fatal.  The lack of what was called during the Meech Lake imbroglio a "Triple E Senate" compounds this problem.  In the regional horse trading that occurs in all federal state an elected and unrepresentative Senate acts as a limiting force on the type of trading possible.  Take for example the notorious Trudeau-Lalonde National Energy Program. 

Such a policy was possible, indeed electorally desirable, because the Liberal government of the day did not need many seats west of the Ontario-Manitoba border to form a majority government.  The West could be sacrificed for the sake of Central Canada because it could not retaliate, except by electing impotent Conservative MPs.  The NEP was repealed only when the Mulroney government felt it politically safe to do so, i.e. when Ontario no longer objected.  The American Senate is composed of two members from every state.  The Australian Senate is composed of 12 members for everyone of its states and two each for the Northern Territory and the Australian capital region.  As an interesting contrast the Australian constitution was written a mere 33 years after the BNA Act.  The conscious decision to emulate the American model, rather than the Westminster model, in the structure of its upper house reflected a lack of fear of being too close to the United States.

Confronted with a Triple E Senate, an Australian Prime Minister is limited in his or her ability to sacrifice one region, or state, for the benefit of another.  An example Don Getty, Alberta's premier during Meech, was well aware of.  Nor is the Senate timid about using its powers.  In 1975 it destroyed the government of Gough Whitlam in a spectacular constitutional crisis that required the intervention of the Aussie GG.  Mulroney's decision to delay repealing the NEP reflected the sort of regional considerations which are more acute in Canada than other democratic federal states.  Unless the structure of the Senate is changed such regional politicking will continue to trump good policy.  Reforming the Senate, however, requires constitutional conferences and all the horrors that would entail.  Then there is, as always, Quebec and its own unique demands.  The Prime Minister's Office, as such, will remain more powerful than those of other Westminster democracies, yet in part because of that power beholden to our rather peculiar form of inter-regional conflict and resolution.

Toward Fabian Conservatism

One of the few names from classical antiquity to still hold currency in the popular imagination is that of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general whose famous vendetta against the Roman Republic nearly destroyed the Eternal City.  One of the Roman generals dispatched to defeat Hannibal was Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, known to history simply as Fabius.  Recognizing the superiority of Hannibal and his army in pitched, or set piece, battle Fabius fought a skillful war of attrition and delay.  The Carthaginian general, far from home and surrounded by generally hostile territory in central and northern Italy, was gradually weakened by his adversary's tactics.  When younger and more aggressive commanders replaced Fabius, they quickly fell into one of Hannibal's classic traps and were utterly crushed at the Battle of Cannae (216 B.C.).  The reason for this digression, aside from appeasing Cassius who always complains about the low-level of classical history on this blog, is that the example of Fabius served as inspiration for the British Fabian Society founded in 1884.  The society's official website has this to say about its history:

The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 as a socialist society committed to gradual rather than revolutionary social reform. The name comes from the Roman general Quintus Fabius, known as Cunctator from his strategy of delaying battle until the right moment. The Society's early members included George Bernard Shaw (later described by Lenin as 'a good man fallen among Fabians'), Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Emmeline Pankhurst and H G Wells.

From the first Fabian Tract (Why are the Many Poor?) and the original Fabian Essays, published in 1889 in the wake of the Match Girls' Strike, the Society has been characterized by a passionate commitment to social justice and a belief in the progressive improvement of society.

Which is a far too modest an assessment of the Fabians astonishing influence in the making of British, and indeed global, public policy over the last century and a bit.  The society was really the world's first think-tank, financing and publishing socialist writers in their campaign to transform Britain from the very epitome of classical liberalism, as it stood in 1884, toward socialism (Among these writers was a young Harold Laski, later President of the Labour Party.  Upon meeting Laski in the late 1930s Ayn Rand was struck by the similarities between him and her character Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead).  By 1945 the Labour Party, which was in part founded by several leading Fabians and then headed by an ex-Fabian, Clement Attlee, won its first majority government.  Its program, successfully implement, consisted of sweeping nationalizations of the "commanding heights" of the industrial economy, socialized health care, a modern welfare state and tremendous privileges granted to the party's union supporters.  In the span of sixty-one years the entire political culture of a nation was changed radically, albeit by the smallest of steps. 

The Fabians did not put forward monolithic party manifestos calling for violent change, they recognized the traditional British abhorrence of violence and the public's desire that change occur gradually.  They also understood that the British dislike, and generally still do, abstract political theories.  British political evolution has usually followed a pragmatic and empirical approach.  A collection of short term expedients, guided by a somewhat vague desire to limit the state's authority over the individua,l and of the national government over local authorities, balanced by a need for a state capable of dealing with strong international rivals.  When one of these short-term expedients had demonstrated its usefulness it was declared a custom and precedent was establish henceforth.  The genius of the Fabians was to use this process against itself, to gradually expand the powers of the government over the individual by the same short-term pragmatic methods, hoping new customs would under mind the old.  The effect was like putting a frog in a pot of water and then slowly increasing the temperature.  The frog fails to sense the gradual changes and is soon dead. 

So is this what I'm proposing for Canadian conservatism?  Yes, exactly, but with one qualifier.  Slow change is necessary when the wider socio-economic environment remains stable.  If it becomes unstable, then all bets are off.  The story of another famous think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, demonstrates how radical change can occur in a very short period of time.  Founded in 1955 by RAF vet and self-made millionaire Antony Fisher, it was a de facto policy making unit for the Thatcher government through out the 1980s.  More than its impact in remaking Britain the IEA influenced, and directly aided, the founding of over 100 free market think tanks through out the world, including the Fraser Institute in 1974. 

The IEA followed much the same path laid out by the Fabians, it advocated gradual change by attacking individual government policies and proposing alternatives.  The institute's success was aided immeasurable by one powerful fact, freedom works, statism doesn't.  The Fabians spent 61 years gradually building up to a socialist government.  Their utopia lasted all of 34 years.  Yet the only reason it lasted as long as that was because Britain was governed for much of the period by the Conservative Party, which checked, though didn't fundamentally challenge, what became known as the post-war consensus.  The economic disaster that Britain was living through in the late 1970s called for radical alternatives and got them. Even so the election of Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 would have been highly unlikely if not for a decision made by Richard Nixon eight years earlier.

Attempting to confront a growing inflationary crisis, spawned by a need to "deficit finance" both the Vietnam War and the Great Society social programs enacted a few years earlier, Nixon instituted a comprehensive system of price controls.  This policy, as it had to, failed miserably and was gradually discontinued over the following decade, being tightened or loosen deepening on the needs of White House PR men.  Of more lasting significance was Nixon's decision to pull the United States out of the Bretton Woods System.  This elaborate network of currency pegging was enacted shortly after the Second World War and proved one of the pillars of the global post-war boom.  The system, which fixed the relative values of the currencies of industrial nations, with the strange on and off exception of Canada, limited the ability of member governments to inflate their way out of budgetary tight spots. 

The only two kinks in the system were that it broke down if either all the nations inflated at roughly the same rate or if the United States broke faith with the arrangement.  All the currencies were pegged relative to the American dollar, this meant that if the United States started to inflate it would export this inflation to other countries.  Which it was doing somewhat by the early 1970s.  When Nixon pulled the US out of Bretton Woods the system soon collapsed.  American monetary policy for much of the 1950s and 1960s had acted as a break on other countries historic tendencies to debase their currencies.  Now it act as a positive encouragement to such behaviour. 

What followed, timed almost perfectly with the coming of several fairly left-wing governments in western Europe, Willy Brandt in W. Germany, Harold Wilson's second coming in Britain, Trudeau here, was an inflationary spree that was not fully quelled until the early 1990s.  It was this inflationary crisis that sped up the coming of Thatcherism to Britain.  Without it another decade or two might have passed before substantial reforms were made to the British economy.  Look at modern France and Sweden, countries which did not face a similar degree of crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s and are only now reluctantly enacting painful reforms.  Canada today confronts no crisis similar to that of the 1970s.  Trudeau's mismanagement and statism were built on top of nearly a quarter century of fairly prudent macroeconomic policies by both Conservative and Liberal governments.  We had kept our affairs in better order than the British and Americans during the immediate post war era.  This gave us far more leeway in screwing up during the 1970s.

Inflation pushed Britain and America over the edge, it merely made a bad problem somewhat worse here.  The infernality of Canadian Liberalism is that refused, and continues to refuse, to go to extremes.  This has less to do with some far sighted bit of wisdom on the part of the Liberal Mandarins, it has more to do with the regional brokering that dominates federal politics and policies.  To move forward we cannot expect the "lucky breaks" which benefited other national conservative movements.  It will be a slow hard slog.  Most likely it will take a lot less time than the 61 years it took the Fabians to dismantle classically liberal Britain.  Unfortunately it will also probably take at least as much time as it did the Institute of Economic Affairs to change the British agenda in the other direction.