Shades of Gray

We are assured, by the Globe's Michael Valpy, that Canadians are political agnostics.  Not left or right, just Canadian. 

Over the past two decades, Canadians have been inching toward small-c conservatism, a slow, oozing shift in values and notions of how the country should be run, taking them further and further away from their one-time rah-rah support for the progressive state as the instrument of national collectivity.

But the real seismic adjustment of the electorate is not from one ideological camp to another.

Rather it's a drift from Canada's traditional small-l liberalism – or, perhaps more accurately, its red toryism – to a rejection of all ideology and theoretical ideas of governance and society that dramatically sets Canadians apart from their southern neighbours.

In the late 1980s, early 1990s, Mr. Graves says, 40 per cent of Canadians self-identified as small-l liberal, 25 per cent identified as small-c conservative and 35 per cent said they were neither. Today, he says, 28 per cent identify as conservative, 24 per cent as liberal and a whopping 48 per cent say they are neither. (A Conservative Party insider last week put the party's core support at 27 per cent.)

In other words conservatives haven't changed their world view since the Fall of Communism and the rise of globalization, but liberals have.  Can't imagine why....  The disenchantment with the lavish welfare state of the Hippie-Disco era, and the Trudeau spending spree the financed it, explains the drift from the Left, but there was no shift to the Right, as in America and Britain.  For Valpy this change shows an abandonment of ideology, so why is it only one ideology that has been abandoned?

For more than half a century, Canadians have seen, or read about, a succession of left and right governments that have promised cure-alls for society's ailments but failed to deliver. Ideological fatigue has set in: Canadians have become tired of the left-right arguments. They have become pragmatic, eclectic, interested only in what works. An increasing number of young Canadians have grown into adulthood not knowing about or having experienced the nanny state in its heyday.

Leaving aside whether the nanny state has really passed its heyday - try smoking in downtown Toronto - Canadians haven't become more pragmatic.  The argument that Canadians have had "a succession of left and right governments that have promised cure-alls" but "failed to deliver."  What right wing government?  Surely, it is a matter of courtesy that we describe the Mulroney Years as Canada's turn to the Right.  The Brian lingered just a little too long over the qualifier when saying the party name, Progressive Conservative, speaking with a kind of relish.  This is something the Grand Old Lady, Mrs Thatcher, noted in her memoirs.  There was a kind of defensiveness about the name, a sad pleading.  Yes, we're conservatives but Progressive Conservatives!  Don't hate us. 

The Reform Party, this country's first genuinely conservative party, carried through out its career an opprobrium for being unCanadian by being too right wing.  The Reform Party was also never able to shake off its image as a western protest party.  We've never really had a conservative party run a conservative platform on a credible national basis.  Harper's take over of the Canadian Alliance, and skillful merger with the PC rump, created a genuinely national infrastructure and party.  The problem was, as critics noted at the time, in becoming less western it also became less conservative.  This was probably inevitable.  The choir invisible of Canadian public opinion still views the word conservative as a pejorative.  That doesn't mean they view conservatives values in the same light.  Valpy concludes:

What researchers are increasingly finding is the large group of non-ideological voters happy to do a mix-and-match of liberal and conservative values: for example, they can be compassionate but have little faith in the state to meet that objective.

The above shows that Valpy, and the academics he is citing, don't know the modern meaning of the word conservative.  A conservative is not an Archie Bunker clone, callously dismissing the genuine misfortunes or minor mistakes of others.  A conservative wants to do many things, many of the same things liberals want to do, except he or she is skeptical of the state's ability to do them.  Harper is correct, Canadians have moved to the Right, they just don't know it yet.