Ideas - Can a New Conservatism Offer Solutions to Modern Social Problems?

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Canadian conservatism remains a contested territory, even for those who see themselves firmly entrenched in its ideas and history. IDEAS examines how contemporary conservatism has shifted over the last decades — and how conservatives are wrestling with their own movement's internal pressures, including a sustained call for a return to socially conservative values. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, and to our series, The New World Disorder Part 2.

I'm Nala Ayed. Together, as Conservatives and Canadians, we're going to reconstruct that grand alliance of West and East, English and French, new Canadians and old. The election of Brian Mulroney brought the Conservative Party back into power after a

nearly 30-year absence. And we are going to make a commitment to unity, to change, to growth and prosperity that's going to mean new days and new hopes and better tomorrows for all Canadians. Mulroney's tenure brought substantive economic changes. Globally, he's most remembered for his strong stance against apartheid in South Africa. If Canada, middle power, doesn't stand for human rights,

the defense of human rights and individual liberties, what do we stand for? And that's exactly it. What does conservatism stand for now? In the last decade or so, political conservatism around the world has shifted radically, a disturbing amount of it, toward ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism.

We seem desperate for novelty these days, and so chaos and creating the sort of, breaking the barriers of what's acceptable, socially acceptable, has become the new kind of thing to watch. It's also shifted in Canada and within conservative circles themselves. There's a number of sort of pressing sort of challenges or grievances that have risen up in the past decade or so. There's a real lack of satisfaction with the status quo. There's a lack of satisfaction with the status quo among Canadians as well.

And we're clearly in a great period of backlash. And the feeling is that certain ideas associated with liberalism or the left have gone too far for some people to be able to handle. But that's come hand in hand, as it did in the 30s, with a feeling of economic insecurity that is creating a sense of chaos and instability, vulnerability around the world. Add to that mix Canada's changing demographics, increasing social polarization, the continuing housing shortages, and various other crises faced by younger and working-class Canadians. All of it has left both traditional Conserv and social conservatives grappling with what conservatism should stand for right now. I would say that if we're talking about modern Canadian conservatism, it's about sort of the embrace of neoliberal economic policies,

but blended in with neoconservatism on the social policy angle and how those two fit together. And there's a certain tension that exists within that. To dig into the contested territory of what conservatism means or should mean, I'm joined by three observers and scholars of Canadian conservatism. Writer and PhD student Sam Routley, journalist Marcy MacDonald,

and John Shields, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, where our conversation was recorded. We're calling this episode, Conservatism at the Crossroads. Thank you all for being here, and thank you for having us here. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you all for saying yes to this conversation. We wanted to kind of, before getting into this substantive conversation, just have a minute from each of you kind of as an opening salvo, using the title of this conversation, which is Conservatism at the Crossroads.

That's what we've titled the conversation. And I'm wondering if each of you could take a moment to take kind of a snapshot of what that crossroads looks like right now. So, Sam, I thought maybe we could start with you. When you look at that crossroads, what do you see? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I can promise you a minute, but what I will say, just to summarize it, is that I think there's a number of sort of pressing sort of challenges or grievances that have risen up in the past decade or so.

There's a real lack of satisfaction with the status quo. There's a sense that the sort of things that conservatives have been pushing for for the past 40 or so years is ineffective, that it led to something of a dead end and things need to be reworked. But no one can quite agree on exactly what needs to be reworked and what that future direction is, hence the sort of crossroads, right, of various different possible directions. And Sam, fear not, we will have, we'll talk more expansively about

the different elements that you raised. So one minute just to start and we'll go from there. Marcy, what do you see when you look at the crossroads? I'm not sure I see a crossroads right now. I see the conservative movement and I look at it as a journalist, an outsider. and I look at it as a journalist, an outsider. In terms of the leaders of, certainly in Canada, the party over the years, there were the Diefenbaker Conservatives, then the Mulroney Conservatives,

and then you had the Harper Conservatives. Now you have the Poiliev Party Conservatives. And in many ways, I see him as the natural heir or successor to a twist in that whole conservative narrative that happened way back in 1987 when Preston Manning became the voice of a rebellion in the West, a populist libertarian strain that would no longer be ignored. It was Western Canadian frustration. It was also largely social conservative and brought those concerns to bear at a time that it was thought Moroni was concentrating too much on the middle of the road, sounding too much like the liberals, and also not paying too much attention to Quebec. So I see Poiliev, who actually, unlike Harper, was born in the West, was raised and went to school at the University of Calgary. So he grew up in the crucible of reform and the Calgary school, which influenced reforms policy. And he is the natural outgrowth of that. But I'm not sure

that what we're seeing is as different as we think it is, because despite his calculated boorishness, we might say, his sloganeering, his provocative rhetoric, we actually may be faced with Harper 2.0, because in the same way that Harper more or less kept the social conservative strain under wraps to their great discontent, Polyev's policies are not that different when you come down to it. He's attacking the elites, but he is not championing the Christian right. Okay. And again, we're going to unwrap all of that as we go. Polyev comes a bit later in our conversation, but it's great. This is the first salvo. So please, John. I would say that if we're talking about modern Canadian conservatism, it's about sort of the embrace of neoliberal economic policies, but blended in with neoconservatism on the social policy angle and how those two fit together. And there's a certain tension that exists within that. Also,

I would say it's about the marginalization and probably the exit of any kind of red Toryism that's gone. So I think those are some of the key elements that are at play within modern conservatism. But, you know, all of these ideologies are hybrid because they pull in other kinds of ideas and they mix them in various ways. And that's certainly true of modern Canadian conservatism. It's also hard to pull apart party politics from the ideological approaches to conservatism. So I'd like to kind of zoom out, you know, go right to the beginning. And well, not right to the beginning, go around maybe in 1980. And talk about what many people would describe as kind of a shift in conservatism around sort of the Mulroney, Reagan, Thatcher era.

And look at the big picture. How would you, back to you, Sam, how would you characterize mainstream conservatism before that? It's an interesting question. I mean, I think conservatism is very hard to define. It's very hard to kind of grasp at its core features in the way that a lot of other sort of predominant modern ideologies, right? I don't want to get too abstract here, but you think of like liberalism and Marxism have very clear articulated foundational principles or criterions by which they sort of assess value and sort of political objectives. You know, conservatism as such seems to lack that same foundation. You could suggest, for example, it's a dispositional sort of preference for the status quo. But that in and of itself, I mean, on a practical level, but also as a philosophical argument, isn't very solid, right? I mean, you know, conservatives sort of have to justify,

have to sort of work their way around this status quo bias in a way that affirms a certain sort of sociopolitical arrangement that they wouldn't have approved of in the past. And so conservatives get accused of being sort of liberals in reverse, right? They're liberals as they were 20 years ago. You know, Buckley's famous saying that a conservative stands in history and yells stop, right? The two problems with this is, you know, history can't stop, first of all, and also because where else is it supposed to go? I think the sort of what we call conservatism is a political arrangement. It was a strategic coalition put together starting in the 60s, but really coalesced in the 80s. And it was this coalition between, we can call them sort of civil libertarians,

people who were, and the American case is mostly where you see this originate, is this opposition to Keynesian economics and the sort of big state represented by sort of the 40 and New Deal and also the sort of just society programs that future administrations did, including, you can say, the Trudeau senior administration had its own just society sort of program. And the fear there was of a sort of, this is inevitably, and Hayek, this is Hayek's argument in The Road to Serfdom, right, is we're inevitably going to lead down this vicious scope, this vicious sort of slide towards totalitarianism, right? And we have to see the state as this enemy. So that's one side. The other side is this sort of social traditionalism. You could call it loosely

Christian, although it's not entirely Christian. And it emerges in opposition to a lot of these transformational social changes that occurred in the 1960s. And I think because a lot of these social changes were accompanied by substantial state action, right? A lot of liberals argued at that time, as they still do today, that in order to fully realize these liberal goals of equality and inclusion, we need significant state intervention, which sort of leads to this coalescence between those two groups. So let me stop you there just to bring the others in. John or Marcy and or Marcy, could you speak to what happens in 1980 to shift course loosely? John? Well, I think, first of all, we have to understand that conservatism, like other ideologies,

are very much part and react to structural changes within the economy. In the 1980s, there were some fundamental structural changes. We had the big economic crisis of the 1970s, which undermined Keynesian approaches to the economy. With Maroney, you've got the embrace of free trade, the leap of faith, as he called it, which was a fundamental shift from, you know, historically John A. MacDonald and the national policy and tariffs and so forth, which were yet a very active state that had to sort of build the Canadian economy. It wasn't active socially, but it was certainly active in terms of creating an economic infrastructure for the country. The other thing we have to remember that even after the Second World War, you had conservative

governments at the provincial level who built the welfare state, because they were reacting to the dominance of Keynesian ideas, and they accepted them. And they were about the social pressures that were coming about. So they had a more moderate version of the welfare state, but they embraced that. Here in the 1980s, you had this other big break, and you have this movement towards the embrace of neoliberal ideas, and then the beginning of the cuts in terms of social programs. So the emergence, with the influences of Thatcher and Reagan, of conservative social programs.

So, Marcy, how would you describe that shift in political conservatism in Canada? What did it go from, and what did it go to? What it went from was red Toryism, essentially. And 1980 was, as you maybe were cuing us to say, was the election of Ronald Reagan, followed by a landslide re-election, which is when I arrived in Washington to cover. You were there for a decade, right, in Washington? More than. And what it did was show an incredibly popular figure championing these ideas, not an intellectual himself, but championing a bunch of ideas out of the Chicago School, but championing a bunch of ideas out of the Chicago school, Milton Friedman's economics,

which come from Frederick Hayek, which you've already referred to. And the neoliberal economics became actually the gospel of the world. And it was buoyed by the election of Thatcher in England. And the fact that it came to Canada later was not accidental or random. There were actually proselytizers who arrived from England to help found the Fraser Institute and think tanks even then, and American money that took a great interest and was championing Brian Mulroney, even though he actually campaigned first against free trade. He was being cultivated by American corporate interests all through this era, and even Canadians quietly championing him. And therefore, they were not at all surprised when he did the switcheroo and was suddenly championing free trade himself. So you had all of that reaction to the Carter years, stagflation, incredible interest rates, 20%. When people are complaining about 5% interest rates now, they have no idea

what it was like in 1978 with the Arab oil embargo and what was happening that led to Reagan's election. So I think that that was one watershed in the conservative movement. And a successful strongman, if you dare to call an elected American president a strongman, is very attractive around the world as a leader in the conservative movement. Marcy, just staying with you for a moment and moving ahead in time a little bit, but because you mentioned Brian Mulroney, you've written about Brian Mulroney extensively and Stephen Harper. I wonder what's your take on how they approach the problem of having a vision,

which all politicians bring to us, and then, you know, on the one hand, and then having to win elections. What was the approach? Was there a common approach in how those two tried to bridge those two things? I never saw it as a common approach. With Mulroney, what was so interesting to me, looking at him from the United States, because I was there the first day he arrived after his election to meet Reagan, and saluted Reagan as sir, which the Canadian press corps all went, ooh, was that he was actually fulfilling an American vision. It had been Reagan's longtime dream to have a hemispheric trade area, including Mexico. That would not come about until NAFTA. But so it was not an original Canadian blueprint that was

suddenly forced upon us. And Moroni still had the support of many longtime red Tories. By the end of his reign, many of those people were saying, I don't recognize my party anymore. And certainly by the time Stephen Harper came to power, they really felt alienated. They have not found a home. And in a famous speech in which Harper described in 1993 his blueprint for a new conservative coalition that would focus for the first time on social conservative ideals. Harper more or less said we may lose some red Tories in the process and naming Joe Clark and others and sort of that's too bad. I want to kind of shift into more of the conversation that you just started, but looking at how things are today.

So the question is, you know, younger conservative thinkers and writers like yourself are trying to articulate a different vision of conservatism, one that kind of offers more meaning. And I wonder what you think about that. Broadly speaking, what does that look like? Oh, that's a small question. It's a very big question. Yeah. I mean, I think past generations of conservatives or people who identify as conservatives sort of came up in this fusionist arrangement. I don't know if we've used that word yet. Fusionist meaning?

Meaning this arrangement between civil libertarians and social traditionalists that characterizes conservatism from sort of Reagan onwards. And you can sort of consider Mulroney and the Reform Party to be kind of the catalyst for how that was implemented in Canada in the same way Thatcher works in Britain. I think because they were sort of raised up, they sort of came up through conservative institutions and sort of communicated that this is what conservatism is. And I think you've had two responses that have sort of led to a pushback against the first one being that it's sort of seized sort of atomized individual freedom as the ultimate political objective, which is which is not a conservative goal. Right. It's a very liberal one.

which is not a conservative goal, right? It's a very liberal one. And I think the second factor here too, which relates to it is, is it's this discontent, the fact that we have a number of economic and social problems that have emerged and conservatism as it works now at the very best doesn't have an answer to them and at the very worst actively caused them. And I think there's, there's a search for, I think, a move beyond what feels like a very narrow politics. That we have a politics of sort of one color of liberal against another color of liberal. Where sort of a lot of the major questions, the major sort of disagreements that naturally arise in politics have sort of been agreed upon ahead of time. John, you're nodding. Yeah, no, I agree with a lot of what Sam is saying. But it's also this kind of appeal that

the conservatives have tried to make, I think, to young people, you know, pulling upon that notion of individualism, independence, entrepreneurship, because their labor market has really shifted dramatically over the last, well, 30 years or more. So now, you know, there isn't, they economically are scheduled to do much worse than their parents, you know, trying to buy a house. There's no job security. This is the alienation and the discontent. There's a lot of alienation. There's an attempt to sort of pick up upon that, I think, for the conservatives and offer these, I guess it's individualistic solutions to that.

That only if you work hard and so forth, you can overcome that. But you've got to do it through a more free market type of approach. I also agree with what Sam's saying. It's not necessarily going to be a solution to most of these folks. But they do feel the pressure and a lot of the economic alienation today. So they're looking for homes. Marcy, I want to stay with you. It just talks a little bit more about Stephen Harper before we go further, because I want to bring his legacy into today and come back to you, Sam. But one of the more contentious debates, as you've all alluded to, is whether to keep social conservatism separate from the economic vision and where that sits in the

conservative spectrum. So he shifted that conversation in really major ways. And I wondered if you could, Marcy, address, I mean, you wrote a book about this, just what, you know, what was he doing that was such a departure from what came before? What he was doing was acknowledging the social conservative base, but he did so in a very pragmatic, some might say opportunistic way, because he had won the leadership contest over Stockwell Day, the champion of the social conservatives, who had gone to churches and religious organizations and even had campaign life, not quite legally, signing up members for him.

So when Stephen Harper won, Stephen Harper, who had argued with Preston Manning that social conservative issues better not take over the reform platform. He was never seen as a true believer himself. Suddenly found himself at the helm of a party whose solid base was social conservative. And he also had the example of George W. Bush in the United States, who had been elected hugely on a social conservative wave. The Christian Coalition had been very active for him. So he very pragmatically gave this speech, which stunned those who knew him, to Civitas,

and outlined we need to shift our focus from the neoconservative economic policies of the Chicago school, we've done enough in this area, to the social conservative concerns. And he even christened them theocons. But he warned that it would be an incremental progress. And that was his way of saying,

don't expect too much from me. And in fact, very soon, social conservatives were very disillusioned with him and actually quite angry and blamed him for not coming forward with more definite policies. He had campaigned when he won the election in 2004, saying he'd reopen the same-sex marriage debate, and then he didn't, or he played it in such a way that it was bound to not be an issue.

And so they punished him in the next election, and he had a minority government. And he always walked this awkward, balancing tightrope, trying to give enough policies that would keep people quiet, money to religious institutions when there were infrastructure payments, appointments of a religious rights ambassador, but never the key issues that they were pushing for. And I see that Poiliev may find himself in the same position. And we'll get to that. But Sam, I wanted you to weigh in and just maybe if you could draw a line between what Marcy just described and the legacy of that today. Where do you see the echoes of that

today? Yeah, I mean, there was a sort of delicate dance between in sort of dealing with that social conservative element historically. Mostly, I think, for one reason was because a lot of conservatives were themselves not socially traditionalist. And you've always had a tension between conservatives or self-identified conservatives who are at least, if not pushing, at least supportive of these social changes and others who are opposed. But I think it meant historically that you saw this, the solution was to sort of redirect those questions to a matter of individual discretion. Not only the fact that the government is not so much involved there, but that it is precisely through, involved there, but that it is precisely through the pitch that was made to social traditionalists was that it's through individual empowerment that we can sort of create a more moral society.

And that meant a lot of conservative parties, I think, while they weren't actively pushing these social traditionalist objectives, they sort of had to allude to the fact that, you know, we believe in it, right? You know, you know, you're sort of you're sort of welcome here. I think what's changed. It seems like the historical sort of Christian-esque social traditionalism linked to a sort of, you know, Christianity declines in prominence. And you see, you know, this this political movement come out of people who feel disquieted by that lack of influence, I think that's sort of faded. And what you see, I think, is this more abstract interest in sort of religious-esque sort of thinking or ways of

envisioning society. There's a discontent with the way liberal society is organized, There's a discontent with the way liberal society is organized, and so it's led to this certain flirtation with religious forms of life. You see in a lot of populist parties in Europe, for example, they have a lot of support from increasingly secular people. If you're a traditional Christian in Europe, you tend to vote for the mainline Christian Democrats. And if you're a secular economic right-wing person, you tend to go for the populists. And the populists are increasingly not so much pushing this orthodox, strict Christian interpretation as

much as they are sort of using Christianity as this broader cultural heritage, and precisely the cultural heritage that leads to these progressive social accomplishments. And they sort of frame it as we need to preserve this Christian society against these outside threats. A podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Nala Ayed. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts.

We now return to conservatism at the crossroads, a conversation about how conservatism in Canada is grappling from within to find a cohesive identity while also facing the external challenge of an ever more diverse electorate. This conversation was recorded at Toronto Metropolitan University. I guess that leads to my next question, which is in a multi-faith society like Canada or the U.S., just how much more difficult is something like social conservatism, which is informed by a very specific religious view? I mean, could you speak to that in today's context? I think with the immigration piece, I mean, I think this idea that Canadians are as a whole

supportive of immigration as an ending of itself, as an inherent value, as this cultural enricher, is a bit of a myth. A solid third of Canadians still remain very much opposed to immigration. What matters is that there is a consensus in Canada, or there was a consensus that immigration was an economic good, right? That it was, we can sort of put aside those reservations because it's an undeniable economic good. What happened

in Canada was, there was a shift towards the opening up of immigrationeniable economic good. What happened in Canada was there was a shift towards the opening up of immigration as an economic good, which created this more pluralistic society. And I think there was sort of an attempt after the fact to frame this in a cultural way. I don't think conservatives in Canada have exactly much of a prescription to it or way to think about it outside of sort of politicking because they haven't had to. There's an easy way on which they can mobilize that vote. And you haven't seen the same amount of ethnic or religious conflicts. What's the easy way? I just think that they can sort of approach it with a certain benign neglect,

mostly because you don't see sort of public interest in the controversy or you don't see public interest in sort of the nuances or the difficulties with it. You know, Canada has an incredibly successful integration system. It's worked really well historically. Yeah, and I mean, the question is whether or not, you know, you can, you can, this sort of declining support for immigration, a number of conflicts perhaps open that up. I'll put it this way. I don't want to, I want to open time up, but if we put religion aside for a moment, there's a growing divide between what you could call sort of post-materialist and traditionalist. That is, on the one side, you have people who tend to be highly educated,

who tend to prioritize these political goals related to sort of self-actualization. And they've been increasingly opposed by people who tend to prioritize this communitarian cohesion, one's sense of belonging to a broader group. And while one's attitude on that ladder is predicted by religion, it's not synonymous with religion. And I think the way things are going, I think, is to arrive at a sort of political coalition that's loosely religious in the sense that it's communitarian and it arrives at a certain set of foundational values, but that isn't strictly Christian or any other sort of religious foundation. But exactly where you locate those sources of agreement and how you put aside those

sources of difference is open. Yeah, I don't think anyone's quite determined how to do that. open. Yeah, I don't think anyone's quite determined how to do that. Just to maybe pick up on the immigration front, the most common response to defining who a Canadian is, is around diversity. And also kind of attached to the idea of immigration. And while there has been some drop in the number of support for immigration, it still is very strong. And it's really around numbers. So it's about, well, maybe there's too many. So that maybe we need to restrain those numbers.

But it's a very different discourse than certainly that exists in Europe, which really defines populism in the European context or the American context. And it doesn't define, really, populism in the Canadian context. And I think for the Conservative Party nationally, I think they realize that...

Because a lot of the divides within the country in terms of conservatism and liberalism, shall we call it that, is an urban-rural divide. And, like, you know, the next election, it's kick out Trudeau. But this isn't just about, this is not, largely not really about ideology.

It's about somebody's time has come. So let's talk about the, take a snapshot of the picture of the way things are today. What is it about conservatism today that you think is compelling to voters and is showing up in the polls? So maybe John, starting with you, what is it that's so compelling about it in the version that it exists today? Well, I think it tries to speak to alienation that people are feeling in terms of the economy, that a lot of the policies don't seem to be working for them. And so the Conservatives,

I think, have really tried to capture that. It's about kind of an anti-statism to some degree, and the idea that I can do better with my taxes than others. And so the Conservatives have been very successful at appealing to that. I mean, it's really interesting because during the pandemic, you know, we really had the government step in and there was actually very broad agreement among political parties with the need for a strong government, an interventionist government, and one that actually supported Canadians. And then there was also, during that period of time, a promise to build back better. And I think what happened in the post-pandemic period with the rise of inflation,

there was a disappointment about that and an economic anxiety that developed. Yeah. Marcy, what do you think the appeal is right now? Simple answers. Sloganeering. I think it has a great appeal right now in this time of everything seeming to come apart. We are slouching towards somewhere, and nobody has any answers that have...

Even... It's interesting, Pierre Poiliev, who has great slogans, does not have any answers. Many of his policies, including on immigration, are not clear. And so people can only look at his past records, say, on social conservative issues and say, well, once he was voting against same-sex marriage, but now he says he's for it. And once he was voting against abortion rights, and now his wife has proclaimed

that they are pro-choice. And he has more or less said that he would not bring any legislation forward. So I think what around the world we see across the border in a magnified sense, simple answers, catchy phrases, the appearance of a strong man who scorns all the existing institutions. We're against the elites. We're against the gatekeepers here. We may not be as extreme as Donald Trump, but we have a lot of anger and therefore we're funneling a lot of anger and frustration in the society, but not, we don't have answers. And I'm not sure whether it's a question of ideology. I think anyone who came forward with that appeal might, conservative, liberal, Marxist, might have a following these days. Yeah. Sam, do you want to respond to the same question? And also the idea of,

is the sum total, you know, the right slogans meeting the right anger? I mean, it seems like it's almost been stalled, the development of conservatism in Canada, because it's very hard at this venture, at least if we're talking about the federal conservatives, to differentiate between sort of these short-term factors and these long-term factors. And I think that the attitude that conservatives are taking is essentially, let's focus on winning the election, and after that, we can sort of figure the rest out, which they are. I mean, there are attempts, I think,

although bringing them out publicly, I think, is in the future. Or perhaps, I mean, we could look at the provincial conservative parties as these sort of areas of active conservative experimentation, where you have different premiers that are trying different styles of a new conservative direction. Kind of testing ground. Yeah, yeah. So much of Canadian politics is driven by anti-incumbency, incumbency and anti-incumbency. How much of this is really just disaffection with the way things are that people are willing to embrace anything? Yeah.

John, coming back to you, when you look at Poiliev's brand of conservatism so far, you know, a skeptic might look at it and say, you know, this increased focus on the needs of young people, this sort of, you know, real focus on working class, all of that might seem to a skeptic as new, is it? I think there is some special effort to go after younger voters. I think there is a special effort to try to tap into the blue collar workers, right? And you also see this in terms of Trump and so forth, because, you know, with the industrialization coming out of the 1970s, you've got a large group of especially white male, maybe high school or less educated, who don't fit very well into this kind of economy.

And so they're feeling very economically isolated, disadvantaged. The gender roles in terms of the rise of women have created certain status anxieties. And so there's an attempt, I think, to appeal by the Conservatives to some of this carefully in terms of how they play it out, because they also want to attract women voters. So let me read you something, a quote from Polyev from a recent speech he gave at the annual Conference of Canada's Building Trades Union. He said, you represent the wage earners and the future pensioners. Wages and pensions have lost purchasing power. Meanwhile, big government and big business and big capital has gotten rich by the inflationary policies of government. It is a transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the have-yachts.

I guess... It's very rhetorical and... And it sounds like, you know, he could be sort of mistaken from someone from the left, from the traditional left. But, I mean, with neoliberal economic policies, I mean, those are policies that are going to continue to benefit the better off

and the wealthy. They're not really putting in place, aside from saying that, you know, we'll get government off your back. But part of that is by reducing social policies that are helping a lot of people. Is there anything about that that's surprising to either of you? What he wrote? The message. No, not at all. It's typical electioneering. But I think it's only words because his big money comes from corporations, comes from oil and gas. In fact, they have been doing most of the lobbying, though he has criticized lobbyists as scum of the earth, he has been meeting with them, and he is not removed from this. And I think you have to look at the sort of history

of the economics he has adopted to see that, in fact, it is all about benefiting people who are well-off corporations. I don't think he's going to turn out to be a mass peron. But Sam, addressing the working class and labor movements, I mean, do you think that's out of character?

So I think we've been sort of circulating around this is that there's a there's a cultural piece to this conversation and then there's an economic piece to this conversation because what we're what's really I think driving this is it's not so much the fact that conservative ideology is pushing conservative parties to consider the working class as much as it's the fact that this shift in how voters are positioned is leading working class voters to be more sympathetic to traditionally conservative positions, or at least they've moved away from traditional left-wing positions and are sort of open to be captured. But assessing, I think, it's about assessing to what extent is this a cultural change? The fact that working class voters are sort of pushing back against,

yeah, again, social changes they perceive to be wrong, or is it really a question of economic discontent, a lack of sort of, not just like short-term discontent, but a lack of even longer-term economic prosperity. I mean, if things continue the rate they are, I mean, depths of despair sort of ideas, right? It's not good for them. I think to really frame that conversation, we have to define what we mean by class.

Conservative parties were historically, and this is like 19th century conservative parties, used to always be the parties of the sort of elite, right? That this push towards democratic representative institutions was always pursued by these lower social orders that were supportive of socialist politics, really. And conservatives emerged as this force that sought to moderate it. But you're sort of seeing a shift. It seems like, I'll say this and then I'll end up, this is just a speculation, I think.

A lot of what conservatives argue is that if you understand class as a matter of status, who's seen as more socially valued, thinking about it in terms of economic well-being, that you have people with a lot of money and people with not that much money, that's not the best way to see class anymore. people with a lot of money and people with not that much money. That's not the best way to see class anymore. You're looking at a sort of cultural value that I think people who are, we can say, highly educated managerial knowledge economy workers,

because they're the ones who sort of control a lot of these political, social, cultural institutions, that they're sort of the real elite. And they're pushing these changes that are against the interest of working class people. And that's what's leading conservatives to reshift. That's not quite well articulated, but hopefully it's clear enough. Okay.

We've talked about policies. We've talked about some of the personalities, but we haven't talked about kind of the elephant in the room, which is globally in the big picture, when we talk about conservatism, there has been a very palpable going off the rails in some contexts. So we have, you know, the denial of reality, you know, 2020 US election, whether it was stolen or not, the vilification of minorities, as we briefly discussed, places like Poland and Hungary and France, and kind of this repetition about a glorified past that has come up in some of these

contexts. And so, of course, we can have, or we have, and we will, and we repeatedly will have conversations about the left's own sordid history. But I'm talking about the current moment we're in. And I'm wondering, how did so much of what passes as conservatism, calls itself conservatism, come to be so unreasonable? And I know it's a big question. But if there are a couple of things you can each say on how you think we got there. John? Well, I think it's part of the challenges of the new economy and so many people not making it. And we live economically in less egalitarian times, and that growing inequality is increasing.

And so then you have electorates who are discontent, and then you have parties that are trying to attract those who have been left out of that. And, you know, conservatives have been part of that movement to try to attract it. In fact, in many instances, they've been more successful than the left in some of these places in doing it. But it's always, I think, country specific in terms of how that plays out. So I think, as we were saying, what's happening in Canada in terms of how that plays out. So I think as we were saying, what's happening in Canada in terms of conservatism, while there are some common tendencies, is also quite different

than the European experience. Sam? Yeah, I think it's a lack of faith, trust in the process. We can say a democratic process. People can disagree, but it rests on a certain set of shared assumptions, shared values, shared sort of objectives, shared norms, and this faith in the fact that institutions that structure this process, that sort of condition the conflict, are neutral, right? Not totally neutral, but at least as neutral as they can. And I think there's probably multiple things that are causing it. There's a sense in which those processes are not neutral, right? That they reflect one side of a lot of contentious political conflicts.

And there is evidence of this, I think, that people are dividing amongst cultural lines that are increasingly irreconcilable. Marcy, in your words, how you would describe how things got so unreasonable on some elements of the conservative movement? Well, I don't know that Canada fits into that global picture of unreasonableness right now. It's clearly all politics, if you take the long view, is ebb and flow. And we're clearly in a great period of backlash. And the feeling is that certain ideas associated with liberalism

or the left have gone too far for some people to be able to handle. But that's come hand in hand, as it did in the 30s, with a feeling of economic insecurity that is creating a sense of chaos and instability, vulnerability around the world. So what you have is the emergence in this backlash of strong voices, strong men. And probably of all the strong men, Trump, who we might roll our eyes and say, oh, he has nothing to do with us, and we're a long way from that. But he, in his rhetoric,

gives a kind of permission, a normalization of demonizing enemies, of saying the outrageous. And once the outrageous is said, a taboo is broken and more and more outrageous things must be said to make headlines because the purpose is, of course, headlines and winnability. And we're beginning to see, even here in state-old Canada, famous for our niceness that question period has become quite brutal, quite ad hominem and there are more and more unreasonable attacks and there's been with that the kind of catering to celebrity, catering to making headlines that is so superficial that it's hard to actually connect it to policy or to a great movement. But we seem desperate

for novelty these days. And so chaos, breaking the barriers of what's acceptable, socially acceptable, has become the new kind of thing to watch. I'm going to read you all one quote to end off from Howard Englund. He was Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and he wrote about conservatism. Canadian conservatism has been renewed and reinvented so many times that a conservative leader today has to squint to discern a coherent tradition among so many disparate and contradictory historical figures, and is thus mostly free to chart his own course free of spectral haunting. Open-ended question, another easy one. What challenges do you think that idea presents for the future of conservatism? Marcy, I'll start with you and John and then Sam. Well, I guess back to Pierre Poiliev, who has

has charted what we seem to think is a new course. But I see in a longer view that many of his positions, even though he didn't actually support Stephen Harper in the early days of his political life, many of his positions have come to resemble Harper's, particularly when it comes to dealing with social conservatives. And he has been very careful about not articulating many other positions. We know what he's against, but we don't actually know what he's for and how he will carry out some of these policies. Because many of these issues are intractable. You cannot please everyone. So I think it remains a mystery where we are today and one that will follow with great interest.

Absolutely. John? Yeah, I would also say once in power, that's when you have to start dealing with the tensions that exist within the conservative, so-called conservative movement. And so I think the populism of the West is going to come into some sort of tension with the pragmatism.

I'll call them traditional conservatives. I certainly agree with Marcia on the social policy issues, because in terms of Canada nationally, those are not winnable issues in national elections. We saw that with the last conservative leaders, Trudeau sort of coming from behind and winning. But the conservatives are leading in the polls. Oh, no, but they'll win.

I have no doubt they're going to win the next election. But that's kicking a government out. Canadian Conservatives have been so preoccupied with determining and sourcing this distinctive Canadian conservatism. And red Toryism has sort of floated, like red Toryism of the sort of George Grant variety is floated as this.

This is the source of distinctive Canadian conservatism, right? That the Americans have these defects and this is it. But the more you confront it, the more it ever becomes a specter, right? It evades your grasp. There's no good evidence to me that it really existed as something beyond pure pragmatism. And so much of the criticism that the Mulroney and the Harper changes got is that they're American imports, which I think in large part they were. So there's that. And I think perhaps the challenge is about, you know, if we care about Canadian nationalism or we care about

maintaining Canada as this distinctive community or maintaining care about Canadian nationalism, or we care about maintaining Canada as this distinctive community, or maintaining our distinctive Canadian values, articulating a distinctive Canadian conservatism in the same way that articulating a distinctive Canadian liberalism, a distinctive Canadian socialism seems like a worthwhile, although it is a challenging goal. But I mean, I think that relates to a bigger problem, which is the fact that conservatism can't sort of justify its basis. Thinking about this as a challenge perhaps might be a limited way of looking at it. We can think about it as a virtue, a lot of conservatives would, to say that thinking about it in terms of we're going to derive a set

of deductive principles that we want to pursue regardless of the practicalities is the wrong way to approach politics, right? That this process of ever-changing coalition building, rethinking ideas, rethinking about identities in light of realignments, pressing challenges, is perhaps... It's a characteristic of conservative thinking. And I mean, whether or not it's a challenge, whether or not it's a defect, whether or not it's a virtue is sort of open to interpretation. Thank you very much for your insights and for being here tonight. Really appreciate it. Thank you. You've been listening to Conservatism at the Crossroads. Thank you to writer and PhD student Sam Routley,

journalist Marcy MacDonald, and John Shields, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. Thank you also to Professors Arne Kislenko and Sanjay Ruparelia at Toronto Metropolitan University, the Frontlines of Democracy lecture series, and to Regina Chong, Jordan LaRue, and other student leaders

of the International Issues Discussion Series at TMU. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. The senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.