THE decade-long war between the forces of American-inspired populist prairie conservatism and eastern Canadian British-inspired progressive conservatism ended on the weekend with a decisive victory for the populists.
The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, with its 60-year-old streak of red toryism, voted itself out of existence to “merge” with the much larger and stronger Canadian Alliance to form a new Conservative Party of Canada. Better dead than red.
Proponents of the deal said it will end the Liberal free ride in federal electoral politics, winning three consecutive majority governments in the face of a divided right.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
The new party, said Peter MacKay – the last Canadian federal Tory leader – is the “worst nightmare” possible for new Liberal leader Paul Martin.
Opponents of the deal thought the nightmare was being visited upon the ghosts of the great Tory party that founded Canada, that gave the country the CBC, the Canadian Wheat Board, the Farm Credit Corp., a national railway.
The political Visigoths were overthrowing the bastions of civilized politics.
There has been much talk among merger opponents about the progressive legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald and John Diefenbaker.
Macdonald, as the proponents of the deal like to point out, was a coalition builder and the leader of a fluid and evolving party in the 19th century. The horse he rode was always changing colour, though the underlying hue remained blue.
But the coalitions he built always had the Tories as the strongest component and he always emerged the leader.
With Tory ranks a shadow of the strength within the Alliance, nobody could sensibly argue this was a merger of equals.
It was the triumph of the Reform-Alliance dream of destroying the Tories.
There is little doubt that the weekend marked a turning point in Canadian conservative politics. It certainly brought forth a flood of commentator nostalgia about the good old days of Tory influence and governance in Canada.
All that made me reflect on my own odd recollections of the Tories.
Growing up as a Quebec kid in the 1950s, I did not have the sense of Diefenbaker and Alvin Hamilton as the progressive reformers that prairie eyes saw. Dief had made a deal with Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, as close to an anti-democratic right wing dictator as Canada has seen, to win the province in 1958.
Through the 1960s, Diefenbaker was a consistent opponent of what many Sixties kids saw as “progressive” – medicare, Canada Pension Plan, bilingualism, a student loan program, a Canadian flag, a royal commission on women’s rights.
The 1970s brought the red Toryism of Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark but it had little impact.
Then the 1980s brought a Tory government led by Brian Mulroney that delivered what it promised it would not – higher taxes, higher deficits and free trade. Of course, Tory Robert Borden gave Canada the “temporary” income tax in 1917 and the War Measures Act.
So perhaps the nostalgia over the death of “progressive” conservatism in Canada is a bit over-wrought. Still, the closest thing Canada has to a founding party has died, the latest victim of Canadians’ lingering anger at Mulroney. R.I.P.
