Amid the balloons, a white flag

The defining sound of the Conservative convention, the theme song if you will, was that desperate, impatient booing that erupted whenever anyone tried to open a debate. They booed the bilingualism crank. They booed Scott Reid, the scholarly MP who had the temerity to suggest that riding associations with fewer members than delegates to the convention should perhaps send fewer delegates. They even booed Elsie Wayne.

In the new-look, New Maturity Conservative Party, there is no room for debate, and they want the whole world to know it. Just because they were gathered in the same room for three days of policy deliberations, that didn’t mean they had anything to say to one another. For that would invite the risk that some of what they had to say would differ from the Liberal party, or from the media, or from each other, and in no case could this be tolerated.

Rather, it was all about Unity, and Professionalism, and Winning, and if you are a Conservative partisan hungering for power you are probably pleased at the result. If you are a person interested in what the Conservatives would do if they got there -- a voter, perhaps -- or what changes they would bring to existing policy, you are perhaps less entranced.

Because it’s over, that sort of thing. The conservative era in Canadian politics -- the age, beginning roughly in 1988, in which conservative parties were prepared to deviate, however fitfully, from the prevailing Liberal orthodoxy -- has at last been extinguished. There is no longer any party at any level of government that has any intention of leading public opinion, or making changes to the status quo -- not, that is, in the direction of smaller government or greater personal freedom. The choice, rather, is between parties that are eager to expand the state, and parties that will do so reluctantly. And everyone couldn’t be happier about it.

Conservatives are happy, because they have been persuaded that this is what it takes to win power -- and because they have been persuaded that winning power is all that matters. Funny: when Republicans in the United States go to great lengths to save the life of a severely disabled woman, they are accused of crass political opportunism, “pandering” to their conservative base. When Canadian Conservatives jettison any number of long-established policies -- from reform of EI to ending corporate welfare to referendums on major issues -- in a transparent bid for popular approval, they are congratulated for their newfound “political maturity.”

The media, of course, are delirious, and not only because of all the free drinks to which they were treated at Belinda’s swanky do. A politics of ideas requires hard thinking about the issues, and risks exposing one’s own biases. But a politics of “moderation,” in which everything is about personality and tactics, is a reporter’s dream, rewarding gossip and speculation over analysis and debate.

But I think the Liberals are happiest of all today. Because everything the Tories have just done is to ratify Liberal assumptions, Liberal premises, Liberal values. You heard it all weekend, every time someone declared, with that strange mix of complacency and defensiveness on which the Tories hold the patent, that this or that abandonment of Conservative principle would “insulate” the party against Liberal attacks. Well, yes: that’s what usually happens when you wave the white flag.

A party that plays on its opponents’ pitch, that lacks the self-confidence to define the terms of debate for itself, will soon find that even if it wins it loses. Either the Conservatives really mean it when they promise they will privatize nothing, deregulate nothing, and make no significant cuts in spending -- in which case they will have achieved nothing but to preside, temporarily, over an unchanged Liberal apparatus that will not thank them for putting their old friends out of jobs. Or they are simply lying, misrepresenting their true intentions in their consuming lust for power: in which case, they will find their reward is a poisoned chalice, a government without a mandate. Having been elected as Liberals, they will be judged by Liberal standards, and meet the fate that previous Liberal impostors met.

I don’t mean to say that there are no differences between the parties. But where the Tories have dared to differ, it is always accompanied by one or more of the following: it is unassailably popular (“cracking down” on child pornography, as if that were not already the case), it asks no sacrifice of anyone (tax cuts), or it maintains the status quo (Kyoto, gay marriage). Indeed one might almost say that the only things on which the Tories disagree with the Liberals are those in which the Grits are broadly in the right.

Oh yes, the convention also ratified the leadership of Stephen Harper. But it is no longer the party of Stephen Harper, really. Perhaps it is just the crackpot system of choosing delegates to which the party is now irrevocably committed, in which the Tory “rotten boroughs” of the east hold vastly disproportionate sway. But it is once again the party of Peter MacKay, and Pierre Claude Nolin, an old-style Tory party, with old-style Tory instincts and old-style Tory prospects.