Where's the conservative vision?

Do conservatives hate Canada? What a silly question. Of course they do. Or at least some of them do. Others just hate what the Liberals have done to Canada. The difference, one supposes, is between those who still think the country amenable to change, and those who do not, or between optimists and pessimists.

All the same, the label has begun to stick. Writing in these pages last week, Adam Radwanski claimed an anti-Canadian perspective “has come largely to define the Canadian right.” Liberal attack dog Warren Kinsella advises Stephen Harper, for whom he claims to have some sympathy, to “start talking, and looking, like you like the place.” Even Lorne Gunter, not previously known as a Liberal supporter, acknowledges that “Conservatives, and conservatives, have to find ways to prove their devotion to Canada to voters.” Imagine! “Mr. Harper, the first question in tonight’s debate is to you. You want to be prime minister of Canada. Could you tell us what you like about this country?”

On the one hand, this is a canard, and a contemptible one at that. “They desire a better country” is the motto of the Order of Canada, not a coven of embittered green-card applicants. Criticism of the present condition and government of a country should never be confused with hostility to the country itself: indeed, it is often the highest form of patriotism. When dissent is made to seem disloyal, it is a sign of a political system in decline.

On the other hand, well, it’s clear that some conservative commentators see the condition as terminal. Corrupted utterly by Liberal ideology and Liberal patronage, the country has become incapable of saving itself. The Liberal party has long been accustomed to mistaking itself for the country. But it is a more recent accomplishment to have persuaded a section of its opposition to embrace the same fallacy.

This is one of the most poisonous consequences of one-party rule. If the besetting sin of Liberals is arrogance, in Conservatives it is defeatism (a culture of defeat?). Despairing of their own political chances, some have begun to despair of Canada. Some western Conservatives, in particular, have succumbed to the separatist virus, either rejecting Confederation outright, or scarcely less objectionable, resolving to use the threat of separatism to renegotiate its terms. That some of these people would take offence at being labeled “anti-Canadian” for propounding such views is only a testament to how confused our politics has become. Some Quebec separatists feel the same way.

What’s to be done? Conservatives, to begin with, have to get a grip. If they are to persuade the voters that the Liberal idea of Canada is not the only conceivable one, they have first to believe it themselves. It is possible to disengage the country from the tentacles of Liberal mythology, but only if another, equally compelling narrative is put forward in its place. Conservatives have to propose their own national idea, their own national dream, in a way that makes not only intellectual sense, but emotional sense as well.

That is never going to happen, so long as the party remains wedded to provincialism, presenting itself as the premiers’ ally, if not their emissary. That this position is wrong in principle may be debated; that it has been a disaster politically is unarguable. Just as the Democrats have allowed the Republicans to position themselves as the party of national security south of the border, so Conservatives have handed the Liberals the Canada card, without even putting up a fight.

But the Liberals bear their own share of responsibility. If many conservatives have concluded there is no place for them in today’s Canada, it is because the Liberals have done their best to make them feel unwelcome. No Republican would dare to make the sorts of claims to a monopoly on the country’s values that Liberals make, routinely. And not only its values: the very symbols of the country -- the Crown, the flag, the anthem, the national day -- have been shaken upside down and turned inside out so often that they have come to seem more symbols of Liberaldom than of Canada.

Perhaps it is because there exists a genuine national consensus in the United States on certain basic questions, rather than the pretend consensus so ruthlessly enforced here; or perhaps it is because America has a contestable two-party system, in which today’s “ins” could as easily be tomorrow’s “outs”; but there is a broad effort there to include all sides in the definition of the nation. Independence Day is a truly national celebration, nonpartisan and inclusive, without any of the coded hymns to the ruling party that make “Canada Day” so hard to take.

The Liberals’ self-professed monopoly on Canadianism, however much it suits the party’s short-term political interests, is making civilized debate increasingly difficult in this country, embittering the opposition and alienating more and more of their followers. That situation is unlikely to change so long as one-party rule continues. The only way either the Liberals or the Conservatives will be cured of their respective afflictions -- arrogance and defeatism -- is with the restoration of a functioning two-party democracy in this country, of a kind it has not had for eighty-odd years.