Selling the conservative soul
Ah. Now you recall: it was the Mulroney government's 1986 decision to award the contract to a Quebec firm, over a clearly superior bid from Bristol Aerospace's Winnipeg plant, that touched off the prairie fire of protest that was to become the Reform Party.
Well, here we are, twenty-odd years later, the Reform Party has come and gone, and nothing has changed. A Conservative party is back in power, largely on the strength of Western support, and once again the party seems to have forgotten who it is, or what it stands for -- or, Westerners might say, who put it there. Only now there is no prospect of a Reform insurgency.
Then, the conservative movement in this country was still in its infancy, still full of fresh ideas and enthusiasm. If the nominal Conservative party was not responsive to their concerns, they'd soon put that right. Hell, they'd start a whole new party if they had to.
So they did, and they had some success, but then they got impatient for more, and they started tinkering around with various unsuccessful efforts at rebranding themselves, until at last what remained of the old Reform party was merged with what remained of the old Conservative party to form ... the Conservative party.
But it was not the same as the old Conservative party, was it? It had a leader, after all, who had left the Conservatives to help found Reform, and even if it seemed inordinately concerned with reassuring everyone that it was a "moderate, mainstream" party, that was mostly for show, wasn't it?
Underneath beat the hearts of true conservatives, committed to fundamental changes in the way this country is governed -- for example, in the abuse of defence contracts for pork-barrel purposes, or the crude regional power-plays that had been the Liberal stock in trade. And for a time it looked that way.
The National Post ran a series in the fall of 2005 on the theme, Is Conservatism Dying? The question seemed to me absurd, and in my own contribution I said so. "Oh, dry up," I began, pointing out that the Conservatives controlled five of the ten provinces and were on the cusp of victory federally. "One more heave, and they are over the top," I concluded.
In retrospect I was quite wrong. After a year of Conservative rule, it is now clear, conservatism isn't just dying -- it's dead. And it's the Conservatives who killed it.
It was one thing for their political opponents to denounce conservative ideas. At least they got a hearing, and as often as not the Liberals would steal them. But when Conservatives themselves hasten to renounce them, they have no outlet. And after two decades invested in the Reform experiment, there is nowhere else to go.
So when the Public Works minister, Senator Michael Fortier from Montreal, intervenes in the procurement process for some desperately needed military cargo planes to demand a greater share of the "industrial benefits" go to Quebec, there is no vehicle for dissatisfaction to express itself -- should it even occur to anyone to protest. The Liberals aren't going to raise a fuss, or not seriously: they'd do the same. And whatever Conservatives remain who still believe in free market principles are either too reluctant to rock the boat or too exhausted by the fight to bother. That, or they have grown too accustomed to capitulation.
For there isn't much left of conservatism nowadays, is there? Spending? The Finance minister's fall economic statement projects spending to rise to levels never approached by any Liberal government, and yes, that's after allowing for inflation and population growth. Taxes? The party that once campaigned on a flat tax, then on broad-based tax cuts, now sprays special-interest tax credits hither and yon, such as that for children's sports. (Which sports? Teams of experts have been retained to advise whether the kids are sweating enough to qualify.)
Corporate welfare? Once upon a time conservatives wanted to abolish subsidies to business. No longer. Agricultural quotas? No danger of any reform there. Privatization? Don't make me laugh. Much of this dilution took place in advance of the last election, notably at the party's triumphant founding policy convention in 2005. But the process has only accelerated post-election, in pursuit of the coveted majority.
The more the party has chased the middle, however, the faster it has seemed to recede; with each abandonment of its principles, the opposition and the media, those arbiters of the status quo, simply yawn and move the goalposts a little further down the field. So that even so humiliating a climbdown as the past week's reinstatement of the very Liberal environmental programs the Tories abolished in their first weeks in office wins them no points whatever.
Quebec, missile defence, China, health care, regional development: it's very hard to tell what the Conservative position is any more, or how it differs from the Liberals, or what it will be a week from now. And the result? 31% in the last poll. Sell your soul, you'd think you'd at least get paid.
1/20/2007
