Right is the new centre

This week’s Throne Speech occasioned more than the usual confusion among the commentariat. Was it “hard line” or “conciliatory”? Was this, as one columnist suggested, a speech that could have been written by a Liberal government, or was it, as another insisted, a brusque, in-your-face rejection of Liberal demands? The answer, of course, is: yes....

The speech was in many ways less a guide to what is to come than a summation of the past several months of partisan manoeuvring. That it is regarded as a success is as much attributible to Liberal blunders as to any Conservative strategic brilliance. The Speech’s achievement is to give expression to these political facts on the ground, and to piece them together into a coherent statement of present-day Toryism.

That the speech crossed a number of opposition “lines in the sand” is undeniable: on Afghanistan (we’re staying at least until 2011), on Kyoto (with 77 days to go, there is no prospect of meeting our targets by the original deadline), on crime (omnibus this!), the government made no effort to meet the opposition half-way, or even to pretend to. Moreover, on a number of other fronts -- taxes, the spending power, the economic union -- it is objectively radical, proposing large changes in the way we are governed. It is, in almost every respect, a recognizably conservative document.

Yet such was the moderation of its tone, and so artfully had the ground been prepared in advance, that almost no one decried it as a turn to the hard right. Certainly the Liberals were in no mood to do so, which would only make their decision to abstain look even more abject than it was. Suddenly the Grits discerned “flexibility” and “ambiguity” where before they saw only far-right, Republican dogma. There were no “poison pills” that he could see, Michael Ignatieff blandly asserted.

But of course. The Liberals are hardly likely to challenge the Tories on taxes and crime, traditional Conservative strengths. Nor is there much mileage left in Kyoto or Afghanistan: the Tories have effectively neutralized these potential liabilities. On Kyoto, it is true, they were ably assisted by the Liberals, whose doctrinaire insistence, in the face of all the evidence, that the targets could still be met on time, left them marginalized on an issue they once owned. 

But the summer meetings of the G-8 and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group were also milestones on the way to rehabilitating the Conservative position. When voters tell pollsters they support Kyoto, they mean something should be done about global warming, and Canada should be part of it. They don’t want us to be out of step with the international consensus. The Prime Minister can now plausibly argue that his own approach -- less severe than Kyoto, but with broader participation, notably from the Americans and the Chinese -- is the international consensus.

On Afghanistan, likewise, the Tories spent the last few months covering an essentially unchanged position -- continuing on with the mission, including a combat role -- with large dollops of fudge: Mr. Harper’s early summer musings about the need for parliamentary “consensus,” the John Manley appointment. To the point that no one seemed to notice that the Throne Speech pledged the troops will still be there four years from now, and perhaps beyond. Or rather, no one chose to notice. It isn’t that there are no poison pills in this document. It’s that the opposition has elected to swallow them.

So the Throne Speech has consolidated and summarized developments that were already in motion. Capitalizing on opposition weakness, the Conservatives have succeeded in moving the yardsticks of political debate, capturing the centre ground for themselves -- not by moving to the middle, as had been the strategy until this spring, but by moving the middle to them: Right-of-centre is the new centre. The combination of firmer policy substance and continued moderation of tone will reassure their base, without scaring off swing voters.

It isn’t that they have taken any great risks in so doing. If they have dared to call the opposition’s bluff, it is only because they are confident that their own position is closer to where the public is than the opposition’s. Fine: minority governments can ill afford to spend too much political capital. What the Tories have done, rather, is to find the overlap between their own agenda and the public’s, and inhabit that space: the sensible centre-right.

There is one exception to this, and that is the section, all but ignored by the national press, asserting “the federal government’s natural leadership” role in enforcing a common market within our borders -- specifically, by dusting off the federal trade and commerce power, all but unused these past 140 years. This bold, transformative proposal, if enacted, would dramatically alter both the political and constitutional landscape, and thus deserves treatment in another column.