The space where Tory principles used to be

So there is nothing left. It is important to accept this. It is important to understand that there is no prospect of this changing. It is not going to get any better. If anything it is going to get worse....

Perhaps, after each of the Harper government’s previous capitulations, each dizzying reversal of field, each casual laying aside of the convictions of a lifetime, conservatives could still persuade themselves that this was all part of some master plan, whose outlines would become apparent after the party won its majority. If it took a compromise here and there — and there, and there — well, that was all part of the plan, wasn’t it? Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good. 

But the longer this went on, the harder it was to sustain the illusion, until at last the stark reality that there is no plan — that whatever the Conservative party might once have stood for, it does no longer; that having slipped any principled moorings, it is simply and totally adrift — became too obvious to ignore. With the Tories’ latest backflip, from defenders of open markets to fervent economic nationalists, that process is complete. 

Were the master-plan thesis to hold, there would have to be evidence that the process had some end point — that the further the party stretched its principles in the service of expedience, the greater its resistance to going further. But that is not in fact what is happening. Rather, each new betrayal of its convictions only whets the party’s appetite for more; it becomes, not just easier, but pleasurable. Listen to the Industry minister, Jim Prentice, defending — no, bragging of his decision to block the sale of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates’ space division to an American firm:

“We need to own our technology and the intellectual property that comes with it. If we do not do this, we will not reap the benefits of our work and our investments, [and] we will not build for the future in a way that keeps us at the forefront of innovation in a knowledge economy… Canada must choose where we will make our investments…”

Well, you get the idea. Once upon a time, Conservatives understood the difference between private ownership and public, or society and the state. But now all have melded into one. The shareholders in MDA, the ones who voted 99.9% in favour of the sale, may have thought they were the company’s owners, and that as such they were entitled to exercise that most elemental right of ownership, the right to sell.  They may even have imagined that the Conservatives agreed. But no longer. Now we own it.

Who is this “we”? Since when was it “our” technology? It was in fact an American company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences, that agreed to design and build the Radarsat-2 satellite, MDA’s most significant asset, a decade ago; MDA was then its Canadian subsidiary. The Liberal government of the time promised to pay the company $445-million up front, in return for access to the images beamed back to Earth over the satellite’s lifetime. It was a contract, a purchase, not a subsidy.

The government would have been unlikely to strike such a deal had it thought there were any danger of the company reneging; in the same way, investors, foreign or domestic, would think twice about getting involved in Canadian technology plays if they feared some future government would expropriate their stake. The second scenario is more or less what is happening now. Yet it is justified in the name of the first — the notion that the government of Canada could somehow be denied access to the satellite imagery it had paid for, by order of a hostile American government.

It is hard to see how. Never mind the company’s legal and binding contractual obligation: the satellite is operated by Canadian scientists, working in Canadian government buildings. The government controls every aspect of the satellite’s operations down to the shutter, and must agree to any transmission of data therefrom. I know we’re all supposed to be paranoid about the Americans. But how exactly is it imagined the US could preempt this? Invade?

So no, there was no valid national security rationale for blocking the sale, still less any basis in economics. That the government did so anyway was commonly described as surprising. But nothing this government does should surprise anyone any longer. There is no promise it will not break, no agreement it will not violate, no belief it will not discard. There is simply no way to predict with any certainty what it will do from one moment to the next. It is literally capable of anything. 

I might not have said so after the party’s founding convention, when it threw out most of what the old Reform party had ever stood for. The Emerson double-cross, the income trust betrayal, even the recklessness of the “nation” resolution: these might have been explained away as one-offs. But after jacking up spending by $33-billion in three years, after foreclosing any possibility of serious income tax cuts for years to come via the $12-billion GST giveaway, after its enthusiastic embrace of the pork-barrel subsidies it used to denounce, it was already hard to identify much that was conservative about this government. Now that it has gone where the Liberals never dared, forbidding outright the sale of a Canadian company to foreigners, it is impossible.