Conservatism Is Dead

Conservatism in Canada is no longer a coherent political philosophy.  It has become a hybrid of a business that sells access to power, and a collection of people who have been drawn into utterly paranoid conspiracy theories.  The slide into this place has been a long, slow process, and I don’t think it’s necessarily all intentional.

Let me explain why I think this is the case, and then we can get into how we got here in the first place.

Consider this past week:  

In Alberta, the UCP government enacted laws which turned the municipal elections into a farce of long lineups, slow ballot counts, and ridiculous processes.  What were those laws built on?  Two major conspiracy theories:  The first being that “voter fraud” is a widespread problem, and we have to clamp down on it or all of the non-citizens voting will tilt the tables too much.  The second being an “expressed fear” that somehow vote tabulating machines are “rigged” and manipulate the outcome of elections.  

Then, in an appearance on a podcast, Pierre Poilievre basically accused the RCMP of engaging in a cover-up of crimes committed by Justin Trudeau.  Also, in press appearances, Poilievre has spent more time talking about Justin Trudeau than he did Mark Carney … as if Trudeau is some kind of political kingpin who is playing puppet master or something.  

Also, this week, the Alberta UCP announced that they would be tabling legislation “so that only serious candidates could run for office” - a clear violation of S2 of The Charter (not to mention other sections), and solving a non-problem.  The less-serious candidates running in Calgary were appropriately shunned by voters. 

This is all conspiracy theory thinking that is designed to undermine the institutions of democracy - be those the assumption that elections are free and fair, and the vast majority of voters are honest and legitimate electors, or that instruments of law and order are somehow acting at the behest of political actors when they should not be.

So, how did we get here?

Well - we got here through a very long process, and one that starts with the rise of Reform in Alberta, and in the wake of the National Energy Program (NEP).  In Alberta particularly, conservatives leveraged the fallout of the NEP into making “being conservative” a matter of identity.  You had to be “conservative” to “fight back against the overreach from Ottawa”.  That permeated conservative political circles in Alberta, and because of Alberta’s peculiar dalliances with populism, really took hold.  Even today, 40 years on from the NEP, many people firmly believe that Ottawa is “out to get Alberta”, and “if you live in Alberta, you have to be conservative”.  

To this day, if you talk to people on the street in Alberta, they will tell you “oh, yes, I’m a conservative”.  But when you start asking them about policies, you quickly find that what the average person wants, and what is in the Conservative Party policy book are often dramatically different.  This is what I mean by making “conservative” an identity rather than a philosophy. 

Reform (which is really what took over the old Progressive Conservative Parties) was always a “small town rump” movement which firmly believed that everything could be so much better if it was just done with “common sense” - common sense often being parochial thinking with a healthy dollop of whatever the church pastor told them that week.  This propensity opened the doors wider for “social conservatives” to enter the tent and dominate the social side of the discourse within the party tent.  

Social conservatism has never been particularly rational.  It has always been based first and foremost on a religion, and the “rightness” of religion. When presented with arguments that are based on science, they often dismiss them as “irrelevant”, or ignore them because it contradicts their preconceived beliefs.  

Once political conservatism decided that they could give these people a home, it opened the doors to all manner of arguments which are not evidence-based.  This becomes a huge problem for conservatism as a philosophy after the takeover of the federal PCs by the Reform movement under Harper. 

However, it was under Harper that we saw what is now the CPC develop the business side of things.  This takes on two forms.  The conservative movement outside the party ramped up its lobbying and disinformation orgs (like The Fraser Institute, and others), and started moving to build stronger ties with their American counterparts.  This gave “new conservatism” a disproportionate amount of influence both in the public and in government lobbying.  Within the party, building on lessons learned by Reform, the fundraising arm went into high gear - selling mailing list members a steady diet of “urgent” requests for small amounts of money accompanied by breathless accounts of the “evils” that they have to stop.  

It was successful - the CPC has an unmatched fundraising machine, and they get to feed their followers a steady stream of material to keep people amped up and angry/afraid.  It's clever marketing - and they present themselves as "only they can fix these problems".  

You should be seeing an emerging dichotomy here.  On one side of things, the conservatives are presenting themselves as the solution to a raft of problems to a base of supporters who will faithfully vote for them because "they'll make the world safer", while on the other hand, they are carefully selling access to themselves as legislators with a known "safe" set of lobbyists and interests that will happily shovel money to the party or related interests in return for access.  

In the most cynical sense, this creates an environment where politicians are often elected based not on what they will do in office, but what the party has made them fearful of.  Then there is a steady stream of misinformation used to bolster the party's unstated plans so they maintain support even when they introduce really terrible legislation. 

But what exactly has "new conservatism" become?  Certainly, they are no longer the "party of reasoned thought" that the PCs once were.  Somewhere along the way, the party adopted a naive form of libertarianism - theoretically that should reduce the size of government, right?  Except then there is the contradiction of the massive interventions that "tough on crime" thinking requires, or that so many Social Conservative demands require to be addressed.  

The appearance of libertarian thinking in conservative circles is somewhat counter-intuitive, but it goes further into contributing to the disintegration of conservative reasoning.  Somehow, libertarian philosophy turned its back on things like facts and decided that "my feelings are equivalent to your facts".  We saw this emerge during the Bush era in the US, where complete fictions were spun to justify invading Iraq.  People who criticized this were derided as suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome.  

Now, in Canada, conservative "skepticism" about climate change shifted from "the science isn't settled" to "it's a hoax".  In spite of a clear consensus from climate scientists around the world, conservatives dispensed with that because they decided that their "intuition" and "common sense" was better than actual evidence.  Enormous amounts of conservative money was funnelled into anti-science groups like "Friends of Science" (a climate change denial organization), so they could sow the seeds of distrust.  

This opened the doors to other conspiracy theories being normalized.  Whether that was Justin Trudeau wanting to pass NEP 2.0,  or the paranoid theories about "chemtrails", or those spread around about the vaccines for COVID.  This isn't "conservative thinking", these are outright conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality.  Yet, we see Danielle Smith in Alberta making it has difficult as possible to get a COVID vaccination for this year, all because the "Take Back Alberta" crowd is upset about vaccines.  

There isn't a shred of evidence that supports any of these conspiracy theories, yet we have conservatives governing as if they are real (or at least as long they can act like they're real).  Smith is ramming a bunch of anti-transgender legislation through in Alberta - not based on facts, but based on "feelings" and "impressions".  Every time she is challenged on the facts of the matter, she doubles down and dismisses the facts as irrelevant, or dodges and creates new "facts" to justify her actions. 

The net result here is that conservatism no longer has a coherent frame of reference that it works within, and has become a coalition of conspiracy theorists, power-hungry politicians, and willing liars - all of whom are bent on doing whatever they can to gain power, and if that means undermining democracy to get there, they're good with that.