What Is Canadian Conservatism?

It is this form of Canadian Toryism that gave us Sir John A. Macdonald (whose ‘National Vision’ was meant to build a true north strong and free). It was Macdonald who fought, again and again, against the liberals that sought to integrate and annex Canada with the United States. Most of the Conservative Canadian Prime Ministers (such as Macdonald, Borden, Meighen, Bennett and Diefenbaker) exerted much effort and gave the best of their energies to defend Canada and define it in such a way that it could not be confused with or assimilated into the United States. It is this form of Toryism/Conservatism that has always contested the drift and direction of Republicanism/Liberalism.

We do not need to read too far or too deep into the writings of such Canadian literary worthies as Thomas Haliburton, Susanna Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, William Kirby, Charles Mair, George Denison, Stephen Leacock or Mazo de la Roche to get a feel for the texture of Canadian conservatives as they touch on culture and the larger questions of nationhood and sovereignty. The 19th century saw the emergence of the Imperial Federation League and the Canada First movement. It is this type of conservatism that cannot be equated with either the so called conservatism of Thatcher/Reagan or the way conservatism is used by Blue Tories in the PC party or by the Alliance Party; needless to say, such positions and ideologies are republican and liberal.

If we ever hope, as Canadians, to reclaim what it means to be a Canadian conservative, we, initially, need to expose and call into question how the word is being used today. Until this is done, there will be much confusion, and we will, increasingly so, march to the beat of the American way and tune. If we ever hope to free ourselves from the power of the American gravitational pull, much work is needed. The New Romans to the south will, understandably so, fight back (as will the comprador class in Canada that serves the empire’s interests).

The first task, it seems to me, is to be grounded and rooted in Canadian history and the struggles we have fought not to be Americans. If we have no sense of history, if we have no memory, if Orwellian like, all that is important is thrown away, we have no way to defend ourselves at a basic level of thought and language. It is by knowing our intellectual and political history that we can defend ourselves against its distortions. There is, of course, more to the struggle than this, but at a basic level if Canadians do not even know the difference between a conservative and liberal, it is most difficult to get the thoughtful (with a concern for the commonweal and Canadian sovereignty) to join the PC party.

There is no doubt that the major media do much to baffle the average reader, and it is equally true that much contemporary education does little to teach, in a serious way, a serious and substantive understanding of Canadian history. The conservative Canadian historian, Donald Creighton, often spoke about how the liberal authorized reading of Canadian history caricatured the authentic conservative way. Such an insight finds a true echo in John Ralston Saul’s , REFLECTIONS OF A SIAMESE TWIN: CANADA AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY(1997), in which the liberal view of Canada is idealized and the classic conservative way is demeaned and distorted. Saul’s authorized reading of Canadian history may serve and suit his interests well, but, as serious intellectual history it is weak and wanting.

Those who are interested in a turn to a more genuine Canadian conservatism might want to read, as a primer, Taylor’s Radical Tories, Orchard’s The Fight for Canada, any of Dalton Camp’s books, George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice or my own The Red Tory Tradition.

-RSD

Ron Dart teaches in the Dept. of Political Science and Philosophy at the University College of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C. He is editor of The Red Tory Review and has published numerous articles and two books of poetry. Dart is also the political science advisor to the Leaock Home/Museum in Orillia.