What Conservative Revolution?

Aaron Wherry, writing for Macleans.ca rebuts the New Republic piece written by Gregory Levey, 'How Canada Became a Conservative Nation', which offers a narrow menu of Harper's so-called conservative victories during his short term in office. What Mr Levey does not delve into however is the very real political climate in this country: that of rule by a minority tory government that actually has a minimal amount of overall support, as explained by Wherry:

"For the past year, Canada has been governed by a Conservative Party whose policies and strategies might have come straight out of a Republican playbook," Levey explains. "Stephen Harper, who took office last February, has a deep respect for the Bush administration and has introduced a hawkish foreign policy and a very conservative social and domestic agenda."

Indeed, Canada is governed by a man named Stephen Harper. And, yes, this Stephen Harper seems fond of U.S. President George W. Bush and interested in pursuing a largely conservative (if not social conservative) agenda. But whether this has amounted to much of a revolution is another matter.

Consider, for starters, the results of the last federal election. Harper's Conservatives won that day with a little over five million votes, 36.2% of the total ballots cast. Add to that the relatively small totals won by the Christian Heritage, Libertarian and Western Block parties and approximately 5.4 million Canadians expressed predominantly conservative views.

Unfortunately, this leaves the Canadian right about four million votes shy of their counterparts on the left. Combine all the parties that Levery would presumably consider to be even slightly left-of-centre (including the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP, the Greens, the Marxist-Leninists, the Marijuana Party, the Communists, the Canadian Action Party and the Animal Alliance), and you get roughly 9.3 million votes.

Even if we move the Greens to the right side of the ledger, on account of their possible status as social conservatives, this is not a close race.

To put Harper's performance in the 2006 election in further perspective, consider how conservative parties have fared in the six federal elections since Brian Mulroney won an impressive 50% of the vote in 1984. Combining the vote totals for Reform, Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties before the most recent uniting of the right, the results look like this:

1988: 43%
1993: 35%
1997: 38%
2000: 37%
2004: 30%
2006: 36%

By those numbers, and polling numbers virtually unchanged from a year ago, we're no more conservative a country than we were 14 years ago - and actually less conservative than we were in the late-'80s.

Canadians continue to reject Harper's major agenda items: endless support for the Afghanistan war, lip service on environmental concerns, the attempt to reopen the same sex marriage debate, the rejection of the Kelowna accord, the so-called reworking of a national child-care plan, the disastrous income trust taxation issue, the funding cuts to womens, literacy and the court challenges programs, the cozying up to corporate Canada, the stalling on the fiscal imbalance concerns, the snubbing of the media, the top down muzzling of cabinet ministers and members... The list goes on.

No, there is no conservative revolution in this country and there certainly won't be one any time soon. We've seen the extremism of that ideology played out to the south of us and we had our taste of what many Canadian conservatives had in mind for this country when the Canadian Alliance still existed. We rejected them and their policies then - as did many moderate conservatives - and we will continue to do so because they are far from being representative of all Canadians.

If Harper's conservatives had any aspirations of seizing power with anything nearing a Bush/Republican-like agenda, they can now thank their cohorts to the south for ruining whatever chance they may have had for actually carrying that out. Canadians have seen how that has been played out. We wouldn't have accepted such repression in the first place but now that we've seen it in action, we're even more cautious than ever about protecting our rights, civil liberties and laws in order to avoid anything similar to the US situation from happening here.

Canadians will not tolerate neo-conservatism. Thankfully, the New Republic article reminds us all of where we'd be now if we had:

In 2003, as the United States went to war against Iraq, Harper--then the Canadian opposition leader--published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal repudiating the Canadian government's decision not to join the war. "This is a serious mistake," he wrote. "The Canadian Alliance--the official opposition in parliament--supports the American and British position because we share their concerns, their worries about the future if Iraq is left unattended to, and their fundamental vision of civilization and human values."