Walkom: We are all Red Tories

Maybe Canadians are all Red Tories or a majority of us but there seem to be a lot less Red Tories in the Conservative Party. Who are they? No doubt there is some truth in what Walkom has to say but the Conservatives no longer even bother to put Progressive in front of Conservative and they are still able to survive. Contrast the recent NDP governments in Saskatchewan actually selling off government assets while warning the voters that the Saskatchewan party would do that! Consider the same government adopting a royalty system that was more generous to the oil companies than that of Alberta Tories! The Manning poll may be wrong about whether individual Canadians have moved to the right in their ideas but certainly Canadian political parties have long done so. The NDP new slogan might be summed up as Long Live the Third Way. This is from the TorontoStar.

Walkom: Why we're all Red Tories



By Thomas Walkom
National Affairs Columnist
Are Canadians becoming more conservative? Those around Prime Minister Stephen Harper believe so. I'm not so sure. I think they are confusing how Canadians view the world with the Conservative government's success in rearticulating that view.

While close, the two concepts are analytically separate. And that's important.

But first the evidence. The notion that Canada is undergoing an ideological shift has been around for a while. It got a boost last week when the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, a conservative think tank, released a poll that concludes the political centre is indeed moving rightward.

"The colour of the centre has shifted from red to blue," think-tank head and former Reform Party chief Preston Manning declared.

His poll appears to jibe with the continued success of Harper's Conservatives who, although twice unable to capture a majority of Commons seats, have at least won the country's grudging acceptance.

And its implicit lesson for both the Liberals and the New Democrats seems to be that if they are to succeed, they must move even further to the right.

I say "seems" because the Manning Centre poll, once examined more carefully, doesn't indicate much that is new about the Canadian electorate.

If anything, it reveals how divorced mainstream Canadians are from the politics of both the Manning Centre itself (which, among other things, wants to gut medicare) and the hard core around Harper.

For instance: Fewer than half those polled firmly believe that a strong military is essential to Canada. Four out of five support Canada withdrawing its troops from the Afghan war. More than 80 per cent think government should have a major role in managing the economy.

Only a minority (26 per cent) strongly believe that private enterprise is the best way to solve economic problems. About the same number (31 per cent) say that such problems could best be solved through government action.

A striking 82 per cent want government to play some role in alleviating income inequality between the rich and the poor. And 84 per cent of those who define themselves as centrist are adamantly opposed to private hospitals.

None of this is hard core conservative doctrine. Quite the opposite. So why the confusion?

Part of the answer is that this interpretation suits the aims of those who paid for the poll. The Manning Centre, according to its website, was set up to build a coherent conservative movement in Canada. And it's been doing its best – running a campaign school for conservatives, a program to link political and religious rightists and a how-to course for conservatives who think they might win power.

But most of this confusion, I think, stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about where Canadians situate themselves ideologically.

The first truth about mainstream Canadian ideology is that it is invisible. Canadians insist they have no ideology. That's why the vast majority always identify themselves as centrist.

But, like everyone else, Canadians have views about what the world is and should be – which is what ideology is. Ideologically, Canada is, in many ways, small-c conservative. It always has been.

So when the Manning Centre pollsters find that the majority of Canadians value family above all else, prefer incremental to radical change and think that the best way to solve problems is by learning from past experience, no one should be surprised.

Liberals value their families no less than Conservatives. Successful New Democrats, such as former Manitoba premier Gary Doer or Saskatchewan's Roy Romanow, prospered through their mastery of incremental change. Tommy Douglas, the iconic social democrat viewed as the father of Canadian medicare, was eminently practical.

The Manning poll found that 60 per cent of those polled strongly believe that abortion is morally wrong. But it also found that most believe government should not try to regulate morality.

Again, what's new? This was the position of former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien as well as his successor Paul Martin, both of whom opposed abortion privately but supported the right of others to make their own choices.

When Pierre Trudeau famously declared that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation, he was tapping into a heartfelt and ultimately conservative Canadian notion that governments should keep their noses out of private affairs.

But the other half of Canadian ideology is its tendency toward communalism. The original reasons for this lie deep in our history and are well-known: We are a small population in a large land faced with a not-always-friendly neighbour to the south and dominated economically by large interests – from the Hudson's Bay Co. to the Canadian Pacific Railroad to the nickel mining giant Vale Inco.

All of this has produced, in Canada, an ideological willingness to use government and other kinds of communal organizations –such as co-ops, trade unions or agricultural marketing boards – as countervailing forces.

In the United States, conservatism and communalism (described there as liberalism) are constantly at war with one another. In Canada, they have quietly merged into what political scientist Gad Horowitz famously labelled the ideology of the Red Tory.

In fact, most successful Canadian political movements are variations on the Red Tory theme – from the Progressive Conservatives, who governed Ontario for four decades, to the federal Liberals, who operate under the slogan of combining fiscal conservatism with social liberalism.

Even the New Democrats are inherently conservative, struggling not to revolutionize society but to buttress it against the excesses of an inherently unstable, global, free-market world. Harper's skill so far has lain in his ability to tap into those elements of Canada's dominant Red Tory view of the world and redefine it in a language that supports his own, more robust, American-style brand of conservatism.

He killed a national child care scheme that he viewed as ideologically repugnant by replacing it with the classic Liberal baby bonus system – one that married Canadians' love of family (let parents decide what's best for their children) with their equal penchant for government grants (in this case, $100 per young child per month).

Then he defined it as a victory of choice over the nanny state.

He sold his decision to increase military spending by focusing on Arctic sovereignty, which in turn appealed to the country's mythic view of itself as an imperilled northern nation in need of strong state support.

But in spite of his efforts, he was never able to persuade the country that this newly beefed up military should be used to indefinitely support the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. Harper has done much to make his version of conservatism palatable to Canadians. But my guess is that in the end, he too will be constrained by the country's ideological contradictions.

As the Manning poll found, we may not think that the federal government is terribly relevant to our lives.

But we believe – again as the Manning poll found – that it should be.

Thomas Walkom's regular column appears Wednesday and Saturday

Harper redefining Canadian political culture

It is clear that it is not just Harper but his government and the media. In spite of Harper's own wariness about the media even hostility at times they are the ones that are helping him by stressing human interest stories and sending pablum from on site in Afghanistan. The casualties suffered become occasions for glorifying the mission and rhetoric about the noble cause etc. Serious analysis or criticism is the exception rather than the norm.


Harper redefining Canadian political culture


What we are doing in Afghanistan is unsupportable. But what we are doing to ourselves is not so obvious. As long as we stay in Afghanistan, we are corrupting our political culture.



>by Murray Dobbin
April 10, 2007

It is stunning how quickly the Canadian military can be recast as a key part of Canadian culture, especially now that we have abandoned our historic peacekeeping role.

With no public debate, we now have a war-fighting military taking up more and more political space in Canada's constellation of defining institutions. The military and the Harper government are trying to make “the mission” in Afghanistan a defining characteristic of who we are.

The militarization of Canadian culture reflects the spread of “deep integration” — the Bay Street initiative whose aim is to see Canada effectively assimilated into its behemoth neighbour. Harper and others on the right know that in order for Canada to adopt policies similar to those of the United States, we have to make the cultural changes that will provide the ideological base for those policies.

When we first sent some 2,000 troops to Afghanistan, it was a major assignment — not strictly peace-keeping, but not war-fighting either — and yet it rarely made the news.

But ever since we took on the war-fighting role in Southern Afghanistan, our mission has become a major part of our daily cultural consumption. And our approach in the country apes the Americans' — witness our government's cavalier attitude toward the routine torture of Taliban prisoners seized by Canada and turned over to the Afghan government.

Which brings us to a crucial point — this deliberate attempt to shift our cultural landscape could not be happening without the complicity of the media, who have become willing partners in this remaking of Canada.

Regarding the prisoner scandal, the Canadian media might never have dealt with the issue at all were it not for Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor, who exposed the issue of Canadian abuse of detainees in a letter of complaint he sent to the Military Police Complaints Commission. He obtained information about three detainees via a freedom of information request. (Shouldn't it be the media who chase down these stories?) When the commission tried to find the detainees in question, they had disappeared.

The media rarely expose what goes on in Afghan detention centres. One story in a major daily newspaper dared to talk about what torture and human rights abuses actually entail by referring to a U.S. State Department assessment. That report stated: “Security and factional forces committed extrajudicial killings and torture ... [including] pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, beatings, sexual humiliation, and sodomy.”

Why is there is no comparable Canadian report? Because the Canadian government knows that if it acknowledged the crisis in governance in Afghanistan, Canadians would realize that the whole effort in that country is doomed to failure and built on a foundation of lies.

The media are virtually silent on the issue — and worse. In late fall of 2006, the CBC began implementing what seemed to be an explicit policy shift to build up the image of the military and downplay any negative aspects of the war. Peter Mansbridge hosted several newscasts directly from military bases in Canada that were nothing more than public relations boosts for “our troops.”

And although the CBC has dedicated considerable resources to covering Afghanistan, it rarely acknowledges that its reporters are “embedded” with the Canadian military, and that what they report, in my opinion, seems largely spoon-fed by military public relations officers.

What happened to the CBC mandate to provide Canadians with genuine debate about critical national issues? Where are the stories about corrupt and brutal Afghan police? About internal refugee camps with no facilities or medical care? About foreign aid disappearing into the pockets of officials? About the fact that we can no longer fund other foreign aid projects because Afghanistan absorbs it all so we can support U.S. foreign policy?

This situation reveals how naive we are as a nation. That old adage — the first casualty of war is truth — applies here in spades because this war is based on lies, including:


This has nothing to do with oil and gas pipelines.

This is a fight against terrorism. (The truth: It's an occupation being resisted by indigenous militants.)

The current Afghan government is democratic. (The truth: Many senior figures should be tried for war crimes, and others are drug lords.)

Girls are now going to school. (Really? How many?)

Bombing villages will provide them with security.

We can “win.”

What we are doing in Afghanistan is unsupportable. But what we are doing to ourselves is not so obvious. We are corrupting Canada's own institutions, including our military, our foreign service, our foreign aide program, and our public broadcaster. Worst of all, as long as we stay in Afghanistan, we are corrupting our political culture.
Murray Dobbin writes from Vancouver. This column has appeared in The Hill Times.