Andrew MacDougall: Dear Conservatives; Grow up

After seven long years in the post-Harper wilderness, it’s time for Conservatives to end the flame wars and finally get serious about their future.

By: Andrew MacDougall

One suspects Conservative MPs love British Prime Minister Boris Johnson more than they do Erin O’Toole. The fact O’Toole is now colonizing the curb outside Stornoway is proof enough.

But the two men are more similar than they might think. 

No, O’Toole has never been caught with his pecker somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be and is most certainly willing to disclose how many children he has (two) and by how many women (one). But Johnson is every bit as flexible on policy as O’Toole — Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former aide, refers to the U.K.’s Prime Minister as the “trolley” given his propensity to wobble all over the shop — and BoJo is a firm believer in the need for Conservatives to have a credible environmental policy in the age of catastrophic climate change.

Nor is Boris all that conservative. The very people in Canadian Conservative circles who deride O’Toole for being ‘Liberal-lite’ no doubt approve of Boris’ interventionist, big spending approach to “levelling up” the United Kingdom. And once the Johnson-approved hikes to National Insurance come through in April the overall tax rate will be at its highest level in over 70 years. Margaret Thatcher he ain’t. 

One thing that distinguishes the two men is victory. Make those victories. Boris Johnson is a serial winner, as evidenced by his two terms as Mayor of London and his (eventual) ascension to the top of the British Conservative Party and on to 10 Downing Street. In a world of manufactured politicians, there is a demonstrably huge market for “Boris being Boris,” although that proposition is now being sorely tested by Johnson’s propensity to party during the lockdowns he himself imposed on the British people.

In contrast, there is no apparent market for “Erin being Erin.” O’Toole ran a leader-centric campaign to unseat Trudeau in the last federal election, and although he held his own in his first campaign against an incumbent who’d spent hundreds of billions of dollars in the run up to the writ, the end result wasn’t what frustrated Conservatives wanted. Too many MPs felt ignored during policy development and dismissed by their leadership during the election and these feelings clearly hadn’t subsided since Trudeau limped home with another minority. 

Boris is also unapologetic and always up for tweaking the noses of both the woke and the “doomsters and gloomsters” who crap on his Brexit project. This combativeness is no doubt what endears him most to frustrated CanCons, who feel drowned out by the progressives who dominate the upper echelons of Canadian society. This explains why so many grassroots Conservatives love MPs like Pierre Poilievre, who gives as good as he gets. To the Reform Act plotters, O’Toole flipped in an instant on key policy (i.e carbon tax), courted the devil — the hated “red” Tories, disaffected Liberals, and “mainstream media” — and lost anyway. And so into the rubbish bin he went.

The desire to tweak the noses of their betters is behind the Conservative embrace of the trucker convoy. Here, advocates enthuse, are people with enough sack to say “fuck this” to everything happening around them. The vast majority of truckers are vaccinated and trucking volumes have not dipped in response to government-imposed vaccine mandates, but that doesn’t matter. That the convoy is funded (in part) by foreigners, has nonsensical and constitutionally-illiterate demands, and are being absolute shits to the people of downtown Ottawa also doesn’t matter. It’s about the attitude and embodying the frustration we’re all feeling as we enter year three of this pandemic dystopia. 

In hindsight, O’Toole must have known the gig was up the moment his MPs went out to hump the trucker convoy with more vigour than he wanted. Of course, it didn’t help that he himself varied the vigour of his own humping. Seventy-three votes later, O’Toole’s problems have now become interim leader Candice Bergen’s.

And what a basket of problems they are. The Conservative movement Stephen Harper created and then kept together — through fucking magic, apparently — is now splitting back into its component parts and it’s going to take tremendous skill and dexterity to knock it back together. 

The first job facing the party is figuring out what it’s for, because the seven years since Harper have been a colossal void on that front. Right now we know more, much more, about what its membership is against. It’s against anything “Liberal” or “Liberal-lite.” It hates carbon taxes and Justin Trudeau. And while the hatred of the current Prime Minister is an adhesive, it’s no longer enough to bind the movement. More importantly, it’s not a platform for change or an invitation to be a part of something optimistic and exciting. Indeed, the zeal with which the party laces into Trudeau is enough to put many Canadians off their breakfasts. Believe it or not @CPC_HQ, not many swing voters stroke to Jordan Peterson or other avatars of the iconoclastic right. 

Is the Conservative Party of Canada resigned to being the party of rural Canada? Does it want to be the party of social conservatives? The party of fiscal conservatives? The old? Is it the party of family and community, or of the individual? We haven’t a clue. Modern conservatism is all about attitude these days, not worldview. If the party’s policy conferences are any indication, the most vibrant areas for policy discussion are downplaying climate change and playing up hot-button social issues. Even an absolute political ninja won’t be able to turn that into government, not in today’s Canada. Sorry, comrades.

To win, the Conservatives need to, yes, get their current team back on the same page, but also get their hooks back into vote-rich suburban Canada. They have to reconnect with the communities they’ve been ignoring since the days of Jason Kenney as the Minister for Curry in a Hurry. It means talking about how to build more housing, how to get smarter and tougher on crime, and how to get more young people the skills they need to get plugged into the modern economy. It means looking and sounding like today’s Canada, not dimestore versions of their American cousins. 

Thankfully, the Conservative party now has the opportunity to use its upcoming leadership election to do what they didn’t do post-Harper or post-Andrew Scheer: invite more people into the movement and then use those fresh perspectives to fashion a more contemporary offer. The Conservative party needs to get out of their current information bubbles and do something the current prime minister or government don’t do much: listen to people with whom they disagree. You never know where the next great idea is going to come from, but you can be pretty sure it won’t be coming from the fever swamp of social media.

This isn’t, by the way, a call to become watered-down Liberals. A family oriented Conservative party has a much different vision for childcare, to pick one example, one that is far more inclusive than the Liberal offer targeted to families in major urban areas in which both parents work. A Conservative party that targets the firearms used by criminals offers a much different approach to fighting crime than a Liberal party which aims for the largely symbolic targets offered by higher-calibre weapons. A principles-based foreign policy would surely be a nice change from Trudeau’s kowtowing and vacuous under-delivery on the world stage.

A revitalized Conservative party should absolutely challenge the intellectual monoculture atop Canadian society. But it must also come armed with serious thoughts about how to inject diversity of thought into our failing institutions, not just do the easy work of calling for them to be torn down (cough, CBC). The party should be robust about its pride in Canada and clear about its view that our country is neither a genocidal state nor institutionally racist. But it must also come to that discussion with enough humility to acknowledge that some communities are struggling to plug into the opportunity many of us take for granted. We’ve come too far as a multicultural society to indulge grifters like Robin DiAngelo (she of “White Fragility” fame) who reduce everything back to a person’s race or religion — but race-based barriers still exist and the party must have ideas, based on our universal rights as human beings, about how to overcome them. Good ideas will help people of all races and religions who are left behind, not help them because of their race or religion.

One day, hopefully soon, the pandemic will recede and life will get back to normal. The more the Conservatives have to say about Canada’s remaining problems then, the better. It’s not going to be enough to be Billy Big Bollocks on social media, flaming “Turdeau” and his “libtards” at every opportunity. It’s going to take an inclusive and optimistic vision for Canada, one centred on family and community and underpinned by freedom, fairness, human rights, and the rule of law.

Ultimately, the best way to stick it to the man is to win, not whine like impotent (if sometimes clever) little bitches, which is what too many in the party are now doing by supporting groups like the truckers or raging against the “legacy media.” The party needs to step back and take a wider and longer view. Take the truckers: they’re not going to trigger a reversal from Trudeau, not in a million years, and going against the vast majority of Canadians, as the Conservatives are now doing, is a surefire vote loser. If anything, the vast majority of Canadians have taken the shot and have little patience for those left who won’t do the safe and neighbourly thing. Especially when they’re shitting on their sidewalks and blasting horns long into the night. And even if the truckers do somehow force a government U-turn, the Conservatives would only be endorsing mob rule, which is hardly a “conservative” position to take. And on the question of the media, there simply aren’t enough non-legacy sources around to build a winning movement, as evidenced by Maxime Bernier’s paltry returns in recent elections. You have to have the confidence and courage to fight your corner on traditional platforms too.

Let’s take it as read that there is no charismatic figure like Boris Johnson on the horizon. It will therefore take a better offer to reclaim the government. Moving the Overton window won’t be done by shouting louder, or with catchier slogans and hashtags, it will be done by gripping the problems our rapidly-ageing and increasingly-expensive post-industrial society faces and proposing sound conservative policies to address them. 

After seven long years in the post-Harper wilderness, it’s time for Conservatives to end the flame wars and finally get serious about their future.

Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com