Not One but Many: Restoring the Varieties of Canadian Conservatism

James Farney and David Rayside introduced their 2013 edited collection on Conservatism in Canada with the following words: “A volume of essays about conservatism is risky anywhere, no less so in Canada. In the contemporary period, the term is applied to very different ideological and policy positions, some of them philosophically contradictory.” Farney and Rayside suggested one way to minimize “risk” is to “embrace this variety.”[1] One might think the challenge (or “risk,” if that is the right word) of gathering the threads of conservative thought has only grown as certain non-conservative and ex-conservative observers decry conservatism’s “crisis.”[2] Conservatives themselves have likewise offered critiques and denunciations upon reaching an alleged “crossroads.” In a recent collection entitled, Up From Conservatism, many contributors echo Michael Anton’s view that “conservatism is a failure,” and, as the volume’s title hints, an ascent to something nobler or better (or at least more effective?) may now be necessary—or, what editor Arthur Milkin refers to as “a counterrevolutionary and restorative force.”[3] Others, in both Canada and the United States, reluctant to give up on conservatism altogether, interpret recent policy failures and disruptive events—including Brexit, the 2016 election of President Donald J. Trump, the rise of so-called populism, Covid shutdowns, and the war in Ukraine—as an opportunity for conservative renewal or reawakening.[4] Whatever else one makes of these claims, it is reasonable to conclude that lively contemporary contestation over conservatism makes ignoring conservative thought the greater risk today.   

A decade after the work of Farney and Rayside, Lee Trepanier and Richard Avramenko have edited a welcome new volume devoted to Canadian Conservative Political Thought. The work takes a slightly narrower approach by focusing on “political thought” (and thereby limiting discussion of what Farney and Rayside characterized as “the link between conservative ideas and party politics”). However, this recent collection of essays is similar in its embrace of variety, and does not shy from the “philosophically contradictory,” which grants readers the latest invitation into some of the tensions or competing claims in and of conservative thought in Canada. This in turn raises the question of whether debate and disagreement over just what conservatism is—not only in Canada but elsewhere, and not only now but at various times—is somehow inevitable, or even an important part of what constitutes conservatism. Trepanier’s introductory essay, “What is Canadian Political Thought?” offers an entrée to this and related considerations.

Trepanier opens by remarking on events, beginning with the “Freedom Convoy” of 2022 and the negative responses from both the Liberal and Conservative parties as well as the fact that an overwhelming majority of Canadians across the ideological divide “responded to the convoy as an affront” to the “values” captured in section 91 of the 1867 Constitution Act: “Peace, order, and good government.” Alongside additional evidence regarding Canadians’ “support for multiculturalism, LGBT rights, hate speech codes, and liberal policies on drugs, abortion, and euthanasia” is that “Canada today is one of the world’s most liberal societies.”[5] This was not always the case, however, and the essays in this volume, arranged in loose chronological order, indicate as much. Insofar as “Canadian conservatism cannot be reduced to any one thing,” Trepanier lists the following subsets based on the variegated substance of the chapters that he argues all fall under the broader category of conservative thought: “Toryism, religion, civic nationalism, state-capacity conservatism, Lockean liberalism, Western conservatism, [and] an appreciation of localism and home.” The volume’s purpose is therefore “to present these various strands of conservatism and the tensions among them, so Canadians can recover this neglected tradition in politics and political thought.” And to this ambition of reviving Canadian conservative political thought is the added motivation of doing so from a conservative perspective, for the dominant accounts of conservatism in Canada are otherwise written from left, liberal, or centrist positions. Thus, even as the variety of conservative political thought in Canada precludes a simple definition of conservatism, it would seem to be presently a mostly forgotten, even somewhat lost tradition, which was once rich and manifest, but now rarely even accounted for by Canadian conservatives themselves. These broad strokes do limited work in filling in the actual content of Canadian conservative thought. The natural question to ask is, just what such thought seeks to conserve? Here too the theme of diversity persists as one finds a variety of responses across the book’s sixteen chapters.

Divided into three parts that mix themes, concepts, and labels—1) “A Founding of a Nation among Strangers,” 2) “High Toryism, Liberalism, and Globalism,” and 3) “Culture, Technology, and Place”—the titular thinkers examined include the following: Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Strachan, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Sir John A. Macdonald, Alexander Hamilton, Eugene Forsey, John Farthing, Janet Ajzenstat, Charles Taylor, Brock Chisholm, Marshall McLuhan, Alexander Kojève, and George Grant. A somewhat disparate list, consisting of various non-Canadians and some individuals who could hardly be considered conservative. Brian Thorn opens the first part by employing Burke’s critique of British imperialism in the North American colonies to the past and present colonization of Indigenous people in North America. He argues we must “complicate” the traditional categories of “liberal” and “conservative” in our effort to understand both Burke and Indigenous activists. Thorn claims Burke’s work is better described as “traditionalist localism” and that those advancing “Aboriginal land claims” fit well with “the conservative worldview.” The tacit implication of Thorn’s essay seems to be that Canada is best understood as an empire, and its imperial federal government and policies have been contemptuous toward–even destructive of–the “little platoons and ancient traditions” that otherwise constitute the liberty and dignity of associational life, as much for Indigenous peoples as other groups outside of, and beyond, the ruling center of the Laurentian valley. Thus, the logical consequence of a Burkean traditionalist localism applied to the Indigenous peoples of Canada could very well be to dissolve, or at least diminish, the sovereignty of the Canadian (imperial) state. Thorn’s answer to the question what conservatism seeks to preserve, appears to be: “anything but the status quo.”

Richard Avramenko and Noah Stengl follow with a piece on Tocqueville, building on his well-known insight regarding the art of association as fundamental to the preservation of liberty under conditions of equality. Avramenko and Stengl argue that during his travels in Lower Canada Tocqueville discovered what they call “a cognate” of thick associations that served to mitigate individualism among the French Canadian churches: “congregation[s] that made it their business to care for their fellow congregants.” For Avramenko and Stengl, such congregational life “encourages a healthy relationship with authority,” insofar as liberty must have its proper limits. However, this localized, rooted, and religious mode of associational living that was “the primary resource with which French Canadians preserved their freedom, culture, and language against the encroaching English,” is now being lost. The consequences are severe, and as they argue, it is not by language alone that Quebec can or will remain a distinct society. Thus, Avramenko and Stengl conclude, “the integrity of identity requires both history and place,” and recalling such an insight is necessary to conserve freedom and identity in a democratic age. So far as the conservative liberal insights of Tocqueville go, Jeremy Seth Geddert likewise draws on the work of the French aristocrat to illustrate John Strachan’s loyalist political thought. Geddert counters the now standard historiographical account of the first bishop of Toronto as “the archetypal intersectional oppressor” by highlighting the ways in which Strachan sought to induce “aristocratic mores without aristocrats” to mitigate the excesses following upon an overbearing love of equality. In Geddert’s account, Strachan’s defense of ordered liberty was another strategy set against “the vice of individualism” and an “alternative to Tocqueville’s modern American approach of self-enlightened interest.” However, on both the specific policy issues as well as in his broader endeavor to shape morals, Geddert concludes that Strachan failed, and so he wonders whether Canada will not culminate in “a patronizing tutelary welfare state”?[6] It is hard not to see the Strachanian desire to conserving aristocratic habits as an exercise in nostalgia, although one may wonder whether there is more to Tocqueville’s diagnosis than that offered by the bishop from Toronto.

David Livingstone depicts Thomas D’Arcy McGee as a “radical conservative,” who “appreciates what is permanent and true while remaining open to what else there is to know.” Driven by the pursuit of truth, Livingstone argues McGee demonstrated “that a person can liberate themselves from their group identity and see what is valuable in other traditions,” for, as an Irish Catholic who had rebelled against Britain, he later became a strong defender of British political principles and believed them to be right and just for Canadians as well. Confederation represented for him the prospect of a “mental union” among the different people of the provinces–the construction of a civic identity or a “political nationality.” Consequently, Livingstone intimates that conserving such a national civic spirit is imperative at a time when various subpolitical or tribal identities may otherwise erode the bonds that bind a pluralist people. Regarding early Canadian nationalism, Ben Woodfinden and Sean Speer characterize Sir John A. Macdonald as Canada’s Hamilton. Seeking to correct the record that depicts Macdonald as a mere pragmatist or cunning political actor, Woodfinden and Speer argue that a coherent worldview motivated many of Macdonald’s decisions–one that “situates him into a distinctive conservative tradition that fits the Canadian context.” They describe it as an “amalgam” of “Enlightenment liberalism” and a “dispositional conservatism,” which led to his enactment of “state-capacity conservatism” that paralleled Hamilton’s own actions at the outset of the nascent American republic. While “fundamentally market oriented,” they suggest that Macdonald’s disposition appreciated “a role for the state to solve for market failures”—ever and always to the end of defending national economic interests. They conclude by suggesting such an approach is suited for an age of globalization and so provide resources for conserving the dignity and capacity of the nation.

In the second part, Tyler Chamberlain argues that contemporary debates over the state of conservatism are commonly missing “a sustained consideration of the Red, or High, Tory conservative tradition,” that Canadian thinkers developed in response to Lockean liberalism. For Chamberlain this tradition “combines and overcomes the apparent tension between respect for order and tradition with a social radicalism consistent with labor politics and state redistribution of wealth.” Chamberlain discusses how both Forsey and Farthing exemplify this tradition, and on his view, they resolve any tension between “social radicalism and constitutional traditionalism” for both are supported by the theory that “the state exists to promote the common good.” Chamberlain concludes by contrasting the High Tory tradition with both populism and classical liberalism to preserve elements of the “Tory touch” in a modern liberal regime. After a tour through High Toryism, one finds two essays on the work of Janet Ajzenstat who is among the strongest critics of the “Tory touch” thesis. As Colin D. Pearce demonstrates, Ajzenstat believes Canadian High and Red Toryism is the cause of “tyranny” or illiberalism in Canada. Pearce situates his discussion of her work in the context of Canada’s “regime change” toward “a form of post-national globalist governance premised on the worldwide triumph of radically universalist values” and compares her to Egerton Ryerson, an advocate of “tutorial statesmanship,” to highlight the limits of the former. Pearce argues Ajzenstat is caught in a contradiction that does not bedevil Ryerson: “her insistence that on the one hand, no one should be so ‘absolutist’ as to desire the enforcing of their views on others who differ from them morally, and on the other hand her sincere concern about Canada’s growing loss of faith in liberal democratic values.” Travis D. Smith takes up Ajzenstat’s “sustained challenge to oligarchical arrangements of all stripes” and argues it is the tie that binds all her scholarly work and public commentary. She shines light on the lie or false promise of a “fanciful future,” of a Canada to be, “once Canadians collectively submit to elite governance for their own good.” Ajzenstat’s effort to sustain liberty is one of conserving its liberal founding– “liberal democratic Canada as it was intended.” Ajzenstat’s efforts at conservation put her altogether at odds with the likes of Forsey and Farthing (and even her former professor, George Grant, as Pearce notes), which sharpens the matter of diversity to the point of seemingly irreconcilable factions within Canadian conservative thought. However, if Smith is correct that Ajzenstat “mainly dispenses histories and diagnoses, not remedies,” then indeed her own work may be just “another kind of lament” following in the wake of Grant’s, for all their differences, which would corroborate Pearce’s claim that, “Ajzenstat cannot prosecute her own cherished liberal principles to the extent necessary for her political medicine to be effective.” Conserving liberty and equality may yet require more than what sustaining a liberal founding can provide.

The following two chapters take up thinkers whom few would conservative, Charles Taylor and G. Brock Chisolm–the being an anti-conservative, with his explicit advocacy of globalism and population control, or eugenics. David Edward Tabachnick’s chapter situates Taylor within the “crisis of liberalism,” which Tabachnick succinctly characterizes as “a conflict or tension between two of the tenets underlying liberalism itself: equality and identity.” In doing so, Tabachnick analyzes and critiques Taylor’s attempt to thread the needle between multiculturalism and nationalism through what he calls “interculturalism.” On Tabachnick’s close and compelling reading, Taylor’s proposed solution cannot help but derail into ethnocentrism despite its effort to avoid any form of strong nationalism; his effort to preserve liberalism ultimately loses touch with reality. Regarding imagined realities, Ian Dowbiggin examines the thought of Chisholm (1948-1953), psychiatrist and first director-general of the World Health Organization, and draws out the underlying connection between psychiatry and globalism—the latter impetus toward a borderless world being a popular notion among Canadian governing elites. Chisholm claimed it was “psychiatry’s job…to train new generations of world citizens,” while Dowgibbin diagnoses his scheme as a form of “medical totalitarianism” with “a breath-taking disregard for the bedrock liberties and trusted traditions of democratic societies.” From Chisholm’s errors Canadians might have anticipated threats to their liberties when faced with government excesses during a pandemic that was ultimately a “moral panic.”[7]

The third part of the volume is in many ways an investigation into the uses and abuses of myths, and how important it is to attend to, as well as conserve, mythical meaning, or meaningful myths, properly understood. Christopher S. Morrissey argues McLuhan’s thought is an “unusual sort of postmodernism” insofar as “it provides us with a mindful retrieval of the metaphysical link between nature and culture.” Morrissey offers extended interpretation of McLuhan’s work, Understanding Media, to demonstrate how he overcame “the unresolved dualisms of both ancient Greek philosophy and modern sociological thought.” The upside for conserving liberty is one rooted in a cautionary hope that, “if we can understand the causes of things, we can also reprogram those causes; perhaps not to achieve the best effects, but at least to ameliorate the worst effects.” Grant Havers, also writing on McLuhan, highlights a fascinating paradox to which McLuhan’s thought points, “that religion becomes stronger as the impact of globalization takes root.” To demonstrate this, Havers contrasts McLuhan’s thought with Kojève’s philosophy of history that presumes a trajectory toward atheism and the end of religion. According to Havers, the effects of globalization are “unsettling” and as “tribalism” increases, the world becomes less intelligible to rationalist minds wed to “the progressivist myth that human beings are motivated by economic self-interest alone.” Havers argues “the mythical-religious mind” is better suited to grasp a less coherent world–that is, to grasp “the story (myth) of unity amid tribalist fragmentation.” Thus, McLuhan therefore underlines the importance of conserving meaning through myths and an appreciation the narrative structure of consciousness. Colin Cordner follows with a nuanced discussion of the thought of Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant. Cordner argues that despite “apparent vacillations” or even “confusion of periagogoi,” Grant’s intellectual development demonstrates a sustained effort “to come to grips with the symbols which underlie technological civilization in hopes of undoing technology’s hold on modern human beings.” For Grant, the challenge facing every North American is a “lack of deep traditions of contemplation through which transcendence is pursued” and so we are limited by “purely historical and contingent thinking.” While an “oblivion of eternity” and a consequent “sense of homelessness” are central to our “fate,” this Grant’s work conserves—even invites—the opportunity for “the soul’s transcendence of the necessity of historically conditioned Being.”

The penultimate essay by Richard Avramenko pays deserved tribute to the scholarship of Barry Cooper by elaborating and refining his distinction between the West and its story of “resistance” in contrast with the central Canadian narrative and “garrison” mentality. Avramenko demonstrates key insights into the significance of conserving the past, or recollecting origins and identity as shaped by memory, which, in the case of Western and Central Canada, is best reflected in the contrast between “homesteaders” and “Orangemen.” Avramenko argues the former embodies Berlin’s negative liberty and the latter positive liberty, therefore, the gulf between the two views is “wide.” He concludes by persuasively arguing that Laurentian “Orangemen Consciousness” persists in exacerbating tensions now manifest in an “elevated and refined” prejudice of “anti-Albertaism” that often goes hand-in-hand with anti-Americanism. In short, any effort at Canadian national identity that fails to consider Western consciousness–its memory and experience that differs significantly from that east of the 100th meridian–will largely appear as “the colonial arrogance and belligerence descending from the Orangeist tradition in Upper Canada.”

On this note, the volume comes full circle from Burke’s concern regarding colonial oppression by the British in its North American colonies to Western opposition to Central Canadian oppression based on clashes in peoples’ self-understanding and opposing views of self-government. Canadian conservatives, one might suggest, offer a qualified defense of the Canadian regime and they debate among themselves just which regime, or regime type, Canada ought to conserve or aspire to–one more individualist or collectivist, more centralist or federalist, or even whether more British or American. Most Canadian conservatives, however, do share a certain skepticism toward globalism and the loss of civic identity and responsibility at the lower levels of nation, province, and region or town. Mary Craig and Sara MacDonald round out the volume with their take on the popular television show Schitt’s Creek that highlights just this concern, and a reminder that however universal the virtues may be, they always only manifest in concrete, particular ways–that is among individuals alongside others. Thus, Trepanier notes in his short concluding remarks that the “several traditions” found in this volume offer “a rich and rewarding history to mine” as conservatives have pressing challenges today, not least as the political left dominates “the commanding heights of politics, money, culture, and education” in Canada. May his invocation be heeded that past thought not merely be “resurrected as museum pieces” but instead “be modified and renewed for the situation of today,” so that future enterprising editors will have opportunity to collect essays analyzing the insights—as well as the achievements—following upon a renewal of conservative thought in Canada.

Canadian Conservative Political Thought
Edited by Lee Trepanier and Richard Avramenko
New York & London: Routledge, 2023; 290pp

NOTES:

[1] James Farney and David Rayside (eds.) Conservatism in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 3.

[2] See, e.g., “The global crisis in conservatism,” Economist, July 4, 2019: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/07/04/the-global-crisis-in-conservatism; David Brooks, “What Happened to American Conservatism?” The Atlantic, Dec. 8, 2021: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/brooks-true-conservatism-dead-fox-news-voter-suppression/620853/; Andrew Coyne, “An affinity for contrarianism has driven a lot of conservatives crazy. Exhibit A: Danielle Smith,” The Globe & Mail, May 18, 2023: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-conservative-weakness-for-contrarianism-has-driven-a-lot-of-them/.

[3] Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Cast for the Future,” Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay (New York: Encounter, 2023), 14-15 et passim. Arthur Milikh, “Introduction,” Ibid., xi.

[4] See, e.g., Ofir Haivry & Yoram Hazony “What Is Conservatism?” American Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 2 Summer 2017: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/what-is-conservatism/; Oren Cass, “A New Conservatism,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-12/new-conservatism-free-market; Brian Lee Crowley, “A modern Conservatism for a modern Canada,” MLI April 25, 2022: https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/a-modern-conservatism-for-a-modern-canada/; Sean Speer, “The Hundred Year Reinvention of Canadian Conservatism,” The Hub, April 22, 2022: https://thehub.ca/2022-04-22/the-hundred-year-reinvention-of-canadian-conservatism/]

[5] Lee Trepanier and Richard Avramenko (eds.) Canadian Conservative Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 2023), 2-3. All future references to this volume will be noted parenthetically directly in the text by page number.

The notion of a “progressivist anthropology” as a key contributing factor to changes in the Canadian regime is a recurring theme in the essays found in another valuable collection, David W. Livingstone (ed.), Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). Emberley and Newell likewise observed nearly four decades ago that a “utopian animus” has been as constitutive of Canadian political life as of Canadian K-12 and higher education: “The enthusiasm to fix the political realm with certainty into a constitution which covers all contingencies matches the revolutionary process unfolding within the educational system which seeks a curriculum appealing to all constituencies and affronting none.” The “crisis” of the decline of liberal education in Canada and “the vast political, cultural, and economic changes taking place in Canada and the world” are part of a single complex, which is, in their estimation, “best summed up by the recent fascination with ‘the end of history.’” Peter C. Emberley and Waller R. Newell, Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 6-7, 9. Cf. Barry Cooper, It’s the Regime, Stupid! (Toronto: Key Porter Books) who argues that in light of major changes in the Canadian regime, “there is no Canadian conservatism” (127).

[6] In this vein, consider the compelling analysis by Luigi Bradizza, who writes, “Applying the lessons of Democracy in America to Canada is, unfortunately, made easier in our day because the nation has begun to exhibit many of the democratic maladies against which Tocqueville warned.” Bradizza, “Democracy in Canada: What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians,” Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime, 201.

[7] On this, see, Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Genie, Canada’s Covid: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (Calgary: Haultain Research Institute, 2023).

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