Carl Vallée: Why Liberals keep winning the patriot game
Juggling regional traditions instead of uniting behind a common vision means the right will keep swimming against the current.
Last week, the Globe & Mail ran a controversial but fascinating piece by Andrew Coyne on Canadian conservatives’ relationship with patriotism.
‘In virtually every other democratic country, patriotism is the province of the right. Only in Canada has it been the monopoly of the left,’ wrote Coyne.
Owning patriotism and national identity is much easier for the side that seeks cultural (or postcultural) hegemony, rather than nurturing the many distinct local communities and traditions in a country as large and regionally diverse as Canada.
It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.
The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.
Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.
In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.
Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.
John Bonnett: Fixing a country in search of itself
In recent years, conservatives, especially Canadian conservatives, have revived a conviction that was self-evident and should have remained self-evident: culture matters.
Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.
Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.
Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.
If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.
With the federal state lost to the Liberals, Quebec nationalists, whether right-wing or left-wing, retreat into autonomism or support for independence from Canada. This reinforces the tendency in Quebec to ‘conserve’ what falls within the jurisdiction of the National Assembly rather than the federal Parliament.
Federal strategy thus becomes one of ‘harm reduction’ rather than a positive proposal to refound Canadian nationalism within a narrative framework that might appeal to Quebec nationalists. Given the libertarian or anti-statist reflexes of many Conservatives in the rest of Canada, I do not know whether that goal is achievable amid these differences. The contours of Quebec nationalism are much more clearly defined and related to culture, history and language, as Quebec understands itself as a nation in the older, sociological sense.
Canada, for its part, seems determined to become ever more of an economic zone that seeks to give itself the trappings of a nation through ‘national programmes’, such as writing exorbitant cheques to fund a struggling healthcare system. Perhaps this is the true challenge of Canadian conservatism.
Can we truly build a national narrative capable of rallying Western and Ontarian conservatives, together with Quebec nationalists, even as each seeks to preserve something different?
I am no longer certain.
Carl Vallée is a Senior Managing Director with Teneo’s Strategy and Communications business, based in Montréal. He was the press secretary to former prime minister Stephen Harper from 2010 to 2015.
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Yes we can.
Conservatives can unite support by …….
1) leaving the culture words to the activists.
2) promoting the Party as the facilitator of innovation, opportunity, and human flourishing.
3) promoting a positive, inclusive, yet orderly system of engagement with Canadians.