Geoff Russ: Macdonald, the Red Tory? Never heard of him
'Red Toryism' is a subversive twisting of Canadian conservatism that must be swatted down whenever it rears its deceitful head.
An enduring rite of passage for any young Canadian conservative is the discovery of ‘Red Toryism’. Many embrace it wholeheartedly for its nominal elegance and claims of grand continuity with the past.
Earlier this month, a 19-year-old attending Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie announced that he would be running for city council as a ‘Red Tory’. First of all, the other editors at Without Diminishment and I wish the candidate well, for it is good to see young Canadians get involved in politics so directly.
Secondly, and with the same sincerity, may the candidate abandon Red Toryism sooner rather than later and never claim the label again. Red Toryism is a bad name for two primary reasons, along with many smaller ones.
It misportrays the conservatism of prime ministers such as Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier, Sir Robert Laird Borden, and R. B. Bennett, as well as that of the author Stephen Leacock and premiers in British Columbia such as Richard McBride and W. A. C. Bennett. (The Bennetts mentioned here were New Brunswick natives of old Loyalist stock and distant cousins.)
Another important reason why notions of Red Toryism must be stamped out is that they serve as a gateway for smuggling progressive and left-wing assumptions into the conservative tent, all while pretending to honour the legacy of Confederation.
Admittedly, Red Toryism sounds attractive on the surface to curious minds, like discovering a sleek coat at an estate sale. However, when worn, it is riddled with stains and holes.
The stubborn presence of Red Toryism can be attributed to a man named Gad Horowitz. He is a highly respected professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Horowitz’s career is genuinely impressive, with extensive scholarship. He made many accurate observations, such as referring to Canadian multiculturalism as an exercise in ‘the masochistic celebration of Canadian nothingness’.
Horowitz also argued that Canada’s Tory instincts furnished it with the ‘seeds of a socialist future’. The Tory preference for order, authority, community, hierarchy, and state action supposedly made socialism more natural in Canada than in the United States. The term ‘Red Tory’ was chosen because of the colour red’s association with leftist international causes and socialism. The British Labour Party, the French Socialists, the German Social Democrats, and the Chinese Communist Party all wave the red flag.
Gad Horowitz, a Marxist, also co-founded the publication Canadian Dimension, which routinely publishes apologia for communism and endorses the anti-Canadian line of the ‘decolonisers’ and similar elements.
Admirers of Horowitz have linked this so-called ‘Tory touch’ to Canada’s greater willingness to use the levers of the state to develop and control the economy, putting the country on a natural pathway to anti-liberal socialism. It is a crude, subversive trick to insist that classic Tory conservatism and socialism are part of the same family because they dislike ‘Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism’, to borrow a phrase from the French.
Sharing a dislike of the same party crasher does not a marriage make. Had somebody approached Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George Étienne Cartier and praised them as proponents of a socialist future, they might have deported that person to Australia.
There was no desire at Confederation to build upon a blank ideological slate or to dream up some innovative new society.
The point of Confederation was to preserve British North America. Yes, that meant conserving the presence and power of the Crown, Parliament, the French-Catholic fact, and Protestant liberty within the British Empire. It also meant preserving the British and French-Canadian people, their culture, and their languages.