Howard Anglin: I've never been more bullish about conservative politics in Canada

There is no dearth of ideas on the right — we have only to harness them into party platforms and turn them into government policy.

(The John A. Macdonald statue in Ottawa, Canada.)

My heart goes out to my disconsolate comrades-in-arms, it really does, but I just don’t get it. My friend and quondam campaign trench mate, Ben Woodfinden, has declared himself ‘more depressed about the state of conservative politics in Canada right now than i think i’ve ever been’ in a tweet that has been shared by many more of my conservative friends, but which leaves me asking, wherefore this sudden malaise?

Surely, it’s not just last year’s unexpected federal election loss—a Black Swan political event if ever there was one—and the prospect of three more years of Liberal majority rule. Protracted time in the political penalty box is nothing new for Canadian conservatives: there were 22 years between 1935 and 1957 and 21 years between 1963 and 1984 (ignoring the brief, hapless Clark interregnum, as sensible people should).

Maybe it’s a matter of perspective or geography: if you are under 30 and outside Alberta, I’m not surprised you can’t imagine what it’s like to have a conservative government that’s not afraid occasionally to do conservative things. Or maybe it’s the Chinese water torture drip-drip dopamine hit of social media slowly driving them mad. But a handful of malcontents sniping on Twitter isn’t the conservative movement, and certainly not worth losing sleep over.

Much of the online division appears to be roiling frustration at the federal party’s inability to square the circle of combining ambitiously conservative substance with a winning election strategy. If that’s the source of the sudden lassitude, I sympathise. This will always be a problem for a party of principle whose principles include respecting regional differences—a problem that a pure party of national power like the Liberals doesn’t have.

But it’s hardly grounds for despair! We’ve been here before, and often. What I find more puzzling is Woodfinden’s lament that the right has no ideas. On this score, far from depressed, I have never been more bullish. ‘Intellectual poverty’? The riot of new ideas and their growing traction, especially among young Canadians, are why I am so hopeful for the future.

¹ So depressed, in fact, that he’s slipped into that weird habit beloved of modern progressives and mid-century poets and demoted his ego to the lower-case pronoun ‘i’.

² It’s notable that most of those most despairing are not from Alberta, where Jason Kenney showed how to quickly turn a province’s economic fortunes around and set in motion education and health care reforms, and where Danielle Smith is now moving ahead with more choice in health care and education, and has even put immigration restrictions on the referendum ballot in October.

³ While Liberals are Liberals everywhere in Canada, Canadian Conservatives remain a loose confederacy of tribes with their own languages and rituals. Liberals in Halifax, Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver are basically the same because they inhabit similar homogenous urban enclaves and imbibe the same cultural/media consensus. Conservatives are much more regionally diverse–and successfully so. Seven of the ten provinces are led by conservative governments of quite different stripes. The problem is aggregating and reconciling those regional differences at the federal level. It’s not clear that what works in Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, or BC translates outside those regions, or what policy formula or leadership style best unites them long enough to win a general election.

With the ease of online publishing, there are now more conservative journals of ideas than at any time in my life. Among those I read regularly are Without Diminishment, The Dorchester Review, The Hub, and C2C, while new outlets like Foundations Forum and 2067 Journal are launching so fast I can hardly keep up with them. Laptop tabs proliferate like bindweed.

Conservatives in Canada don’t just have one Cité Libre; they have a shelf of them, and this is without counting all the excellent and provocative individual Substacks and Twitter accounts, the National Post’s op-ed pages, or the hundreds of foreign journals, Substacks, and podcasts at our fingertips. Good ideas know no boundaries, so I subscribe to many of those too.

Then there are the in-person forums of ideas like Civitas, Project Ontario, Canada Strong and Free, The Hub’s pub nights, Without Diminishment’s gatherings, and countless local grassroots clubs. I know of at least two discussion groups in Alberta started by and for young conservatives, and there are doubtless many more across the country that I don’t know of.

Canadian think tanks have never been as well-funded or influential as those in Washington or London, but there are now more than a dozen churning out research, ideas, and practical policies, as well as hiring interns and hosting educational and networking events. The Hub’s Hunter Prize archives are a good place to start, especially for ideas for economic growth.

No, the challenge for Canadian conservatives is not ideas. We’ve never had it so good. There are literally hundreds of policy prescriptions out there for fixing health care, education, immigration, crime, drugs, housing, and the legal system–you name it and someone’s written about it here, and many, many more have done so in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

The challenge is corralling the best ideas into party platforms and, eventually, into government policy. But that’s the easy part. It’s much easier to assemble blocks than to quarry them. It’s also the fun part. I had the privilege of coordinating policy for Caroline Elliott’s recent campaign, and while policy plays only a small part in a leadership race, we generated endless ideas for renewing BC if she’d won.

The same is true at the federal level, where Conservatives had so many good ideas over the last few years that the federal Liberals have borrowed, er, liberally, from them. That’s a political win, even if the government’s motives are half-hearted and their methods half-baked. Call it a half-win.

In fact, about the best thing anyone can seem to say about Mark Carney is that he looks and acts like a conservative. He’s not and he doesn’t, except in comparison to Justin Trudeau, our first NDP prime minister, but the fact that so many Canadians want to think he is, is another half-win.

So why the long faces? Conservatives have proven they can win provincially, and they have good ideas for which there is a growing demand (uniquely among Western countries, the radical tendency of our younger voters trends as much right as left). They just need to put the two together, which is a matter of tactics, and a tactical deficiency is hardly worth despairing about.

So, cheer up, conservatives. If I’ve learned one thing in my time in politics, it’s that things are never nearly as bad—or as good—as they seem in the moment. If you want to do something helpful, get off Twitter, start mining the resources I listed above, and compile a programme for government. The opportunity will come sooner than you think, and when it does, you have no excuse not to be ready.

Howard Anglin is a founding partner of Haultain Group. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, D.C.

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