Andrew Averay: JJ McCullough is part of the conservative elite
And that is not necessarily a bad thing, writes Guest Contributor Andrew Averay.
Andrew Averay is a social studies teacher from Ontario.
Since Without Diminishment launched, a flurry of contributions defending and critiquing its central “new right” thesis have emerged. J.J. McCullough’s recent Substack column, “The problem with Canada’s conservative elite: Strange, unpopular fixations are warping a movement”, is no doubt intended to be another entry in this saga.
Anthony Koch previously made the case that “We need a Pierre Trudeau of the right to remake Canada”. McCullough’s response is that the desire to push the boundaries of Canadian electoral politics should be dismissed as a product of out-of-touch elitism that will never yield electoral results.
This argument is more than a little ironic, coming from McCullough. If he is known for anything, it’s for his enthusiasm for American culture and a “North American” reading of Canada.
On December 15th of last year, he even published a YouTube video titled “Can Trump and Trudeau unify Canada and the US?” in which he seriously considered the possibility of Canada joining the United States.
At roughly the same time, data from Ipsos and YouGov found support for US annexation to be in the low teens. Close to four-fifths of Canadians opposed becoming the “51st state,” and negative views of the United States and of Donald Trump reached generational peaks.
The idea that this kind of content would help Conservatives win belongs in the same category of wishful elite thinking that McCullough ostensibly deplores. Other issues that were once unpopular, however, have become serious topics of debate. Take access to privatised medical care, which was a complete electoral non-starter until very recently.
Readers old enough to remember the year 2000, or to have at least read about it, will remember when then-Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day felt compelled to bring a prop sign reading “No 2-tier healthcare” to a federal election debate.
If some political support for healthcare reform now exists, and Alberta is taking the lead through (limited) changes in this direction, then this evolution in public attitudes is the result of both the failure of existing policies and a consistent push over many years by “elites” who were convinced that change was needed even when public opinion was firmly against them.
Recent surveys now show majorities of Canadians are open to expanding private healthcare delivery inside a universal system. A 2024 Ipsos poll found 52 percent of Canadians want more care provided by independent businesses, and 65 percent favour models where private operators run publicly funded hospitals. What was once a taboo, elite opinion became mainstream.
This brings us to the real point: despite their criticism of “out-of-touch conservative elites,” McCullough could have quite recently been called, “out of touch.” He surely counts as an “elite” given his educational attainment and public profile. But neither of these qualifiers should be taken as an insult.
The conservative movement needs its elites, including elites with views outside of the (current) range of acceptable public opinion. In fact, the movement’s failures to date can arguably be attributed to its failure to properly cultivate such an elite, while being far too willing to follow the stated preferences of its base or the Canadian electorate, even when doing so has been to its detriment.
The true wedge is therefore not between “out of touch” and “in touch,” but between elites who understand that opinion is malleable, and will try to move it, and elites who fixate on aged polling crosstabs as if they were the Ten Commandments.
Take the Charter, for instance. McCullough claims that “elite” conservative opinion (and here what he really means is the opinion of certain Without Diminishment contributors and allied voices) is at odds with the views prevalent among not just the Canadian public but also the conservative base. He is not entirely wrong.
In 2019, a survey from the Association for Canadian Studies found 65 percent of Canadians cited it as a source of pride, behind only medicare and the flag. By contrast, a 2023 Angus Reid study suggested that roughly half of the population believed the notwithstanding clause weakens rights, and majorities of those critics wanted it abolished.
Yet the elites he criticises hold the views they do for good reasons. If Canadian courts were already a problem for the Harper government, they have become actively hostile to an ever-growing range of conservative positions over the past decade. The conservative base, and indeed the broader Canadian electorate, happen to disagree with the courts on key issues, and to side with the elites McCullough decries, on many of these issues.
Instead of elites convincing voters of the ways in which the Charter undermines the conservative positions that they already hold, McCullough would have them listen to voters’ stated preferences. McCullough treats the emotional attachment to the Charter as a reason to abandon substantive critiques of how courts use it, rather than as an issue on which conservatives must win over voters if they want their policies to survive contact with the judiciary.
Similar observations can be made on immigration. McCullough claims that, “It’s immigration, however, where a gap between conservative elites and the base has been historically widest, and most consequential, given the immigration crisis facing Canada today.”
This is pure revisionism. He forgets that for a thirty-year period stretching from the 1990s to the 2020s, support for immigration in Canada was very high across virtually all segments of Canadian society. As recently as 2022, record shares of Canadians said immigration made Canada a stronger country. It was only in 2023 that opinions started rapidly swinging negative, driven by housing shortages, strained services, and concerns over integration.
Taking McCullough at his word means that the Conservative Party should have been content with high immigration, as indeed it was until quite recently. It is on immigration, coincidentally, that the Party has likely suffered the most electorally from its failure to take the lead on public opinion. As with changes in public attitudes towards healthcare reform, public sentiment on immigration eventually soured due to the failures of Canada’s immigration system, and because of a conservative intellectual class that was not afraid to go where the Party would not.
The Conservative Party’s mistake was that the official line clung to outdated talking points long after the economic factors of immigration had sharply declined, rather than a few “out-of-touch” elites being too far ahead of their voters on the risks of mass immigration. Arguably, the Party missed out on a chance to tip the 2025 election in its favour by waiting for this shift to occur, instead of taking the lead on public sentiment that was only just ripening.
Both examples provide a useful contrast to the dominant ethos of the Liberal Party of Canada. As Koch noted in the National Post piece, Pierre Elliott Trudeau transformed Canada. He did this through the adoption of the Charter, but also more broadly by shifting the bounds of acceptable discourse first within the Liberal Party, and through it, within the whole of Canadian society. The old social compact based on outmoded British attachments to God, King and country was replaced by a compact based on American-style individual rights.
The Liberal Party has carried Trudeau’s example forward by cultivating an elite that is not afraid to set the tone of broader cultural discourse. Climate change, “safe supply” and myriad other radical policy positions were initially niche, “out of touch” ideas.
If most Canadians then came to believe that climate change is a civilisational threat, or that “safe supply” was the only humane response to rising drug overdose rates, it was because these beliefs were imposed from the top down. The Conservative Party was then required to offer meaningful “responses” to these perceived issues, significantly hampering its electoral efforts in 2015, 2019 and 2021.
This is to say nothing of the Liberal Party’s successful narrative shift in 2025, which occurred while the Conservative Party remained committed to running an election on the “pocketbook” issues that voters claimed to care about. Canada’s media ecosystem, dominated by elites sympathetic to the Liberal Party, enabled the Liberals to pose as defenders of Canadian sovereignty, while views of the US and of Trump collapsed to historic lows. In that environment, McCullough’s “North American” conservatism was not only a marginal, elite opinion, but actively hampered conservative electoral fortunes simply by existing.
There is a consistent pattern at play. Liberal elites took unpopular or marginal ideas, put institutional power behind them and made them trademarks of polite society. Conservatives should realise that carefully triangulating within the resulting frame will do nothing to change the frame itself.
As much as McCullough might (selectively) complain about out-of-touch conservative elites, or claim that their beliefs offer nothing but distractions from issues that really matter, the plain truth is that no political movement can hope to achieve any kind of lasting change, or even to govern at all, if it does not have the means and desire to shape public discourse in its own image. Every political movement worth its name needs an “out-of-touch elite” to lead public discourse where it needs to go, because the only alternative is to follow the lead set by others.
The hour is now quite late. If conservatives (and Conservatives) have any hope of effectively governing, or indeed of governing at all, then they need to stop complaining about “out-of-touch elites” and learn to embrace them. That these elites tend to care about issues that are not currently top of mind for the average Canadian voter, or even the average member of the conservative movement, makes it all the more important, not less. It means that the broader culture has yet to recognise its alignment with conservative ideas, and that significant effort will need to be expended to reshape public perceptions.
Only an elite that is “out-of-touch” with the present concerns of the conservative base can tell that base, and the rest of Canada, what it really wants to hear.
Andrew Averay is a social studies teacher and writer with interests in politics, current affairs and education policy.
