John Weissenberger: Don’t praise Red Toryism, bury it

If the ‘Tory mind’ is neither right nor left, is it nothing at all?

Many are the politically undead, walking amongst us, the living Canadians, but few are as ghoulishly unkillable as the Red Tories. Regardless of the number of well-placed, sharp wooden stakes, pounded in with ferocious vigour, they inevitably return like cheap B-movie characters, confounding conservatives and frightening the children.

These pages recently featured a back-and-forth between Geoff Russ and Tyler Brooks on the subject. One was right. Russ argued that Red Toryism was a gateway into the movement for leftist ideas, thereby undermining the whole project, whereas Brooks saw it as part of a very broad tradition of ‘Tory’ thought, extending back centuries. I myself questioned the modern relevance of Red Toryism in C2C Journal, having collided with it over decades of activism, and had the pleasure of debating Tasha Kheiriddin on the subject at a Civitas conference.

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My experience, beginning in the euphoria of High (Joe) Clarkian Red Toryism, supports Russ’s conclusions. One recalls that English Canada had had enough of the Trudeau revolution – after only four years – reducing the Liberals to a tenuous minority in the 1972 election. In fact, Pierre Trudeau would never have formed another government without reliably massive support in Quebec. Canada’s Swedification continued, however, thanks to the New Democratic Party (NDP), which propped up the Liberals. This led to multiple socialist experiments, such as the national oil company Petro-Canada, the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA), and vastly expanded social spending.

And Canada had no intellectual counterweight – no Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley Jr – while palaeo-Tory intellectuals like George Grant had no influence on policymaking. Our entire political class was riding the statist train – and supporting social progressivism – whether on the express or the bullet train. Sweeping dirigisme and the expansion of the welfare state were the order of the day. This paralleled the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States, where the Heath and Nixon/Ford governments would hardly be considered ‘conservative’ in any modern sense. As today, the media were more than 90 per cent left-of-centre, providing cover for our Liberal-Dipper coalition.

So it was that the federal Progressive Conservative (PC) leader Robert Stanfield proposed wage and price controls in the 1974 election to counter ‘stagflation’ (low economic growth combined with high unemployment and inflation). Trudeau lied during the campaign (surprise!), saying he opposed the policy, then promptly implemented the controls once his majority was restored.

Leaving theory aside for the moment, in practice Red Toryism was, in reality, merely the least-fast road to leftist unicornia, as Gad Saad would say. Adherents would describe themselves as ‘fiscally conservative but socially liberal’, despite the latter position’s reliance on the mega-state essentially ruling out fiscal prudence. Red Tories also suffered from a wicked strain of elitist fear of missing out (FOMO), an aching desire to be accepted and affirmed by the Laurentian elite. They preferred this to, say, rejecting and fighting the Liberal-NDP programme.

My C2C Journal article and the debate with Ms Kheiriddin posed this question: what relevance do Red Tories have in the twenty-first century, given that all the social ‘progress’ desired by 1970s progressives has been achieved? Does it mean continuously pushing the boundaries of traditional social norms? Swallowing wokeism whole?

Where I can broadly agree with Mr Brooks is that Canadian conservatives and conservative populists must decide which elements of our intellectual inheritance to retain as we strive to grow our movement. Red Toryism – as it really was, and as it is commonly understood – is not one of them. One can rant over Grant and laugh with Stephen Leacock as much as one wants, but people will hear and understand this when the term ‘Red Toryism’ is used: ‘moderation’, centrism, ideologiophobia, and acquiescence to any hare-brained leftist schemes.

This is plain in Brooks’s piece, where he begins by stating that ‘Canadian conservatives do not have the luxury of a clear doctrine to steer our ship’. Huh? He asserts that the ‘Tory mind’ is ‘neither on the right nor the left of the political spectrum; it is the political spectrum’. Remarkable. So, if it is everything, is it also nothing? Brooks appears to be channelling Charles Taylor – son of financial magnate E. P. Taylor – whose book Radical Tories (1982) included everyone from Leacock and Stanfield to socialist Eugene Forsey under the label ‘Tory’.

In reality, defining modern conservatism as some type of fusionism – à la Frank Meyer and Buckley – is straightforward enough. It combines key elements of traditional conservatism and libertarianism, drawing on thinkers from Burke to Hayek, Sowell, and Scruton. In the Canadian context, one wonders why we cannot simply mine the successes and failures of Mulroney’s PCs, the Reform Party, Harris’s Common Sense Revolution, and of course the Harper government.

Must they be skipped over in favour of some kind of palaeo-Toryism with ill-defined intellectual moorings?

Nor are we up against Pearsonian Liberals. Our opponents are more radical and ideological than ever, so that, in any confrontation, ‘moderates’ will be left like so much flattened roadkill behind the woke express.

Why a young conservative municipal candidate would wish to run explicitly as a ‘Red Tory’, as Russ describes, is baffling. Whatever his motivations, people will hear either ‘little red’, as in Liberal, or ‘big red’, as in Battleship Potemkin. They will not hear ‘conservative’; is that the point?

A final cautionary note involves the role of the state, the expansion of which Red Tories have either favoured or not opposed. Brooks draws a necessary distinction between the state used for the ‘common good’ and ‘revolutionary and ideological socialism’. But again, we are not dealing with the bureaucracy of Confederation’s first few decades, which was, in real terms, less than half its current size and largely populated by traditionalist Christians. Experience, including my own, shows that the ‘deep state’ (a very accurate term) has its own agenda – generally antithetical to an organically developing civil society and free markets.

The reality – not the theory – of Red Toryism yields one conclusion: that, to quote a prominent Red, Leon Trotsky, it should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

John Weissenberger is a Calgary geologist, originally from Montreal, who speaks English, French and German. He was formerly Chief of Staff to the federal Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. His political writing appears in the National Post and C2C Journal.