Geoff Russ: The reactionary necessity

If this is the sum of modern Canada, how can a conservative not charge backwards?

(Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper during 2010 Winter Olympics.)

Good governance is sorely needed in Canada, and conservatives should aspire to it. However, a robust reactionary programme must come first.

The word “reactionary” makes some shy away, but it is hardly an inaccurate description for much of the mainstream right. Throughout “Harperpalooza” earlier this month, conservative columnists wrote eloquently of how the country was much more soundly governed during Stephen Harper's time.

Similarly, Flag Day on February 15 is an annual inspiration for laments and defences of Canada’s old Red Ensign banner.

What sort of conservatives could observe the state of our country without having their reactionary impulses spiked? Those who remember 2010 should regard it as a good year in a hopeful age for Canada.

16 years on, it grows only more evident that the Harper years were a golden era compared to today, and the Conservative Party is rightfully proud of that.

True, we have no time machine to return to 2010. That Canada is gone. However, the confidence, sense of self, belief in the country and pride in its history we had then are desirable goals, but that is the bare minimum.

Nonetheless, many conservatives have fallen into the trap of only wanting to be the prudent voice of a progressivist regime that is entrenching itself day by day. When they promise merely to manage and repair what exists through a lower tax bill or a more noble rhetoric, they are only embalming our sorry state of affairs.

This is where the calls for a gentler conservative disposition espoused by the Burkeans, and thinkers like Without Diminishment contributor Peter Copeland, while deserving respect and correct in most ways, can be challenged.

Copeland rightly posits that tone is not separable from the ends of politics. An attitude of permanent contempt finishes the soul of a movement. Burkean modesty is also a genuine virtue, but context matters.

Those qualities are tailored to societies where inheritance is valued, and our institutions can be trusted to act as stewards and evenly apply the laws of the land. There is no such moral ecology in Canada. This is especially apparent in 2026 after years of a government that treats the country as a project instead of a home and a people.

Conservatives have perfected the art of critique and complaint against this project. But do they have the machinery, courage, or theory of action to do battle against such an entrenched regime if they win power?

Even after electoral wins, they are often “undone by victory”. What begins as a bullheaded, energetic vision for change drifts into caretaking and attempting to be liked.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has now headed an officially Progressive Conservative government for eight years, but has Ontario become any more conservative in that time? Satisfaction with administration can very easily replace the desire for reform.

On the whole, Canada’s problems are restoration problems.

From 2010 to 2025, the Canadian population exploded from 34.2 million people to just shy of 42 million people. The number of those illegally in the country almost certainly pushes that latter figure higher.

Copeland himself has written previously that, “For decades, policy followed an extreme open-society ideal that downplayed borders, integration, and common culture. The result has been diffuse national identity, declining trust, strained services, and civic fatigue.”

In more recent years, the rate of immigration into Canada has been one of the most intensive in the developed world. On an economic scale, the impact is felt everywhere from the state’s shrinking capacity to administer health care, the overcrowding of public schools, wage suppression, and the stretching of infrastructure. Added to that is an erosion of a shared, but precarious Canadianness.

The Canada of 34 million people was a better place to live than the Canada of 42 million people by any honest measure. In bitter retrospect, it is evident that the state had no business trying to absorb such an influx of people.

Then there is the weakening of our public trust and sense of safety. It is not that Canada has turned into a lawless failed state, but there are real declines in public safety and Canadians feel less secure on their own streets.

Defenders of our status quo insist that the fears about crime and safety are only hysteria, but their self-comforting narrative has few legs to stand on.

In British Columbia, a survey published this month found that 53 per cent of respondents fear for their family’s safety in their community. 56 per cent actively avoid areas within their community due to safety concerns, and 73 per cent say crime and violence are hurting their quality of life. 37 per cent say they have been the victim of a recent crime. That is not something that can be written off.

90 per cent of respondents believe crimes often go unreported, and 71 per cent of victims who failed to report the crime confessed they lacked confidence in the justice system. Cities like Vancouver have responded with increased funding for the local police, which has made a positive impact, but the jurisdiction of the Vancouver Police Department is not international, or even regional.

The extortion crisis in Surrey, often led by foreign criminal gangs, is a new phenomenon. Governments have responded to the crisis with grand gestures like demanding an “extortion czar” and new helicopters.

However, the problem underneath it all is that Canadians have conditioned themselves into believing that a rigorous examination of our immigration system is impolite at best, and bigoted at worst.

An immigration system as porous and incapable as our own is a nuisance to our justice system, which itself cannot or will not impose consequences at the speed and scale required to address crime and fraud.

Groups of foreign suspects accused of crimes can make bulk asylum claims and effectively blockade enforcement of the law, and delay their expulsion from Canada. For predatory actors, Canada is exploitable, sentimental, and slow.

In Ontario, Brampton mayor Patrick Brown has warned that transnational networks use encrypted apps to threaten people, launder money, and escalate their operations, while lawful means of stamping them out lag behind.

Our state capacity is failing in its most basic duties. Repairing it will take money, but now that is in short supply for many provinces.

B.C.’s fiscal trajectory is dreadful. Warnings about downgrades to the provincial credit rating are growing, and the B.C. NDP are passing budgets that dwarf the emergency spending of the pandemic. Debt servicing is one of the most expensive budget line items.

British Columbians have become poorer while being more forcefully governed than ever. There is no real economic growth to justify such spending, with slackening private investment and government employment growth masking just how poor the job market really is.

Intentional or not, the progressive formula for governance in Canada seems to be expanding state apparatuses, weakening the productive cores of the economy, and demanding tremendous obedience to manage the consequent disorder.

The case for reaction is apparent. But what does that look like in Canada?

It means an aggressive restoration. The last decade cannot be regarded as a misunderstanding that can be smoothed over and corrected incrementally. It must be seen as a field of malignant crops infected with blight that must be ripped up, root and branch, and replanted with something whole and nourishing. Normal life cannot return without stern and swift action, making reaction an agenda in itself.

Of course, the sport of ice hockey provides the perfect metaphor.

During the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, when our national hockey team won gold on home soil, Canada was invigorated with a wave of euphoria that confirmed the righteousness of our confidence.

Last Sunday, when the national team was defeated by Team USA for the gold medal, it shattered our already weakened morale.

The gold medal game was just one more reminder that Canada cannot accomplish things that we once assumed were in our bloodstream. Symbols, such as sports, are vital because morale matters and follows reality.

Should conservatives regain power in B.C. or the whole of Canada, their path is not going to resemble a seminar if they are serious about rescuing our home. Rather, such an undertaking will feel like overdue antibiotics for lingering illnesses, unpleasant at times, but surely necessary.

If gaining power federally continues to be a challenge, the provinces are not some consolation prize for the right. Our provinces should be laboratories for conservative governance and new methods of recapturing the levers of the state.

As Eric Kaufmann writes, Canada has been thoroughly inundated by progressive politics for generations. It makes it easy for left-wing assumptions to be mistaken for institutional neutrality.

Dismantling and rebuilding institutions and narratives with a conservative agenda is a better and more ambitious path than simply freezing what exists. Between our unhappy present and pessimistic future, looking backwards for inspiration is one of our only options, provided we do not fall into useless bouts of worthless nostalgia.

John Lukacs, a Hungarian-American historian, described his reactionary outlook as a politics belonging to, “somebody who thinks the clock has to be put back sometimes.”

The American thinker Mel Bradford once wrote that, “Reaction is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous.”

Many scoff at notions of taking inspiration from the past as outdated or primitive, all while upholding a present that is exposed as truly outrageous upon any close examination.

If what we see and hear every day is the sum of modern Canada, how can a conservative not want to charge backwards? If you are shoved into a muddy pothole, the natural instinct is to jump back and wash your soiled clothing.

Would it be so radical? Not half so radical as what has happened to Canada for the past ten years or more, which will require new methods to undo the damage. In fact, rolling back certain Canadian attitudes much further back than 2010 would be better still.

Rightly or wrongly in cause, many former prime ministers, conservative or otherwise, did not shy away from hardline measures to quell crises in their times.

Brian Mulroney sent in the Canadian army at Oka in 1990, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the October Crisis of 1970, and Sir John A. Macdonald refused to pardon Louis Riel in 1885. These were not happy occasions, but these men at least had the steel to take drastic measures.

Our crises are more simmering and systemic, but the imperative to deal with them is no less important.

On the West Coast, there is a competitive leadership race for the B.C. Conservatives, and a weak, vulnerable NDP government. The victor in that leadership race will have an opportunity to set a new example for the right across Canada if they go on to become premier.

B.C. has been the epicentre of leftist misrule, from sanctioning overtly anti-Canadian activism, to enabling drug addiction on the grounds of compassion, pursuing immature fiscal policy, and treating law and order as an afterthought. It is all reversible, but not with the fusionist ways of thinking that Peter Copeland accurately critiques as tired and unsuitable for these years.

The disposition Copeland urges, for charity, decency, and warmth, should be the hallmarks of healthy conservative statecraft. However, that is not a strategy for securing power in a country such as Canada.

Measured, moderate governance can only flourish once the rotten, superimposed modern pillars are replaced by oaken foundations.

In Canada, a conservative leader must first adopt a reactionary disposition to govern with modesty thereafter.

Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.