Hugh Segal - The long road back : creating canadas new conservative party

This book explores the history and prospects of the post-Cold War conservative cause in Canada. It follows the journey of the conservative movement in Canada over its decade-plus in the wilderness of factionalism, incompetence, and irrelevance back to its return to power in 2006. I began to write this book in 2003, after observing the summer of negotiations between the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties. It struck me then that what had transpired that summer between two conservative parties that had railed at each other for a decade needed to be put into a larger context. The final chapter was completed after the 2006 federal election. I hope, for the sake of the party and the country, that the lessons learned by carefully examining the events of these years will help prevent another such lost decade.

The perspective of this book is one of profound respect for the importance of the conservative idea in the dialectic of contemporary political debate. This perspective is tied not to any notion that conservatism must always prevail, but more properly to the premise that without the inclusion of the conservative idea, any debate that matters will be hollow and its outcome unreflective of societys broader and deeper interests and passions. My effort here is at once personal, because I have been an active partisan of the Conservative Party since my youth in the 1960s, and analytical, because my work outside of politics, in the private and not-for-profit sectors, has allowed me to see the conservative process from something other than the boundless optimism of the engaged partisan. These two strands come together in my deeply held view that the Conservative Partysometimes loving, sometimes dysfunctionalis a family, not a private club. It is also an instrument for democratic government: whether in office or in opposition, the party is a public instrument with duties and obligations to the greater public welfare of Canada and Canadians.

One of the key Tory biases is a concern for balance. The absence of balance in political, intellectual, public, and corporate life inevitably leads to failure. Whether in the politics of the right, the left, or the centre, or in the business of investing and generating profit, or in the marketplace of ideas and insight, the absence of balanceof a measured reflection on the competing pressures at handis usually the precursor of a loss of legitimacy. Narrowness on the right or the left, too much intensity on the centralist or decentralist side in federal-provincial relationsthese ordain incipient dysfunction. As I see it, the years from 1993 to 2006 represent a time when this balance within the Tory movement was disturbed by a period of hubris, fragmentation, incompetence, conceit, and a smaller view of our mission, a period that rendered a profound disservice to Canada.

Conservatism has its weaknesses, and they can be disruptive: fear of change, unvarnished belief in tradition, occasional distrust of collective endeavour, and deep tendencies toward division. (Robert Stanfield told me when I was a young legislative assistant that with three conservatives in a room, you would have at least five points of view.) But there is no doubt in my mind that these potential weaknesses are clearly outweighed by the beneficial presence of the conservative movements root beliefs in individual opportunity balanced by the common interests of nation and enterprise and by the overarching framework of democratic freedom and institutional stability. This is the right counterbalance to the liberalism that de-emphasizes collective responsibility, thereby contributing to an atomized society in which individuals primarily seek their own material advance with little sense of responsibility, and in which anticipating the next trend outweighs understanding our history and protecting institutions that preserve order. Conservatism, therefore, has nothing less than a profound duty to the future: it is the duty of conservatives to understand and overcome the factionalist impulse in order not to default on this responsibility.

Allow me to set the political and geopolitical context of this study of one movements recent travels and travails. Political causes and the parties and people that champion them have seasons, and there are histories on which these seasons are built. Those histories not only reach into the past, they also extend with unlimited impact into the future, shaping outcomes and strategies and being shaped in turn by personalities. The current dynamics of federal politics in Canada are not simply the result of the strengths and weaknesses of the present Conservative Party or the recent Jean Chrien and Paul Martin ministries; they are also the result of a complex evolution over a number of years within a convergence of particular histories and contextsan evolution not without connections to the wider post-Cold War conservative movement in the English-speaking world.

Conservative parties in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada have experienced more than just the ups and downs of political fortune since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. In all three countries, the politics of the conservative cause have been marked by internal dissent, dramatic change, and the dynamics of decision and reconciliation. Each of these twists and turns has created real consequences for individuals, policies, and society.

In the United Kingdom, the end of the Thatcher-Major era yielded a Conservative Party that was not so much in decline as in disarray, unable to present cohesive policies and coherent leadership at the same time. This disconnect from the British people not only enabled the rise of Tony Blairs New Labour centrism, but also afforded that movement room to grow on the right, as conservative political vacuums usually do. For Europe, for the transatlantic relationship, and for the geographical balance of the larger world, this conservative failure provided New Labour with great licence, one it has used with some long-term implicationssome good, some less cheeryfor British economic, military, and diplomatic policy. It is a licence that has contributed to challenges and reckonings as far away as Iraq, Sierra Leone, Washington, and Tripoli.

In American conservative politics, the period between Ronald Reagan and George W Bush was one in which the promise of a post-Cold War new world order became, instead, the hard-slogging reality of commitments compromised, capacities overstretched, and naiveties shattered. The emergence of the Christian right in the core dynamics of the Republican Party, along with the isolationist Buchanan wing, conspired to dilute the patrician noblesse oblige of the Republican mainstream and shape a disparate coalition held together, from time to time, by overwhelming prospects for power and inexhaustible amounts of money. The despair during the Clinton years for American Republicans, along with the intensity of the character-assassinating excesses that changed the tone and intensity of American politics, also made a new candidate from Texas, with an old pedigree, the logical Republican option. The vicious attack on America and on innocent Americans by al-Qaeda produced a dynamic all its own within both Republican and Democratic circles. The Republican mindset into which that dynamic intruded so violently, however, was established as much by the conservative stresses within the Republican Party as by the broader political themes and arguments the party had come to embrace.

In Canada, the end of the Mulroney era ushered in a decade of fragmentation based on narrow ideology and regional discontent. Always a fragile and sometimes disenfranchised participant in Canadian politics, the conservative movement deserted the workable if temporary coalitions of leaders such as Diefenbaker, Stanfield, and Mulroney for the less worthy attractions of regional chauvinism, ideological excess, and disunity. At the beginning, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Preston Manning led the forces of fragmentation, from the right of the conservative spectrum; in the new millennium, Joe Clark did so, from the left. As in the case of Great Britain with New Labour, these conceits and diversions gave licence to a Liberal Party in Canada to proceed unchallenged. Canadas facility, effectiveness, and competence diminished over a decade in areas as disparate as health care, defence, provincial fiscal capacity, and Canada-U.S. relations. The truth is, conservative self-indulgence was as much to blame for this state of affairs as were narrow or misguided Liberal policies. The anti-Quebec leanings during Mr. Mannings beginnings and the holier-than-thou Red Tory condescension of Joe Clark all helped and stoked the Liberal victory machine.