Erin is a Tool: The Conservative Party's Latest Quisling Leader

The last time the old Conservative Party was led by someone whose political philosophy I would feel comfortable acknowledging as my own was almost a decade before my birth.  The Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, who became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party when it was in Opposition in 1956, led it to victory (a minority government) in the 1957 Dominion election, shortly before winning the party’s largest majority in percentage of seats ever the following year.   Reduced to a minority government again in 1962, Diefenbaker’s government fell in 1963 when Tommy Douglas’ socialists and the right-wing Social Credit Party both supported Liberal leader Lester Pearson when he called for a vote of no confidence because of Diefenbaker’s refusal to allow Washington D. C. to dictate policy in Ottawa on the matter of the nuclear arming of the Bomarc missiles.   Pearson, who had betrayed his country to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union when he was attached to our Washington embassy in World War II (see the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley before the American House of Un-American Activities Committee), and betrayed the entire Commonwealth to both the Soviets and the Americans when he sided with these powers against the alliance of Britain, France, and Israel in 1957 as a Minister in the government of Louis St. Laurent, was here acting on behalf of John F. Kennedy’s government in the United States.   Diefenbaker continued to lead the party in Opposition for the next four years, which saw the shining moment of his entire career, when he led the Conservatives in fierce opposition to the new flag of 1965, the first major step taken by the Liberals during the long period in which they were led by Lester Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau to radically re-invent the country, and strip it of the most visible symbols of its Loyalist heritage and identity.   In 1967, Diefenbaker was replaced by Robert Stanfield as party leader in a leadership convention that was the culmination of two years’ worth of effort on the part of Dalton Camp, then the party president (which is not the same thing as party leader) to oust him.

 

While I admit that Diefenbaker’s performance in the office of Prime Minister was far less stellar than his performance in the office of Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, his political philosophy was what I admire most about him.  He was a fierce defender of Canada’s Loyalist history and heritage, the traditional institutions derived from these such as the monarchy, Parliament, and the Common Law, and the symbols of all of these, such as the old flag.   While most if not all of his successors have paid lip service to much of this, it has never been with his passion.  He opposed all threats to Canadian freedom, whether it was the external threat posed by increasing American cultural and economic influence – or, as in the case of the Bomarc missiles incident, political influence – or the internal threat posed by the subversion of Parliamentary tradition, the exponential growth of the civil service, and the alarming way in which the government was increasingly treating the latter as a means of bypassing the former to govern by bureaucratic regulation rather than Parliamentary legislation.   His views are best stated in his own words in the speeches collected in his Those Things We Treasure (1972).   This book and John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (1956 – posthumously edited by Judith Robinson) are the two classic texts of the political philosophy associated with the old Conservative Party from Sir John A. MacDonald to John G. Diefenbaker, a Canadian version of classical British Toryism.  Sadly both books have been out-of-print for years, although Diefenbaker’s has been fairly easily and inexpensively obtainable through used-book stores.   (I first obtained a copy from Black’s Vintage Books in Winnipeg, sadly no longer around, when I was still a theology student in college.   I had to send away for Farthing’s book when my attention was drawn to it by Ron Dart several years later.)   The classic text of the religious philosophy underlying this political philosophy, expressed as a jeremiad over the latter’s failure, was George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), which remains in print.

 

After Diefenbaker was ousted, the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives fell alternately to people who were more-or-less socialists in Conservative garb, like Stanfield, and had little-to-no problem with increasing bureaucratization and its threat to Canadian freedom, or to people who were basically big business liberals in Conservative garb, like Brian Mulroney, who promoted free trade with the United States, which throughout Canadian history had been a Liberal Party policy, and who had little-to-no problem with increasing American economic and cultural influence over Canada.     It was while Stanfield led the party that a "conservative movement" outside of the party began to form to oppose what Pierre Trudeau's Liberals were doing and lobby for conservative causes, obviously because it was felt that the Party was failing to do this.    While the organizations and publications that made up this movement fought for good things for the most part - to give one example, Colin Brown founded the National Citizens Coalition in 1975 to fight for government fiscal accountability against Trudeau's huge deficits - it lamentably tended to ignore the classical texts of Canadian Toryism mentioned in the previous paragraph and look for inspiration to the American conservative movement.   This led to a blindness in the Mulroney years.   They could perceive that Mulroney had little interest in combatting the sweeping social, moral, and cultural changes that were quickly being introduced as a result of Pierre Trudeau's having given the Supreme Court powers similar to its American counterpart by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the constitution (although to give credit where credit is due Mulroney was the last Conservative leader to attempt to pass legislation restricting abortion after the newly empowered Court struck the existing laws down in 1988) and thus in that sense was way too far to the Left like Stanfield,  but failed to recognize that the problem stemmed from unnaturally grafting an element of the American republican system onto our system of Crown-in-Parliament where it neither belongs nor fits (a mistake Tony Blair would later make in the United Kingdom) and to see Mulroney's reversal of traditional Conservative opposition to free trade with the United States for the betrayal it was.   It was during the Mulroney years that the conservative movement allied itself with a populism that had been growing in the Western prairie provinces in response to the exceedingly arrogant way in which they had been treated by Ottawa under Trudeau and how Mulroney had offered little in the way of redress.   Together they formed a new party, the Reform Party of Canada.

 

This was not the first time conservatism and populism had been united in Canadian history.    John G. Diefenbaker, as explained above, was the last Conservative leader to fully represent in a way that did more than lip service, authentic traditional Canadian Toryism, but he was also a prairie populist reformer, a role that arose naturally out of his early career as a defence lawyer in Saskatchewan.   W. L. Morton, who was head of the history department at the University of Manitoba and the author of the Kingdom of Canada and a Canadian historian second only to Donald Creighton was, like Creighton, a traditional Tory, and, unlike Creighton, a strong advocate for fairer representation of the West in the Dominion government.   Diefenbaker and Morton, however, combined traditional Toryism with Western populism.   The Reform Party combined a neoconservatism that looked for inspiration to the United States with Western populism and this was not a good mix.   Ironically, they gave their party what had originally been the Confederation era name of their despised foe, the Liberals.   Also ironic, but in a less amusing way, their dividing the right-of-centre vote with the Progressive Conservatives kept the Liberals in government from 1993 to 2005.

 

Realizing that their division would only keep the Liberals in perpetual power, the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party began "Unite the Right" discussions in the late 1990, partially merging into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 and then fully uniting into the present Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.  They have had four leaders since then.   The first of these was Stephen Harper, who became Prime Minister with a minority government in 2006, won a majority government in 2011, and served as Prime Minister until 2015.   When Captain Airhead led the Liberals back into government in the Dominion election of that year, Harper stepped down, was briefly replaced by Rona Ambrose as an interim leader, before Andrew Scheer was chosen as the next leader.   Scheer performed incredibly poorly in that role, being initially too cautious as Opposition Leader, then essentially throwing away an election that was practically being handed to him by Captain Airhead with his self-destructive heaping of scandals upon scandals, with his, that is Scheer’s, one shining moment coming in March of last year, when he resolutely opposed the Liberals’ attempt to use the pandemic to escape Parliamentary oversight for two years.   At this point, however, it was too late to salvage Scheer’s leadership, and Erin O’Toole was chosen as the next leader.

 

Erin O’Toole has now set the record for the shortest time it has ever taken for a Conservative leader to so disgust me that I vowed never to vote for anyone in the party as long as he led it.   It took Stephen Harper until the last year of his premiership, when he introduced legislation to enhance the powers of government to invade the privacy of Canadians and spy on them, to do that.   Erin O’Toole has not even been leader for a full five months yet and he has already managed to do so.

 

On Monday O’Toole announced that he would be seeking to kick Derek Sloan out of the party caucus.   Sloan is the Member who represents the Upper Canada riding of Hastings-Lennox and Addington in the House of Commons.   Although he is a quite young MP – he is in his mid-thirties and was elected for the first time in the Dominion election of two years ago – he was one of O’Toole’s rivals in the leadership race last year.   He had become a target of the Left earlier that year when he asked the question of whether Theresa Tam, the federal chief medical mandarin, was working for Canada or China.  The Left assumed this to be a racist question based upon Tam’s ethnicity, although the question naturally arises out of the possible conflict of interests between her position in Canada and her role in the World Health Organization over which Red China has held an inordinate amount of influence, especially under its current director.   Sloan, a Seventh Day Adventist, is also a strong social conservative who opposes abortion, gender-identity discrimination legislation, and the Liberal government’s current attempts to ban conversion therapy.   O’Toole’s announcement was based upon the revelation that Sloan had received a donation from Paul Fromm.   On Wednesday the party voted to expel Sloan from the caucus.

 

Sloan’s response to this, appropriately, was to call out O’Toole for his blatant unfairness and hypocrisy.   Sloan could not have been reasonably expected to have known that the donation came from Paul Fromm since he had used his first name, Frederick, in making it, nor, would I add, is it reasonable in a free country to expect people who receive donations to vet their donors to make sure they are not guilty of some sort of crimethink.   That is the unfairness – the hypocrisy is in the fact that the party took a cut from the same donation and had sold a membership to the donor. 

 

This incident illustrates the biggest problem I have with the post-Diefenbaker leadership of the Conservative Party whether of the Left-leaning Stanfield variety or the American neo-liberal Mulroney variety.   They have all been terrified of being labelled “Far Right” and since they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to define the “Far Right” and attach this label to whomever they wish without serious challenge, this has meant that they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to dictate the acceptable parameters of thought within their own party.   Back in the period alluded to earlier, when discontent with the performance of the Progressive Conservatives had led to the creation of first a conservative movement and then the Reform Party of Canada, Dalton Camp, the party official who had orchestrated the backstabbing of Diefenbaker, was a regular commentator on the CBC.   He was frequently part of a panel with Erik Kierens of the Liberals and Stephen Lewis of the NDP as the Conservative representative to create the false impression of balanced commentary (like Kierens he very much represented the Left wing of his own party).   Camp shared with his Liberal and NDP colleagues an abhorrence of social conservatism or “the Religious Right” as he called it, and regarded the phenomenon as both an import from the United States and the next thing to fascism.   This was utter nonsense, of course – most of the things that the Religious Right railed against – abortion on demand, the relaxing of laws and liberalization of attitudes towards sexual morality, the driving of the Bible and Lord’s Prayer out of schools – came to Canada much later than they did to the United States and consequently what social conservatives wish to return to had remained the status quo here much longer and had been the status quo much more recently(1).    Indeed, the first issue in the Culture War between the Left and the Religious Right in which the Left's triumph in Canada preceded its victory in the United States was same-sex marriage, and Camp could hardly have claimed the Religious Right's stance on this issue as an American import because he died of complications from a stroke the year prior to the first court-ordered alteration to the status quo of 1 man + 1 woman = marriage and three years before the Liberals introduced the bill in Parliament that generalized the change.    The leadership of the Conservative Party, however, was terrified of the accusations coming from the Liberals, the NDP, the Left-dominated mainstream media, and their own Dalton Camp, that the social conservative ideas of  the conservative movement and the new Reform Party were dangerously" Far Right".

 

That by taking this stance they were helping to move the centre of the Canadian mainstream dangerously close to the "Far Left" never seemed to occur to them.

 

Everything I have just said with regards to the social, moral, and religious issues of the Culture War also applies to the issues pertaining to immigration, nationality, and race except that with these issues, the Progressive Conservative Party leadership was even quicker to concede to the Liberals and to the Left the right to define a consensus and the acceptable parameters containing that consensus from which all dissent would be excluded. The capitulation was more complete.   Furthermore, the leadership  of the Reform Party joined in this concession with regards to these issues.

 

 

What is the consensus that the Liberals and their further-to-the-Left allies, given this free reign, imposed upon Canada?

 

It amounts to this: if you are white, discriminating against someone who is not is about the worst thing you could do, and the law must protect others against your discrimination by giving the government the power to punish you with complete and total economic and social destruction, but you yourself must have no protection under law against discrimination, because you, being white, are incapable of being discriminated against, and if you complain about or even notice the unfairness of this then you are an evil, prejudiced bigot, a racist, a Nazi, who must either be re-programmed or completely excluded from society.

 

The Liberal Party worked hard at establishing this double standard which is utterly repugnant morally and completely indefensible intellectually as consensus, or rather state-imposed dogma,  during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.   In 1970 Parliament passed a bill introduced while Pearson was Prime Minister that added sections 318-320 to the Criminal Code which created several new offences each having to do in some way with "hate propaganda".   This was entirely unnecessary because anything criminalized by these sections that really ought to be against the law was already against the existing laws against inciting crime and violence.   The existing laws were superior in every way because they protected all Canadians alike.   In 1977, Trudeau's Liberals rammed the Canadian Human Rights Act through Parliament.   Despite the title, this bill had nothing to do with ensuring that such basic rights as life, liberty, and property were guaranteed to all people in Canada or in protecting anybody in Canada from the abuse by the state that is the first thing that pops into most people's minds upon hearing "human rights violations".   The Act was entirely about dictating to Canadians that they could not discriminate against each other on the grounds of race, sex, etc. in their private lives.   It established an investigatory body to look into accusations of discrimination, and a tribunal to hear the charges.   Since it is considered "civil law", the accused are denied the rights they would have as defendants under criminal law.   The reality, however, is that it punishes the "crime" of wrongthink.   Although the law is written in such a way as to make the offence reside in the act of discriminating rather than the race/sex/whatever of the complainant and the accused so that in theory, the white person turned down from a job by an employer who only hires people from his own Asian or African nationality ought to have just as strong a case as someone in the reverse situation, that is not how it works in practice.   The Commission that investigates and the Tribunal that hears these cases operate on an Animal Farm, "some animals are more equal than others" basis, which is, of course, how the Trudeau Liberals instructed them to operate from the beginning.   In the few instances when anybody has ever bothered to question the uneven way in which this law is administered, the answer has always been to point back to the intent behind the law, to protect "vulnerable minorities".    It is, of course, incredibly bad practice to allow the intent behind a law that is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects everybody from racial discrimination to overrule the wording and turn it into a law that protects people from some races and not others, but then, the law itself is bad because it unnecessarily extends government control into the private lives of Canadians to the point of telling them what they can and cannot be thinking when interacting with others when all that was really called for was for the government to lead by example in not practicing colour discrimination itself.   That, however, would have required going back to the policies of John G. Diefenbaker, the Conservative Prime Minister who  militantly opposed racism and whose vision for the Dominion of Canada was one of national unity, which he believed in so strongly that he made it the title of his three volume memoir One Canada, instead of following the bad example of the Americans, who at least had the sense to call their earlier and equivalent law a "Civil Rights Act". 

 

The protecting "vulnerable minorities" justification for all this bad legislation and practice has grown in its rhetorical force from then until now and Pierre Trudeau's foul offspring has just trotted it out again in support of his upcoming efforts to seize even more control over what Canadians are allowed to think and communicate to each other.   Its rhetorical force should have shrunk.   At the time it was first evoked, 96% of Canadians were white.   This is no longer the case today, indeed, we are at the point where whites becoming a minority is on the near horizon, but the voices from the Left telling us that everybody else belongs to a "vulnerable" or "disadvantaged" minority that needs increased government protection against whites are becoming louder, more stringent and more hysterical by the day.   Don't expect  those same voices to come to the defence of whites when they become a minority and one far more vulnerable than any other in Canada has ever been due to decades of this anti-white propaganda.   The demographic transformation just alluded to is the direct result of immigration changes introduced by Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.   I don't mean the points system introduced by Order-in-Council in 1967.   It is itself an admirable and fair way of processing applications based upon individual merit, although the Pearson Liberals do not deserve the credit for eliminating racial discrimination from immigration policy that the Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History - what Donald Creighton dubbed "the Authorized Version" - assigns them because Diefenbaker had already done that in 1962.   I refer rather to a number of changes introduced quietly, unannounced, and with no fanfare, whereby the civil servants charged with processing applications were told to give priority to applications from non-traditional source countries over those from traditional source countries with the result that "traditional Euro-British sources of immigration were effectively shut off in favour of migrants and their extended families from the Third World" (Kenneth McDonald, A Wind in the Heath: A Memoir, Epic Press, 2003).  

 

Instead of opposing all of this, as they ought to have done, the Progressive Conservatives whether the socialist Stanfield types, the moderate Joe Clark types, or the neo-liberal Brian Mulroney types embraced it.   Indeed, when Brian Mulroney took over the leadership of the party he basically sent out the message that opposition to the Trudeau agenda on these issues would not be tolerated and that discrimination against whites would be continued.   As Prime Minister, in fact, he set out to out-Trudeau Trudeau himself with regards to immigration.   Perhaps some of the Conservative leader were dense enough to think that Pearson and Trudeau had been continuing Diefenbaker's "One Canada" vision rather than subverting and inverting it.   For the most part, however, they were terrified of being labelled "Far Right" by the Liberals and the press.   The Liberals, in the Pearson-Trudeau period had attempted the frighten the public into accepting their measures as necessary to fight a non-existent "Far Right" threat, by creating a fake "Canadian Nazi Party", which their media allies then splashed all over the headlines and the television news.   The Mulroney Conservatives, having received the message, proceeded to pass it on when they gained competition for the right-of-centre vote in the Reform Party.   They ordered CSIS, the spy agency created in the last month of the Trudeau premiership, to create another fake neo-Nazi group, the Heritage Front, which the media again went wild over.   This was in 1989, two years after the Reform Party was formed.   The purpose seems to have been to smear the Reform Party by association, a goal towards which they received assistance from lawyer, activist and Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella in his 1997 book Web of Deceit, which, in my opinion ought to be categorized as fiction, under which genre it might actually deserve an award for its creative plot about the imminent threat of  a neo-Nazism working through the  conservative movement  and  the Reform Party to take over Canada.   Note this is the same Warren Kinsella, who should not be confused with the late novelist W. P. Kinsella (W. P. stood for William Patrick, Warren is, I think, a middle name), but who was, according to a Globe and Mail article conveniently timed to come out just before the last Dominion election, hired by Andrew Scheer's Conservatives to sling mud of a similar nature against Maxime Bernier, Scheer's chief rival in the previous Conservative Party leadership race, and his new People's Party of Canada.

 

Erin O'Toole has now followed the shameful examples of Mulroney and Scheer.   His motive is obvious enough - only a few weeks ago he was jumped on by Captain Airhead, for giving an interview to Ezra Levant's Rebel Media.   Captain Airhead, who thinks that only media that he subsidizes and which express views of which he approves, should be allowed to exist, condemned the Rebel as being "Far Right".   If he had Ludwig von Mises concept of "Left" and "Right" as a spectrum moving from total government control on the Left to an absence of government on the Right, he might have had a point, as The Rebel is quite libertarian, but I very much doubt he has read Mises or that he possesses the capacity to do so.   The interview, however, came shortly before the incident on Epiphany when, as Donald the Orange was addressing half a million of his supporters before the Washington Monument, a smaller group entered the Congress building on Capitol Hill, took selfies and, unfortunately in a handful of cases, got into violent skirmishes with the Capitol Hill Police, all of which was blown up by the same media that supported the BLM and Antifa anti-white hate riots that produced far more destruction, violence, and death all across America, into the ludicrous lie of "Trump incites insurrection".   O'Toole, pissing himself, immediately proceeded to proclaim how much he and the party he leads are against "white supremacists", by which the media seems to mean anyone who opposes anti-white racism and certainly everyone - all 75 million American voters of them - who supported Trump.   He also took the opportunity to throw his own rival from last year's leadership race under the bus and out of the party.

 

Well, perhaps he can instruct his party to stop soliciting me for funds.   I have not received a campaign contribution from Paul Fromm, as I have never stooped so low as to run for office, but I have donated to the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, the Canadian Association for Free Expression, and the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee, all of which were founded or co-founded by said Paul Fromm, whom I have known for years.  The first mentioned, which is also, I believe, the oldest is "a group of aid reformers who eschew guilt and believe that population control and free enterprise are the key to development".   I took that definition from the Glossary in my personally inscribed copy of Down the Drain? A Critical Re-examination of Canadian Foreign Aid written by Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published by Griffin House, Toronto in 1981.  Fromm and Hull's approach to foreign aid has always made more sense to me than the Liberal policy of taxing poor people in rich countries to subsidize rich people in poor countries, never more evident than under the current Prime Minister.   The Canadian Association for Free Expression was founded shortly prior to when Brian Mulroney became Prime Minister which was also around the time that Canada's two most publicized trials for crimethink began, those of Ernst Zuendel, the German born graphic artist and publisher who resided in Toronto and James Keegstra, the school teacher and mayor from Eckville , Alberta.   CAFE is committed to the classical liberal view of John Stuart Mill that speech, whether right, wrong, or somewhere in between, ought never to be suppressed.   While there are many who would think that the cases of Zuendel, whose publications included The Hitler We Loved and Did Six Million Really Die?, and Keegstra, who taught his students that the Jews were behind a conspiracy to dominate the world, stretch that principle past its breaking point, these are, in my opinion, wrong.   Cases like this are not the breaking point of freedom of speech, they are its test.   Only those willing to stand up for freedom of speech, when it is opinions that the vast majority find loathsome that the government is trying to suppress, can truly be said to have passed that test - men like Paul Fromm and the late Doug Christie, who was the lawyer in both of these cases.   If the state is allowed to get away with suppressing extremely unpopular opinions, it will move on to suppressing less unpopular opinions.    In Canada we have moved from the government persecuting a man for saying that Hitler's victims were significantly less than six-million in number all the way to where the government is trying to tell us that we cannot say that someone born with a penis and testicles and who has XY chromosomes is a man if he self-identifies as a woman.   Give the state censors an inch and they will take a mile.   Pastor Martin Niemöller said "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a socialist.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me".  It astonishes me that there are those familiar with this poem and the story behind it who miss the point completely and will get offended at the application I am about to make.  In 1984 - a rather significant date don't you think - they came for Ernst Zuendel and James Keegstra, and Doug Christie and Paul Fromm spoke out!   Everyone who values the freedom our country was built upon - Richard Cartwright famously expressed the spirit of Confederation by saying that he preferred British freedom over American equality - and for which we have always been told our country went to war against Hitler, would do well to look to that example.

 

The progressive media, of course, in their lust to help O'Toole crucify Sloan, has been calling Paul Fromm such names as "white supremacist" and "neo-nazi", as have those members of the neo-conservative press who have defended Sloan on the same grounds on which he defended himself.   Mr. Fromm has never applied such terms to himself, which the media have thrown against him for decades, but has always eschewed and disavowed them (I once witnessed him do so to someone who actually was a self-proclaimed National Socialist).   He has referred to himself as a "white nationalist" but I remember that when he started doing this the term had not developed the connotations it now has and simply meant something along the lines of an advocate for the rights of white people, similar to what groups like the NAACP are for black people in the United States, and I have never gotten the impression that he meant it in any other way.   He should, perhaps, have foreseen the way the term would evolve.   I never liked the term, although I believe that now more than ever, open advocates for the rights and liberties of white people, who are demonized by racist hate groups such as BLM and Antifa with the full support of the media and the politicians and who are officially discriminated against, are needed.   It confuses "race" with "nation" for one thing.   For another, nationalisms of any sort tend to conflict with my Tory political philosophy.   One's monarch is the proper object of political allegiance, not a people, race, or nation, and in association with one's monarch, one's country, which is a place, one's home writ large, although not merely in the sense of a location on a map, but a place vested with tradition and history, expressed in its institutions, and including, of course, those who live there.   This is what the old patriotic cry "for King and country" meant.

 

This brings me back to Diefenbaker.   

 

Diefenbaker, because he was the last Conservative leader - and the last Canadian Prime Minister - to really embrace "King and country" or "Queen and country" Toryism in a wholehearted way, was the last Conservative leader and Prime Minister capable of taking the strong stand against racism that he did, without replacing it with racism of another sort, as the Liberals who governed after him did.   This is precisely because "Queen and country" is the only object of allegiance which can truly provide civil unity and harmony.   As W. L. Morton put it "Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself." (The Canadian Identity, University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972)   If that sounds like Pierre Trudeau's "mosaic" vision of "multiculturalism", understand that Trudeau's doctrine is actually a mockery of this.  Instead of uniting diverse people in loyalty to their Royal Sovereign so that they can all participate in the country over which she reigns in a way that makes the history, traditions, and legacy of freedom of that country their own, Trudeau's doctrine turned diversity itself into an object of cult worship that keeps them divided so that bureaucrats can increasingly manage their lives and rob them of the freedom that is the property by right of all Her Majesty's subjects.   If Erin O'Toole really believes that "racism is a disease of the soul" then he would do better to lead his party back to what it was when Diefenbaker led it rather than to win Captain Airhead's approval by repeating his totalitarian rhetoric about "It has no place in our country" and opportunistically ejecting a rival from the party's caucus, over his unknowingly having received a donation from the man who has for decades been the most courageous opponent of the only racism that is truly a problem in Canada today, the racism that has been enshrined in law since 1977, anti-white racism.

 

 

 

(1)   This also shows how utterly absurd the expression “Red Tory” is.   Originally, Gad Horowitz coined the term to refer to traditional Tories like George Grant who had some positive views of socialism.   Grant, a strong social conservative who warned that in the legalization of abortion the essence of fascism was coming to North American under the guise of liberalism, did not like having this label applied to him.   Dalton Camp, who was a Mulroney Conservative until Mulroney became a free trader – it is to Camp’s credit that he abandoned the Mulroney camp over this – embraced the label.   Grant wrote his Lament over the fall of the Diefenbaker government, Camp was responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the party leadership.  Any term coined to refer to the one and appropriated by the other cannot possibly express anything meaningful.   

Disagreeing with Dalton about Discrimination

Dalton Camp was a descendant of United Empire Loyalists and the son of a preacher. He was born in New Brunswick but spent most of his formative years in the United States, returning to Canada for summer vacations. He ran a successful advertising agency but is most remembered for his roles in Canadian politics, both as a strategist and unsuccessful candidate for the old Conservative Party and as a commentator in the media. Despite his association with the Conservative Party, more often than not his views were ones with which I vehemently disagreed. There were exceptions, of course. He was a supporter of the monarchy and a Canadian nationalist, who opposed free trade, continentalism and globalism. In these areas I agreed with him and occasionally he would take a stand I could applaud. When Prime Minister Chretien went to China in 1994, for example, to negotiate a trade deal, he wrote an excellent column ridiculing the Prime Minister weak stand against the Communist power’s abuse of its own citizens. Most of the time however, I found his views to be wrongheaded, arrogant, and repugnant. The first part of Whose Country Is This Anyway?, a collection of his columns that was published as a book in 1995 (1), is devoted to advancing the idea that running a large national deficit isn’t really a big deal after all but if you don’t like it you should happily agree to pay more taxes for if you prefer the other option, of cutting spending, that means that you are heartless and selfish. Camp called himself a Red Tory, but he was so in the worst possible meaning of the term, i.e., someone who promoted the ideas of the American progressive left from within the Canadian Conservative Party by pretending that these ideas were what made Canada historically distinct from the United States. The best possible meaning of the term Red Tory is the original meaning, i.e., someone like George Grant. The contrast between Grant and Camp could hardly be greater. Grant is most widely remembered for a jeremiad he penned in 1965, lamenting the downfall of the Diefenbaker government which he saw as the end of the Canadian national project. A couple of years later, Camp was responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the leadership of the Conservative Party. Grant was a socially conservative pro-life activist, who opposed abortion-on-demand and euthanasia. Camp, despite his paternal heritage, ridiculed opposition to abortion as being American and far right, and displayed the kind of intellectual contempt for “fundamentalists” that Grant expressed indignation at in his final collection of essays, Technology and Justice. (2)

Perhaps you are wondering why, twelve years after his death, I am now wasting so many words on a man who is now mostly forgotten. It is because, while recently perusing the columns in his aforementioned book, I was struck by the way in which recent events have demonstrated just how out to lunch one of those columns was. Over the past several months, American states such as Kansas and Arizona, have introduced legislation for the protection of religious liberty. This legislation is designed to protect business owners from discrimination lawsuits brought by same-sex couples. The perceived need for such protection is due to the increasing number of American states that have enacted same-sex “marriage” legislation and the American Supreme Court’s decision last summer to strike down the provision in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting such “marriages” from being recognized at the federal level. It appears inevitable that same-sex “marriage” will become universally available in the United States and the freedom of religion laws introduced in Kansas and Arizona were drafted with an eye to a future in which a same-sex couple asks a Christian photographer, baker, caterer, or florist to participate in a gay wedding and then sues if that Christian refuses to do something against the historical and traditional teachings of his faith. The response of the progressive left, to this attempt to protect those who dissent from the ideology of the new Revolution, was to trot out the corpse of their Civil Rights era foe “Jim Crow” and take shots at him.

That the day would come, when American states felt it necessary to pass laws protecting Christians from being forced to participate in events that go against the ancient teachings of their faith and these laws would be condemned as violating somebody else’s “rights” would have been virtually unthinkable twenty years ago. At the time, our Parliament here in Canada was considering a bill, one of several introduced by Svend Robinson, NDP representative of Burnaby, British Columbia, over the years, that would add sexual orientation to the list of prohibited bases for discrimination, in the Canadian Human Rights Act. This time around the bill had a lot of support in the Liberal government of Jean Chretien, who assured everybody that if enacted, such a bill would not threaten the freedom of religious Canadians because such was already protected by the law. By the end of the ‘90s, it would be apparent to those who were paying attention, just how empty this promise of Chretien’s was. In 1996, Scott Brockie, a Christian who owned a printshop in Ontario, was charged with discrimination before the provincial Human Rights Commission for refusing to print stationary for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. The Charter protection of freedom of religion failed to protect Brockie whom the courts consistently ruled against. Cases of this nature were springing up all over Canada during the ‘90s, even before sexual orientation was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act and before the Liberal government enacted same-sex “marriage” legislation early in the new millennium.

Twenty years ago, not everyone in the Liberal Party supported the ideology of the Revolution. Roseanne Skoke, who had been elected to represent the riding of Central Nova in Nova Scotia in 1993, declared her opposition to adding sexual orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act. In a column, presumably originally published in the ultra-left wing Toronto Star on September 30, 1994, (3) Dalton Camp, the Canadian left’s favourite “conservative”, rebuked this member of the left-leaning centrist party, for being too right-wing.

Camp noted that Skoke’s view is “contrary to the legislative intentions of the Liberal government” and that therefore Chretien, asked to comment, took the position that in a free country, Skoke had the right to express her own opinion, an unusually liberal opinion from the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party who had served in the Liberal government which introduced all sorts of restrictions on freedom of speech back in the 1970s. He also remarked that it was “reassuring” that Chretien’s “endorsement of free speech” contained the implicit possibility that “he may have disagreed with Skoke’s opinion”. Then he encapsulated his objection to Skoke’s position by writing:

Skoke’s premise is that homosexuals are demanding “special rights” in seeking protection against discrimination in the human rights act. She is wrong and apparently wilfully so.

Actually, it is Camp who was wrong. Allow me to explain how.

There are rights which all Canadians possess. All Canadians, for example, have the right to be represented by a lawyer when charged with a criminal offense. Suppose that were not the case. Suppose, homosexuals were routinely denied access to counsel when charged with crimes, then a bill that changed that, that extended the right to counsel to homosexuals, would not be granting homosexuals “special rights” and homosexuals would not be demanding “special rights” in lobbying for such a bill but just the same rights that everyone else in the country has. There would, of course, be nothing wrong with such a demand.

The right to protection against discrimination is not such a right. The Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination under certain circumstances and based upon certain grounds. The grounds are defined in Section 3 (1) of the Act which currently reads as follows:

For all purposes of this Act, the prohibited grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.

This means that the Act protects you from discrimination if you are discriminated against on the basis of your skin colour but that it does not protect you from discrimination if you are discriminated against on the basis that you smell funny. Furthermore, while the Act is written in such a way that it sounds like it protects you against racial discrimination regardless of what your race actually is, that is not how the Act actually works. The way this law actually works, you are protected against discrimination on the basis of race, if you are any race but Caucasian, you are protected against discrimination on the grounds of colour if you are any colour but white, you are protected against discrimination on the grounds of sex if you are a woman, etc. This is not spelled out in the Act itself – although it is in Section 15 (2) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – but it is obvious in how the Human Rights Commissions and the courts interpret the Act. While progressives may deny that this legislation grants special protection to some rather than protection to all, they affirm it in the justifications they offer for this kind of legislation. “It is needed to protect vulnerable minorities” is the refrain we usually hear from progressives when the need for this kind of legislation is questioned.

It is one thing to say that citizens of a country have the right to protection against discrimination on the part of their government in the administration of law and justice. This would simply be another way of asserting the concept that has been present in the Great Tradition since ancient times in the depiction of justice as wearing a blindfold. This kind of protection is not provided by anti-discrimination laws, like the Canadian Human Rights Act, which forbid private citizens from discriminating in their everyday affairs and business but by non-discriminatory policy on the part of the government. Anti-discrimination laws, like the American Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is the template for all anti-discrimination law elsewhere, and the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, actually work against the ideal that government should be fair and non-discriminatory in the administration of law and justice to all of its citizens. Everywhere these laws have been passed they have been used by non-whites against whites, by non-Christians against Christians, by women against men, and now by homosexuals against those who hold to traditional faiths that from ancient times have affirmed that man is made for woman, and woman for man. These laws by their very nature work against the good of the whole of society, by turning class against class, race against race, sex against sex, they work against harmony, unity, and the good.

The idea that the passing of this kind of anti-discriminatory legislation in the late twentieth century represents a major leap towards moral enlightenment on the part of Western mankind is an idea that has led to a major decay in our ability to conduct moral reasoning. Many people now think of discrimination in simplistic terms – it is always bad. To discriminate, however, means to treat people differently on the basis of a distinction made. It could mean, to refuse to employ a man because he is black. It could also mean to award higher marks to a student who gets more answers correct on a test than to one who gets more answers wrong. We might qualify the idea that discrimination is always bad by saying that discrimination on the basis of race is always bad. This is more correct than the original idea but even it is too simplistic. Racial discrimination might mean the actual mistreatment of people on the basis of their race. It might also refer, however, to the way a shopkeeper in a bad neighborhood, where people from one race commit the vast majority of the crimes, stays extra alert and keeps his finger near the alarm when a youth who belongs to that race enters his shop after dark. Unfair as this may be to the youth if he is a law-abiding young man of good character, it would be unjust to condemn the shopkeeper for allowing the realities of the neighborhood in which he lives to influence his prudence and caution.

“The issue”, Dalton Camp wrote, “is whether to make it unlawful to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation”. Let us also consider the question of whether it is moral or immoral to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.

Are we talking about the factory owner who refuses to hire a man to sweep his floor because he is gay? Or are we talking about the Christian baker who refuses to bake a cake for the celebration of a “wedding” between two women? Or are we talking about the young man who chooses to date a young woman instead of a young man?

If we were merely talking about the first example, I would still oppose legislation that makes this kind of discrimination unlawful, although I would also say that the discrimination in this case is the least morally justifiable of these examples. If we include the second example, however, that of the Christian baker, we are dealing with something that is completely different. For the Christian baker to bake a cake celebrating a Sapphic wedding would require the baker to participate in an event that violates the teachings of his faith. It would be immoral of him to do so. Any law that required him to do so would be immoral. Yet a law that makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation would do precisely that.

As for the third example, perhaps you do not think it belongs with the other two but I disagree. As the late Lawrence Auster pointed out a couple of years ago, the logic of the movement to prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians leads inevitably to the requirement that people agree to date members of their own sex. If you do not think it will ever go that far, look at how far we have gone already. Dalton Camp, when he penned his arrogant dismissal of Roseanne Skoke’s opposition to the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Canadian Human Rights Act, probably had no idea that twenty years later American states would be contemplating legislation to protect the religious freedom of Christians who would otherwise face discrimination lawsuits for refusing to violate their faith.

Unfortunately, such legislation, even if it passed, and was not struck down by some arrogant court, would just be a Band-Aid solution. Anti-discrimination law is, for the reasons I have explained above, bad law, and it is always better to get rid of bad laws than to keep piling up more laws on top of them, to make up for the damage they have done. Anti-discrimination legislation needs to go. That means, for us here in Canada, that the Canadian Human Rights Act in its entirety must be revoked. The sooner it goes, the better, I say.


(1) Dalton Camp, Whose Country Is This Anyway? (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995)

(2) “There are loyal Christians (called by their critics ‘fundamentalists’) who generally say that ‘technology’ is not a paradigm of knowledge but a set of instruments – inventions which come from scientific discoveries. As a whole, they do not much reflect on the ontological implications of the modern paradigm. They therefore live with certainty in the modern. Such people often make crude mistakes in theory; but who does not? Nothing fills me with greater aesthetic annoyance than the scorn which has been heaped on such people by clever journalists and ‘intellectuals’ (whatever that word may mean).” - George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity”, in Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1986).

(3) The column is found on pages 193-195 of Whose Country Is This Anyway? where it appears under the title “Is It Okay for Skokes?” The book dates the column to September 30, 1994. Most of the material in this book comes from Camp’s Toronto Star column. A search of the internet for this column brings up several references to it, mostly in comments on Kate McMillan’s “Small Dead Animals” blog, under the title “Skoke-ing the Fires of Anti-Gay Sentiment.” These indicate the Star as the place of origin, with the date of October 2, 1994.

Tory Economics: Part One

“Are you a Calvinist or an Arminian?”

This is a question that theological students in the colleges and seminaries of North American evangelical Protestantism are fond of asking of one another. There is an assumption underlying the question that if one is an evangelical or even a Christian one must be either one or the other. This assumption is foolish for many reasons. When the Western Christian tradition split in the Reformation, the Protestant side itself divided into several traditions. Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, (1560-1609), was himself a theologian in the Reformed tradition that had been established by John Calvin (1509-1564) and his followers. Arminianism, in other words, is historically a dissenting opinion within Calvinism. While the controversy between mainstream Calvinism and Arminianism over predestination and free-will affected the way these matters were discussed in other Protestant traditions, neither Lutheranism, the oldest and least radical of the Protestant traditions, nor the Anabaptists, the most radical of the Protestant traditions, could be accurately described as either Calvinist or Arminian. Furthermore, the beliefs of the majority of North American evangelicals probably line up with neither the Arminian Articles of Remonstrance of 1610 nor the Calvinist canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619). There are those serious Calvinists and Arminians who insist that if you do not belong to their camp you must belong to the other but I cannot think of any better response to the absurdity of such a view than that given by fundamentalist educator Bob Jones Jr. who wrote:

Because a man refuses to believe in the doctrine of limited atonement, it does not follow that he believes that it is possible for a Christian to lose his salvation. This is as stupid and illogical as saying that a Jew who buys meat from a Protestant butcher believes in the infallibility of the pope. (1)

A similar sort of false dichotomy can be found in the discussion of political economics where it is widely assumed that if one does not support capitalism he must therefore support socialism and vice versa. This false dichotomy is particularly problematic for conservatives. Capitalism is liberalism expressed in economic terms. Indeed, economic liberalism is the more precise term for the theory of laissez-faire or free market economics. It was socialist philosopher Karl Marx who coined the word capitalism as a term of abuse for the industrial economic system that he wished to see overthrown and replaced by socialism in a revolution of the workers. If economics is a contest between capitalism and socialism then when the conservative approaches economics he must find himself faced with the unpalatable choice between liberalism and socialism.

Just as the theological discussion of predestination and free will is not limited to the two options of Calvinism and Arminianism, neither is the discussion of political economics limited to the options of capitalism and socialism. In “Tory Economics: Part Two”, we will look at a number of alternatives to capitalism and socialism that are more compatible with conservative views than either capitalism or socialism and will attempt to identify the most basic Tory economic principles. We will not attempt to draw up a “Tory economic system” and the first Tory economic principle will be that the very idea of an economic system is incompatible with Tory views. For the rest of this essay, we will attempt to clear up certain types of confusion regarding the relationship of conservatism to liberalism, capitalism and socialism.

“I thought conservatives were capitalists and liberals were socialists” some of you might be saying. While this idea is widespread in North America it does not reflect the historic meaning of either conservatism or liberalism. It reflects, rather, the way both conservatism and liberalism have changed in post-World War II North America, neither change being for the better.

Historically, liberalism is a system of thought, influenced by Renaissance humanism and “Enlightenment” rationalism that developed in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dominated the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, and became more or less universal throughout Western civilization in the twentieth century. Politically, liberalism is a faith in democratic elections and legislative assemblies, constitutional and legal protections of rights and freedoms, and the maximum freedom for the individual citizen in all walks of life that is consistent with the minimum rule of law needed to maintain civil order. Economically, it is a belief in legal protections for private property and contracts and in the ability of the free market to effect a just distribution of goods and services. Philosophically it is a belief that man is basically good and that he is by nature, first and foremost an individual.

Historically and traditionally, the Tories or conservatives were those who at first defended the older, pre-modern, pre-liberal, order of church and state from the challenge of liberalism and later, once liberalism had developed, spread, and triumphed, continued to defend the traditions, ideas and institutions that survived from the pre-liberal order against liberal absolutism. Tories do not merely negate what the Whig or liberal affirms and assert the exact opposite. If we did that we would be truly deserving of liberal J. S. Mill’s description of us as the “Stupid Party”. Philosophically, the Tory reminds modern man that knowledge, wisdom and truth did not begin at the Renaissance or the “Enlightenment” and calls upon modern man to heed the entire tradition containing the best of what has been thought and said since the most ancient time. In response to the liberal belief in the goodness of man the Tory says yes, man was made good in the image of God, but goes on to say that the image of God was marred in the Fall and that man is now tainted with Original Sin. In response to the liberal doctrine of the primacy of the individual, the Tory does not deny man’s individuality, but observes that man is born into his family, community, society, and nation, his membership in which must be balanced with his individuality. The Tory asserts the organic nature of community and society, against the contractual theory preferred by liberals, and insists upon the classical and medieval Christian idea that the good of the whole of society, for which laws are written and governments established, is more than just the aggregate of the individual goods of society’s individual members. The Tory defends the importance of faith, not just a private spirituality that means whatever a person wants it to mean, but religion as an organized, institution. Politically, the Tory does not reject the elected legislative assembly but speaks out on behalf of the other two ancient elements of parliamentary government, the upper house and especially the hereditary monarchy, insisting that the principles that these, however imperfectly, embody and represent, are needed to check and balance the principle of democracy. Where the Tory stands economically is what we are seeking to determine in this essay and its sequel.

In the twentieth century liberals, especially North American liberals, moved away from their eighteenth and nineteenth century ideas of maximum freedom and minimal government, especially in the economy, and accepted the idea of a larger, more active, economic role for government. In part this was due to their having seen governments successfully organize their economies to support the ends of war during World War I. They asked themselves why government, if it can coordinate the economy towards wartime goals, cannot do the same in peacetime to achieve positive social goals. The Great Depression came in the 1930s, providing them with the opportunity to experiment with that idea and in 1936, John Maynard Keynes provided them with a theory upon which to work in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes argued that to combat unemployment and the Depression, government needed to lower interest rates, inflate the money supply, and spend, spend, spend. As liberals abandoned the theory of Adam Smith for that of Lord Keynes they also developed various programs for the purpose of alleviating the effects of the Depression. As the twentieth century unfolded these would grow and expand into a more comprehensive attempt at finding a solution to poverty and other social ills through the means of government programs.

This overall shift in liberal thinking was seen by many as a move away from capitalism towards socialism although it would probably be more accurate to say, as many did (2), that both liberalism and socialism were converging towards something new that was neither capitalist nor socialist but in some ways a combination of both and in others something different altogether. Whichever way we look at it, this is the reason that liberalism is now widely equated with socialism. Liberals who did not approve of the direction liberalism took in the twentieth century and who still articulated the older ideas of eighteenth and nineteenth century classical liberalism, now called libertarians, formed an alliance with classical conservatives or traditionalists, against the new left-liberalism. One unfortunate consequence of this alliance was that the meaning of conservatism came to be watered down. For many, the older meaning of conservatism, the attempt to challenge the narrow, modern, ideology of liberalism with a vision of the good drawn from the older, broader, pre-modern, classical and Christian tradition and to preserve worthy ideas and institutions from the older tradition into the modern era, was lost and “conservative” came to mean little more than the attempt to conserve the older form of liberalism against the innovations of the new. Needless to say, for those who think of conservatism in such terms, conservatives are supporters of capitalism.

There are those, odd as it may seem, who would suggest that true conservatism is closer to socialism than to capitalism. Here in Canada this view is called Red Toryism. Red Tory is often used as a term of opprobrium on the right against people who are “Conservative” in their party affiliation but whose views are indistinguishable from those of the NDP and the left-wing of the Liberal Party. This is not how the term was originally used and it is not how I am using it here. The original meaning of the term, which is still usually its meaning when self-applied, referred to those who identify with the older, more authentic, classical Tory conservatism but who conclude that because this conservatism opposed classical liberalism that there is much common ground between conservatism and socialism which also opposes classical liberalism, and that therefore conservatism and socialism are closer to each other, than either is to liberalism.

The first thing that needs to be pointed out in response to this reasoning is that it is like arguing that King Charles I and his supporters had more in common with the Levellers than they did with Oliver Cromwell, (3) or that Dr. Johnson, the eighteenth century Tory who wrote against the rebellion of the American colonies, would have supported the French Revolution had he lived to see it, because it had been condemned by Edmund Burke who had earlier supported the American rebels. Moreover, while the Red Tories are right to criticize the trend within twentieth century conservatism towards ignoring the older, broader, tradition of classical conservatives and merely seeking to conserve the earlier, nineteenth century version of liberalism, this criticism loses its edge somewhat when those making it seem to be proposing that conservatives align themselves with something that is closer to the later, twentieth century version of liberalism.

There is an interesting observation, that is sort of related to the last point that I wish to make here. In Canada, traditional Tory conservatism historically opposed continentalism, i.e., the move towards economic, social, and cultural integration with the United States historically championed by the Liberal Party. Some Red Tories often linked this element of traditional Canadian conservatism, with which I am in sympathy, with a defense of our bloated welfare state. Ironically, in doing so, they not infrequently defended as “Canadian” taxes and government programs that we had actually borrowed from the Americans. The income tax, for example, is a Marxist concept that was adopted by the United States, long before Canada followed her example. (4) The United States introduced central banking twenty years before we followed suit in Canada. When our Prime Minister R. B. Bennett introduced a battery of subsidies, regulations, and social programs aimed at combating the Depression in 1935, he was consciously following the example of American President FDR. Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s exponential expansion of the welfare state into what he called “The Just Society” was patterned after Lyndon B. Johnson’s expansion of the American “New Deal” into the “Great Society”. Despite all of this, Dalton Camp, after describing our social security system as “confirmation of a social contract between Canadians and their federal government” and acknowledging that “Most of that contract has been proposed, endorsed and enacted in my lifetime” went on to say “I believe these measures have defined the country”. (5)

Although it is common to think of capitalism and socialism as polar opposites, actually capitalist liberalism and socialism are closer to each other than either is to conservatism. Both are products of the Modern Age. Both have a progressive view of history. The liberal, even if he is thought of as a neoconservative like Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, holds to what Sir Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, in which the ideas and institutions of democratic capitalism are thought of as the final achievement of history and the past is dismissed except as it is seen as leading up to democratic capitalism in the present. The most influential school of socialist thought, that of Karl Marx, taught that history was moving, through a series of revolutions by oppressed “have not” classes against oppressor “have” classes, to a future state of communism. Both are forms of economism, the idea that everything in society can be reduced to the economic, that the “real” explanation of any given social phenomenon is the economic explanation, and that man is best understood as homo oeconomicus, i.e., a rational being whose primary motivation to act is the acquisition of material goods. (6) Both were built upon a contract theory of society – liberalism upon that of John Locke, socialism upon that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

These areas of similarity between liberalism and socialism are far greater than the areas in which conservatism and socialism are supposed to agree. Benjamin Disraeli, who was Conservative leader and Prime Minister of Great Britain in the Victorian era, condemned the effects of industrial capitalism upon the poor in his novel Sybil and when in power introduced a number of social reforms aimed at alleviating the conditions of the industrial working classes. He drew upon traditional Tory principles, such as the feudal concept of noblesse oblige, to support these actions. None of this reflected any affinity with socialism and its ideas on Disraeli’s part. Disraeli saw socialism as a dangerous threat to the civil and social order and introduced these reforms to strengthen that civil and social order against socialism. The same can be said of similar reforms introduced by Prussian conservative Otto von Bismarck in the new Germany. In Canada, traditional conservatism was heavily influenced by this “One Nation” interpretation of the Tory tradition but Sir John A. MacDonald, R. B. Bennett, and John G. Diefenbaker, would not have been pleased with the suggestion that their programs had any similarity to socialism. (7) Stephen Leacock, remembered mostly as a humourist today, was also a political scientist, economist, and traditional Canadian Tory. While he wrote a lengthy critique of laissez-faire capitalism, subjected aspects of capitalism to satire in his Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, and supported social welfare programs in his The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, he was opposed to socialism. In The Unsolved Riddle he analyzed socialism and concluded that while it put forward a “beautiful dream” it “wouldn’t work” and that attempts to make it work would simply amount to slavery. Clearly it is a misreading of these traditional conservatives to say that because of their criticisms of liberal individualism and industrial capitalism and their support for various government programs designed to alleviate the conditions of the poor that they were closer to socialism.

One important Canadian conservative who did see socialism as an ally against liberalism was George Grant. Grant was undoubtedly the most important thinker in the history of Canadian conservatism. An Anglican Christian, Platonist philosopher, and Canadian nationalist who taught in the political science and religion departments of Dalhousie and McMaster Universities, throughout his career Grant drew from the best thoughts of modern thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger a critique of the Modern Age, its concept of progress, and of liberalism, that called modern men back to the wisdom of the ancients. In the book for which he is most remembered, Lament For a Nation, Grant argued that Marx was “not purely a philosopher of the age of progress” and that he was “rooted in the teleological philosophy that pre-dates the age of progress” because he had a concept of the good that imposed limits on human freedom and that therefore Marxists “fail to understand the modern age when they assume that socialism is a more progressive form of organization than state capitalism”. (8) All of this is mere wishful thinking on the part of a conservative, who correctly seeing capitalism as the instrument of modern progress, naively sought an ally in capitalism’s primary modern opponent. Grant went on to ask:

Yet what is socialism, if it is not the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good? In actual practice, socialism has always had to advocate inhibition in this respect. In doing so, was it not appealing to the conservative idea of social order against the liberal idea of freedom? (9)

The answer to the first question is that socialism is the theory that the private ownership of productive property (farmland, mines, factories, etc.) is the cause of social, political, and economic inequality which is itself the root cause of most if not all social evils and that the good of society would be better served if productive property were collectively owned. Some forms of socialism, such as that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon the nineteenth century French anarchist, do not involve the government at all! The answer to the second question, one so obvious that it is astonishing that it eluded a man of Grant’s intelligence, is that while conservatives believe in social order, not all theories of social order are conservative. (10)

To understand further, why their mutual disagreement with capitalism does not draw the Tory and the socialist together, it is important that we understand what the traditional Tory objections to capitalism were. Here is the Tory case against capitalism:

Capitalism shifts a country’s economy away from agriculture to manufacturing. This in turn causes the country’s population to migrate from rural areas to urban centres. This leads to all the problems associated with urban sprawl. Worse, by uprooting a large part of the population, which is itself a bad thing because people need roots, need a sense of connection and loyalty to place and people, it harms families and communities. Since in order to function it requires goods to be constantly produced and sold in large quantities, it promotes the production of consumer goods over enduring goods, which encourages both waste and the sacrifice of quality craftsmanship in the name of quantity. By encouraging constant consumption, it teaches people to make the acquisition of material wealth a higher priority in their lives, which promotes the habit of avarice that is traditionally considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Capitalism shifts power away from elites whose wealth is inherited and whose capital is fixed and immovable towards elites of the self-made whose capital is fluid. This undermines the sense of noblesse oblige and public spirit among the governing classes. Capitalism also has a bad effect upon the middle classes as their aspirations to upward mobility become less tied to the acquisition of manners, culture, and civil responsibility and come to rest almost solely upon the acquisition of wealth. Meanwhile, it leads to the growth of the proletariat class of industrial labourers creating the conditions which socialist demagogues exploit in their crusade against the civil and social order.

From all of this it ought to be clear that the Tory case against socialism does not bring the Tory and the socialist together. Much of what the Tory objected to in capitalism, the socialist praised. Marx and Engels wrote that the bourgeoisie, i.e., the urban capitalist class:

wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. (11)

If this sounds at all similar to the Tory criticism of capitalism that I outlined above it needs to be recognized that Marx wrote the quoted words, not as criticism but as praise.

In the sequel to this essay, we will look at economic nationalism, distributism, agrarianism, and what Wilhelm Röpke called economic humanism and will show that each of these is closer to the conservative view of economics than either capitalism or socialism as those terms are ordinarily understood.

(1) Bob Jones, Cornbread and Caviar (Greenville, S. C.: Bob Jones University Press, 1985), p. 187.

(2) Hilaire Belloc predicted that this would occur in his The Servile State (London & Edin burgh: T. N. Foulis, 1912). Thirty years later, James Burnham argued that a social transformation was occurring simultaneously in liberal North America, the fascist countries, and the Soviet Union, bringing about a system that was neither capitalist nor socialist but dominated by a new class of technocratic managers in The Managerial Revolution(New York: John Day, 1941).

(3) This is not just true by way of analogy. The Royalists or Cavaliers who fought for King Charles were the original Tories or Conservatives. The Puritan leaders of the New Model Army who established Oliver Cromwell as the Lord Protector were the progenitors of the Whigs or Liberals. The Levellers were an extreme egalitarian and democratic faction within the Puritan ranks. These are forerunners of the socialists.

(4) The income tax was first introduced in the United States in 1861. This was repealed in 1872 but in 1913 the Americans reintroduced the income tax with the sixteenth Amendment and have had it ever since. Canada introduced its income tax in 1917. Like the initial American income tax, which was introduced to raise funds for their internecine war, the Canadian income tax was introduced as a temporary measure to raise war funds, in our case for World War I. Unlike the United States, we never rescinded the tax. It is also worth noting, that for most of the twentieth century the American income tax system was far more socialist than Canada’s. From World War II until Reagan, their highest margin was taxed at 70% or over, and for two decades in that period, over 90%

(5) Dalton Camp, Whose Country Is This Anyway?, (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995) p. 38. The idea Camp puts forward here, that our social programs define us as a country, is a widespread notion. It is neither a true nor a conservative one. Note the significance of Camp’s acknowledgement that the social network he was describing was mostly set up in his own lifetime. He was born in 1920, over half a century after Confederation. This, combined with the facts pointed out in the text of the essay about how in much of this we actually followed the example set by the Americans, makes nonsense of his claim that it defines us as a country, by which, of course, he means as distinct from the United States, as the whole tenor of the column, and indeed the entire book, makes clear. The conservative answer to the question of what defines us as a country may be found in these words of Prime Minister Diefenbaker addressed to the United Nations on September 26, 1960 in response to an arrogant anti-Western speech by Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev “We were the first country which evolved by constitutional processes from colonial status to independence without severing family connections”. John G. Diefenbaker, One Canada: Memoirs of the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, Volume II: The Years of Achievement 1956-1962 (Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1976), p. 133. The most complete explanation of the Tory answer to what defines Canada as a nation can be found in Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure (Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1972). Dalton Camp was the one who was personally responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1967.

(6) “Economic conservatives' and libertarians' free market, liberals' welfare state and Keynesianism, and radicals' socialism and communism all presuppose that the good life is one of gratification through consumption.” – John Attarian, “Economism and the National Prospect, Part One”, The Social Contract, Volume 10, No. 2, Winter 1999-2000.

(7) R. B. Bennett’s introduction of a moderate version of FDR’s “New Deal” towards the end of his premiership was clearly done with the Disraeli-Bismarckian goal of robbing socialism of its steam. Unlike FDR, who showed a naïve attitude towards Soviet Communism throughout his entire administration, Bennett loathed both Communism and socialism, between which he saw little difference, and for better or worse, invoked Section 98 of the Criminal Code against left-wing labour agitation. Diefenbaker, while a champion of the downtrodden, and a supporter of a generous social safety net in the Disraeli tradition, and a Canadian nationalist opposed to continentalism, was also a defender of free enterprise against the socialism of Tommy Douglas’s NDP and a strong anti-Communist Cold Warrior. See chapter five of Those Things we Treasure.

(8) George Grant, Lament For a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1989), pp. 56, 58.

(9) Ibid. p. 59.

(10) University of Toronto professor Gad Horowitz in an article entitled “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation” that appeared in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science in May 1966, defined socialism as “an ideology that combines the corporate-organic-collectivist ideas of toryism with the rationalist-egalitarian ideas of liberalism.” This definition of socialism was clearly influenced by Grant, repeating the same basic mistake of equating the conservative and socialist views of the common good and the social order. It was Horowitz who had coined the term “Red Tory” in an article reviewing Lament for a Nation that had appeared in the May 1965 issue of Canadian Dimension. Grant disliked the term and did not use it to refer to himself, as William Christian explained in George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 266. Others did adopt the term “Red Tory” as a self-description. Of these, a Red Tory of the highest caliber of Toryism is Professor Ron Dart of the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B. C. Dart is an Anglican and Canadian Tory very much in the tradition of Leacock and Grant. While he asserts that which I have argued against in the text of this essay, i.e., that Tories and socialists have much in common, nevertheless in his account of the dialogue between Grant and Horowitz, he remarks that “the tory notion of the commonweal is not the same as the socialist notion of the collective” in The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes – a Series of Essays by Ron Dart (Dewdney B. C.: Synaxis Press, 1999), p. 46.

(11) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, Chapter One: “Bourgeois and Proletarians”.

Red Is Not the Color of Toryism

The June 2, 2010 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press contained a tribute to the late Duff Roblin entitled “His love for Manitoba marked the province”. The author of this piece was Frances Russell. Russell, classy as ever, used the opportunity this article afforded her, to politicize our province’s time of mourning over the loss of a beloved statesman.

Russell’s remarks, however, were not just tasteless and inappropriate. They were also false, promoting a favorite myth of the Canadian progressive left. Here are the remarks in question:

Roblin was a Progressive Conservative in the full meaning of that term. He embraced British Red Toryism, not the libertarian conservatism Canada recently imported from the U.S.

Today's Canadian Conservatives represent free market forces, rampant individualism and punitive intolerance towards what they regard as social and moral misbehaviour. Society is a jungle where the fittest survive; government merely sets the rules and gets out of the way. Too bad for those who can't make it. They're on their own.

Red Toryism, Roblin's conservatism, is the polar opposite, anchored in the belief that society is an organic entity. Government is the means for society to achieve the best outcome for all by working to achieve the best outcome for each one. The whole can't prosper if the many are in want and deprivation. All for one and one for all.

All error contains an element of truth. If it were not so, it would never deceive anyone. It is true that traditional Canadian conservatism is a version of British Toryism. It is also true that traditional conservatism is “anchored in the belief that society is an organic entity”.

Belief in an organic society, however, does not lead, either necessarily or logically, to the idea that the government's role in society should be expanded, that it should minutely regulate our everyday lives, or that it should manage the economy and redistribute wealth.

Russell identifies traditional British and Canadian Toryism with “Red Toryism” but they are not the same thing. “Red Toryism” is an abstract construction created by thinkers like Gad Horowitz and Dalton Camp. It is also a contradiction in terms and a clever ideological switch and bait. The basic idea of “Red Toryism” is that because Toryism regards society as an organic whole and historically and traditionally opposed liberalism, which prior to the 20th Century was individualistic and capitalistic, Toryism therefore, would, could, and should support the agenda of radical, progressive, and collectivist movements, because these too are opposed to individualistic and capitalistic liberalism.

Traditional British Toryism, however, was even more opposed to those things than it was to classical liberalism. Indeed, one of its primary objections to classical liberalism was that liberalism would open the door for all sorts of other radical movements.

The Tories defended the interests of Crown, Church, nobility, and landed gentry against the rising class of merchants and factories owners who sought to reshape society into their image, reducing it to what Thomas Carlyle would dismiss as a “cash nexus”. Edmund Burke, the converted Whig of the 18th Century whose ideas would inspire the Tories of the 19th Century, spoke in disgust of how the age of chivalry had been supplanted by that of “sophisters, economists, and calculators”.

Do those sound like the kind of people who would approve of the establishment of an army of government bureaucrats and inspectors who think their university degrees give them the ability and right to micromanage everybody else’s affairs for them, answerable only to elected politicians, supported by levels of taxation that were unheard of prior to the 20th Century, and charged with the task of intruding into the everyday life of society to make sure everybody is treated fairly, and that members of previously disadvantaged groups are treated more fairly than others?

“Red Tories” and their admirers on the progressive Left make much out of the fact that Benjamin Disraeli, who helped reshape the Conservative Party in the mid 19th Century, in his Premiership under Queen Victoria introduced a number of policies aimed at alleviating the conditions of the working class. Disraeli, prior to his career in the Tory Party, had been considered a Radical of sorts and those searching for a pedigree for a Toryism that is red, believe that he brought socialist sympathies into the Tory Party with him which manifested itself as “One Nation Conservatism”.

Disraeli, however, was clearly attempting to thwart radical causes and movements with his policies, not accomplish their goals for them. Whatever his ideas may have been in his youth, Disraeli the statesman was a Tory by sentiment. Radicals were attempting to form an army out of the working classes to wage war against traditional society – they had already attempted revolutions across continental Europe in 1848-9. Disraeli hoped, by his programs, which were quite modest in comparison to those that became part of the 20th Century welfare state, to nip this threat in the bud. The idea behind “One Nation Conservatism” was not to create a society in which the “have nots” have a claim on what belongs to the “haves”, but to ensure that all classes had a stake in maintaining the traditional social order so that none could be talked by demagogues into seeking to tear it down.

While it is difficult to define a Tory economic position precisely there are a great many parallels between traditional Tory economic policy and the view known as “economic nationalism”. Economic nationalism was adopted as official policy by the Conservative Party of Canada in 1878 and remained Tory policy for decades. The last true Tory Prime Minister of Canada, John G. Diefenbaker, was certainly a committed economic nationalist.

What is economic nationalism?

Economic nationalism is the belief that the proper role of the government in the economy is to ensure the country’s economic prosperity by protecting its productive capacity and by maintaining its transportation infrastructure. In economic nationalism, however, the government is not responsible for guaranteeing the economic well-being of any individual in particular let alone all individuals in society. In economic nationalism, as in Adam Smith’s economic liberalism, people are the best administrators of their own economic well-being. The government looks out for the country’s economic interests, families and individuals look out for their own economic interests, and those who are for one reason or another incapable of looking to their own interests are cared for by institutions intermediate between the individual and the state.

What exactly is this “organic society” that is at the heart of traditional Toryism?

It is best understood by contrasting it with the liberal vision of society. Liberalism believed that individuals were prior to society, that society was the creation of individuals, and that society was best organized along the principle of voluntary contract. The relationships of the business world and the marketplace they believed were ideal patterns for all human relationships. Nobody would be bound by anything to which they had not consented beforehand.

Toryism, on the other hand, maintains that most basic social unit, the family, is itself prior to the individual, and that society is not a contractual construction of individuals, but a natural outgrowth of the social life that begins in the family. Families live together in neighborhoods, worship together in churches, and out of their cooperation form communities, which generate the customs, traditions, and prescription that form the cultural and social foundation upon which the political and economic edifice which is the country is built.

Society is organic, because the institutions which comprise it, have their distinct functions which cooperate together to make the whole work, the way a body’s organs and systems work together. In the Tory view of society, the Queen and her ministers have their place and their role, the Church has its place and role, the upper, middle, and lower classes have their places and roles, the neighborhood, the school, the family, have their places and roles, and there is a time and place for business and the market as well.

St. Paul in the twelfth chapter of his First Epistle to the Church in Corinth, likens the spiritual community which is the Church, the Body of Christ, to an organic body in this manner. Each part belongs to the body as much as every other part, and should not envy the others their roles. St. Paul wrote:

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?

The same principle applies to the larger society as well.

Society, we are told by progressives and “Red Tories” has a responsibility to the widow and the orphan, to the poor, the sick and the infirm, and to the needy in general. They are correct in principle but err in their application. These societal responsibilities are traditionally met by institutions like the family, the church, and the neighborhood community. Government, which has its own place in society and its own role to play, is not well-suited for meeting these needs. The government exists to enforce the basic laws of society, to administer justice, punish crime, and to provide for the common security of the society. Other institutions would do poorly in these roles, just as government does poorly in the role of nurse, mother, and care provider.

Furthermore, when the government attempts to do these things which other institutions were designed to do, it undermines those institutions, weakening their authority and their role in society. To borrow from St. Paul again, it is as if the ear were saying to the hand “I have no need of thee”.

Toryism’s organic view of society is then, an argument against the welfare state, socialism, and the progressive, collectivist agenda in general and not an argument for these things. “Red Toryism” is a contradiction in terms.

The welfare-state is not an “organic society”. It is an attempt to re-create by government the organic society which liberalism had sought to destroy. Organic society, however, cannot be created by government fiat. It must grow naturally, out of the everyday communal life that is generated by the cooperative efforts of families, churches, and neighborhoods.

Robert Nisbet wrote, towards the end of the final chapter of his landmark The Quest For Community:

I cannot help thinking that what we need above all else in this age is a new philosophy of laissez-faire…We need a laissez faire that will hold fast to the ends of autonomy and freedom of choice, one that will begin not with the imaginary, abstract individual but with the personalities of human beings as they are actually given to us in association…What we need at the present time is the knowledge and administrative skill to create a laissez faire in which the basic unit will be the social group. (pp. 278-279).

Those words, originally written in 1953, come from a sociologist who spent his life as an advocate of both organic society rooted in local community and limited, non-intrusive, government. They express quite well the traditional Tory understanding of what society needs – even if they were written by one of the founders of American conservatism.