Is Stephen Harper a Conservative?

Betrayed! Stephen Harper’s war on principled conservatism by Connie J. Fournier, Createspace, 2015, pp. 148.

On the feast of Epiphany in the first year of the new millennium, an online forum for the discussion of Canadian political issues from a conservative perspective was launched. Its founders had been Canadian members of Free Republic, a similar message board in the United States, and so naturally, called the new forum Free Dominion. The founders and administrators, Mark and Connie Fournier, gave it the tagline “the voice of principled conservatism.”

Principled conservatism meant a conservatism that consisted of ideas and principles, rather than mere loyalty to the party which calls itself conservative. At the time there were two such parties, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, which had been formed the previous year in the first stage of a merger between the Western populist Reform Party and the PCs. Stockwell Day was leader of the Alliance at the time but by the end of the year he had resigned and early in the following year Stephen Harper was elected the new leader. In the year after that, the merger between the two parties was complete, and Mr. Harper became leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. In that capacity he served as Leader of the Opposition, then Prime Minister in a minority government, and finally won a majority government in 2011.

This was a triumph for the Conservative Party, for sure, but was it a victory for principled conservatism? Connie Fournier, in her new self-published book, Betrayed! says no, and she has good reasons for saying so. Some of these are personal, pertaining to the persecution she, her husband, and the forum they have put so much devotion into have undergone at the hands of government agencies and employees, all during the Harper premiership. Due to the nature of these injustices she cannot tell her story in full. She cannot, for example, name Richard Warman as the man who is responsible for most of the abuses of the legal system that Free Dominion has faced since shortly after Stephen Harper became Prime Minister. What she does tell, however, is told because it perfectly illustrates how the present leadership of the Conservative Party has abandoned its principles.

When Connie – who I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of years ago when she accompanied her husband, a truck driver by profession, on a run that took them through Winnipeg – speaks of conservative principles, she means the principles that underlay the Thatcherite and Reaganite movements in the United Kingdom and United States respectively, and the Reform Party here in Canada. This set of principles was created by a fusion – to borrow Frank Meyer’s word – of classical conservative views on society and morality with classical liberal views about government and the freedom of the individual. I am more of an unmixed classical conservative – a High Tory – not because I disagree with the ideas of limited, accountable, government and personal liberty, but because I hold strongly to the classical conservative view that these things can only exist in the context of a stable and secure order of established, traditional, institutions. I bring this up to make the point that while what Connie and I would regard as conservative principles are different – in a complementary rather than a contradictory way, I hope – I find her argument that Stephen Harper has betrayed those principles to be compelling and illuminating.

She tells the story of Stephen Harper’s rise to the federal premiership, showing him to have been ruthless in his pursuit of power right from the beginning. From the curious way in which he won the leadership of the Canadian Alliance away from socially conservative Stockwell Day and the heartless way in which he confiscated the party nomination for Calgary Southwest from Ezra Levant to his stacking the party council with his yes men and negotiating the merger of the two parties against the wishes of both parties' memberships, she demonstrates how within his own party he showed the same contempt for the people who elected him as he later would as the country’s Prime Minister.


She takes us through the way he has sold out one segment of the conservative support base after another, starting with the social conservatives who have no one else to speak for them having been told that their views, which were once, and within living memory, the consensus in the land, are now unwelcome, by the other parties. Harper, knowing this, has been able to collect the votes of social conservatives while doing nothing to deserve them, a pattern established early in his leadership when he offered social conservatives, who had started a grassroots effort to put a ban on partial-birth abortion into the party platform, a discussion of same-sex marriage instead, which never materialized. Even gun owners, widely though of as having benefited from the Conservative government with the abolition of the long-gun registry, are among the betrayed, Connie shows.


The biggest betrayal, however, is of those who fought for freedom of speech against Section 13. Section 13 was part of the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. This Act, modelled on the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, proscribed discrimination on certain grounds (race, sex, religion, ethnicity, etc.) and in certain circumstances (employment, housing, etc.) even between private individuals. Section 13 declared it to be an act of discrimination to communicate via telephone, anything that was “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the basis of one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination. Around the turn of the millennium this was made even worse by the adding of subsection 2, which extended its application to all electronic communications including, of course, the internet. This law had, as it was intended to have, a chilling effect on public debate, adding the force of law to the creepy contemporary phenomenon known as political correctness, that protects left-wing social and cultural engineering with loud and hysterical accusations of “racism”, “sexism”. “homophobia”, or some other made-up pathology, against its critics.


In the late 2000s, the public spotlight finally fell upon this terrible law, when Muslim groups laid charges under it against well-known conservative figures Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. Traditionalists and libertarians united against it, and, through the means of a private member’s bill, ultimately succeeded in having it repealed. This was without the help of the present leadership of the Conservative Party. The charges against Levant and Steyn were made about the time Harper became Prime Minister, and it was during the battle over Section 13 that ensued, that Free Dominion’s legal woes began.


The Canadian Human Rights Commission, having received a complaint about some material that controversial Christian evangelist Bill Whatcott had posted on Free Dominion, urged the complainant to charge the website as well. At the time the CHRC had already targeted Free Dominion, having previously set up a dummy account “jadewarr” on the forum, for purposes of spying or, possibly, entrapment. The charge against Free Dominion was withdrawn by the complainant, but the CHRC, its doings, and Section 13 became hot topics on the discussion board. Richard Warman, the human rights lawyer and former CHRC employee who was responsible for most of the complaints under Section 13, launched a myriad of lawsuits against his online critics, including the suits that have been so devastating to Free Dominion and the Fourniers.


It is not just that all of this took place on Stephen Harper’s watch, however. His government has introduced bill after bill after bill in attempts to monitor and control discussion on the internet. These include bills that would order ISPs to spy on their customers and hand information over to law enforcement agencies without warrants. The worst of them is Bill C-51, which the government rammed through the House of Commons and Senate earlier this year. In the name of fighting terrorism, this bill authorizes law enforcement agencies to spy on Canadians without warrants, share the information they gather with each other, and even engage in disruptive activity.


In light of all of this damning evidence, Connie calls principled conservatives to hold the Conservative Party and their leadership accountable. The party needs to know that conservative votes cannot just be taken for granted, and that their betrayal of conservative principles and trampling all over the privacy and freedom of Canadians will not be tolerated, let alone rewarded.


Every Canadian, especially those who believe in the principles of conservatism, ought to read this book before the upcoming election.

Religious Need Not Apply?

Imagine that a national political figure made a controversial statement that was highly offensive to black people and the leader of a black organization was to publicly rebuke him for it. Suppose that you then opened your newspaper one morning, turned to the opinion page, and in a syndicated column were to read that although the politician had stuck his foot in his mouth he was now out of hot water because “Canadians don’t like black people involving themselves, at all, in politics.” Would you find this statement to be offensive? If so, what would you consider to be most offensive about it, that it expresses racist sentiments or that it presumptuously attributes those sentiments to you and your countrymen?

There are many substitutions you can make for the main variable in the above scenario. You could substitute any other racial group other than white Europeans for black people. Or you could substitute women or homosexuals. Run the scenario again with each of these substitutions and you will probably get the same results. Progressive, liberal, and forward thinking people would be appalled to read such remarks in their newspaper and would probably put pressure on the editor to stop running the column.

What if, however, we were to substitute “Christians” for “black people”? Or “religious people” used in such a way that many if not most people would automatically read it as meaning “Christians”.

This, it would appear, is somehow different because we were recently treated to just such a comment and by a progressive, liberal, forward thinking commentator, nonetheless.

The national political figure was Justin Trudeau who, a little over a year ago, was elected leader of the Liberal Party, presumably on the basis of his youth, good looks, and family name. He is the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the lawyer and far left editor, writer and activist from Quebec who entered federal politics in the 1960s as a member of the Liberal Party and succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberals and Prime Minister. Under his leadership the Liberal Party went from being the party of free trade and continentalism, founded with its lips firmly pressed against Uncle Sam’s rear end, to being the party of socialism, multiculturalism and post-modern moral relativism (in other words a huge redundancy as we already had the NDP for that). Take your pick as to which version of the Liberal Party was most repulsive – it is six of one, half a dozen of the other. In the decade and a half that Pierre Trudeau governed Canada as the head of the Liberal Party he did everything he could to undermine the political, cultural, and social traditions of both English and French Canada, while ruining the country’s economy, saddling us with an enormous debt, and creating a constitutional crisis that long threatened to tear the country apart. The reason I bring all this up is because Trudeau fils is doing an excellent job of making Trudeau père look good by comparison.

The controvers y the young Trudeau provoked a few weeks ago was over abortion. The day before the annual March for Life in Ottawa he announced that future Liberal candidates would be expected to vote the party line with regards to abortion and defined that party line as pro-choice – no legislative restriction on abortion. Needless to say, Trudeau’s stance did not impress the Roman Catholic Church, whose members have traditionally tended to vote Liberal in Canada. Trudeau himself is a member of the Roman Catholic Church and claims, despite his obvious disagreement with the Church on this key ethical issue, to be devout. Catholic leaders have condemned Trudeau’s stance and last week, in an interview with the CBC, the Catholic Bishop of Ottawa described Trudeau’s support for abortion as “scandalous”.

Enter Warren Kinsella. Warren Kinsella is, among other disagreeable things, a lawyer, a punk rocker, a former Liberal Party strategist, and a progressive, forward minded, liberal. He writes a column for the Toronto Sun which is carried by the other papers in the Sun chain, including the Winnipeg Sun. As these papers generally have a right-of-centre, neo-conservative slant, Kinsella’s left-of-centre column tends to stand out.

Last Friday an article by Kinsella entitled “Trudeau leaps blindly into abortion debate” appeared on page 9 of the Winnipeg Sun. In the first half of the column Kinsella praised as reasonable Trudeau’s earlier statement that the party’s position is “we do not reopen (the abortion) debate” but then pointed out that by declaring that future candidates would have to toe the party line Trudeau had done just that. He further observed that Trudeau has dug himself deeper into this hole with his confusing and contradictory attempts to salvage the situation.

Then, however, Kinsella went on to talk about and quote from the Catholic Bishop’s remarks, suggesting that by rebuking Trudeau, the bishop has provided him with a way out of the mess he has made. Here is the reasoning he used to arrive at this conclusion:

“As Stockwell Day learned the hard way, Canadians favour a wall between church and state. And they don’t like the religious involving themselves, at all, in politics.”

It is interesting the different ways in which different people remember certain events. When I think back to the federal election of 2000 in which Stockwell Day led the Canadian Alliance, I do not recall “Canadians” as a whole mocking or attacking Stockwell Day because of his Christian faith. I remember progressive and liberal media elites doing so, especially a certain Liberal Party strategist.

Tories, if and when they are ever true to their own principles, look to their country’s long-rooted traditions and institutions as the foundation of their policies. Progressives look instead to the “will of the people”. Since the people don’t actually have a collective will, unless you count that which is filtered through time and expressed as tradition and which is hence on the side of the Tory rather than the progressive, progressives have to supply the people with one, which inevitably is indistinguishable from the progressive’s own will. Which is why, in this country, one frequently finds progressive writers in an arrogant and condescending tone, telling Canadians what they think.

On almost any issue, Canadians have a wide diversity of ideas. There are those, like myself, who are Tories and support Canada’s traditions and institutions. Then there are those who for some reason or another – perhaps they had a nasty fall when they were children, perhaps they are lacking some important nutrient in their diet, perhaps they have been breathing in too many noxious fumes of one sort or another – are progressive and think more like Kinsella. Of course there are many other viewpoints out there as well. The closest thing to a general consensus among Canadians is that we are not Americans (referring to America in the sense of the country not the continents). Almost everyone agrees about this. Traditional Tories say that we are not Americans with a sense of patriotic pride in our country’s Loyalist heritage and traditions. Neoconservatives agree that we are not Americans but with a sense of regret that we were not part of what they consider to be the great experiment in freedom and democracy shaping the ultimate destiny of the world. Progressives like to say that we are not Americans in the context of telling us what we think, even if what they say we think has less to do with our own country’s traditions and institutions than it does with the United States.

This can be the source of great irony. Note that in the sentences quoted earlier in which the progressive Kinsella tells Canadians what they think, he attributes to them the American concept of a “wall between church and state”. The idea of a “wall between church and state” is not a Canadian idea, nor is it part of our political tradition or constitution. The expression comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. Jefferson was explaining the significance of the First Amendment to the American Constitution. Furthermore, when Jefferson wrote about “the wall of separation between church and state” he was clearly expressing a liberal, democratic fear of the power of the state, not a progressive contempt for religion. This wall, as Jefferson saw it, was to keep Congress out of religion, not to keep religion from having any say in politics.

Kinsella therefore, has not only attributed to Canadians the belief in a political concept that is part of the American tradition rather than our own, he has also transformed that concept into its polar opposite, a fence to keep “the religious” out of politics rather than a defensive wall protecting religion from state intrusion.

We have not yet mined the irony in Kinsella’s remarks to its full depth. The author of The Web of Hate has built a reputation for himself, among his supporters as an expert on bigotry, among his detractors as a jerk who likes to bully his opponents on the right with accusations of bigotry. You can decide for yourself which version is more accurate, but note in doing so, the irony that this same self-appointed expert on bigotry and hatred, who in the federal election of fourteen years ago publicly ridiculed the leader of the Canadian Alliance for his evangelical Christian beliefs, wrote “the religious” rather than “religion”.

Then ask yourselves whether you, as Canadians, feel complimented or insulted at having this progressive sentiment attributed to yourselves.

The Unsolved Riddle of Affordable Health Care and the Medicare Mystique

Imagine that you are suffering from chronic pain due to a condition that can be alleviated by fairly simple surgery. You schedule the surgery but are told that it has recently been re-classified as elective or cosmetic surgery and so is no longer covered by your health insurance. If you want the surgery you must now fork over thousands of dollars.

Or imagine that you live in a rural community that is only a half hour drive away from the second largest city in your province. You have a condition that is fairly common but the city close to you does not have any of the specialists who treat that condition, despite having a decent sized general hospital and several smaller clinics, and so twice a year you must travel half way across the province to see a specialist in the capital city.

How about this scenario? Your spouse has an irreversible, progressively worsening, mentally debilitating condition that requires round-the-clock supervision and extremely expensive medication. As your savings disappear paying for the expensive and ineffective medication you find that you are now figuratively chained to your spouse because the health care system seems unable or unwilling to provide you with relief from the duty of watching over your spouse 24/7.

Suppose you are a young, expectant, mother on the verge of giving birth. You are staying with your family in a rural community that has its own, modest, health centre. When your water breaks you contact the local health centre and are told to go to the hospital in the nearest city which is approximately an hour’s drive away. So you hop in your pickup truck, the father of your child takes the wheel, and off you go but you do not have time to make it and give birth along the road.

Let’s say that an elderly loved one was discharged from the hospital in a particularly harsh winter, taken home by taxi, and later found dead on his porch. What would you think if the provincial health minister were to try and pin the blame for this entirely on the cab driver?

All of these scenarios are real. Two of them are taken from stories that made the news here in Manitoba during the last six months. One describes a situation within my own family. One describes something that friends of mine from church have had to deal with. One is a story that was relayed to me by these same friends.

What all of these scenarios have in common is that they point to the fact that our publically funded health care system is overburdened and unable to meet the demands upon it or the medical needs of Canadians.

That the publically funded health care system is overburdened is not exactly news. For years now Canadians have had to put up with waits to see their family doctor, followed by longer waits either to see a specialist, to have lab work done or both, followed by yet another wait until they actually receive treatment. These waits can be months or even years long, even if the condition is serious enough to require urgent treatment. It is openly acknowledged that there is a problem here and there is also a pre-packed, knee-jerk, pat answer to the question of what the solution is. That answer is to say that the government needs to devote more resources to health care, to put more money into it.

That is the wrong answer but to point that out in Canada is to be like the boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s story who observes that His Imperial Majesty is strutting around naked as a jaybird. This is because it is the only answer that is consistent with the prevalent Medicare mystique.

By Medicare mystique I refer to the ridiculous but popular idea that our single-payer health care system is not only superior to all other systems but a glorious national institution, Canada’s pride, joy, and crown jewel, and that its monopoly on the provision of health care services must be protected against competition at all costs, lest we become like the Americans. I have often heard this mystique put in these words “our health care system is what makes us different from the Americans”.

I wonder if those who put it this way realize how utterly stupid it makes them sound? On the national level, universal, single-payer, health care dates back to the Medical Care Act passed by Parliament in 1966. Not that the Pearson Liberals invented it from scratch. It developed over the course of a couple of decades as the provinces, starting with Saskatchewan under the socialist government of Tommy Douglas, developed provincial public health insurance programs, and the federal government, under both the Liberal and Conservative parties in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, began to provide funding. Something that is less than fifty years old in its present form cannot be what defines us as a nation and makes us distinct and different from our nearest neighbour. Canada is a parliamentary monarchy and a federation of English and French provinces, formed out of colonies that had remained loyal to Britain when the Americans rebelled and by Loyalists that had fled persecution in the new republic, which developed as a country within the British family of nations rather than through revolt and rebellion. This, and not Medicare, is what distinguishes us from the Americans. I will not dwell on this point further, however, because I am writing about what is wrong with our health care system not what is wrong with our educational system.

The way the system works, each province operates its own public health insurance plan with a large part of the funding coming from the federal government. The province issues a card with a health number on it to each of its residents which they show to the hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. The provincial health plan is then billed for the services.

Public health insurance systems like Canada’s were created in response to the rapid and exponential rise in the cost of health care over the last century brought upon by such factors as the explosion in the development of new health technology. The rise in the cost of health care put it beyond the reach of many people and so public health insurance was developed with the goal of making sure that everybody who needed medical care had access to it and that families did not have to clean out their savings, take out a loan, or go into bankruptcy to pay for life-saving surgery.

This was and is a laudable goal but the problem with public health insurance is that it is an answer to the question how can we make somebody else pay for our health care rather than to the question how can we make health care more affordable overall. Indeed, if we think of the expense of health care as being the problem, public insurance adds to the problem rather than decreases it. Health care that is paid for by public insurance is not free because we pay for it with our taxes, but by separating the payment from the use, it creates the popular illusion that it is free. This in turn leads people to use the system more often than they would if they had to pay per use. When you increase the demand for any commodity you drive up its price and so public health insurance increases the total cost of health care even though you don’t pay for it at the moment of use.

If this sounds like an argument for private health insurance of the sort that we ordinarily associate with the United States, think again. Private health insurance also increases the overall cost of health care, albeit for different reasons. Look at how much the Americans spend on health care every year if you want evidence of this.

If both public and private health insurance drive up the cost of health care then it seems like we are trapped between a rock and a hard place. Paradoxically, however, countries that have both seem to have better overall health care than countries that have only one or the other.

Several decades ago, in an interview that was published in the Paris Review, British novelist Anthony Burgess remarked that despite his loathing of the State he conceded “that socialized medicine is a priority in any civilized country today”. To this, he added that “there’s no reason why a private practice shouldn’t coexist with a national health one”. This, he noted, was how it was set up in England, and then remarked on how the difference in treatment is indistinguishable, except that “the State materials (tooth fillings, spectacles, and so on) are inferior to what you buy as a private patient.”

What Burgess was describing is what exists not only in the United Kingdom but in every other first world country other than Canada and the United States. Canada and the United States do have a mix of public and private in the sense that the United States has had public health insurance for the elderly and low-income families since the 1960s and Canada allows private coverage for procedures not covered under the public plan. In the UK, Europe and Australia, however, a universal public health system exists alongside competing private systems and the health care is generally superior, both in quality and affordability, to that of the North American countries that have taken the more extreme routes of either relying mostly upon private companies for health coverage (the United States) or giving the universal public plan a monopoly (Canada).

Technically it is the provinces that give their public health plans a monopoly, although the Canada Health Act of 1984, one of the last bills passed by the Trudeau Liberals, provides strong incentive for them to do so. While this monopoly was successfully challenged before the Supreme Court in Chaoulli v. Quebec (2005) it has not yet been broken. The refusal to allow private insurance to compete with public insurance is downright stupid and is the single biggest reason why the public system is failing. It is also the sort of thing that outside Canada only exists in Communist dictatorships. Unsurprisingly, it is also the aspect of our health care system that is most protected by the Medicare mystique. You may recall that in the 2000 general election the other parties ganged up against Stockwell Day of the Canadian Alliance and accused him of wanting to Americanize the country by introducing “two-tier health care”. Day’s response was to hold up a sign in the leader’s debate that said “No 2-Tier Health Care”. There is irony in the fact that two-tier health care would have given us the British/European/Australian model and not the American model but this irony is lost on the type of people who, with the twisted reasoning of egalitarianism which in a wiser age was known as Envy, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, would rather have all Canadians waiting in long lines to receive more expensive, poorer quality, health care, than to allow Canadians who can afford it to opt out of the public system and pay for private care, thus relieving the burden on the public system and allowing it to operate better.

As long as this mystique prevails, the burden on our health care system, especially in provinces like Manitoba where the socialist NDP government is determined to cling to the public monopoly even as it finds itself closing rural emergency rooms and obstetric wards across the province, will continue to grow, and the riddle of affordable, quality health care, will go unsolved.