Uniting the right

Commenting on Joe Clark's resignation announcement, Tory house leader and potential leadership candidate Peter MacKay mused that he didn't understand why Clark couldn't translate popularity into votes. It appears that MacKay is still in the same state of denial that has afflicted many federal Tories since the 1993 federal election - the fantasy that the party can ever be a viable electoral alternative to the Liberals while being obliged to split what passes for a right-of-centre vote in Canada with the Canadian Alliance (née Reform Party).

Meanwhile, the stalemate on Canada's political right remains basically where it has been since the 1993 election. As long as the Tories and the Alliance continue slugging it out for the small-c conservative vote, that vote will be split and the Liberals will effortlessly cruise into power. The erstwhile Reformers finally faced this reality in 2000 by endorsing Preston Manning's United Alternative initiative to knit together a small-c conservative coalition with genuine prospects of unseating the Grits.

Regrettably, the Tories under Joe Clark remained in their defiant "we are the only true national alternative party" mode, which proved a sure-fire formula for maintaining PC status as a fifth-party rump. The Canadian Alliance is not going to conveniently disappear, and as long as there is an Alliance Party, the Tories have about zero hope of ever forming another federal government.

The only sensible alternative, as advocated by Alliance leader Stephen Harper, is to forge a true Canadian conservative party, building on the strengths of both the Tories and Reform, while ditching their respective tendencies to wander into the wastelands of small-l liberalism and populism. "It is my strong view that the country does not need a second liberal party, and it does not need a populist party," Harper declared back in 1998. "It needs a national conservative alternative."

Harper has proposed a quick merger of the Alliance and the Tories, followed by a joint leadership convention in which both Harper himself and Peter MacKay would be likely front-runners. Both of these men are young, telegenic, and well-spoken. Both are fiscal conservatives, but pragmatist liberals on social issues, which is a problem.

There is a bitter divide in nominally conservative ranks on social and moral issues such as abortion and gay rights. This conflict of visions is between cultural conservatives (religious and traditional family-values oriented) on the one hand, and "neo-conservative"/libertarians (fiscal bottom-liners who tend to be secularist moral pragmatists) on the other. These factions occupy opposite sides of the barricades in the culture wars.

Many neo-cons, such as most of the current Tory caucus and more than a few Alliance MPs, are no less hostile than are socialists and liberals to any sort of religious assertiveness in the public square, an attitude typified by former U.S. president Richard Nixon, who referred to cultural conservatism as "an embarrassment. So many people are gay, or go both ways. I don't want to hear about it. And I don't want to hear about abortion. That's people's own business."

Neo-conservatives and cultural conservatives are thus thrust together in an uneasy coalition signalized not so much by what they favour, but by what they oppose; namely, big government, but they don't even agree on why big government is bad. One faction objects mainly to its cost, and wouldn't object to what big government does if cost were not a factor. The other camp is steadfastly opposed on principle to big government's agenda, perceiving the legislative process and the courts as being used to turn Canada into not just a religiously neutral society, but an unapologetically anti-religious one.

On the other hand, neo-conservatives are reflexively suspicious of the cultural conservative agenda, which they characterize as a plot to "ram religious values down everyone's throats." They know that religious conservatives see the laws of the land as ideally expressions of moral, and therefore religious principle, and fear that cultural conservatives' intent, conscious or unconscious, is to establish a theocratic state, a prospect that repels neo-cons.