CALGARY — There are different types of conservatives. In Canada, all will be facing big tests very soon.
All of them get categorized as conservatives. But in personality and style, they could not be more different.
There is Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party, which was previously known as the Progressive Conservative Party. When the party’s name change happened in 2003 — via a merger that was more of a take-over — those conservatives still on the progressive side of the spectrum fretted about what would happen to the party of Mulroney and Stanfield.
Stephen Harper mollified them for a decade. While Harper would sometimes employ the rhetoric of his Reform Party antecedents, his actions, in power, were decidedly centrist. Ominous predictions that he would end gay marriage and abortion — including by this writer — never came to pass.
Harper mainly abstains from commenting on current affairs in Canada. A few days ago, however, he gave an important interview in which he excoriated Donald Trump, saying that the newly installed president was neither a friend nor ally of Canada. Harper, then, is a conservative who knows the lexicon — but embraces a kinder and gentler approach when it counts.
Poilievre, on the other hand, favours bumper-sticker articulations of policy — which arguably works well in the Internet age, when everyone is competing for attention in a cyber-space filled with a trillion channels. But it’s a style that has aroused suspicions that Poilievre favours simplistic solutions to complex problems. And, perhaps, it has contributed to a significant recent slide in Conservative support in Ontario, which he needs to win majority power.
It is a puzzle, because Poilievre can give thoughtful answers when he is in the mood – during a recent tour in Atlantic Canada, for example, his plan to respond to American tariffs was more comprehensive than anything heard to date by federal Liberals. Then, a few days later, Poilievre actually accused a Zionist Jewish Liberal MP of favoring Hamas. It was disgusting, and it was the sort of thing of which electoral defeats are made.
Trump, of course, is who he is: No one can accuse him of hiding the flavour of conservatism he espouses. He is a conservative in the mold of former president William McKinley, an empire-building conservative Republican who once admitted he couldn’t locate the Philippines on a map — but seized it anyway in 1898.
Trump’s military threats against Panama, Greenland and Denmark — an actual NATO ally — eerily recall McKinley’s manifest destiny madness. Canada, which has also been repeatedly threatened by Trump, would be unwise to dismiss Trump’s McKinley-style expansionism. (Trump, meanwhile, would be wise to avoid McKinley’s fate: An anarchist assassinated the 25th president in 1901.)
Danielle Smith is a different type of Conservative ruler and her rule is popular — here in Calgary, for sure, but not so much elsewhere. Smith has often achieved notoriety for pronouncements that create problems for the aforementioned Poilievre in the rest of Canada:
— She has said cancer patients are to blame for getting sicker — “that’s completely within your control,” she’s said.
— She’s similarly said that smoking “reduces the risk of disease.”
— She’s said people who decline to get vaccinated for COVID are “the most discriminated group” — which was probably news to Jews, gays and people of colour.
— She’s said that a malaria treatment is a “100% cure of coronavirus,” which is false.
— She’s shrugged about Putin’s war on Ukraine, saying “why should we be surprised if Russia is upset that Ukraine has nuclear weapons” — even though Ukraine doesn’t, and hasn’t, for decades.
— She — much like Trump — has tweeted that she favours redrawing Canada’s map to erase British Columbia, and to give Alberta some waterfront.
— Most recently, she has allowed for the possibility that “chem-trails” exist — a conspiracy theory that aircraft are seeding the atmosphere with biological agents.
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Despite her many missteps, Smith is right to defend Alberta’s oil wealth: That’s her job. But she is also a conservative who has too many self-inflicted wounds, and is now energetically isolating her province from the rest of Canada.
The final type of Conservative is Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who starts a reelection campaign Wednesday. The election is a year early, which always carries risk.
But Ford’s ballot question is, paradoxically, a winner because it targets another conservative — Trump and his planned tariffs on Canada. In the campaign that will unfold, opposition parties will be hard-pressed to attract attention because Ford is hunting bigger game.
It’s a decidedly pro-Canada kind of conservatism, too. Which is why it is a winner:
Conservatives always do better when adding, not subtracting.