Canada’s conservatives should ease up on Harper - The Globe and Mail

By Neil Reynolds - from the Globe and Mail

Throughout his two minority governments, Prime Minister Stephen Harper endured incessant carping from the right: especially from conservatives who wanted more ideological purity. Mr. Harper wisely ignored them. The purer the ideology, the more problematic the politics. Mr. Harper diligently pursued the political centre (with right-ward forays: for example, unequivocal support for Israel). It all worked out fine. The Conservatives took the centre, held it and won a transformative majority in Election 2011. But conservatives now need, once again, to relax a bit. Nothing extraordinary is about to happen.

Mr. Harper made this clear in his election-night comments. He would govern, he said, for the whole country – not (he implied) for hard-core conservatives or soft-core libertarians. These people have their own work to do, in moving the political centre, but this philosophical task is fundamentally different than governing. In Canada’s democracy, social and economic change will inevitably be incremental and erratic. After all, if the more than 14 million Canadians who voted wanted more radical change, they could have voted Libertarian – as 6,017 of them did.

This isn’t to say that Mr. Harper won’t make fundamental reforms: especially toward freer trade with Europe (and other countries) and closer economic integration with the U.S. It is merely to observe that Canadians themselves – and not the federal government – will determine how far and how fast the political centre pivots.

The political centre in Canada has been drifting to the right for almost 30 years – since the last Liberal government (1984) of prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose excesses pushed the country toward conservatism. Every federal government since has governed to the right – with the single, ironic exception of Paul Martin (who had done so much for the country as finance minister). Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney (free trade with the U.S.), Liberal Jean Chrétien (fiscal restraint) and Conservative Stephen Harper (tax cuts): all remained firmly centred even as the country itself rotated, slowly, to the right.

Mr. Harper is the most impressive politician among all these small-c conservative prime ministers.

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Canada’s conservatives should ease up on Harper - The Globe and Mail