Politics: Will Canada Redefine Conservatism Again?
Originally published in The Atlantic. Read the full article here.
In Toronto this spring, Andrew Scheer, the man seeking to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister of Canada, made what is perhaps the most important speech of his career. While Scheer, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), is no Trudeau—he’s younger, dorkier, and less foppish—his speech, about immigration, sounded at times like something Trudeau would say. Scheer spoke of Canada as a generous, diverse country and denounced “intolerance, racism, and extremism of any kind.” If anybody disagreed, he added, “there’s the door.”
But if Scheer was aligning himself, in some ways, with his electoral rival, he was also setting himself apart. He quoted scripture, something politicians in Trudeau’s Liberal Party are less likely to do. He praised the entrepreneurial spirit that impels immigrants to leave their home. And he spoke darkly about “Mexican drug-cartel members” and “individuals flagged as threats to national security,” who exploit weaknesses in the immigration system at the expense of lawful applicants who wait their turn. The speech was shot through with conservative themes: free enterprise, law and order, self-reliance, and faith.
In this respect, Scheer sounded more like his CPC predecessor Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015. When Harper became the leader of the CPC in 2004, the organization had only just come into existence, through a merger between an establishment Tory party and a populist upstart. Harper built a winning coalition by linking rural western Canada to the ethnically diverse suburbs of Toronto and Vancouver, which were then considered Liberal strongholds. He framed conservative and populist talking points in ways that resonated with many minority voters.
Tories across the world took notice. British Prime Minister David Cameron personally sought Harper’s advice, a former Canadian government official told me, as did operatives close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. On the American right, too, strategists were contemplating what a more magnanimous conservatism might look like. In 2013, the Republican National Committee ran a postmortem on Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid, concluding that, to ensure their long-term viability, Republicans needed to become less hostile toward immigrants.
Much has changed since then. The rise of Donald Trump and the European far right has made political cultures more toxic. The CPC is under pressure both to distinguish itself from its far-right counterparts and to resist the lure of nativism, while the revelation that Trudeau wore black- and brown-face makeup several times prior to his entry into politics has undermined his status as an icon of liberal cosmopolitanism. Canada will hold a general election on Monday, and nobody is sure what will happen. Will the country again be at the vanguard of a multiethnic conservative revival? Or is it no longer possible to build a voter coalition that is at once right-leaning, populist, and diverse?
This is an except. Read the full text here.