Welcome to Need to Know, your Saturday dive into thought-provoking research from think tanks, academics, and leading policy thinkers in Canada and around the world, curated by The Hub. Here’s what’s got us thinking this week.
We’re in the midst of a political realignment not seen in decades. When Prime Minister Trudeau came to power in 2015, 40 percent of Canadians aged 18 to 35 supported the federal Liberal Party. Fast-forward nearly 10 years, and now it’s only 22 percent. If the Liberals rode a youth wave to power in 2015, the Conservatives look likely to ride the same wave to power in 2025. Nearly 40 percent of the 18- to 35-year-old age group now supports Team Poilievre.
However, it’s not just an age realignment. Close to a majority of working-class voters say they plan to support the Conservatives in the upcoming election. The outdated stereotype of Conservatives being old, stale, male, and for the rich simply no longer applies.
With realignments come new ideas, and there is increasingly a question of what ideas will animate the conservatism and Conservatism of tomorrow. Let’s take a look at a few.
Give “ordered liberty” a chance
A starting point in understanding where Canadian conservatism is going is understanding where it comes from. After the 2015 defeat of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer and Ken Boessenkool sketched out what they saw as the intellectual basis for Harper’s agenda, coining the term “ordered liberty.” This term represented the fusion of traditional conservatism and classical liberalism that significantly reshaped Canada’s federal policies.
Harper’s traditional conservatism, influenced by Edmund Burke, emphasized incremental policy changes and government support for civil society institutions like marriage and family. This approach aimed to promote what he considered socially beneficial behaviours, like educational attainment and personal savings, through individual choice rather than centralized planning.
Concurrently, Harper’s classical liberalism was evident in his efforts to reduce the overall tax burden, control discretionary federal spending, and encourage individual action over collective solutions. In other words, he put money back into people’s pockets to let them use it as they saw fit rather than the government determining what was best for Canadians.
This dual approach of “ordered liberty” sought to balance freedom with social order, reflecting the Conservative leader’s vision of the government’s role relative to the role of individuals and civil society.
Speer and Boessenkool argued that Harper’s intellectual rigour and policy implementation shifted Canada’s federal policy landscape, moving away from the liberal technocratic consensus that had dominated it for decades. They suggested that this shift had established a durable foundation for future conservative leaders to build upon, marking Harper’s near ten-year tenure as a transformative period in Canadian politics.
Is conservatism’s future the neo-populist economic consensus?
While ordered liberty may have served as the previous intellectual foundation for Canadian conservatism, it remains uncertain which direction small-c and big-C conservatism will take, given the populist shift many right-leaning parties are experiencing globally.
Canadian economist and Macdonald-Laurier Institute senior fellow Jon Hartley has a new essay in National Affairs that examines the bipartisan shift in U.S. economic policy away from neoliberal principles and towards a neo-populist framework.
Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre talks with people in the crowd prior to the National Acadian Day concert at the airport in Yarmouth, N.S., on Thursday, August 15, 2024. Ron Ward/The Canadian Press.
Historically, neoliberalism emphasized fiscal discipline, trade liberalization, and deregulation. However, recent years have seen both Republicans and Democrats adopting policies that diverge from these tenets. This shift became evident during the 2016 presidential primaries, with figures like candidate Donald Trump opposing trade liberalization and then-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders opposing agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Today’s emerging neo-populist consensus includes principles such as increased government spending directed toward domestic goals, progressive taxation, trade barriers, industrial policy, and aggressive antitrust enforcement. This approach often overlooks traditional economic theories supporting neoliberalism, focusing instead on political messaging and voter appeal.
Hartley warns that while this neo-populist framework addresses certain political sentiments, it may neglect the benefits that market-driven policies have historically provided. He suggests that proponents of market economies should aim to steer neo-populist impulses toward policies that harness market mechanisms to deliver broad-based prosperity.
Let me put it this way, if Harper’s intellectual foundation was “ordered liberty,” then what Hartley distills as the emergent populist economic consensus can be described as “disordered illiberty,” which Canadian Conservatives should try to avoid.
Has urban conservatism’s time come?
In the 2021 election, the Liberals won nearly 75 percent of the 116 ridings in the Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal metropolitan areas, definitely winning them the title of Canada’s urban party. Yet, amid the ongoing political realignment, can Canadian Conservatives begin making inroads into Canada’s major urban centres?
The recent Conservative by-election win in Toronto-St. Paul’s certainly lends credence to this possibility. So, too, does Donald Trump’s recent performance in major American cities. While Democrats are generally still on top downtown, Trump performed around 10 points better this time around compared to the 2020 election.
What explains the rightward shift of major cities in both Canada and the U.S.? Two words–disorder and incompetence. Voters look to be getting tired of the high levels of crime, vagrancy, and drug use plaguing the major cities that left-of-centre politicians have governed for so long.
At the same time, major cities seem to struggle with the basics of competent fiscal management. The City of Toronto, for example, despite crying the blues to higher levels of government every year to fill their budget shortfalls, has yet to implement a competitive tendering process for construction contracts. This is despite one estimate finding that this could save the city nearly $350 million.
What can Conservatives learn from recent urban gains? In an article for City Journal, The Manhattan Institute’s president Reihan Salam and his co-author, Charles Fain Lehman, shed some light on how Trump “put cracks in Democrats’ dominance of big cities.”
Their answer is that,
It’s not, as some might suspect, that the nation turned far right. Rather, it’s that Trump’s campaign understood how to speak to a key constituency: the forgotten middle. These voters want their cities to be safer, their schools to be better, and their culture to be saner. And Trump’s success with them clearly marks a path for repeatable political success in cities nationwide.
After all, insofar as Trump won on the issues, it was because he played to the middle. He worked to win the 30 percent of voters who prioritized the economy with promises of growth and tax cuts, while distancing himself from the GOP’s unpopular positions on abortion and entitlement reform. And his focus on immigration resonated with an electorate that has turned sharply against the chaos at the border under the Biden administration.
They conclude that the lesson for Conservatives is to embrace an intellectual foundation of “conservative popularism” by focusing on issues that resonate with voters across political divides, including fiscal responsibility, merit-based education, public safety, skills-based immigration, economic growth, and rejecting extreme gender ideologies. These policies appeal not only to rural conservative strongholds but also to urban areas frustrated by disorder and ineffective leadership.
ChatGPT assisted in the creation of this article.
Taylor is The Hub's Research and Prize Manager. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. He has worked with several think tanks in Canada and the U.S. and previously served as a senior advisor to the Ontario Minister of Finance....
