The Weekly Wrap: The Conservatives should not be afraid of the Liberals stealing their ideas

A common political reaction is that the government will steal their ideas and get credit for them. But is that even so bad? Not only would it move federal policy in a more conservative direction, but it would also arguably address one of the issues that Canadians seemingly had with Poilievre in the election. They liked his policy idea but had misgivings about his perceived oppostionalism. This should be understood as a long-run investment in improving people’s perceptions of Poilievre and the party. Here’s where the fall budget represents an opportunity. Poilievre should write an open letter to the prime minister this month that sets out his priorities and the conditions under which Conservatives could support the budget. He might even request a meeting with Carney to discuss the letter’s content. Jack Layton did this in the 2011 minority Parliament and ultimately secured key NDP priorities in the budget, including a boost to the Guaranteed Income Supplement, student loan forgiveness for rural doctors and nurses, and funding for a program to help veterans enter the skilled trades. Causality is hard to prove, but one could argue that Layton’s influence on the budget influenced his image as an effective opposition leader and contributed to his party’s historic election gains later that year. The Canadian Sovereignty Act has value as a statement of the Conservatives’ comprehensive policy agenda. But it shouldn’t be the only statement. The Conservatives should bolster it with some targeted policy proposals that are difficult for the Carney government to resist. I’ve argued before for the Conservatives to champion an expansion of the Canadian Disability Benefit, which the Trudeau government created and then inadequately funded. They should also push to renew and expand the capital expensing provisions introduced after the first Trump tax cuts and now renewed under The One Big Beautiful Act. And no doubt there are other such policy ideas that would force the government to respond. The point is to use the minority Parliament to define the agenda on the CPC’s own terms. This could start to put Poilievre and the Conservatives back into the driver’s seat, as well as challenge people’s (false) perceptions that they’re merely obstinate and oppositional. Minority parliaments don’t last forever. Every sitting day is an opportunity to shape the national agenda. If the Conservatives want to reclaim the political initiative, they should make it harder for the Carney government to say “no” and easier for Canadians to imagine them governing. Why are we determined to forget the lessons of history?  As my adopted home of New York City gets poised to elect Zohran Mamdani—the most radical North American political candidate we’ve seen in a long time—as its mayor, George Will, the long-time dean of conservative columnists (and someone I admire), told Bill Maher that it could actually be a good outcome because it would remind us of the costs of the bad ideas he represents. Will’s point is a longstanding one in conservative circles: humans have a generational tendency to forget the lessons of history, and sometimes the most effective teacher is failure. The theory goes that living with bad ideas can ultimately create the political conditions for better ones. There’s something to that. Some of the most important reforms in recent political history, including in Canada, were preceded by damaging policies. Pierre Trudeau’s high-spending, interventionist prime ministership arguably set the stage for Brian Mulroney’s market reforms in the 1980s. In Ontario, Bob Rae’s short-lived NDP government paved the way for Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution. These major policy shifts occurred in large part in reaction to their predecessors’ failures. But the costs in the interim can be enormous. In Mamdani’s case, the price of a “controlled experiment” in his radical ideas won’t just be economic—it will also affect the city’s public safety. Mamdani is among the last remaining “defund the police” candidates in North America. His policy commitments are unambiguous: cut police funding, redirect resources to social programs, and fundamentally reconceive the role of law enforcement in New York City. A mayor with that agenda in a city already struggling with crime would be a dangerous gamble with people’s lives. The outcome is easy to predict. We’ve seen it before: petty crime rises, violent crime follows, and the people most affected are working-class New Yorkers. It makes one wonder why we have to go through the cycle at all. Is it hubris? The presentist assumption that this time will be different? Or just the fading of collective memory? Christopher Buckley once joked that every administration should have a minister—or secretary—of history, someone who would mostly remain silent but occasionally say: “We tried that once and it didn’t go well.” The trouble is that political culture doesn’t seem wired to take that counsel. Every generation seems determined to start anew. Will’s framing of a Mamdani victory is optimistic. In his telling, the predictably disastrous results would create a public backlash and spawn more sensible governance. That’s possible. But the interlude between bad idea and course correction isn’t costless. A Mamdani mayoralty won’t just make New Yorkers poorer—it will make them less safe. Those losses, measured in shuttered businesses, diminished property values, and lives harmed or lost, are a high price for a civics lesson. Politics shouldn’t just be about power—but power does matter At the heart of many debates on the Right these days is a fundamental question: Is the purpose of politics to advance ideas or to acquire and wield power? I’m personally motivated by the former. I’ve spent most of my career in the world of policy development, arguing for conservative reforms and trying to persuade people of their merits. But those—like Christopher Rufo—who argue that power is what ultimately matters, and that an emphasis on ideas can be a losing strategy, aren’t entirely wrong even if I wish they were. Power without ideas is bad. It’s unmoored, arbitrary, and dangerous. But ideas without power are, to a certain degree, an exercise in capitulation. This is especially true because much of what a government does is not act. A Conservative government would have been better than the Trudeau government, not only if it had enacted a series of conservative reforms, but simply because it wouldn’t have doubled the national debt, or ramped up immigration to unprecedented levels, or entrenched identity politics into the machinery of the federal government. The unseen—the policies not enacted, the cheques not written, the laws not passed—is rarely the stuff of a political campaign message. Yet it’s arguably the most important thing a government does. The ability not to act, or to control the federal purse, is an enormous and consequential form of power. If you believe, as George Will once wrote, that “statecraft is soulcraft,” then you understand how these choices can even come to shape the country’s culture and character over time. I was reminded of this point this week by an announcement from the Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF, which receives millions of dollars in federal funding, canceled and then uncanceled a film about Hamas’s horrific terrorist attacks of October 7 because it didn’t meet the festival’s “standard for inclusion.” What does “inclusion” mean here? Giving terrorists equal time? It makes one wonder what’s wrong with our elite culture. Whatever the answer, power is a more immediate remedy than ideas. If a Conservative government were in power, it could pull TIFF’s funding for censoring a film about a terrorist attack. Without a Conservative government, it can’t. And we’ve learned that, for better or worse, Left-adjacent institutions like TIFF only seem to respond to the exercise of power. There are, of course, risks in this line of thinking. It can lead to power devoid of principle. It can rationalize political compromises or the aggrandizement of government itself. It’s how you get the Ford government in Ontario. On balance, we should still aspire to a politics of ideas. But the TIFF fiasco was made possible, in part, by public money is a reminder that power matters, too. Without it, even the best ideas can remain unrealized, while bad decisions go unchallenged.