Seize the agenda and succeed
National Post. April 6, 2009.

The following is an edited excerpt of Tom Long’s recent presentation to the Manning Networking Conference and Exhibition in Ottawa.

The dominant Tory assumption has been that the way to victory is to force the Liberals left by moving to the centre.

My mission is to try and explain what conservatism means in the province of Ontario. What does conservatism mean in a province which is as geographically dispersed, as highly urbanized and as diverse as Ontario? In the political timeline that I have been active, our conservatism has resolved itself into two major streams. One is a progressive strain and the other is an unhyphenated conservatism strain.

The progressive strain has been the dominant strain in provincial politics for a long time. For 42 years we conservatives were the government of the province of Ontario and had largely a progressive point of view. Progressives make some fundamental assumptions. The first assumption is that there is going to be an inexorable drift in terms of public policy making to the left. And our job is to inject some prudence into that process. The best example I can give you is before we lost majority government in 1975 and the Stephen Lewis New Democrats held the balance of power.

We were very quick to implement rent controls in Ontario. Privately, the senior members of the Progressive Conservative government were quite clear that they had no faith that rent controls work. But, they said, rent controls are inevitable and it is much better if we are in power and we are the ones implementing them than if we let the other guys do it.

The second assumption progressives have made in our movement in Ontario is that all voters are in the centre and the way to political victory is to tie down the right but then move as quickly as you can to the centre to force the Liberals left. Senator Hugh Segal used to tell the story of how premier Bill Davis, when he got the sense that the right wing was getting a little cranky, used to go out and declare that the monarchy was under attack and then he’d organize a province-wide campaign to defend it.

We saw brief flashes of the other strain of conservatism in Ontario, the unhyphenated conservatism, in the 1980s. But it was really tested from 1990 through 2002 when Mike Harris was leader of the party. The assumptions that this strain of conservatism makes are fundamentally different from the ones the progressive strain of conservatism would make.

In the Harris years, the first assumption we made is that conservative ideas are not only politically viable but they are absolutely necessary to ensure that our province is put on the path to prosperity. There was considerable effort not only to identify policies but to ensure we were prepared to do the heavy lifting necessary to go out and sell them. So the policies that I would highlight would be injecting quality into public education and health care, powerful tax cuts to create economic growth and jobs, an end to unfair hiring quotas, a repeal of Bob Rae’s labour legislation and respect for the institutions of law and order in the province.

The second assumption that we made is that there is a viable conservative coalition in the province of Ontario that can deliver a majority government and is sustainable over time. That required a realignment of political thinking in Ontario and political identification in Ontario. That meant seizing the agenda. This strain of conservatism believes that specificity is your friend and being bold and clear, and being prepared to stand up and sell these ideas, is the way to political success.

The two strains have typically come together and clashed within our party over the argument of who can make our party relevant in terms of urban voters, female voters and visible minority voters. For 42 years our party has taken tremendous efforts to attract all of these voters. Under Mike Harris we were able to win 45% of the vote in two successful campaigns. In 1995 we won one half of the seats in the “416” area — the core Toronto part of the GTA. In 1999 after four years of government, and after a lot of controversy and a hard fought campaign, Mike Harris held on to one third of the seats. We have won none of those seats since Mike Harris has been premier despite the fact that we have had two leaders from the progressive wing of the party who ran on the idea that only they could make us relevant.

Tom Long is a director of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. He chaired former Ontario premier Mike Harris’s victorious 1995 and 1999 campaigns.

Gerry Nicholls

National Post Tuesday, October 21, 2008

With Stephane Dion shuffling off the political stage, the Conservative government must now come to grips with a new enemy. And I am not talking about Bob Rae or Margaret Atwood or a hostile left-wing media. The new enemy for the Conservatives is time; simply put they are running out of it.

Realistically speaking the Conservatives will be able to effectively govern this country for perhaps one more year. After that a revitalized Liberal party led by a shiny new leader, whose name isn’t Stephane Dion, will start to gum up the government’s Parliamentary agenda and perhaps even force an election. And because the Conservatives are running out of time, they have no choice but to abandon the grand political strategy they have been employing for the past two and half years.

This strategy is usually referred to as “incrementalism.” The chief proponent of incrementalism is former Conservative campaign manager Tom Flanagan and it’s essentially based on the idea that the Canadian public doesn’t really like conservative ideas or conservative polices.

Hence, according to Flanagan, if a Conservative government actually tried to feed the Canadian public a true conservative agenda the public would start to choke and this would necessitate some sort of gigantic national Heimlich manoeuvre.

To prevent this from happening, Flanagan and his incremantalist followers argue, the only way to introduce conservatism in Canada is for the government to feed it to the public in tiny little itsy-bitsy bites –bites so tiny you would need a microscope to see them. This is what I call a good news, bad news theory. The good news about this “go slow” incremental approach is it would indeed succeed in creating a conservative Canada; the bad news is it would take about 5,000 years.

And as already noted the government has considerably less than 5,000 years to implement an agenda. In other words, there is not enough time for conservative incrementalism. If the government truly wants to bring about conservative policies it must act quickly.

That means the Conservatives must soon do one or more of the following: cut taxes, make government smaller, reduce government spending, promote and protect individual freedoms. To put it another way, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has to put away his sweater-vest and stop trying to convince Canadians he is a warm and fuzzy guy. Instead he must start inspiring people with a conservative vision, a vision that’s an alternative to the tax-and-spend policies of the NDP and Liberals.

Who knows, maybe if he implemented a true conservative agenda, Prime Minister Harper might even win his coveted majority government in the next election. Then again, maybe he won’t. But at least he would have accomplished something while in power.

And isn’t that what politics is really supposed to be all about? It’s got to mean more than just winning elections or holding onto power for the sake of holding onto power. That’s how Liberals think. For conservatives, at least, politics should be about making Canada a freer and better place.

I realize, of course, that pushing a true conservative agenda would not be easy for the government. The easy thing to do would be to continue with the incremental approach and follow the path of least resistance. But taking the path of least resistance is not leadership.

Nor is it leadership to blindly following the dictates of public opinion polls or to abandon policies whenever a special interest group whines or to shamelessly pander to a particular province. A true leader stands for certain principles and then convinces others to support those principles.

Margaret Thatcher was a leader. Ronald Reagan was leader. In the last election, the Conservative party kept telling us Stephen Harper was a leader.

It’s time he proved it. – Gerry Nicholls is a freelance political consultant www.gerrynicholls.com.This column is adapted from remarks delivered at a recent Fraser Institute-sponsored event.
© National Post 2008