Abstract: The modern Conservative Party of Canada frequently invokes Sir John A. Macdonald as its ideological founder, but the historical and ideological lineage is far more complicated. The Conservative Party that built Canada was a Burkean, nation-building political tradition rooted in institutions and national development, while the contemporary party emerged from the Reform movement and Western populism. The two parties share a name, but not the same political tradition.
Stephen Leacock once wrote that “a half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.” The claim that the Conservative Party of Canada is the party of Sir John A. Macdonald is one such half truth.
It is a claim often heard in Question Period and on the campaign trail: members of the Conservative Party of Canada invoking Sir John A. Macdonald as the ideological founder of their party. The argument is simple and rhetorically useful. Historically, however, the lineage is far more complicated.
The original Conservative Party of Canada, which existed from Confederation until the mid-twentieth century, was born from the political coalition that brought Canada into existence. With deep conviction, one of the great Fathers of Confederation, the Honourable Sir George-Étienne Cartier, declared: “We must have a country before we can have liberty.” It emerged from a merger of the Parti bleu in Canada East and the Tories of Upper Canada.
The party adopted the “Progressive Conservative” name in 1942 when Manitoba Premier John Bracken agreed to become leader of the federal Conservatives on condition that the party add Progressive to its name to match that of the “Progressive Conservative party” of his province. But in practice, it remained the institutional successor to Macdonald’s political tradition.
Over time, however, that tradition adapted. By the late twentieth century, the Progressive Conservatives had adopted a broad “big tent” model, attempting to hold together multiple strains of Canadian conservatism and account for the regional Canadian identities that had matured over time. Under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, the party adapted to the economic realities of the late twentieth century, embracing market-oriented reforms and freer trade. Like many conservative parties in the Western world during the 1980s, the PCs moved toward “neoliberal economic policy.” Mulroney’s approach remained more pragmatic than ideological, an adaptation to the prevailing economic consensus of the era.
Former Progressive Conservative leader and premier of Nova Scotia, Robert Stanfield, often referred to as “the greatest prime minister Canada never had,” later reflected, stating that he considered Mulroney’s embrace of free trade “highly dangerous politically, but clearly the right one for Canada.” In Stanfield’s own words, free trade with the United States would “in time eliminate one of the oldest grievances in Confederation: the feeling in the west and in the Maritimes that trade policy in Canada had always been designed to benefit central Canada at their expense.” Yet even this evolution still occurred within the institutional continuity of the old Progressive Conservative Party. This was characteristic of the Progressive Conservative tradition: a national party attempting to govern a regional nation.
This tradition is often described as Red Toryism, a distinctly Canadian strain of conservatism within the Tory tradition that accepted an active role for the state in shaping national development and maintaining social cohesion, while embracing the liberties of the Enlightenment. The Right Honourable John Diefenbaker — a man of principle, or, as some may view it, stubbornness almost to his detriment — declared in the House of Commons during the debate preceding the passage of the Canadian Bill of Rights on July 1, 1960: “I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong.” Diefenbaker’s conservatism was deeply nationalist and rooted in the belief that Canada was a political community that had to be defended and developed, not merely administered. Red Tory thinkers such as George Grant argued that conservatism in Canada had historically been less about limiting the state than about using it to protect national institutions and identity. While the Progressive Conservatives adapted to changing economic realities, they still operated within this broader intellectual tradition.
The conservatism of Macdonald and the early Canadian Tories was closer to the tradition of the British statesman Edmund Burke, the father of Westminster conservative philosophy, than to the ideological conservatism of today’s Conservative Party. Burke believed that societies were built slowly through institutions, traditions, and inherited structures, and that the task of conservatism was to preserve and strengthen those institutions over time. Canadian conservatism, in this tradition, was not about shrinking the state, but about using it carefully to build and sustain a nation.
The real rupture in Canadian conservatism came later.
Sir John A. Macdonald’s conservatism was shaped by the political realities of the nineteenth century and the task of building a new nation. Canada existed beside a rapidly expanding and increasingly assertive United States, and Macdonald believed the young federation required an active national state to survive. His National Policy — built on high tariffs, nation-building infrastructure, and the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway — reflected that goal. Macdonald’s conservatism was fundamentally a project of national development. A vision — and a truth — later echoed by Leacock: “Canada is not a country that works itself; it has to be worked for.”
That vision diverges sharply from the political movement that ultimately produced today’s Conservative Party of Canada. Macdonald’s conservatism was rooted in state-led nation building, while the movement that produced the contemporary Conservative Party emerged from Western populism and distrust of centralized federal power — largely a reaction to the Pierre Trudeau years and the fallout that was the Pandora’s box of the patriation of the Constitution. “Western alienation,” a sentiment comprised of both valid and invalid arguments that, for the sake of scope and scale, ought to be addressed at another time. Most accurately exalted in the words of Preston Manning: “The West wants in.”
Stephen Leacock wrote in Canada: The Foundations of Its Future: “Calgary was non-existent at Confederation. When the Canadian Pacific was built, it was just a poor place, a few shacks. They moved it a mile or so, on ropes, rather than move the railway line.” The great irony — and historical reality — is that the political movement that would later reshape and dominate Canadian conservatism emerged from a region that had itself been built by the earlier Conservative project of national development.
The Progressive Conservative Party collapsed in the 1993 election, ending the lineage that stretched back to Confederation. The contemporary Conservative Party was created a decade later through the merger of the Progressive Conservative remnants and the Canadian Alliance, itself the successor to the Reform Party. This merger produced a new political coalition rooted largely in the populist and Western reform movement that emerged in the late twentieth century.
Political movements are shaped not only by ideas but by incentives. A party that exists to build a nation develops very different habits from a movement that emerges in opposition to government. Over time, the incentives of opposition reward grievance, rhetoric, and internal cohesion; the incentives of governance reward institutions, compromise, and long-term planning. The Conservative Party of Macdonald was shaped by the incentives of building and governing a nation. The Conservative movement that later emerged from “Western alienation” was shaped by the incentives of opposition. These are not the same political environments, and they do not produce the same political traditions.
For this reason, when the contemporary Conservative Party invokes Sir John A. Macdonald as its founder, it is making a rhetorical claim rather than a historical one. The contemporary party did not evolve directly from Macdonald’s conservatism; it emerged from the political tradition of Reform and its successors.
In a historical sense, the Conservative Party of Sir John A. Macdonald ended not with the creation of today’s party, but with the collapse of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993.
It would therefore be more accurate to say that the contemporary Conservative Party is the party of Preston Manning rather than the party of Sir John A. Macdonald — a name and legacy co-opted by Western populism, rhetorically invoked but ideologically distant from the political tradition Macdonald represented. This reality is reflected in both the party’s political base and its electoral prospects, where voters have rejected it in its current populist form in favour of alternatives.
Macdonald sought to bind a fragile federation together through institutions and infrastructure — symbolized most famously by the railway spanning coast to coast. Much of contemporary conservative politics, by contrast, has drawn its potency from regional grievance and suspicion of national institutions. It is a politics that is reactive and oppositional rather than nation-building, provincial in outlook rather than national in vision.
Macdonald’s conservatism was not a vision of shrinking the state, but of using it to build a nation.