By Mark Graham
As social media influencers are wont to do, they make fanciful claims. They need reactions to avoid honourable employment or business. My usual practice is to leave them alone, scrolling past, not deigning even to read them. They are base creatures, and the last thing I desire is to interact with them and so inadvertently drive traffic to some monetized YouTube channel or other such silliness. The claim, however, that there is some kind of Red Tory establishment on the Canadian right, ludicrous as it is, provides a convenient segue into a brief clarification of term “Red Tory,” the correction of the term’s misuse being a stated goal of the Red Tory Standard. And it will be brief. Reacting to populist influencers should be done sparingly and with as little time of one’s life wasted as possible.
There has been no Red Tory establishment since long before the 2003 merger. Mulroney had already steered the federal Progressive Conservative party well into the territory of Blue Toryism with a sharp shift toward continentalism and market-oriented approaches. In fairness to Mulroney, he was not quite as doctrinaire in his neoliberalism as was Reagan or Thatcher, but his move away from economic nationalism was never reversed on the Canadian right in any significant way since his tenure. The sudden shift to friendly rhetoric toward and sense of kinship with the American right — bizarre for Tories who were once reliably scornful of that Republic and used to correctly identify the American “right” as liberal — has not changed, either. The 2003 merger only further entrenched Blue Toryism as the party’s centre of gravity.
The choice of current and former politicians whom these influencers derogatively call “Red Tories” is curious. A current Premier who is a growth-oriented, business-driven populist? A former federal party leader who speaks of a “Fortress North America”? A former Premier who would have Conservatives be “true to their principles” in reverting to Reform Party era free market ideology? I have much respect for these three men I allude to and I think Canada is fortunate to have them, but they hardly fit the bill as Red Tories.
These influencers call whatever they dislike “Red Tory,” and what they dislike the most is a sense of moderation. In this, they betray just how fundamentally unconservative they are. Moderation is a defining characteristic of any kind of conservatism. It is the radical who scorns moderation. As any true conservative will be, a Red Tory will be moderate in temperament, but he will also be anti-continentalist, wary of doctrinaire worship of the market, culturally and economically protectionist, paternalistically oriented to the common good, and other things that the individuals whom these influencers call “Red Tories” are not.
No, there is no Red Tory establishment. I would that there were! We are doing our best at the Red Tory Standard to revive this strain of conservatism in Canada, but there is, alas, a long way to go yet.