Journal

By Dave Langille

O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Charles Inglis to be a bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

As a native Nova Scotian now living and working in Minnesota, I return home at least twice a year. No visit to my old home port of Halifax is complete without a pilgrimage day. I need to pay homage to the Anglican heritage in which I now serve as a priest of the Church. My pilgrimage begins with a visit to St. Paul’s, Canada’s first Anglican Church, then with a visit to the King’s College Chapel, the “Mother Church” of Prayer Book Anglicanism in North America. Without the former we would not have the latter, and we have this all because of the Bishop we honour today, the Rt. Rev. Charles Inglis, first Bishop of the Church of England in British North America.

My pilgrimage is a celebration of Canadian Church history, but it is also a homage to my own spiritual journey. It begins with a walk from my childhood home in Dartmouth to Halifax Harbour where I take the Ferry across the “Big Harbour,” my daily commute while a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. It was as a student at NSCAD that I had a crisis of faith, as church-going college students often do. A product of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, I found my childhood faith sadly too thin as I faced the challenges of a radically secular Art School faculty and student body. Punk rock anarchism had exploded on the scene, blowing up everything in its wake, including my faith. I recall walking into a local bookstore, desperate to find something to bolster what was left of it. There I found a book by British broadcaster and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called Jesus Rediscovered. It contained articles he had written examining his growing attraction to Christ firstly as an atheist but later as an agnostic increasingly more open to Jesus. In that book, I discovered those he described as “God’s spies,” a line from King Lear Muggeridge used to describe those God leaves behind in every generation to point their fellow creatures home to God. From great saints of the 20^th century like Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he traced a lineage of God’s spies back to St Augustine. For the first time, I discovered the Communion of Saints, and a history of the Church that predated the early 20^th century origins of my own Pentecostal denomination. I became curious about historic Christianity, the Saints, and how they worshipped. This is when I discovered St. Paul’s Anglican Church, just two blocks from my Art School studio.

I had walked by St. Paul’s on an almost daily basis during my four years at NSCAD. Finally, inside the Georgian Church built in 1750, it was like entering a time portal to not only Halifax’ past, but—like Muggeridge described it—the Church’s past. Here I discovered ancient worship according to the Prayer Book tradition, liturgy and preaching both Catholic and Reformed, with beauty of architecture and music that transported me upward. Worshipping in this historic space was one of many steps on my own walk down the Canterbury Trail. When one enters St. Paul’s, one also discovers interior walls covered with the memorial plaques of Halifax’s founding generation, with several notables buried beneath the Church in its crypt. Memorialized by a plaque and buried beneath the Church is the first Bishop of Nova Scotia and founder of King’s College, Charles Inglis. A future article in the Red Tory Standard will explore Bishop Inglis at length, but for the purpose of my pilgrimage travelogue, it is sufficient to say that Charles Inglis was one of the essential men who secured a homeland for the High Tory tradition in British North America, shaping it for later generations.

It is shocking that Inglis’s story is not better known in the country whose foundations he helped lay. There are two things I am reminded of on my pilgrimage: the first was Inglis’s own courage and the second is his legacy. Inglis was a courageous man. As the republic to the south celebrates its 250^th Anniversary, the Dominion of the north honours Loyalists like Inglis who offered another vision for the colonies. Inglis’s The True Interest of America Impartially Stated (1776) cast a vision for what could become of British North America. But the violence of the American Revolution birthed, as it were, two nations: one nation seized irregularly through war, and the other over time upholding what George Grant called “the principle of my ancestors.” This is a reminder to us that Tories like Inglis and the Loyalists like him who settled in the 14^th colony of Nova Scotia—the one that did not revolt against the Crown—were the children of the Glorious Revolution and could speak of the great victory of that gloriously bloodless revolution that ended a civil war, restored the monarchy, and reinvigorated the institutions of government. A priest of the Church of Ireland known online as Laudable Practice has highlighted from Inglis’s The True Interest of America Impartially Stated: “The constitution of England, as it now stands, was fixed at the Revolution, in 1688—an era ever memorable in the fair annals of Liberty… the principles on which the glorious Revolution in 1688 was brought about, constitute the articles of my political creed.” This is a reminder that the Canadian High Tory tradition was birthed in liberty and won without bloodshed.

It was against a peaceable and ordered Glorious Revolution that Inglis saw the so-called American “Patriots” revolt violently. One can only imagine the courage it took for Inglis and all loyal priests of the Church of England to pray for the King in the Great Litany as their ordination vows required, but had been demanded stricken by George Washington and these Patriots. Inglis even did so with Washington physically present in the Church! As a missionary priest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Inglis first served in Delaware and later Manhattan where he served as Rector of Trinity Church. From that base he continued to serve the Church and the loyalist cause courageously in running pamphlet battles with Alexander Hamilton and others, all the while serving his loyalist parishioners in royalist Manhattan.

Then there is Inglis’s legacy. After finally being forced to leave New York, he returned to England first in 1783, and then made his way to Nova Scotia where most of his former Trinity Church parishioners had fled. He was consecrated the first Bishop of British North America, which then included all of Canada and Bermuda. With the Diocesan boundary shrinking to something of the manageable size of the current Maritime provinces, he made St. Paul’s his see, serving as his Cathedral. From there he would go to build over 40 Anglican Churches throughout his Diocese. While in Manhattan, he had also taught at the original King’s College, which would become Columbia University after the British defeat. Once the Loyalists were forced to leave Manhattan in 1779 and made their way to Nova Scotia, Bishop Inglis reestablished King’s College in Windsor, NS, for the formation of future clergy. While a fire would destroy the historic seminary in the 1920’s, it would be rebuilt at its current location on the Dalhousie University campus in Halifax. It is King’s College Chapel that has faithfully upheld the Inglis legacy, providing Canadian Anglicanism robust Prayer Book worship, and giving global Anglicanism one of its great divines in the Rev. Robert Crouse.

My pilgrimage continues. I leave St. Paul’s after kneeling in prayer behind the pew reserved for the Royal Family the next time they are in town. But as I leave, I recall with some amusement how things come full circle in life. While a student at NSCAD, I became friends with a lad from Yarmouth County who would go on become a well-known illustrator. While I was studying theology at Regent College, my friend Kevin Sollows illustrated a stamp designed by graphic designer Stephen Slipp honouring Bishop Inglis. The Stamp fittingly depicts Inglis against a stained-glass window framing a Nova Scotia landscape, a Church and school—his great legacy—for all to see.

By Victoria Savage

I. Introduction

For many on the Canadian right, the label of Red Toryism has become something of a burden. Even in its infancy, the term suffered from definition drift and many thinkers and politicians who espoused its tenets refused to claim ownership of it. For some, this is cause to do away with it in its entirety. But neither misuse nor disuse of the term will make the idea disappear.

The cause for this is that while the label has only existed since the 1960s, it was coined to describe a much older, much more structural piece of Canadian political and economic history and thought.

The roots of this political tradition run deep into pre-Confederation Canada, where an economic interventionism born of geography and the trade of fur and timber converged with a counter-revolutionary culture and social order inherited from early settlement. It is this convergence that marks Red Toryism as a unique Canadian ideal, and its history is what this article sets out to explore.

II. The Economic Tradition

In the early 17th century, as fishing operations gave way to a nascent fur trade, the lands of Canada became a rapidly growing economic zone. Official fur trading operations were established by the French Crown in the form of monopolies and licenses given to select traders. The Ministry of Marine created a crown corporation, the Compagnie des Indes occidentales, that among other colonial administration tasks governed the price and sale of beaver and moose hides from these traders back to the Crown.

This style of economic partnership reigned in the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes region, but further West a truly state-run monopoly was growing with the creation of a company chartered by the British Crown – the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).

Unlike the French system, there existed not even the pretense of individual entrepreneurship in the governance structure of the HBC. Instead, they maintained control over Rupert’s Land with a strong hand ruled from London. Attempts at competition from privately owned companies, such as the Northwest Company, ultimately failed and were all-but forced into mergers or acquisitions by the HBC.

The fur trade and its domination by the HBC is merely the first of many economic ventures that sustained the Canadian economy through resource extraction and the production of raw materials. Timber, wheat, minerals, and oil and gas followed in succession over the centuries. This understanding of Canadian economic history, first forwarded by the economic historian Harold Innis, is known as Staples Thesis.

These industries, which require heavy up-front capital to start and run, produced economic conditions in Canada that naturally lend themselves towards state-intervention. The scale of capital required to traverse the distances and terrain to produce economic goods at scale exceeded what private enterprise or individual entrepreneurship could sustain without state backing.

The industry that was able to be profitable in this economic context was not merely supported by the state, but a co-dependent relationship also formed from this structure. The mercantile elite supported monopoly and state power because that’s what their capital had been built on. It was a governing oligarchy allied with colonial government and power.

This relationship, once formed from necessity, became ideological as a consequence of the American Revolutionary War.

III. The Cultural Tradition

While economic life supplied the necessities of structure and hierarchy, it was the Loyalists that endowed it with legitimacy.

The Loyalists were the British-Americans who had sided with the British during the American Revolutionary War, and following the loss of thirteen North American colonies in 1783, were pushed northwards from their homes into the Maritimes and the western portion of the Province of Quebec, shortly after renamed to Upper Canada.

In a general sense they believed the American Revolution was an unnecessary and dangerous break with Britain, and revealed the worst excesses of mob rule and tyranny. They were loyal first and foremost to the Crown, but also to the ideas and promises of an ordered, structured society, that only a life centred on family, the community, and the Empire could provide.

The Loyalists did not come exclusively from the elite of American society. Many, in fact, came as farmers, labourers and other tradespeople, and what little they had was largely left behind. Despite these hardships, the Loyalists built settlements, cleared the land and tilled the soil, and developed industries.

Beyond the physical mark they left on Canada, their attitudes and beliefs built the first ideological touchpoints of society in English Canada. They created a Canada with a distinct culture from both the United States or Britain that became a cornerstone of Canadian national identity and in particular, conservative thought in Canada.

The Loyalists and their descendants institutionalized their beliefs through the creation of the Province of Upper Canada in 1791, and the formation of the critical elements of civil society in Upper Canada – schools, churches, governmental and legal structures, and the beginnings of an industrial economy.

By the end of the War of 1812 this uniquely Canadian Tory nationalism had grown substantially, especially in the province of Upper Canada, which had taken the brunt of the American incursion and pushed back at great cost.

It was at this time that two companion groups took control over the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. The Family Compact in the former, and in the latter, the Château Clique. As the beneficiaries of state-capital funded industry and the progenitors of early state institutions, these factions sought total control over their respective provinces.

The Family Compact sought the creation of an established Anglican Church in Upper Canada, if not in law then in practice. They held senior positions on appointed councils and provided land grants to other loyalist elites. Their strong opposition to reform of these systems cannot simply be boiled down to corruption. Rather, they held an ideological belief that the legitimacy of their hierarchy they had established flowed from loyalty and birthright, which others could aspire to but not attain in the same way.

Conversely, Lower Canada’s Château Clique was largely made up of an Anglo-speaking merchant minority that ruled over a French Catholic majority and wished to make Lower Canada ‘more British’. This stood in stark contrast to the older, independent conservative tradition in French Canada, which was marked by ultramontane Catholicism and the seigneurial system. While that tradition has its own storied history, what emerged in the lead-up to the rebellions of the 1830s was a structural pattern in both provinces of chartered elites who derived economic power from collaboration with the state and fused this with unfettered political power.

IV. Synthesis

While Macdonald’s generation of conservatism in the 1860s had been somewhat diluted from its pure Tory inheritance by the success of the reformers two decades earlier, the political and cultural traditions he inherited from the Loyalists were not washed away entirely.

With Confederation in 1867, Macdonald had brought his vision for a country into fruition. He won for himself a federal state with strong central powers, backing from the Crown, and of course, the premiership itself. In his crafting of the nation on these terms, Macdonald imbued the country and the national project with a deeply Tory nationalist flavour.

Importantly, Macdonald also faced a new wave of pressure and influence from the South. The reminder of this ever-present liberal and revolutionary behemoth state that existed at his doorstep was both the impetus for Confederation, as well as a guiding path for what to do with the new nation.

Almost immediately, Macdonald set to work on the central scheme of his nation-building enterprise: the National Policy.

The National Policy pursued a protectionist economy through high tariffs and the creation of a state-sponsored and funded infrastructure project to connect one side of the country to the other via the Canadian Pacific Railway. Other infrastructure projects received massive government subsidies and land expropriations to hasten the development of burgeoning Canadian industries, like harbour development and steamship building. Western settlement was advanced through targeted immigration policies that brought large numbers of Central and Eastern Europeans to the prairies to establish homesteads and farms.

As we have seen, this style of economic development in Canada was not new, but instead the National Policy should be seen as the institutional descendant and inheritor of the same elite-driven, state-guided development of natural resources of the HBC and earlier waves of staples production. Macdonald synthesized this style of economic development with the cultural and political traditions derived from the Loyalists and the Family Compact.

In Macdonald, these two traditions were solidified in the foundations of the country. In sum, the idea that the economy should work in the national interest, and that this can best be achieved by administering the country with a firm-handed state that works to achieve peace and order.

This can be seen in many of his actions as Prime Minister. Macdonald routinely chose paths that were potentially more difficult and less profitable in order to protect Canadian sovereignty over its lands and economy. For example, the most economically efficient route for the Canadian Pacific Railway would have been to dip southwards through parts of the United States. But such a route would defeat the nation-building and sovereignty purposes of the railroad.

Similarly, it may have been economically smart (and classical liberals argued this at the time) to pursue a restoration of the reciprocity agreement with the United States, which had been abrogated after the Civil War. To do so would have been to hand economic power to a nation that wished to absorb Canada politically as well as economically.

These pragmatic necessities of economy and government did not derive just from geography and climate, but also from the cultural traditions and inheritance that supplied the legitimacy for state action. Though Canada has been impacted by the general homogenization and liberalization that many Western countries have experienced over the last several decades, these early principles of Canadian political and economic tradition are still present today.

V. Conclusion

The convergence of state intervention in the economy and a cultural bent towards hierarchy and loyalty is one of the defining characteristics of Canada as a nation. Perhaps it is too ubiquitous to even be named, and why attempts to do so continue to remain so controversial.

Regardless of what we call it, the phenomenon described by thinkers like Gad Horowitz is still relevant today as a theory that helps us grasp our own history through our own interpretive lens. As students of history we can see Red Toryism not so much a fringe mid-20th century notion, or a burden easy to shrug off and dismiss, but a way to understand how and why we came to have the country we do today.

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.

By Mark Graham

“Many of the American Tories were Anglicans and knew well that in opposing the revolution they were opposing Locke. They appealed to the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker.”

What is one to make of George Grant’s claim that American Tories opposed Locke and appealed to Hooker? Any casual but educated reader today of his Lament for a Nation will surely have a general idea of the political philosophy of John Locke, but that of Richard Hooker would likely be little known even to most contemporary Anglicans. This is itself lamentable (if my feeble pun may be forgiven). Grant’s brief inclusion of a contrast between Locke and Hooker was not a throwaway historical aside but philosophically key to the substance of the book. His biographer, William Christian, writes of the Lament: “In ninety-seven pages George distilled his years of study of theology and philosophy, together with his knowledge of history and his acute attention to the daily passage of political events.”¹ Although Lament for a Nation enjoyed a broad readership throughout the decades, to understand the compactness of its references (unintended to be mere passing references) requires a knowledge of theology, philosophy, and history approaching Grant’s own. What follows is not an exhaustive treatment of the differences between the worldviews of Locke and Hooker, but hopefully it provides Red Tory Standard readers with enough information about Hookerian political philosophy to help contextualize Grant’s comment.

Richard Hooker and Anglicanism in the Colonies

Although a minority of the colonial population, Anglicans were disproportionately represented among the Tories who rejected the American Revolution (henceforth: “Rebellion”). Their monarchism alone was enough grounds for a theologically sound churchman of the established Church of England to reject rebellion. The Book of Common Prayer contained prayers “for the King’s Majesty” at Morning and Evening Prayer services (also said by some daily at home), Collects for the monarch during Communion services, and royal references in the Litany and in other suffrages. These prayers of the Established Church went well beyond the belief shared by many other types of Christians that believers should prayer for those in power. For Anglicans, the monarch was (and still is) the “Supreme Governor” of the Church of England itself, a state Church that exists precisely because it rejected Papal Supremacy in favour of Royal Supremacy. Anglican Tories would have also been familiar with The Book of Homilies, including its 21st Homily, An Homily against Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion, in which one could certainly find no justification for rebellion against the Crown. Grant’s claim, however, is that the Loyalists appealed to the political philosophy of Richard Hooker, a philosophy which, unlike Locke’s, provided an underlying intellectual foundation that was inherently contrary to the Rebellion.

Among the Church of England’s many Anglican Divines, Richard Hooker was one of the earliest and the greatest of its systematic theologians. Written in the late 16th century primarily as a defence of the Church of England against both Puritan and Catholic extremes, his masterwork, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, also contained a good deal of political thought that would shape English conservative temperament for centuries to come. (It is fair to say that Hooker was something of a precursor to Edmund Burke himself.) When John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government a century later, he (mis)quoted Hooker a number of times to lend a veneer Established Church authority, even calling him “the Judicious Hooker.” As implied by the passage from Lament for a Nation, George Grant believed that the Loyalists would have seen through the veneer and recognized that Locke’s appropriation of Hooker to be selective and distorting.

Insights into Hooker’s political philosophy can be gleaned from almost anywhere from his voluminous Laws, but it is in Chapter 10 of Book 1 where it is most concentrated. I have selected 5 passages to introduce readers to Hookerian political thought and show some ways in which Hooker and Locke differed in order to give some background to Grant’s claim. It is my hope that readers will digest the beauty of Hooker’s prose, but, aware that Anglican theology students refer to Hooker affectionately and despondently as the Church of England’s Cicero (i.e., he is difficult to read), I have paraphrased most of the content of the passages at the beginning of each exposition.

Consent: historic and corporate, not individual

To be commanded we do consent, when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement. Wherefore as any man’s deed past is good as long as he himself continues; so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years since stands as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still. (Laws I.10.8)

For Hooker, we have “consented” to being governed whenever the society to which we belong has previously given its consent and has not later withdrawn that consent except by another act of unanimous agreement by the entire community. Just as a person’s past decisions remain valid as long as that person remains the same individual, so the decisions of a community made 500 years ago remain valid as the decision of those who belong to that community today. This is because political societies (“corporations”) are a kind of immortal body. We are alive in our predecessors, and they continue to live in us, their successors.

John Locke also used “consent” language, and he even appealed to Hooker as he did so. Lockean consent, however, is individualistic, contractual, and revocable at the whim of a living generation; Hookerian consent is historic, corporate, and revocable only by the agreement of the entire body politic. To be commanded is not something we individually consent to. There is no re-signing of a liberal social contract each generation. Our signature is our birth into the community to which we belong. This inherited consent can only be revoked by universal agreement, not by one faction of innovators overpowering all others. The very existence of neutral or Loyalist factions at the time of the American Rebellion would have delegitimized the the Patriots’ cause in the eyes of Hooker, and in the eyes of anybody with a Hookerian socio-political worldview.

Hooker’s political society is a “corporation.” A corporation is body composed of individuals forming a single body. Like a body, it does not die when its limbs or members die. As an immortal Person, its decisions made even 500 years remain valid. (And the American colonies were nowhere close to 500 years old!) Hooker’s conception of society as a single, multi-generational body will cause any traditionalist conservative to recall Edmund Burke’s assertion in his Reflection on the Revolution in France that society is “a contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” For Burke, those members of the immortal body who just happen to be alive should not unilaterally override the wishes of those who came before (nor the potential wishes of those yet to be born). Hooker took a softer view that a single generation could give consent to a new contract, but only by unanimous consent. There was no unanimous consent for the reshaping of the colonies into a Republic.

Lawful Power: derived from Natural Law and corporate consent

By the natural law, whereunto [God] hath made all subject, the lawful power of making laws to command whole politic societies of men belongeth so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince or potentate of what kind soever upon earth to exercise the same of himself, and not either by express commission immediately and personally received from God, or else by authority derived at the first from their consent upon whose persons they impose laws, it is no better than mere tyranny. (Laws I.10.8)

According to natural law, the natural law to which God has made all people subject, the rightful authority to make laws for the entire political community belongs, in the fullest sense, to the community itself. If any ruler on earth claims to make laws on his own without either the “direct commission” of God or the authority originally derived from the people he governs, then he is no better than a tyrant.

On the surface, aspects of Lockean thought seem to echo those of Hooker in the above passage. Locke grounds his entire political philosophy in (his own understanding of) natural law, a natural law to which all people were subject, and according to which the rightful authority to make laws over a society belonged to society itself. Like Hooker, he certainly insisted that rule without the consent of ruled was tyranny. Many Anglican Tories, however, would have understood, as Hooker did, that Natural Law grants law-making power to the entire corporate society as an historic, immortal body: not to individuals who have formed a society for the sake of collectively protecting their assumed individuals rights that pre-existed in a state of nature (as Locke conceived of such things). Hooker unquestionably asserts that it would be tyranny to rule without the consent of the ruled, but, for Hooker, that consent has already been given long ago and cannot be rescinded except by unanimous consent. Such a stringent understanding of consent by corporation renders rebellion immoral in almost any circumstance. Rebellion would, in fact, be kind of reverse tyranny, where individual limbs have defied the will of their own corporate body.

Hooker allows that a ruler would not be tyrannical if he lacked the consent of the ruled, provided he had received a direct commission from God. This does not mean that Hooker was a divine-right absolutist in regard to monarchy. His idea of commission, “immediately and personally received by God,” indicates extraordinarily rare conditions, the kind we might find with the biblical prophets and judges. Likewise, few Anglican Tories were divine-right absolutists, but faced with the present threat of rebellion, they surely doubled down on loyalty to King George III, the Supreme Governor of their Church. In their minds would have been the words of the Apostle Paul which he wrote to the church in Rome: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” They would have also known from their specifically Anglican An Homily against Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion that: “[a] rebel is worse than the worst thief, murderer, or adulterer… For rebellion is the mother of all evils… It is the root of all other sins against God and man.” Consequently, although these Tories would likely not have been philosophically absolute monarchists, their disposition of respect for the Crown combined with their wariness of any rebellion would have made them effectively so.

Necessity of Government: rooted in human sinfulness and maintenance of the common good

Political laws, ordained for external order and regiment amongst men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast, they do accordingly provide notwithstanding so to frame his outward actions, that they be no hindrance unto the common good for which societies are instituted. ( Laws I.10.1)

Hooker’s political vision is deeply realistic (detractors might say pessimistic) about human evil. He thought that political laws established to maintain order in society are only conceived of correctly when lawmakers assume that individuals are inwardly stubborn, rebellious, and resistant to the very moral laws built into themselves. Unless lawmakers assume that humans, due to their “depraved minds,” posses a moral sense little better than that of wild beasts, then they will fail to frame laws appropriately to prevent individual human actions from being hinderances to the common good, the common good being the entire purpose of forming civilized human society.

For Hooker, government exists not merely to protect individual rights in a state of nature, but to restrain sin (even innate sinful human nature) and direct human action toward the common good. This stands in sharp contrast to Locke’s more optimistic account of the state of nature. For Locke, men in a state of nature are are free, equal, and independent, governed by a law of nature discoverable by reason that teaches “no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions” (Second Treatise §6). Government is instituted primarily as a protective mechanism to secure those natural rights more effectively than individuals would be able to do so in a state of nature. Hooker sees laws as necessary restraints on deeply flawed human beings; Locke sees them as safeguards for naturally rational individual actors. Hooker’s government is proactive and directive toward the common good; Locke’s is more defensive and protective of assumed natural rights.

This highlights a core difference between the underlying assumptions of liberalism and conservatism regarding human nature. Liberalism, in its classical and even modern forms, tends toward optimism about human beings in their natural state: individuals are fundamentally rational, free, and capable of self-government if only liberated from arbitrary or tyrannical power, or some kind of constraint. Conservatism is more cautious about human nature. For the conservative, government is necessary to restrain vice, cultivate virtue, and direct individuals toward the common good. For the liberal, government’s role is primarily to secure pre-existing (and quite abstract!) natural rights. A liberal sees at least potential for self-ordered, societal harmony once artificial constraints have been removed; a conservative denies even that potential, and sees a permanent need for authoritative order and inherited institutions to temper flawed human nature. These contrary views of human nature lie not only at the heart of the philosophical divide between American Tories and the rebel Patriots, but also in the fundamental divide between liberalism and conservatism. The Tory worldview that Loyalist refugees brought to British North America after the American Rebellion eventually contributed to Canada forming with more conservative underpinnings than the quintessentially liberal United States: “Peace, order, and Good Government,” not “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Two Foundations of Society: natural sociability and agreed-upon order

Two foundations there are which bear up public societies; the one, a natural inclination, whereby all men desire sociable life and fellowship; the other, an order expressly or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their union in living together. The latter is that which we call the Law of a Commonweal, the very soul of a politic body, the parts whereof are by law animated, held together, and set on work in such actions as the common good requireth. (Laws I.10.1)

In Hooker’s political framework, there are two foundations that support every human society: one is that people possess natural sociability, meaning they naturally desire to live together and form communities; the other is that people establish, either expressly or implicitly, some kind of agreed-upon order that determines how they will live together. The second is what Hooker calls “the Law of the Commonweal,” or what we would call today “the common good.” The Law of the Commonweal is like the soul of body that is society, giving life to its parts, holding them together, and directing them toward the actions that are necessary for the common good.

For Hooker, natural sociability and agreed-upon order together constitute the corporate body whose consent, as we has seen, is historic and effectively irrevocable. People are social creatures who have a natural inclination toward an ordered fellowship for the sake of the Commonweal. For Locke, people form political societies not out of natural inclination of sociability oriented to the common good, but through private consent to protect their own individual rights more effectively. Hooker’s society is organically formed by people, who, although flawed and in need of authoritative order, desire to form a corporate whole animated by law for the common good. Locke’s society is an essentially artificial, contractual arrangement.

This contrast between organic society and artificial society is yet another key difference between conservatism and liberalism in general. Anglican Tories during the American Rebellion held a more authentically conservative view of society than the liberal view of their their rebel counterparts. Throughout his Lament, George Grant rightly identifies as liberalism what many Americans today call “conservatism.” He labels American conservatives as “old-fashioned liberals” and argues that “their concentration on freedom from governmental interference has more to do with nineteenth-century liberalism than with traditional conservatism, which asserts the right of the community to restrain freedom in the name of the common good.”

Strife: the end of an individualist view of rights

Men always knew that when force or injury was offered they might be defenders of themselves…. [yet] no man might in reason take upon him to determine his own right, and according to his own determination proceed in maintenance thereof, inasmuch as every man is towards himself and them whom he greatly affecteth partial; and therefore that strifes and troubles would be endless, except they gave their common consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon. (Laws I.10.4-5)

Hooker acknowledges that men have always understood that if another person attempts to harm them by force, they then have a natural right to defend themselves. He contends, however, that no man can reasonably be allowed to decide for himself what his own rights are and then act upon what he individually has decided. The reason for this is clear to Hooker: every man is biased in his own favour and for the benefit of those he loves. Conflicts would be endless unless all gave their “common consent” to be governed by some agreed-upon authority.

This is in profound disagreement with Locke on the consequences of political individualism. Locke’s state of nature, although inconvenient in the sense that individual rights are may not be best protected, is nonetheless populated by rational actors capable of recognizing natural law (if only freed from their constraints) and thereby recognizing for themselves their natural rights. Hooker, while he asserting that humans are inclined toward natural sociability, recognizes that the partiality inherent in every flawed human heart makes such self-directed judgment of rights dangerous and a potential cause of endless strife. Government is not merely a protective contract that societies as collections of individuals can enter or exit at will: it is a necessary restraint on innately selfish human nature.

Anglican Tories would have been wary of the natural and individual rights rhetoric of the Patriot cause. It is noteworthy that Hooker does not deny something akin to the concept of natural human rights. He did acknowledge a natural right to self-defence, but he did not hold to the expansive, pre-political rights language that was characteristic of Locke and later liberalism. Rights, for Hooker (and for the Loyalists), were not natural but were understood within the context of corporate, not contractual, consent. As it turns out, American Tories were justified in their wariness this liberal rights rhetoric. They saw the rights championed by the Patriots turn quickly to strife in the form of bloody Rebellion.

Hooker’s little-known contribution to Canadian conservatism

Contemporary Episcopalians (and the multiple schismatic sects of Anglican heritage) in the Unites States today might object to the presentation of classic Anglican theology as fundamentally contrary the American Revolution. Anglicanism in the newly formed republic had to reimagine itself without Royal Supremacy, without even monarchy, and somehow pray for a new nation born out of the very kind of rebellion expressly forbidden by their own Book of Homilies. The name “Episcopalian” itself is a result of American Anglicans forced to disassociate themselves with England and the Crown. Even a staunch Loyalist clergyman like Samuel Seabury conveniently changed his tone after the Revolution and became the first Bishop (consecrated in the Scottish Episcopal Church) of an independent American Episcopal Church.

Not all clergy could bring themselves to such a modification of their religion. Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church in New York, faced the same crisis, but left for Nova Scotia to build up Loyalist Anglicanism in British North America, becoming the first Bishop of what would later be the Anglican Church of Canada. The essence of Richard Hooker’s political philosophy and Loyalist Toryism was carried north by Anglicans like Inglis. George Grant recognized this Hookerian and Loyalist influence as one of the deep sources of Canadian conservatism and of Canada itself, setting it on a path distinct from the Lockean liberalism to the south.

1. William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 244.

By Clif Clemotte

Red tory defined

Summary: Red toryism is a Canadian political tradition which continues to express itself in voting patterns and voters’ beliefs, even though the traditional label is typically misused today. In this piece, I identify four principles which can be drawn from historic red toryism to guide red tories (and Canadian conservatives more generally) today: (1) Active governance, (2) Intervention and welfare, (3) Communitarianism, and (4) Internationalism.

What is a red tory in the modern Canadian context? Though the phrase seems less and less frequently used, it has colloquially come to mean a fiscal conservative with socially progressive views. But this is a reversal of its original meaning. That original meaning often appears in slogan form as ‘cultural conservatism with socialist economics,’ but more can and must be said.

When Gad Horowitz coined the term ‘red tory’ in 1966, he gave it distinct connotations for distinct political contexts. In the context of real-world voting patterns, the term denotes “a Conservative who prefers the CCF-NDP to the Liberals, or a socialist who prefers the Conservatives to the Liberals, without really knowing why.” Under this connotation, the red tory political tradition is still with us in the form of NDP-Conservative switchers, though this category of switch voters is likely quite small.

Alternatively, within the context of political theory, Horowitz defines a red tory as “a conscious ideological Conservative with some ‘odd’ socialist notions… or a conscious ideological socialist with some ‘odd’ tory notions.” (I myself fall into this alternative sense of red toryism, i.e., a conscious ideological Conservative with some odd socialist notions.) And the paradigmatic red tory is “a philosopher who combines elements of socialism and toryism so thoroughly in a single integrated Weltanschauung that it is impossible to say that he is a proponent of either one as against the other.” It is less obvious that this form of red toryism is a living tradition today.

While of course voter choices and political philosophies may coincide, the existence of NDP-Conservative switchers does not itself indicate a current of political thought in Canada’s broader political culture. Nonetheless, I suggest that the basic political outlook of red toryism is in fact still with us. Better evidence for red tory thought comes from the apparent strength of traditional red tory political beliefs in the Canadian population, even when deprived of a proper label.

In early 2025, Abacus Data found that cultural conservatives with progressive economic views made up 21% of their population sample, compared to only 6% of the population sample identifying as cultural progressives with conservative economic views. This group corresponds neatly with red toryism as a political ideology. When supplemented by the additional 32% of the sample who held some combination of conservative and progressive tendencies in tension, the current vitality of red toryism under both Horowitz’s connotations seems undeniable. Indeed, red toryism in its original sense seems a far more vibrant and relevant political tradition today than red toryism in its misused sense!

While this is of course merely one poll, it still suggests that red toryism is a living political tradition today, albeit under cover. But to remain living, it must not only exist but also must carry basic principles which can drive policies and frame political vision. In this piece, I suggest some tentative basic principles which can be drawn from the red tory tradition.

1. Active governance

First, I suggest that the core principle underlying red toryism is the belief that the state should be active. More specifically, red tories reject the contemporary version of conservatism which equates conservatism with classical liberalism, believing instead that some level of state activity is necessary to a flourishing society. Ordered liberty does not spontaneously emerge from collisions of individuals with purely private values and goals. Note that this active role for government does not entail authoritarian theocracy or the curtailment of civil liberties! There is a middle ground between pursuing neutrality and enforcing a comprehensive doctrine. Far from enforcing a comprehensive doctrine, red tories instead view the state as having an essential role in some limited cultural elements and values.

Which elements and values exactly are chosen is a matter of prudence and must be governed by the virtue of moderation; I suggest that Kenneth Boessenkool’s basic framework for positive social conservatism is a useful initial guide. Examples might include preserving civic traditions, such as celebrating constitutional role of the Crown in our parliamentary system or the Anglican ceremonies surrounding Remembrance Day (and for the record, I am no Anglican); designing policies as ‘nudges’ towards some moderate (but substantive) values, such as stable family formation or human-scaled walkable cities; and generally renewing the mores of parliamentary government, making visible through aesthetics and rhetoric a tradition so often submerged by American republicanism.

Crucially, this parliamentary emphasis is the mechanism preventing a government with values from becoming an authoritarian regime, since opposition is one of the two lungs through which parliament breathes. This also highlights the importance of distinguishing between constitutional principles and partisan principles. It would be inappropriate to establish a constitution predisposed towards one political party, but it is nonetheless appropriate for a party to govern according to its values once granted a mandate. The red tory political agenda does not aspire to mere neutral managerialism.

2. Intervention and welfare

Second, and closely related to the first principle, red tories accept that nation-building can require economic sacrifice, and for that reason are willing to entertain government intervention in the economy (even for sub-optimal economic outcomes) if they serve some other political value. This principle is important but most not be over-stated. Red tories may be tempted to prefer inefficient economic policies over efficient ones, and this would be an error. By and large, free exchange, free markets, and free trade are the best available mechanism for achieving nation-building goals, and red tories need not oppose this.

This second principle is more negative than positive. Unlike the caricature Reaganite, who is a priori opposed to government intervention in free market principles, the red tory is not a priori opposed to government intervention in an economy, whether in the form of industrial policy, some limited protection, or expansive welfare. As an example of the latter, Hugh Segal’s support for a basic income is a policy proposal red tories (and policy writers in general) should take seriously today.

Nonetheless, this tolerance for intervention does not dispense from the necessity of making economic decisions based upon empirical evidence. Nor does this tolerance dispense from the prudence of being pro tanto predisposed towards free markets, with interventions reflecting prudential exceptions rather than primary inclinations. Wasteful industrial policies, unlimited protectionism, and complicated welfare programs all tend to erode or reverse economic growth, and lost growth is in turn a major injustice which no society should be forced to bear. The key here is that the decisions must still be empirically informed, rather than solely ideologically driven.

3. Communitarianism

Third, red tories are communitarians rather than individualists, loosely speaking. One way of phrasing this might be as follows: a society and its common goods are not merely the sum of individuals. In keeping with the classical tradition of virtue ethics and standard contemporary economics, there exist common or public goods which are irreducible to individual values and choices, which do not diminish when shared among individuals, and which must be actively provided. Classic examples of public goods include navigational lighthouses or the provision of free markets.

Achieving these common goods, in turn, calls for a conception of citizenship structured around both rights and responsibilities. This principle is closely related to the first principle above, in that the state must provide for more than just a neutral arena where individuals pursue their individual values independently of each other. Conversely, maximal individual rights are not the source and summit of political values, and may be constrained by legitimate public goods. I would suggest that Fred Delorey’s defence of Nova Scotia’s 2025 fire bans (including bans on hiking) is an example of red tory communitarianism, albeit perhaps unconsciously.

This communitarianism entails a rejection of classical liberalism to an extent, but this point must not be over-stated: Red toryism is not postliberalism. Rather, red toryism is a an element within the broader tory political tradition, and one which evolved alongside liberalism through direct interaction. Toryism and its sub-currents are as much a part of the parliamentary political tradition as liberalism (both classical and otherwise) and are not mere political latecomers.

For instance, when reading Benjamin Disraeli’s 1835 work Vindication of the English Constitution, one finds a political vision decidedly at odds with the ‘classical’ liberal ideal of radical individualism and the ideal of a valueless state. Nonetheless, Disraeli presents toryism as a political tradition which protects robust individual civil rights, and indeed is structured so as to elevate those rights into abilities. (Whether his historic claims are accurate must be distinguished from the political ideals he promotes in that text.) Freedom, civil liberties, and personal rights are ideals claimed by many political traditions, and not just by liberalism.

It would be anachronistic to describe Disraeli as a postliberal, and unfair to view him as an opponent of parliamentary democracy. He advocated for parliamentary government and the English tradition of political freedoms (albeit also marked by his era’s imperfections) while simultaneously rejecting liberalism as a political philosophy. Again, freedom, civil liberties, and individual rights are not the exclusive property of philosophical liberalism; other political philosophies can cherish and protect these values also.

It is also important to emphasize the extent to which the notion of ‘classical’ liberalism is a somewhat artificial construct. Contemporary classical liberals identify themselves with the tradition associated with John Locke, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill, but often seem to read that tradition back into this canon, obscuring these philosophers’ actual views on morality and social collectives. For instance, Locke’s A letter concerning toleration makes substantive space in society for self-regulating associations, and he in fact begins his argument for individual toleration by identifying the freedoms owed to associations qua associations. This type of argument does not carry the narrowly individualistic focus of today’s classical liberals, and in fact presages contemporary debates about communal identities so frequently dismissed by classical liberals.

More fundamentally, however, it is a mistake to identify the entire post-1688 parliamentary tradition with classical liberalism. There was always an opposition, and parliamentary privileges were offered both to the court and country parties (more or less). Liberals, Conservatives, and Radicals were each essential in the life of parliament as it developed around the globe; no single partisan tradition can claim to be the essence of parliamentary democracy any more than any subcurrent of partisan thought party can claim to be the essence of a political party.

Moreover, while public goods may legitimize restrictions on individual liberties, it is essential to exercise caution and restraint in prescribing such restrictions. Where restrictions are imposed, they must not be ad hoc judicial prescriptions in particular circumstances, as there is a tendency for such judgements to decay into a strikingly limp version of utilitarianism. The parliamentary tradition is filled debates on acceptable restrictions, re-evaluations, reforms, and liberalisations. And since parliament is the proper arena for political opposition, it is appropriate that elected assemblies rather than courts take the responsibility for any restrictions on rights they may prescribe for good governance. Judicial review and its attempted finality does not enable meaningful opposition. The “reasonable limitations” and “notwithstanding” clauses in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms reflect a stream of thought within the broader parliamentary tradition from which red toryism originates. The challenge we are faced with today is not so much whether there are reasonable limitations on individual rights, but rather by which criteria such limitations are to be established.

4. Internationalism

Conservatism is often characterized as a political vision prioritizing local particularities over abstract universals. And this is a good first-pass criterion. However, I suggest that red toryism takes a broader view of ‘particularity’ than is common to today’s blue conservatives.

Red tories were historically associated with support for the British Empire. Today’s red tories ought not pine for the return of imperialism, but from that past can nonetheless draw a fourth principle: red tories view Canada as a nation within a broader common history, and thus in partnership with other nations in pursuit of an international common good. Far from exalting the nation-state as the ultimate expression of political identity, red tories see even a nation as merely one particular among others, and for this reason are capable of conceiving of common goods which transcend merely national interests. The particularity of a nation, like the particularity of an individual, only exists in the context of a broader community with its own proper goods, irreducible to merely national or individual interests. International law and international institutions – such as the United Nations, the European Union, and perhaps someday CANZUK – embody valuable ideals to the red tory, and ideally elevate rather than erode a nation’s freedom and interests.

Among mainstream conservatism, there remains the Enlightenment premium placed upon nation states. It is common in conservative circles to deride the United Nations, the European Union, and even international law itself on the grounds that such institutions undermine national sovereignty. To be clear, I myself have criticisms and concerns regarding these institutions also! But my own critiques and concerns do not stem from a desire for national self-determination contra mundum. Individual freedom is not maximized by scorning association with peers, and neither is national freedom. The red tory views international cooperation and associations as precious elements of the Western political tradition. These elements need to be reformed and built up, not rejected and torn down.

Red toryism’s internationalist disposition also contrasts against alt-right forms of nationalism, such as those driving the disquieting emergence of the Dominion Society – a group which claims to draw its principles from Canada’s historic identity. Far from taking an expansive view of the common good, conceived as existing even among nations, these pseudo-nationalists see other nations as a threat to Canada’s interests. Even though the Dominion Society claims to draw its principles from an expansive conception of the common good, its pseudo-nationalism is fundamentally a rejection of the Western civilizational traditions underpinning Canada’s founding. Far from believing in a broad political tradition claimed by no single race or local culture, they exalt local culture (and seemingly race – I don’t know how else to interpret their emphasis on ancestry and “ethnogenesis”) as the proper expression of Western civilization. This kind of nihilistic moral relativism is inconsistent with the tory tradition in general, and deeply alien to red toryism in particular. Fortunately, such pseudo-nationalists remain a fringe minority, are excluded from the conservative mainstream, and have no part to play within red toryism.

I have thus far described internationalism as an essential principle of red toryism without mentioning red tories’ traditional exception: America. George Grant famously described the United States of America as the universal and homogeneous state, and it must be recognized that one of the many cultural subcurrents within the USA is one of expansion by right and jingoistic interventionism, a subculture which is in tension with many of America’s better angels and yet continues to exist. Suffice it to say that red tories will tend to see Canada’s future as better secured by closeness with the United Kingdom and Europe, even in their present weaknesses, than by closeness to the United States, especially in its present predation.

This tendency need not undermine fruitful cooperation with the USA on continental defence or trade, nor does it mean that Canada is going to be more closely integrated with Europe than with the USA. We are already closely integrated with the USA, and increased integration does not seem likely. Rather than fruitlessly pursuing further American integration, we should preserve what integration we have and focus on increasing ties with Europe. We are a nation on the North American continent, it is true, but we are also a maritime nation – we are not landlocked, and we should act accordingly.

Remaining alive and well

There is a nagging concern with the term ‘red tory’ which is frequently raised: the term has become so widely muddled and misused that any attempt to revive its original sense is only going to add to the confusion. Given this confusion, the term is unhelpful at best, and should be set aside in favour of other terms less saddled by ambiguity.

This concern makes sense, but at what cost? Is there any other political label which doesn’t suffer from comparable ambiguity and widespread misuse? The word ‘liberal’ is often used as a pejorative in North America, and typically by people who embrace a particularly individualist form of… well, liberalism. Similarly, ‘socialist’ is often used as a pejorative, yet with little other than vibes. Even when used by smarter people, the term ‘liberalism’ has been claimed equally by George Will and by John Rawls. The term ‘social democrat’ has been claimed by religiously observant figures such as Bill Blaikie, and yet when used today seems typically to evoke (even erroneously) the likes of Bernie Sanders or Avi Lewis. And the term ‘conservative’ is itself quite ambiguous, claimed equally by David Frum and the writers at the excellent Without Diminishment newsletter. Even a term such as ‘post-liberal’, a term gaining newfound political prominence, is highly ambiguous, claimed by figures such as Viktor Orbán but also by niche integralists, including some who apparently defend some form of slavery.

Not a single one of these eclectic figures is particularly similar to any of the others, yet several of them share common political labels (and sometimes more than one label). Every political label is ambiguous and contested, and yet continues to be used and useful. The label ‘red tory’ continues to be used, and that is itself one reason to advocate for reviving its older meaning: whether the older meaning catches on or not, total neglect of the term is unwarranted. Indeed, the apparent and alarming embrace of the term by remigrationists from the Dominion Society is itself sufficient reason for those of us who reject racism to revive the term. Just as the Red Ensign is a lovely national symbol and should not be neglected to the point that racists can coopt it, so also is the red tory tradition far too interesting and principled to be left decaying into use as a dogwhistle.

I have proposed four principles which I suggest are implicit in the red tory tradition. I expect and hope that all four will be vigourously and courteously disputed, as disputation is a sign of life! If red toryism is indeed a living tradition, it needs to be sufficiently alive and well that it can withstand internal debates, let alone external debates. And if there are to be internal debates, there must also be distinct hues of red toryism, and the intensity and location of redness in policy will vary. (I myself am a red tory in the sense of an ideological conservative with conventional economic views, yet also endorse a handful of odd quasi-socialist notions mostly drawn from my Catholicism.) I look forward to seeing these hues developed and expanded here in the Red Tory Standard.

By David Langille

Summary: American Roman Catholic scholar Edward Feser tweeted the following regarding the King’s recent speech before the American Congress: “Gravitas, genuine wit, magnanimity, intelligence, reverence for the rule of law, Christian faith that is confident without being performative. The king is the voice from a lost world.” His is not, however, “a voice from a lost world,” but as we take on this High Tory mantle, a voice from the North of North America.

As a Canadian living and serving as clergy in the Episcopal Church south of the 49th parallel, I note with more than passing interest when Canada makes the news here, which was the case when the King of Canada made his state visit to the United States in April. It was HRM’s speech to Congress that drew the most attention. Why this was so illustrates one of the marked contrasts between these two North American ideas: between Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and our High Tory commitment to Peace, Order and Good Government. But even more so, it was the content of the King’s Speech that warmed this Red Tory’s heart.

Time did not permit me to watch the King’s speech live. It was the next day when I read a tweet from American Roman Catholic scholar Edward Feser that I knew the mark the monarch had made: “Gravitas, genuine wit, magnanimity, intelligence, reverence for the rule of law, Christian faith that is confident without being performative. The king is the voice from a lost world.” To which I replied: “Not lost, just north.”

Of course, I know there are republican voices in the North. There are also those Canadians so immersed in American popular culture that they are unaware somehow of the history of British North America, the great inheritance of the Westminster parliamentary system, our constitutional monarchy, and of Canada’s King. As High Tories who happily accept the moniker of Red Tory, this Canadian republicanism and the lack of awareness of our inheritance provide an opportunity to graciously teach and celebrate our distinctly Canadian tradition. In Ron Dart’s The North American High Tory Tradition, the first of his articulated High Tory principles states that Tories “are concerned about the wisdom of tradition.”¹ Canada’s King in his speech to Congress, and the praise of American thinkers like Edward Feser, reminded me of what CS Lewis made clear to be at stake if we ever lose the monarchy:

“Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap‑root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film‑stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.²

We Canadian Tories we remind ourselves, our fellow Canadians, and our neighbours that new Canadians swear an Oath of Citizenship that begins: “I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty, King Charles the Third King of Canada, his heirs and successors.” The Government of Canada itself explains the oath to the Crown in this way:

In Canada, we profess our loyalty to a person who represents all Canadians and not to a document such as a constitution, a banner such as a flag, or a geopolitical entity such as a country. In our constitutional monarchy, these elements are encompassed by the Sovereign (Queen or King). It is a remarkably simple yet powerful principle: Canada is personified by the Sovereign just as the Sovereign is personified by Canada.

And, as a particularly “red” Red Tory, the King’s speech to the US Congress was also heartening to me in what it contained. As Ron Dart’s articulation of High Tory principles also makes clear: “the Tory tradition has a deep and abiding respect for the land.”³ King Charles’ lifelong commitment to the land was evidenced in his speech:

Even as we celebrate the beauty that surrounds us, our generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of nature. We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems, in other words, nature’s own economy, provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.

Speaking in a legislative chamber, HRM offered both a Tory critique and call, a reminder that the institutions of government that have a responsibility to guard the land for the common good of all its citizens. All said, of course, with what Professor Feser underlined: “Gravitas, genuine wit, magnanimity, intelligence, reverence for the rule of law.” His is not, however, “a voice from a lost world”, but as we take on this High Tory mantle, a voice from the North of North America.

Although living in the United States and serving a clergy in the Episcopal Church, I still pray for our King from the Daily Office of the 1962 Canada Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church of Canada:

LORD our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lord, King Charles; and so replenish him with the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that he may alway incline to thy will, and walk in thy way: Endue him plenteously with heavenly gifts; grant him in health and wealth long to live; strengthen him that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies, and finally after this life he may attain everlasting joy and felicity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayer is effectual.

1. Ron Dart, The North American High Tory Tradition (New York: American Anglican Press, 2016). ↩︎
2. C. S. Lewis, “Equality,” in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 17–20. ↩︎
3. Dart, North American High Tory Tradition. ↩︎

By Kieran Wilson

Summary: The books we read as a child are central to the formation of our political instincts and outlook. Kieran Wilson takes us to the world of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge stories, arguing that they offer glimpses of Tory utopia to kindle the conservative imagination of young and old alike.

Why am I a Tory? Sometimes, on frosty winter evenings when the fire burns low and the ice lolls about pleasantly and sleepily at the bottom of my glass, I catch myself asking this question. And when I do, I find I am not asking myself why I support a certain political party or subscribe to a certain set of philosophical propositions. My question is far more psychologically probing than that, for, as far as I can tell, I was not argued into my Toryism, nor did I come by it by reading Burke, Johnson, Oakeshott or Scruton, as important as these luminaries have been in shaping the preexisting raw matter of my conservative impulses.

My Toryism is pre-ideological and instinctual, bubbling up in my boyhood from some font hidden deep in my character. It belongs, in its beginnings at least, to the realm of imagination, of affection, of aesthetic delight. It is not a system of ideas but an assortment of loves, love of place and past, of tradition and hierarchy, of beauty and right order. These things have I loved far longer than I have been able to give an account of my love for them.

Where, then, does my Toryism come from? Before my daughter was born, I would vainly ponder this question until the fire was cold and my glass was empty, and I would shuffle off to bed no nearer the answer than when I had first begun pondering. But since I became a father and assumed the ancient and venerable mantle of bedtime-story reader, I think I’m closer to solving the puzzle: my Toryism comes, at least in part, from the books I read as a child.

Yes, I am persuaded that The Wind in the Willows, with its tender evocation of the ordered beauty of nature, along with kids’ histories of Canada, with their watercolour sketches of Tecumseh, Brock, and Secord daring all for hearth and country, have done more make me a Tory than whole oceans of ink poured out in the cause of political theory ever could. In other words, I owe my Toryism, not to Edmund Burke, but to Mr Toad.

One of the great joys of fatherhood has been rediscovering some of these formative books with my daughter. They offer up fragmentary glimpses of the Tory ideal, partial visions, almost, of Tory utopia, a perfect world in which Tory principles, given free rein, beget imaginary societies in harmony with themselves and the world around them.

A series of children’s books that falls into this category is the Brambly Hedge series by the late Jill Barklem. The eight Brambly Hedge stories follow the lives and adventures of a community of hedgerow mice through the turnings of the seasons and the adventures and celebrations that punctuate their lives. These are not merely stories to be read; they are whole imaginative worlds to lose oneself in. The pastel pageantry of her rich watercolour illustrations – the detailed cross-sections of the mice’s homes are my favourite – earns Barklem a place in the foremost rank of children’s illustrators alongside E.H. Shepard and Beatrix Potter. My pen cannot hope to do these illustrations justice; the reader will just have to discover them for herself.

The world of Brambly Hedge is confessedly utopian. As Barklem writes in her introduction to the omnibus edition, “Brambly Hedge is my ideal world,” whose inhabitants belong to “a loving and caring society.” I submit that Brambly Hedge is in fact a Tory utopia, an ideal embodiment of Tory principles in an imagined setting. I propose in what follows to attempt a sort of anthropological (musological?) study of this utopia, to emphasise some of the main Tory themes in Barklem’s stories and to commend them to a budding generation of Tory readers – and their parents to boot. What follows is not a manifesto, nor yet a practical guide to building one’s own Tory utopia, but a simple reflection on a series of stories that I have come to love and that have stirred my imagination even at the decrepit age of thirty.

First, a word in defence of utopia. The Tory is nothing if not a practical person, and descriptions of ideal worlds however charming might not at first commend themselves to her consideration. A utopia is famously both a good place (eu-topia) and no place at all (ou-topia). Precisely because a utopia has no real existence, it is a useful venue for the human mind to play as it will, to propose theories and pursue them to their logical conclusions, to imagine the world not as it is, but as it might be.

Ideal worlds are instructive not merely as thought experiments, but as objects for the will to strive for. They form our tastes, indeed our innermost desires, as much as they provide a sandbox for the intellect to sport about in. We see the good of the utopian vision before our mind’s eye and we yearn for it. And even if we acknowledge the impossibility of attaining our ideal world, we may still be content that we have contributed something towards recreating an imperfect simulacrum of it in the imperfect world in which we find ourselves. It is in this spirit, then, that I invite you to join me in the world of Brambly Hedge.

Brambly Hedge is a community at peace with itself and at peace with its past. Countless generations of mice have lived in the cottages of the hedgerow that runs along the banks of the millstream, and their collective wisdom has been treasured up in traditional customs and rituals that each generation passes on to the next.

The mice are comfortable in their environment, and its natural rhythms give shape to their understanding of the passage of time. The cycle of seedtime and harvest, midsummer and midwinter, intertwines with the patterns of birth and marriage, youth and maturity (there is no death in this Arcadia) of the mice’s lives. Theirs is a ritual year, marked by festivals during which their communal memory is expressed and reinforced in song and story. The mice even have a kind of natural religion complete with grace at meals, wedding ceremonies, and quasi-baptismal liturgies. These rites are solemnised by the Old Vole, who acts as a kind of parish priest, though whether it is his oldness or his being a vole that especially qualifies him for the cure of souls is never quite made clear.

Mice at harvest.

The effect of the mice’s reverence for the past and their common ritual life is an organic social harmony. Each mouse knows herself to be part of a whole that, while deeply rooted in place, transcends the present moment to embrace the dead, the living, and the unborn. Within this whole, its parts – the individuals and families of Brambly Hedge – retain their integrity in their distinctive roles, from Lord and Lady Woodmouse, who superintend the affairs of the mice from their ancestral fastness, to Basil, the perpetually sozzled keeper of the hedgerow cellars, to the children who help their parents with their daily tasks.

The politics of Brambly Hedge reflect this harmony. Brambly Hedge is governed, loosely speaking, with benevolent hereditary paternalism by a duumvirate of mice, Lord Woodmouse and his father-in-law Mr Apple, the warden of the Store Stump. They preside over the affairs of the hedgerow, convene the mice, and coordinate their collective action, but they also take their share in the common labour. The doors of Lord Woodmouse’s hereditary seat, the Old Oak Palace, are flung wide to his subjects, and his kitchen and halls are ever ready to accommodate their merrymaking. If there is a hierarchy among the mice, it is a hierarchy without hubris.

The Old Oak Palace, the ancestral seat of Lord Woodmouse and the venue for the mice’s annual Midwinter celebration.

This is not noblesse oblige, for that would imply an extrinsic relationship between a distinct class of commons and an elite who condescends to do them favours. There is no such distinction between the leaders of Brambly Hedge and the community they lead; their relation is as natural and unmediated as the relation of head to body. Barklem paints, in essence, the perfect picture of an idealised pre- or early-modern village, with its close collaboration between the lettered and hereditary leadership and the ordinary householders. Readers of Eamon Duffy’s sensitive descriptions of village life in Tudor England will see more than a little of Morebath in Brambly Hedge.

The economy of Brambly Hedge embodies principles that, while they would curl the toes and upset the digestion of the libertarian right, exemplify the Tory ideal of a harmonious relation between the parts of the community and the whole. Food, gathered by the common efforts of the mice, is deposited in the Store Stump to be distributed, under the kindly eye of old Mr Apple, to each family without payment to furnish their tables. The private kitchens of Brambly Hedge supply in turn the round of feasts and festivals that lend rhythm and order to the hedgerow’s common life. Housing, too, is provided from the community’s shared stock: cottages left empty by the passing of one generation are given as needed to newly-formed families.

The interior of the Store Stump, from which the hedgerow kitchens are supplied.

In the economy of Brambly Hedge, there is an organic and reciprocal relationship between the private lives of households and the public life of the community as a whole. The community supplies the needs and respects the integrity of the household, and the household in turn acknowledges its obligations to and enriches the life of the community.

What the libertarian rightist might condemn as rank rodent dirigisme is anything but. The economy of Brambly Hedge is in no sense directed by an abstract “state” because no such thing as a state could possibly exist in the narrow sphere of the hedgerow’s common life. Indeed, the binary of a state- versus a market-directed economy simply breaks down: if the community is too small for anything like a state to exist, it is also too tight-knit to allow the needs of its members to be met or not according to the mere whims of supply and demand. Free from the cold indifference of the market and the cack-handed concern of the state, the economy of Brambly Hedge is just that, the nomos of the oikos, the law of the household, the practical expression of shared affection and common interest in a hyper-local setting.

It is perhaps this aspect of Brambly Hedge that seems to us most fantastical, not least because it depends upon a social cohesion that no longer exists in Canada. Such economies may still limp along in the very smallest towns, and can perhaps still be found, like huddled groups of dispossessed noble emigres, in little enclaves in cities. But how could such an arrangement, which depends on friendship and trust between a handful of households, be implemented in a country of 40 million people? Here, again, the value of utopia is in offering us, not a model to be replicated, but an ideal to strive for.

The economic system of Brambly Hedge springs naturally from the community’s shared identity, its sense of itself as a community, and it is sustained by the bonds of neighbourly love. We could do worse in cultivating this Tory ideal than by investing our time and treasure in the “little platoons” (to pinch a phrase from Burke) – our churches, clubs, Legion and Oddfellows halls – that approximate the affectionate reciprocity of Brambly Hedge in the midst of the unfeeling anonymity that otherwise characterises our collective life. More than this, we might advocate – and vote for politicians who advocate – for the renewal of our common national identity against the centrifugal forces of left and right that seek to undermine it.

I am conscious that the picture I have painted of the utopian vision of Brambly Hedge may seem rather more sterile and static than the stories themselves. I own my limitations, and I can recommend only one way to supply the defects of my description: read the stories for yourselves and, more importantly if you wish to raise up a new generation of Tories, read them to your little ones. You will be glad you did, and your Tory imagination will thank you for it.

Images in this article are taken from The Complete Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem (London: HarperCollins, 2011) and are reproduced for the purposes of criticism and review under section 29.1 of the Copyright Act.

By Mitch Proctor

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.

By Brent H. Cameron

For those who feel that the state of western democratic politics has gone bananas, you are probably right – both literally and figuratively.

Consider that there are about 1000 species of banana in the world, growing in 135 countries. Of those, 500 are edible. Yet one of those species – the Cavendish – accounts for 47 percent of all bananas consumed and, more importantly, about 95 percent of what you see in your grocery store. That means that virtually all of you will only have eaten 1/500th of the edible types of banana available on earth – even if you have eaten a banana a day for years on end.

But the dominance of this one type above all others has certain trade-offs:

They are unable to reproduce sexually, instead being propagated via identical clones. Due to this, the genetic diversity of the Cavendish banana is very low. This, combined with the fact the Cavendish is planted in dense chunks in a monoculture without other natural species to serve as a buffer, makes the Cavendish extremely vulnerable to disease, fungal outbreaks, and genetic mutation, possibly leading to eventual commercial extinction.

Some of you will be getting hungry while others will be asking why am I talking about bananas?

‘American conservatism’ is but one species of conservatism, just like what I call ‘Westminster Conservatism’ (which is indigenous to CANZUK countries like Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand). But the rise of American power – hard and soft –created a push to standardize the marketplace. Hollywood and Washington spent 80 years convincing themselves and whole swaths of the English-speaking world to ditch their own local variant of conservative for the shinier and tastier American one.

It happens subtly at first because one accentuates the similarities: the commitment to liberty and personal freedoms. You may not necessarily love the imported version over what you grew up with, but it is cheaper, more accessible and the taste is only marginally different – that and the big marketing push.

But, at some point, the new brand takes over more and more shelf space while the old brand steadily disappears. This was the crux of what George Grant was saying in his 1965 book Lament for a Nation. Combine that with the work of another great Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, and you cover both means and motive.

There is some predictability to it all. In every imperial age, the habits and customs of the metropole get transmitted outward. But we are not talking about Orientalism design aesthetics in Victorian London. We are talking about a political influence that causes the great-great-great grandchildren of United Empire Loyalists to express solidarity with the descendants of the Sons of Liberty who had made their ancestors refugees.

The sad reality is that despite the trend to displace local variants of conservatism with the US version, American conservatism was never actually meant for export. Consider that portion Washington’s Farewell Address published in 1796:

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.

We forget that America’s foray into these aforementioned ‘political connexions’ began in earnest in the aftermath of World War II, 149 years after Washington’s address. Liberal democratic powers continue to grapple with a United States that is becoming more isolationist and transactional, but this was essentially the default position for 60 percent of its existence.

Regardless of the back and forth of Washington politics, both Republicans and Democrats do take the concept of ‘American exceptionalism’ as a given. At its core is the belief that the truest expression of liberal democracy in human history is found in the origin story of the United States. By definition, this means that all other forms of governance external to the United States are, at best, imperfect and corrupted, and at worst, sinister and soulless.

Politically, in the context of Canada, our homegrown variants of liberalism and conservatism are viewed as being either quaint or an act of apostasy.

But here is the conundrum: if American exceptionalism says Canadian conservatives are following an illegitimate form of conservatism, and it holds that America is the only truly legitimate democracy in the world, then the only way you gain legitimacy is through conversion to the true path.

But American exceptionalism is a story meant for Americans to tell themselves, just as every nation on earth has their own histories and stories to interpret who and what they are. To devotees of the MAGA movement, Canadians may appear to be “lousy at being American.” This is true, but it is also true that they also make lousy Canadians. Neither take is morally superior to the other.

Canada was founded by peoples who, when presented with the choice in the late 1770s, rejected the American Revolution. They were not anti-democratic, but they did not believe democracy’s highest ideal was expressed by an organized mob who threatened to burn your house or string you up from the nearest tree. The Crown represented a stability that defied the vagaries of changing fashions, emotions and factionalism. The fact that the leaders of the American Revolution scrambled to draft a Constitution to restrain those vigilantism tendencies is of little surprise.

Like the Cavendish banana, the American variants of liberalism and conservatism have dominated the global marketplace. History and geopolitics made it better capitalized and gave it a better distribution network, to say nothing of the highly effective marketing campaign throughout the 20th century. But American conservatism, in particular, is not a monopoly, nor is it necessarily the best product for the tastes of the Canadian market.

Whether or not one wishes to apply the “Red Tory” moniker to what is needed is a point of worthy debate, but what should be of interest to all is the rehabilitation of organic forms of liberalism and conservatism that speak to the Canadian experience and are not simply ill-fitting hand-me-downs from south of the border.

We welcome readers to the Red Tory Standard.

This inaugural bi-monthly newsletter previews our upcoming articles for June, offering a brief introduction to each forthcoming piece. As our first letter to readers, we also take this opportunity to outline the purpose, content, and tone that will define The Red Tory Standard, along with a short description of the site’s current and future navigational tools.

The Red Tory Standard “exists to explore, articulate, renew, and promote a distinctly Canadian strain of conservatism, one rooted in tradition and oriented toward the common good”. Readers can expect articles in the form of historical commentary, book reviews, literary analysis, theological discussion, commentary on current events and issues, and personal reflections. (We invite you to read our full Mission Statement.)

It is our hope that we attract a thoughtful readership, uninterested in the latest contention for contention’s sake. We prefer timelessness, not timeliness; the enduring issues, not the most recent outrages. We are not journalists or social media personalities who rely on manufactured controversy for income; this frees us to provide thought-provoking commentary, not mere provocation. Our content is free and a “donate” button will not be found anywhere on our site. Neither are we aspiring partisan hacks positioning ourselves for future roles in party politics, nor are we aligned with any lobby groups, industries, or donor-driven organizations. We are like-minded Canadians of various occupations – academics, educators, writers, artists, clergymen, students, and other professions – who love our nation and have no vested interest in The Red Tory Standard other than it being an outlet for classic Red Tory thought.

Visitors to the journal will encounter a deliberately minimalist layout. We appreciate national symbols and heraldry, but they will not decorate our journal. Ideas are our focal point. As the journal grows, we will introduce a navigable table of contents organized by themes and topics, along with a general index.

An ongoing topic that our readers will naturally encounter is the definition of the term “Red Tory” itself. Our contributors are various shades of red, but we are all committed to correcting the mistaken notion floating about that Red Tories are “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” (a description that better fits Blue Grits). Likewise, while we maintain that a sense of moderation is a fundamental aspect of any authentic conservatism, we wholly reject the disparaging notion that a Red Tory is somehow “Liberal Lite”.

The first few months of publications will naturally contain a fair amount of definition and explanation of Red Toryism. Clif Clemotte argues that Red Toryism, although a label often misused today, is a political tradition that continues to express itself in voting patterns and beliefs. He draw four principles from historical Red Toryism to guide Canadian conservatives today: active governance, intervention and welfare, communitarianism, and internationalism. Victoria Savage explores the historical roots of Red Toryism, identifying the earliest thinkers and figures in Canadian history that informed the ideology. Mitch Proctor observes that while the modern Conservative Party of Canada often claims Sir John A. Macdonald as its founder, its actual ideological lineage is far more complex and now owes more to the Reform movement and Western populism than to Macdonald’s nation-building tradition. In a more general question of the direction of Canadian conservatism, Clif Clemotte makes the case that Benjamin Disraeli’s account of civil rights in connection to the notion of elevating equality is relevant to contemporary debates on the nature of Canadian conservatism, as it creates an intellectual space for a political vision which is neither classical liberalism nor post-liberalism.

Respect for the enduring relevance of our established institutions, history, and heritage lies at the heart of Red Tory thought. Our most central institution is our constitutional monarchy. Dave Langille reflects on the warm American reaction to King Charles’ recent speech to Congress, exploring what Canada’s tradition of “Peace, Order, and Good Government” and our living constitutional monarchy can still teach us about allegiance, continuity, and ordered liberty. Mark Graham explores George Grant’s argument that the Loyalists, by rejecting the American Revolution, rejected John Locke’s liberalism in favour of the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker. He also highlights the profound influence of classical Anglicanism on Canadian Toryism and later Red Tory thought. Brent Cameron argues that the powerful monoculture of American conservatism has displaced organic local variants of both conservatism and liberalism, leaving nations like ours with ill-fitting imports that ignore our historical rejection of American revolutionary excesses.

Literature, read through a Red Tory critical lens, will have a constant presence in the journal. Even books we read as a child are central to the formation of our political instincts and outlook. Kieran Wilson takes us to the world of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge stories, arguing that they offer glimpses of Tory utopia to kindle the conservative imagination of young and old alike.

We hope this inaugural edition offers a meaningful glimpse into the character and substance of The Red Tory Standard. We invite you to enjoy the journal, subscribe for free to receive new articles directly in your inbox, and join us in exploring our Canadian tradition that values ordered liberty, continuity, and the common good.