Farewell to the Party of Sir John A. Macdonald

(This article was originally written in 2003)

However Peter MacKay spins the story, he has agreed to the takeover of the Tory Party by the Canadian Alliance. If he is not stopped in the courts or by members of his own party, his deal with Stephen Harper will be consummated on December 6. What the proponents of the new Conservative Party of Canada have set out to kill is the political party that John A. Macdonald founded.

Why should Canadians in general, and not just those on the political right, be alarmed by this development?

Macdonald’s party was the great nation-building political instrument that fashioned Confederation and elaborated the National Policy, the economic doctrine that created a transcontinental Canadian economy. The Canadian Tory tradition, inseparably linked to the culture, ideas and policies of John A. Macdonald, shaped Canada in its formative decades. Macdonald’s deepest commitment was to the creation of a Canadian nation that would be able to sustain itself separate from the United States.

While pragmatic and capitalist, Macdonald’s political philosophy contained an element of paternalism and the belief in the large state that was strange on a continent where individualism and the market were the true deities. The state Macdonald constructed was imbued with these Tory notions. To build a railway across the country and to have institutions in place to receive hundreds of thousands of new settlers would require strong government intervention.

The Tory idea proved highly useful to Canadians for generations in their efforts to compete with the powerful nation to the south. In the first decade of the twentieth century, under the leadership of Adam Beck, a manufacturer from London, Ontario, the province of Ontario drew on the Tory creed when it created a publicly owned hydro-electric system. The inspiration behind Ontario Hydro, at the time the largest public utility on the continent, was that a public corporation could provide electricity at cost to consumers and businesses alike. Later, Tories established the Canadian National Railway, the Bank of Canada and the CBC.

To free market purists, the idea of the state acting to improve Canadian productivity and the promotion of Canadian culture is incomprehensible. They cannot help but see this as a statist heresy, or even as a diabolical leftist scheme. In truth, the idea had everything to do with the Tory view of the proper relationship between the state and society.

By contrast, the origins of the political culture of the Canadian Alliance are to be found in the unique social landscape of southern Alberta. In the last years of the nineteenth century, southern Alberta was the "last best west," the frontier that was still open to settlers after the American frontier was officially designated as closed. A much higher proportion of those who settled in this region of Alberta came from the United States than had been the case in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Many of the Americans who settled in southern Alberta brought with them an evangelical Protestant outlook. That outlook served as the cultural foundation for the development of important political movements that had an impact on Alberta and national politics.

Both on the left and the right, Alberta was to have its own brand of populist politics, heavily spiced with the views of American immigrants. In the depression years of the early 1930s, a charismatic political leader by the name of William Aberhart founded the Alberta Social Credit, the political movement to which the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance trace their roots. A native of Ontario, Aberhart moved to Calgary where he taught mathematics in a major high school and then became its principal. What he shared with many southern Albertans was Protestant fundamentalism.

Armed with the idea that Alberta needed an injection of "social credit", in the form of a dividend to be paid by the government to Albertans, Aberhart built a party that propelled him into the premier’s office in the 1935 election. With Aberhart’s election, Alberta’s populism became entrenched on the political right where it has remained ever since.

With Alberta’s major oil discoveries, beginning in the late 1940s, the province shifted from being Saskatchewan’s economic twin, to becoming a mighty petroleum power. A new populism, tailored to Alberta’s metropolitan stature as Canada’s petroleum power, emerged in the 1970s with the election of Peter Lougheed as premier in 1971. From Lougheed, with his wars with Pierre Trudeau over oil revenues, to Ralph Klein’s struggles against Jean Chretien over health care, the Kyoto Accord, and even the Iraq War, Calgary and rural southern Alberta have been the locus of power in the province.

And out of the culture of southern Alberta has come the newest power in Canadian federal politics, first the Reform Party and now the Canadian Alliance. Here the link goes straight back to the populism of William Aberhart and the Social Credit. Ernest Manning, a young man from a rural family in Saskatchewan, walked into Aberhart’s Prophetic Bible Institute in 1927 and enrolled in the Institute’s one year course in bible studies, becoming its first graduate. It was the most fortuitous choice of a course ever undertaken by a student in Canada. When Aberhart died in 1943, Manning succeeded him as premier and held that post until 1968.

His son Preston was the mastermind behind a new political vision of Canada and the place of the West in Confederation. His brainchild, the Reform Party, and later the Alliance pushed aside the Progressive Conservatives, to become the leading vehicle of the Canadian right. It is no accident, given its origins and its history in the "last best west", that the Canadian Alliance is the political party with the most natural affinity for American values and is the most pro-American party in Canada.

For the party of John A. Macdonald, John Diefenbaker, and Joe Clark to be taken over by a sectionalist, pro-American party that is politically dead east of Manitoba is a shocking development. It is a loss to all who believe the Liberals ought not to be the only party to whom Canadians can turn to form a national government.