I have been asked to give a summary of the development and current condition of conservatism in the United States and Canada. Please allow me to begin with a bit of historical interpretation. The nature of American and Canadian political society, including their somewhat different notions of conservatism, are derived from their early days.
Champlain founded Canada with the dream of a great French state in the New World, independent of the Americans, and this dream was modified and relaunched by Sir Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, the greatest of the British governors, as a great bicultural country also independent of the Americans.
The Americans began with something like the famous surmise of F. Scott Fitzgerald several centuries after, from “The Great Gatsby,” of all places, of: “a land that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.” This was thirty years before the Space Age.
Canada’s was always a sterner vision. Jacques Cartier famously said, on first sight of the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, “It is the land God gave to Cain.”
The incursions of the French from New France, Quebec, so aggravated New England and New York in the 18th century that, led by their brilliant representative in London, Benjamin Franklin, the Americans prevailed upon the British to expel the French from Canada, in the Seven Years’ War. That war was actually started by subaltern George Washington, with no authority whatever, when he attacked a French detachment where Pittsburgh now stands, in the name of the governor of Virginia, in 1753, three years before war was officially declared.
This was really the first world war, as it was conducted in India, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America as well as Europe and was known as the Seven Years, French and Indian, Silesian, Pomeranian, and Carnatic war in the different participating countries.
The fate of Canada and the United States was determined by what had emerged as the division of forces in Europe: France had the greatest army and Britain the greatest navy, and while France herself was impregnable to anything but a coalition of all the other European powers (such as eventually opposed Napoleon), Britain took what she wanted overseas and France was confined to Britain’s colonial leavings.
The French conundrum was that it could never decide whether it wished to cross the Rhine or the English Channel and so, apart from Napoleon’s magnificent military expeditions, it never really crossed either.
New France, accordingly, had little chance of durable survival, but for Canada to survive it had to begin as a French undertaking, or it would have been assimilated from the beginning to the American colonies and then the rebellious states. And it had to become British approximately when the Americans ceased to be British to avoid being vacuumed up into the American Revolution, and to retain the protection of the British after the Americans had achieved their independence.
While Britain could defeat other European powers overseas, it could not maintain forces of occupation indefinitely overseas and was vulnerable to well-organized local unrest, as the Americans demonstrated. The American Revolution was complicated by the facts that about a third of the British, led by Edmund Burke and William Pitt, sympathized with the Americans and a third of the Americans opposed the Revolution, and many moved to Canada, attracting British loyalty in their defence.
The future of this continent was effectively determined by one of the great diplomatic achievements in all of history. Benjamin Franklin, having helped to persuade the British to remove the French from Canada, 20 years later, almost by his own persuasive talents alone, convinced the French to assist the Americans in removing the British from America. The British doubled their debt in the Seven Years’ War, and the largest cost was in the war in North America. Because the Americans were the wealthiest of all categories of British citizens, the British naturally expected the Americans to help pay for the expensive colonial expedition that the British had conducted on their behalf.
Had they required the Americans to accept the Stamp Tax before they set out to remove the French, the Americans would certainly have agreed, but Britain was left in the difficult position of trying to collect payment for services already rendered with a tax that it could not ultimately collect.
The Americans responded with the facile argument of no taxation without representation. The British were faced with the extremely difficult challenge of a guerrilla war among kindred people 3,000 miles away.
Once the French intervened, having been persuaded by Franklin that it was quite in order for an absolute monarchy to go to war on behalf of democracy, republicanism, revolution, and secessionism, the war was unsustainable for the British. The Americans had their country, Britain salvaged Canada, which had the prospect of ultimate independence separate from the Americans, and France was dismissed by Franklin as soon as American independence was obtained.
France had a sensation of revenge against Britain but had only six years to wait for the fall of the Bastille, its own revolution that quickly descended into the Reign of Terror, and more than twenty years of war that extended French rule from Lisbon to Moscow and from Copenhagen to Naples and even Alexandria, but cost France over a million dead and installed Great Britain as the world’s leading power for a century after the Battle of Waterloo.
Canada had the time it needed to launch itself peacefully as a country, and the United States had a heroic start. It held the world’s attention and has not forfeited it these nearly 250 years. All serious countries have a mythos, none more skillfully crafted and maintained than that of the United States. The leaders of the American Revolution were an awkward alliance of avaricious Boston lawyers and southern plantation-owning slave-holders.
The effective cause of the American Revolution had little to do with human rights and was really, as we have seen, a slightly grubby tax squabble. The prominence among the revolutionaries of slaveholders made America’s claimed raison d’être as the world’s new and unique repository of human freedom implausible.
The chief author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, even began by blaming King George III, poor old Farmer George, whom he arraigned as if he were a defendant at the Nuremberg Trials, for the British importation of slavery into the United States. Jefferson did not persist with this, because Franklin and John Adams, who were abolitionists, warned him that given his status as a slave-holder and allegedly the parent, with one of his slaves, of seven children, there could be credibility problems.
In the late 18th century, though some countries were defined by dynastic connections, such as the Habsburg Empire, almost all were defined by cultural unity: the French spoke French, the English spoke English, the Spanish spoke Spanish, the Dutch, Swedes, Portuguese, Russians, and others spoke their own languages.
But the United States was only the second English-speaking country in the world, and it was in order to endow itself with a compelling identity as a basis of national purpose and morale that it staked out, from the start, its standing as the world’s premier haven for human liberty and the rights of man.
On its face, it is preposterous that America, as the world’s principal slave-holding country, represented itself as a “new order of the ages,” where it was held to be “self evident that all men are created equal.” Americans had no more civic freedom after the Revolution than before, other than that they had a resident government which they chose. They had no more freedom than the British, the Swiss, or most of the Dutch or Scandinavians, and they were lumbered with the evil of slavery.
But they had the advantage of being 3,000 miles from Europe, with comparatively few class stratifications and ethnic prejudices, almost a continent of their own, which offered the world access to a land of unlimited wealth and opportunity under a stable constitutional government. It was a brilliant launch.
While Canada’s experience was forcibly more modest than the American, it was not, I believe, ultimately less promising or distinguished. In the War of the American Revolution and the War of 1812 that followed it 30 years later, Canada narrowly resisted American attempts to suborn or conquer it, largely because the French were loyal to the agreement they had made with Carleton in the Quebec Act of 1774.
After four years lobbying the home government, Carleton wrung from Britain for the French-Canadians that Great Britain would guarantee the liberty of the Roman Catholic Church, which was officially discriminated against everywhere else in the British Empire at that time, and that the French language and the French civil law would be conserved and promoted; and in return, French Quebeckers would be loyal to the British crown. This was a brilliant and fateful act of statesmanship by Carleton.
In two long lifetimes, America rose from a few million colonists on a distant shore to the greatest eminence ever enjoyed by any state or people in history, an influence that has permeated the entire world for over a century, and despite perturbations, remains at its crest today.
What Canadians generally fail to recognize is that we essentially kept pace with that growth, without the mighty and unprecedentedly propagandized mythos of the world’s self-nominated (and widely accepted) trustee and supreme hope for human liberty.
From Yorktown in 1783 to the end of World War II and the beginning of the atomic age in 1945, 162 years, the U.S. population multiplied by over 40 (3.2 million to 135 million), and Canada’s multiplied by 60, from 200,000 to 12 million.
The Americans walked on eggshells as the great issue of slavery remained to be resolved. By the 1840s, Canadians concluded that they rightfully must have the same civic liberties and authority to elect their own leaders as their British and American cousins. Revolution, the American precedent, was not an option; the British could have been got rid of, but would have been replaced at once by American occupiers.
In the awkward and not evidently heroic manner of much of Canada’s political development, Canada generated the Gilbert and Sullivan 1837 uprisings of Louis Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie, in which 325 people died, but the great majority were loyal to the British crown, and the effect was precisely as had been hoped, not by the insurrectionists but by those who subdued them. It was enough of a disturbance to convince the British government that something should be done, but not enough to exasperate the British into losing patience with Canada, and giving it to the United States in exchange for other consideration.
In their ineffable manner, the British, confused but benign, produced a solution which, had it been strictly enacted, would have assured the complete failure of Canada. It was designed to end discontent in Canada by requiring the assimilation of the French to the English-speaking population. The governor who recommended this, Lord Durham, assumed that it was what French-Canadians wanted, but, of course, it was anathema to the French and it was not something the English wished either. Durham was sacked for exceeding his authority, though his plan to unify Quebec and Ontario was implemented, and so the first authentic Canadian-born political leaders, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, acquiesced in the Union and initiated French-English cooperation. Instead of trying to use it as a tool for assimilation as Durham had intended, Baldwin and LaFontaine turned it into an engine for agitation for sovereignty in a bicultural country.
Almost all powers except foreign policy were achieved in 1848, a year marked by great upheaval in Europe, including the overthrow of the House of Orleans in France, and its replacement by the Second Republic led by Louis-Napoleon, Bonaparte, and the ouster of the great Austrian chancellor Metternich after 39 years. Baldwin and LaFontaine retired from politics after achieving responsible government, like Cincinnatus and George Washington. They were not office-seekers.
When the slavery issue, which had long immobilized the United States, was resolved by the U.S. Civil War, in which 750,000 Americans died in a population of 31 million, the United Sates emerged with the greatest army and finest generals in the world, and a profound lack of appreciation for Britain’s scarcely concealed preference that the southern secession from the American Union be successful.
In the circumstances, the leadership of most parties among the French and English-Canadians recommended to the British the swift confederation of all the British entities near the U.S. border and an attempt to organize the territory as an autonomous country and extend it to the Pacific coast around a transcontinental railway.
The United States, after its horrible war, was in no mood for conflict with Great Britain, but the new Dominion government in 1867 judged it prudent to deploy all 50,000 of its soldiers and militiamen, a force almost as large as what Canada could deploy today with fifteen times as great a population, to repel the nasty and belligerent Irish Fenian Society raiders in America’s large Irish population.
The principal political personality and chief founder of the new country, John A. Macdonald, was the leading figure at the Washington Conference of American and British diplomats and himself in 1871 and established Canada in the eyes of both senior powers as a distinct national identity with legitimate national interests.
Canada’s emergence as an independent country could thus hardly be more easily distinguishable from that of the United States 85 years before. The United States fought its way to independence with a citizen army shouldering its own rifles, and sponsored by France, and Canada was given birth by Britain, with no violence and no tradition of armed self-help or military activity. The senior country seized its independence and elaborated a stirring if factually somewhat embellished spirit of heroic assertion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and Canada was born painlessly and had the objectives of “peace, order, and good government” conferred upon it by its distant imperial queen-protectress.
The United States has always had a unique sense of showmanship and of the spectacle, from the Declaration of Independence to the Super Bowl. Canada, as historian W.L. Morton has remarked, is “a country strong only in moderation and governable only by compromise.”
That does not deprive this country of the nobility of her achievements. Canada was bound together by a railway that was a wonder of the world, infinitely more difficult to lay down over the Canadian Shield than its American competitors, and to finance in a country that had no serious capital markets. In the nearly 50 years between the end of the Civil War, and the beginning of World War I, the United States expanded economically and demographically on a scale the world had not imagined to be possible.
It almost tripled in population in that time, and so did Canada, even though it meant advertising for immigrants throughout much of Europe and accepting as many as six percent of Canada’s entire population as immigrants in a single year.
Wilfrid Laurier effectively saved Canadian Confederation in 1917 by telling Prime Minister Robert Borden that if he imposed conscription for combat service in World War I on French Canadians, who felt little mother-country loyalty to France or Great Britain, just by a vote of Parliament, he, Laurier, would lose the leadership of French Canadians to Henri Bourassa and Quebec would be waiting to secede. He said that Borden would win an election or a referendum, and that would be sufficiently democratic for Laurier to defeat the separatists in Quebec.
This was what occurred, and as Laurier also predicted, though not to Borden, because of the stranglehold the Liberals then gained on Quebec, the Liberals also won twelve of the next 14 full-term general elections, and governed for 51 of the 63 years between 1921 and 1984.
As a country with a revolutionary tradition, the United States has always considered the right to own and carry firearms as implicit in the success of the American Revolution, and in the right and ability of all Americans to protect their property. This was stated in the Declaration of Independence, particularly in reference to the native people, whom Jefferson described ungenerously, to say the least.
This helped give to American conservatism the character of individualism, of the rugged citizen, practically completely independent of the state, and in some respects, suspicious of it, patriotic and participating in political life, but above all in a society of individuals, in which the unallocated powers clause of the Bill of Rights attached to the Constitution at its outset holds that powers not accorded the federal government belong to the states or the people, to individual citizens themselves.
In Canada, conservatism has always been an alternative policy to Liberalsim, first liberalism of the Burkean school: wide freedom of choice and behaviour, and more recently of the statist, more dirigiste, big-government model. In the United States, conservatism has been an enlarged private sector, relatively low taxes, a relatively unregulated meritocracy, and a foreign policy more based on the national than on collegial interests. The constitutional right to bear arms has been indicative and supportive of the muscular citizenship of a very free people. In Canada, the Imperial monarchical state conferred liberties that conservatives and liberals benefit from and exercise in a narrower band of prerogatives, largely defined by rates of tax and the extent of behavioral regulation.
This brings us to the perturbed present where a glance at both Canada and the United States, and Great Britain, might incite the inference that the mainly English-speaking countries have lost the capacity for self-government. But with regime change, as both Canada and the U.S. have surely now earned the right to enact, we could slightly replicate the tale of the tortoise and the hare.
It is unwise to be too confident in explaining complex historical phenomena, but it appears that what Mr. Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil” created a reservoir of resentments in the U.S. African-American community that was as much released as appeased by the confirmation of racial equality a century after the abolition of slavery. It is certainly possible to identify with the anger of African-Americans, but it is also true that no society in the history of the world has made such efforts as the United States not only to emancipate a formerly servile and subjugated element of its population, but to raise it up to absolute equality with the majority. This combination of the legacy of slavery in a country with 400 million firearms has produced some manifestations of freedom that are distressingly violent.
Let’s look at our prospects. I regret speaking unflatteringly of the American administration when that country’s president is visiting us; I always respect that great office and its occupant. Except for President Biden and President Obama, it has been my great privilege to have known all the U.S. presidents starting with Lyndon Johnson. However, the largely contemptible national political media of the United States may try to disguise the fact, the current administration is a disaster.
Inflation, workforce shrinkage, the deluge of 5,000 or more illiterate peasants illegally across the southern border every day covering the smuggling of tons of Fentanyl (from which more Americans die every year than in all the country’s wars since 1945), the Green Terror, the imminent arrival of Iran as a nuclear power to join North Korea, the abandonment of $85 billion of modern military hardware to the Taliban, skyrocketing crime rates, and collapsed education standards will not be defensible in the elections next year.
The ultimate demonstration of the debility of the American political structure is the seven-year lawless assault on Donald Trump. Having known him for 25 years, I am well aware of his shortcomings and am not particularly puritanical about how politics are conducted. But the leadership of the intelligence agencies and the FBI were knowingly complicit in a completely false allegation of illegal collusion by Trump with a foreign power to distort the result of the 2016 presidential election. Trump was subjected to two unfounded impeachment trials, was deprived of re-election by recourse to an unconstitutional use of millions of unsolicited, unverifiable, imprecisely distributed ballots. And he was accused of fomenting an insurrection when he had warned the House speaker that their could be hooligans among his audience on January 6, 2021; Trump offered 20,000 national guardsmen as reinforcement for the Capitol but Speaker Pelosi declined.
The two ultimate guardrails protecting the American presidential selection process are that the courts will not overturn an apparent presidential election result, and ex-presidents are not indicted. If the notoriously politicized U.S. justice system has been so deformed that a stale-dated response to blackmail is reconfigured as a crime charged against Trump, it will either assure his re-election or confirm that the U.S. is no longer, in its most important constitutional function, a society of laws.
In a country where federal prosecutors abuse the plea bargain rules by extorting and suborning testimony with threats and promises of non-prosecution for perjury, to achieve a 98 percent success rate in federal prosecutions, 95 percent of those without a trial, that is not such a drastic step as it might seem. Either the Democrats will think better of the alleged pending prosecution of Trump, or he will be re-elected, or both.
In order to sell Trumpism without Trump, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had to oppose the indictment of Trump unconditionally. Unlike former vice president Mike Pence, Ambassador Nikki Haley, and others, DeSantis flunked that litmus test. And now he has flunked the Ukrainer test as well. If he can’t do damage control or produce a rival issue to the persecution of Trump, he will have to wait until 2028.
As for Canada, Quebec has effectively begun the formal extirpation of the English language and the prime minister has taken it upon himself to make to the world on behalf of all of us the confession that our forbears attempted some form of genocide on the native people. No government that has acquiesced in the first and proclaimed the second is fit to be re-elected. Apart from those problems, we are suffering from a severe annual deficit in investment capital flows, are steadily falling in comparative national per capita wealth measurement, our health care is inadequate, almost insolvent, and reduced to advocating the merits of suicide to reduce its deficit.
Our education system is a colossal unemployment deferral scheme that at immense public expense graduates huge numbers in fields from which they could not possibly make a living. Our strength is natural resources and instead of making the most of them, we regard them with shame and neglect, and have declared war on our greatest industry, oil and gas. We are a free-loading ally. No one has won four consecutive full-term elections except Macdonald and Laurier, and the amiable incumbent is not in their category.
I believe that Pierre Poilievre will be elected, that he will effectively defend conservatism from the inevitable barrage of partisan and media obloquy as harsh and primitive by explaining it, accurately, as greater freedom for individual Canadians, with no diminution of benefit for the disadvantaged. In doing so, I think we will graduate back to having a functioning two-party system for the first time since before World War I, apart from the Mulroney-Turner years.
The world is rubbing its eyes in astonishment at the woke self-mutilation of America and the sophomoric morality play of government in Canada. I believe that in the one country as in the other, we will not continue to disappoint a world that has come to expect, and desperately needs, us to do better.
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