Alberta election proves Red Tories alive and well

When Stephen Harper took over the right in 2004, his victory appeared to signal the demise of that stock figure in Canadian politics, the Red Tory.

Harper’s more muscular brand of conservatism had little use for those who thought government had a legitimate role in restraining markets.

Some Red Tories, like former federal minister Sinclair Stevens, left the new Conservative Party. Those that remained tended to keep their heads down.

But as events in Alberta and Ontario showed this week, Red Toryism — that peculiar Canadian mix of conservative and communitarian ideologies — is alive and well.

In Alberta, the decisive election win by Alison Redford’s ruling Progressive Conservatives surprised pollsters and analysts — including me.

After 41 years of PC rule in the province, a victory by Danielle Smith’s upstart Wildrose Party had seemed inevitable.

For one thing, Smith is far closer ideologically to Harper — particularly on issues like climate change (neither thinks it is real).

And Alberta appears to love Harper, giving him all but one seat in the last federal election.

But in the end Albertans rejected Smith in favour of Redford’s more progressive conservatism.

Why the federal-provincial disconnect? Certainly Albertans seem to think that Harper’s hard-line Conservatives will better protect their interests in far-away Ottawa.

But at home, they are much like other Canadians. They want a provincial government that will not only manage its finances well but that will soften some of the edges of the free-market economy.

Or, to put it another way, they want a Red Tory government.

The concept of the Red Tory, famously popularized by University of Toronto political scientist Gad Horowitz, was designed to explain a persistent strain in Canadian politics.

Parties that are successful in this country tend to marry fiscal conservatism with social progressivism. They support free markets but don’t make a fetish of them.

As a result, Red Tories don’t hesitate to intervene in the economy to serve what they define as the public interest. Successive Red Tory governments used the state to build railways and public hydro-electricity networks. One invented the CBC.

Not all Red Tories label themselves conservative. Manitoba’s business-friendly New Democratic government is arguably a Red Tory regime. So is Dalton’s McGuinty’s Ontario Liberal government, with its ambitious plans to force-feed a green energy industry.

Indeed, this week’s Liberal-NDP accord over the Ontario budget has a classically Red Tory cast to it.

The budget itself outlines a harsh austerity regime for the province, harsher even than that proposed for Canada as a whole by the Harper government.

The NDP-Liberal accord maintains that harshness. Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats made no effort to turn the government away from its plans to reduce the real wages of public sector workers.

Nor does the NDP appear to have any qualms about McGuinty’s plans to scale back health spending.

Instead, both parties offered up Red Tory compromises, centred on a plan to have the rich pay more in taxes.

The Liberals then agreed to spend a little more on the poor — which makes them seem compassionate.

And the NDP agreed that all revenues raised by new taxes should go to pay down the deficit — which makes them seem fiscally responsible.

In the end, that leaves Horwath and McGuinty effectively arguing over who is the better Red Tory.

We already know that Redford has successfully defended the Red Tory brand in Alberta. The odd man out in this round is Harper. A Conservative certainly. But no Red.

Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Thomas Walkom