Harper's history key to a Conservative future
David Akin, National Bureau Chief
March 28th, 2014
OTTAWA - Both his fans and his critics agree on one thing about Stephen Harper. He wants to transform the country, so Canadians will come to see his Conservatives and not the Liberals as the natural governing party.
By the election of 2015, he will have done much in that regard.
But to make that work endure, the Conservatives need history on their side. They need a narrative of Canada in which Conservative Party values are integral to the story. Voters who buy this history will then turn to Conservative leaders as the default choice in this century the way Canadians turned to Liberal leaders by default in the last century.
Governments have been turning to history to legitimize their rule pretty much forever. Shakespeare's history plays, for example, featuring heroes like Henry V or villains like Richard III, were endorsed by Queen Elizabeth I's censors precisely because they told England's history in a way that would help solidify what was, at the time, a relatively shaky monarchy.
In Canada, the last half of the 20th century was sustained by a reading of Canadian history in which the Liberals' Constitution Act and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982 played a central role. Liberals in Ottawa were (and still are) flabbergasted that the current Conservative government didn't do enough to celebrate the charter's 30th anniversary in 2012.
For Liberals, the charter is a foundational document in their narrative of our history - a history in which English, French, First Nations worked towards the compromise of that 1982 Constitution. Liberals are unabashedly proud of that work and, if you ask them, they will invariably say it's one of the things the "defines" Canada.
But Conservatives (and New Democrats, for that matter) say "charter love" defines a Liberal. They believe the text of the charter is flawed. And without Quebec the whole process is flawed - a work half-done.
Conservatives, in any event, prefer the Bill of Rights, brought in by Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker's government in 1960. The Bill of Rights spoke to the protection of property rights - central to just about any conservative philosophy - while the charter did not.
In any event, dry constitutional negotiations or House of Commons debate are not nearly so evocative of Conservative values as a history of the Canadian people which show us to be a vibrant people establishing our dominion over nature (Diefenbaker's DEW line to Sir John A. Macdonald's CPR) or over American invaders (The War of 1812).
"As I reflect on Diefenbaker's legacy," Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said this week, "I realise that our past makes me optimistic about our future. What we can offer the world is more important, not less. More relevant, not less. I think that it is fair to say our country has defied the low expectations of 'middle power'. We have defied it with the ambition of leading rather than following."
Baird's 2,000-word speech was a neat encapsulation of this Conservative view of our history. There was a brief mention of Dief's Bill of Rights, but much talk about how the Chief stood up to Soviet communism, just as Harper is standing up to Russian imperialism today.
"We are builders and pioneers," Baird said. "We are warriors when war is thrust upon us, and we are compassionate when confronted by catastrophe."
Professional historians have been taking issue with Conservatives for this reading of history but their argument is a column for another day.
Today, it's worth marking Baird's speech as a manifesto, a rationale for the Harper government's decision to spend millions marking the War of 1812, and millions more for upcoming First World War commemorations.
It is through the re-telling of these stories that Harper hopes Conservatives will be able to displace Liberals as Canada's "natural governing party".
