Is this a founded generalization?
I hear this about European vs USA politics too. Perhaps very broadly, but when you start looking at individual philosophies and policies it doesn’t really hold up.
No. In general our Conservatives are quite a bit more liberal in nature than the Republicans. But I certainly wouldn’t say they lean more to the left than a U.S. Democrat.
There are regional differences too. You’d find the Conservatives in the prairie provinces much more hard-lined than say, along the east coast. In general our conservatives are softer that U.S. conservatives. Like oh, say you won’t find as many of our conservatives being as uptight about marijuana, but they’d still get their knickers in a twist over same-sex marriage.
Conservatism in Canada is just different than it is in the U.S. On the one hand, conservatives tolerate things like hate speech laws, socialized medicine, and other intrusions into the market. On the other, some conservatives here can make the moral majority look like party animals.
The ‘liberal’ nature of conservatives is much more pronounced in eastern conservatives. The Progressive Conservative party had a large proportion of ‘red Tories’ who were quite a ways over to the left, and in fact when that party merged with the much more conservative Alliance party, a number of them fled to the Liberals or resigned. So the Conservative party that exists today is much more conservative than the old Tory party that represented ‘conservatives’ in Canada.
The leadership of the new Conservatives in Canada is VERY conservative, with more of a libertarian bent than the old conservatives which were formed more from religious farmers and similar people. Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative party, is an intellectual - a member of a group of professors and intellectuals from the University of Calgary. They’re free-market urban conservatives, much like you might find at the CATO institute or the Fraser Institute, or the Chicago school of economics. He’d have a lot more in common with, say, Newt Gingrich than with Jerry Falwell.
Comparing “conservatives” or “liberals” between two countries is nearly impossible. Canadian conservatives are conservative with respect to Canadian issues, many of which either don’t exist in the United States, are very different, or are at very different levels of importance.
Well, it’s fair to say that even the most conservative British Tory and the most conservative “Progressive Conservative” in Canada accept and take for granted a degree of socialism that even the most far-left Democrat in the U.S. probably wouldn’t dare propose.
Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney MAY not have liked their nations’ socialized health care systems, but both knew better than to make any sweeping changes to it. Very few American Democrats would dare push for a comparable national health care system.
To THAT extent, I’d say Canadian conservatives stand to the left of most American Democrats.
Snork!
I concede that i haven’t really kept up with the shifts in Canadain conservatism since i lived in Vancouver, except for following local BC politics. It’s entirely possible that the Canadian Conservatives are now of a rather libertarian bent.
But, if they are, and if their policies are similar to those of the CATO Institute, then it’s pretty nonsensical to also compare them to Newt Gingrich. Despite some of his free-market, small-government rhetoric, Gingrich was a pork-barrel king who never saw a government subsidy he didn’t like, as long as the recipient of the subsidy was a corporation or conservative interest group rather than a “welfare mom” (his term, not mine).
I may not always agree with libertarian groups like the CATO Institute, but i can at least respect the honesty of their position. And it’s quite different from politicians like Gingrich who talk a small-government game for PR purposes, but who legislate in a big-government way.
It’s odd that you’d say that, because it seems to me that the new Tories are much more socially conservative than the old Tories were. Certainly Harper isn’t pushing the party to adopt libertarian positions on notable social issues currently up for grabs, like same-sex marriage or decriminalization of marijuana. On the other hand, the last remnants of the PCs had largely distanced themselves from that sort of social conservatism. Morever, it’s rather ironic that you’d talk about the old conservatives being religious farmers when the first two leaders of the Reform/Alliance/New Conservative party were pastors.
This discussion seems very familiar to me. In fact, I believe we’ve had it before, where I provided rather solid evidence that Harper is indeed a self-described Burkean social conservative.
And indeed, search bears me out. See our exchange in the big Canadian election thread beginning here.
As to the OP: what RickJay said.
No, I agree with you, actually. I wasn’t very accurate in the way I described him. ‘Libertarian’ isn’t the best description, but I was trying to draw a distinction between him and the old Reform types. And I didn’t mean to suggest that he wasn’t religious.