Canada’s libertarians: holding the mike, but not much to say

The only thing more annoying than a sore winner is an ignorant one. In the last couple of decades, virtually all the leading voices of right-wing opinion in Canada have steadily become more restrained and moderate, which is to say, steadily more libertarian, yet the libertarians themselves remain in hostile denial of this victory.

My pals at the Western Standard, one of Canada’s leading libertarian webzones, have been having a lot of “whither libertarianism?” type discussions lately, hashing back and forth as to whether or not their preferred ideology is compatible with Canada’s conservative movement, and if not, how to ensure libertarian voices do not go unheard in the national discourse.

The whole issue rings fairly hollow, and has the taint of a manufactured crisis. Libertarians in Canada are actually doing much, much better than they themselves are willing to admit, and, as an intellectual movement, have in fact largely eclipsed all other forms of right-wing thought in this country. A particularly revealing moment can be found in a recent CBC interview on the matter; intending to showcase a debate between a traditional conservative and a libertarian, the host is startled to find out that her “conservative” guest is actually just another libertarian. Oops.

The rise of a homogeneous Canadian media and political class, who, by background and education, are fundamentally disinterested in social/cultural issues but obsessed with financial and legal ones, has in large part displaced any truly “conservative” voices from the contemporary partisan debate in this country. Marci MacDonald’s wild conspiracies notwithstanding, there is no organized “religious right” in Canada, nor is there any identifiable network of John Birch/Pat Buchanan-style traditionalists. Though Canada did, at one time, have vibrant paleoconservative organizations and Anglo-rights groups, notably the grassroots Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform and the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada, they have long since withered on the vine; shunned and denounced, if acknowledged at all. Even identifiably “Tory” outfits promoting a robustly class-conscious, hierarchical vision of Canada are now few and far between.

Libertarians have almost single-handily filled this ideological vacuum. Indeed, if we define “libertarian” as one who favors personal liberty, free-markets, and individual choice at the expense of government coercion, state planning, and arbitrary moral codes, then practically every single institution and personality forming Canada’s mainstream “right wing” establishment is libertarian in some form.

People can and do debate how effective Stephen Harper has been in implementing his stated agenda, but the statements themselves have been quite unambiguous. The Conservatives’ 2008 policy declaration announces in its opening lines that the party believes in “fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities” and supports the idea that government should be “fiscally prudent and … limited to those responsibilities which cannot be discharged reasonably by the individual.” A purer definition of libertarianism would be hard to concoct, and it is precisely this sort of founding purpose that has made issues like abortion, the death penalty, multiculturalism, and (now) same-sex marriage verboten within the Harper caucus. If there was a battle for the soul of the Conservative Party, the paper trail seems to clearly indicate who the winners were.

When it comes to the media, Canada doesn’t exactly possess a vibrant right-wing punditocracy. At best, we have some high profile critics of the left, almost all of whom opine from a decidedly libertarian perspective.

The National Post editorial board, for instance, Canada’s leading generator of anti-Liberal decrees, routinely promotes fairly radical individual-rights initiatives, such as the legalization of marijuana and prostitution, and rarely misses an opportunity to denounce the RCMP. In the the 2008 US presidential election they endorsed Ron Paul.

Andrew Coyne, the prolific MacLean’s commentator, frequent “from the right” CBC talking-head, and probably the closest Canadian equivalent to a Charles Krauthammer or Fred Barnes, endorses much of the same, plus gay marriage and unrestrained immigration. His pundit contemporaries in other publications, such as Lorne Gunter, Colby Cosh, Jason Clemens, Chris Skelly, and countless others, champion a similar philosophy of fiscal restraint, skepticism of authority, and “I couldn’t care less” attitude towards everything else.

Strategy-wise, little is likewise written about conservatism in Canada that does not advocate libertarian solutions to present problems. Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah’s famous 2005 book on “Rescuing Canada’s Right” offered explicitly libertarian prescriptions to the then-out of power Conservative Party, encouraging a wholesale rejection of social conservatism in favor of a market-based focus on things like tax cuts and for-profit health care. They also called for more think tanks like the Fraser Institute, already one of the largest and most well-heeled right-wing institutions in Canada, and an outfit almost entirely concerned with privatization and corporate competitiveness.

In noting all of this, I am not necessarily complaining. I consider myself right-of-center, and to a large extent support much of the work these various groups and individuals are doing. Yet it’s important to realize that the complete ideological dominance of a distinctly Canadian flavor of libertarianism among all center-right voices in this country has consequences, the most notable of which has been to severely limit the array of issues on the table for discussion at any given time.

Part of the problem is that libertarianism is not an ideology terribly well suited to understand contemporary Canadian politics. This is because the true source of political tension in Canada is not right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal, or libertarian vs. statist, but rather an ongoing existential conflict between competing visions of national identity and purpose. The great debates of Canadian history have, sad to say, been much more about “Canada” as an entity than any higher-concept pursuit, such as economic growth or civil rights.

The free trade debates of 1911 and 1988, for instance, were not really about the comparative pros and cons of free trade at all, but rather mere pretense for a less tangible argument about how much Canadian financial sovereignty could be safely entrusted to the United States without compromising a distinct national identity. Canada’s foreign policy dilemmas have likewise been more about our relationship with imperial allies than our own interests, while the longest debate in the history of the House of Commons was over which flag to fly. Today, ongoing tensions with Quebec center around struggles to effectively craft a bicultural polity, while East-versus-West anxieties reflect an inability to structure a workable federal parliamentary system — Meech and Charlottetown notwithstanding.

These are all rather parochial discussions, and don’t fit comfortably into the “state vs. freedom” paradigm libertarians are fond of. Libertarianism may thrive in the United States, but Canada is not the sort of post-national country America is, with its universally beloved, non-tribal constitution and one-size-fits-all moulds of citizenship and federalism. In many ways, we’re really more analogous to an old world empire, a vast and unwieldy territory of well-organized competing identities and ethnicities, where the most serious question facing the political class is simply how to keep the whole loosely-stitched project from unraveling.

Confronted by this dilemma, many Canadian libertarians have taken the route of least effort, and uncritically toss their chips in with the entrenched establishment consensus of the day, abandoning any pretense of seriously caring about the patriotic dilemmas of identity and purpose that have dominated the Canadian historical narrative for centuries. On issues such as bilingualism, Quebec, First Nations, East vs. West, the monarchy, the parliamentary system, arctic sovereignty, supreme court reform, multiculturalism, and US-Canadian relations, libertarians rarely have much of interest to say, and are usually content to genuflect to the status quo before moving onto something more interesting to talk about, like, say, the census. The fact that right-wing politicians and pundits are now entering their third week of debate on the latter issue, with an intensity rarely expressed towards any of the former, nicely highlights the privileged status of libertarian esoterica within this country’s politico-media axis.

Libertarianism is a perfectly legitimate political philosophy, and in many substantial debates libertarians have a great deal of worthwhile things to say. But their obsessive, disproportionate focus on a small handful of particularist issues, namely drugs, police powers, and hate speech tribunals, at the expense of all others, makes it hard to avoid concluding that the ideology exists more for the intellectual satisfaction of other libertarians than the fulfilment of any pressing democratic mandate. The people of Canada, after all, are not nearly as indifferent to questions of geography, language, race, and federalism as libertarians constantly insist they should be, and we’re a weaker country when no one in the press or parliament bothers to take their side.

The historian Arthur Lower has a famous line about Canada being a country whose greatest problems are never solved. At one time we used to at least debate them, but an increasingly libertarian political culture is making it hard to even get much of that done these days.