Good summary on problems with conservatism

Terence Corcoran put together a good analysis of what's wrong with "conservatism" today, as seen on the Federal and Provincial (Ontario and Alberta) scenes. Basically, he echos the points made by Tom Flanagan the other week... for Conservatives to succeed in Canada, we can't keep on trying to pander to the mushy middle... we need to be conservative.

I can't find it at the National Post online, so here's the article.

LESSONS FROM A RED TORY
TERENCE CORCORAN - National Post
tcorcoran@nationalpost.com

Nobody expected John Tory to lead the charge for a new conservatism in Ontario. He never said he would. Instead, being a good moderate Conservative of the old Red Tory school, he played the game according to the old rules: Don’t rock the boat, keep a middle course, hew occasionally left if necessary and fight a clean fight.

And so Ontario Tories today wake up to an entirely predictable electoral disappointment. Some will blame John Tory’s ill-conceived plan to fund religious schools. But his defeat was in the air long before the schools gaffe. Political strategists in both the Liberal and Conservative camps saw yesterday’s results coming as long as a year ago. “Tory has no hope,” said a Liberal insider last January. “He simply has not connected, no matter how hard he tries. McGuinty may be a bit of a disaster in terms of consistency and personality, but Tory is not in the chase.”

John Tory, achingly sincere and blandly articulate, could not catch Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, an uncharismatic politician whose churchy self-righteousness could turn nuns into streetwalkers. Tory could not overtake McGuinty because he failed to do what professional Conservatives today refuse to do across Canada: shift to the economic right and move the goalposts of political debate.

The leading theory of current Conservative political strategy was recently spelled out by Tom Flanagan. In an article in the online magazine C2C, reproduced on these pages last month, the former advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveiled what could be called the Flanagan Rules for Conservative Engagement. The title of his piece was “Incremental Conservatism.”

Flanagan put the strategy into a one-sentence nugget: “My vision of incremental conservatism means endorsing even very small steps if they are in the right direction, and accepting inaction in areas that can’t feasibly be changed right now, but opposing government initiatives that are clearly going the wrong way.” While Flanagan is here describing the goslow Conservatism of the Harper government in Ottawa, it also fits the John Tory Conservative opposition in Ontario. Another jurisdiction that meets the Flanagan rules is Alberta, where Ed Stelmach’s Conservatives are flying the flag of incrementalism to a political disaster.

In fact, it seems to be a pattern. Wherever incrementalism reigns as strategy, moving a bit here and giving up a bit there, Conservative parties slumber in the polls, and go down to defeat. Stephen Harper’s Tories are nationally stuck in the mid-30% range, despite weak opposition. Ed Stelmach’s ruling Conservatives, now flirting with new royalty taxes, are at disastrously low support levels in Calgary and Edmonton. And now, with John Tory’s defeat in Ontario, we have a trifecta of evidence that riding the middle of the road and avoiding conservative economic policies is a dead-end political strategy: Incremental disasterism.

To be sure, Ontario Conservatives ran a particularly slow version of incrementalism. Under the Tory plan, it would have taken 100 years just to get the government out of the liquor business, and that would be about it. The Conservative platform was an alien document to conservatives — and one suspects to large numbers of Liberals who know in their hearts that Dalton McGuinty’s big-spending, high-tax blundering Liberal government is a train on track to a wreck. Give us something else to vote for!

But the Tory Tories delivered nothing. The official platform was a relentless catalogue of more spending, special-interest cash dropoffs, generalized waffles and copies of the latest conventional policy wisdom on anything and everything. On health care, the plan reached new levels of meaninglessness: “Invest in training and education programs for health care professionals,” and “improve long term planning with accurate forecasts of current health human resources shortages and future health care demands.”

Buried here and there were the occasional hints at what Flanagan calls “very small steps” in the right direction toward private delivery of care. “As long as universal accessibility is always protected and no one can buy access to better health care in Ontario, we will involve the private sector where there are opportunities to shorten waiting lists and improve access.” Not much there for a conservative to chew on.

Ontario Conservative fiscal plans promised more spending than the Liberals and NDP. As for tax cuts, the best Tory could do was promise to roll back Liberal tax increases. His accompanying attacks on McGuinty as a promise-breaker inevitably fell flat. No party leader has won an election anywhere in the last 50 years by accusing his opponent of breaking election promises. What else do politicians do?

On energy policy, where he should have taken a leadership role, Tory was more Liberal than McGuinty. He abandoned all previous Conservative ideas on market operation of electricity markets. Instead, he attacked McGuinty for not closing coal plans as planned — even though closing the plants remains a dangerous energy policy that could leave Ontario in the dark in years to come. Tory’s plan was for the same policy, only more of it.

In short, there was nothing to Tory Conservativism that could not have been endorsed by any Liberal, and nothing to appeal to the bedrock conservatives who must be seen as the heart of the Conservative party. They want less government, lower taxes, reduced dependence on government, more frequent initiatives to change the direction of policy.

The lesson from yesterday’s Ontario vote and the sliding fortunes of Alberta’s Conservatives must be that incremental conservatism is a flawed strategy that can, indeed has, produced disastrous results for those who play the game of either deceiving themselves or the voters.

It’s a fate that could befall federal Conservatives. Flanagan’s assessment was that the Harper government had taken a few small steps in the right direction, put off others and perhaps edged a little too far in the wrong direction now and then.

But the record is much bleaker than that from a conservative perspective. Federal spending is soaring, budget surpluses are piling up, tax cuts never get beyond the rumour stage and more than a few “wrong way” programs have emerged.

Flanagan, for example, is particularly apologetic for the fact that the Conservatives have become enthusiastic public backers of farm supply-management programs. It’s irrational, he says, to insist that the government commit political suicide by alienating the farm vote. Even granting that point, was it really necessary to add to farm lobby dependence by bringing in massive ethanol subsidies?

Maybe the Harper Tories will reverse their backtracking ways with the Throne Speech next week and a taxcutting budget, thus putting an end to incremental conservatism, a strategy that so far looks like a policy failure in three jurisdictions. For millions of Canadians whose politics favour less government, reduced regulation and significantly lower tax rates, there is nothing in incremental conservatism but small steps, inaction and too many forays heading the wrong way down a one-way street.