I have lived in the Prairies and Ontario for decades, as well as here in BC. Your descriptions of Conservatism in each of those places misses the mark a bit. My job had me criss-crossing the country, developing leadership, addressing culture and yes, the perception you describe prevails, but it does not survive living there.
It was always a curious characteristic of the west to hear, "we're so different; nobody understands". People are not different here, a truth that only reveals with substantial time spent in different locations.
Ontario conservatism is much more practical, real politik, compared to BC. The boardrooms exist, but they are too small a voting block. The vast majority of Ontarians are working people in manufacturing, trades, services. Far fewer as a % work for a government job, including the military... a much larger % face 100% responsibility for their financial security. There is distinctly less mental masturbation, analysis paralysis, and more experience and maturity about human nature brought to bear in policy decisions. Peace, order and good government where many people live in close proximity requires it. (I attended 2 riots in Toronto that barely made the news.) We're not there yet, but increasing population and painful experience will get us there.
My experience with Prairie conservatism parallels the farmer meme. Common sense is elevated to the level of sainthood, whether it prevails or not. Tall poppy syndrome is real and will limit progress if it's not acknowledged. Populism is easier there, but can't trump "common sense."
To the point of your terrific piece, the many nuances across the country are shaped in large part by geography, and how that geography becomes our lifestyle.
Of course we need to be good stewards of our environment! True conservatism, to me, equals good stewardship of all resources (the environment, public money, public assets, public employees, our institutions.) The quality of our stewardship and governance is in direct proportion to our honesty about human behaviour. Governance, when it works, is simply the effort to get a good result when human beings are making choices, with their deeply biased filters obscuring the "truth" needed for better decisions.
Many people, including me, reject the current version of reconciliation and compensation because it's disrespectful to the community. There is no justification for, "well, it was done to us, first", any more than among 2 year olds, or any dispute in a playground. People understand this point intuitively. Even if there were any basis for this justification, and every philosophy student knows there isn't after the first week of the first class, experience and practical leadership knows it's a failure from the start.
Smart communities accept a few great truths about people.
Here's one:
"I don't care about what you have to say unless I think you care about me."
So, how well are my policies about driving 30 kph, supporting bike lanes, supporting environmentalism, or (most of all) supporting reconciliation with FN going to go when the strategy seems to depend on creating an insane moral hierarchy, vilifying parts of the population, ignoring the feelings of huge portions of the community? Throwing statues into the harbour with no consequences, destroying traffic with bike lanes and doubling down on "cars are immoral", not enforcing any rules for cyclists, apologizing for property criminals and refusing to prosecute them, and on and on. In my experience the results are all predictable.
The worst part of this immaturity is that it doesn't even understand how uninformed it is. "Evidence based" is utter marketing bullshit. Experienced leaders know the kind of political culture promoted here means you'll be surprised every time: no-one is bothering to tell you how they feel any more because they see you as deaf... because you are.
Thank you for this. Seriously. This is exactly the kind of response the piece needed and I want to engage with it honestly rather than just thank you for reading.
You're right that I generalized. The regional sketches were meant to be impressionistic rather than comprehensive and they flattened real complexity in service of narrative momentum. Ontario conservatism in particular — I took the Bay Street shorthand too readily and you've correctly pointed out that the actual weight of Ontario's conservative tradition sits in the trades, the manufacturing towns, the working people who have always been the real voting base. That's a fair correction and it makes the argument stronger rather than weaker if I'm honest about it.
Where I want to push back is on the idea that the West's sense of distinctiveness is primarily a curious regional characteristic that dissolves with enough travel. I think geography shapes political culture in ways that are more durable than perception. The specific tensions of this coast — Indigenous title as a live legal and practical reality, a working class built on resource extraction from land whose ownership remains genuinely contested, an environmental inheritance that the people who depend on it for their livelihoods have a direct stake in protecting — these aren't feelings about being misunderstood. They're structural conditions that produce specific political problems requiring specific thinking. That's not a complaint about Ontario. It's an observation that the policy toolkit adequate to governing close urban proximity isn't automatically adequate to governing a coast where a fisherman's livelihood depends on decisions made about watersheds his grandfather fished.
Your point about reconciliation is where I want to be most careful because I think you're identifying something real and important and I don't want to either dismiss it or fully agree with it without being precise.
You're absolutely right that the current reconciliation framework as practiced — the moral hierarchy, the vilification, the performative gesture politics, the statues in the harbour — is counterproductive and in many cases actively harmful to the working relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities that actual progress depends on. The line you quoted — I don't care what you have to say unless I think you care about me — cuts both ways, and the progressive reconciliation industry has been catastrophically bad at demonstrating that it cares about non-Indigenous working people. That failure is real and your description of its political consequences is accurate.
Where I'd separate myself from the full rejection is on the underlying question of Indigenous governance and title as distinct from the progressive performance of reconciliation. My argument isn't that current reconciliation policy is good. My argument is that the underlying reality — nations with prior and ongoing governance claims over lands and waters that the BC working class depends on — doesn't disappear because the progressive framework for addressing it has failed. Repudiating the framework is right. Pretending the underlying question goes away with it is where I think conservatism has made a practical error that costs it in the long run.
Your stewardship definition is the best short statement of what I'm trying to build toward that I've read. Good stewardship of all resources. The quality of governance in direct proportion to honesty about human behaviour. That's the foundation. Everything else is application.
And your closing point about evidence based being marketing bullshit and experienced leaders being surprised because nobody is telling them how they feel anymore — that belongs in the next piece. Verbatim if you'll let me.
You have a chair at this table engraved with your name on it. I am always open to hearing your perspective and deeply value your honest engagement.
I'm so angry about the failure of leadership, the absence of leadership, the ascension of sheer unexamined ego and selfishness foisting stupidity upon us all, setting us back, wasting time and resources...
I forget to acknowledge the necessity and correctness of addressing FN governance and claims. This work does need to be done, and I like the idea of nations having seats in the legislature in proportion to the population. It will be also be very hard, even without bigoted ideological poison running through our discourse. No matter the marketing, all indigenous populations combined represent 6% of the population. No strategy should succeed or will succeed without the other 94% coming along.
Doing this work ethically, getting the best possible result for all parties, will require leadership that includes self-sacrifice. Bob Ray was Premiere of Ontario for one rare, short term because of "Ray-days". An NDP Premiere said the debt was a crisis and the public workforce was bloated so he created policy to address both. Both were addressed and he lost the unions support, and the premiership, because of it. This was a very rare example of someone doing the right thing despite the personal consequences.
Try to imagine Eby, or Falcon, or Fulmer doing the right thing knowing it would cost them power. Just try. (laughing with tears emoji)
Merci Denis. It means more than you know coming from someone who lives this rather than theorizes about it. I hope something in here felt like it belonged to you as much as it does to me. This coast has a way of making people from very different places feel like they've come home. Pull up a chair.
For over a decade, I racked up 140 - 160,000 air miles per year, mostly in Western Canada, travelling at least 2 weeks of every month. Every time I landed in Vancouver, and Victoria, I felt different than anywhere else. Moving back here, permanently was never a choice, more a necessity, but I can't tell you why.
Sure, the family is here... but it was something else I don't understand.
I'm a mystic, for sure, so mysteries are fine. I love them.
Eric, I really like this and I agree in substance with almost all of it. The idea that conservatism has to be anti environmentalist and contra indigenous property rights has always felt like a mistake to me.
I do have one (or maybe two) central questions though
I take the point you allude to, that 'conservative' means to be committed to 'conserving' certain institutions or values. I've toyed with the idea of adopting the 'conservative' label for this very reason.
However, words can be generally taken to mean what the community of speakers intends them to mean, and so I think a certain amount of deference is owed to what 'most people' think they mean when they use the word 'conservative'.
In that vein, 'conservative' doesn't usually include the positions that you articulate in this piece (correct though they may be). 'Conservative' in this second sense, the sense that most people employ when they use the term, doesn't usually capture an overriding concern for the environment, or concern for indigenous property rights, or (if I have read the tone of your piece correctly) concern for labour interests.
So my two primary questions are what, if anything, in the conservatism you are advocating for would be captured by the ordinary everyday use of that term, and, what, if anything, is gained by keeping the conservative label on the politics you are trying to articulate, especially if those politics might not be recognizable to most people as 'conservative'.
It's a semantic point, but I do think it is important, because the recieved political notions of the people you might try to convince seem to be important rhetorically. It's also the reason I've tended to avoid adopting the conservative label.
I love this piece though and would love to be convinced otherwise.
Tony, so great to hear from you and overjoyed that you found this piece.
You're raising the right question and I want to answer it honestly rather than defensively. And knowing you, you'd see through anything less.
You're correct that words mean what communities of speakers intend them to mean. That's not a trivial point. It's actually a Burkean one. Language is itself an inherited institution and you don't get to simply redefine it by fiat. I take that seriously and I know you'd hold me to it.
But here's where I push back. The question isn't whether my conservatism matches the current popular understanding of the word. The question is whether the current popular understanding of the word is itself conservative. I'd argue it isn't, and I think if you follow the logic you'll land in the same place.
Look at the political field as it actually exists. The NDP represents progressivism coherently. Genuine intellectual tradition, clear philosophical foundation, follows it honestly even when I disagree with it. The Liberal Party represents clientelism with equal coherence. Coalition management through transactional politics, the eternal promise to be all things to all people, which is precisely why they've survived as Canada's so-called natural governing party. You can critique both but you cannot say either is intellectually vacant. They know what they are and they act accordingly.
So to answer your first question directly. My conservatism shares more with the popular understanding of the term than it might first appear. A deep suspicion of centralized state power. A preference for evolved institutional solutions over bureaucratic apparatus built from scratch. A belief in ordered liberty over administered equality. A respect for the particular over the universal. A preference for proven institutions over revolutionary new frameworks. Most people who call themselves conservative would recognize those instincts immediately even if the conclusions I draw from them occasionally surprise them. Where my conservatism departs from popular usage is in refusing to treat labour, environmental stewardship and Indigenous political standing as progressive concerns to be reflexively opposed. But here is the honest answer to why. Those were never properly progressive concerns to begin with. They were always part of the genuine Tory inheritance. They were abandoned when the movement lost its intellectual thread and began outsourcing its identity to politicians and personalities rather than principles. I am not adding foreign elements to conservatism. I am restoring what was always there before someone replaced the clothes with a costume.
What passes for conservatism in that same field is something categorically different. It's a reactive formation, defined not by what it believes but by what it opposes. Progressivism advances and conservatism recoils. That's not a philosophy, that's a reflex. Russell Kirk understood this. His entire intellectual project, most powerfully in The Conservative Mind, was built on the argument that conservatism is a defined philosophical tradition rooted in Burke, not an opposition movement, not a mood, not whatever happens to be standing to the right of the left at any given moment. A conservatism without that principled foundation, Kirk argued, had nothing to conserve. Roger Scruton made the same argument from a different angle, insisting that conservatism is a politics of love rather than a politics of opposition, rooted in genuine attachment to particular places, institutions and ways of life rather than mere resistance to change. What we have now in the field that calls itself conservative would be largely unrecognizable to either of them.
It draws a certain segment reliably but it has no lasting intellectual foundation because it isn't built on one. It's a shell. Which means when you map the actual intellectual traditions onto the actual political field, genuine Toryism, first principles conservatism rooted in Burke, in the Loyalist inheritance, in ordered liberty and evolved institutions, is simply absent. The label exists without the content.
That's the process of elimination that brought me here. Not that I invented something new and decided to call it conservative. The content already exists. It predates all of us. George Grant understood this in a specifically Canadian context. His Lament for a Nation was a lament that English Canada had surrendered its Tory strain, the organic and communitarian conservatism that distinguished this country from its neighbour, to a continentalism that served neither tradition nor community but simply capital and convenience. Grant was writing in 1965 and the drift he identified has only accelerated. I'm simply arguing that somebody needs to pick it back up.
And that content has always had room for environmental stewardship because Tories understood that conserving things, actually conserving them, includes the land. It has always had room for Indigenous political standing because Tories understood treaty relationships as solemn institutional commitments not historical footnotes to be managed around. And it has always had room for the dignity of labour because a conservatism that exists purely to serve capital isn't conserving anything worth having and never was. Disraeli understood this. One Nation conservatism was built on precisely that recognition, that a conservatism indifferent to the condition of working people was not only morally hollow but politically suicidal.
So when I call for a return to first principles I am not proposing something new dressed in old clothes. I'm pointing at the clothes that were there before someone replaced them with a costume and calling it what it is.
What's gained by keeping the label? Precisely the argument itself. If I call this something else — some new centrist synthesis — I concede the word to people who have no legitimate claim to it and let them go on calling disruption conservatism unchallenged. I'd rather fight for the inheritance than abandon it because squatters have moved in. You know me well enough to know I was never going to do otherwise.
The rhetorical risk you're naming is real and I don't dismiss it. Some people will hear conservative and stop listening before I've said anything. But I think more people, ordinary people exhausted by Liberal management and NDP moral instruction, are hungry for something that sounds like plain sense rooted in actual Canadian experience. The label is the argument. Reclaiming it is half the point. And frankly, if not now, when?
Your point about the popular meaning of the word is actually one I've been sitting with for a while, and I'll confess I touched on it only briefly in the piece itself. The diagnosis of how we got here, how a movement allowed its identity to be defined by politicians and media personalities rather than first principles, is a piece I am nearly finished writing. I think you'll find it speaks directly to the very concern you're raising. The short version is this: when a political tradition outsources its definition to its most visible and loudest figures rather than its intellectual foundations, it loses the thread entirely. What's left isn't conservatism. It's a brand. And like any brand without a product worth selling, it eventually hollows out.
Watch for that one soon. And thank you for this. These are exactly the conversations worth having and you've always been one of the rare people I can have them with properly.
I have lived in the Prairies and Ontario for decades, as well as here in BC. Your descriptions of Conservatism in each of those places misses the mark a bit. My job had me criss-crossing the country, developing leadership, addressing culture and yes, the perception you describe prevails, but it does not survive living there.
It was always a curious characteristic of the west to hear, "we're so different; nobody understands". People are not different here, a truth that only reveals with substantial time spent in different locations.
Ontario conservatism is much more practical, real politik, compared to BC. The boardrooms exist, but they are too small a voting block. The vast majority of Ontarians are working people in manufacturing, trades, services. Far fewer as a % work for a government job, including the military... a much larger % face 100% responsibility for their financial security. There is distinctly less mental masturbation, analysis paralysis, and more experience and maturity about human nature brought to bear in policy decisions. Peace, order and good government where many people live in close proximity requires it. (I attended 2 riots in Toronto that barely made the news.) We're not there yet, but increasing population and painful experience will get us there.
My experience with Prairie conservatism parallels the farmer meme. Common sense is elevated to the level of sainthood, whether it prevails or not. Tall poppy syndrome is real and will limit progress if it's not acknowledged. Populism is easier there, but can't trump "common sense."
To the point of your terrific piece, the many nuances across the country are shaped in large part by geography, and how that geography becomes our lifestyle.
Of course we need to be good stewards of our environment! True conservatism, to me, equals good stewardship of all resources (the environment, public money, public assets, public employees, our institutions.) The quality of our stewardship and governance is in direct proportion to our honesty about human behaviour. Governance, when it works, is simply the effort to get a good result when human beings are making choices, with their deeply biased filters obscuring the "truth" needed for better decisions.
Many people, including me, reject the current version of reconciliation and compensation because it's disrespectful to the community. There is no justification for, "well, it was done to us, first", any more than among 2 year olds, or any dispute in a playground. People understand this point intuitively. Even if there were any basis for this justification, and every philosophy student knows there isn't after the first week of the first class, experience and practical leadership knows it's a failure from the start.
Smart communities accept a few great truths about people.
Here's one:
"I don't care about what you have to say unless I think you care about me."
So, how well are my policies about driving 30 kph, supporting bike lanes, supporting environmentalism, or (most of all) supporting reconciliation with FN going to go when the strategy seems to depend on creating an insane moral hierarchy, vilifying parts of the population, ignoring the feelings of huge portions of the community? Throwing statues into the harbour with no consequences, destroying traffic with bike lanes and doubling down on "cars are immoral", not enforcing any rules for cyclists, apologizing for property criminals and refusing to prosecute them, and on and on. In my experience the results are all predictable.
The worst part of this immaturity is that it doesn't even understand how uninformed it is. "Evidence based" is utter marketing bullshit. Experienced leaders know the kind of political culture promoted here means you'll be surprised every time: no-one is bothering to tell you how they feel any more because they see you as deaf... because you are.
Thank you for this. Seriously. This is exactly the kind of response the piece needed and I want to engage with it honestly rather than just thank you for reading.
You're right that I generalized. The regional sketches were meant to be impressionistic rather than comprehensive and they flattened real complexity in service of narrative momentum. Ontario conservatism in particular — I took the Bay Street shorthand too readily and you've correctly pointed out that the actual weight of Ontario's conservative tradition sits in the trades, the manufacturing towns, the working people who have always been the real voting base. That's a fair correction and it makes the argument stronger rather than weaker if I'm honest about it.
Where I want to push back is on the idea that the West's sense of distinctiveness is primarily a curious regional characteristic that dissolves with enough travel. I think geography shapes political culture in ways that are more durable than perception. The specific tensions of this coast — Indigenous title as a live legal and practical reality, a working class built on resource extraction from land whose ownership remains genuinely contested, an environmental inheritance that the people who depend on it for their livelihoods have a direct stake in protecting — these aren't feelings about being misunderstood. They're structural conditions that produce specific political problems requiring specific thinking. That's not a complaint about Ontario. It's an observation that the policy toolkit adequate to governing close urban proximity isn't automatically adequate to governing a coast where a fisherman's livelihood depends on decisions made about watersheds his grandfather fished.
Your point about reconciliation is where I want to be most careful because I think you're identifying something real and important and I don't want to either dismiss it or fully agree with it without being precise.
You're absolutely right that the current reconciliation framework as practiced — the moral hierarchy, the vilification, the performative gesture politics, the statues in the harbour — is counterproductive and in many cases actively harmful to the working relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities that actual progress depends on. The line you quoted — I don't care what you have to say unless I think you care about me — cuts both ways, and the progressive reconciliation industry has been catastrophically bad at demonstrating that it cares about non-Indigenous working people. That failure is real and your description of its political consequences is accurate.
Where I'd separate myself from the full rejection is on the underlying question of Indigenous governance and title as distinct from the progressive performance of reconciliation. My argument isn't that current reconciliation policy is good. My argument is that the underlying reality — nations with prior and ongoing governance claims over lands and waters that the BC working class depends on — doesn't disappear because the progressive framework for addressing it has failed. Repudiating the framework is right. Pretending the underlying question goes away with it is where I think conservatism has made a practical error that costs it in the long run.
Your stewardship definition is the best short statement of what I'm trying to build toward that I've read. Good stewardship of all resources. The quality of governance in direct proportion to honesty about human behaviour. That's the foundation. Everything else is application.
And your closing point about evidence based being marketing bullshit and experienced leaders being surprised because nobody is telling them how they feel anymore — that belongs in the next piece. Verbatim if you'll let me.
You have a chair at this table engraved with your name on it. I am always open to hearing your perspective and deeply value your honest engagement.
You are very kind.
I'm so angry about the failure of leadership, the absence of leadership, the ascension of sheer unexamined ego and selfishness foisting stupidity upon us all, setting us back, wasting time and resources...
I forget to acknowledge the necessity and correctness of addressing FN governance and claims. This work does need to be done, and I like the idea of nations having seats in the legislature in proportion to the population. It will be also be very hard, even without bigoted ideological poison running through our discourse. No matter the marketing, all indigenous populations combined represent 6% of the population. No strategy should succeed or will succeed without the other 94% coming along.
Doing this work ethically, getting the best possible result for all parties, will require leadership that includes self-sacrifice. Bob Ray was Premiere of Ontario for one rare, short term because of "Ray-days". An NDP Premiere said the debt was a crisis and the public workforce was bloated so he created policy to address both. Both were addressed and he lost the unions support, and the premiership, because of it. This was a very rare example of someone doing the right thing despite the personal consequences.
Try to imagine Eby, or Falcon, or Fulmer doing the right thing knowing it would cost them power. Just try. (laughing with tears emoji)
Fantastic article and thinking as usual Eric. Thank you
how refreshing to read your thinking on this subject....merci
Merci Denis. It means more than you know coming from someone who lives this rather than theorizes about it. I hope something in here felt like it belonged to you as much as it does to me. This coast has a way of making people from very different places feel like they've come home. Pull up a chair.
There is one more thing:
For over a decade, I racked up 140 - 160,000 air miles per year, mostly in Western Canada, travelling at least 2 weeks of every month. Every time I landed in Vancouver, and Victoria, I felt different than anywhere else. Moving back here, permanently was never a choice, more a necessity, but I can't tell you why.
Sure, the family is here... but it was something else I don't understand.
I'm a mystic, for sure, so mysteries are fine. I love them.
Eric, I really like this and I agree in substance with almost all of it. The idea that conservatism has to be anti environmentalist and contra indigenous property rights has always felt like a mistake to me.
I do have one (or maybe two) central questions though
I take the point you allude to, that 'conservative' means to be committed to 'conserving' certain institutions or values. I've toyed with the idea of adopting the 'conservative' label for this very reason.
However, words can be generally taken to mean what the community of speakers intends them to mean, and so I think a certain amount of deference is owed to what 'most people' think they mean when they use the word 'conservative'.
In that vein, 'conservative' doesn't usually include the positions that you articulate in this piece (correct though they may be). 'Conservative' in this second sense, the sense that most people employ when they use the term, doesn't usually capture an overriding concern for the environment, or concern for indigenous property rights, or (if I have read the tone of your piece correctly) concern for labour interests.
So my two primary questions are what, if anything, in the conservatism you are advocating for would be captured by the ordinary everyday use of that term, and, what, if anything, is gained by keeping the conservative label on the politics you are trying to articulate, especially if those politics might not be recognizable to most people as 'conservative'.
It's a semantic point, but I do think it is important, because the recieved political notions of the people you might try to convince seem to be important rhetorically. It's also the reason I've tended to avoid adopting the conservative label.
I love this piece though and would love to be convinced otherwise.
Tony, so great to hear from you and overjoyed that you found this piece.
You're raising the right question and I want to answer it honestly rather than defensively. And knowing you, you'd see through anything less.
You're correct that words mean what communities of speakers intend them to mean. That's not a trivial point. It's actually a Burkean one. Language is itself an inherited institution and you don't get to simply redefine it by fiat. I take that seriously and I know you'd hold me to it.
But here's where I push back. The question isn't whether my conservatism matches the current popular understanding of the word. The question is whether the current popular understanding of the word is itself conservative. I'd argue it isn't, and I think if you follow the logic you'll land in the same place.
Look at the political field as it actually exists. The NDP represents progressivism coherently. Genuine intellectual tradition, clear philosophical foundation, follows it honestly even when I disagree with it. The Liberal Party represents clientelism with equal coherence. Coalition management through transactional politics, the eternal promise to be all things to all people, which is precisely why they've survived as Canada's so-called natural governing party. You can critique both but you cannot say either is intellectually vacant. They know what they are and they act accordingly.
So to answer your first question directly. My conservatism shares more with the popular understanding of the term than it might first appear. A deep suspicion of centralized state power. A preference for evolved institutional solutions over bureaucratic apparatus built from scratch. A belief in ordered liberty over administered equality. A respect for the particular over the universal. A preference for proven institutions over revolutionary new frameworks. Most people who call themselves conservative would recognize those instincts immediately even if the conclusions I draw from them occasionally surprise them. Where my conservatism departs from popular usage is in refusing to treat labour, environmental stewardship and Indigenous political standing as progressive concerns to be reflexively opposed. But here is the honest answer to why. Those were never properly progressive concerns to begin with. They were always part of the genuine Tory inheritance. They were abandoned when the movement lost its intellectual thread and began outsourcing its identity to politicians and personalities rather than principles. I am not adding foreign elements to conservatism. I am restoring what was always there before someone replaced the clothes with a costume.
What passes for conservatism in that same field is something categorically different. It's a reactive formation, defined not by what it believes but by what it opposes. Progressivism advances and conservatism recoils. That's not a philosophy, that's a reflex. Russell Kirk understood this. His entire intellectual project, most powerfully in The Conservative Mind, was built on the argument that conservatism is a defined philosophical tradition rooted in Burke, not an opposition movement, not a mood, not whatever happens to be standing to the right of the left at any given moment. A conservatism without that principled foundation, Kirk argued, had nothing to conserve. Roger Scruton made the same argument from a different angle, insisting that conservatism is a politics of love rather than a politics of opposition, rooted in genuine attachment to particular places, institutions and ways of life rather than mere resistance to change. What we have now in the field that calls itself conservative would be largely unrecognizable to either of them.
It draws a certain segment reliably but it has no lasting intellectual foundation because it isn't built on one. It's a shell. Which means when you map the actual intellectual traditions onto the actual political field, genuine Toryism, first principles conservatism rooted in Burke, in the Loyalist inheritance, in ordered liberty and evolved institutions, is simply absent. The label exists without the content.
That's the process of elimination that brought me here. Not that I invented something new and decided to call it conservative. The content already exists. It predates all of us. George Grant understood this in a specifically Canadian context. His Lament for a Nation was a lament that English Canada had surrendered its Tory strain, the organic and communitarian conservatism that distinguished this country from its neighbour, to a continentalism that served neither tradition nor community but simply capital and convenience. Grant was writing in 1965 and the drift he identified has only accelerated. I'm simply arguing that somebody needs to pick it back up.
And that content has always had room for environmental stewardship because Tories understood that conserving things, actually conserving them, includes the land. It has always had room for Indigenous political standing because Tories understood treaty relationships as solemn institutional commitments not historical footnotes to be managed around. And it has always had room for the dignity of labour because a conservatism that exists purely to serve capital isn't conserving anything worth having and never was. Disraeli understood this. One Nation conservatism was built on precisely that recognition, that a conservatism indifferent to the condition of working people was not only morally hollow but politically suicidal.
So when I call for a return to first principles I am not proposing something new dressed in old clothes. I'm pointing at the clothes that were there before someone replaced them with a costume and calling it what it is.
What's gained by keeping the label? Precisely the argument itself. If I call this something else — some new centrist synthesis — I concede the word to people who have no legitimate claim to it and let them go on calling disruption conservatism unchallenged. I'd rather fight for the inheritance than abandon it because squatters have moved in. You know me well enough to know I was never going to do otherwise.
The rhetorical risk you're naming is real and I don't dismiss it. Some people will hear conservative and stop listening before I've said anything. But I think more people, ordinary people exhausted by Liberal management and NDP moral instruction, are hungry for something that sounds like plain sense rooted in actual Canadian experience. The label is the argument. Reclaiming it is half the point. And frankly, if not now, when?
Your point about the popular meaning of the word is actually one I've been sitting with for a while, and I'll confess I touched on it only briefly in the piece itself. The diagnosis of how we got here, how a movement allowed its identity to be defined by politicians and media personalities rather than first principles, is a piece I am nearly finished writing. I think you'll find it speaks directly to the very concern you're raising. The short version is this: when a political tradition outsources its definition to its most visible and loudest figures rather than its intellectual foundations, it loses the thread entirely. What's left isn't conservatism. It's a brand. And like any brand without a product worth selling, it eventually hollows out.
Watch for that one soon. And thank you for this. These are exactly the conversations worth having and you've always been one of the rare people I can have them with properly.