Stephen Harper said the Conservative government he led from 2006 to 2015 practiced what he called “populist conservatism.” The Conservative Party led by Pierre Poillievre — backed by Harper this week — would fully accept that description.
One can only speculate why the former prime minister decided to take the unusual step of endorsing a candidate in the current leadership race – and why he chose to do so now. Perhaps Poilievre’s campaign has some reason to believe he needs an extra push to get over the line.
Maybe Poilievre’s campaign is doing well, but she wants to make sure her victory is clear and overwhelming. Perhaps Harper’s blessing is meant to help the party consolidate after a bitterly contested race.
Maybe Harper really, really doesn’t like Jean Charest.
Whatever his reasons, Harper’s imprimatur symbolically connects his personal political project with Poilievre’s own approach to politics and leadership. Not that Andrew Scheer or Erin O’Toole ever vowed to make a dramatic break from Harper’s approach. But if there are conservatives worried about where the next leader might take the party, Harper’s message to them is that his conservatism includes Pierre Poillievre.
Harper’s Theory of Populist Conservatism
In his 2018 book, Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in an Age of Ruin, Harper wrote that conservatives have three possible paths ahead of them in this moment of populist unrest.
They could hold fast to a doctrinaire view of conservatism and an ideological belief in supply-side economics. They could “double down on unbridled populism.” Or they could “reform conservatism to address the issues driving the populist cataclysm … adapt conservatism to the practical concerns, interests and aspirations of working- and middle-class people.”
WATCH: Stephen Harper backs Pierre Poillievre for Conservative leadership
Stephen Harper is backing Pierre Poillievre in the Conservative leadership race
Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has endorsed Conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre as the party’s next leader. It’s the first time Harper has given an endorsement since the vote to leave office.
Harper argues that this third approach — which he calls “populist conservatism” or “applied conservatism” — is similar to his governing style.
“The new populist conservatism must bring conservative ideas to bear on the real-life challenges facing ordinary people,” he wrote.
This is not an inherently unreasonable notion, even if there are significant gaps in Harper’s larger analysis. For one thing, it’s not yet clear what a “populist conservative” would do about climate change.
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre stands up during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)
It is also unclear how “hands-on” Poilievre’s approach to government would be, as his campaign has largely avoided presenting detailed policy proposals.
He will appoint a federal ombudsman to ensure Canadian universities meet his standards to protect free speech and wants to make Canada the “blockchain capital of the world.” But his only climate policy is to scrap the national price on carbon.
His inflation analysis excludes global factors and its faced the Bank of Canada is wrong. His complaints about housing are generally on the right track, although his solution is a new system of sanctions and rewards for municipal authorities.
Poilievre’s loud populism
Harper defines populism quite benignly as “any political movement that puts the broader interests of ordinary people ahead of the special interests of a privileged few.”
But it can also be defined as something more hostile in nature – as “an ideology that considers society to be definitively divided into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the ‘clean people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, in the words of Cass Mude, Dutch political scientist. (I also quoted Mudde’s formulation of populism in writing about the 2017 Conservative leadership race.)
In practice, populism seems to have less to do with offering practical solutions to real problems than with finding someone to blame or resent. It is against establishment in a way that may threaten traditional institutions.
“Populism,” writes Mudé, “represents a Manichean view in which there are only friends and enemies.”
Harper showed some of that populism. His government seems enjoy battles with academics and public policy experts and he attacked”liberal elites.” In “Right Here, Right Now,” he develops the theory that Western societies can be divided into “somewhere” and “everywhere”.
But Poilievre fully adopted the language of populism. If Harper offers a conservatism that responds to concerns that they fuel populism, Poilievre seems to offer a populism that celebrates conservative ideals.
Poilievre built his campaign around the idea that “gatekeepers” were holding Canadians back. After being criticized for promising to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada, he declared that “the elites in Ottawa are beside themselves that I would hold them to account [the] the harm they have done to ordinary people.”
He called on his supporters to “resist the cultural awakening” and his campaign criticized his own party for choosing a “liberal media personality from the Laurentian elite” to moderate the debate.
“Bad politicians make bad decisions and the system protects them,” Poilievre wrote in a fundraising appeal earlier this year. “The media, the pundits, the professors say I shouldn’t attack Justin Trudeau as hard as I do.”
Where does populism lead?
Harper apparently approves. And if you believe that the world is as Poilievre describes it, his arguments are no doubt compelling. But just how far will this populism take the Conservative Party?
While chasing the populist dream of Brexit, the Conservatives in the UK have burned through three Prime Ministers in the past six years. Their current leader, Boris Johnson, was driven out by a hurricane of scandal.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney may have considered himself a conservative populist before his own party pushed him out. (Dave Chidley/The Canadian Press)
In the United States, the Republican Party has gone down a populist rabbit hole and become a hysterical, anti-democratic personality cult. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who would probably think of himself as a populist conservativewas ousted by his own party barely three years after taking office.
If it is possible to imagine that populism can lead to constructive reform (at least in theory), the evidence suggests that the spirit of antagonism is not easily controlled once embraced. Worst-case scenarios aside, it’s not hard to see how a populist approach could end up doing more harm than good.
But Stephen Harper’s party is now ready to accept Pierre Poillievre as its new standard-bearer – and roll with an undisguised kind of populist conservatism.
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