Ottawa
Last week in Washington began with reports that the president might have shared sensitive classified information with Russian officials and, after other shocking revelations arrived daily, sometimes hourly, ended with talk that the United States’ chief executive could be pushed out of power in a national security scandal. Just across the border to the north, meanwhile, a man who had already suffered such a scandal—and admitted to wrongdoing—was enjoying increasing influence and could be just days away from moving into a multimillion-dollar government residence.
Donald Trump is such an American original that it might be hard to believe that multiple frontrunners for the leadership of a major political party in Canada, one of the politest nations on earth, have borne comparisons to him, with some even encouraging the analogies. But that’s exactly what’s happening. Former prime minister Stephen Harper made Canada the best-governed nation in the Anglosphere while Barack Obama oversaw a new entitlement Republicans still despair of discontinuing. To no avail. In November 2015, Harper’s Conservatives sustained a massive loss to the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau—who proved before Trump that style over substance is back. Now some of them are wondering if wildness is the way back out of the wilderness.
Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier revels in his nickname, even posting online an image of his face superimposed on that of the movie character. If he wins the Conservative leadership contest on May 27, he’ll become Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a position that comes with its own Ottawa mansion. He’s the frontrunner to replace Harper, who tossed him out of his cabinet less than a decade ago after Bernier, then minister of foreign affairs, oafishly left classified documents at the home of his girlfriend, who had ties to Hells Angels. He’s known as the “Albertan from Quebec” for libertarian views that are more commonly found in the West. But it’s his birthplace that’s made him the frontrunner.
Kevin O’Leary shocked the country last month—and not, as usual, with one of his proposals, such as auctioning off Senate seats—by pulling out of the race when it was clear he led the pack. O’Leary was the only Conservative candidate with real celebrity: The former software magnate is one of the investor stars of American television’s Shark Tank—where he’s known by the somewhat ironic self-descriptor Mr. Wonderful—and that fame made up for the charges of carpetbagging. But O’Leary decided his inability to speak French meant he couldn’t garner enough seats in Quebec—which accounts for a quarter of the ridings in Parliament—to make taking down Trudeau a possibility. He threw his support behind the Francophone Bernier, saying at a press conference, “Quebec is the Florida of Canada.”
It was easy to liken O’Leary to Trump—a flashy businessman prone to saying outrageous things running for political office as a newbie. But Trump was already on the minds of northern right-wingers, as was obvious at what’s billed as “the event for conservatives and libertarians to attend in Canada.” This year’s annual Manning Centre conference in the Canadian capital of Ottawa was the best-attended ever, perhaps because the Conservative party faces its first leadership race in a decade—and only the second for the party that arose from the merger of the old Progressive Conservatives and the Reform party that Preston Manning founded as a Western protest movement in 1987.
Manning changed the political character of the entire country. “A lot of water under the bridge,” Manning chuckled when I mentioned to him I was last in Ottawa almost exactly 20 years ago, for a Reform party convention. In the election that year, the party didn’t make the inroads it hoped and some members wondered if it was time to give up. They didn’t, and less than a decade later, Stephen Harper, a former Reform MP, became prime minister under the rebranded Conservative party and ruled for a decade.
“Populism has been used by the left as a dirty word. A more respectful word is bottom-up democracy. Ordinary people, with one person, one vote, that’s one place where there’s real egalitarianism,” said Manning, who founded his eponymous think tank after his retirement from politics. “I think there is a more small-d democratic ethic in the West than there is in the older parts of the country.” In the younger parts of Canada, he said, there’s still a feeling that “things are not cast in stone.”
He sees the recent rise of populist movements in North America and Europe as a mixed bag—but the twinkle in the 74-year-old’s eye as we talked suggests he’d love to be back in the game right now. “The worrisome part about it is it is a measure of the number of people who are disenchanted from politics and government parties and mainstream media and that. But I don’t worry about it as much as some of these other people because I think it can be channeled,” he said. “I like political energy, I like manifestations of political energy because I’ve been in situations where it’s dead flat, and you can’t spend enough money to create a political excitement if it’s not there. But if there is—it’s like if a boat is moving, then you can steer it. But if it’s dead in the water, you can’t do anything.”
Manning emphasized the importance of channeling that energy in a productive direction. “Can you find hooks in the mentality that’s fueling this thing that actually connect to conservatism? I think one is the value of the individual person. We tend to connect that in the economy: The individual person is valuable and important and should be given the freedom to do what they want to do, and often we’re talking economically.” That’s not enough, though. The disenchantment isn’t simply economic. “If you really value the individual citizen, then you shouldn’t let him get in this position where he doesn’t think his opinion counts, and if he says something that’s politically incorrect, you shut him down or get the security guys to throw him out of the room.”
There was plenty of political incorrectness to be found at Ottawa’s Shaw Centre that weekend. The leadership candidate in favor of a carbon tax, Michael Chong, was roundly booed when he mentioned it. Another, Kellie Leitch, promised personal interviews for every single immigrant coming into Canada. Police were posted outside the door of a conference session titled “Leading the Response to Islamist Extremism and Its Ideology in Canada.” Pundit and humorist Mark Steyn closed the conference with a rollicking celebration of dissent with a distinctly Canadian flavour. Steyn addressed a recent parliamentary motion—since passed, supported by many in the Conservative caucus—that called for the government to “condemn Islamophobia” and do something about “the increasing public climate of hate and fear.” Steyn declared, “I’m a phobia phobe. And I’m sick of the medicalization of differences of opinion.”
Some of Steyn’s best jokes wrote themselves. He did a sound check in the auditorium after the headline event, a debate with all 14 candidates vying to lead the Conservative party. Some of them had left their notes on the stage; one piece of paper had on it the words “Wife. Three kids.” Steyn barely had to ask why a man needed a note to remind him of this before the crowd erupted in laughter.
That man was probably Chong, who noted in his closing remarks that he has a wife and three children. “The reason I tell you that is I think the next leader of the Conservative party needs to understand the concerns of middle-class families.” It wasn’t an electric moment, but this is a race in which the social media campaign of another candidate, Andrew Saxton, presented a “boring hall of fame”—featuring former prime ministers Harper and John Diefenbaker—and the tagline “boring gets the job done.” Ontario MP Lisa Raitt, in her closing statement, insisted only she has the attributes necessary to beat Trudeau. “Last election, we lost Atlantic Canada. I was born in Cape Breton. Last election, we lost women,” she said, and here there was a too-long pause. “I am a woman.” “Everybody panders,” one constituency president said wryly after the debate. “Pick your panderer.”
Raitt’s wasn’t the sort of argument to win over this crowd. It was a bit disconcerting to walk into a panel the first day of the conference and see a speaker wearing one of the red “Make America Great Again” hats made famous—and lucrative—by Donald Trump. It turned out she is a dual citizen, though it wasn’t the only red Trump hat on display there. The panel was on “Understanding the rise in anti-establishment sentiment,” and those in the packed room certainly exhibited it. Doug Ford, the brother of controversial but lovable late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, drew cheers every time he complained about the media, the bureaucrats, and the establishment in “all parties.” “Down with the elites is very good shorthand for 2016,” concluded another speaker in the session, Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of the Brexit Vote Leave campaign.
Despite some imported speakers, the conference still fulfilled Canadian content quotas. One panel featured two different hockey metaphors in the space of five minutes, while another focused on that perennial question about the government broadcast company: “CBC: Time to Pull the Plug?” But the apotheosis of the presence of Trumpism there was obvious. “A Trump Movement in Canada? Can Trumpism be exported to Canada? Or is it already here?” had, besides a questioner, just a single speaker: Frank Buckley, a professor at George Mason University’s law school who became better known after writing a speech Donald Trump Jr. delivered during the campaign. Only Canadians would invite into their home someone to insult them. “You’ve doubtless heard the expression ‘world famous in Toronto.’ Trudeau is world famous in Toronto,” Buckley said dismissively of the Canadian prime minister whose strikingly handsome visage regularly appears in newspapers and magazines around the world. Buckley is a dual citizen but declared with pride that he might be the only Canadian in Washington who doesn’t know what “softwood lumber” means. Someone on Trump’s staff does, though—the president announced after the conference that the United States would slap new tariffs on imports of it, the latest volley in what has long been the biggest dispute between the trading partners.
Buckley brought a direct connection to the Trump campaign and a flair for the dramatic, giving his talk in a fedora that shaded his eyes; he didn’t take audience questions. But he did offer valuable insights into the winning campaign that so many seek to replicate. “A crucial question right now is how to bust up the monasteries,” he said, using a clever analogy for today’s elites. To those who would run to do so, he advises, “You gotta get angry. Second is have a Twitter account.” He noted that Trump speechwriter “Steve Miller asked me for about four constitutional conservative speeches” during the election—none of which ended up being delivered. But he reassured those in the audience—and it was a great deal of the crowd—uncomfortable with the new president, even before Trump formally sent notice that he would seek to renegotiate NAFTA. “Americans and Canadians don’t do fascism. That’s not who we are. So don’t worry about that,” Buckley affirmed. And he departed from his sometime boss on one big issue: “I should have thought it obvious that the point of immigration is to let in the people who are going to make the native Americans or native Canadians better off. And then you can afford to be generous with a refugee policy.”
The response to Buckley’s talk was mixed, as was every mention of Trump throughout the weekend. Some of the ambivalence was self-interested. “Canadians are very worried that Mexicans will come in great numbers across the border when it warms up, because of Trump,” one attendee told me, a remark echoed over the weekend. Others were even more blunt. “After years of public education, I think conservatism has been hollowed out,” one attendee said over lunch. “Look at Trump. He’s not conservative.”
That’s not stopping the president from making a mark on conservatives up north. “Trump is causing a lot of schisms within the conservative tribe, there and here,” Paul Bunner, editor of the Manning Centre’s C2C Journal and a former speechwriter to Harper, told me. Bunner has seen it first-hand. “So many conservatives that I’ve known for a long time, had good relationships with, friendships with, and we’re estranged from each other on the question of Trump, which is a proxy for the questions like ‘Is the media all bad, all liberal, all fake, all wrong?’ ” he reported. “They’re willing to overlook what a creep and cretin he is to get back at their enemies.” He believes the news business is full of bias, but also full of good people—and it’s dangerous to attack the entire industry at a time outlets are already facing extinction. “If you add the demonization of political media by conservative demagogues on top of that, you’re really putting democracy itself at risk.”
Trump is toxic, Bunner argued, for right-wingers everywhere. “He’s potentially poisoning the well for a long time for conservative ideas and the conservative brand. Worse than that, he’s causing otherwise rational and reasonable conservatives to forget about their values and principles and the philosophical foundations of their beliefs.”
Even those Conservative leadership candidates who encourage comparisons with the president don’t trumpet Trump’s policies. “The populist message that Trump brings is so powerful because we have to connect with what people think,” Vancouver businessman Rick Peterson told me after the Ottawa debate. “The conservative party needs a more grounded message than we’ve had in the past. .  .  . I’m the only one, I think, who brings a true populist grassroots approach to the race.” Now that O’Leary’s out, Peterson is the only candidate in the contest without experience in office, the sole outsider, competing against a dozen MPs and former MPs. He’s a talented speaker and a smart guy who answers policy questions with ease. And he’s one of the few talking about reaching out to new constituencies. “Where the party is going to grow is where I represent. We don’t have any MPs in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal,” he pointed out. But he’s unlikely to win: Despite his complete fluency in French—he lived in Europe for a time—and sharp policies—he’d eliminate the corporate income tax entirely—he doesn’t have name recognition or the flash that earns it.
“Mad Max” Bernier does. The recognition might have come from the bad publicity surrounding his classified document scandal, but Donald Trump proved that old saying about bad publicity. O’Leary dropping out and endorsing Bernier “solidified Max’s positioning as the candidate that conservatives can look to if they hope to see a Trumpish revolution come to Canada,” Bunner said.
It seems a strange thing to say about a libertarian free trader who would break the dairy industry cartel of his home province—”supply management” has been a regular refrain of the campaign, showing that Canadian Conservatives haven’t given up all of their policy wonkery. “It’s not fair at all to call Maxime Bernier the equivalent of Trump,” Bunner conceded. “Max is a far more civilized, decent, thoughtful, experienced political operator than Trump. But—but he is asserting radically conservative ideas. In that sense, he is speaking to the same frustration and impatience and hope as the near-Trumpers or the full Trumpers or the people who are overlooking Trump’s shortcomings in hope that he’ll succeed and win and defeat their enemies. At some level, there’s a connection between what Max is offering and Trump is delivering.”
There’s a good chance that Bernier, though the frontrunner, will not win the party leadership. That’s because the balloting is being done by preferential vote. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the lowest-scoring candidate is eliminated and the second choices of that candidate’s voters are then plugged in; this will continue until some candidate does reach a majority. If the Republican primary had been decided under such a system, it’s quite possible—maybe even likely—that Donald Trump wouldn’t have won the nomination.
One Conservative party member, who wasn’t at the conference, complained to me that it was tedious to have to rank all 13 candidates. “I bet lots won’t vote because of that,” she predicted. The head office sent out a press release bragging, “The Conservative Party of Canada has set a record for memberships in a leadership race.” Party membership—which costs $15—more than doubled, from around 100,000 to 259,010. The largest membership gains came in areas where Conservatives have the least support. “Why is that?” Bunner asked. “If you’re a small campaign planner, you get a bigger bang for your buck in the rotten boroughs in Quebec and the Maritimes.” Such ridings might have had as few as a dozen Conservative members before the race. “They’re way easier to go in and take over.” As in America, this isn’t a one-person, one-vote race: Every riding, no matter how many members, is worth 100 points.
“We’re all trying to figure out what the definition of Conservative means and how we can win,” is how one candidate put this race at the Ottawa debate—Kevin O’Leary. Some candidates, appealing to a broad number of members across the country with their visions of both, could have strong second- or third-ballot support. Andrew Scheer is only 37, but spent four years as House of Commons speaker and even ended up one of the thirteen Canadians put on a retaliatory sanctions list by Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2014. “I will pull federal funding from universities that do not foster a culture of free speech on their campuses,” he declared in a recent tweet. Erin O’Toole, 44, spent a decade in the Canadian Armed Forces; the Globe and Mail says his “policy proposals include meeting NATO commitments, allowing provinces to develop privately administered health services and a plan called Generation Kickstart, which would give young people under 30 a sizable tax credit.”
At one level Bernier’s appeal “is akin to Trump’s appeal to American conservatives. It’s hunger, this impatience, this desire to ‘shake things up’ that is really the single most important parallel,” Bunner said. “God forbid that Trump is impeached and does incalculable damage to the conservative brand on the continent at the same time that Johnny-come-lately Conservatives are trying to get power in Ottawa.” Trudeau’s Liberals could then become the reassuring party. Bunner imagined them convincingly arguing: “These conservatives are great fans of Kevin O’Leary and Donald Trump. They want to shake things up and look how that ended up south of the border. They’ll just wreck the place.”
Kelly Jane Torrance is deputy managing editor of The Weekly Standard.
