Social Conservatives in Canadian politics

Some time ago, I've read an interesting article on how social conservatism became extinct within the Liberal Party of Canada. Here's a link to that article: https://thehub.ca/2024/01/11/from-influence-to-irrelevance-how-the-liberal-partys-social-conservatives-went-extinct/

I still remember a pro-life woman candidate from the Liberal Party of Canada, who was campaigning where I lived. All that ended with Trudeau's official ban on such positions within his party. Now, it appears that a similar process of distancing from anything socially conservative may be under way within the Conservative Party of Canada. The difference is that socially conservative party members still exist among Conservatives and occasionally (God forbid) say something about issues of concern to social conservatives. But as the news story illustrates, the rare comments are now a cause of immense anger among Conservative Party of Canada leadership. Apparently these positions can never be articulated in public. Sure, you can hold them, as long as you never discuss these positions in the public square or dare to vote in an unapproved way on these matters.

Quotes from the Toronto Star: "Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are furious at a member of their own caucus for going offside the leader’s positions on hot button social issues — but also because Alberta Conservative MP Arnold Viersen spoke out about them at all."

"Viersen’s decision to discuss his long-standing positions against abortion, same sex-marriage and the legalization of cannabis on a podcast hosted by a Liberal MP is being described as just short of treasonous by fellow MPs, who’ve been told for months by Poilievre that any discussion of issues outside of the “core priorities” is off-limits without express approval from on high."

"A few options are available, several Conservatives told the Star: Tory MPs could eject Viersen from their caucus using legislation known as the Reform Act; Poilievre could prevent Viersen from seeking re-election as a Conservative; or he could simply become a political pariah, denied any chance to speak in the Commons, sit on committees or receive support for any of his backbench endeavours."

CBC News story : https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-same-sex-marriage-abortion-1.7222881

Toronto Star article link: https://archive.is/ynh4j

 

It's not just a top-down phenomenon that Conservatives want to run as socially moderate. Many middle and lower rank-and-file Conservatives agree. One reason is that many are socially moderate themselves.

Another reason is that most voters for whom social conservatism is important aren't in play. They're either safe Conservative voters who will be a little less enthusiastic about the moderate direction, or inasmuch as they don't vote or they vote for a minor party, few will affect the seat totals as many are in safe electoral districts.

The swing voters the Conservatives need to form government are typically social moderates, are typically in suburbs and secondary cities, and are mostly in Ontario.

I'm skeptical of strong party discipline.

Many Canadians, myself long included, support electoral reform to a system incorporating some proportional representation. One effect of proportional representation would be to help ginger groups of legislators get elected who advocate several positions you don't hear much from the five major parties today. Social conservatives would be among them. Ginger group legislators would have some influence in minority government and coalition government horse-trading.

 

No, it’s not just a top-down phenomenon. You’re right about that. it’s reflective of the conditions on the ground within the Conservative Party of Canada as well as the electorate’s set of preferences. I agree that a change in the electoral system might provide a more accurate rendering of those preferences. Still, the social conservatives are not in a position to claim widespread popular support on the hot button issues. That’s clear at this point. My issue is that the presence of social conservatives within the party could have been addressed without open hostility, as it was done in the past. This could have easily been portrayed as an issue of individual conscience for certain party members, thus showing there is room for a large coalition. Once you go after such positions as unthinkable, you don’t leave much room for the component in the post-election context. Inevitably, this will result in social conservatives seeing that the door is shut to them among mainstream parties in Canada. Currently, the X/Twitter account of the right-libertarian “People’s Party of Canada” led by Maxime Bernier, is one of the few outlets where issues of social conservative concern are addressed without squeamishness. But this non-mainstream party has no access to prominent Canadian media outlets.

 

Here's what I meant: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/maxime-bernier-chides-trudeau-for-shoving-this-nonsense-of-pride-season-in-our-face/

 

I actually lived in Ontario, in what has been the closest riding in the country (Ted Opiz won 2011 election by 16 votes, and the contest was decided in the Supreme Court. I actually considered voting for Ted (who is a decent enough guy) over our very hypocritical Ukie community "leaders", Wrzesnewskyj and Baker. Met them both, don't care for either. Since I dislike the Harpercon party as well, ended up throwing out my vote to NDP, twice.

 

Author: Christopher Dummitt, a professor of Canadian Studies at Trent University (https://www.trentu.ca/canadianstudies/faculty-research/faculty/christopher-dummitt), a member of the Heterodox Academy

Link: https://archive.is/DKDAD

Conservatives are weird — because progressives have bastardized cultural norms

Following attempts to create a more open society through secularization and sexual liberation, the left has imposed its own draconian standards on the rest of us.

Desperate to try any tactic to dig them out of the hole they find themselves in, the Liberals appear to have looked south and borrowed the Democrats’ idea of calling conservatives “weird.”

The tactic might just work for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her party. There are, after all, more than enough fringe Republican elements to make this somewhat convincing, especially as a sop to the Democrats’ political base and to independents who find political shenanigans ludicrous in general.

In Canada, though, this seems less likely to make the Liberals’ poll numbers budge. The irony is that in many respects, the basic argument is right. Conservatives in Canada are weird — or they’ve been made to seem so — just not in the way the Liberals think. That’s because, to be conservative in Canada in the 21st century, is to be part of a new cultural out-group. Modern conservatism doesn’t emanate from the establishment outward, as it sometimes has in the past. Instead, if you’re looking for establishment figures today, you’d be more inclined to find them in parts of town that sprout red signs at election time, or even orange and green ones.

Over the last two decades, establishment values have changed. The rise of wokeism has transformed the institutional expression of official culture in this country. From land acknowledgements in schools and sporting venues, to school systems that push the politics of gender and critical race theory, Canada’s institutions have embraced a series of left-wing values and presented them as something that everyone should agree with. It’s the new normal. To stand against this — to speak up for more traditional values in Canada, even the small-l liberal values of the 1990s and early 2000s — puts you on the out. It kind of makes you weird.

If you’re looking for a sign of how things have changed, turn your eyes to things like land acknowledgements. The land acknowledgement has replaced prayer in the rituals of Canadian life. It was only around a generation ago that libertarians and humanists rid prayer from institutional Canadian life in the interest of cultural pluralism. A series of political battles and Charter court cases determined that it wasn’t fair to impose any one religious tradition on all Canadians.

And yet, just over a generation later, the new progressive orthodoxy insists that each school day must begin with religious-like invocations of collective guilt. The same now goes for sporting events and theatrical performances. At universities, some professors think that every class and meeting ought to begin with one. These land acknowledgements often contain very spiritual invocations about protecting and caring for the land and talk of the “creator.” The land acknowledgement is, in other words, the new school prayer. To question this, as some conservatives do, is to be kind of “weird” in today’s Canada.

Yet it’s possible that in the rush to make a new normal and enshrine woke values in our institutions and cultural life, progressives have gained so much power, so quickly, and without sufficient cultural buy-in, that they have done what they never quite imagined possible: they’ve made conservatives weird. And conservatives, who normally want to be anything but odd or eccentric, are increasingly OK with it.

 

I’ve heard and seen many land acknowledgements in Canada. I might not have heard or seen any that mentioned a creator outside a setting like a Christian church, though I‘m sure some do. When a creator is mentioned, the decision to do so may well have been made or influenced by conservatives or Christians.

I recently attended a regional professional theatre show in Southern Ontario where after thanking the Indigenous people, the land acknowledgement continued, “We also thank the settlers…” The land-acknowledgement phenomenon is too diffuse and even diluted to support the strong claims against it.

 

This seems adjacent to this topic, though not directly about it.

Don't judge a book by its title, says N.L. Conservative MP about her faith-based memoir: Carol Anstey, MP for Long Range Mountains, says publisher put 'Satan' in title of her book (Bernice Hillier, CBC News, July 2, 2025)

 

I think that her attitude is actually part of the problem. I don't know what the Conservative Party of Canada actually endorses. If it's not social conservatism, what is it? What are these alternative ideals?

Quote from the conservative MP:

"Anstey said the Conservative Party of Canada has been clear in its national policy handbook that it won't endorse any changes to abortion legislation, and Anstey said she has no agenda to ever change anything as far as the 2SLGBTQ+ community is concerned."

Here's an opinion piece that deals with this issue (https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/06/98070/)

"If Canadian conservatism is to become anything more than a periodic managerial alternative, it must cultivate a long game to change culture and the courage to offer a truly differentiated vision; otherwise it will continue to be seen by Canadians for what it is: liberalism with a lag. "

Liberalism in Conservative Clothing: A Century of Failed Imitation

"Canada’s century-long political trajectory proves the point. Conservatives in Canada have never been natural cultural or political leaders. From free trade and multiculturalism to same-sex marriage, from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to enthusiastic support for high levels of immigration and qualified endorsement of diversity initiatives, conservatives have not resisted liberal ideas but merely endorsed them after a delay."

"Part of the failure stems from an excessive emphasis within conservatism on libertarian social freedom—the exaltation of personal choice and autonomy as supreme goods."

"Some argue that the solution is a more serious classical liberalism. But classical liberalism grew up within a thick cultural matrix—shared faith, strong family and social ties, a communitarian environment, and common national identity—that it has since eroded. Without that rich cultural soil, liberalism alone morphs into relativism. Moreover, what we are seeing today is not a betrayal of liberalism by “wokeness,” but liberalism arriving at its logical endpoint. A political and moral order that treats individual autonomy as the highest good must continually validate ever more divergent and incompatible lifestyles."

"Without cultural strategy, conservatism merely manages liberal decline without changing the long-term trajectory."

"Conservatives are no longer conserving traditional values and a more conservative society—they are conserving the remnants left behind by an overemphasis on some of liberalism’s core tenets, without appropriate balance from values equally important to human well-being: loyalty, reverence, moral vision, patriotism, and social trust rooted in shared commitments and beliefs.

"Ironically, Donald Trump—a lifelong Democrat, a Manhattan social liberal on nearly every issue—is himself a product of this cultural milieu. He embodies rather than rejects the post-1960s order. His persona, rooted in self-promotion, celebrity, and the rejection of norms, mirrors the very values the cultural left has celebrated for decades. In many ways, Trump represents the culmination of postmodernism’s ethos: the triumph of subjectivity over truth, power over principle, and narrative performance over moral integrity. He is not a conservative; he is the logical product of a culture that treats all identities, impulses, and truths as equally valid. And while his administration achieved more in 100 days than decades of lukewarm conservatism, that is more a testament to the failures of establishment conservatism and Trump’s outsider and entrepreneurial instincts than to his philosophical coherence."

 

Poland seems to be relatively thriving as a country. Social conservatism seems to be well represented in its culture and politics. How are you doing it there @tadj ?

 

Libertarian social freedom is not necessarily synonymous with tolerance. If it were, the absence of this peculiar form of freedom would automatically make a society intolerant. I don’t think that’s the case.

Poland is thriving economically, but there are cracks in the system in the form of very low birthrates, an aging population and other long-term trends which may ultimately derail the upward move. Also, economic success breeds its own problems. In the past, Poland didn’t face as much pressure from migrants. It was too poor to attract them. The traffic was in the other direction. That’s not the case today. And we have many politicians who believe that the solution to the above problems lies in opening the doors to large-scale migration. There’s really no guarantee that Poland won’t go in the same direction as other Western countries on that front. Poland also has the highest share of temporary foreign employees from outside the European Union, not something that you typically hear in Western media.

When I came to Warsaw after a long period of absence, I had the impression that the city had very low levels of migration. When I walked the streets, I mostly saw tourists and well-integrated minorities that have been here for a long time, like the Vietnamese. Today, the picture is very different. The city is way more multicultural. Depending on one’s point of view, this may or may not be a harbinger of good things to come. A gruesome murder and rape of a 24-year old girl, a talented Polish doctoral student, by a 19-year old migrant from Venezuela, has been making the rounds in the news media in recent days. You would not normally hear such stories in the past.

Warsaw is also extremely progressive in terms of the prevailing belief system. This morning, I was reading a local Warsaw newspaper, and it spoke of the initiative of a group which is attempting to create a massive and costly LGBTQ+ rainbow installation in the center of the city with the support of the city council. The idea that Poland is this bastion of uncontested conservative values is closer to wishful thinking than reality. Sure, Poland is more socially conservative as a whole. But it’s good to take a look at where this social conservative vote comes from. There are definitely more young people in Poland who share broadly conservative values. Rural areas are also more conservative. At the same time, conservative parties have a very hard time reaching big city populations, which is a reoccurring problem for Conservatives in other countries. So, while it’s true that Conservatism is much better represented in Poland than in Canada and other nations, it’s also highly contested and despised by a substantial part of the population, including most of my progressive city resident neighbors with whom I interact on a daily basis.

While the new Polish president is socially conservative and may block certain government initiatives, the current Polish coalition government is not on board, to put it mildly. In the Polish parliamentary republic system, the legislative power isn’t vested in the President. That’s also something to keep in mind.

The Polish conservatives are divided into the economically-left/paternalistic/socially conservative “Law and Justice” party and the economically libertarian/socially conservative “Confederation” party (which is more popular with younger Poles, particularly males). There’s also a more radical third party, a split from the second one called “Confederation of the Polish Crown”, known for traditionalist Catholicism and conspiracy thinking. Its leader burns EU flags, extinguishes public displays of Hanukkah candles and other activities of the sort. In other words, a bit of an embarrassment. The first two parties represent a substantial part of the Polish conservative electorate.

 

One of the earliest well known summation of American constitutional rights comes from Justice Brandeis. He called it, "The right to be left alone."