A few years ago, around the time of another Ontario election, the actor and director Sarah Polley was flying home to Toronto from Los Angeles. She found herself seated beside a nice-looking, pleasant, older fellow who clearly recognized her. They chatted amiably. He seemed especially interested in her political views, which were known to be leftish. He urged her to consider supporting Ontario's then PC leader John Tory, whose quality the man said he would vouch for.
Polley said she couldn't even contemplate voting Conservative; when she was 15, she'd had two teeth broken by police as she protested Conservative premier Mike Harris's harsh policies on welfare and poverty. She said maybe in an earlier time, when Bill Davis was Tory premier, it would have been possible. She'd often heard that he was a fine person. Her seatmate beamed. "You've made an old man very happy," said Bill Davis.
So I tried to watch Tuesday's election debate through Bill Davis's eyes. Did he start when his name was invoked in praise by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty against current Tory Leader Tim Hudak? Probably not. They were a savvy bunch, those old Progressive Conservatives; they knew their party had been swiped from under them. Even the party acronym, PC, gradually became associated with a different term: Politically Correct -- a clever piece of rebranding.
I'm thinking of Davis, Joe Clark, Flora McDonald, Lowell Murray and Hugh Segal -- still in the Senate -- or best-in-show, the late, great Star columnist Dalton Camp. You'd probably have enjoyed sitting beside any of them on a long flight, as Sarah Polley did, and not been tempted to fake snoozing (a test for politicians once proposed by Alexander Cockburn). Never mind whether they should be called "Red Tories." They sought power in order to do something, not just punish certain demographics by cutting welfare (Harris), building prisons (Harper) or creating chain gangs (Hudak). They didn't think government was "the problem" like Ronald Reagan, a hero of their right-wing conservative successors, or that society didn't exist at all, like another such hero, Margaret Thatcher. Labels and ideology mattered little to them.
They had real success provincially: Davis's PCs in Ontario, Peter Lougheed's in Alberta. Federally they felt thwarted. At their last PC leadership convention, Peter Mackay was elected on a written pledge not to unite with the Reform party -- which he went on to do. Some of them whined, as if they knew it was already over, that they'd never got a break in the media, compared to Liberals.
They probably did deserve better, but who doesn't? Merit is rarely decisive in real life. And there is such a thing as the zeitgeist, the mood of the age. They shared the ZG of an earlier time, along with the Liberals and the NDP. It involved a sense of the usefulness of government and the importance of some kind of social solidarity, expressed largely through public institutions and programs.
The current ZG is harsher, very individualistic and also shared by all parties. Even the NDP's Andrea Horwath showed a quick flash of the anti-immigrant card during the debate, calling for jobs, "not just for new Canadians but for young people." Then it was gone, whoosh. What was that? That was the zeitgeist, folks.
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Fortunately the zeitgeist isn't a godlike, unaffectable entity. It's partly the result of deliberate human effort and resources (like ideas and money), and it has to somehow reflect underlying realities. These include the reality of human interconnectedness and mutual need, which are hard to reflect without some role for government and society.
I sometimes wonder if the shrillest attacks on Big Government and the Gravy Train mightn't reflect an awareness of how vulnerable we'd all be without those public and social supports. It can be terrifying to feel that, and tempting to deny it so as not to face it. They don't want to feel vulnerable, since they do. In that case, the insights of Bill Davis's era remain useful, even if they'll surely take a new form as a new zeitgeist unfurls.
I'm glad the conversation with Sarah Polley brought him happiness and I wish him more in the years to come.
This article was first published in the Toronto Star.
I never voted Conservative..I never will.
However the new species of Conservative really makes me appreciate 'progressive' conservatives like Joe Clark.
In 2011,old Joe would be considered quite liberal.
Fiscal conservatives,as much as I don't agree with its ideology (the poor,sick and uneducated being their favourite targets),at the end of the day are not totally out of their minds.
A REAL conservative government would look at the economy and NEVER make its priority a police state that would bankrupt the feds and provinces.
I wish legitimate Progressive Conservatives would come out of hiding to condemn and criticize these faux conservatives.
Not to defend conservatives but conservatives,like liberals and ndpers,will always vote for their brand regardless if the brand has abandoned them.
The so called zeitgeist of capitalist societies has always been harsh and individualistic. That is the nature of capitalism. The only reason that Bill Davis and the other "Red Tories" appear so nice in our nostalgia mirror is that they were products of their time. They were in government at a time when the balance of social forces were such that the capitalists had to concede certain things to the working class, unions were relatively strong, there were still a few communists around organizing effective resistance and the NDP actually paid some degree of attention to its guiding principles.
The Conservatives that preceded Bill Davis and the others were probably just as brutal and nasty as Mike Harris and Steven Harper. They were this way because they didn't feel that they had to make concessions to workers, as they did not perceive them as a threat to capitalism. They no longer see that threat, so they can revert to their true nature. There is nothing to stop them from doing this.
Bill Davis and the others happened to have been in government during a time of unprecedented prosperity for North America. They could afford to make concessions to the working class. That time is gone; global competition is much more brutal and there are a number of emerging economic powers to challenge our priviledged position. As the pie gets smaller the wealthy in North America want to keep their large share. The state will become more brutal in pursuing their class interests. I don't see any reason why Bill Davis or the others would be any different from Harper in this type of an environment.
melikes has an interesting take here. I've been wondering where all the red tories disappered to in the last few years, but perhaps it just comes down to tories get away with the things the current zeitgeist lets then get away with.
As far as a shrinking economic pie, the right loves to tell us how rising tides lift all boats, but of course that's nonsense. Maybe the reaason the right is so energised in their fight to dismantle social democracy, esp. in the U.S., is a panicky response to global economic woes and particualrly the rise of the east and the south...