Stephen Harper has said the Conservative government he led from 2006 to 2015 practiced what he calls “populist conservatism.” A Conservative Party led by Pierre Poilievre, endorsed by Harper this week, will fully accept that description.
One can only speculate as to why the former prime minister decided to take the unusual step of endorsing a candidate in the current leadership race and why he decided to do it now. Perhaps Poilievre’s campaign has reason to believe he needs an extra push to get over the line.
Poilievre’s campaign may be doing well, but he wants to make sure his victory is clear and overwhelming. Perhaps Harper’s blessing is meant to help the party consolidate after a bitterly contested race.
Maybe Harper doesn’t like Jean Charest.
Whatever his reasons, Harper’s imprimatur symbolically connects his personal political project to Poilievre’s own approach to politics and leadership. Not that Andrew Scheer or Erin O’Toole ever promised to make a dramatic break with Harper’s approach. But if there are conservatives worried about where the next leader might take the party, Harper’s message is that his conservatism includes Pierre Poilievre.
Harper’s theory of populist conservatism
In his 2018 book Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption, Harper wrote that conservatives had three possible paths before them in this moment of populist tumult.
They could cling to a doctrinal view of conservatism and an ideological belief in supply-side economics. They could “double down on rampant populism.” Or they could “reform conservatism to address the issues that are driving the populist agitation … adapt conservatism to the practical concerns, interests, and aspirations of working-class and middle-class people.”
WATCH: Stephen Harper backs Pierre Poilievre for Conservative leadership
Stephen Harper endorses Pierre Poilievre in Conservative leadership race
Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has backed Conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre to be the party’s next leader. This is Harper’s first endorsement since being voted out of office.
Harper argued that this third approach, which he called “populist conservatism” or “applied conservatism”, was similar to his style of government.
“A new populist conservatism must bring conservative ideas to bear on the real-life challenges facing ordinary people,” he wrote.
This is not an inherently irrational notion, even if there are significant holes in Harper’s larger analysis. For one thing, it’s still unclear what a “populist conservative” would do about climate change.
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre stands during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)
It’s also unclear how “hands-on” Poilievre’s approach to government would be, as his campaign has largely avoided presenting detailed policy proposals.
He would appoint a federal ombudsman to make sure Canadian universities meet his standards for protecting free speech and wants to make Canada the “blockchain capital of the world.” But their only climate policy is to remove the national carbon price.
Seve inflation analysis excludes global and own factors take over the Bank of Canada it is defective. Their complaints about housing are generally in the right direction, although their solution is a new system of penalties and rewards for municipal governments.
Poilievre’s strong populism
Harper defines populism rather benignly as “any political movement that puts the broader interests of ordinary people ahead of the special interests of the privileged few.”
But it can also be defined as something more inherently hostile, as “an ideology that sees society as ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite'”. Cas Mudde’s words, a Dutch political scientist. (I also cited Mudde’s framing of populism in writing about the Conservative leadership race in 2017.)
In practice, populism seems to have less to do with proposing practical solutions to real problems than finding someone to blame or resent. It is anti-establishment in a way that can threaten traditional institutions.
“Populism,” wrote Mudde, “presents a Manichean vision, in which there are only friends and enemies.”
Harper has shown some of that populism. His government seemed have the pleasure of sparring with academics and public policy experts and attacked”liberal elites.” In Right Here, Right Now, he advances the theory that Western societies can be divided into “somewhere” and “anywhere”.
But Poilievre has fully embraced the language of populism. If Harper was suggesting a conservatism that responds to the concerns that fuel populism, Poilievre seems to be proposing a populism that celebrates conservative ideals.
Poilievre has built his campaign around the idea that “the gatekeepers” are holding Canadians back. After being criticized for promising to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada, he claimed that “the elites in Ottawa are beside themselves that I would hold them back. [the] the harm they have caused to everyday people”.
He has called on his supporters to “stand up to wake up the culture” and his campaign has criticized his own party for choosing an “elite Laurentian liberal media personality” to moderate a 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 seems to approve. And if you believe the world is as Poilievre describes it, his arguments are certainly compelling. But where exactly will this populism lead to the Conservative Party?
While chasing the populist dream of Brexit, the UK’s Tories have burned three prime ministers in the past six years. Its current leader, Boris Johnson, was ousted in a hurricane of scandal.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney might have considered himself a conservative populist before his own party kicked him out. (Dave Chidley/The Canadian Press)
In the United States, the Republican Party has become a populist rabbit hole and has become a hysterical and anti-democratic personality cult. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who would probably consider himself conservative populisthe was expelled by his own party just three years after taking office.
If it is possible to imagine that populism could lead to constructive reform (at least in theory), the evidence suggests that a spirit of antagonism cannot be easily controlled once it has been embraced. Worst-case scenarios aside, it’s not hard to see how the populist approach could do more harm than good.
But Stephen Harper’s party is now poised to embrace Pierre Poilievre as its new standard-bearer, and go for a spin with unabashed populist conservatism.