What Canada's Election Tells Us about the Meaning of "Conservatism" and "Liberalism"

Yesterday an economist who served as the governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England defeated a populist candidate with working-class roots to win election as prime minister of Canada.

The defeated candidate, Pierre Polievre, earned a reputation as a fiery tough-talker whose outbursts in Parliament were such an affront to Canadian protocols of decorum that he was ejected from the House of Commons last year for insulting the prime minister.

The winning candidate, Mark Carney, on the other hand, is the epitome of staid restraint. Educated in economics at Harvard and Oxford, he has earned an international reputation in both Canada and Britain as a highly skilled banker.

So, which one is the conservative and which one is the liberal? Carney, of course, was elected as the Liberal party leader, while Polievre is leader of the Conservative Party.

Only a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine an international economist who heads a central bank winning election as head of a Liberal Party that for a long time was defined by pro-environmentalist policies and opposition to free trade agreements. It was perhaps equally hard to imagine a working-class populist who supports tariffs and immigration restrictions emerging as the leader of the Conservative Party, which was once a leader in negotiating free trade agreements.

But such shifts mirror the shifts elsewhere in the English-speaking world. In England, it wasn’t the Labour Party that produced the disheveled, hard-partying Boris Johnson, who was censured for defying his own government’s COVID regulations; it was the Conservatives.

In the United States, of course, it is now the Republican Party, not the Democrats, who are the anti-establishment party. It is the Republican Party that is defying economic orthodoxy to pursue a trade war with the rest of the world. It is the Republican Party that is attacking leading universities. It is the Republican Party that is now even flirting with the idea of raising taxes on millionaires – something that few would have imagined. And it is the Republican Party that routinely nominates candidates who are bombastic outsiders who make up in populist working-class appeal what they lack in political experience.

Canada’s election this week shows that this strange shift in partisan identity is not unique to the United States; it is part of a larger international phenomenon.

What has happened, I think, is that in both North America and Europe, the parties have divided over the international order that was created at the end of World War II. At the end of the Second World War, the United States led the way in promoting free trade, international economic stability, global democracy, and the rule of law. For decades, both the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States accepted that general framework, which might be called a manifestation of small-L liberalism.

What Americans called “conservatism” in the late twentieth century was not really an attack on this international liberal framework. Instead, they were strong advocates of free trade, a stable international economic order, and the promotion of global democracy – they just thought that these measures could best be promoted through lower taxes on upper-income earners, as well as greater restraints on social welfare spending at home. These minor differences with the “liberals” were enough to win the conservatives the support of a lot of bankers and economists – the sort of people, in other words, whose resumes were a lot like Mark Carney’s.

But neither the “conservatives” nor the “liberals” of the late 20th century were fundamentally opposed to the international liberal order of trade and democracy. In Europe, the people who were opposed to this order were part of far-right third parties that did not have enough votes to take power in the late 20th century. And in the United States, those who opposed the liberal order (as Pat Buchanan arguably did) were relegated to distant second-place primary finishes. As long as people like George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, or George W. Bush remained the standard-bearers of the Republican Party, the GOP was not going to become an anti-immigrant or anti-free-trade party.

But in the 21st century, conservatism was redefined when far-right parties started to win larger percentages of the vote in European elections and when an anti-liberal movement that resembled a European far-right party gained control of the Republican Party in the United States. At that point, at least some corporate magnates and conservative bankers decided that the party of international stability – that is, the party that was most likely to preserve the postwar liberal order on which the global economy depended – was not the party that called itself conservative. If someone really wanted to conserve economic stability and liberal democracy, the best bet was the liberal party.

In short, we can probably expect a lot more “liberals,” both in the United States and elsewhere, to start looking more like Mark Carney. The Democratic Party in the United States has already become the party of the highly educated in general. It may soon become the preferred party of bankers and economists as well.

After all, stability and the preservation of institutions are what conservative bankers have long favored. And if the “conservative” party cannot offer that, maybe they’ll look to the liberals.

(Photo credit: Mark Carney speaking at the 2012 World Economic Forum - photo by Michael Wuertenberg / Wikipedia)