What's Right: The New Conservatism and What It Means For Canada

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

David Frum has made a substantial splash in both Canadian and American
right-wing circles. Young, articulate, and intelligent, he has argued
for conservative causes and even (unsuccessfully thus far) tried to play
a political role in Canada as the man who will bring the political
parties of the right together. This book collects various newspaper
columns from a variety of Canadian and U.S. papers, some longer magazine
articles, and a few unpublished pieces, all written over the last 10
years.

What is one to make of it all? Frum is an American-style tory, one who
is suspicious of government and a believer in the market. This stance
puts him at odds with the tradition of Canadian conservatism, which, the
Mike Harrises of the world notwithstanding, has always been willing to
use the power of the state to achieve social and national aims. He is
hard on Quebec’s independentist aspirations, but he is simultaneously
a decentralist. Apparently it does not occur to Frum that giving all
power to the provinces, whether Quebec remains or not, will remove any
reason for Canada to exist. He is a fiscal conservative of the
spend-less/tax-less school, and, given that many of the essays and
columns here are on the U.S. scene, he is a Reaganite. There is little
bad one can say of President Clinton that Frum cannot accept.

In other words, Frum is a recognizable type. He is more American in his
approach to public policy than he is Canadian—and, indeed, there is a
temptation to point to his being out of touch with the Canadian (not to
say the American) reality. Right-wing conservatism in Canada has already
passed its zenith, and the recent flurry of interest in how best to
spend the public money once the deficit is under control suggests that
Canadians are returning to their traditional practices. Frum will then
have to rail at the big spenders again, and it will scarcely matter
which party is in power—they’ll all be big spenders. What’s Right
by that point will simply be an artefact, an ideology preserved in
amber.