Beyond Greed

J.L. Granatstein, distinguished research professor emeritus of history
at York University, is the author of Who Killed Canadian History? and
co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Influential Canadians of the
20th Century and the Dictionary of Canadi

Hugh Segal is a moderate man, a Red Tory in an era in which the noise on
the right comes from the genuinely immoderate. To the American New
Right, government is an encumbrance that should be done away with;
indeed, anything that interferes with the right of the strong to get
everything they can should be eliminated. The Reform Party, or some of
its more enthusiastic proponents, sometimes sounds very much as if it
imbibes at the fountain of the U.S. New Right. But not Segal, a believer
in the Progressive Conservative party that, he argues, stood for a
balanced approach that combined a respect for profit with a desire to
achieve an ordered, responsible society that took care of all its
members. Written while the Harris “Common Sense Revolution” is
underway in his native province, Beyond Greed is an implicit assault on
the excesses of ideological conservatism and a call for reason.

Such a book could have been very tedious, but this one is not, largely
because Segal can write, thinks clearly, and is very funny. The
Stanfield- Mulroney Tories that he served were far from perfect, to be
sure, but their attitudes to social justice seem far removed from the
arguments advanced in Fraser Institute publications by some of the more
exuberant Reformers in or out of Parliament, and Mike Harris’s Tories.
If the Progressive Conservative party comes back from its present
decayed condition, it will certainly be because Canadians want to keep a
place for moderate conservatism.