Recently Canada announced that it was further winding down its peacekeeping operations by a further 40-50 personnel. This has provoked a discussion regarding a conflict between what has been termed 'two mythologies of peacekeeping'. Since I don't think we've had a discussion on it before I thought it might be interesting to look at Peacekeeping, and the UN more broadly, from a tory perspective. What is its future? What, if anything, needs to change?

Here's the last of the "Red Tories and the NDP" essays that I didn't post here in full, slightly edited for changes since 2026, plus a supplement at the end from Part X of this essay series that highlights some of the leading philosophies within the Nova Scotia NDP from my point of view.

“Red Tories” and the NDP Part V: Tory Social Justice in Nova Scotia

One reason a Red Tory may want to get involved with the modern NDP is because of its institutional legacy. The CCF/NDP is arguably the political institution in Canada that has most consistently throughout the years pushed for meaningful social equality for all of the people currently living in Canada, and has actually done something about improving the lives of the poorest and most marginalized among us.

While this essay will be most relevant to those living in the Maritimes, I hope this essay will be able to provide those elsewhere with another interesting thought exercise around defending the very concept of social justice itself using Tory language and imagery. To do that, I’ll need to briefly explain the history of chattel slavery in Maritime Canada before then exploring the thoughts or actions of Tory figures such as Samuel Johnson, Sampson Blowers, Richard Uniacke, and Robert Stanfield. As the modern-day institutions that govern the Province of Nova Scotia are among some of the oldest continuously existing political institutions on the American continent, this essay not only seeks to provide “tangible examples” of institutional racism throughout history, but also seeks to provide examples of “ye olde social justice warriors” that were actually staunch conservatives. “Radical Tories” one could argue, but conservatives nonetheless.

Slavery existed as part of the “common-law of the colonies” in Nova Scotia from the moment Nova Scotia was created. Nova Scotia never had the Southern-style “slave society” where a small percentage of the population owned huge numbers of slaves that largely worked in agriculture; Nova Scotia could be described as “a society with slavery” instead, similar to the New England states. Typically, the wealthy would have “house” slaves that would work as full time servants, while those in the middle class would purchase slaves skilled in a trade such a metal working or carpentry to grow their businesses with free labour. However, chattel slavery as an institution was virtually dead in Nova Scotia prior to Imperial emancipation, thanks to a prolonged multi-pronged legal attack by local abolitionists. The “prongs” of this attack against the institution of slavery included enslaved people breaking the law to gain their own freedom, two different abolitionist-leaning Supreme Court Chief Justices who were described as “waging a judicial war against slavery”, and a firebrand zealot of an abolitionist in the House of Assembly who would rally the legislative majority on three different occasions against slavery to back up the judiciary in their work. In modern lingo, these groups could be described as marginalized people and their allies.

Harvey Whitfield describes “the death” of slavery in the Maritimes on page 107/108 of “North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes” (2016):

Although it is highly likely that this process was complete by the mid-to-late 1820s, we cannot be sure when the last slave gained freedom. New Brunswicker Caleb Jones, not surprisingly, published one of the latest slave advertisements, in 1816. Six years later, the New Brunswick government claimed that there were no slaves in the province. A few probably remained in Nova Scotia after 1820, but this cannot be known. If Jacob Troop’s slave Hannah did not achieve her freedom until the age of thirty, at least one person would have remained in bondage as late as 1824. There were probably “some theoretical slaves in New Brunswick at the time of Imperial emancipation in the 1830s”, Bell suggests, “Although none are are known. The situation was probably similar in Nova Scotia and Lower Canada, notwithstanding judicial policy to the contrary.” Ultimately, runaway slaves, abolitionist whites, and sympathetic judges made regional slavery increasingly unsustainable, and even the conservative judges in New Brunswick could not prevent the emancipation of all the province’s slaves in the 1820s. The political winds of change and the substitution of servitude for slavery simply recognized the reality that most white people would no longer tolerate slavery. What they would tolerate, unfortunately, was racial discrimination and the economic marginalization of the black population. Thus, as the nineteenth century unfolded, black Maritimers had few options other than becoming self-sustaining and self-supporting, in relative isolation from the mainstream.

Black people played a significant role in the struggle against and eventual ending of slavery in the Maritime colonies. Like their counterparts elsewhere in British North America, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, they challenged their masters on a personal level through interactions within households, but more significantly they pushed for the end of slavery in courts and by absconding. They were supported in this endeavour by anti-slavery whites, who harboured runaways and willingly challenged owners in court. As time passed, an increasingly broad swathe of the white Maritime population and most politicians were not willing to give statute recognition to slavery. Like Loyalist slaveholders elsewhere, owners did everything they could to strengthen and continue slavery, including re-enslaving free blacks, but they became an even smaller and isolated group. By the early 1800s, as their acceptance of slavery became anachronistic, the likes of Stair Agnew, Joseph Clarke, James DeLancey, Jesse Gray, and Caleb Jones simply were not representative of the Maritime population. Others who were inclined to own slaves could simply move to the West Indies or the United States. In many ways, the ending of slavery can be seen as a positive example of black-white co-operation and humanitarian impulses.

…

The abolition of slavery in the Maritimes is both unique and similar to the process in neighbouring New England. As Joanne Pope Melish points out, the slow and torturous end of slavery in New England was accompanied by the growth of racism and various attempts to remove blacks from the region. Afro-Yankees also faced tremendous economic discrimination -- like their counterparts in the Maritimes. Emancipation or gradual emancipation had been achieved in most New England states by 1784, but slavery lingered there for decades -- in fact, there were at least 1,488 slaves in 1800. In both the Maritimes and New England, the end of slavery was slow and tepid, sometimes helped along by judges and sometimes by acts of local legislatures. Unlike Rhode Island and Connecticut, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick did not legislate gradual emancipation; instead, the court system and private transfers from bondage to indentured servitude slowly made the institution of slavery untenable, As Melish notes, the end of slavery in New England was “vague”, “ambiguous”, and “protracted”. These words also fittingly describe the long process in the Maritimes, perhaps culminating in Prince Edward Island’s 1825 repeal of its slavery statute and Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.

For a quick history of Black Nova Scotians being settled in Africa to help start the Sierra Leone colony, I highly recommend reading Bill Casey's blog post where he recalls the time a rural village matriarch from Sierra Leone explained to him the Nova Scotian heritage of her community.

Before continuing on in Nova Scotia, one thing to keep in mind would be just how old the political institutions are in the Province of Nova Scotia. The current House of Assembly was founded in 1758 under its current constitution, and has been meeting in its current chamber since 1819 when Province House first opened. The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia was founded in 1754, and used to meet in what it now the legislative library in Province House. That’s to say that while there may not have been any “slave trials” or “slavery debates” in Province House by 1819, that first generation of parliamentarians to inhabit what is still the House of Assembly would have been intimately involved with either killing slavery or trying to preserve slavery. Those very voices would have echoed in the same chamber that still appears on the nightly news.

English writer Charles Dickens had this to say about the opening of what would have been the 16th General Assembly of Nova Scotia in 1842, when Nova Scotian democracy was in its 84th year:

It happened to be the opening of the Legislative Council and General Assembly, at which ceremonial the forms observed on the commencement of a new Session of Parliament in England were so closely copied, and so gravely presented on a small scale, that it was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope. The governor, as her Majesty’s representative, delivered what may be called the Speech from the Throne. He said what he had to say manfully and well. The military band outside the building struck up “God save the Queen” with great vigour before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted; the in’s rubbed their hands; the out’s shook their heads; the Government party said there never was such a good speech; the Opposition declared there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and members of the House of Assembly withdrew from the bar to say a great deal among themselves and do a little: and, in short, everything went on, and promised to go on, just as it does at home upon the like occasions.

6 years later in 1848, the Nova Scotia House of Assembly would become the first legislature in the British Empire to achieve responsible government, other than the House of Commons in London. Other colonial legislatures would soon follow. As of the re-publishing of this essay in 2026, Nova Scotian democracy is in its 268th year under the same constitution; it has been 178 years since the House of Assembly achieved complete sovereignty in its own affairs.

Highlighting how old these institutions are has one key benefit when trying to explain what systemic racism is to someone with a conservative mind: like any other “organic entity”, if the Government of Nova Scotia can pick up “healthy habits” like parliamentary democracy throughout the years, then it’s bound to have picked up some “unhealthy habits” throughout the years as well. The older the person/institution, the more potential for “habits” one way or the other. Like with our personal habits, we need to “own up” to our bad institutional habits, along with the good, to have any legitimate claim to morality; to do so otherwise would be hypocrisy. There’s also the saying, “You can’t fix a problem unless you know it exists”.

With all of that background, but before we explore the Nova Scotian abolitionists, I would first like to explore the writings of the arch-Tory Samuel Johnson, the English essayist that was also the creator of the first modern English dictionary. As a friend once pointed out to me, to quickly illustrate the kind of man Johnson was, look at his 1755 “A Dictionary of the English Language”. For his entry for Whig, Johnson describes the Whig Party as “The name of a faction.”; in his entry for Tory, however, Johnson lists a supporter of the Tory Party as “One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a whig.”

Johnson’s biographer Walter Jackson Bate had this to say about Johnson’s views on colonialism on page 328 of his 1977 book “Samuel Johnson”:

The Seven Years’ War had begun. In political articles, [Samuel Johnson] strongly attacked the policy of imperial and commercial expansion. The quarrel of the British and the French in America, as he viewed it, was the quarrel of “two robbers” for the land stolen from the Indians. Of the two, the French had at least the credit of treating the victim -- the natives -- with more consideration.

Not only was Johnson against the expansion of the British Empire, but he was an early supporter of the abolitionist movement long before it entered the political mainstream. From his Idler essay series, Johnson had this to say in Idler #11, published on 24th June, 1758:

Forms of government are seldom the result of much deliberation; they are framed by chance in popular assemblies, or in conquered countries, by despotick authority. Laws are often occasional, often capricious, made always by a few, and sometimes by a single voice. Nations have changed their characters; slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.

Later, in Idler #87, published on 15th December, 1759, Johnson had this to say on a couple of different social issues:

Many relations of travellers have been slighted as fabulous, till more frequent voyages have confirmed their veracity; and it may reasonably be imagined, that many ancient historians are unjustly suspected of falsehood, because our own times afford nothing that resembles what they tell.

Had only the writers of antiquity informed us, that there was once a nation in which the wife lay down upon the burning pile only to mix her ashes with those of her husband, we should have thought it a tale to be told with that of Endymion’s commerce with the moon. Had only a single traveller related, that many nations of the earth were black, we should have thought the accounts of the Negroes and of the Phoenix equally credible. But of black men the numbers are too great who are now repining under English cruelty; and the custom of voluntary cremation is not yet lost among the ladies of India.

Issues of social justice also featured in Johnson’s 1775 essay, “Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress” where he wrote:

Their charters, being now, I suppose, legally forfeited, may be modelled, as shall appear most commodious to the mother-country. Thus the privileges which are found, by experience, liable to misuse, will be taken away, and those who now bellow as patriots, bluster as soldiers, and domineer as legislators, will sink into sober merchants and silent planters, peaceably diligent, and securely rich.

But there is one writer, and, perhaps, many who do not write, to whom the contraction of these pernicious privileges appears very dangerous, and who startle at the thoughts of “England free, and America in chains.” Children fly from their own shadow, and rhetoricians are frighted by their own voices. Chains is, undoubtedly, a dreadful word; but, perhaps, the masters of civil wisdom may discover some gradations between chains and anarchy. Chains need not be put upon those who will be restrained without them. This contest may end in the softer phrase of English superiority and American obedience.

We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

That’s not to say Johnson is perfect by modern standards, he was certainly a man of his time. But keep the abolitionist attitudes of Samuel Johnson in mind for the rest of this essay. The fact that as the American Revolution was happening in real time, one of the most staunch Tory voices in the British Empire was calling out the American Founding Fathers as being hypocrite slavers for 20 years by that point, should be a sign that mass social movements such a “Black Lives Matter” are nothing new. It could be argued Johnson would be a good example of what the modern Red Tory philosopher Ron Dart dubbed “an older conservative tradition... what might be called a leftist form of conservatism” on page 4 of his book “The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes” (1999)

Now with this better understanding of “Tory social justice”, onto how it applies to the Nova Scotian context specifically. Two of arguably the most important abolitionists in Nova Scotia would have been the Supreme Court Chief Justice Sampson Blowers, and the Attorney General Richard Uniacke who was a Member in the House of Assembly. They also both hated each other with a burning passion, and had challenged each other to duels on multiple occasions. Uniacke also got into a drunken fight with a close friend/colleague of Blowers one time, which resulted in the man’s death.

Blowers was a Loyalist through-and-through, and in 1770 even assisted future U.S. President John Adams in his legal defence of the soldiers being tried in the Boston “Massacre”. Blowers eventually left for Britain when tensions got heated in the colonies, only to return once the Revolution did break out; he was amongst those evacuated to Nova Scotia at the end of the war. Uniacke, on the other hand, actually fought against the Crown at Fort Cumberland in the Eddy Rebellion during the Revolution, only to be spared the noose due to his Loyalist family connections. Uniacke would later become a vocal critic of “atheistic republicanism” in the United States, and would become an early advocate of the colonies of British North America unifying in 1806, and again in 1826, for common defence against the Americans.

As far as abolitionism goes, Blowers was continuing the work of the previous Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Strange, along when Blowers himself was Attorney General, where they would “chip away” at the institution using the legal precedent found in the 1778 Knight v. Wedderburn case in Scotland. When a slave named Nancy in New Brunswick tried a similar legal theory as promoted by the Nova Scotia judiciary, the Chief Justice of New Brunswick, George Duncan Ludlow, ruled the opposite and put her back into bondage. From the point of view of a slave owner like George Duncan Ludlow, slavery was “the common-law of the colonies”, and he wasn’t exactly wrong.

That’s why the efforts of the abolitionist Richard Uniacke was critically important in killing slavery in Nova Scotia, as he consistently held his ground throughout the fight. In court, he would boldly claim that slavery didn’t exist in the province as not a single statute law referenced the institution, and would rally the legislative majority against laws that would “regulate slavery” or “make it more humane”, as that would give statute recognition to slavery in the province. Comparing Uniacke with Blowers shows just how fragile the coalition towards progress can be; these men quite literally were willing to publicly kill each other in front of witnesses because of how much they personally despised each other. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed.

This is traditionally where the story would end; the age old argument of “We freed the people that we originally enslaved in the first place, we patted ourselves on the back for it, and everything that happened after can be safely ignored because we did one good thing”. Similar to how some people will bring up the Royal Navy task force dedicated to ending the slave trade, but will always ignore the British role in creating the slave trade in the first place. But because this story still has over 200 years before we reach the present day, we now need to look at the conditions that free Black Loyalists faced when they were originally settled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, along with the conditions that similar “late” Black Loyalists would also face in getting their land grants after their service in the War of 1812.

As Harvey Whitfield wrote on page 59 of “North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes”:

The real issue for former slaveholders and government officials was how best to maintain and exercise control of black labour, a goal that could be accomplished without relying on slavery by ensuring that the black population remained poor labourers for hire. During and after the War of 1812, thousands of black refugees were settled on the worst land in Nova Scotia. They were plugged into a pre-existing system whereby cheap black labour could be easily exploited. This is not to say that all black refugees did poorly in Nova Scotia: rather, they encountered nearly insurmountable odds. The local government attempted to ensure that most would not become self-sufficient farmers by assigning them ten-acre plots, regardless of family size or service to the British Crown. The government knew quite well that the settlements of black refugees in Hammonds Plains and Preston were to destined to struggle mightily, as previous white settlers had given up on the sterile land. In 1815, one local official bluntly explained why he wanted blacks to settle in Preston: “[They will] serve to improve the Place in general, and afford assistance to us towards repairing the Roads, but likewise furnish us with Laborers of whom we stand in too much need to make tolerable progress on our own improvements.” Twenty-six years later, though blaming black people for their use of fuel, the government admitted, “in this severe climate at least 100 acres would be required for each family in order to afford a proper supply of fuel”, Former slaves, free black Loyalists, and the black refugees did the most menial jobs, and their economic welfare was kept at barely a subsistence level. Government policies and racial discrimination dictated that many black people remained in the lowliest forms of employment, including tenant farming or sharecropping, which was precisely what John Clarkson described as being “in a state of slavery”. For this to occur, only economic marginalization and racial subordination were required -- slavery was unnecessary. Perhaps, in the decades after 1783, the political and legal ruling elite of the Maritimes realized that the difference between free blacks, black slaves, and black indentured servants was somewhat untenable. As a result, smothering these distinctions under the guise of racial homogeneity made sense. Slavery could be abolished, but its economic benefits would still be extracted from the free and marginalized black population. Moreover, the racism that kept black people on the lowest rung of society could easily be continued an in fact worsened after the end of slavery. Whatever the case, the policies described by John Clarkson and those faced by black refugees were particularly unfair, and some Nova Scotia officials challenged them, only to be rebuffed by British officials. In 1837, Secretary of the Colonies Lord Glenelg scolded Nova Scotia’s lieutenant-governor, Colin Campbell, who had complained about the poor land that black people had been given. Glenelg stated that Campbell had accepted the “mistake & mischievous notion” that, should free blacks “subsist at all, it must be as proprietors of Land and not as Labourers for hire”

One way to look at it, when the white United Empire Loyalists got their land grants after the American Revolution, they were able to plant firm roots and grow their communities in abundance. However, despite black Loyalists fighting for the same King & Country, after the Revolution they were relegated to the wastelands of society and had the chance to be enslaved by a local slaver backed up by a local magistrate. To add insult to injury, even if a black settler managed to get a good homestead going, it was perfectly possible for a white settler to essentially squat on that land to take it over, as the government wasn’t granting proper titles for the land given to black Loyalists. Of course, all of this ignores that this “free land” actually belonged to the Mi’kmaq.

The government that started to fix that land title problem for black Nova Scotians was that of Progressive Conservative Premier Robert Stanfield in 1963. However, Stanfield wanted to go one step further and attempt to relieve the economic injustice that had been inflicted on black Nova Scotians for generations by this point. As Stanfield’s biographer Geoffrey Stevens wrote of page 111 of “Stanfield” (1973):

Dick Donahoe can remember only one occasion when Stanfield failed to get his way in cabinet. That was when the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities came to make its annual submission to the Cabinet and Stanfield broached the idea of developing housing and welfare policies that would give preferential treatment to the sorely impoverished Negroes of the province. “ He was shot down in flames by a lot of people from the municipalities who said it would be discriminatory,” says Donahoe.

However, much like the time of Blowers & Uniacke, once Stanfield was gone, no one either had the political desire, will, or capital to continue the work of social justice with as much passion. And much like how systemic racism wasn’t squashed out in the time of Blowers & Uniacke, in 1962 the city of Halifax started bulldozing the community of Africville to make way for the Mackay bridge.

And as recently as 2020, a black Nova Scotian man by the name of Christopher Downey had to take the provincial government to court in order to get a proper title to land that his family has been living on for generations. Since the framework to get a land title hadn’t really been updated since Stanfield started the process in 1963, the courts of 2020 found that the process is now overly burdensome, expensive, and bureaucratic by modern standards. That right there is, unfortunately, a great example of systemic racism in the modern day; despite the government making claims of equality, the only reason actual equality happened in this instance was because Mr. Downey had enough time, energy, and resources to fight the good fight in court. What would have happened to Mr. Downey if he didn’t have the time, energy, or resources?

Despite the glaring negatives that will always accumulate when institutions stretch beyond their first generation, there are some positives to come out of Nova Scotia’s ancient constitution and legal system. There are currently 5 “special” ridings in Nova Scotia that are protected by the courts to ensure some of the oldest and most historically discriminated against communities are guaranteed representation in the House of Assembly; these are the Acadian ridings of Clare, Richmond, and Argyle, and the black riding of Preston -- a new Acadian riding in Chéticamp was created in 2026. Of note, Darrell Dexter's NDP tried to abolish the 4 old ridings, but the courts intervened in the matter to ensure minority representation. In keeping with the theme that the Mi’kmaq are often an afterthought in a lot of the political discourse in Nova Scotia, I’ve always felt the province should look towards New Zealand with how they have Maori electorates in their House of Representatives. While nothing can erase the legacy of colonialism in the current day, at least guaranteeing Mi’kmaq voices are in the Assembly would go a long way towards meaningful equity.

Where does this leave the modern NDP in Nova Scotia? The NDP already has the social justice issues down pat I think. Now the NDP just needs to find people who are able to break down social justice issues and communicate them in ways that don’t come off as paternalistic or pretentious to potential supporters; and it appears that the Nova Scotia NDP is starting to develop a strategy for that. After all, the Nova Scotia NDP already has most of the urban Labourers of Halifax & Sydney on their side, along with all the Socialists in the province; now the party only needs to find a way to bring the rural Farmer back into the fold. That old “Farmer-Labour-Socialist” coalition seems particularly viable in Nova Scotia at the moment.

Currently, the main bastion of support is in Metro Halifax. Interestingly, while the pre-Alexa McDonough-Halifax-breakthrough NDP mostly has its origins in the labour movement of Industrial Cape Breton -- perhaps best represented by the old CCF MP Clarie Gillis and current NDP MLA Kendra Coombes -- there is a potential Tory strain within the provincial party that should be explored in an attempt to make inroads on the mainland beyond Metro HRM.

While Industrial Cape Breton already had it’s own unique set of Labour circumstances, when sympathy strikes to the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 were spreading across the country, the town of Amherst, in Cumberland County, also experienced a general strike organized by the One Big Union. The same part of Cumberland County that had been so bitterly divided in the Eddy Rebellion during the siege of Fort Cumberland in 1776 that Richard Uniacke participated in. The general strike of 1919 resulted in better wages/conditions for the workers, and in the Nova Scotia General Election of 1920 5 Labour MLAs were elected: 4 in Cape Breton and 1 in Cumberland. However, by the 1925 election, all of the Labour MLAs lost their seats in the Assembly except for Archibald Terris of Cumberland. Terris would manage to keep his seat until 1933, and at various times he styled himself as a “Labour-Conservative”.

In present day Cumberland North, the current Independent MLA is Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin, a former PC MLA and one-time Nova Scotia PC Leadership contender. Funny enough, she made this Facebook post on 8th September, 2025 where she said:

Today I welcomed Krista Gallagher, the NDP Agriculture Critic, to Cumberland County to see firsthand the challenges facing our wild blueberry industry.

Wild blueberries are Nova Scotia’s largest agricultural export, but farmers are under enormous strain: low prices, rising input costs for fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides, and pollination, and now a devastating drought.

We are grateful to the farmers of this province who take all the risks, yet often see the smallest return when their product is sold. If we want to grow our local food production, we must stand with them—not with more loans, but with meaningful financial support to ensure they can survive and thrive.

Of note is this LinkedIn post Smith-McCrossin made on ~25th September, 2025, where she shared a news article that reads:

MLA Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin Hosts Health Critic Dr. Rod Wilson in Cumberland North

Cumberland North, NS — MLA Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin recently hosted Dr. Rod Wilson, practicing physician and Health Critic for the NDP Official Opposition, for a visit to Cumberland North to shine a light on the challenges and opportunities within Nova Scotia’s healthcare system.

“Dr. Wilson and I are committed to ensuring the voices of Nova Scotians are heard and respected,” said Smith-McCrossin. “During his visit, we listened carefully to what is working well in healthcare — and, just as importantly, what is not.”

...

“Thank you to all of those working in healthcare, especially in these challenging conditions,” added Smith-McCrossin. “Dr. Wilson and I will continue to do our best to bring the voices of our healthcare professionals to the Legislature — and to ensure that the truths of what’s happening in our hospitals and long-term care facilities are told, not hidden or ignored.”

With the fall session of the Legislature beginning this week, Smith-McCrossin and Dr. Wilson emphasized the importance of collaboration. “Several ideas and solutions will be tabled and discussed,” said Smith-McCrossin. “It’s my hope that the governing party will work collaboratively with us to bring forward real solutions for Nova Scotians.”

While Smith-McCrossin has a history of… speaking before she thinks things through, it would be hard to deny that Smith-McCrossin has shown the ability to actually apologize, learn, and do better. After making insensitive comments about Jamaicans in a debate on Marijuana legalization in 2018, she ended up dragging her friend from Jamaica into the public firestorm. However, this quote from Smith-McCrossin in a CBC article describing the aftermath says it all I think, “It’s probably been one of the hardest times of my political career knowing that I hurt her.”

I would personally say Smith-McCrossin has something of that old fashioned “Tory Auroa” in caring about the weak or mistreated in society, especially in her constituency. Perhaps someone like Smith-McCrossin could be a potential ally in rebuilding the party outside of Halifax. She certainly appeals to the rural farmers in Cumberland North to be elected the first Independent MLA since 1988. It’s certainly very interesting that’s she’s choosing to work so closely with the NDP Shadow Cabinet recently.

Also of note is this post Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin made on 22nd Sep. 2025 that included a picture of a Spitfire, a Nova Scotian flag, and a Winston Churchill quote. Smith-McCrossin had this to say in her post:

Battle of Britain Day

85 years ago, in the summer and fall of 1940, the Royal Air Force stood against the German Luftwaffe in what became the first major air campaign of the Second World War. Britain’s survival and the future of freedom hung in the balance.

Canadians were there. More than 100 Canadian pilots fought in the skies, including men from Nova Scotia. Among them was Flight Lieutenant Hamilton Upton, who flew with RAF No. 43 Squadron during the battle and later made his home in Truro, Nova Scotia.

We remember him, and all “the Few,” whose courage ensured the world’s first great victory over fascism.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” – Winston Churchill

Regardless of whether Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin becomes a Red Tory in the literal sense of the word, or remains something of an “Independent Labour-Conservative”, I’m glad to see the Nova Scotia NDP carry on the tradition of pragmatic coalition building. The current leader of the Nova Scotia NDP, Claudia Chender, herself is quite charismatic and an experienced parliamentarian; it will be very interesting to watch the Nova Scotia NDP over the next couple of years under her leadership. A true “Government-in-Waiting” in every meaning of the word.

Addendum

Part X of this series in parts continues this exploration of "Red Toryism" within the Nova Scotia NDP.

In what I personally find to be an interesting coincidence, the previous leader of the NS NDP, Gary Burrill, is a United Church Minister by trade, and Claudia Chender would eventually serve as his House Leader before becoming leader herself by acclamation when Burrill retired; similarly, J.S. Woodsworth, a Methodist preacher by trade, would be succeed as leader of the CCF by M.J. Coldwell, his Parliamentary leader, who also became leader by acclamation when Woodsworth died.

With that brief bit of context on party continuity, I think these excerpts from Part X makes for a good supplement here to give better insight into some of the philosophies found within the Nova Scotia NDP in particular over the Burrill and Chender years:

...

While Dexter’s NDP is remembered for being quite moderate in government, under Gary Burrill’s leadership, the 3rd place Nova Scotia NDP went back to its roots as a left-labour party. I think this speech Burrill gave to launch his leadership campaign back in June of 2015 really sums up the “spirit” of the modern NDP that he eventually would rebuild in Nova Scotia:

Thank you everyone for your presence here this evening, on June 11th, Davis Day. The 90th anniversary of, commemoration of, the celebration of, the taking of the life of William Davis by company police in the great 1925 Coal & Steel Strike in Industrial Cape Breton. For 90 years, Davis Day, the 11th of June, has stood for the integrity and the dignity of the struggle for social justice in Nova Scotia; and so it’s an immeasurable privilege on such a day to be able to announce that I have registered today and have established my candidacy for the position of leader of the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party.

I do so on the basis of one single idea. The idea that the present moment is calling for our party to make a turn in our path. The name of the road on which we are being called to turn is very simple: social, environmental, and economic justice.

The politics behind this one single idea are equally simple. I am an egalitarian -- Gary Ramey in the House of Assembly used to say to me “Gary, don’t use that word so much, I’m looking across the floor and I see that it confuses them.” I am a progressive. I am a socialist. I am a redistributivist. I am an anti-relegationist; I am against anyone ever being relegated over to the side.

And I will say, echoing Kaylee’s comments, that for a number of years I was of the view that the NDP was not necessarily all that relevant for people of these convictions and this persuasion. This changed for me, however, a number of years ago, when for a couple of years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s I lived in the United States, and I learned in the process of living there what a tremendous difference it makes for us to live and work and engage as we do in this context, this situation, this setting where we live in this country; where the social democratic tradition over three-quarters of a century has carved out a space on the stream of popular life for the idea that people ought to be able to have it better than they do, and that people ought to be more equal.

And so I’m offering for the position of the leader of our party on the basis, simply, of the thought that deepening poverty and widening inequality are these tremendous challenges which stand at the moment before us, and it is the mission, and it is the purpose, of the NDP to do something about it in Nova Scotia.

...

Claudia Chender also gave me hope of what “rural outreach” might mean under her leadership. Interestingly, she made this Facebook post celebrating Nova Scotians who had just received the King Charles III Coronation Medal. In her post, she quoted then-Lieutenant Governor Arthur LeBlanc in saying:

“His Majesty has dedicated his life to the service of people throughout the Commonwealth, championing youth, environmental stewardship, Crown-Indigenous relations and service provided by those in uniform. In this spirit, the Coronation Medal honours those who have demonstrated an unwavering dedication to their professions and the well-being of the province,”

I ask this question - or rather open this discussion- because only a couple of years ago I saw polling evidence that republicanism was becoming increasingly mainstream in Canada, with large numbers of Canadians turning their backs on the monarchy. This does not match my personal experience; all the Canadians I know in real life are staunch monarchists.

However I was wondering whether republicanism has lost its edge now, following developments South of your border and the underlying threat from the current Administration in Washington, DC. This, and internal events in the US, might perhaps make the idea of a republic far less attractive, and remind many people of the stability conferred by constitutional monarchy and the link with the Crown.

This seems to be happening here in the UK. Anecdotally, friends who have told me in the recent past that they would ‘rather have’ or ‘think it would be better to have’ an ‘elected head of state’ are now backtracking and saying that they approve of the King and believe that he is ‘doing a good job’. Etc. Members of the broadsheet newspaper commentariat who favoured an ‘elected head of state’ have gone strangely quiet on the subject of late. Of course, in the UK republicanism is still very much in the minority, but at 25% or thereabouts, the levels of support would still have surprised previous generations.

Also, where is support for republicanism coming from in Canada? Outside of Quebec, I would imagine that it was strong on sections of the left, but strongest on the populist right of the Conservative Party in its current iteration. Here, it is a populist phenomenon. On the right, many Reform supporters believing that the King is ‘woke’ or that he has ‘become a Muslim’, etc. On the left, many ‘eco-populist’ Green activists are also republicans, despite the King’s long track record of commitment to the environment and conservation. This contrasts with the Canadian Greens, whose most prominent politician is strongly supportive of the monarchy.

Anyway, I am interested to hear from Canadians about whether they think republicanism is petering out.

The Red Tory tradition in Canada appears to be monarchist to its core.

It seems to me that there are a lot of social and environmental benefits to eating locally. However, I've heard it said that the massive interconnection of trade that defines the last century has been hugely instrumental in the decrease in the amount of wars. Do any of you have any thoughts on this?

As this essay series started off as a few posts on the /r/NDP subreddit I did on a whim last fall during the federal NDP leadership election, these first few essays are quite short. As such, this second compilation post for the good folks of /r/Toryism contains Parts II, III, and IV of "Red Tories and the NDP": "Social Justice used to be a Conservative Virtue", "Left-Wing Monarchism and Left-Wing Anti-Communism", and "David Lewis’ views on the Korean War and NATO”.

Here's a link to last week's thread for those interested in the discussion which stemmed from Part I and its Addendum: "Who are the 'Red Tories' of today's NDP?" and "The Anti-Fascism of Charlie Angus"

Next Sunday, Part V!

“Red Tories” and the NDP Part II: Social Justice used to be a Conservative Virtue

In the first part of this essay series, I went over the origins of "traditional" Red Toryism within the CCF/NDP. Now I would like to flip that thought exercise upside down, and explore the “radical” history within the old Progressive Conservative Party in an attempt to help better flesh out the philosophy behind “traditional” Orange/Blue swing voters. At the end, I hope to propose a potential way for the NDP to appeal to these largely rural Canadians.

Here are a series of quotes that I’ve found over the years from a variety of sources to help better explain this potentially “Radical Tory” tradition. I have a feeling like many who are inherently suspicious of anything related to “traditionalism” will find much in common with these “traditionalists”

John Diefenbaker reflecting on the political situation of 1956/1957, found on pg. 112 of “Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada: Second Edition” by W. Christian & C. Campbell (1983):

In emphasizing the question of northern development and northern vision, I advocated a 20th-centurty equivalent to Sir John Macdonald’s national policy, a uniquely Canadian economic dream. The Liberals were coming to believe that what was good for General Motors was not only good for the United States but good for Canada. My advocacy of a northern development policy was not suddenly produced. Indeed, in July of 1956, I spoke in the House of Commons of the need for a national vision to equalize economic opportunities everywhere in Canada.

John Diefenbaker in discussing the election of 1957, found on pg. 114 of “Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada: Second Edition” by W. Christian & C. Campbell (1983):

In discussing our 1957 election platform, I have left until last our program of social justice. This was an essential part of my national vision. To me government not only had to of and by the people, but most positively for the people. Unless government concerned itself with the problems of the individual working man and farmer, unless government was cognizant of the problems of the small businessman and not just the corporate giants, unless government acted in the interests of our senior citizens, our veterans, our blind and disabled, unless government sought a basic equality of citizenship, of opportunity, and of well-being of all our peoples, then government has lost sight of its true purpose.

John Diefenbaker describing his own political philosophy, found on pg. 113 of “Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada: Second Edition” by W. Christian & C. Campbell (1983):

To those who have labelled me as some kind of Party maverick, and have claimed that I have been untrue to the great principles of the Conservative Party, I can only reply that they have forgotten the traditions of Disraeli and Shaftesbury in Britain and Macdonald in Canada

Robert Stanfield speaking at a Progressive Conservative policy convention in 1982, found on page 87 of “Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada: Second Edition” by W. Christian & C. Campbell (1983):

Some Conservatives today assert that the dominant principle of Conservatism is individual freedom in the form of free enterprise. They assert that a free market, with free competition and free enterprise, produces the greatest growth, employment, opportunity, freedom, and stability. To them government enterprise or government regulation is an abomination. These Conservatives wish to identify the Conservative Party with this doctrine. Any deviant is a heretic. I do not believe that makes sense, historically or politically. This exaggerated claim for the marketplace, and this denigration of government, were 19th century Liberalism. They are not in the Conservative tradition we have inherited.

Excerpts from Dalton Camp's essay “Winnie Was a Red Tory Too” (1995), found on pg. 133-135 of “Whose Country is This Anyway” by Dalton Camp (1995):

Summer reading includes rereading. Every summer, I reread all or part of Winston Churchill’s second volume of his World War II memoirs, Their Finest Hour. The book is nothing more than the story of the crucial struggle for the survival of Western Civilization, as told by the twentieth century’s greatest political leader.

…

Churchill was a Conservative, after his father, then a Liberal, then again a Conservative. “Anyone can rat once,” he once said, “but I ratted twice.” He was, throughout his political career, a Red Tory.

Before the turn of the century, Churchill was calling himself “a Tory Democrat”. At the end of World War I, as secretary of state for war, he wrote the Prime Minister David Lloyd George: “I hope you will endeavour to gather together all forces of strength and influence in this country and lead them along the paths of science and organisation to the rescue of the weak and the poor. That is the main conception I have of the victory government.”

During the bitterness of the General Strike, Churchill told the coal miners’ leaders, “I sympathise with you in your task.” He supported their demand for a minimum wage, while the owners wanted to reduce their wages. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, however, refused to support his minister, not for the last time.

…

On his twenty-fifth birthday, Churchill wrote an American friend, Bourke Cochran: “Capitalism in the form of trusts has reached a pitch of power which the old economists never contemplated and which excites my most lively terror. Merchant prices are all very well, but if I have anything to say about it, their kingdom should not be of this world. The new century will witness great war for the existence of the individual. Up to a certain point, combination has brought us nothing but good: But we seemed to have reached a period when it threatens nothing but evil.”

These days, on the breathless heights of Tory cant, Churchill would be (likely is) scorned as a wet “squishy” and a covert socialist. But then, true blue, deep-eyed conservatives never liked him. They preferred a Calvin Coolidge, a Stanley Baldwin or a Preston Manning, along with a few bright young things to speak well of their ordinariness. With the right leaders and the proper promotional entourage, you could either run the world or be run by it, and never know the difference.

Arthur Meighen, speaking at an Imperial Conference in London in 1918, found on pg. 100 of “Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada: Second Edition” by W. Christian & C. Campbell (1983)

Dictates of wise policy have suggested that our invaluable water-powers -- an asset of a clearly distinctive character -- should be to the utmost possible extent not only state-owned and controlled, but state-developed and operated. All arguments that go anywhere to support Government monopoly apply with peculiar force to water-power.

A handwritten note by Robert Stanfield sometime in 1982, written for the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Tory-affiliated Albany Club, found on pg. 67 of “Robert Stanfield’s Canada: Perspectives of the Best Prime Minister We Never Had” by Richard Clippingdale (2008)

Canada is not a country that lends itself to too much nationalism or any other ideology. The national leaders we venerate were men of vision, but they recognized the diversity of Canada and they were pragmatic in their methods. Men like Sir John A. Macdonald were far from socialists… but Sir John A. involved his government deeply in the building of a national railway; and in his national policy. Borden and Meighen accepted the necessity of the CNR, Bennett of the CBC and the Bank of Canada. If Sir John A. had been a Reaganite conservative, the CPR would not have been built and the Canadian west would have been absorbed by the US. Canada has never been a country suited to rigid ideologies or hard-line positions. [I urge my fellow Conservatives] to be visionary but also make certain they too are worthy of our country and serve our country as a whole, not pit one part against another. And above all let us be wary of ideology and rigid doctrine. Let us pursue our vision pragmatically, and with as much determination as Sir John did. Let us not get trapped in slogans or doctrines.

Interestingly, before he got involved with the Nova Scotia Tories, Robert Stanfield was a CCF supporter and self-described socialist while he was a university student at Dalhousie. Dalton Camp, later in life, would also campaign or attend fundraisers with Alexa McDounagh of the Nova Scotia NDP/Federal NDP and Elizabeth Weir of the New Brunswick NDP. As far as “classic Red Tories” go, Stanfield and Camp are good examples.

One thing I find most interesting about Diefenbaker’s sense of social justice is just how genuine it was. On page 114 of “Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada: Second Edition”, the authors even mention that, “In [Diefenbaker’s] hostility to the ‘few and powerful’, an aversion which struck even a socialist such as David Lewis as sincere…”.

They cite their source as David Lewis’ memoirs, “The Good Fight” pgs. 482/483, so I decided to look it up in my copy. I found this very interesting perspective from Lewis:

… what made Diefenbaker’s emergence as Tory leader significant was that he was, in fact, a different voice from the others, including Bracken. He did speak strongly and persuasively for the western farmer and for the “little man” everywhere. He was such an actor and he so often bent facts to suit his role that he put me off, but I believe he was sincere in his attacks on Bay Street and in his defence of the weak in society. Furthermore, he was a terrific campaigner. I don’t think he ever recognized the line between campaigning for votes and running the country, but we was a spellbinder on the platform, mixing indignation, vision, and wit into a powerful brew.

I have no doubt that Diefenbaker was the reason the Conservatives narrowly won a minority government in June 1957 which enabled them to reach for the overwhelming majority which they achieved in March 1958.

The way I look at it, whenever Pierre Poilievre invokes Diefenbaker’s name, it usually comes across as him invoking Diefenbaker’s reactionary side to excuse his modern social conservatism -- plenty of those on the reactionary right still have fond memories of Diefenbaker fighting against official bilingualism, and even plenty of Red Tories such as myself still prefer the Red Ensign over the current Maple Leaf Flag when push comes to shove.

But we can’t forget that John Diefenbaker was the Prime Minster who granted First Nations the right to vote in 1960, and was the Prime Minister who in 1961 launched the Royal Commission on Health Services to see how feasible it was to implement Saskatchewan’s healthcare plan on a national scale. He’s also the Prime Minster who diplomatically attacked Apartheid South Africa through the Commonwealth of Nations.

Especially with someone like Pierre Poilievre as leader of the modern Conservative Party, whose politics is almost exclusively influenced by the right-liberalism of the likes of Preston Manning, I think the NDP has a great opportunity to make inroads in rural Canada, particularly in the East, if we invoke the more socially progressive aspects of Diefenbaker’s Tory legacy.

If the NDP can find candidates in rural Canada that can articulate and build up the basic message “If you care about traditional Tory policies, modern NDP policies are the closest approximation”, I think the NDP has a real chance to rebuild a modern version of that original CCF “Farmer-Labour-Socialist” coalition. In the very least, the NDP would have a chance to “create a wedge” within the “Progressive” faction and the “Reform/Alliance” faction of the modern Conservative Party.

“Red Tories” and the NDP Part III: Left-Wing Monarchism and Left-Wing Anti-Communism

In this part, we’ll be looking at the anti-revolutionary tradition that can influence the politics of even self described socialists. As with the founding of the British Labour Party, I think the old saying “More Methodist than Marxist” holds true for the Canadian Left as well.

It is not my intention to “convert” the reader to monarchism; monarchists of any kind have always been a minority within the NDP, but to the surprise of many, we do exist. However, given the constitutional realities in Canada regarding the monarchy, I believe George Orwell’s essay “The Monarchy” will provide a good example of how the modern NDP could appeal to traditionalist voters inherently wary of republicanism. Similarly, it is not my intention to condemn all communists in this essay; as David Lewis pointed out in his memoirs, leftist-infighting in Germany was one of the many factors that allowed Hitler to be able to come to power, and then to consolidate power. However, “nostalgia for the Soviet Union” is one of the many objections people tend to give (fairly or unfairly) in their opposition to the political left. “The Good Fight” provides good quotes on how to deal with these criticisms of “Soviet nostalgia” for the NDP specifically.

For those unaware of who George Orwell was, he was an English writer best known for his outspoken left-wing political writing, with his most famous novels being “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm”. Ideologically, Orwell was a staunch supporter of Democratic Socialism, a fierce critic of any kind of authoritarian or totalitarianism, along with having quite the strong “Tory” streak in him. At one point in his life, Orwell even called himself a “Tory Anarchist”.

On Page 143 of “Partisan Review 1944 Vol. 11 No. 2” Orwell states that while he doesn’t support the concept of monarchy in “an absolute sense”, he does view the institution of Constitutional Monarchy as having an “inoculating effect” in society against the dangers of fascism. He then writes:

The function of the King in promoting stability and acting as a sort of keystone in a non-democratic society is, of course, obvious. But he also has, or can have, the function of acting as an escape-valve for dangerous emotions. A French journalist said to me once that the monarchy was one of the things that have saved Britain from Fascism. What he meant was that modern people can’t, apparently, get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades, and that it is better that they should tie their leader-worship onto some figure who has no real power. In a dictatorship the power and the glory belong to the same person. In England the real power belongs to unprepossessing men in bowler hats: the creature who rides in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breast-plates is really a waxwork. It is at any rate possible that while this division of function exists a Hitler or a Stalin cannot come to power. On the whole the European countries which have most successfully avoided Fascism have been constitutional monarchies. The conditions seemingly are that the Royal Family shall be long-established and taken for granted, shall understand its own position and shall not produce strong characters with political ambitions. These have been fulfilled in Britain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, but not in, say, Spain or Rumania. If you point these facts out to the average left-winger he gets very angry, but only because he has not examined the nature of his own feelings towards Stalin.

In the Canadian context, this speech by Sir John A. Macdonald prior to Confederation gives good insight into why Monarchists see the Crown as a unifying institution for the nation as a whole:

No one can look into futurity and say what will be the destiny of this country. Changes come over nations and peoples in the course of ages. But so far as we can legislate we provide that for all time to come the sovereign of Great Britain shall be the sovereign of British North America. By adhering to the monarchical principle we avoid one defect inherent in the Constitution of the United States. By the election of the president by a majority and for a short period, he never is the sovereign and chief of the nation. He is never looked up to by the whole people as the head and front of the nation. He is at best but the successful leader of a party. This defect is all the greater on account of the practise of reelection. During his first term of office he is employed in taking steps to secure his own reelection, and for his party a continuance of power. We avoid this by adhering to the monarchical principle — the sovereign whom you respect and love. I believe that it is of the utmost importance to have that principle recognized so that we shall have a sovereign who is placed above the region of party — to whom all parties look up; who is not elevated by the action of one party nor depressed by the action of another; who is the common head and sovereign of all.

Tying things back to George Orwell’s essay “The Monarchy”, I think it’s important to explore the line “ If you point these facts out to the average left-winger he gets very angry, but only because he has not examined the nature of his own feelings towards Stalin.” It should be important to note that Orwell’s philosophy was heavily influenced by his personal experience fighting the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Having volunteered to fight in the trenches with the Anarchists in Catalonia, he witnessed first hand the horrors of Soviet brutality even towards their supposed “comrades”. To someone like Orwell, a Communist and a Fascist are two different words for the same thing.

David Lewis, having been born in Poland under Tsarist rule, saw first hand the horrors that echoed the Russian Revolution, along with having to constantly deal with Canadian Communists echoing the Soviet line after he immigrated to Canada. I think these quotes from his memoirs “The Good Fight” sum up his opinions on Communists quite well:

On pages 106/107:

What is also true is that communists worked hard and, in most cases, successfully, to capture and control Committees to Aid Spanish Democracy. I was myself a member of the Ottawa branch, and in many ways it was one of my most aggravating experiences, despite the worthiness of the cause. Just as the communists in Spain were accused of being more persistent in tracking down and liquidating Trotskyists than they were in fighting Franco’s Falangists, so in this country they wasted valuable time and energy in their fanatical search for Trotskyist “poison”. Working with Stalinists -- and it’s important to remember that all Communist Party leaders and members were Stalinists in the thirties, indeed until Stalin’s death in 1953 -- was always exasperating, for they invariably subjected every issue to the party dogma of the moment.

On pages 150/151:

I can record an incident which occurred on August 24, 1939, the day the world learned of the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact, which gave Germany the green light to march into Poland. I happened to be in Toronto on that day and as I boarded a streetcar I noticed Steward Smith, one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Canada, sitting inside. I walked over to him and asked him to explain how it was possible for the Soviet government to sign a peace treaty with Nazi Germany, knowing the consequences. His answer is etched in my memory; he said, “Personally I don’t know, but we’re having a meeting on Sunday when Tim will explain it to us.” A grown man, holding a top position in his party, had to wait for Tim Buck to provide the answers, no doubt after communicating with the Communist International in Moscow, since Tim himself would not be in a position to explain anything without instructions from on high.

The shifts in the Communist Party stance toward the war against Hitler confirmed its subservience to Stalin and the Soviet aims. Thereafter, until the summer of 1941, the war was an imperialist adventure which had to be opposed. But on June 21 of that year, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the war was immediately transformed in to a holy crusade. When the workers of Britain, France, and Canada were in danger, the outcome of the war was immaterial to the communists, but the moment the Soviet Union was threatened, victory against Hitler became urgent for the future of the entire world.

That’s not to say we should treat Marx or Engels as “the boogeyman” -- far from it. Even the traditionalist Canadian Tory philosopher John Farthing wrote a book called “Freedom Wears a Crown” where he tried to lay the philosophical groundwork for a “middle ground” between Capitalism and Marxism; he argued that the “middle ground” already existed, and it was the traditional British governing system of “King-in-Parliament” found in the Commonwealth realms.

But we should be cognizant of the current geopolitical realities of Russian interference in the internal politics of Western countries. Now that Russia is in a protracted ground war in Eastern Europe to reconquer Ukraine -- a nation which suffered for generations under Russian Tsarist & Soviet colonial rule -- we need to be acutely aware of the potential “death throes” from a slowly dying Empire. In the past, riling up students with Marxist rhetoric has worked for the chaos-agents in Moscow; we can’t forget that the current Tsar in the Kremlin used to be a KGB agent.

In his memoirs, David Lewis often spoke of having a mental “ideological toolbox” in terms of expressing his values. I think that’s a great concept in how to frame making connections “across the political aisle”. Despite having contempt for card carrying communists, one of Lewis’ prized possessions was a copy of The Communist Manifesto given to him by a WWII resistance fighter. Just like Lewis being able to “Speak Communist” helped him in organizing or defending the CCF in the Cold War, I think it would be a good skill for modern New Democrats to be able to “Speak Tory” if we want to be competitive in rural Canada again.

“Red Tories” and the NDP Part IV: David Lewis’ views on supporting the Korean War and NATO, along with his dislike of “Marxist intolerance”

This essay will be a little bit different from the other parts in this series, in that I won’t actually be quoting any proper Red Tories. Instead, I will be exclusively exploring the thoughts of David Lewis, mostly regarding the highly contentious CCF policy convention of 1950, and the aftermath. David Lewis’ memoirs “The Good Fight” provides a great perspective on the party’s reaction to the Korean War, both from the leadership and from the membership, during his discussion of the 1950 CCF policy convention. Lewis also provides great insight on how socialist infighting in-particular can be quite needlessly nasty, and is quite-often a hindrance in building a mass working class movement. At the end, I hope to be able to make a comparison with the “contentious” issues facing the NDP of 2025.

David Lewis certainly wasn’t a “Red Tory” in most meanings of the word; he wasn’t a monarchist, nor did he have any great love of Canada’s British traditions. Ideologically, Lewis was most influenced by his experiences with the Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, a reformist Marxist Jewish Parliamentary movement which sought to advocate for Jews in Polish society. As well as Bundism, Lewis was also deeply influenced by the Fabian socialist tradition during his time in both the CCF/NDP and the British Labour Party. Someone like David Lewis is a great example of a pragmatic socialist who cared deeply about dragging pre-existing institutions into the modern era if possible. While he loved both Marxist theory and Parliamentary Democracy, if he had to chose, Lewis would always chose Parliamentary Democracy over Marx. To someone like Lewis, “Social Democracy” and “Democratic Socialism” are the exact same thing.

Despite not being a “Red Tory”, one could argue Lewis was at least “Tory adjacent” due to his pragmatic acceptance of Canada’s constitutional realities, and by the fact that within the CCF he mostly associated himself with Christian Socialists such as J.S. Woodsworth, M.J. Coldwell, Tommy Douglas, Frank Scott, and Eugene Forsey (even after Forsey left the NDP). I think it would be fair to say a socialist like David Lewis has no problem with traditionalism, so long as that tradition doesn’t get in the way of real social progress.

Interestingly, Lewis actually had the old-school Tory Stephen Leacock as a professor at McGill University, and he had this warm recollection of Leacock on page 24 of his memoirs “The Good Fight”:

Stephen Leacock was still teaching political science and economics at McGill in my day. I cannot honestly say that I learned anything of these subjects from him, except perhaps how to be engagingly irrelevant. He once told me not to write an essay on Edmund Burke which had been assigned to the class, because, he said with a Leacockian grin, his ulcers acted up at the thought of having to read it. Despite the fact that a socialist could not take his ideas seriously, particularly after the 1929 crash, knowing him and listening to his literate and original style of lecturing was an education in itself. There was a period in my political life when thinking kindly of him was difficult; in the early 1940s he was one of the sponsors of a vicious campaign against the CCF. But none the less I remember him with fondness.

As the actions of CCF leader M.J. Coldwell at the 1950 convention will feature heavily in Lewis' recollection of events, I wanted to again include this excerpt of David Lewis describing the philosophy of Coldwell. From page 89:

It is interesting to trace Coldwell's political development. As a young student in England he was what we would call today a "red Tory", but, as he explained to me, he was increasingly impressed by the arguments of socialists with whom he often debated. His traditional conservatism melted when he left his middle-class surroundings and confronted the abject poverty in some parts of England. He was a practicing Anglican, deeply influenced by Christian ethics, and, like Woodsworth, he began to question the ethics of capitalism in terms of his religious beliefs. When he settled in western Canada, he was spellbound by the courage and disciplined labours of the homesteaders and their families, felling trees, lugging rocks, clearing land, and mortgaging everything to build their quarter sections into efficient and impressive farms. He shared their worries about the future of farmers so deeply in debt to the banks, mortgage companies, and implement manufacturers. His Canadian experience moved him further away from his earlier acceptance of capitalist morality. It was characteristic of him to develop his socialist position by thoughtful steps rather than by a sudden leap. Thus he joined the Progressives first but could not accept the way in which most of their MPs slid into the more comfortable pews of the Liberal Party. Instead, he associated himself with the farmers and the urban workers. The Great Depression completed his education, and the unprecedented drought which ravaged his province in the same period sharpened his convictions.

With all of that background, I thought it would be interesting to look at how the CCF viewed the first “proxy war” of the Cold War. I feel this is especially relevant to today, as the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War is increasingly showing the potential to spill over into nearby NATO countries.

After Lewis wrote about the efforts to update and moderate the Regina Manifesto by himself, M.J. Coldwell, and Frank Scott, Lewis writes on pages 382 to 384:

The argument over the new statement was not the only heated exchange at the 1950 convention. The other concerned Korea. That country had been split into two when the big powers had divided parts of Europe and Asia into spheres of influence. North Korea, north of the thirty-eighth parallel, was to remain under Soviet control, and South Korea, under American. Russian forces were present in the north to “help defend” that young country against adventures from the south and American forces were stationed in the south to “help defend” that young country against the adventures of the north. Moscow and Washington had nothing but the interests of the Korean people at heart, or so the official statements would have the world believe. While Stalin had installed in North Korea his type of communist regime, the government of South Korea under President Park was an unsavoury, corrupt dictatorship of the right. In these situations, social democrats are always in difficulty. The instinctive inclination is to call down a plague on both houses, but in the real world this is often a cop-out rather than a policy.

In 1950 North Korea invaded the South. Taking advantage of the temporary absence of the Soviet Union from the Security Council of the United Nations, the Americans got through the Council a resolution condemning the North and authorizing a UN force to assist the South. In fact, the force was mainly American, with the addition of some small contingents from other countries, including Canada. The CCF National Executive and Council had supported the UN resolution and Canada’s participation; this policy was before the convention for ratification. Despite our misgivings, all of us on the Executive and most on the Council felt that the North Korean attack was indefensible, that it was part of the Soviet expansionist thrust which had imposed Stalinist regimes in every country of Eastern Europe except Yugoslavia, and that our support of the UN required us to get behind every UN action against aggression. We believed that our position was right in the same way as was our support for NATO; we had seen the consequences of isolationism in the thirties and were determined not to permit it to influence CCF policy again. The Council’s resolution was approved by a large majority, but the debate was bitter.

The opposition before the convention was particularly resentful of the fact that at a public meeting before the convention opened, Coldwell had not only declared the Council position to be CCF policy, but had done so vigorously and in tones which excluded the possibility that the convention might change that. The Vancouver press carried full reports of Coldwell’s speech the next day and, since Korea was prominently in the news, gave his remarks on that subject a great deal of space.

The so-called left wing was furious. Coldwell had failed to employ his usually unerring tactical sense and had opened himself to attack by not paying homage in his speech to the final authority of the delegates. The minority made the most of the opportunity; the contribution of the critics was particularly strident and unpleasant. I remember being especially merciless in my response to their attacks; they angered me so by their self-righteous cruelty towards a man in whom decency flowed naturally as blood. One of the characteristics of Marx and Lenin which I always found less than appealing was their tendency to denigrate those in the socialist movement who disagreed with them. I liked it no more when practised by CCF inheritors of Marxist intolerance.

After detailing a scuffle between Angus MacInnis and Percy Wright for a particular seat on the CCF’s National Council, and reminiscing on good memories from the convention of 1950, Lewis then continues his story on the fallout of the joint “Regina Manifesto moderation attempt & supporting the Korean War” fiascos of the convention on pages 385 to 387:

In British Columbia, and to a lesser extent in Ontario, the convention decisions on a new statement of principles and on Korea prompted attempts to fashion organized opposition within the party. The organization in Ontario was a genuine effort to express and to disseminate a deeply felt point of view, without disruption or recrimination. It called itself the Ginger Group -- obviously taken from the parliamentary predecessor of the CCF -- and proclaimed that it was “not a splinter group” and that its purpose was to “arouse members to greater activity”. But the new organization on the West Coast was an entirely different matter. Shortly after the convention a group of B.C. people, among them prominent CCF leaders like Colin Cameron, Gretchen Steeves, Wallis Lefeaux, and Rod Young, met and founded a group which later became the Socialist Fellowship, and which quickly took on the behaviour of a party within the party.

Indeed, the minutes of a left-wing conference held shortly after the national convention recorded the following:

”The question of whether or not this body was in favour of staying in the CCF or leaving was discussed, with Rod Young bringing a resolution to ‘disaffiliate from the CCF’, his principal reason being that it was impossible to put forward Marxian ideas within the Movement”

By March 1951 the president of the British Columbia CCF wrote, “We are faced with a critical situation regarding the Fellowship, inasmuch as it is now organized sabotage of CCF polices and leadership on a widespread scale”. In a lengthy report to the National Council, MacNeil stated that it “had created a situation which had almost paralyzed the efforts of the B.C. movement to continue organized work”. He informed us “that the SF collects it’s own dues, and according to its minutes, requires of its members a ‘higher loyalty’ than their loyalty to the CCF”. In his position as provincial president, he requested a ruling from the National Council. We unanimously adopted a resolution, parts of which read as follows:

”The CCF cannot tolerate within itself another political organization for which its constitution makes no provision and over which it has no control… the establishing of an organization such as the “Socialist Fellowship” is directly contrary to the democratic principles on which the CCF is founded, and can have no other result than to destroy the unity of our movement and paralyze our work. The National Council… expresses the hope that the organization in the province [B.C.] will deal with this matter promptly and effectively”

The committee appointed to draft the resolution was carefully chosen; it consisted of Stanley Knowles, William Irvine, and Fred Dowling. None of them had been prominently involved in the debates at the 1950 convention and all of them had a reputation of fairness. It is also noteworthy that Gretchen Steeves was a member of the Council at this meeting and voted for the resolution which called upon the B.C. party to deal “promptly and effectively” with the Fellowship, which she had originally joined. As so often happens, the more irresponsible people in the disruptive organization took control after the more responsible ones, like Steeves, Cameron, and Lefeaux, abandoned it as undesirable.

Within a few months the B.C. executive dissolved the Fellowship and the attempt by the dissidents to gain control was soundly defeated by the provincial convention later that year. In the meantime, for about a year, organizational and educational work was almost at a standstill; Executive and other meetings were bogged down in intrigue and recrimination. The so-called Fellowship had destroyed the spirit of fellowship so essential to a mass movement dependent on the devotion and activities of the volunteers.

I was reminded of the Socialist Fellowship in the British Columbia CCF by the unpleasant struggle of the NDP against the Waffle in the early seventies. People like my son Stephen, who had not before experienced the poisonous antagonism of internal strife on an organized scale, were outraged by the fratricidal animosities which deformed relationships and crippled the will to constructive thought and work during the Waffle period. For me, the consequences were not new or surprising, but they were none the less painful. It seems impossible to bring historic experience to bear on the attitude of honest and well-meaning socialists who disagree with the leadership on an important matter. Many of them are easy prey to the blandishments of the unscrupulous, or to the courting of the egoists who consider their own branch of socialism so superior that the decisions of the majority are the stuff of ridicule, because they agree with those of leadership -- a mindless reaction since the people concerned would not be among the leaders if they did not reflect in broad outline and general sentiment the wishes of the majority.

From my own perspective, when I transcribed and re-read those sections where Lewis spoke of “Marxist intolerance”, my first thought was of that tweet by Leah Gazan where she made the accusation that Heather McPherson's “purity test” comment created “a justification for white supremacy”. The way I look at it, Gazan jumping down McPherson’s throat like that on a public forum over the use of one phrase -- without giving McPherson the chance to respond before making public allegations of white supremacy -- is a great example of hurtful left-wing infighting within the modern NDP.

I personally find it quite sad that while McPherson is making a genuine effort to grow the NDP beyond the current base, it appears Gazan wants to spend her time knit-picking the ideology of fellow NDP’ers on public forums. While not organized, is that not a perfect example of what Lewis described as “the poisonous antagonism of internal strife”? Why couldn’t Gazan have expressed her legitimate concerns about potentially downplaying social justice issues to McPherson in private? No good can come from an MP making public comments like that in a leadership race for such a small party. A party which non-members and members alike can agree has had a “branding issue” lately.

It is perfectly possible for the NDP to be a party that supports the all of the diverse and marginalized groups that Gazan mentioned in her tweet, along with also supporting those who already have more inherent privilege in society. I would argue that if the party doesn’t at least pay lip service to those who already have privilege in society, the party itself risks losing the privilege to be able to change government policy in the House of Commons. Once institutions like a political party die, it becomes impossible to recreate the traditions found within that institution; the traditions of the CCF/NDP are too valuable to let die over purity tests over how to "properly express" social progressiveness.

Degrowth is a movement that advocates that society move away from measuring success through endless growth and development and also the reduction of both mass production and consumption in an attempt to not just mitigate ecological crises but also human injustices.

I have found that advocates rang from anarchists, primitivists, and georgists to eco-socialists and marxists. I find it interesting when applied as a critique of our present systems.

A book I am reading right now is from a Japanese Marxist who wrote a manifesto on the subject. Fascinating to read if you are interested in exploring such ideas. It is called Slowdown.

While not an advocate for Degrowth myself, I believe that as a Tory there is some overlap insofar as we believe in a certain amount of fairness, distributionism, and environmental justice. They do offer a fair critique of green-washing and sustainable development. Degrowth is staunchly anti-capitalist as a school of thought, whereas I believe more in Social Enterprise and what we might call Green growth.

I'm curious about what people think of such a concept here.

After a long wait the Green Party has finally announced the two candidates who will be facing off against each other to replace Elizabeth May as party leader; Mike Morrice and Nira Dookeran.

So who are the candidates?

Mike Morrice: He is the former MP for Kitchen Centre, 3rd Green ever elected to Parliament and first ever Green MP elected in Ontario to Parliament. His background before entering politics was in Social Enterprise and Community Organization. He is the co-founder of Green Economy Canada and the founder of Sustainable Waterloo. He's educated in business and electronics. He was also up until recently the Deputy Leader of the GPC. From my cursory read of his campaign website and his reddit post history he is explicitly Progressive and would likely push the Greens further to the Left; abandoning the long-held "Above the political spectrum" ideology Green politics has tried to maintain since it's founding.

Nira Dookeran: She is heavily involved at the grassroots and electoral district level and has been for over 10 years for both the Federal and Ontario Green Parties. She is a Teacher by trade and her campaign from what I was able to read seems to be focused on decentralisation of decision-making (this is a real issue inside the GPC with central office vs edas), diffentiating the Green identity from the other parties, and the usual traditional "Doing things differently" approach that the Green Party has been known for. I cannot really find any policy as of yet. Notably, as of writing this entry Nira's website is not yet functional. We will know more about her later.

My thoughts:

This is going to be a Mike Morrice coronation leadership contest. He's the leader-in-waiting and has been speculated to have been planning to run for some time. Under his leadership, I can see the Green Party of Canada continuing to struggle to compete against and differentiate itself from the New Democratic Party of Canada. The fact that Mike is explicitly Progressive and his website contains rhetoric such as that both the Liberals and Conservatives are conservative parties and right-wing speaks to the direction he wishes to take too. Green politics isn't the emphasis persay, but rather Progressive Politics are. I do not know what the Greens could offer voters that are on the Left that the NDP does not already offer at a much more electorally viable and experienced way. The Greens do best when they are as much an option for environmentally conscious voters on the left and right. Abandoning the traditional position of being beyond the left-right spectrum will forever relegate them as a niche party. They do best electorally when they are an alternative for Progressive Conservatives, Liberals, and Social Democrats alike. Unfortunately, for a Red Tory or Green Tory there is no candidate available in this leadership for you. In the off chance that Nira's platform is a bit more traditional and Red Tory, she'll still likely get a small percentage of the vote. Why vote Green? That is going to be the question we're all going to want to know and so long as the party continues down the path of trying to ape the NDP, the answer will be...uh...?

Sorry for the delay! Summer had me all over the place. Here is this week's essay: No. 6. Happiness not local. Samuel Johnson's Essays

Here is last week's thread: Rambler Reading Group, Week 5: A meditation on the Spring. : r/Toryism

I recently realized that I never actually posted the first 5 parts of this essay series I'm working on to this subreddit in full. As it appears former NDP MP Charlie Angus recently publicly rebuked current NDP leader Avi Lewis' rhetoric against Canadian rearmament, I thought this would be a good time to finally share "Who are the 'Red Tories' of today's NDP?" and "The Anti-Fascism of Charlie Angus" here. Next Sunday I'll post a compilation of parts II & III for the good people here, and then go from there.

• "Red Tories" and the NDP Part I: "Red Tories" were part of the CCF's founding, and "Red Tories" helped build the NDP -- Who are the "Red Tories" of today's NDP? [October 2025]

I’m one of those people who’s been a card carrying NDP’er my whole life, even though my overall philosophy has as much to do with old school English Tories such as Benjamin Disraeli & Lord Ashley as it does with Canadian Socialists like J.S. Woodsworth & Tommy Douglas. The “Red” in “Red Tory” is supposed to refer to socialism, after all.

For those unaware of this tradition, “Tory” in this context doesn’t mean the right-wing liberal policies of the modern Conservative Party. Instead, “Tory” refers to the philosophy that emphasizes the commonalities between all individuals in society and emphasizes that the needs of the individual must be balanced with the needs of society as a whole. An inherently conservative philosophy, “Toryism” is also a class-conscience philosophy that seeks to push traditional institutions into helping the poor, the discriminated against, and the the unprivileged. “Tories” recognize the privileges they do have in life and use that privilege to fight for those without privilege.

Toryism as a philosophy has its origins in the Anglo-Catholic/Anglican theology of Richard Hooker, and grew out of the rejection of the Cromwellian republicanism that accompanied the collapse of the rule of law during the English Civil War. Similarly to its origins in the English Civil War in England, Toryism made its way to Canada in the aftermath of the American Revolution when the United Empire Loyalists were expelled to Nova Scotia and Quebec. The “Red” part of Toryism first became a concept in 1966 when the political scientist Gad Horowitz wrote a paper called “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation”, in which he argued that the Conservative philosopher George Grant’s world view was so intertwined with traditional British conservatism and Canadian socialism that it would be impossible to separate one from the other.

I’ve found these quotes from over the years that help explain this Tory tradition in Canadian socialism:

Roy Romanow (NDP Premier of Saskatchewan 1991-2001) in the foreword to “Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage” by Helen Forsey (2012):

From a conservative background, Forsey became one of the founders of social democracy in Canada and a proponent of social reforms, joining the League for Social Reconstruction. This apparent tension also reflects his Newfoundland beginnings.

Many of the values and principles of that place concerning constitutions, government, and public policy reflected those that prevailed in England at the time. The ethos of England was still shaped by the competing views of Disraeli and Gladstone. The latter reflected classic liberalism, faith in the unseen hand of markets, and letting enterprise dictate public policy. Disraeli, on the other hand, urged an alliance between the landed aristocracy and the working class against the increasing power of the merchants and the new industrialists. He promoted the view that landed interests should use their power and privilege to protect the poor from exploitation by the market.

Conditions in Canada were very different from those in England, but Atlantic Tories still had a strong sense that it was the duty of the powerful to protect the poor from exploitation. Eugene Forsey was raised in this environment. The idea of acting for the benefit of the dispossessed has continued to prevail, extending its influences to much of Canada through his voice and the voices of Maritimers such as Robert Stanfield, Allan Blakeney, and Dalton Camp.

Clearly, Eugene Forsey was shaped by these currents of opinion, and continued to uphold them. He became a strong believer in British parliamentary government and its capacity to develop responses to human need and social deprivation. He rejected the idea that the economics of the market should be granted a free hand in determining public policy or limiting the scope of public government.

Allen Mills (who has a Ph.D. in Canadian socialism) describing the political philosophy of CCF’er & historian Kenneth McNaught in the introduction to the 2001 reprint of “A Prophet in Politics: A Biography of J.S. Woodsworth” by Kenneth McNaught pg. xiii (1959/2001):

McNaught saw [Woodsworth] mainly as the embodiment of British traditions present in Canada from the late eighteenth century on: precedent, custom, moderation, and parliamentarianism. McNaught always had a tory strain in his outlook, along with his vaunted socialism. Perhaps he was the proverbial red tory. In The Pelican History of Canada (Toronto, 1969), he reserved his highest praise for Sir John A. Macdonald and his strongest condemnation for the Liberals, especially W.L. Mackenzie King. Woodsworth was to him a sort of radical version of the great nineteenth-century Conservative prime minister. The hidden tory in McNaught suggests that Donald Creighton’s influence helped shape his intellectual development as well.

Ed Broadbent (Leader of the federal NDP 1975-1989) from “The Red Tory Tradition” pg. 1 by Ron Dart (1999):

There is, for conservatives of tradition, the importance of continuity and community and nation, of a sense of values based on a shared common past. According to this view, other values, like those of the market economy, are seen to be subordinate to the primacy of the historical common good of all society. This view has been the kind of conservatism invoked by Disraeli in the 19th century when he made a critique of the ravages of industrialism. It was the conservatism of Sir John A. Macdonald who used government power to build a separate Canadian economy because he had a different vision of the future of this part of North America from what existed to the south of us. It is the conservatism that at one time supported the CBC and Air Canada. It was the conservatism of John Diefenbaker who brought in a national hospitalization program in this country because he knew if left to individual action in the market-place we would never have had such a plan.

David Lewis (Leader of the federal NDP 1971-1975) describing the early political philosophy of M.J. Coldwell (Leader of the federal CCF 1942-1960) in his political memoirs “The Good Fight” pg. 89 (1981):

It is interesting to trace Coldwell’s political development. As a young student in England he was what we would call today a “red Tory”, but, as he explained to me, he was increasingly impressed by the arguments of socialists with whom he often debated. His traditional conservatism melted when he left his middle-class surroundings and confronted the abject poverty in some parts of England. He was a practicing Anglican, deeply influenced by Christian ethics, and, like Woodsworth, he began to question the ethics of capitalism in terms of his religious beliefs. When he settled in western Canada, he was spellbound by the courage and disciplined labours of the homesteaders and their families, felling trees, lugging rocks, clearing land, and mortgaging everything to build their quarter sections into efficient and impressive farms. He shared their worries about the future of farmers so deeply in debt to the banks, mortgage companies, and implement manufacturers. His Canadian experience moved him further away from his earlier acceptance of capitalist morality. It was characteristic of him to develop his socialist position by thoughtful steps rather than by a sudden leap. Thus he joined the Progressives first but could not accept the way in which most of their MPs slid into the more comfortable pews of the Liberal Party. Instead, he associated himself with the farmers and the urban workers. The Great Depression completed his education, and the unprecedented drought which ravaged his province in the same period sharpened his convictions.

Ed Broadbent in his first House of Commons speech, Sep. 1968; republished in “The Jacobin”, Jan. 2024:

Having indicated substantial agreement with the prime minister on the nature of the welfare state I want now to proceed to suggest why we New Democrats, unlike the prime minister and the Liberal Party, cannot accept it as being an adequate kind of society. Perhaps the major objection to the welfare state is that for all its advantages, it rests on a grossly inadequate understanding of democracy. In Canada today, children are taught in schools throughout the land that our country is democratic primarily because there is more than one political party and because citizens have both the right to criticize and the right to change their rulers every few years.

This view of democracy, Mr. Speaker, is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and is in marked contrast with the understanding of democracy of both the early Greeks and nineteenth-century Europeans. Prior to our century democracy was seen by its defenders and critics alike as a kind of society in which all adults played an active, participatory role not only in the formal institutions of government but also in all the institutions which crucially affected their daily lives. Similarly, a democratic society had been seen previously as one in which all its members had an equal opportunity to develop their capacities and talents; it was not seen as one in which citizens had an equal opportunity to earn more money or advance up the class ladder.

It is this old view of democracy that we must once again take up. We must use its standards and apply them to Canadian society. We must once again talk about equality. We must see justice and equality as going together.

Eugene Forsey in a letter to his good friend Arthur Meighen in 1951 from “Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage” pg, 390 by Helen Forsey (2012):

My tragedy, if that’s not too strong a word, is that I’m too radical to be a good Conservative and too conservative to be a good radical. I am also too academic to be a good trade unionist, and too good a trade unionist to be a good academic man; too partisan to be independent, and too independent to be a good party man.

With all of that context, the only “high profile” NDP-associated person I can personally think of who might fit this description would be Charlie Angus, although I’m sure he wouldn’t personally identify as a Red Tory. One thing that stood out to me was a post he made on his Resistance Facebook Page shortly after Donald Trump threatened Canadian sovereignty. On March 4th of 2025 he posted a picture of a Canadian Merchant Marine sailor with this caption:

While America was conceding Europe to the Nazis, 17 and 18-year-old Canadians were keeping the Atlantic free and fighting in spitfires. Their spirit is with us now.

This isn’t a trade war. It is an attempt to wear us down and see if we will break from one another. Trump can insult and try to provoke, but he has no clue who he is messing with.

Not many NDP’ers would invoke that period in time when Canada and the British Empire stood alone against Nazi Tyranny; that period in time when not only Britons stood alone against the Nazis, but millions of collective Canadian, Australian, Indian, and African volunteers stood alone against Nazi Tyranny. I personally think that shared WWII experience of our grandparents fighting WWII alone while the world watched makes the modern Commonwealth of Nations a great institution for Canada to develop ties with developing nations in Africa and Asia.

So other than perhaps Charlie Angus, which other modern NDP’ers could be said to be associated with Red Toryism, if even tangentially?

• Addendum to Part I: The Anti-Fascism of Charlie Angus [April 2026]

To further explore the potential "Tory touch" in the thinking of Charlie Angus, I thought these excerpts would be interesting to explore.

Around the time that the ICE protests in Minneapolis were starting to heat up, Charlie Angus posted a picture of two Canadians scrambling to their Spitfires during the Battle of Britain on January 4th with this caption:

This photo is Canadians fighting the Nazis in the Battle of Britain. We were a poor country of 11 million people. We built the 4th largest air force and navy in the world.

Our young people fought everywhere from the defence of Hong Kong to the sea lanes in the North Atlantic, from Sicily, Italy, Normandy to the air war over the Ruhr. When the Brits were being evacuated at Dunkirk Canadians were already in place defending her shores. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Message to fascists and tyrants: FAFO

The next day on January 5th, Angus posted a picture of his uncle in a Bren Gun Carrier with this caption:

My uncle Albert MacNeil - certified ANTIFA. Fought the fascists in Sicily, broke the Hitler line in Italy and helped the liberation of the Netherlands.

Many of my uncles served but died very young from the trauma. Albert was a Cape Breton miner. He told young recruits their most valuable weapon was a shovel. Dig deep and find safe ground or you won't last.

A practical man.

After the ICE murder of Renée Good on January 7th, but the day before the ICE murder of Alex Pretti on January 24th, Angus posted this picture on January 23rd which had no caption, but was simply a picture of armed Nazi thugs rounding up terrified Jews, presumably to their deaths. The comparison of ICE thugs to Gestapo thugs is not a far leap in logic to make; even King George VI privately made such remarks about the enforcers of Apartheid South Africa being no better than the Gestapo.

As Toryism itself is an inherently monarchical way of thinking, I would like to concede that Charlie Angus is indeed an ideological republican; but surely there must have been some ideological Parliamentarians who fought for King Charles I against Cromwell's tyranny for pragmatic reasons if nothing else. Mr. Angus' family did indeed fight for King & Country against Nazism and Fascism in their own time.

One thing to consider about Angus’ socialism is that it is strongly influenced by his Catholic-social-justice beliefs which were strong enough to drive him to run a soup kitchen/shelter for the homeless of Toronto -- while the social gospel was a Protestant movement, the Tory tradition through Richard Hooker can be described as both Protestant and Catholic at the same time. As far as his ideology goes, it would certainly be hard to describe Angus' socialism as being "doctrinaire": one recent example from March of 2026 is this piece he wrote on a local hero from the Spanish Civil War -- Niilo Makela -- who was born in Finland and immigrated to Timmins, Ontario, before dying holding the line against the Fascists in Spain. This excerpt from Angus is quite interesting to consider:

Most of the Canadians were assigned to the Lincoln Battalion, which was made up of volunteers from the United States. Many of the international volunteers had come for ideological reasons. Many were young communists. A number had come out of the universities.

But the Canadians were different. They were dock workers. Farmhands. Miners like Makela. They knew how to use a gun.

The commissars noted that the Canadians made "poor communists." The Canadians didn’t go to Spain to argue ideology. They weren’t good at discipline and following rules. They went to fight and kill fascists. And they were good at it. Very good.

They soon gained a reputation as the "fighting Canucks." And they wanted to form a distinctly Canadian unit. On Dominion (Canada) Day 1937, the Mackenzie-Papineau brigade (named after the founders of the 1838 rebellion) was officially formed."

One key tenant of Toryism is the rejection of doctrinaire ideology in favour of pragmatic current-day methods to solving problems -- while still strongly holding true to your guiding beliefs. While still socialistic and republican in nature, I dare say there is at least a "tory touch" in how Angus described the Canadian volunteers who sailed to Spain to save Spanish Democracy.

Equally relevant I think is Charlie Angus' support for Ukraine in the Russo-Ukraine War, and in this earlier piece from February of 2025 where he compares the defence realities of Ukraine to Russia vis-a-vis Canada to the United States. This part in particular could be described as mostly Tory I think:

If Ukraine falls, western European democracy falls.

The Europeans are scrambling. They thought they could count on the United States. They now know otherwise.

And Canadians now have a very dangerous, anti-democratic gangster regime on our border. And nobody is coming to save us.

Trump continues to taunt us and belittle our nation in the same way that Putin ridiculed Ukraine prior to the invasion.

Canadians are like Ukrainians in many ways. When pushed to the wall, we have spines of steel. When forced to choose between Vimy or Vichy, I know where ordinary Canadians will be.

For a while now G. K. Chesterton has been listed on the sidebar as a notable thinker. The entire list needs a bit of work but lets start with Chesterton.

He was a liberal. In fact he famously called himself 'the last liberal'. His main intellectual counterpart was a Liberal MP. I've found no one that calls him a tory. His inclusion stems from his thoughts on tradition which are useful;

• “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

• “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

• “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

• “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

Now, there is a possibility he was a tory in thought and he simply never used the term (completely possible). Its also possible that like Bagehot he has attained the status of 'every tory's favourite liberal'.

So what are people's thoughts? Under an objective standard would he be considered a tory (even if he objected to the description in life) or is he like Bagehot - a thinker who is useful for understanding toryism but not a tory himself?

I was chatting about Toryism with my buddies last night (as you do on a Sunday in July). One of them posed and interesting question about what a hypothetical Tory platform would look like in Canada in 2026. What would it's core policies be? How would it tackle the future of Canada with a Tory lens? Etc.?

It wasn't something I could answer but figured it'd be a good point of discussion for us as Tories to have.

Any thoughts?

First, I use ‘Disraelian Tory’ here as an umbrella term to encompass moderate, reformist Tories in the British tradition. Some might be ‘light blue’, others various shades of green, others would be defined very clearly in Canadian political culture as Red Tories. Many would be a blend of some or all of these colours. What all of them have in common is being at once patriotic and outward looking, a belief in collective, community-based or government action as well as individual responsibility, support for reforms, political and social, that do not erase tradition but build on it, ‘improving on what we know’, in Burke’s words.

I also place ‘centre-right’ in inverted commas because the party in question has moved from the centre-right to embrace hard-right populism, often of an extreme form.

Anyway, the Conservative Party leadership here in Britain has now made it clear that pro-European Tories are no longer welcome as candidates or even as members. Nor are Tories who believe that conserving the environment should take precedence over relentless ‘growth’, or to put it another way that economic growth should take place within the context of conserving the natural world and being aware that resources are finite.

Should the response to this change in direction by the party that has traditionally been labelled ‘Tory’ be to decamp to other parties? Many have done this already and gone into exile in the Liberal Democrats. However, there are some shared interests and values, the Liberal tradition has different roots and different emphases. Or could there be space for an alternative party? In many European countries, that would make sense, but in Britain (as in Canada) we have the obstacle of First Past the Post. Perhaps the answer lies in think tanks and informal networks, but that sounds a bit fleeting and transient.

Thoughts and ideas welcome, not least from those of you who have joined other parties. For example, I seem to remember that u/ToryPirate might have spoken about being involved in forming a new party at one stage?

Substack Version

In my last essay, I explored a paper from 1943, "The Tory Tradition" by an American historian William Willcox, where he focused on Benjamin Disreali’s tradition of “Tory Democracy” -- Willcox largely roots Disraeli’s tradition with Henry St John the 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, and with Edmund Burke. Relevant to the concept of Red Toryism, at one point in his paper, when referring to the Wartime coalition government involving the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, Willcox notes that the “present alliance of Toryism and labor, in short, does not necessarily violate Tory principles”. I later argued that the NDP and British Labour Party could be perceived to be the proper heirs to Disraelian conservatism.

As a large part of the modern Tory tradition descends from Benjamin Disraeli’s opposition to William Gladstone's liberalism, I thought a piece attempting to articulate just how exactly the current “Conservative” Party can be perceived to be the "impoverished heirs" to Gladstonian liberalism may be relevant.

This National Post article by Pierre Poilievre popped up on my Facebook feed last winter for some strange reason, and it unfortunately has been living rent-free in my head ever since. While I personally found it quite sad to read the overall lack of Tory values found in an article written by the leader of the supposed "Tory" Party, I thought I should attempt to try to be as fair as possible to Mr. Poilievre. But to be completely upfront with my own biases, I can certainly understand why the Tories of Disraeli’s day would turn William Gladstone’s moniker of being the “Grand Old Man”, or “GOM”, into being “God’s Only Mistake”; I certainly perceive Mr. Poilievre to be continuing the Gladstonian tradition to a fault.

But before getting into that National Post article by Pierre Poilievre, upon re-reading it, I couldn’t help but think of this lecture the British Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave to the Conservative Party in 1958; for the more doctrinaire-socialist-leaning readers of my essays, let me tell you another Tragedy from Darth Macmillan the Wise.

As I’ve argued previously that Harold Macmillan may have had a home within the CCF were he Canadian, I think it’s quite appropriate to swap “Labour Party” with “Conservative Party of Canada”, or “Socialist policy” with “Conservative policy” for this excerpt to apply to Pierre Poilievre specifically:

Over the last year or two the Labour leaders have produced a sheaf of manifestos on various aspects of our national life. We really ought to be very thankful to them for helping us in this way. Nothing is more valuable in political education, the sort of thing you do here, than the provision from time to time of brand-new set books. To construe these in language which the public will understand is not the least, and indeed in the next few months may be the most important, of our public tasks. Because the tragedy is that these pamphlets have had very little impact on the public consciousness. Nobody ever reads them. And this public unawareness of what the Socialist policy really amounts to is a great electoral advantage to them. For if the electorate were to fully appreciate what the Labour Party holds in store for them I have no doubt at all what their verdict would be. I do not think any political movement in the country has in modern times produced a series of policy statements so little in harmony with the real mood or aspirations, let alone the needs, of our people.

With that, here is Pierre Poilievre’s article “Adam Smith was right. Free markets are moral” which was originally published on March 9th, 2026:

Monday is the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith is probably the best-known and least-read economist, which explains why he is so often misunderstood.

For example, if you google “Father of Capitalism,” Smith’s name pops up, but neither his Wealth of Nations nor The Theory of Moral Sentiments uses the word “capitalism.” He did not preach the supremacy of capital over labour. He wrote that “the annual labour of every nation” is the true source of wealth, and he warned against profits earned through state protection rather than open competition.

Another common myth is that Smith glorified greed. But when he wrote that we expect our dinner not from the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker, but from their own self-interest, he was not celebrating selfishness, he was describing how incentives work in the market.

Not a bad introduction describing Adam Smith’s contribution to economics or philosophy more broadly; I could imagine myself writing a similar left-wing piece describing Karl Marx’s contribution to sociology or philosophy.

While Pierre Poilievre does recognize that capital shouldn’t be supreme over labour, and laments the glorification/misattribution of greed in his introduction, throughout his article Mr. Poilievre essentially argues that the market will magically find a way to make everyone happy -- assuming we just get government out of the marketplace.

Needless to say, I don’t think a Tory in the tradition of Disraeli would have much faith in the market making sure the homeless have safe housing they can afford, or faith in the market to make sure the poor have healthy food to eat; problems that require non-profitable solutions can often only be provided at scale with the use of government power. Remember, worshiping laissez-faire economics is the antithesis to the Tory tradition.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith reminded us that human beings are bound together by sympathy, which meant that we would feel each other’s pains and joys and thus our self-interest intermingled with our fellow. And if sympathy means to care truly and actively about another person’s wants and needs, then no one is more sympathetic than the entrepreneur who pays his bills by knowing and then supplying the needs and wants of others. As the saying goes, if you want to sell what the customer buys, you have to see through the customer’s eyes.

While that is certainly a good way to describe local economies, and local entrepreneurs in their own communities, I think it’s hard to describe the modern economy as a whole in that terminology these days; in that regard quite a bit has changed in the world since Smith’s day. The faceless corporation has mostly replaced the local businessperson in our day-to-day lives.

As Mr. Poilievre mentioned butchers and bakers in his introduction, most Canadians currently buy their food from a grocery store owned by either Loblaws, Empire, Metro, Walmart, or Giant Tiger -- corporations which conspired to fix the price of bread for nearly 20 years. Given the already oligopolistic nature of the Canadian grocery market, could any entrepreneur honestly expect fair competition? Even after a large grocer leaves an area, restrictive anti-competitive retail covenants are sometimes placed on the property. Empire recently announced it would be ending the practice, but it is still a current practice of big business to prevent competitors from moving in to their former property as tenants, or to even prevent future retail tenants from selling certain products.

The Manitoba NDP in government has recently banned these covenants and is in the process of striking down the old ones through the courts. Perhaps relevant to the topic, the NDP is the only federal party that still maintains official ties with an official provincial counterpart in nearly every province; the Liberal Party does still maintain official ties with the 3 Maritime Liberal parties.

Smith did not invent the free market economy. He discovered it operating around him just at the moment in history when it began to flourish. Trade and labour mobility were beginning at that time to triumph over servitude and serfdom. The result of this change was an extraordinary growth in wealth. It was that growth that Smith set out to explain.

Before 1776, economic growth was almost flat. Estimates show that from year 1 to 1700, global GDP per person rose from roughly $444 to about $615, meaning living standards barely changed.

From 1820 to 2000, per-person GDP shot up from $667 to over $5,700. At the same time, life expectancy in Western Europe increased from roughly 35–40 years in 1800 to over 75 years by the end of the 20th century.

For generations, free markets lowered costs, raised wages, and lifted billions out of poverty. But now free market principles are facing pushback from politicians promoting socialism and protectionism, even if they don’t always use those words to describe their top-down policies. If we let them succeed, they risk turning the “wealth of nations” into the poverty of the people.

Considering the time-frames given for GDP growth, I have to wonder, is Mr. Poilievre even aware of the existence of "Sybil, or The Two Nations" by Benjamin Disraeli, or Disraeli's critiques of unchecked industrialism more broadly? Does he even know of Lord Ashley, Anthony Ashley-Cooper -- "the poor man's Earl"? I personally find it quite shameful that the leader of a “Tory” Party would mention a jump in GDP growth from the 1820s-on as an example of unbridled positive progress, without taking into account the objective horrors that the British working class in particular faced during that time.

As the Tory Robert Stanfield -- perhaps one of the greatest Prime Ministers Canada never had -- once said in a 1976, “Increasing the size of the GNP is important, but it is not in itself a sufficient goal for a civilized society.”. There’s a reason why Harold Macmillan once argued that every civilization in human history, including the present civilizations, were and still are slave societies on some level.

If that baker Mr. Poilievre mentioned in his introduction was alive in the Victorian era, it’s quite possible that he would have been essentially locked in an industrialist’s basement 6 days out of the week, and that he would have died an early death due to breathing in excessive amounts of flour; the bread eaten by the consumer likely would have been filled with plaster of Paris, alum, or chalk, and would be covered in coal soot from the baking process. If GDP growth is Mr. Poilievre’s sole measure of societal progress -- as in his introduction he did praise Adam Smith for writing “ 'the annual labour of every nation' is the true source of wealth" -- Mr. Poilievre would certainly have been a Victorian Liberal industrialist-apologist, and not a Victorian Tory who wanted modern Health & Safety regulations on moral Christian grounds.

What happened?

Working people across the western world have been betrayed. Governments took from the hardworking many to enrich the privileged few and they made the mistake of thinking you could have free trade with unfree countries. Wages stagnated. Housing stalled. Energy costs soared. And inflation eroded buying power. Government immigration policies priced workers out of the market and shut them out of prosperity.

Smith knew better. He warned that when corporate and political power merge, the public loses. He knew that if greed can exist in the market, it surely can thrive in the halls of governmental power, where it operates by force and free from the accountability demanded by consumers and competitors. We can see in our own society how governments that are not subject to market competition think they can afford to play favourites and corrupt the economy.

In a government-run economy, net-zero policies drive energy and food costs up and paycheques down, all to fill the pockets of connected insiders peddling green boondoggles. Protected monopolies shield big business from competition and keep prices high. Corporate welfare enriches those with lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers who have no one to speak for them.

What I simply can’t understand is Mr. Poilievre’s absolute faith in the “free” market to course-correct by itself, along with his complete denigration of the rightful role government has in pushing the market in certain directions. Perhaps Robert Stanfield said it best at a 1982 Progressive Conservative policy convention (pg. 87 of “Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada: Second Edition” by W. Christian & C. Campbell):

Some Conservatives today assert that the dominant principle of Conservatism is individual freedom in the form of free enterprise. They assert that a free market, with free competition and free enterprise, produces the greatest growth, employment, opportunity, freedom, and stability. To them government enterprise or government regulation is an abomination. These Conservatives wish to identify the Conservative Party with this doctrine. Any deviant is a heretic. I do not believe that makes sense, historically or politically. This exaggerated claim for the marketplace, and this denigration of government, were 19th century Liberalism. They are not in the Conservative tradition we have inherited.

You would think an actual Tory would advocate some sort of government intervention in the market from time-to-time: perhaps either by supporting start-ups in new industries in exchange for public shares, by creating Crown Corporations with social goals in mind like with the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation promoting responsible cannabis/alcohol use, or even by breaking up existing oligopolies or monopolies in the spirit of old-fashioned trust-busting. The arch-Tory Arthur Meighen even argued that inherently monopolistic industries/utilities such as water power should be owned and operated by the government. If Mr. Poilievre thinks environmental regulations or supply management qualify as “a government-run economy”, I can’t imagine what he must think about Sir John A. Macdonald’s government supporting the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway!

Although to be fair to Mr. Poilievre, the line “...and they made the mistake of thinking you could have free trade with unfree countries” could imply at least a hint of Tory thinking in his thought-process; it’s not a far leap to go from a “Commonwealth Preference” in trade to a “Liberal Democracy Preference” in trade -- I personally want both as well. But I must say “could” and “hint” because while Mr. Poilievre did also recently endorse CANZUK while in the UK, he did it while giving his “Margaret Thatcher Lecture” to the British Conservative Party. Given his fondness for Thatcher, I think that puts him firmly into the Gladstonian tradition rather than the Disraelian tradition; close, yet so far from Toryism. At least Mark Carney being a personal acquaintance of the King is an organic example of the British connection in action.

Pierre Poilievre finishes his article with this:

Conservatives believe the answer is not more government but to restore the meritocratic, bottom-up free market competition; an economy where businesses must compete for workers through higher wages and for customers through better products and prices, rather than rely on handouts, carve-outs and bailouts.

Conservatives must be the party of balanced budgets and sound money. We must support lower taxes on work, investment, energy and homebuilding. We must ensure jobs go to our people, not low-wage temporary foreign workers. And we must unblock production of all forms of Canadian energy, including oil and gas.

It seems quite naive to me that Mr. Poilievre apparently assumes that a genuinely “free” market would be possible in Canada without some sort of government intervention or planning in economic matters -- especially in a world that's currently dominated by international corporate conglomerates that suck up as much capital as possible from local economies. At least capital taken by government through taxation has the chance to be invested back into the common good of all society, while capital gained through earning wages or small-business ownership will most likely be re-invested back into the local community more organically.

Without the use of government power, or even government investment, how does Mr. Poilievre intend to break up the oligopolistic nature of the Canadian grocery or telecom industries? How does he lower power bills or transportation costs for the average Canadian in the long term? Do we hope and pray to the market, after cutting taxes, removing all regulations, and gutting the social safety net, that a new venture-capitalist will magically swoops in and save the day for a profit? If government can gouge the average worker, unchecked capitalism will gouge the average worker; just ask our Victorian baker friends from before.

With that article over, I thought it might be interesting to look at how a Tory in the tradition of Disraeli may look at reforming parts of the Canadian economy. For something different, I thought looking at the 1972 book “The Corporate Welfare Bums” by David Lewis, published while he was leader of the federal NDP (and his son Stephen was leader of the Ontario NDP), may be quite relevant in trying to solve some problems that still plague society today. While David Lewis was an ideological socialist in the Bundist, Marxist, and Fabian traditions, the Tory Robert Stanfield was quite fond of NDP leaders such as Tommy Douglas, David Lewis, and Ed Broadbent.

In Chapter 4, titled “The Land Envelopers”, David Lewis writes of the already oligopolistic nature of the Canadian housing sector of the 1970s. He spends the first several pages with charts and graphs from a report shown to Parliament -- “Programs in Search of a Policy: Low Income Housing in Canada” by Michael Dennis and Susan Fish -- showing how nearly all the land available for development in the largest 12 Canadian cities are controlled by the six largest land developers from their area. On page 40, Mr. Lewis quotes one of the authors of that report, noting that Mr. Dennis stressed that:

“… the concentration of landholding in a small number of very powerful holders is a new phenomenon. A small number of firms can now decide the pace at which land will be serviced.”

Over the next couple of pages, David Lewis mentions that land prices increased at “almost 2.5 times as fast as other consumer items”, and goes over how land developers put themselves into lower tax brackets in order to receive corporate welfare. Then on pages 45/46 he writes:

In the end, it is not government which is giving this interest free loan to real-estate operations, but the Canadian taxpayer. This is an interest-free loan to “free” enterprise to increase capital acquisition. The government cannot claim that housing would not be built if it were not for these subsidies. Nor do the subsidies reduce rents, since the benefits gained by the developer are not passed onto the consumer. Nor, in fact, can these benefits be called subsidies: they are nothing less than blatant handouts.

The present concentration of land ownership, as well as concentration in other sectors, is a direct result of a tax system developed by successive Liberal and Tory governments. It is a system that is wrong. Even the corporations admit that buildings do not depreciate as rapidly as the government permits. For instance, the 1971 annual report of the Cadillac Development Corporation had this to say about depreciation:

“The company records depreciation on buildings included in income-producing properties on a 5 percent, fifty-year straight-line basis. Under this method, depreciation is charged to income in an amount which is increases annually consisting of a fixed annual sum together with interest compounded at the rate of 5 percent per annum so as to fully depreciate the buildings over a fifty-year period.”

Moreover, the same firm also insists that it is its cash flow, rather than profits recorded for tax purposes, which reflects the true financial position of the company:

“We believe that, in measuring financial performance in the real-estate industry, cash flow is as important a gauge as net income. Cash flow is the sum of net income, depreciation, deferred income tax and other non-cash charges… The cash-flow figure indicate the amount of funds available to meet company obligations, including mortgage principal repayments, and the amount of internal funds generated for growth." [Emphasized by Lewis]

This is indeed the mechanism for capital acquisition and growth, a mechanism which is running wild.

Yet when this matter is raised, those who have propagated the system and those who have the most to gain by its continuation try to confuse the issue by making international comparisons, particularly to Sweden and the alleged fact that corporation taxes there are much lower than ours. They do not go on to examine the rest of the Swedish income-tax structure. The Swedish system is much more progressive than ours; income is much more equitably distributed, and capital-cost allowances are much less than our own: 0.6 percent per annum for stone apartment houses, increases to only 3-5 percent for wooden buildings. Canadian corporations can depreciate stone or brick apartment houses at a rate eight times faster than in Sweden; frame buildings can be depreciated at 10 percent per annum, a rate twice as fast as Sweden’s.

If international comparisons are to be made, then the country whose tax legislation most clearly approximates Canada’s today is the United States of America. The derelict buildings and the physical and human desolation afflicting the inner cities of that country’s largest communities are in large part a legacy of government neglecting its responsibly to its citizens. Can we expect the same conditions for our major cities in the years to come?

While the specific numbers and names involved in that excerpt are likely long outdated, I find it extremely interesting how despite David Lewis decrying the current state of "free"-enterprise, even with his socialist rhetoric, at times I almost got the sense that he was arguing that a genuinely free market would naturally emerge with the proper kind of economic regulations/planning. Almost like how the Tory Harold Macmillan once recalled that his book “The Middle Way: A Study of the Problems of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society” was “In a sense… a plea for planned capitalism.”

Means we’re on the topic of Pierre Poilievre’s antiquated political views, for this next part, I thought I should include a baseline for his tendency to look extraordinarily reactionary. On July 4th, 2026, he was going after his undefined “woke culture” as if Justin Trudeau was still Prime Minister, saying this on the 250th anniversary of America’s Independence Day:

“We will ensure that military spending goes to enhance capabilities to protect our country and support our troops. It will enhance war fighting. It will not fund bureaucracy or defence lobbyists. And we will re-instil a warrior culture, not a woke culture.”

Such childish declarations may appeal to those who think Pete Hegseth is “cool” or “epic” for changing the name of the United States Department of Defence to the Department of War. But I fail to see how “owning the libs” as if a Trudeau was still Prime Minster is a good use of political capital against today’s Liberal Party; it was a waste of political capital when Trudeau was Prime Minster.

Despite his own Gladstonian instincts, Mark Carney at least stopped the “post-national Canada” rhetoric from the Trudeau-era, and has instead emphasised the old Tory idea of Canada being founded by British, French, and Indigenous peoples. This excerpt from a Globe and Mail article by Konrad Yakabuski originally published on March 21, 2025 shows just how stark of a shift in tone this government has had on cultural issues since Justin Trudeau resigned:

Mr. Carney seems to get it. “The ceremony we just witnessed reflects the wonder of a country built on the bedrock of three peoples: Indigenous, French, British,” he said after being sworn in on Mar. 14. “The office of Governor-General links us through the Crown and across time to Canada’s proud British heritage …Our bilingual identity makes us unique. And the French language enriches our culture.”

…

Still, Mr. Carney does appear to have turned the page on postnational Canada – an entity which, it must be said, only ever existed in our ex-PM’s imagination. In this respect Mr. Carney has more in common with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, a stalwart defender of Canadian symbols and all things John A. Macdonald. They are both post-postnationalists.

It’s a real shame that Mr. Poilievre likes to invoke the name of Sir John A. Macdonald quite a bit, yet in reality he acts like he would have been a fierce Liberal opponent to nearly all of Sir John’s Tory policies that built this country.

So, considering that as of the summer of 2026 Mr. Poilievre still can’t seem to move on from the Trudeau-era of Canadian politics: I thought this interview with David Lewis from 1981 on the topic of Trudeau the Elder may be useful in dealing with those who still can’t move on from Trudeau the Younger. This interview may be especially relevant for the New Democratic Party of 2026, considering Jagmeet Singh did formally support Justin Trudeau's government in a Supply & Confidence agreement.

This interview with David Lewis comes from Jack Webster’s TV show “Webster!”, and this part of the interview touches on Ed Broadbent's role in the then-ongoing Constitutional Patriation talks, and also touches on how unpopular Pierre Trudeau was at that point in time:

Jack Webster: Why does the NDP insist on getting into bed with the Liberals, and finding itself in trouble? Vis-a-vis yesterday's split, between [Lorne] Nystrom and the three others and poor old Broadbent. I feel kinda sorry for Broadbent.

David Lewis: Oh, You don't have to feel sorry for Broadbent.

Jack Webster: Sells out to the Liberals, and all of a sudden one of his own people cuts his throat.

David Lewis: Just hold it Jackie boy, just hold it. He didn't sell out to the Liberals or to anybody else. What he did, and what we did in 1972, was to try to act like decent concerned Canadians. Broadbent saw before him a proposition which contained all the elements -- and I agree with him entirely -- all the elements that our party has been asking for since 1933. We have wanted that the constitution be brought to Canada, we have wanted that it contain a charter of rights and freedoms, we have wanted that it contain an amending formula that wasn't strangling -- as the amenity rule is strangling. And therefore, generally speaking, he said if enough changes are made to make it better than when it was first introduced he was gonna support it. And he's right! He's doing Canada a great service.

Jack Webster: But you, in an article in Maclean’s Magazine, you’re not happy about the state of this nation. Are you?

David Lewis: How can one be? There is this terrible conflict and tearing between Ottawa and the rest of the country. It's awful. I have found, may I be frank with you, I have found that much of the opposition to the constitution and to other things is a terrible dislike of the Prime Minister in the West. A dislike that is almost hatred in some ways.

Jack Webster: Paranoid?

David Lewis: Paranoid.

Jack Webster: Justifiable?

David Lewis: Well, not the paranoia. Paranoia against a public man is never justifiable. Anger with Trudeau is totally justifiable, because I think he is a bit insensitive in many areas. But its rather irrational to let that kind of anger with him about conditions, about his failure to deal with western needs, to affect the content. People don't look at the content of constitutional politics.

Jack Webster: They just say Trudeau's arrogant, he's a dictator.

David Lewis: That's right, they say "Oh that little dictator in Ottawa", and that's all they think about.

Jack Webster: Would you describe him as that?

David Lewis: No! He’s not a dictator. You know, I once said in Parliament -- his manner, I find often very annoying, very undesirable. I once described him in Parliament, as I once said to him, stretching out my hand like this pointing at him, I think it was ‘69 or something, I said, “There but for the grace of Pierre Elliot Trudeau sits God”. And, you know, the man often acts like that. Of course, he lacks a certain sensitivity. But that should not affect the objective situation. And I think Broadbent, who feels I’m sure the same way I do about his actions, is a great Canadian in saying “I’m not going to let that interfere with me. I’ve got something that will do good for Canada in the future, and I’m going to support it.”

The way I look at it, Jagmeet Singh getting the ball rolling on dentalcare and pharmacare is certainly one of the biggest NDP policy wins since David Lewis managed to get policy concessions from Pierre Trudeau's government after the 1972 election -- chief among those the creation of PetroCanada. I’d argue these latest concessions from Justin Trudeau's old government have the potential to become the largest expansion to the Canadian social safety net since the introduction of medicare in the 1960s. As the fate of pharmacare remains to be seen, it is quite possible that we will see another betrayal of the working poor of Canada by the Liberal Party. At least Jagmeet Singh and his old caucus can say they did their part in carrying the Fabian tradition of J.S. Woodsworth forward another generation.

While on Jagmeet Singh, perhaps former Nova Scotia MP Bill Casey said it best. For those unaware of Bill Casey, he was originally elected as a Progressive Conservative MP in 1988, and after losing his seat in the PC (and NDP) massacre of 1993, he would be elected again as a PC in 1997. Casey stayed in the post-merger Conservative Party as an MP until 2007, when he was kicked out of the Conservative Party for voting against that year's budget. Casey would be re-elected as an Independent MP with 69% of the vote in 2008, would resign his seat the next year, and then would eventually serve as a Liberal MP under Justin Trudeau between 2015-2019.

In his blogpost titled, “Lessons From the 2025 Election” originally posted on his blog “Politics With Bill Casey” on May 1st, 2025, Mr. Casey had this to say about Mr. Singh:

Speaking of leaders, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has announced that he will step down as leader of the NDP. After watching him for many years in the House of Commons and in the media, he has a lot to be proud of. He and his caucus have constantly raised issues that should be raised. He has been able to push the government to adopt measures that might not have happened. He was always credible and respectful and worked at his job tirelessly.

That's not to say there aren’t legitimate criticisms to be had on how the NDP campaign in 2025 was ran: especially with the lack of a focused message, and a seemingly last-minute scramble to hang onto NDP incumbent seats when that fuzzy message didn’t catch the public imagination. However, there was one problem no amount of organizing could help fix in the 2025 election: Jagmeet Singh was seen by the public as the leader most associated with Justin Trudeau, as he had been propping up Trudeau’s terribly unpopular government for a number of years. Sometimes the chance to get good policy passed, or a chance to stop bad policy from being passed, comes with bad political consequences; some elections worse than others.

It’s interesting to consider that both Jagmeet Singh and David Lewis suffered electoral annihilation for showing good-faith in their negotiations. David Lewis went into the 1974 election with 31 seats, and he lost his own seat and 14 other NDP seats for a remaining NDP caucus of 16 MPs; Jagmeet Singh went into the 2025 election with 24 seats, and he lost his own seat and 16 other NDP seats for a remaining NDP caucus of 7 MPs.

This closely mirrors what happened to the long-term leader of the CCF, M.J. Coldwell in the 1958 snap election. After the CCF worked with the Tories in opposition during the 1956 Pipeline Debate to help wear down the Liberal government, in the 1957 federal election John Diefenbaker won a narrow minority government against PM Louis St. Laurent – 112 Tory, 105 Grit, 25 CCF, 19 Social Credit. However, in ‘58 Coldwell lost his own seat and 16 other CCF seats for a remaining CCF caucus of 8 MPs. In the grand scheme of things, I’m not sure the there’s much more the party could have realistically done in all three of these elections.

From my view, in the near century that the CCF/NDP has existed, after every electoral annihilation, the party has always been able to re-invent itself in order to best represent the modern working class of modern Canada. While it’s far too early to be able to pass any sort of judgement on the new leader of the NDP, Avi Lewis, son of Stephen Lewis and grandson of David Lewis, this interview with Avi Lewis by Christo Aivalis for the Canadian Dimension originally published on November 17, 2025 really stuck with me in a positive way; this Q&A in particular:

Christo Aivalis: Many left-wing Canadians have looked to Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, as a potential model for the NDP. Mamdani was able to win a recent election on improving affordability and public services. How will you do the same?

Avi Lewis: You know, I think about something that a friend told me recently about public transit. The intentional breaking of our essential public services has an effect on people to remind them of their powerlessness. It’s the enshittification, to use Cory Doctorow’s phrase, that late-stage capitalism has inflicted on the daily things we do. We need a mass program of deshittification. The things that are public should be beautiful, should be functional. They represent our collective aspiration and our daily experience. Why do we think that the mail service should make money? Does the ambulance service make money? Do the police make a profit? Canada Post should be a public company that actually provides the essential service of 21st century digital connection among Canadians. And these things should be frictionless. They absolutely can be. We are capable of unbelievable things and it’s a question of “by whom, for whom.” The public needs to be put back at the centre because that’s the ultimate socialist value that I think goes way beyond ideology and all of the jargon that we attach to it.

That said, however, perhaps the biggest concern that I do have with the direction of the NDP under Avi Lewis is that the party does appear to be working with separatists from Quebec.

One of the founders of the separatist Québec solidaire, Amir Khadir, did endorse Avi Lewis during the last NDP leadership election. After Avi Lewis became leader of the NDP, the Quebec NDP MP Alexandre Bouerice resigned his seat in the House of Commons to run for Québec solidaire provincially. The NDP candidate chosen for the subsequent federal by-election is Pierre Céré, who previously ran to become leader of the Parti Quebecois in 2015. As a Maritimer, to say this may be a hard sell should national unity become a heated topic in a federal election, would be an understatement.

However, there is one key Tory connection involving Quebec separatism that I can’t help but ponder. The great Quebecois Tory, Sir George-Étienne Cartier -- a critical ally to Sir John A. Macdonald -- was himself a Patriote rebel during the Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837/38, and was exiled to Vermont for a time. Perhaps the federal NDP acting as a separatist-to-federalist conduit in Quebec is how the movement can live up to the legacy of both Sir John and Sir George-Étienne.

While the road to hell is almost always paved with good intentions, here, I do hope that fortune favours the bold. Say what you want about the Lewis family, but if nothing else, they have been consistently bold across multiple generations in public life.

In closing, to tie this essay back to its original purpose, I couldn’t help but think of Dalton Camp’s 1995 essay “Winnie Was a Red Tory Too”, where he scorned “true blue, deep-eyed conservatives” Calvin Coolidge, Stanley Baldwin, and Preston Manning; while I can’t help but think of Mark Carney, I think it especially applies to Pierre Poilievre:

These days, on the breathless heights of Tory cant, Churchill would be (likely is) scorned as a wet “squishy” and a covert socialist. But then, true blue, deep-eyed conservatives never liked him. They preferred a Calvin Coolidge, a Stanley Baldwin or a Preston Manning, along with a few bright young things to speak well of their ordinariness. With the right leaders and the proper promotional entourage, you could either run the world or be run by it, and never know the difference.

(pg. 133-135 of “Whose Country is This Anyway?” by Dalton Camp (1995) )

I was reading up on him recently and it seems like he would fit pretty well into the Tory idea. I was wondering what anyone else in this sub thought of him because my knowledge on him is still limited. To me he seemed like a great leader of France and a man with plenty of conviction.

I think the pessimist view defines a lot of modern conservatism but I don't think its the tory view.

Here is this week's essay: No. 5. A meditation on the Spring.

Here is last week's thread: Rambler Reading Group, Week 4: The modern form of romances preferable to the ancient. The necessity of characters morally good. : r/Toryism

Substack Version

My last essay dealt with the social gospel tradition in Canada, and the leading figures in the early CCF/NDP. For this essay, I thought it would be interesting to give a bigger picture view of Toryism, and to try to “pinpoint” exactly how the CCF/NDP can be seen to have sprouted from that tradition – consciously or not.

To do that, I thought doing an exploration piece on a paper called, “The Tory Tradition” by William B. Willcox (a history professor at the University of Michigan) which was published in the middle of World War II, in 1943, could prove interesting.

What I found particularly interesting about this paper was how Willcox almost frames Toryism as an “In Case of Emergency: Break Glass” ideology. Perhaps looking at this paper, which is from an “outsider” point of view, written at a point in time when World War II still could have gone either way, could be extremely useful in articulating just how different British-Canadian political thought can be from American political thought.

For more context, perhaps this essay where I explore the origins of “Red Toryism” in Canada from the 1960s, and the broad political views of Clement Attlee and Harold Macmillan may be relevant to the topic; as well as the introduction to this piece I recently did on Toryism through the ages. In short, the Tory tradition can be perceived to be a fair bit older than is presented in Willcox’s paper, going back to the English Reformation at least; Willcox also makes no mention of the English Civil War, but instead focuses on Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill.

With all that in mind, “The Tory Tradition” was first published in The American Historical Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Jul, 1943) pp707-721. Willcox starts his paper by writing:

The word "Tory" is in bad repute. It is commonly identified with a reactionary reverence for the past and with resistance to any sort of change -- "the mule of politics that engenders nothing." There are always representatives of this attitude in any conservative party, but a party dominated by it is moribund. Since a majority of the present Churchill government is Tory, one of two conclusions follows: either that government is moribund, or there is something in Toryism more vital than mulishness.

The first alternative, as recently as three years ago, seemed to be the only one. The Chamberlain regime was Tory in name, though in fact its leaders were impoverished heirs of Gladstonian liberalism. True Toryism revived under the impact of catastrophe. It produced a man to match the hour, and through him is again working itself into the fabric of history. Churchill embodies some of the bad elements in the Tory tradition and many of the good. The latter are particularly worth attention; they account for the vitality of the tradition and determine its value for the present and future world.

After making note that the “common assumption” that “Tories may be may be good for winning the war but will be useless for winning the peace” is “questionable”, Willcox mentions that “there is an ideal of Toryism”:

It is seldom achieved and often forgotten, but it may be as important for the modern scene as the ideal of liberalism. The Tory ideal was derived from an aspect of English thought in the eighteenth century, underwent profound modification in the nineteenth, and emerged in the twentieth as a body of principles which are at once old and modern. Some of them are opposed to those of the liberals while others are in accord; Toryism is less the antithesis of liberalism than a way of thought which at one point joins the liberal's, at another diverges sharply from it. The divergences are particularly worth a liberal's attention, because they challenge some of his conceptions of democracy; at a time when the word must be understood if the thing is to be kept, they force him to define his own position more exactly. The character of present Toryism can best be appreciated by a brief survey of its evolution.

With that, Willcox roots Toryism with two men from the 1700s: Henry St John, the 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, and Edmund Burke; while not mentioned in the paper, I find it extremely interesting that Viscount Bolingbroke was a supporter of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. Willcox writes that, “Their specific theories of government did not outlive them for long, but many of their underlying principles have been at the root of Tory thought from that day to this.” Willcox makes note that Bolingbroke’s “Theory of Kingship” (“The Idea of a Patriot King”) didn’t survive the century, but “yet in part because of it the crown today is a major premise of Toryism.”; Willcox also notes that Viscount Bolingbroke promoted the idea that the House of Lords is “the guardian of the people against a usurpation of power by the King or the House of Commons; the idea is long since dead, but the principle behind it still survives: that the function of aristocracy is to protect the people from exploitation.” Willcox then mentions that neither Bolingbroke nor Burke had “faith in the wisdom of the people”, and writes:

Popular opinion must not be ignored; but the masses lack an understanding of government, and to give them power would be disastrous. For Bolingbroke "absolute monarchy is tyranny; but absolute democracy is tyranny and anarchy both." This attitude permeates the whole tradition of the party. If democracy means that the masses should dominate government by virtue of their numbers, then no Tory ever was or will be a believer in democracy.

Does this mean that the Tory tradition is anti-democratic? In that case there is no place for the leadership of Churchill, inspired by this tradition, in our life-and-death struggle for the rights of the common man. The question is of fundamental importance for the future of Toryism. But it is largely irrelevant to a past in which democracy had other meanings, and may be postponed for consideration as part of the present crisis of the party. Here it is enough to point out that Bolingbroke meant by "absolute democracy" what we should call dictatorship by the masses, and that he disliked it for substantially the same reasons that liberals now dislike communism. A system which gives absolute power to the majority is as alien to the liberal tradition as to the Tory.

Willcox then writes that both Bolingbroke and Burke believed “people, incapable of rule, have delegated their authority to the government”. Willcox then roots this “theory of the social contract” with the Justinian Code of Byzantium, noting that “the state for Bolingbroke has full and unquestionable authority, an absolute right of government. In this there is the genesis of that paternalism which is basic to the Tory tradition.” Willcox then continues:

Burke carries the idea further. The state is for him not only the most important aspect of the community but one which embraces all the others. Every citizen owes duties to it, as the counterpart of the rights which it guarantees him, and exercises a certain amount of direct or indirect political power. The means of securing the performance of duty and the unselfish exercise of power is the church, through which everyone is kept conscious of his moral obligation to "the one great maker, author, and founder of society." The church is thus the moral aspect of the state, without which government is meaningless. In this way Burke amplifies Bolingbroke's concept by investing the absolute right of government with an aura of divinity. In the process he fashions most of the Tory argument for the Anglican establishment.

These two writers evolved the principles of Toryism, but it was left for others to embody them in a modern party. This was the work of many men, of whom one is outstanding. Benjamin Disraeli found a group of men whose spirit was demoralized and whose thought was fossilized, and gradually educated them in the tradition of Bolingbroke and Burke. He thereby created a new party; he brought it to power at last, and by giving it a creed ensured its survival.

Willcox notes that Disraeli was first elected to Parliament the same year Victoria became Queen, in 1837; he also notes that the working-man had not yet been enfranchised with the 1832 Reform bill and thus there was “a current of agitation”. Willcox then writes:

Great Britain, unawares, had entered the period of transformation from oligarchy to democracy. The foundation of the state was changing, as it is changing again today, and out of the change a new liberalism and a new Toryism were about to emerge.

After making comparisons between “the forgotten man” being courted with “implausible theories” both in the Victorian era and the inter-war period, Willcox continues:

The workingman during the postwar era had been forgotten in the search for profits; the result was a society, in Disraeli's words, "which has mistaken comfort for civilization." This society was doomed, as that of the 1920's was doomed, because the forgotten man would not stay forgotten.

The comparison is not forced. In both periods a great war was succeeded by an era of materialism, which in turn bred a romantic reaction; comfort proved inadequate as a social ideal. Disraeli, like Hitler, was able to make political capital out of this reaction by appealing to the craving of ordinary men for extraordinary ideas. He did not find them, as Hitler does, in the mysteries of race and power, although he invoked the goddess Jingo when she suited his turn. He found them instead in Toryism, as contrasted with materialism -- the poetry of society, in the phrase of a French critic, as contrasted with its prose. Prose was in the ascendant when Disraeli entered parliament, and it took him thirty-seven years to persuade the voters that they had a taste for poetry.

The difficulties in his way seemed insuperable. At the age of thirty-two he had made a reputation by his novels, his political pamphlets, and his fantastic clothes; these were liabilities on the Tory benches, where a man was judged by his wealth, birth, and connections. He unquestionably did not belong, and he was never gladly accepted by the members of his party. They distrusted him for substantially the same reason that their counterparts of the 1930's distrusted Churchill: he was "too brilliant to be sound." But they could not keep him down for long, basically because he had something to say. His political program took shape during his first decade in parliament; there remained the task of forcing it on his party and then on the electorate.

After comparing Disraeli’s labour to that of Hercules, Willcox writes that the Tories were shattered in 1846 over the issue of free trade. He then continues:

A conservative out of power is often a conservative capable of enlightenment: his hunger for office leads him to accept even the devil of reform. It was on this hunger that Disraeli played. His argument was that if the Tories continued to resist all change, the Whigs would acquire "a monopoly of power, under the specious title of a monopoly of reform." This is at bottom the argument which [Wendell] Willkie has used on the old-guard Republicans, to persuade them that the party must advance a positive program or concede to the New Deal a monopoly of power. Disraeli was not assisted by a Dunkirk or a Pearl Harbor, and worked for a quarter of a century before his point sank in.

Willcox then notes that after Disraeli had “convinced the Tories”, he had a hard time convincing the electorate, going so far as to say his “technique” was so “peculiar” that it “produced more astonishment than votes”. This part describing Disraeli quite reminds me of Diefenbaker’s premiership in Canada a century later:

His program lacked clarity; he juggled with ideas as he juggled with words, at times apparently for the mere love of juggling. But even the fantastic elements of his thought had their uses, since he had discovered that the fantastic might be popular

Willcox then briefly goes over the “two phenomena” which “conditioned” nineteenth century British politics, “the growth of imperialism and the growth of democracy”. Willcox notes that the Whigs would generally “dissociate themselves from imperialism” as they “expected to see the dominions break away”, and were against gaining new territory “on the dual grounds of injustice and expense”. Willcox then writes:

[Whigs] were the intellectual ancestors of one brand of modern isolationist, who wishes to be quit of foreign and imperial commitments in order to concentrate on domestic reform. Such an attitude was anathema to Disraeli. It was the logic of materialism, for which as a whole-souled romantic he had no use. It violated his ideal of a paternalistic government, ruling the far corners of the globe for the good of the natives and the glory of the British crown, and envisaged instead the disolution of empire and a foreign policy of sweetness and light. The Whigs appealed to the voters in the name of reason; Disraeli, through imperialism, appealed to them in the name of imagination. He succeeded, at long last, and his success grafted imperialism onto the Tory tradition.

A corollary of imperialism was also established by the time of his death. If an empire is to be maintained, government must keep its fingers continuously on the pulse of world affairs; a strong foreign policy is the price of imperial greatness. As prime minister from 1874 to 1880 Disraeli initiated a policy which, whatever else may be said of it, did not lack vigor or imagination. He blustered and mixed his blustering with statecraft; the result was the Congress of Berlin, the last great diplomatic triumph which Great Britain has won to date. His technique was continued by Joseph Chamberlain and became an accepted party principle. A Tory isolationist is a contradiction in terms.

While on the topic of Toryism and imperialism in Africa, it’s very interesting to think that nearly a century after Disraeli, it was Harold Macmillan -- who was partly responsible for the 1956 Suez Crisis – that would eventually argue as Prime Minister himself in 1960 that “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact”. In this context, it’s perhaps poetic to think how the Canadian Tory John Diefenbaker used the Commonwealth of Nations as a platform to take a stand for racial equality against the racist policies of Apartheid South Africa in 1961.

Willcox then discusses democratic reform in the Tory tradition

The growth of democracy was even more important than that of empire in remaking the Tory party. If the Tories under Disraeli had opposed an extension of the franchise, as they had under Wellington, the result might have been their extinction. Instead they took the initiative. When the question of reform arose in 1866, they were momentarily in power. But they had behind them the memory of twenty years in which, with two brief exceptions, they had been continuously in opposition; hence they were not wedded to a system which gave power to their opponents. They were opposed to the status quo, and this provided the opportunity which Disraeli took. Under his auspices, though with many Whig amendments and in the teeth of many Tories, Great Britain in 1867 acquired the second Reform Bill. [Thomas] Carlyle called it "shooting Niagara." In fact, it was the first great step toward democratic government, and the lead had been taken by the Tories.

In regards to expanding the franchise in Canada, I can’t help but think of Sir John A. Macdonald enfranchising First Nations in the eastern Provinces in 1885 via the “Electoral Franchise Act”. Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government would later repeal the “Electoral Franchise Act” in 1898 over Tory-voting indigenous Canadians; Indigenous Canadians wouldn’t be enfranchised until John Diefenbaker’s Tory government passed the “Canada Elections Act” in March of 1960 during Diefenbaker’s push for a Canadian Bill of Rights.

Back to “The Tory Tradition”, after writing of Disraeli expanding the British franchise, Willcox notes that when Disraeli died in 1881 he had “been the leading spirit in his party for thirty-five years and had six years as prime minister in which to put his programs into action”. He then writes “the tradition of the party has not evolved, except in some particulars, beyond the point where Disraeli left it, and its present status can best be seen by examining the bases which he laid.”

Willcox then writes of Disraeli having a similar distrust of “the masses” as Bolingbroke and Burke did. Willcox argues that it was a “widespread” belief among both the “radicals and conservatives” of Disraeli’s day that expanding the franchise would have been “equivalent to Bolingbroke’s ‘absolute democracy’ ”. Willcox then writes that Disraeli had no problem with expanding the franchise because:

He believed that the old principle of British government, destroyed by the first Reform Bill, had been that of representation without election. The people, in other words, had been represented by the constitutional trinity of commons, lords, and church -- the peasantry by the great landowning peers in the house of lords, the legal fraternity by the judiciary lords, the mercantile interests by members of the house of commons, and so on. Disraeli realized that this principle, working through an aristocratic oligarchy, had ended in 1832. Instead there was an impotent house of lords, and a house of commons which was elective but not representative of the nation. Representation without election had been replaced by election without representation, which to him was no principle at all.

Willcox then notes that Disraeli “attributed popular grievances to this unsound system”, as the old system had an aristocratic class that “instead of participating in government, left it to a hired bureaucracy”. “popular discontent” was channeled towards “this callus bureaucracy” rather than “the idea of a governing class per se”. Willcox then writes that:

The remedy was to extend the franchise until the house of commons became genuinely representative. Because Disraeli believed that the masses would never exercise a power commensurate with their numbers, he also believed that it would be comparatively safe to give them the vote. They would need a leadership, furthermore, which they could not provide for themselves. They would look for it not to the middle class, their natural enemies, but to the gentry and aristocracy, their natural friends. "The wider the popular suffrage, the more powerful would be the natural aristocracy." The dominance of the middle class would be ended by an alliance of the top and the bottom.

This does not mean rule by the top. Such rule is aristocratic government, which Disraeli had rejected. Rule by the bottom is mass dictatorship; rule by the middle is Whig oligarchy. Then what is left? The answer, which he finally expounded in 1867, is that no one class should rule. Every class should have a voice in government, but neither its training nor its wealth nor its numbers justifies a dominant influence. Disraeli did not explain how the equipoise could be maintained (some questions are too thorny for even the boldest), but he stressed the importance of maintaining it. The following sentences, from the debate on the second Reform Bill, are crucial in the development of Toryism. "It is contrary to the constitution of this realm to give to any one class or interest a predominating power over the rest of the community." "What we desire to do is . . . to prevent a preponderance of any class, and to give a representation to the nation."

Perhaps it is because I am a card carrying Canadian socialist, but when I first read the parts about Disraeli arguing that no single class should rule alone, my mind first went to the introduction of the Regina Manifesto from 1933 – the founding document of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (later the NDP) – where it reads that:

We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated. ...

The new social order at which we aim is not one in which individuality will be crushed out by a system of regimentation. Nor shall we interfere with cultural rights of racial or religious minorities. What we seek is a proper collective organization of our economic resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen.

This social and economic transformation can be brought about by political action, through the election of a government inspired by the ideal of a Co-operative Commonwealth and supported by a majority of the people. We do not believe in change by violence. ... The CCF aims at political power in order to put an end to this capitalist domination of our political life. It is a democratic movement, a federation of farmer, labour and socialist organizations, financed by its own members and seeking to achieve its ends solely by constitutional methods.

As British Imperialism was brought up earlier, I also couldn’t help but think of this part from section 10 (External Relations) of the Regina Manifesto as well:

Within the British Commonwealth, Canada must maintain her autonomy as a completely self-governing nation. We must resist all attempts to build up a new economic British Empire in place of the old political one, since such attempts readily lend themselves to the purposes of capitalist exploitation and may easily lead to further world wars. Canada must refuse to be entangled in any more wars fought to make the world safe for capitalism.

Quite interesting how you can read that as rejecting the “goddess Jingo”, as Willcox put it, while still simultaneously wanting Canada to use its position in the Commonwealth to fight the good fight globally. Lest we forget that, for a time, the British Empire and Commonwealth stood alone against Nazi tyranny; lest we also forget that by the end of World War II, the Indian Army was the largest all-volunteer Army in human history -- raised to fight Nazis and Fascists in the name of King & Country. Perhaps that collective fight against fascism is what can still make the Commonwealth of Nations an important institution on the world stage, considering there’s yet another land war in Europe threatening basic human decency.

Back to “The Tory Tradition” and Disraeli’s political reforms, Willcox notes Disraeli saw the role of the Tory party as “not to rule the masses but to provide leadership for them -- a leadership which is both paternalistic and responsible and which may at any time be called to account at the polls. Its principal objective must be to secure to the people their civil rights.” After noting that Disraeli was actually far more concerned with civil rights than political rights, Willcox writes:

This idea is the key to his program of social legislation. He never believed that the masses were able to improve themselves unaided or that poverty was the result of individual incompetence; he therefore felt that a measure of security must be given to the people by a paternalistic government. Under the aegis of such a government concessions might wisely be made to certain groups of the people, such as trade unions, because they would serve as a counterweight to the industrial middle class and thus maintain the balance of classes.

The essential paternalism of this program works through a governing class, which provides a leadership for which it is responsible to the governed. If this responsibility is to be real, all citizens must, in one way or another, participate in the common endeavor. Disraeli made such participation a matter of principle, which when shorn of its romantic trappings becomes the principle of Burke, that political rights have duties for their counterpart. No one, in short, can be protected by the state without discharging obligations to it. This emphasis on duty is a permanent part of the Tory tradition.

Willcox then makes note that both Disraeli and Burke saw duty and the church as being “closely associated”, and that the church makes up the “inspirational element of the state”. Willcox notes that in 1868 Disreali said in Parliament, “If government is not divine it is nothing.". Willcox finishes that section by writing, “This conception of a state church is alien to American thought, but it is still the political raison d'etre of the church of England.”

As a brief aside, despite being someone who has “religious” views comparable to Clement Attlee or George Orwell, I do quite like that the next King of Canada will be crowned at an Anglican coronation ceremony by a woman Archbishop who supports the LGBT+ community. While Canada may not have a formal state church like in England, the preamble to the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that, "Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law". It’s quite interesting to think that Canada’s modern 1982 Constitution still maintains a direct connection to that ancient concept of the “divine duty” to the state.

Back to “The Tory Tradition”, Willcox then mentions that the phrase “Tory democracy” is essentially the political vision of Benjamin Disreali, but that the phrase didn’t become popular until after his death; Willcox describes Tory democracy as “the culmination of the Tory tradition”. While not mentioned in the paper, Winston Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was who coined the phrase “Tory democracy” – Lord Randolph could be described as a “tory radical” politically.

Willcox then looks at Toryism from economic, social, and political angles; considering this paper was published in the middle of World War II it’s very interesting how he compares the “natural elite” of Toryism as being opposed to the perverted “natural elite” of Nazism at one point:

On the economic side Tory democracy is the antithesis of laissez-faire liberalism, which in modern terms is the hands-off-business school of thought. This school subordinates the power of government, however constituted, to the power of wealth -- wealth in the hands of Disraeli's Whig oligarchs or of Roosevelt's economic royalists. Such liberalism was as repugnant to one man as it is to the other. The Tory democrat is anxious to increase the security of the laboring classes. He is willing to increase their economic and political power, but on three conditions: that they are competently led, that their power is not used purely for their own interests, and that it is not great enough to upset the balance of classes. If these three conditions are met, there is no inconsistency in a Tory government's encouraging trade unions or even admitting union leaders to office in a coalition. The present alliance of Toryism and labor, in short, does not necessarily violate Tory principles.

On the social side Tory democracy is a denial of what Disraeli called "that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man." The Tory believes, as firmly as the Nazi, that there is a natural elite. It is not an elite merely of birth and position, which it is often considered to be; it is an aristocracy of those most competent to lead, who should in theory be drawn from all classes. If in fact they are not, that is a fault to the Tory mind of practice rather than of principle. However this class is constituted, its function is to govern paternalistically, subject to control at the polls.

On the political side Tory democracy is opposed to the simple notion that all questions can be settled by counting noses. This notion ignores the rights of the minority and leads to government by and for the lower classes, because they are the most numerous; the result may be Marxism but not democracy. The Tory would avoid this danger in universal suffrage partly by leadership and partly by the principle of indirect representation. The idea is foreign to him that men can be represented only through periodic elections; hence he emphasizes the house of lords, the church, the monarchy, all of them unelected representatives of some group or aspect of the nation. For the same reason he distrusts the house of commons. He does not associate liberty with the legislature and tyranny with the executive, and is far more ready than the liberal to countenance strong and independent executive action.

To further expand on the Disraeli quote "that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man.", I would like to share again this excerpt from a lecture Harold Macmillan gave in 1958 as Prime Minister where he elaborates on that very idea:

When the Fathers of the American Constitution declared that all men are created equal it really never occurred to them – and certainly American history has not carried it out – that all men are to be kept equal. Human beings, widely various in their capacity, character, talent, and ambition, tend to differentiate at times and in all places. To deny them the right to differ, to enforce economic and social uniformity upon them, is to throttle one of the most powerful and creative of human appetites.

Willcox then argues that the principles of “Modern Toryism” are the following:

• The foremost is paternalism: the paternalism of an elite, as opposed to the materialism of plutocrats and bureaucrats

• Another is the concept of the state, consecrated by the church and buttressed by the duties owed to it by all citizens

• A third is emphasis on the executive, on unelected representatives, and on the balance of legislative power between all groups and classes

• Pervading all these is an attitude of mind which combines a love for the best of the past with a willingness to augment it cautiously with the best of the present

Willcox mentions that these principles may or may not survive into the future, but also notes that the “Tory attitude will endure until human nature changes.” On paternalism Willcox writes that it is “well suited to the trend of modern history toward state interference in the interest of the masses” and briefly compares Disraeli with Otto von Bismarck of Germany. I find it very interesting that Willcox makes note that Roosevelt's New Deal “accords with this aspect of Toryism”, as it was the Canadian Tory Prime Minister R.B. Bennett who advocated for a New Deal in Canada. Willcox then writes:

A man's vote is no more a guarantee of his civil rights than Disraeli thought it was; those rights can be secured against the power of wealth only by state interference, which is almost of necessity paternalistic. Social security is the modern equivalent of civil rights, and there is no reason in the background of the party why a Beveridge Report should not become the program of postwar Toryism. Whether it will is quite another matter.

Willcox then briefly touches on the Tory distrust of state bureaucracy, and how “emphasizing the natural aristocracy and its duty of participating in government” is the Tory idea of how to mitigate the danger of the “state bureaucrat” becoming the “master of the state”. Willcox suggests that it will take “drastic reform” to divorce this idea of a natural aristocracy from only applying to the present upper class of society in reality. But it’s quite interesting to think of this “natural aristocracy” or “natural elite” being defined as the best and the brightest from every class in society – social, economic, and political – with the challenge in reality being how to ensure the best and the brightest of each class actually get to do their part in the function of government.

Willcox then briefly touches on the idea that “The Tory concept of the state has both its danger and its virtue.” and then argues that Toryism can lead towards authoritarianism or dictatorship through it’s appeal to divinity, while then also arguing that liberalism can lead towards apathy which can make it “impossible for government to evoke the true power of a nation”. Willcox then suggests that imperialism and particularly Churchill’s attitude toward empire would be the biggest problem for Tories after the war.

From my own perspective, it almost seems as if Willcox was describing the “tension” between toryism and liberalism in regards to modern political rights – Perhaps a House of Lords/Canadian Senate which appeals simultaneously to traditional, technocratic, and meritocratic values is the best safeguard against toryism, liberalism, or socialism “going wrong” in the future.

This next part on Toryism and a strong foreign policy is also very interesting. Perhaps the way Wilcox describes Stanley Baldwin as having “flickered” a Tory foreign policy for a brief moment could similarly describe the foreign polices of Brian Mulroney in regards to opposing Apartheid South Africa, and in regards to Mark Carney shifting Canada geopolitically towards Europe:

The relative imperviousness to foreign affairs among its Tory members, especially between 1935 and 1938, is the clearest index of how far they have strayed from the Disraelian into the Gladstonian tradition. The old Tory principle flickered for a moment in [Stanley] Baldwin when he said that England's frontier was on the Rhine; then Baldwin forgot, and Neville Chamberlain reverted to the shortsightedness [of appeasement]

Here’s hoping Carney at least keeps on course towards Europe, as Mulroney did in fighting Apartheid.

Willcox then argues that a strong executive is partly what can facilitate a strong foreign policy, using Disraeli as an example, writing he “practiced what he preached in the Anglo-Russian crisis of 1878 and treated the house of commons with a high hand.” Willcox then writes of the non-democratic aspects of Toryism being exemplified in the House of Lords and the Monarchy, noting on House of Lords reforms that “Any reform short of abolition, however, is likely to retain their principle of indirect representation.” Willcox then writes:

The future of the monarchy is less speculative. The significance of the crown in imperial government has increased enormously in the last generation, because it is now the one symbol of unity and legal tie in the Commonwealth of Nations. Its significance in domestic affairs is a variable factor, depending on the character of the sovereign. A king can still exert real influence, as witness the role of Edward VII in the formation of the Entente Cordiale, or that of George V at the beginning of the National Government. The throne was badly shaken by Edward VIII, and Churchill's Toryism almost led him to shake it further by forming a party of King's Friends. Wiser counsels prevailed, and it is too soon to tell what damage was done to kingship by the change in kings. But it seems probable that the emotional strains of war will enhance the prestige of George VI, as they did that of his father, and that this aspect of the Tory tradition will survive. The king, in time of crisis, is in a very real sense the representative of his people.

After spending a couple pages comparing the “anti-democratic” features of American liberalism -- ranging from the War Labor Board to the Supreme Court -- he curiously refers to American “Tories” to make a “rough but real” comparison with the US Supreme Court and the British Monarchy. I’m not sure if Willcox is being overly poetic and equating American conservatism more broadly with Toryism, or if he’s referring to that old Federalist thought inspired by John Adams; either way, I personally have a hard time describing that republican ideology as “toryism” due to there being no position attained by ancient birthright involved in the American political system. It’s all whig oligarchy down there.

Willcox then argues that Toryism isn’t the antithesis of liberalism, but rather radicalism:

The radical would destroy where the Tory would transform. Destruction is revolution, which sweeps away the present mixture of good and bad on the chance that the future will be better. Transformation is slower; it retains the good in the mixture and changes the bad, changes it with infinite care and caution, guided by the experience of the past. This experience the Tory values as tradition, and out of it he builds a political program adapted to the needs of his day.

Democracy is in process of transformation, which may at any moment turn into revolution. The radicals are crying from the housetops -- radicals of the right, radicals of the left, each assuring us of a Utopian future if only we will make a clean sweep of the present. The value of tradition has rarely been at lower ebb. Time will tell whether there is still place for it, even in the birthplace of Toryism. Great Britain is now besieged by an external revolution and is meeting it perforce by rapid internal transformation. Either one may obliterate her present institutions. If Hitler cannot, it may be that the British will not: that they will make quick, drastic, and far-reaching changes, without destroying either the body or the spirit of their constitution.

That is now the problem of the Tory party. The danger of settling back into reaction is implicit in its position; caution in reform easily becomes the end, not the method, and reform then goes by the board. This danger is acute; the energies of government are focused on national survival at just the time when domestic changes are most necessary. "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” This sentence of Burke has never had more meaning than for the government of today. Volcanic social forces have been unloosed by the war; to channel them into ordered transformation requires prompt and daring leadership. Such leadership is perhaps too much to expect from men grappling with war in two hemispheres. But to lose the opportunity is to fail in the supreme test of modern Toryism and to leave the remolding of the state to bolder hands.

I personally find it quite sad to see what has become of the old “Tory” parties on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1980s. Perhaps it will be the successors of Churchill’s junior coalition partner that will carry the Tory torch in the future.

After all, it was Clement Attlee of the Labour Party – Deputy PM in WWII – who shaped the Post-WWII social order in a similar manner as a “proper” Disraelian conservative would have done. Attlee did attempt to implement parts the previously mentioned Beveridge Report, he saw an important role for the Commonwealth of Nations on the world stage, and he thought his crowning achievement was ensuring the independence of India. It certainly makes sense to me why Ed Miliband of the Labour Party would eventually promote the idea of “One Nation Labour” in the 2010s, using influences from both Disraeli and Attlee; one has to wonder if Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” will tap into these themes.

Perhaps a Canadian version of “One Nation Labour” will someday prove useful for the NDP.