Juno News - Can libertarians and social conservatives work together？

00:00:00.000 it's one of the most common descriptors of the conservative party of Canada the big tent party

00:00:10.680 a party that is supposed to be so broad in appeal that it has people from all different factions of

00:00:16.380 the right from red Tories and blue Tories fiscal conservatives foreign policy conservatives

00:00:21.600 libertarians social conservatives all getting together for the purposes of having a conservative

00:00:28.740 government now the problem is that not everyone gets along so well all the time in fact as we're

00:00:35.820 seeing from Andrew Scheer's resignation right now there is a very different vision from some people

00:00:41.060 in the party to how the party should move forward than there is from others and we saw during the

00:00:46.380 Maxime Bernier split from the conservatives to found the PPC that it's not always as cohesive as

00:00:52.140 everyone likes to think but there is a big question that oftentimes I think is answered incorrectly the

00:00:58.680 question can conservatives who are socially conservative get along with people who are

00:01:04.320 libertarians can social conservatives and libertarians come together under one party and

00:01:10.060 achieve success most people say no there's a gap too wide for those two groups to come together but

00:01:16.060 I take a bit of a different perspective on this you see I'm someone who is a libertarian and a social

00:01:21.340 conservative simultaneously now this is not signs of some vast internal torment that I deal with on a

00:01:27.860 day-to-day basis simply put I think there's a difference between how people choose to view

00:01:33.200 the world as far as their own moral compass goes and what people think the role of government is to

00:01:38.300 be for example my socially conservative values and views don't impede my fundamental belief that

00:01:45.020 government should be non-sectarian the government should stay out of the way the government should

00:01:50.220 protect religious freedom which I think is the libertarian answer to upholding people's right to be

00:01:55.980 socially conservative let's take for example people who are personally opposed to same-sex marriage

00:02:02.420 they could have that personal opposition but still believe that the role of the state is to be

00:02:07.620 non-interventionist to allow anyone who wants to get married to get married where things get tricky is on

00:02:13.400 the question of abortion can you be a pro-life libertarian the answer that I would give is absolutely

00:02:19.160 yes in fact the premise of libertarianism is that you believe that you should have complete and

00:02:24.900 absolute freedom right up until the point that your freedom interferes with another's the way you

00:02:31.360 rationalize being pro-life and also pro-liberty is very simple you're talking about a life an unborn

00:02:37.400 child is to a pro-life person a life which means that abortion would compromise that being's rights

00:02:43.880 that being's right to life in this case and I don't raise this to rehash the abortion discussion

00:02:49.640 in this particular video but I think that there can often be a lot more connecting and uniting people

00:02:56.220 even from different factions of the conservative movement than perhaps we give them credit for

00:03:01.780 and this is very important there are not enough conservatives in Canada for the conservative party to

00:03:07.840 win without building coalitions and without building bridges and this means that oftentimes people

00:03:13.560 need to overlook certain disagreements to focus on the core values to compromise without abandoning

00:03:20.500 your views for true north I'm Andrew Lutton

Juno News - December 28, 2019