00:00:00.000Well, the questions that are facing attendees here at the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference are mostly of a domestic nature,
00:00:16.160but occasionally we can look to our friends and colleagues abroad for best practices, things to do, and in many cases, things not to do.
00:00:24.300I referenced earlier the rather lively discussion between Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson, which was moderated by the always convivial John O'Sullivan, who joins me here today.
00:00:34.740John, great to see you. Thanks very much for coming on.
00:00:37.220Very good to see you, Andrew. Nice to be back together again.
00:00:39.820Now, you're not just some foreign interloper in Canadian politics. You actually have a Canadian connection by way of the National Post.
00:00:46.860Yes, I lived in Canada for three years, almost four, helping to launch the Post under Conrad, its founder and owner, and under Ken White, who was a brilliant editor.
00:01:06.700And my publisher now, to give Ken a plug there.
00:01:09.380I think Ken is the most brilliant editor in North America, and I'm always amazed why he hasn't been lured down to take over the failing enterprises there and give them some vim, you know?
00:01:19.920Yeah, so you've obviously, by virtue of being involved in the National Post, you've seen actually some of the critical steps in the development of the modern Canadian conservative movement.
00:01:30.080I mean, Canada, as you're well aware, has obviously taken its cues from the old British Tory tradition, but we also had this Western populist revolutionary party that has really, I think, become the senior partner in this merger with the current conservatives.
00:01:44.680And I was wondering if you could situate that in a global context, because there seems to be a shift in conservative parties around the world, not even just in the Anglosphere, that is moving towards what the media would call the far-right populist view.
00:01:57.140But it's a lot more nuanced than that.
00:01:59.340Well, yes, it's much more nuanced than that.
00:02:02.360I would say that conservatives throughout the world are now a divided group, divided parties or divided into two different parties.
00:02:13.060That was the situation of Canadian conservatives back in the, well, I'm trying to think of the dates now, but something like that in the 80s and later.
00:02:21.920Now, what happened in that case was that two very brilliant entrepreneurs, Preston Manning, who started reform, and Stephen Harper, essentially campaigned against the Brown Mulroney's conservative party.
00:02:40.240Well, Mulroney had actually very serious achievements to his credit, but he'd lost touch, really, I think, with the conservative rank and file, well, outside Ontario and to the West.
00:02:52.620So, you know, that led to the complete implosion of the conservative party here, which, by the way, is likely to happen, maybe not quite so dramatically to the British Tories now.
00:03:05.740And so, looking at the, so to speak, wreckage, Harper and Manning created a party which combined the conservatives of the East with the reformers of the West.
00:03:19.580But I don't think, I mean, populism is a misleading term, in my view, because it tends to be the view of the left about the democracy of the right.
00:03:31.100And essentially, what Harper and Manning did was to create a new conservative party that represented the conservative voters of the entire country.
00:03:43.340And that's not a majority party, but it is now, in the last two elections, it gets most votes, more votes than any other single party.
00:03:54.420And it is plainly destined, I think, only a huge traffic accident can prevent the conservatives winning the next election.
00:04:04.020And that means that they will have been in power a significant part of this new century.
00:04:08.460And I think that they are a serious governing party, probably going to be the governing, the main governing party for some time to come.
00:04:19.020And I think that the conservatives in the rest of the world have got to look at them and say, how did this happen?
00:04:27.500There are interesting dilemmas in Canada, which are really across the Western world in terms of population.
00:04:33.540We have in Canada a dismally low birth rate.
00:04:35.540I know in Hungary, where your Danube Institute is headquartered, this has been an issue that has been really front and centre for the government there.
00:04:43.000But it's not one we hear Western conservative leaders talking about.
00:04:47.740I've never heard Pierre Polyev talk about birth rate.
00:04:49.780I've certainly never heard Rishi Sunak or Scott Morrison or any of these guys talk about it.
00:04:54.820So what can they learn from Orban's party, or even in general, some leaders that have taken up this question?
00:05:01.900Well, you say that you haven't heard them talk about the birth rate, but you have heard them talk about immigration.
00:05:09.840And those two issues are closely related.
00:05:12.960If you don't have, if you don't produce your own population, then other people are going to come in to fill the gap.
00:05:20.140And I think that that's something which obviously has been most clearly realized by Viktor Orban, but is also now being seen by British conservatives looking at the prospective defeat and saying to themselves,
00:05:34.000look, we've made a mistake in trying to replace our own people who are more and more likely to be not working, to be receiving different forms of social and medical benefit and retiring early.
00:05:52.140One of the themes of British life at the moment is where are our own people?
00:05:58.880Well, that's an exaggeration, but there's obviously a trend there.
00:06:03.680So what I think now is happening is serious conservatives are saying, for some years now, we've been quite complacent about treating our own workers, offering them low wages.
00:06:19.120If they didn't take those low wages, we'd bring in cheap labor to pay, to do the work.
00:06:26.200And meanwhile, we would pay them through the welfare system one way or another to stay at home.
00:06:32.660That's not a sensible way to run a country.
00:06:35.960And that's obviously that's going to be the number one problem to face any government, but particularly the conservative party in opposition.
00:06:47.300And remember, they're likely now to face another competitor on the right in the form of the Reform Party, the equivalent of the Canadian reformers.
00:06:56.780And that's going to make right-wing politics much livelier, much more competitive.
00:07:03.220And with competition, they're going to have to pay attention to their markets, in other words, the people who vote for them.
00:07:10.320And I think they're going to have to turn to the issues that reform is preaching.
00:07:16.080And the conservative party cannot really write those voters off.
00:07:20.080I wanted to, on the note of the UK Tories, help see if you could help demystify this, because every now and then people will send me something and say, oh, you won't believe what the UK Conservatives are doing.
00:07:29.860And usually I'd say, yes, I can believe it either way.
00:07:32.240But they've been very strong in some ways on resisting some of the transgender wokeness and on migration.
00:07:39.680Every now and then they say the right thing and do the right thing.