The Candice Malcolm Show - November 19, 2021


The road to victory for Conservatives is through culture

Topics
conservative values promotion CARDIS think tank plus cultural issues and conservatism collective bargaining
Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Mentioned
Ray Pennings Michael Bolton Jordan Peterson Stephen Harper Erin O'Toole Andrew Scheer Jason Kenney Z. Um Cardis
Erin O’Toole alienates the Conservative base The Canadian Left respond to the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

182.24

Word count

4,382

Sentence count

192

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Why are conservatives so reluctant to talk about culture? If conservatives want to win elections, then they have to lay the groundwork beforehand. They have to promote conservative values and conservative ideas well beforehand. In this episode of The Candace Malcolm Show, host Candice talks to the co-founder of CARDIS, Ray Pennings, about why this is a problem.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Why are conservatives so reluctant to talk about culture?
00:00:03.460 If conservatives want to win elections, then they have to lay the groundwork beforehand.
00:00:07.660 They have to promote conservative values and conservative ideas well beforehand.
00:00:12.100 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:18.800 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:00:20.980 Thank you for your continued support of True North and The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:24.700 Now, if you're anything like me, you often feel disappointed at conservative politicians in this country.
00:00:30.520 They constantly let us down.
00:00:32.240 Namely, they often believe that in order to win elections, they have to basically abandon core principles and core values in order to win over the sort of middle-of-the-road, socially moderate Canadian electorate.
00:00:44.820 That's the basic conventional wisdom among conservative strategists, conservative elites.
00:00:49.180 They tell us that if a conservative party, a conservative politician wants to win, they have to either hide their conservatism or completely throw conservatism under the bus and instead promote the sort of latest, trendy, leftist, progressive ideas and values.
00:01:05.420 And so this strategy, this conventional wisdom is all based on the idea that Canada is a progressive, left-wing, liberal country that would never elect conservatives.
00:01:14.860 I believe that's a misconception, but regardless, that is the basic theory.
00:01:19.680 And so rather than defending tradition, rather than articulating conservative ideas and a different conservative vision for the country, what we see is conservative politicians often just try to mirror whatever the liberals are saying and doing, including often just the latest left-wing kooky fads, because these conservatives believe that that is the best hope of getting elected.
00:01:40.600 And look, in some ways, you can't really blame conservative politicians for failing to lead us in a more conservative direction, because at the end of the day, a conservative's job is to get elected.
00:01:50.860 And so too many are willing to just say and do anything that they need to in order to win.
00:01:55.560 So if we want to see more conservative politicians in this country, we want to see more conservatives promoting true conservative values and ideas.
00:02:03.340 Because it's not just up to the politicians to lead us down that path.
00:02:07.080 We need to have help from other people in society.
00:02:09.980 We need more people to defend conservative values.
00:02:12.880 We need activists and leaders from the rest of society, from civil society, to step up and help pave that path.
00:02:18.800 We need more voices articulating a conservative vision for Canada, more thinkers and leaders defending conservative values, promoting and defending our history, our tradition, our way of life, as well as the basic ideas like human dignity, liberty, and having a robust civil society that's capable of solving some of the tough problems we encounter without always having to rely on the heavy hand of government.
00:02:42.280 So today I want to focus on an organization that does just that.
00:02:45.660 It's called CARDIS, and I really encourage you to check them out and to support the great work that they do.
00:02:50.380 So it was originally founded all the way back in 1974, but back then it was called the Work Research Foundation, and it worked alongside and in support of the Christian Labour Association of Canada.
00:03:01.660 It was originally just there to sort of help out the Christian Labour Association with conferences and writing and those kind of things.
00:03:08.660 And then CARDIS, as a think tank, came into existence in the fall of 2000 with Michael Van Pelt as its first president and the first full-time employee, and Ray Pennings, who is joining me on the program today.
00:03:21.100 He secured the initial grant and was sort of the mastermind of this project.
00:03:25.800 So the two of them together founded CARDIS.
00:03:27.800 CARDIS focuses on human dignity, strong families, religious freedom, formative education, and healthy communities.
00:03:33.820 Those all sound like wonderful things that I would like to hear more of from politicians.
00:03:38.660 And I think that the way to do that is to have more people in society talking about these ideas, aware of the impact that they have and how much we need these sort of secondary institutions, not just relying on government for everything, but again, relying on civil society, relying on communities, relying on strong families.
00:03:56.300 And I just want to read one bit from my friends over at the hub.
00:04:00.100 They did a spotlight on CARDIS, celebrating 20 years since CARDIS was formed.
00:04:04.740 And they wrote this, and I think this is completely spot on, and I think it's so important.
00:04:08.580 And this is part of the reason why I want to talk about this today, but they say this.
00:04:11.180 So while modern conservatives are comfortable pointing out all of the different ways that government is the problem or is not the solution to the problem, they're less comfortable actually explaining what the solution is.
00:04:22.860 So for CARDIS, the answer is found in culture, religion, and civil society, which means we need to build a road that connects these things to politics and policymaking.
00:04:31.360 I think that's right. I think that's absolutely brilliant.
00:04:33.520 And I'm so pleased today to be joined by Ray Pennings, the co-founder of CARDIS, to just sort of delve into some of these ideas a little more.
00:04:41.600 So, Ray, thank you so much for joining us, and congratulations on 20 years of CARDIS.
00:04:47.600 Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
00:04:50.320 Great. Yeah. Well, so to any of the audience out there who's not familiar with CARDIS,
00:04:55.120 why don't you give us a little bit of overview on what it is that you do day to day and what you focus on?
00:05:00.180 Well, CARDIS is a think tank, so we, you know, in terms of our day to day work, it's not dissimilar from other think tanks.
00:05:08.700 There are, we actually call ourselves a think tank plus, and we do so for a couple of reasons.
00:05:14.360 Think tanks usually are focused on the political and policy sphere.
00:05:20.260 And the core premise of our existence is that while government and the state and politics is part of,
00:05:27.380 it is not the entirety of public life. And in that sense, we want, we pay a lot of attention to the other institutions of society,
00:05:35.460 be that the family, the community organization, the business organization, the church.
00:05:40.940 Our premise, in that sense, we're probably more Burkean conservatives, talking about the little platoons and how they contribute.
00:05:48.500 And our argument is that many of the problems of public life that people are looking to government to solve are, in fact, better solved through other institutions.
00:06:00.620 And so we, we're a think tank, but that serves not just the political, but the entire broad sphere of civil society and public life.
00:06:08.280 That's great. It seems like so many think tanks on the conservative side or the classical liberal side in Canada focus squarely on economics
00:06:15.700 and sort of conventional thinking that, you know, the conservative movement in Canada, it's a big tent.
00:06:21.700 There's lots of different types of conservatives. There's libertarians, people that are more traditional or social conservative.
00:06:27.780 But there's sort of conventional wisdom, Ray, that the winning ideas are the fiscal ideas, the economic ideas,
00:06:34.760 and that it's when the cultural issues and the social issues kind of come up during elections that it's bad for conservatives
00:06:40.740 and therefore we should just sort of push these ideas aside, ignore them, kind of come to the consensus of the left-wing liberal establishment in the country.
00:06:50.220 Whereas it seems like Cardis is taking the complete opposite approach.
00:06:54.180 And so I want you to maybe to tell me a little bit about how it is that these cultural issues can unite conservatives just as much as economic issues.
00:07:04.040 Well, let me answer that in two ways. First, pragmatically, and then, and then more fundamentally, philosophically.
00:07:09.940 Pragmatically, you know, Stephen Harper in 2003, DeCivitas, argued on the importance of social conservatism alongside,
00:07:19.560 and social and cultural conservatism alongside economic conservatism.
00:07:24.180 His approach, the day after he was elected in 2006, I wrote a piece that was published in Policy Options,
00:07:31.780 which highlighted that his was a coalition that required all of, and I identified six different branches of conservatism.
00:07:41.020 And in many ways, I think the secret to the Harper decade in office was the fact that they recognized this was a coalition of interests
00:07:49.200 and incrementally built along that way, I would argue that when conservatives have focused only on economic issues, they typically have lost.
00:08:00.840 I actually don't think that is a formula for success in today's Canada, which steps back to more fundamentally.
00:08:07.760 And I think the argument is, it's because who we are is fundamental as human beings.
00:08:13.160 We are not just consumers. We are not just people who are focused entirely on making money.
00:08:20.140 And there are a lot of people who have a lot of money who aren't all that satisfied and happy in life.
00:08:24.320 We are created, and this is, you know, obviously, there's a fundamental anthropology that is contested along the way,
00:08:33.420 but Curtis would come from the perspective that we are created as image bearers of God, imago dei.
00:08:38.840 That gives us dignity. That gives us worth. That also makes us social beings.
00:08:43.000 And we find flourishing and happiness and satisfaction when we're in relationship with others, whether that relationship is in the family,
00:08:52.160 whether that's in the community, enterprise being a shared social relationship.
00:08:58.560 I think, you know, any, you can go to Harvard Business Review, go to any successful entrepreneur,
00:09:04.000 and they'll tell you that if you only focus on making money and not any other values, you rarely will continue to make money.
00:09:11.600 You know, in many ways, profit is like breathing. It's essential in a market economy.
00:09:18.700 But when I wake up in the morning and think about the fact that I need to breathe, it's probably a sign of sickness, not health.
00:09:24.800 Right. Well, and I mean, there certainly seems like there's been a crisis of meaning and purpose in our society that so many young people don't really see.
00:09:35.100 They don't have the same motivation or they don't really know their role because our social roles are changing so much.
00:09:40.500 And this is particularly the case for young men.
00:09:43.200 And I think that the meteoric rise of Jordan Peterson speaks volumes to the fact that he was saying something that was sort of different than the traditional conservative message.
00:09:52.880 But unfortunately, it doesn't seem like our political class has really joined on to that because, I mean, we're seeing a little bit of a crisis in the federal Conservative Party of Canada where, you know, Aaron O'Toole, the leader, sort of took the party more to the centre, more to what we would describe as like a liberal light and didn't really defend conservative ideas and values.
00:10:13.300 And we're seeing it across the country that, you know, before it was, you know, let's stay away from these divisive social issues because they they drag us down.
00:10:21.820 And, you know, maybe people perceive that Andrew Scheer being a social conservative and a Catholic hurt his ability to to win that election.
00:10:28.600 But now, you know, the cultural issues that we're talking about are a little bit more basic to the country.
00:10:35.080 Like, is Canada a horrible, genocidal country?
00:10:38.080 Did we found it on all of these terrible institutions that need to be demolished or is there something there?
00:10:44.380 And again, I don't really see very many conservative politicians really coming out and defending Canada against some of the worst accusations against us.
00:10:52.620 So I'm kind of wondering what what what's Curtis's position and how do you think we can influence more of that kind of leadership to talk about meaning some of the things that you were talking about, human dignity from our political class?
00:11:07.480 I in many ways, Curtis started in 2000 out of a sense that the political institutions were failing us and that the ideas that were needed were very unlikely to come from within.
00:11:21.100 And therefore, they needed to come from outside of the political institutions.
00:11:25.540 I say that as a former candidate for the Canadian Alliance, having been involved extensively in in political campaigns, the argument, I think, when we take a look and let me be very clear, my criticism would be as much on social conservatives in terms of how they have engaged the political sphere.
00:11:46.440 And I would say, and I would say, and I would say, typically not very wisely.
00:11:49.980 So they haven't done themselves a whole lot of favors in terms of making making the argument for their cause.
00:11:55.600 I don't think you're going to win by by cherry picking hot button issues and somehow polarizing and us versus them culture wedge in society.
00:12:05.080 I think instead, you know, I think some of the immigration, you know, we look at what Jason Kenney did when he was involved in the outreach for the conservatives.
00:12:17.740 Many immigrants to this country share values in terms of family, in terms of community, and a sense of identity.
00:12:24.720 They tend to be entrepreneurial and pro-market, but there's a whole lot more to what they understand and expect out of the public square and the shapes they're voting.
00:12:34.820 I recall speaking to Civitas in 2003 on why collective bargaining is fundamentally a conservative idea.
00:12:43.080 I had the predictable line of people at the mic ready to challenge in terms of my defense of unionism along the way.
00:12:51.020 Now, my defense is not a defense of mainstream contemporary unionism, to be sure.
00:12:55.880 But I would argue that collective bargaining is not only economically feasible, it recognizes the fact that a workplace is a community and there are diversity of interests.
00:13:05.780 And that when labor and management can work together in terms of building a larger pie, there are all sorts of things positive that can happen.
00:13:15.620 And there are models around the world quite different than the adversarial North American model in which collective bargaining should be seen as a positive.
00:13:23.820 You know, I look at some areas in Europe where, you know, the EI system, for instance, doesn't belong to government.
00:13:30.260 It belongs to industry associations and unions together.
00:13:32.740 I've often, you know, we've had our trouble with our EI in terms of the differences between seasonal work and cyclical work in eastern Canada and having those rules apply to a manufacturing base in southwestern Ontario and a recognition that doesn't work.
00:13:51.760 There are some structural things that flow up.
00:13:54.100 This isn't just about hot button moral issues.
00:13:56.880 This is about a way of organizing life, a way in terms of what is my obligation to my co-worker, to my employer, to my neighbor.
00:14:06.340 And fundamentally, it all roots back to the fact that as a human being, I have a dignity and a worth and I'm a social being.
00:14:15.680 And flourishing is going to come as I live with and alongside others.
00:14:20.900 No, that's great.
00:14:21.600 There's definitely been a political sort of realignment.
00:14:24.240 And I think that some of the things that conservatives today are realizing is that, you know, they have a lot of allies with traditional blue collar union voters that might have, you know, used to vote for a party like the NDP.
00:14:35.920 But with all of the identity politics and the sort of left wing fad issues that the left wing parties are consumed with, they've sort of ignored and neglected this big part of their base that this sort of could very much fall in line with conservatives in terms of some of the values that you're discussing.
00:14:53.560 And I think to some extent, there has been an overreach on the part of the progressive left in which, you know, they are more proselytizing than anybody on the right that I see.
00:15:06.260 And there is a sense of a forced identity that a lot of people, you know, it's not politically correct to say all of these things, but a lot of people say, wait a minute, that's not me.
00:15:15.720 That's not what, that's not how we live our day to day life.
00:15:20.240 And that's increasing the disconnect between public life and family life.
00:15:24.000 And I think within the cracks that are there, the light is shining in and they're in, I'm reasonably optimistic in terms of what the future might look like.
00:15:33.620 Well, that's great.
00:15:34.180 One of the things you mentioned when you're talking about community is sort of the obligation that we have to one another.
00:15:40.240 All the political parties talk a lot about your rights, your freedoms, your liberties.
00:15:46.140 With regards to COVID, we did start to hear more about, you know, the obligation that you have to others and this idea that you might sacrifice yourself for the betterment of society.
00:15:55.240 That's not something that we are used to hearing from our politicians.
00:15:59.060 So maybe you could tell me a little bit about what you think the duty of a Canadian is or ought to be and how, you know, we can talk more about not just, you know, what you can get from the government that you, the country that you live in and the government, but what is your obligation as a Canadian to provide to society?
00:16:19.760 Well, I think, you know, ultimately it is about the stewardship of gifts.
00:16:24.520 We all have equal dignity and equal rights as citizens along the way, but this notion, this notion of sameness, sometimes we transform equality and equity into sameness.
00:16:39.440 And yet we intuitively know from, you know, being two or three years old on, you know, in kindergarten grade one, I realized I wasn't the same as some other people in the class.
00:16:49.620 Some of them could run faster and, you know, were more athletic and smarter and all of the other things.
00:16:54.620 There is a sense in which difference itself is, is, is, is not a bad thing.
00:17:01.680 It can be celebrated, but when we view our gifts, not just in service of an autonomous self in terms of how can I win and how can I get, but have a sense of the common good, have a sense that a rising tide, this all boats.
00:17:16.120 Um, you know, when we work together and any business recognizes that, um, I have yet to meet the entrepreneur who's been successful in the long run, who says I've done it all the most successful entrepreneurs say I took risks.
00:17:30.480 And then I found people who had particular gifts and talents that I didn't have.
00:17:34.800 And together we accomplished it X, Y, Z.
00:17:38.020 Um, there is a sense in which we just know that is how we are created.
00:17:42.780 That's how the world is made.
00:17:44.580 Uh, we don't live on islands all by ourselves.
00:17:47.020 That's not the ordinary way of life.
00:17:49.000 And I think having a rich sense of a shared flourishing, a shared common good, um, ultimately makes us happier as individuals than simply say, I'm going to pursue my own happiness.
00:18:00.300 And I don't care who I have to tromp on in the process, uh, because most of us discover the fact that tromping on other people doesn't feel very good either.
00:18:08.820 Right.
00:18:09.220 Well, and, and I think some people have a misconceived idea of what happiness means.
00:18:13.060 They think that happiness is just, you know, the, the joy that you might feel a freedom of a day.
00:18:17.680 And they don't recognize that, uh, you know, happiness is built over time with, with, with, comes in hand with, uh, more responsibility with service to others, um, with the sort of, you know, building families and communities.
00:18:30.280 And these kinds of things that we don't, we don't often hear, uh, much, uh, people talking about, you know, especially for my generation, that the sort of emphasis was really, you know, you go to school, you get an education, you get a good job.
00:18:41.700 And that's, and that's the pathway.
00:18:43.600 That's, that's the focus.
00:18:44.540 And, and, you know, family is almost like a distraction from that.
00:18:47.920 And I, and I feel like there's so many people, uh, who, who miss the opportunity or forgo the opportunity to have family and have kids because they're so focused on a career, so focused on the economic side, uh, that they're really missing out on something much deeper in, in, in life.
00:19:01.560 And one of the things I've noticed, Ray, is that the generation younger than me, so young Canadians, I noticed this in a poll that you did, um, they, they might be more inclined, uh, to, to, to have a more traditional view, um, of, of things like whether there should be religion in public life and, and the importance of family and marriage.
00:19:18.480 Um, can, can, can you tell me a little bit about the, the, the, the poll that you've had and maybe how this could help conservative politicians because conservatives have a tough time appealing to young people in general.
00:19:28.320 So maybe how these new, uh, shifting values, uh, could, could help conservative fortunes.
00:19:34.340 Yeah, we, uh, and, you know, Curtis, right from the beginning has, we, we've defined our roots explicitly.
00:19:40.480 Um, we are rooted in 2000 years of Christian social thought.
00:19:44.340 Um, that said within our, our staff and that we have the entire range Catholic.
00:19:48.460 Protestant, um, there's no one denomination, nor are we churchy or narrow in that regard.
00:19:55.300 But in, in light of the fact of, you know, what are the roots of happiness?
00:19:59.640 What is the purpose of life?
00:20:01.060 There are some fundamental questions on which we recognize Canadians differ.
00:20:04.420 We live in a pluralistic society, but we think it's valuable to put our stake in the ground to say, here is where we're coming from.
00:20:11.380 And I think that has lots of implications.
00:20:13.200 Um, you know, they're, they're, the poll that you referenced, uh, we, we pulled, uh, over 4,000 Canadians, half over the age of 40, half over, under the age of 40.
00:20:23.660 What is interesting is in terms of the role of faith in public life, um, by, by approximately 10% younger Canadians are much more open to being authentic.
00:20:34.840 Um, including those that they differ with, um, but saying it's better to, instead of privatizing these conversations, it's better to have them in the public square.
00:20:44.660 Um, it may come as a surprise to most, but statistically speaking, the most likely to have read a sacred text or to have gone to a place of worship in the last 30 days is someone under the age of 30 on a per capita basis.
00:20:59.860 Um, so younger people and immigrants are the, are the areas in which there is the most connection to faith and faith communities in this country.
00:21:08.220 Um, and I think that for, you know, indicates a path forward.
00:21:12.540 I would highlight the fact that among those groups also are the most who are, I would say they're agnostic or don't have anything to do with faith.
00:21:21.360 What they value is an authenticity, authenticity, and not the fact of, you know, we've been measuring since 2017 and we have four categories.
00:21:29.420 You have the, the very religious and the very non-religious categories, the very religious category is held firm about one in five Canadians.
00:21:37.620 Um, you know, and that includes all faiths, uh, you know, are very regular and we use seven measures to, to do that.
00:21:47.220 Um, what has happened in the, in the years that we've been studying it is there has been a shift from the middle to the non-religious side.
00:21:54.880 Um, in which the person who would have checked the box and said, you know, I'm, I'm a Catholic or I'm an Anglican or I'm a Presbyterian or Baptist, whatever, gone to church perhaps once or twice a year or not at all, but had been baptized, but it really was not a meaningful part of their lives.
00:22:12.500 Those are the people who are becoming increasingly hostile to religion.
00:22:15.980 Um, however, younger Canadians, those who were not raised in traditional faith, immigrant Canadians, um, there is a growing sense of a recognition of the importance of faith and faith institutions.
00:22:27.940 Um, and I would highlight, um, you know, go down University Avenue in Toronto and take a look at the names of the various hospitals and recognize the fact that, you know, our healthcare system, even today relies on religious communities who are raising significant monies for the, you know, the Jewish community for the MRI machines at Mount Zion. 0.66
00:22:46.920 And then, you know, the Catholic communities, health education, social services, a vast proportion of that even today is being delivered by faith communities, um, in our country.
00:22:58.760 It's part of our, it's part of the system of delivery.
00:23:02.800 And, um, you know, it's a story that by and large has been forgotten, but it is, and remains part of the public square.
00:23:10.220 And if all of that were to disappear tomorrow, Canada would not be at all the place that most of us has taken for granted.
00:23:17.520 Well, absolutely.
00:23:18.440 I think that's right.
00:23:19.220 I think that, uh, for, for myself as well, I wasn't particularly raised in a religious family, go to church once or twice a year, but I found that when I was older on my own, I sort of, again, the same thing that you feel like there's something deeper here.
00:23:32.260 And maybe it's, it's wise to turn to some of the traditions and ideas of the past that got us here instead of just throwing them out and saying, you know, we're, we're too enlightened for this now.
00:23:40.700 It's like, there's wisdom in, in the past.
00:23:42.980 And I, I know a lot, many of my peers, uh, feel similarly to that.
00:23:47.060 Well, we'll end the, uh, interview on that note, a little bit of optimism that younger Canadians are, are seeing the value, uh, of tradition.
00:23:53.840 Ray Pennings, thank you so much for, for joining us and keep up the good work over there at Cardus.
00:23:57.760 Thank you so much, Candice.
00:23:59.320 All right.
00:23:59.680 Thank you so much for watching.
00:24:00.760 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.