Western Standard - March 23, 2023


Keynote： The Right Honourable Stephen J. Harper [Canada Strong and Free Network 2023]

Topics
conservative renaissance social credit movement
Mentioned
Preston Manning William Eberhardt Pierre Poilievre Reagan John Weisenberger Ernest Manning Pierre Trudeau Jean Chrétien Hugo Chavez Paul Martin Thatcher Jamil Randy
MPC Daily Market Update Mar 22, 2023 President Joe Biden arriving in Ottawa

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

125.29

Word count

2,652

Sentence count

153

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Learn English with Stephen Harper. Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivers a keynote address at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Vancouver, Canada on the 30th anniversary of the Reform Party of Canada's victory in the 1988 election. Harper discusses the need for a conservative renaissance at the national level.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 Thank you very much.
00:00:10.000 Thank you very much.
00:00:14.000 Merci beaucoup.
00:00:16.000 Thank you.
00:00:18.000 Je suis ravi d'être ici au congrès annuel du réseau Canada Forêt Libre.
00:00:23.000 So you see, old habits die hard.
00:00:26.000 Friends, I'm delighted to be here.
00:00:29.000 For the first time in several years, actually, at this conference of the Canada Strong and Free Network,
00:00:35.000 our country is badly in need of a conservative renaissance at the national level.
00:00:42.000 Indeed, I think the future of the country and the future of our middle and working class families depends on it.
00:00:49.000 But such a renaissance cannot occur.
00:00:53.000 It cannot be accomplished, achieved or maintained by a political party working alone.
00:01:01.000 It needs organized support in the broader society.
00:01:05.000 And that's what this organization, the Canada Strong and Free Network, can help do.
00:01:10.000 Now, I know that this year, as you contemplate how to bring about that conservative renaissance,
00:01:19.000 you're observing that this is the 30th anniversary of a critical milestone in the last such renaissance.
00:01:27.000 I'm referring, of course, to the election of 52 MPs, including yours truly, to the House of Commons in 1993 under the banner of the Reform Party of Canada.
00:01:40.000 The Reform Party of Canada went on to become a critical element in the eventual formation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada.
00:01:53.000 You know, I tell people the Conservative Party of Canada, as I conceived it, is not simply a merger of two legacy parties, nor is it just an electoral coalition.
00:02:05.000 It is a synthesis of three distinct conservative traditions in this country.
00:02:11.000 The Toryism of Eastern Canada, the populism of the West, and the autonomist tradition of Quebec and French Canadians.
00:02:19.000 This synthesis, populist conservatism, I've often called it.
00:02:25.000 Now, that word, populist, has taken on a number of imprecise and often negative meanings.
00:02:34.000 For instance, if you were to read liberal media around the world, which, of course, you should not do.
00:02:40.000 There you will find that any election result that they like is, quote, democratic.
00:02:51.000 And any election result they don't like is, quote, populist.
00:02:56.000 Even in my time, though, in the hands of people like Hugo Chavez and others,
00:03:01.000 the term populist had come to mean simple demagoguery.
00:03:06.000 But the word populist was used in the 1980s and the 1990s by the Reform Party according to its original meaning.
00:03:15.000 The original populists were a political party in the late 19th century.
00:03:20.000 That party came out of the frontier agrarian society of the Western United States.
00:03:26.000 The populists sought to represent the broad interests of the great mass of local people.
00:03:33.000 Those people were overwhelmingly small-hold farmers and modest-income labourers.
00:03:41.000 They contrasted with the elites of the time, the railways, the banks, grain companies, and the like,
00:03:49.000 those who possessed enormous monopolistic economic power and controlled the traditional political parties.
00:03:56.000 They were actually quite small in number and represented organizations headquartered hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
00:04:04.000 The original populists died out, but such movements continued to arise in both the Western United States and Western Canada for decades to come.
00:04:15.000 Those movements could be of the left, of the right, or of the centre.
00:04:20.000 But what really united them was the belief that the bulk of the population shared common interests and values that the elites who controlled the system simply ignored.
00:04:34.000 Alberta, of course, has a unique history of populism.
00:04:37.000 For most of the first century of its political life, its politics tended to be dominated by a single, broad-based political party,
00:04:47.000 extensively organized and connected at the grassroots level.
00:04:51.000 Most relevant here was the history of social credit.
00:04:55.000 In 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, a truly desperate electorate gave a landslide victory to William Eberhardt, an evangelical preacher.
00:05:09.000 Eberhardt's program was then, even for the times, a radical populist agenda.
00:05:16.000 Very, very anti-establishment in substance and tone.
00:05:21.000 When Eberhardt died in 1943, his young lieutenant, Ernest Manning, converted that populism into what was, policy-wise, a largely mainstream conservative party.
00:05:35.000 But it was one that, right to the very end, kept its roots among farming class, working class, and middle class people.
00:05:43.000 You know, it's now conventional to remember social credit for its, quote, funny money ideas, which Eberhardt had actually discarded, which Manning had actually discarded.
00:05:55.000 As well, it's also remembered for some of the other peculiarities of the era, which, by the way, were peculiarities in a lot of other places at the time, not just in Alberta.
00:06:06.000 However, it's indisputable that social credit's mix of conservative policy and a populist ethic created a long period, a three decades long period of inclusive economic development that laid the groundwork for the prosperity that Alberta enjoys to this day.
00:06:26.000 Now, fast forward to the late 1970s and 1980s, when I was as young as Jamil, and some of you in this room.
00:06:38.000 Back then, that period, we had low and slowing economic growth, periodic recessions, high and rising inflation, so-called stagflation,
00:06:52.000 which, by the way, the liberal elite at the time said couldn't really happen.
00:06:57.000 And if it did, it must just be temporary.
00:07:00.000 And therefore, we should ignore these problems in favor of broader, quote, social priorities.
00:07:06.000 If that sounds a lot like today, it should.
00:07:09.000 Because today does, in fact, exactly resemble that time.
00:07:16.000 Governments and central banks in Canada and elsewhere in the democratic world have, in these past few years, implemented the economic policies of the 1970s.
00:07:26.000 And as a consequence, we are getting the economic results of the 1970s.
00:07:32.000 And by the way, this looks like the 1970s in other ways as well.
00:07:37.000 Back then, democracies were suffering from profound internal social and political divisions.
00:07:44.000 And in the world, democracy itself was in retreat.
00:07:49.000 And authoritarianism, especially Soviet communism, was on the rise.
00:07:55.000 But then we had a new generation of conservative leaders, Reagan, Thatcher, and others.
00:08:01.000 They contradicted all the established wisdom of the elites.
00:08:05.000 And things changed for the better.
00:08:07.000 And in fact, they changed for the better quite quickly.
00:08:12.000 Within 10 years, the Soviet bloc was collapsing.
00:08:16.000 Stagflation was a thing of the past.
00:08:19.000 And by the 1990s, the model of free markets and democratic societies was spreading around the world, the beginnings of what became globalization.
00:08:30.000 Now, it's important for younger generations to understand this.
00:08:35.000 Reagan and that group were not from the political and business establishment of the time.
00:08:42.000 Indeed, especially in the early days, they were almost universally opposed by that establishment, even in their own political parties.
00:08:54.000 The Reform Party was, in part, a product of that era.
00:08:59.000 And was broadly similar in orientation.
00:09:02.000 I should say it, I should say we, advocated overall very orthodox economic policy.
00:09:09.000 Yet, while being portrayed, while at the same time being portrayed as radical by the media and rejected by the elites.
00:09:17.000 The way, by the way, to be blunt, that Pierre Poiliev is today.
00:09:22.000 Pierre, of course, having been, way back then, a reformer, a very tiny reformer, at the time, when I was first elected.
00:09:35.000 But, in spite of that opposition, reform's economic policies were eventually adopted.
00:09:42.000 Ironically, mostly by the Liberal Party under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin in the 1990s, mid-1990s.
00:09:50.000 And this country, Canada, which was becoming an economic basket case by the time Pierre Trudeau left office, gradually turned around.
00:10:01.000 Now, I tell this story, by the way, not just to give you hope for the future and a not-too-distant future.
00:10:08.000 But I tell you this story also as a testament.
00:10:12.000 As a testament to the superiority, not just of well-thought-out, market-based economic policy.
00:10:19.000 But also as a testament to the importance of the democratic system of government.
00:10:25.000 There's a lot of criticism of democracy these days, and a lot of challenges in the democratic world.
00:10:31.000 Pretty serious ones.
00:10:33.000 And democracies, if we're honest, rarely get things exactly right at any point in time.
00:10:41.000 But democracies are adaptable and resilient.
00:10:45.000 And over time, when it becomes obvious that countries are on the wrong path, democracies have a way of correcting error, changing course, and revitalizing themselves.
00:11:01.000 It happened like that in the 1980s, as I say, when I was a young man.
00:11:05.000 If my father were here, he could tell you that it happened like that after the 1930s, when he was young.
00:11:13.000 And when the challenges faced by the western democratic world were much more serious than anything we face today.
00:11:20.000 It's happened again.
00:11:22.000 This kind of rebirth and revitalization has happened again and again over the generations.
00:11:28.000 So, populist conservatism that I talk about is a belief, both in free markets and in democracy.
00:11:37.000 But to go back for a moment to the early days of the Reform Party, the truth is that populism was not really a choice for us.
00:11:47.000 It was a necessity.
00:11:49.000 The Reform Party was founded in 1987, six years before that historic breakthrough in 1993.
00:11:56.000 In those early years and many years after, the party had no real corporate support and very few large donors.
00:12:06.000 Initially, we weren't, we didn't even have any full-time professional staff.
00:12:12.000 In fact, in the beginning, in the beginning, reform was ineligible for the subsidies and tax credits that the established parties got.
00:12:22.000 In fact, the Reform Party was even forbidden by law in its first election to buy the election advertising that the traditional parties were entitled to, if you can believe that.
00:12:36.000 I was the chief policy officer in those days and I can remember going with Preston Manning or just myself or just myself and a couple of others.
00:12:45.000 Just myself and my friend John Weisenberger smashing up his car.
00:12:49.000 That's a whole, that's a whole other story.
00:12:53.000 Anyway, we were going, literally, we were going from town hall to town hall alone and raising money by stump speaking and passing KFC buckets.
00:13:04.000 That's how we actually raised money for the party.
00:13:07.000 So in such an environment, it was essential for the party, including for this young academic conservative economist, to figure out pretty quickly how to become a populist in the sense of responding to the actual concerns of our members and supporters who were ordinary middle class and working class people.
00:13:30.000 And that kind of populism is a very good thing.
00:13:43.000 And I believe that the approach of those early days continued to manifest itself in the economic success of our later conservative government.
00:13:52.000 And I see a lot of people in the audience who played a role in that.
00:13:55.000 And let me just summarize that record.
00:13:58.000 It is that despite going through a global economic crisis, this country experienced steady income growth for Canadians across the income spectrum, from the top to the bottom.
00:14:10.000 We had record investments in things like health care and infrastructure, but ended with a balanced budget and the lowest federal tax burden in over half a century.
00:14:20.000 We also left a free trade network expanded from five to 51 countries and done with strong public support at a time when populations elsewhere were turning protectionist.
00:14:40.000 Now, friends, that record stands, I think, in stark contrast to the policy war being waged these past few years against working Canadians and their families.
00:14:52.000 I could point to monetary policy, which has created out of thin air renewed inflation, eroding the budgets of all modest income households in this country and affecting the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history.
00:15:07.000 I could point to an elite-driven climate change agenda, which is forcing the cost of energy transition entirely on ordinary middle-class consumers and taxpayers. 0.93
00:15:19.000 Of course, we shouldn't forget tax policy, which has been marked by tax hikes across the board for all kinds of small business workers, ordinary middle-class people, while at the same time sparing the corporate sector, the big corporate sector, from any increase in the corporate tax rate.
00:15:38.000 That is what elite liberalism looks like.
00:15:43.000 And, of course, it runs counter in every way to the populist conservatism that previously governed the country.
00:15:49.000 And, friends, I never hesitate to say that the first architect of that modern populist conservatism is the man who's going to join me up here on the stage in a moment for a conversation.
00:16:03.000 Preston Manning and the Reform Party, as I say, had a huge influence on the politics of Canada, one that I think, frankly, is underappreciated.
00:16:16.000 Reform, as I said, already changed the debate in the 1990s on fiscal and economic policy and paved the way for policy changes that, for two decades, got this country moving in the right direction.
00:16:30.000 It also changed the debate on constitutional and unity policy.
00:16:35.000 It developed the first Clarity Act and led to a government more sensitive to provincial interests contributing in the process to a long-run decline in both Quebec separatism and Western alienation, at least until recently.
00:16:50.000 It changed some important things in terms of how political parties operate and how they're run.
00:16:57.000 The Reform Party brought back the detailed party election platform, which had virtually vanished.
00:17:03.000 It brought in national membership lists.
00:17:06.000 People forget that, way back then, often constituency associations were tightly controlled, effectively rotten boroughs for sitting MPs.
00:17:17.000 Reform brought in more participatory grassroots structures, including leadership balloting by members in place of brokered conventions.
00:17:27.000 The fundraising experience I told you about earlier laid the groundwork for the comprehensive reforms my government made to party fundraising,
00:17:38.000 making parties dependent on a marketplace of small contributions rather than on a combination of big donors and government subsidies.
00:17:49.000 And that, by the way, that system, by the way, doesn't include support from foreign governments.
00:17:55.000 I just thought I would mention that.
00:18:05.000 I don't know why.
00:18:07.000 I hear it's topical.
00:18:10.000 Anyway, few people will also remember, a little contribution,
00:18:15.000 will remember that the Reform Party was instrumental in largely ending desk thumping,
00:18:22.000 one of the House of Commons oldest and most obnoxious practices.
00:18:28.000 But, of course, most importantly, the Reform Party ultimately made the modern Conservative Party of Canada possible,
00:18:37.000 obviously with other elements as well.
00:18:39.000 And let me talk a bit about Preston Manning's role in that.
00:18:48.000 You all know Preston Manning is the founder of this organization and the founder of the Reform Party before that.
00:18:56.000 What many of you may not know is that Preston Manning's conception of a broad modern populist conservatism
00:19:04.000 predates the formation of the Reform Party itself by some two decades.
00:19:11.000 In 1968, Preston Manning did the research for his father's book,
00:19:16.000 Political Realignment, A Challenge to Thoughtful Canadians.
00:19:21.000 That book was the first attempt to conceptualize and advocate the creation of the kind of conservatism
00:19:27.000 that found expression in the Reform Party of Canada, in the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance,
00:19:35.000 and finally in the modern Conservative Party of Canada.
00:19:38.000 And this much also needs to be said.
00:19:41.000 I, of course, am very proud of my role as the first elected leader and first Prime Minister of the modern Conservative Party.
00:19:48.000 I'm the only Prime Minister to have come to office in this country since Confederation through a third party.
00:19:55.000 But that could not have come about without the work of Preston Manning.
00:20:01.000 No one else since Confederation has created a new political party at the national level
00:20:08.000 that would be so successful as to eventually become, at least in part, the Government of Canada.
00:20:15.000 No one else.
00:20:17.000 And to build such a party from virtually nothing is not just a unique accomplishment,
00:20:25.000 but a manifestation of a skill set that very few people will ever possess.
00:20:31.000 It is not something, for example, that I could ever have done.
00:20:36.000 And it is why I say that Preston Manning is the closest thing we have to the founding father
00:20:42.000 of the modern-day Canadian Conservative movement.
00:20:46.000 So...
00:20:54.000 So let me welcome to the stage to discuss the breakthrough of 1993 and a few other things,
00:21:00.000 the Honourable Ernest Preston Manning.
00:21:07.000 Thank you, Randy.
00:21:08.000 you