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.
00:00:53.000It cannot be accomplished, achieved or maintained by a political party working alone.
00:01:01.000It needs organized support in the broader society.
00:01:05.000And that's what this organization, the Canada Strong and Free Network, can help do.
00:01:10.000Now, I know that this year, as you contemplate how to bring about that conservative renaissance,
00:01:19.000you're observing that this is the 30th anniversary of a critical milestone in the last such renaissance.
00:01:27.000I'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.
00:01:40.000The Reform Party of Canada went on to become a critical element in the eventual formation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada.
00:01:53.000You 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.
00:02:05.000It is a synthesis of three distinct conservative traditions in this country.
00:02:11.000The Toryism of Eastern Canada, the populism of the West, and the autonomist tradition of Quebec and French Canadians.
00:02:19.000This synthesis, populist conservatism, I've often called it.
00:02:25.000Now, that word, populist, has taken on a number of imprecise and often negative meanings.
00:02:34.000For instance, if you were to read liberal media around the world, which, of course, you should not do.
00:02:40.000There you will find that any election result that they like is, quote, democratic.
00:02:51.000And any election result they don't like is, quote, populist.
00:02:56.000Even in my time, though, in the hands of people like Hugo Chavez and others,
00:03:01.000the term populist had come to mean simple demagoguery.
00:03:06.000But the word populist was used in the 1980s and the 1990s by the Reform Party according to its original meaning.
00:03:15.000The original populists were a political party in the late 19th century.
00:03:20.000That party came out of the frontier agrarian society of the Western United States.
00:03:26.000The populists sought to represent the broad interests of the great mass of local people.
00:03:33.000Those people were overwhelmingly small-hold farmers and modest-income labourers.
00:03:41.000They contrasted with the elites of the time, the railways, the banks, grain companies, and the like,
00:03:49.000those who possessed enormous monopolistic economic power and controlled the traditional political parties.
00:03:56.000They were actually quite small in number and represented organizations headquartered hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
00:04:04.000The original populists died out, but such movements continued to arise in both the Western United States and Western Canada for decades to come.
00:04:15.000Those movements could be of the left, of the right, or of the centre.
00:04:20.000But 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.
00:04:34.000Alberta, of course, has a unique history of populism.
00:04:37.000For most of the first century of its political life, its politics tended to be dominated by a single, broad-based political party,
00:04:47.000extensively organized and connected at the grassroots level.
00:04:51.000Most relevant here was the history of social credit.
00:04:55.000In 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, a truly desperate electorate gave a landslide victory to William Eberhardt, an evangelical preacher.
00:05:09.000Eberhardt's program was then, even for the times, a radical populist agenda.
00:05:16.000Very, very anti-establishment in substance and tone.
00:05:21.000When Eberhardt died in 1943, his young lieutenant, Ernest Manning, converted that populism into what was, policy-wise, a largely mainstream conservative party.
00:05:35.000But it was one that, right to the very end, kept its roots among farming class, working class, and middle class people.
00:05:43.000You 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.
00:05:55.000As 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.
00:06:06.000However, 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.
00:06:26.000Now, fast forward to the late 1970s and 1980s, when I was as young as Jamil, and some of you in this room.
00:06:38.000Back then, that period, we had low and slowing economic growth, periodic recessions, high and rising inflation, so-called stagflation,
00:06:52.000which, by the way, the liberal elite at the time said couldn't really happen.
00:06:57.000And if it did, it must just be temporary.
00:07:00.000And therefore, we should ignore these problems in favor of broader, quote, social priorities.
00:07:06.000If that sounds a lot like today, it should.
00:07:09.000Because today does, in fact, exactly resemble that time.
00:07:16.000Governments and central banks in Canada and elsewhere in the democratic world have, in these past few years, implemented the economic policies of the 1970s.
00:07:26.000And as a consequence, we are getting the economic results of the 1970s.
00:07:32.000And by the way, this looks like the 1970s in other ways as well.
00:07:37.000Back then, democracies were suffering from profound internal social and political divisions.
00:07:44.000And in the world, democracy itself was in retreat.
00:07:49.000And authoritarianism, especially Soviet communism, was on the rise.
00:07:55.000But then we had a new generation of conservative leaders, Reagan, Thatcher, and others.
00:08:01.000They contradicted all the established wisdom of the elites.
00:08:19.000And by the 1990s, the model of free markets and democratic societies was spreading around the world, the beginnings of what became globalization.
00:08:30.000Now, it's important for younger generations to understand this.
00:08:35.000Reagan and that group were not from the political and business establishment of the time.
00:08:42.000Indeed, especially in the early days, they were almost universally opposed by that establishment, even in their own political parties.
00:08:54.000The Reform Party was, in part, a product of that era.
00:08:59.000And was broadly similar in orientation.
00:09:02.000I should say it, I should say we, advocated overall very orthodox economic policy.
00:09:09.000Yet, while being portrayed, while at the same time being portrayed as radical by the media and rejected by the elites.
00:09:17.000The way, by the way, to be blunt, that Pierre Poiliev is today.
00:09:22.000Pierre, of course, having been, way back then, a reformer, a very tiny reformer, at the time, when I was first elected.
00:09:35.000But, in spite of that opposition, reform's economic policies were eventually adopted.
00:09:42.000Ironically, mostly by the Liberal Party under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin in the 1990s, mid-1990s.
00:09:50.000And this country, Canada, which was becoming an economic basket case by the time Pierre Trudeau left office, gradually turned around.
00:10:01.000Now, I tell this story, by the way, not just to give you hope for the future and a not-too-distant future.
00:10:08.000But I tell you this story also as a testament.
00:10:12.000As a testament to the superiority, not just of well-thought-out, market-based economic policy.
00:10:19.000But also as a testament to the importance of the democratic system of government.
00:10:25.000There's a lot of criticism of democracy these days, and a lot of challenges in the democratic world.
00:10:33.000And democracies, if we're honest, rarely get things exactly right at any point in time.
00:10:41.000But democracies are adaptable and resilient.
00:10:45.000And 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.
00:11:01.000It happened like that in the 1980s, as I say, when I was a young man.
00:11:05.000If my father were here, he could tell you that it happened like that after the 1930s, when he was young.
00:11:13.000And when the challenges faced by the western democratic world were much more serious than anything we face today.
00:11:49.000The Reform Party was founded in 1987, six years before that historic breakthrough in 1993.
00:11:56.000In those early years and many years after, the party had no real corporate support and very few large donors.
00:12:06.000Initially, we weren't, we didn't even have any full-time professional staff.
00:12:12.000In fact, in the beginning, in the beginning, reform was ineligible for the subsidies and tax credits that the established parties got.
00:12:22.000In 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.
00:12:36.000I 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.
00:12:45.000Just myself and my friend John Weisenberger smashing up his car.
00:12:49.000That's a whole, that's a whole other story.
00:12:53.000Anyway, we were going, literally, we were going from town hall to town hall alone and raising money by stump speaking and passing KFC buckets.
00:13:04.000That's how we actually raised money for the party.
00:13:07.000So 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.
00:13:30.000And that kind of populism is a very good thing.
00:13:43.000And I believe that the approach of those early days continued to manifest itself in the economic success of our later conservative government.
00:13:52.000And I see a lot of people in the audience who played a role in that.
00:13:55.000And let me just summarize that record.
00:13:58.000It 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.
00:14:10.000We 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.
00:14:20.000We 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.
00:14:40.000Now, 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.
00:14:52.000I 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.
00:15:07.000I 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.
00:15:19.000Of 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.
00:15:38.000That is what elite liberalism looks like.
00:15:43.000And, of course, it runs counter in every way to the populist conservatism that previously governed the country.
00:15:49.000And, 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.
00:16:03.000Preston Manning and the Reform Party, as I say, had a huge influence on the politics of Canada, one that I think, frankly, is underappreciated.
00:16:16.000Reform, 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.
00:16:30.000It also changed the debate on constitutional and unity policy.
00:16:35.000It 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.
00:16:50.000It changed some important things in terms of how political parties operate and how they're run.
00:16:57.000The Reform Party brought back the detailed party election platform, which had virtually vanished.
00:17:03.000It brought in national membership lists.
00:17:06.000People forget that, way back then, often constituency associations were tightly controlled, effectively rotten boroughs for sitting MPs.
00:17:17.000Reform brought in more participatory grassroots structures, including leadership balloting by members in place of brokered conventions.
00:17:27.000The fundraising experience I told you about earlier laid the groundwork for the comprehensive reforms my government made to party fundraising,
00:17:38.000making parties dependent on a marketplace of small contributions rather than on a combination of big donors and government subsidies.
00:17:49.000And that, by the way, that system, by the way, doesn't include support from foreign governments.