What Went Wrong For The Tories?

It's good to be back at the old fruit stand. A lot of history has passed since I last had a regular spot on these pages, and not all of it has been happy. I'd been rather looking forward to a plush patronage appointment from a Harper government, perhaps as equerry to Canada's new ambassador to the United States, the Hon. Mark D. Steyn.

Instead, the voters disappointed us all on June 28, and I'm reduced to filling newsprint again. Minority governments being unstable things, however, it's all too possible the verdict of the voters might yet change and that the equerry job might come through after all. Just to stay on the safe side, the column will be a temporary one, lasting through the end of the summer.

But maybe before we close the cover on the recent past, we should try to understand it better. The new Conservative party had almost everything going in its favour on June 28. Three weeks before the election, a Conservative minority government seemed within reach. Then, in the last 10 days or so, the scandal-wracked incumbents recovered and won a surprisingly strong minority. The result was not a Liberal victory, but it was certainly a Conservative defeat. What went wrong?

One theory has had a good airing in these pages: That is the theory that the Conservatives were dragged down by their social conservative members. The hard-line opinions of some MPs against abortion and same-sex marriage, it is said, frightened away moderate Ontarians. If the Conservatives want to win power, the theory concludes, they must reinvent themselves as an economically conservative but socially liberal party.

Like a lot of theories, this one might well be true. It should be tested in polls and surveys, and if it bears up, then the Conservatives will have some hard thinking to do. But I strongly suspect that the theory will not bear up.

Is it plausible that the Conservatives failed to make inroads into Brampton and Kitchener because voters there are horrified by opposition to same-sex marriage? Is it really to be believed that the Conservative vote dropped in Atlantic Canada, one of the most socially conservative parts of the country, because an MP from British Columbia speculated that counselling might be useful to women considering abortion?

Abortion and same-sex marriage may be top-of-mind issues in midtown Toronto. But midtown Toronto was not where the Conservatives hoped to pick up the 40 or more Ontario seats they needed. Any explanation of the June 28 disappointment has to explain what went wrong in the suburban, ex-urban and small-town ridings where the Conservatives had been poised for big gains up until the election's final days.

Let me propose an alternative theory, one that may fit the known facts somewhat better.

The Liberals opened the 2004 campaign with a barrage of ads about medicare. The ads at first seemed strangely beside the point. The Liberals argued that medicare was in trouble and needed to be saved with a big infusion of new money. The ads muttered darkly about a Conservative secret agenda. But as the Conservative counter-ads reminded viewers, it was the Liberals themselves who had taken the money out of health care in the first place.

And then along came Alberta Conservative Premier Ralph Klein, just days before the election, to say, in effect: "Yup. We Alberta Conservatives do have a secret agenda to change medicare. I can't tell you what it is, because as I said, it's a secret. All I can reveal is that my secret plan will quite possibly violate the Canada Health Act."

The next day, Klein's own government hastily backed away from his words. But the harm was done. The harm could be done because (to continue my theory) most Canadians in their heart of hearts know that Ralph Klein is right. They know that medicare is failing. They know it is a clumsy and unresponsive government monopoly that behaves in irrational ways and creates perverse incentives for doctors, nurses and patients alike.

They know all these things -- but they don't like them. They wish they were not true. And they stand ready to punish any politician they see acting on them.

Canadians are unhappy and anxious about medicare and crave solutions. They don't much like the kind of medicare solutions that Conservatives tend to favour: solutions that emphasize competition, incentives, and individual responsibility. On the other hand, Canadians sense that the Liberal slogans that insist that medicare is just fine as it is -- or will be fine as soon as it is topped up with another billion or 10 -- are dishonest and exploitive.

It's just that, for the moment at least, Canadians seem to prefer those exploitive lies to unpalatable truths.

So where can the Conservatives go from here? There's not much point, not yet, in developing alternative medicare policies. First, Conservatives have to help Canadians acknowledge out loud what Canadians inwardly know to be true: Medicare as-it-is is failing. Nobody likes to criticize medicare; it has become so central to Canadian identity that listing its failings has become the Canadian equivalent of burning the flag in the United States.

But every day, medicare creates real live Canadian victims: underpaid doctors, nurses who feel the pressure to emigrate, patients waiting in pain for treatment. Conservatives should be able to throw Liberal secret-agenda talk back in the Liberals' faces.

The message: This system is broken. You broke it. Canadians are suffering. And fixing it ought to be on somebody's agenda -- not in secret, but out in public, where it can for once be discussed honestly, by people who have an agenda bigger than power and the profits of power.