This article originally appeared in the Public Discourse.
By Peter Copeland, June 10, 2025
We’ve seen it all before. The Canadian Conservative Party squanders a commanding lead as the liberals quietly adopt its core economic policies—lower taxes, modest spending restraint, skepticism toward the carbon tax—while taking a slightly more moderate tack on social issues. Donald Trump was a key factor in the election outcome this round, but the reality is that Liberal Party leader Mark Carney’s platform mirrored the core of what the right typically campaigns on, and as has been the case in the past, a slight nod in that direction is often enough to see the conservatives’ distinctiveness evaporate. The shallowness of the conservative offering becomes painfully apparent. As John Ibbitson recently noted, the parties ended up looking like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. This reality has been borne out in the first few actions of the new liberal government, both in the mandate letter (whose priorities include balancing the budget, reducing immigration levels, and eliminating interprovincial trade barriers) and the Speech from the Throne, which committed to meeting NATO’s 2 percent defense spending target, to public safety messaging, and to enhancing national sovereignty through military and Arctic investments. It shows that the so-called conservative position was never deeply conservative at all—it is merely a variation on liberalism, as it was ten or twenty years ago.
If Canadian conservatism is to become anything more than a periodic managerial alternative, it must cultivate a long game to change culture and the courage to offer a truly differentiated vision; otherwise it will continue to be seen by Canadians for what it is: liberalism with a lag.
Liberalism in Conservative Clothing: A Century of Failed Imitation
Canada’s century-long political trajectory proves the point. Conservatives in Canada have never been natural cultural or political leaders. From free trade and multiculturalism to same-sex marriage, from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to enthusiastic support for high levels of immigration and qualified endorsement of diversity initiatives, conservatives have not resisted liberal ideas but merely endorsed them after a delay.
This is not a criticism of the party’s performance in this election, as it earned its highest share of the popular vote as the modern conservative party. And regardless of how you feel about any of these issues, the point is that if you zoom out, you can see the problem is more systemic.
Part of the failure stems from an excessive emphasis within conservatism on libertarian social freedom—the exaltation of personal choice and autonomy as supreme goods. Postwar “fusionism” attempted to combine these instincts with traditional moral foundations but never fully resolved their contradictions. Friedrich Hayek—a hero to many conservatives—is illustrative of this tension; he insisted that he was not a conservative and warned of the inherent difficulties in combining such principles. In “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek wrote that the conservatives’ respect for and deference to established authority troubles him, and that conservatives must feel as though someone is supervising change and keeping it orderly. He writes that they often rely on figures like Tocqueville, Lord Acton, and Burke to justify their positions—who themselves would have “shuddered” to be seen as Tories. Indeed, this heavy liberal influence is all too common among self-described conservatives, although often unbeknownst to them.
Liberalism’s Logical End: From Autonomy to Alienation
Unchecked liberalism has frayed civic and family life. It’s contributed to declining birth rates, splintered social fabric, and lower social trust from excessive immigration and unwieldy diversity, widespread loneliness, and a moral relativism that corrodes the pursuit of a coherent common good. After a century of emphasizing autonomy, the human person is today rootless and atomized.
Some argue that the solution is a more serious classical liberalism. But classical liberalism grew up within a thick cultural matrix—shared faith, strong family and social ties, a communitarian environment, and common national identity—that it has since eroded. Without that rich cultural soil, liberalism alone morphs into relativism. Moreover, what we are seeing today is not a betrayal of liberalism by “wokeness,” but liberalism arriving at its logical endpoint. A political and moral order that treats individual autonomy as the highest good must continually validate ever more divergent and incompatible lifestyles. If not properly balanced by other values, liberalism’s internal logic inevitably leads not to stable pluralism, but to balkanization and the dilution of shared principles and common life.
Focusing myopically on winning elections by tacking either more socially progressive or conservative guarantees only minor, temporary adjustments. Without cultural strategy, conservatism merely manages liberal decline without changing the long-term trajectory.
It is beyond question that the cultural excesses we see today are not failures of liberalism, but its logical conclusions. Hyper-individualism, instantaneous, unfiltered and constant communication, uninhibited social mores, postmodern relativism, and celebration of selfish desire—all of these were promised by progressives as paths to liberation and fulfillment. Instead, they have become sources of alienation, confusion, and cultural decay.
Decadent Status Quo: When Progressivism Becomes the Establishment
This is not just a Canadian problem. Hyper-individualistic liberalism is now the dominant culture across the West. Conservatives are no longer conserving traditional values and a more conservative society—they are conserving the remnants left behind by an overemphasis on some of liberalism’s core tenets, without appropriate balance from values equally important to human well-being: loyalty, reverence, moral vision, patriotism, and social trust rooted in shared commitments and beliefs.
Ironically, Donald Trump—a lifelong Democrat, a Manhattan social liberal on nearly every issue—is himself a product of this cultural milieu. He embodies rather than rejects the post-1960s order. His persona, rooted in self-promotion, celebrity, and the rejection of norms, mirrors the very values the cultural left has celebrated for decades.
In many ways, Trump represents the culmination of postmodernism’s ethos: the triumph of subjectivity over truth, power over principle, and narrative performance over moral integrity. He is not a conservative; he is the logical product of a culture that treats all identities, impulses, and truths as equally valid. And while his administration achieved more in 100 days than decades of lukewarm conservatism, that is more a testament to the failures of establishment conservatism and Trump’s outsider and entrepreneurial instincts than to his philosophical coherence.
Demographic shifts, such as the working-class realignment and the rightward movement of younger voters, point to the fact that we are undergoing a social shift, an inversion of what’s been typical. Defending the status quo—a procedurally conservative action—is a now a vote for liberalism and liberals. Those who favor the status quo are the wealthy, established, and older demographics, and those on the outside (the working class and younger voters) advocate change, which is now, paradoxically, to advocate conservative principles and likely to vote Conservative.
Traditionally non-conservative classes of people are waking up to the fact that the status quo is not working for them, due to the excesses of hyper-individualistic liberalism. The time is ripe for change. A conservatism of ideals must reject Trump-style decadent cultural populism just as it rejects the ideological excesses of progressive liberalism. It must be rooted not in personality or performance, but in truth, virtue, and the common good.
The Case for a Conservatism of Ideals
First, conservatives can strive to emulate serious long-term cultural efforts, like the Federalist Society’s reshaping of legal philosophy in the United States, Britain’s Policy Exchange, or France’s Cercle Aristote. These institutions patiently shaped professions, policy, and national narratives, not just electoral wins. In Canada, there is an opportunity in existing organizations like the Canada Strong and Free Network, which consistently underperforms in this regard. It could make much more of its “Conservative values tomorrow” mentoring program that I helped start, to have long-term, multigenerational impact.
Second, this conservatism must be communitarian and virtue-oriented. It must affirm the family as the first polity, the neighborhood as the beginnings of solidarity, and virtue—not just credentials and quantified results—as the currency of trust. People are profoundly hungry for these things, as antidotes to rootlessness, anomie, and increasing social isolation and loneliness.
Third, it must be genuinely progressive in the true sense: aiming to fulfill the unrealized human potential to live well, according to objective norms that we know are good for people—things like seeking transcendent experiences through faith and philosophy, cultivating family and friendships, balancing work and life, and imbuing both with a sense of vocation. It must recognize not an endless array of choices and diversity, but that there are certain things that are conducive to our well-being, and that, conversely, other things are objectively damaging to both individuals and communities. Liberalism’s attitude of “to each their own” leaves us in a dark place when people want to overdose on opioids, instruct a doctor to take their life, or mutilate their undeveloped body. In contrast to these plainly destructive policies springing out of the excesses of liberalism, conservatism should show that human life has a clear and understandable purpose, meaning, and a telos beyond itself.
This is the conservatism we need: not nostalgia and anachronistic social conservatism, not progressive liberalism with better branding, but a bold conservatism of clearly articulated ideals for human flourishing. Canada—and the West—desperately need such a vision. The only question is whether conservatives will have the courage to embrace it, and the wherewithal to see it through in the long term.
Peter Copeland is deputy director of Domestic Policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
