The out-of-office Conservatives need a policy to show they are a party that cares about the least well off, as Britain’s Tories have done so successfully. Brian Lee Crowley, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, has just the thing: A small-c conservative, markets-based approach to making Aboriginal Canada more prosperous.
By Brian Lee Crowley, Feb. 26, 2016
If Canadian Conservatives wanted to steal a page from British Prime Minister David Cameron’s playbook to reinvent themselves I would nominate the one entitled Compassionate Conservatism.
Rightly or wrongly the Harper government was seen as hard and mean, which clashes with Canadians’ self-image. No electorate will go on giving the nod to a party they sense is out of step with their values.
The British Conservatives faced a similar challenge. Facing an opposition known popularly as the mean party helped give Tony Blair a record run as Labour prime minister.
To recover from such brand damage is not easy, but the Tories achieved it, in part under the leadership of a former party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, who founded a think tank called the Centre for Social Justice to lay the groundwork for a constructive but distinctively Tory response to social challenges such as poverty, housing and social mobility. The political payoff has been tremendous. The Tories are now able to articulate and put into practice intelligent ideas about how to use the power of markets and the state to improve the lot of the least well-off.
No electorate will go on giving the nod to a party they sense is out of step with their values.
If Canadian Tories wanted to achieve such a rebranding, how would they do it, especially given that so much social policy falls under provincial jurisdiction? By embracing Aboriginal Canada.
I did not say it would be easy. On the other hand a party wishing to burnish its compassion credentials  might well want to start with a burning social issue that most Canadians regard as a stain on the conscience of the country, namely the shocking conditions in which far too many Aboriginal citizens live.
It is also an issue that lends itself increasingly well to a small-c conservative narrative. The Canadian Left sees the issue as largely one of victimhood, something to be put right by inquisitions into the past that will underline yet again the poor treatment meted out to Aboriginal Canadians, with compensation, apologies and increased transfers the solution.
A conservative narrative, however, might take an entirely different tack, noting that victimhood focuses on the past, which cannot be changed, and disempowers the victims, who must go cap in hand to the authorities for restitution. In its place can be put a narrative of opportunity and legitimate Aboriginal power that must now be accommodated in modern Canada.
To date the subtext of Conservative policy has been a grudging admission Aboriginal people have gained power thanks to the courts and the constitutionalisation of treaties and Aboriginal rights in 1982, but that this power is illegitimate and cannot be embraced for fear of alienating the Conservative base. This attitude has been overtaken by events. The rising generation of young Indigenous Canadians wants jobs and opportunity on the reserve as well as in the cities, and the natural resource frontier now runs through many of those communities, juxtaposing legitimate Aboriginal power and real opportunity in a way not seen before in our history.
Within a few years several Aboriginal development corporations will be among the largest corporations in Canada with billions in assets.
First Nations, Metis and Inuit are now striking deals for development of those resources with hundreds of developers and realising major opportunities as a result. They are an increasingly vocal and articulate voice in favour of the natural resource development the Tories see as key to Canada’s future, just as they hold the power to obstruct that development. Significantly, polling shows that when local Aboriginal groups support development, extreme environmental opposition has difficulty gaining traction.
Within a few years several Aboriginal development corporations will be among the largest corporations in Canada with billions in assets.
Within a few years several Aboriginal development corporations will be among the largest corporations in Canada with billions in assets. The evidence shows when Aboriginals negotiate benefits with developers, those benefits stay in the local community, benefiting Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike.
A pro-opportunity Conservative Party that embraced Aboriginal Canada as a respected, necessary and welcome partner in unlocking prosperity would find a growing audience in the Indigenous world. And they’d have the foundation of that distinctive Tory narrative on social issues that Canadians are looking for.
Brian Lee Crowley (twitter.com/brianleecrowley) is the Managing Director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an independent non-partisan public policy think tank in Ottawa: www.macdonaldlaurier.ca.
