This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Shawn Whatley, June 8, 2026
The biggest victories from the 1996 Winds of Change conference cannot be seen or measured. Both the formation of the Conservative Party of Canada and Stephen Harper’s subsequent election wins owe some credit to the conference. But highlighting measurable outcomes misses the larger, and more important, point.
The accomplishments of the conference hide behind the ethos of the event itself. Winds of Change tackled opinion and sentiment. It was not just a policy conference but a gathering of clans. Political opinions gained nuance and depth, but the clans endured. No one changed tartans.
Ezra Levant and David Frum organized the conference, aware that many factions on the Right do not like each other. Today, we see Levant and Frum as outspoken men with strong opinions. In 1996, they were equally strong and demonstrably more outspoken. Organizing the conference proves their greatness, literally megalopsychia, in being able to work together and bring warring tribes into one room.
William Gairdner, author and former Olympian, leveraged the conference to create Civitas Canada: “A society where ideas meet.” Civitas celebrated its 30th conference this year. Gairdner used to grumble (politely) at lunchtime conference keynotes. “It’s far more important to talk at our tables,” he would say. Gairdner loved ideas, but he was even more passionate about food and conversation to build society.
Winds of Change addressed something deeper than political opinion. It addressed the need for friendship, what Aristotle called homonoia (Greek: Ὁμόνοια); political unity, concord, or oneness of mind. Political friendship allows libertarians and social conservatives to enjoy and help each other while remaining profoundly opposed on core ideas.
Edmund Burke described a “mixed system of opinion and sentiment,” which “harmonized the different shades of life,” something our modern managerial minds find hard to understand. We want clear policy and performance outcomes. We feel little need for friendship. By default, we too often adopt the levelling and homogenizing approach more reflective of the Stalinist Left, in which friendship “is to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason.” Outcomes and ideological purity matter foremost.
The conservative movement in Canada is a blended fabric, a coalition. The Canadian Right contains classical liberals, libertarians, social conservatives, monarchists, prairie populists, Tories, and more. Attempting to make it a pure fabric will tear it apart.
The conference was a great success, but did it make a lasting difference? Did the Right learn anything or has it already forgotten?
In the 1990s, conservatives had become experts at opposition. Opposition had become oppositional. Finding bad ideas became more salient than leading. Being right mattered more than building the Right. We were trapped in a Hegelian “labour of the negative,” what Roger Scruton notes as an inherent risk in attacking bad ideas.
Winds of Change rescued us from our labour of the negative. We shifted focus from ideological purity to winning, and it delivered victory: a season of grown-up governance in Canadian government. But in so doing, we ignored inescapable contradictions within the conservative movement. We forgot the need to maintain a coalition.
Insofar as we can credit the conference with the eventual merging of the Canadian Alliance with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 2003, it delivered a pyrrhic victory. Harper had addressed Civitas in early 2003. He called for a “conservative coalition of ideas,” a combination of economic and social conservatives, a Canadian fusionism.
Once in office, Harper was forced to respond to urgent demands, most of which were economic in nature. What started as fusionism ended as economic determinism. Economics is the easiest thing governments can shape. The Conservatives largely adopted the regnant conservative paradigm sometimes called “second neoconservatism”—a blend of neo-Wilsonian managerialism and aggressive foreign policy.
In fairness, political practice and political theory are different beasts. The gap between theory and practice can never be closed. Practice requires action and purpose. Lofty notions about friendship and homonoia must be set aside. We must censor idealists who refuse to compromise in the interests of victory.
Victory through compromise, however, never brings a return to first principles. Once compromised, the movement has proven that ideals, and idealists, are non-essential. If they were worth dropping before an election, they aren’t worth picking up afterwards. Campaigning is its own libido dominandi, and it suffers no loss.
The imperatives of victory made Winds of Change less relevant. We forgot that unity cannot mean unity of thought. Unity must only mean unity of purpose.
The CPC chose the simple path of fusion and coherence. United under one banner, it didn’t need to worry about clans and political tribes. It did not need to face inherent ideational contradictions. The CPC worked on winning. Although understandable, it cooled the movement. The West never got in, and East Coast Tories felt shut out, too.
Consumed with pressing matters of government, Conservatives also failed to manage populism. Preston Manning describes populism like wildcat well drilling. It is dangerous, high-pressure, and always high-risk. But ignoring populism does not make it disappear. Anti-elite, anti-establishment passion remains an element in the inherently contradictory nature of Canadian conservatism. It cannot be ignored or disparaged.
Consider a final contradiction. Civitas grew out of Winds of Change as “A society where ideas meet.” Civitas combines the British habit of forming clubs with the un-British habit of embracing general ideas. Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that the English have no taste for “general ideas.” “For the English, the human mind is torn from the contemplation of particular facts only with regret and sorrow.”
Clinton Rossiter levelled a similar accusation at North American conservatives in 1955. The conservative finds “political theory..so foreign” that “he will not even vindicate his own way of life unless it is openly and dangerously attacked.” Civitas seeks to prove both men wrong.
Winds of Change offers lessons learned but easily forgotten: friendship matters; the Right is a coalition; the pursuit of doctrinal purity begets failure. The lessons recall a habit of mind. Scruton said, “From its beginning in the world of the Enlightenment, conservatism has been engaged in a work of rescue.” In this sense, the Conservative movement might consider some old-fashioned rescue work. Revisiting the ethos behind the Winds of Change conference seems a solid place to start.
Shawn Whatley is a physician, past president of the Ontario Medical Association, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
