Prime Minister Stephen Harper cast out the libertarians several years ago. He’s more recently stamped out the last of the actual conservatives. So who’s left in the Conservative Party? Harperites and devoted non-ideologues:
It is time to retire the word “ideological” from Canada’s political lexicon. It doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore. In recent weeks, Tony Clement, a Conservative cabinet minister, has chided NDP leader Thomas Mulcair for “taking an ideological approach” to oil-sands development; Prime Minister Stephen Harper has deplored the New Democrats’ “ideological aversion to trade”; various New Democrats have accused the Conservatives of being “ideological” for their plans to contract out post-office services, eliminate Canada Revenue Agency counter service, cut funding for scientific research and limit health-care benefits for refugee claimants, which Liberal critic Kevin Lamoureux also deplored as “ideological.” Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae denounced the Conservatives’ entire “wrong-headed ideological agenda” — which is apparently “hidden” in various places around Ottawa, though he and Mr. Mulcair seem to have no difficulty discerning how awful and ideological it is.
I wonder how evocative the word “ideological” is to people who aren’t political junkies. Is it so bad, so uncommon, to have — as the Oxford dictionary defines it — “a system of ideas or way of thinking” that one regards “as justifying actions, especially one that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless of the course of events”?
Among political junkies, the term is sometimes — though not always (see above) — meant to imply pigheaded rigidity. For a Canadian politician, that’s very bad. Weirdly, it’s also very bad when a Canadian politician changes his mind — the dreaded “flip-flop.” But is there any politician in Ottawa anywhere near power who can usefully be described as consistently ideological? Since the Reform days, Mr. Harper and his mates have been on a public policy magical mystery tour. Now they say whatever they need to say on Friday, contradict it completely on Monday, and think nothing of it. To call them ideological is to miss an opportunity to call them shameless hypocrites.
