I remember the days of the eternal Progressive Conservative government in Ontario rather un-fondly, but Richard Anderson says it was a fluke of the times that Bill Davis really was the best the “conservatives” had during his time in office:
It’s often said about Bill Davis that he was more progressive than conservative. The meaning of words, especially in politics, change with the times. A conservative in 1975 was a far more statist figure than a conservative either twenty years before or twenty years after. Between the election of Pearson and the defeat of Turner Canadian politics took an astonishingly Leftward lurch. So did the rest of the developed world. There simply was no conservative movement or politician, as we understand that term today, of any consequence in the Disco Era Dominion.
By the time the conservative reaction to mid-twentieth century Leftism had set-in Davis was already eyeing the political exits. He was, as his immediate predecessor John Robarts quipped upon his own retirement in 1971, a man of his times. By 1985 Bill Davis’ time was up. The public mood had grown weary of statist experiment, though it was far from re-embracing free market alternatives. It would take the brutal recession and fiscal retrenchment of the 1990s to beat the utopianism out of Canadian politics. […]
Whatever their colour, gender or personal history, politicians want one thing and one thing only: Power. It does not matter their intentions. However honourable they must bend somewhat to political reality. How far they choose to bend determines how long a political career they will have. The tragedy of the Davis years is that, whatever we think of the era now, the only real alternative to Bill Davis would have been Stephen Lewis. The man with the pipe and bland genial manner was, for a brief crazy moment, one of the most conservative politicians in Canada.
