Andrew Coyne: Manning Conference displays how vapid Canadian conservatism has become
In its seven years, the Manning Networking Conference has served as a kind of haven for what one might call a normal conservatism — a gathering, as I put it last year, of the Conservative Party in exile: the Conservatives who see politics as something other than a constant search for fights to pick, and policy as something more than just another vehicle for raising funds.
It was the place where Conservatives, starved for talk about ideas by a leadership that long ago declared its contempt, not just for ideas, but even for the idea of ideas, mingled with conservatives, the broader movement outside the party, and recalled a time when it was still permissible to think that governments are elected to change things, not just to perpetuate themselves in power; that elections are opportunities to win a broad mandate from the public, not to dangle a few precisely crafted baubles of nonsense in front of the right micro-demographics; that governing is something done openly and through Parliament, not secretly and by any means at hand; and all the rest of what we have been educated, after these many years of misrule, not to expect.
And yet, as the years have passed, the party’s presence at each conference seems to have grown, the movement’s declined. The more open the conflict between what conservatives are supposed to believe and what the Conservatives have tended to produce, the more it has been resolved in favour of the party. As late as last year, when the party was at its lowest point in the polls, there was still a useful tension in the air, the odd veiled suggestion that the Conservatives had lost their way. But this is an election year, and the party is back in contention, and so this year’s conference has thus far broadly favoured politics over ideas, discretion over debate.
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