What follows are notes from a 4 April 2025 presentation in Kelowna, British Columbia, at The Future of Canadian Conservatism, a conference hosted by the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Student Association of the University of British Columbia.

There are several famous people around the world who share my name. These include Jonathan Kay, a doctor at the University of Massachusetts who ranks as a renowned expert in rheumatology. I know this because every once in a while, I get mistakenly emailed an invitation to speak at a rheumatology conference. I’ve considered accepting one of these invitations for the sake of performance art, and then regaling my audience by reading aloud from the Wikipedia entry for rheumatology (a branch of medicine that concerns inflammation, apparently). But I decided that would be a mean thing to do to Jonathan Kay, MD.

When the organisers of today’s conference asked me to speak about the “Future of Canadian Conservatism,” I worried that this might be a similar case of mistaken identity. As many of my right-wing critics on social media frequently point out, my conservative credentials are weak. I live in a left-wing Toronto neighbourhood alongside retired university professors and media types. As far as I’m aware, I’m aligned with these CBC-tote-bag neighbours on pretty much every political issue imaginable—except two.

The first is that I don’t think men can magically transform into women (or vice versa) by changing their pronouns on LinkedIn.

The second is that I’ve stopped pretending to believe that 215 tiny Indigenous corpses were lifted from “unmarked graves” in Kamloops four years ago.

That’s it. These two points of heterodoxy are all it takes to get you classified as a “conservative” in this country—which is quite amazing given that neither of these positions even constitutes an actual political viewpoint. They’re both just statements of fact. It’s shocking that saying either out loud should be considered controversial. But that’s Canada for you.

Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?

In 2021, Canadians were told that the remains of 215 Indigenous children had been found at a former school. The story turned out to be false—but no one in authority seems to know how to walk it back.

QuilletteJonathan Kay

The organisers asked me to talk about the “core principles of conservatism”—which, if we’re talking in general philosophical terms, would take us into the historical legacy of the French Revolution. And yes, I’m sure there are a few people in this room who really do wake up every morning, confront a political problem, and think to themselves, “Gee, I wonder what Edmund Burke would do in this situation?” But as far as the Canadian political idiom goes, that kind of high-flown analysis of conservative thought is completely inapt.

That’s because being “conservative” in Canada often has little to do with one’s substantive ideological commitments. As exemplified by the two examples listed above, it’s more about your willingness to break unspoken rules of political etiquette by saying inconvenient truths out loud. It was perfectly obvious that immigration levels were unsustainably high under Justin Trudeau. A conservative is someone who said so in 2023 (or earlier), while a doctrinaire Liberal is someone who waited till 2024 to say the same thing.

The same goes for the Liberals’ carbon tax. In 2021, Trudeau bragged it was a “model system” to help save the planet, and attacked Conservatives for objecting to it “every step of the way.” Now the Liberals themselves have cut the carbon tax, and are bragging about how that’s making gas cheaper in the process.

Another reason I say that Canadian conservatism is usually more about manners than ideas is that the range of policy-based discourse in this country has become extremely narrow.

When I joined the editorial board of the National Post in the late 1990s, we would meet daily to discuss our newspaper’s editorial policy on abortion, capital punishment, embryonic stem cell research, senate reform, private health care, gun control, drug legalisation, and numerous other topics. There was a sense that all of these issues were still in play in Canada. We’d also have lengthy discussions about conservatism’s different types—such as social conservativism, libertarianism, fiscal conservatism, and, yes, crunchy conservatism. It all seems very antique.

Compare that to the current state of politics. Not a single one of the above-listed issues is a major theme of the current election campaign. Amazingly, you don’t even hear much about assisted suicide (rebranded in Canada as MAiD) despite the fact that it arguably represents the single most important legislative innovation advanced under Trudeau’s watch.

No one has the attention span for that sort of debate anymore, because social media (which didn’t exist when I began my career at the Post editorial board) has destroyed everyone’s attention span. As a result, Canadian conservatives—like everyone else—now spend their bandwidth on transient scandals and quasi-scandals involving open-mic gaffes, backbench bozo eruptions, old social media posts, press-conference malapropisms, internal party bickering, and, of course, the polls. Needless to say, Edmund Burke would be disgusted.

These petty controversies are what most pundits love writing about, too. Assisted suicide is boring and morbid. You can get far more hits by denouncing the treasonous ways of Wayne Gretzky, or calling out some Conservative politician for failing to tweet about Non-Binary Week of Resilience or whatnot.

A second challenge facing anyone hoping to promote a conservative agenda in Canada is the weak nature of our national identity. Globally, conservative political movements tend to be based on a nostalgic appeal to some collectively recognised set of norms and national characteristics. But as recent events show, our national self-conception is fundamentally unstable.

Recall that in 2021, our political and journalistic class responded to the “unmarked graves” social panic by denouncing Canada as a literal genocide state built on a mountain of baby Indigenous skulls. Trudeau lowered the flags on federal buildings for almost six months, and CBC hosts started referring to our country as “so-called Canada”—the idea being that we’re not just a crappy country, but a fundamentally illegitimate one as well. But now that Donald Trump has started a trade war, those very same politicians and journalists are demanding that we all celebrate our boundless Canadian awesomeness amidst blasts of red and white Liberal confetti cannons.

As a country, we’ve gone from flags down to “elbows up” in less than four years. How does a conservative tap into the traditions of a country whose historical memory doesn’t extend past the current media cycle?

A third problem for Canadian conservatives—and this might be the biggest—is that Canadians are so obsessed with American political culture war that they take their cues on what words such as “progressive” and “conservative” mean from the United States. So while it’s nice that we’re all sitting around this room figuring out what it means to be a Canadian conservative, many voters answer that question by watching American media. Which means they casually equate Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives with the daily spew of inane pronouncements and economically self-destructive policies emanating from Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I can’t imagine how frustrating this must be for Canadian conservative politicians, but it’s the reality they inhabit.

I’m the furthest thing from a politician or political strategist, and so I have no insights into how Canadian conservatives can overcome these headwinds—except, perhaps, by focusing their efforts (and hopes) on provincial politics, which—being more directly staked to day-to-day issues such as education, land use, transportation infrastructure, crime, and health care—are at least somewhat insulated from the reality-field distortions generated by the American political circus. In Ontario, where I’m from, Conservative premier Doug Ford just won another majority—though I’d argue that it’s hard to classify him as any kind of small-c conservative.

I realise that this is a gloomy analysis I’m offering. But there’s at least one important bright spot, which is that the Canadian conservative movement has largely avoided succumbing to the strongman populism that now defines the Republican Party in the United States (as well as conservative movements in several European countries). South of the border, the word conservative has become more or less meaningless, as the Republican platform is essentially whatever Trump says it is on any given day. Destroying free trade, abandoning Ukraine to the Russians, ignoring the Constitution, flouting due process, and promoting crackpot vaccine conspiracy theories—that’s all on the right-wing menu. And I’ve been gratified to see that most Canadian conservatives generally have steered clear of these tendencies.

Most, but not all. Just a few years ago, a majority of the trolls who pestered me on social media were radicalised progressives who objected to my tweets about trans rights or the unmarked-graves social panic. But these days, I’m more likely to get trolled by right-wing Trump supporters who resent Quillette’s support for Ukraine and mainstream vaccine science.

Many of these people are nakedly authoritarian in their outlook, just like the woke progressives they rail against. As Andrew Doyle told me on the Quillette podcast recently, the real culture war isn’t really between left and right. It’s between authoritarians and those who embrace classically liberal values. Quillette will always have both feet planted in the latter camp. And I hope the people in this room will too.

Podcast #278: The Scourge of the ‘Woke Right’

Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with author and satirist Andrew Doyle about the worrying rise of illiberal ideologies and cultish political tendencies among conservatives.

QuilletteQuillette

Donald Trump isn’t a principled conservative. (He isn’t a principled anything, in fact.) But he’s still managed to pollute the conservative brand internationally—and he will continue doing so, unfortunately, until the happy day (for me, at least) when he leaves office. Until then, no matter what happens in Canada’s upcoming election, I’d urge everyone who calls themselves a conservative to stick to their principles. You can’t control whether others accuse you of being northern followers of Trump’s movement. But you can ensure that nothing you do lends credibility to those accusations.