You Had An Option, Sir - The Rebellious Right

On campus, Conservatives enjoy about the same amount of support as anarchists, and I have long wondered why this is the case. Certainly the political trends of the world outside the Canadian campus don’t reflect the trends within. Maybe, as Churchill once suggested, students prefer not to be seen as heartless. Alternatively, perhaps students haven’t yet recognized the truth of Thatcher’s declaration that “the facts of life are conservative”. But possibly the most common answer to this question is that students tend to be more rebellious and that time will moderate once radical people. However, this explanation ignores the fact that the modern conservative movement on student campuses is probably just as rebellious as the socialist movement, if not more. What could be more rebellious than fighting against the expansion of government and promoting the cause of liberty?

In terms of membership numbers, Conservatives are an almost insignificant minority on campus. If paucity is an indication of rebelliousness, then Conservatives at McGill are amongst the most rebellious group on campus. For every thousand Che shirts you see on campus, you’d be lucky to see one reference to an idea or figure in the conservative movement. One of the few times you’ll see a reference of this kind is when I wear my ‘Stephen Harper – Number One’ shirt, and I don’t wear that too often for fear of being stoned (though I’m making an earnest effort to gather up the courage to actually start wearing that shirt more often). The question raised in this article will continue to bother me, but I am unconcerned. Having recently participated in Management frosh, I can’t help but jest by slightly modifying one of the faculty’s chants and proclaiming that “it’s alright, it’s OK, you’ll all think like us one day”.

This year, I’ll be writing a column on Canadian Conservative politics titled ‘You Had An Option, Sir’. It will be a highly biased and controversial opinion column, I promise. At McGill, the right is the real world’s left. But what conservatives lack in numbers we make up for in ideas formed from reason and empirical evidence. Maybe conservatives just haven’t articulated their ideas well enough yet. The image of a heartless conservative melts away upon the realization of what conservatives seek to gain – the betterment of all of society rather than only that of particular interest groups. This column will attempt to articulate conservative ideas more clearly.

To understand the title of the column, one would have to be familiar with a relatively obscure event in Canadian politics. During the English television debates of the federal election in 1984, Liberal leader John Turner sought to criticize future Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney by accusing him of having a vast patronage network that would bring cronyism to the federal political scene. Somehow, Turner had forgotten that he had just made a bunch of last-second Liberal appointments on behalf of Pierre Trudeau. When Mulroney brought this up, Turner had said that he had no option but to make the appointments. Mulroney’s response is now known as one of the biggest knock-out punches in Canadian political history. He replied: “You had an option, sir. You could have said, 'I am not going to do it. This is wrong for Canada, and I am not going to ask Canadians to pay the price.' You had an option, sir - to say 'no', and you chose to say 'yes' to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Liberal Party. That sir, if I may say respectfully, that is not good enough for Canadians”. Though I recognize that this column will not score punches on the scale of Mulroney’s devastating uppercut in 1984, it will reflect its spirit and purport to throw a few punches on behalf of the conservative movement. Perhaps this year campus conservatives will become just a bit less rebellious.

This column first appeared in the McGill Tribune on September 11, 2007.