Canada’s Conservatives Have Become the New MAGA Republicans

Canada is not immune from U.S. style anti-trans culture wars

The genesis of this article was a comment that was left for me on one of my social media posts. It was a throwaway post of mine on the Bluesky app, cross-posted to Instagram: an observational riff at the expense of the then-upcoming Conservative Party of Canada policy convention in Québec City on the weekend of 9–10 September, 2023. More on the comment later.

Conservatism is by its very nature — and name — a reactionary and typically regressive political and social ideology. It seeks to maintain the status quo wherever possible, at least insofar as the status quo lines up with the inherent traits and characteristics of the dominant class. It is inimical to democratic and individual freedoms, despite the desperate insistences of those who promote it.

Conservatism attracts like-minded ideologies like nationalism, populism, demagoguery, and fascism as it seeks to force a wholesale societal crackdown on progressive policies and individual autonomy, subverting the gains of broader civil rights to the narrow views of conservatism’s most extreme and vocal adherents. That these narrow views are almost universally seeded by religious fundamentalism is no accident; it is an inevitability.

Canada’s prairie provinces have been, for the past 40 years, the political and religious nexus of this relentless rejection of Liberalism (and small-l liberalism), and this has been apparent to anyone who cared enough to look.

By now, it’s clear that this article is a denunciation of conservatism in Canada. Yet while I would, if only for the sake of simplicity, label myself a progressive, I am not a Liberal. I think Justin Trudeau is an insufferable jackass. I’m not even a New Democrat, although that party’s fundamental drive toward a greater social good lines up more neatly with my own beliefs:

• that a society must be willing and able to care for its most destitute and marginalized people
• that every person is worthy of not being forced into poverty and destitution; that we have an obligation to provide housing, healthcare, and education to all
• that the bodily autonomy of an individual, where it does not infringe on the greater social good, is paramount.

There’s more, but this suffices for my purposes: a society that cannot fulfil these fundamental tenets is objectively unworthy of calling itself a “society.” This is about where I expect the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” crowd to either tune out or froth in rage: “intersectionality” is not in their vocabulary.

The Liberal Party of Canada had its chance to look in the mirror after its shambolic electoral efforts in every federal election between 2006 and 2011, before the party’s eventual electoral turnaround in 2015. However, with the party’s anointment of Justin Trudeau it fell victim to the cult of personality attached to the Trudeau name. It never took the opportunity to decide what kind of party it wanted to be on behalf of not only all Canadians, but to represent Canada globally as an aspiration. The Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau own their share of the rise of vitriolic conservatism in Canada.

As an out and very public trans woman, I’m acutely aware of the rising tide of overt transphobia and vitriol that has been unleashed toward my community specifically, and toward LGBTQ+ people generally, by the right wing in Canada over the past half-dozen or so years.

The so-called “grassroots” that are driving the CPC policy discussions in Québec City this weekend have secured as part of their agenda the “debate” of the rights and very humanity of trans people in Canada. Without a hint of self-awareness as self-styled champions of individual freedom and autonomy, and as loud and proud opponents of big government and the “nanny state,” these people seek to curtail and eliminate the ability for self-determination and medical care for trans people.

As we have seen with events to the south in the US, trans people are the start when conservatives sense they are losing the “culture wars.” Republicans wrote the playbook on artificially creating wedge issues to incite division and stoke the flames of grievance politics. First it was trans kids being saved from themselves, then the goalposts shifted to deny care and self-determination to all trans people. Then the goalposts shifted again to fearmongering against drag queens, and now US conservatives are promoting book bans and redefining equality for LGBTQ+ people.

The American trans community warned that this still wouldn’t be enough, that women’s rights vis-a-vis Roe would fall next, and they were correct. They warned that the civil rights gains of Blacks and POC would also be rolled back, and they have been through the elimination of affirmative action policies, the gerrymandering of electoral districts, and the banning of teaching of the history of American racism. All of this has unfolded under the wider umbrella of what conservatism has become in the 21st century.

Canada is not immune.

The current leader of the CPC, Pierre Poilievre has, like Donald Trump, resorted to sloganeering, the language of demagoguery, and the cult of personality as he campaigns hard for the next federal election in 2025: “People aren’t angry, they are hurting and they are desperate for someone who gives them hope. And for so many millions of people, I am humbled by the fact that I am that person. I am the only one giving them hope that things can get better” (emphasis mine).

Without offering a single concrete and vettable policy proposal to counter Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the governing Liberals, Poilievre is relying on division and scapegoating to sow fear and resentment. Poilievre embraces anyone who will throw a potential vote his way, which was readily apparent during the pandemic and the “Freedom Convoy” that blockaded downtown Ottawa in early 2022.

He posed for pictures with known white nationalists, racists, bigots, and pandemic conspiracy theorists — although he was careful enough to not be photographed with their flags in the background: the ever-popular F*ck Trudeau flags; the Confederate flag; the Gadsden flag; and even a Nazi flag or two.

This year, Poilievre has posed for “summer BBQ circuit” pictures with virulent anti-trans activists, and he gave his tacit approval for members of his party to court far-right European politicians like Germany’s Christine Anderson, who visited Canada at the request of supporters of the “Freedom Convoy,” which she publicly supported.

Anderson is a member of the European Parliament representing the Alternative for Germany party, which has been under surveillance as a suspected extremist group in Germany. It is accused of downplaying Nazi crimes, opposes immigration, and pushes anti-Muslim ideology. While in Canada, Anderson met privately with CPC MPs, including Leslyn Lewis.

Leslyn Lewis is a devout and hardline Catholic who lost the party leadership race to Poilievre, and is a heavy hitter for the social conservative wing of the party which wields influence in excess of its membership size. Lewis opposes abortion and the right to choose, is firmly anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+, supports conversion therapy, and is for unrestricted firearms.

All of these circumstances, happenings, and events are the result of actions set in motion from the early 1980s. Western Canada, specifically the socially conservative prairie provinces, have never gotten over their visceral hatred of Pierre Trudeau, and they have jealously nurtured their grievances for decades. The dissolution of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993, as it merged with the born-in-outrage Reform Party, led to the birth of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Stephen Harper, a young economist and “policy wonk,” hid his own social conservative leanings as he rose from early Reformer to become prime minister in 2006 under the new CPC banner. However, by the time of Harper’s final election campaign in 2015, he had removed his mask and was openly promoting things like the “Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline,” which played on fears of Muslims: too different, too dark, too likely to be a terrorist. Too non-Christian.

Regular (read: white Christian) Canadians were encouraged to anonymously report people who were, or were suspected of being, Muslim. Niqabs and other traditional headwear were to be banned — as has since happened for public servants in Quebec — and it was to be assumed every Muslim parent was an adherent of infant genital mutilation. It was an appalling display of bigotry, misogyny, and racism, and Harper rightly lost the election. Even now, Harper works behind the scenes doing things like strengthening and promoting Conservative ties and communications with autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

This undercurrent of hatred and scapegoating of the “other” persists in the CPC. Conservative planners have taken notes from not only Trump’s MAGA Republicans, but also the Republican reliance on wedge issues (abortion, crime) that the Evangelical Republicans of the “Moral Majority” used to propel Ronald Reagan into the White House. Eight years after the CPC lost the 2015 election, trans children have now supplanted Muslims as the thing to be feared, regulated, and banned from Canada’s pubic sphere. The fingerprints of modern Republican tactics of religious-based outrage and rejection of subject-matter expertise are all over the Conservative Party’s strategy.

So, how did I get from where we started — the comment on my social media post — to where we are now? My friend believes there is a “silent majority” of Conservatives who do, in fact, support all human rights, including those of trans kids and adults, the LGBTQ+ community, and support a woman’s bodily autonomy and right to choose abortion.

They seem to want to believe that “fiscal conservatism” is still a recognized brand of conservatism, that it can be successfully attained while simultaneously divorcing itself from it’s bigger, badder twin “social conservatism.” They seem to believe that there are a majority of Conservatives in Canada who do, in fact, believe in the existence of “Progressive Conservatism” even as the party by the same name is now 30 years in its grave.

That type of conservatism was never anything more than a flash in the pan from an era when seeking a greater global consensus as the Cold War was closing just made good economic sense. That was the limit of the “progressive” nature of conservatism in Canada. It was never “progressive” in the sense of equality, or women’s rights, or social justice, or seeking to redress systemic and hegemonic racism.

The current iteration of Canada’s conservative movement is one that is overtly predicated on division and fear, on grievances and retaliation, on the rejection of evidence-based decision-making, and on spurning a global consensus to fight climate change. This was enough to get Donald Trump elected, and, with the balance of the US Supreme Court irreparably altered, the repercussions of that seminal electoral event will reverberate for decades to come.

Conservatives are even borrowing from the Trump campaign: Make Canada Great Again. That Canada never existed, except in the minds of those who want to ensure Canada is only for white, Christian, heterosexual and cisgender people.

I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party of Canada, and the people who support both, are telling us exactly who they are. That they will win the next election is virtually a certainty.

Meghan McKie is a retired Naval officer, a writer, a crafter, and vinyl record enthusiast. She is a trans woman who transitioned on active duty.