When I took my first course in political science at the University of Calgary over forty years ago, the reigning orthodoxy on Canada’s ideological landscape seemed alien to my Alberta way of thinking. I was taught that Canada had no genuine free enterprise or limited government political tradition. Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism all had a presence in this country, it was said, but there was little to distinguish one from the other in terms of their preference for Big Government solutions.This line of thinking was based on a famous 1966 article by University of Toronto political economist Gad Horowitz, Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada, which by that time had become orthodoxy in Canadian political science. In his description of Canadian Conservatism, Horowitz wrote the following: “The Tory and socialist minds have some crucial assumptions, orientations, and values in common, so that from certain angles they may appear not as enemies, but as two different expressions of the same basic ideological outlook.” Canadian Conservatism shared “the same basic ideological outlook” as socialism? That did not resonate with me as an Albertan.The situation was similar with Canadian Liberalism. According to Horowitz, Canadian Liberalism emphasized its similarity to socialism as a way of attracting working class support. He described the perspective of Canadian Liberalism this way: “Social reform, yes; extension of public ownership, yes; the welfare state, yes; increased state control of the economy, yes; but not too much.” In other words, Canadian Liberalism was a less-extreme version of socialism. This made some sense in light of Pierre Trudeau’s socialistic policies.Of course, Canadian socialism, like socialism everywhere, favoured a large and powerful role for the government in running society and the economy.From Horowitz’s perspective — which was presented as authoritative — the three Canadian political ideologies seemingly amounted to three variations of socialism. It may be relatively softcore socialism or hardcore socialism, but it was all socialism.In this view, all true Canadians fit within a narrow ideological spectrum that valued some form of collectivism over individualism.Even as a young undergraduate, I found this reigning orthodoxy to be very unappealing. The Horowitz perspective did not seem to match my experience of Alberta at all. In fact, it seemed to ignore Alberta altogether.By the time Horowitz wrote his famous article, Ernest Manning had been premier of Alberta for over 20 years. Manning certainly couldn’t be shoe-horned into Horowitz’s ideological categories. He openly favoured free enterprise over statist solutions. Furthermore, by the time Horowitz’s article appeared, Saskatchewan also had an ardent proponent of free enterprise in Premier Ross Thatcher.Even worse than his failure to account for the free enterprise perspective popular in Alberta, Horowitz refers to the “populism (anti-elitism)” of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker as “a genuinely foreign element in Canadian conservatism.” Diefenbaker was a Western Conservative from Saskatchewan, and the populist tradition he represented is deeply imbedded in Saskatchewan and Alberta politics going back to the early twentieth century. It is not “foreign” to the prairies, that’s for sure.Apparently, from his Toronto perch, Horowitz completely failed to contemplate the West. It seems like the West was excluded from his analysis altogether. Otherwise, how could he possibly see historic prairie populism as “foreign” to Canada?In some respects, the ideological makeup of Western Canada differs from the rest of the country. This was reflected in the success of the influential newsmagazine Alberta Report (and its sister publications Western Report and BC Report) which offered a distinctively Western Canadian vision of conservatism that doesn’t fit Horowitz’s categories.In addition, the Reform Party of Canada represented this same distinctively Western version of conservatism. It also embodied the Western populist tradition that Horowitz considered “foreign.”Of course, Horowitz couldn’t have anticipated these later events that occurred after he wrote his article. But the inability of his analysis to account for them shows that he didn’t understand the Western perspective at all. That is, the accepted orthodoxy on ideological perspectives in Canada ignored the experience of the West. The Western perspective was left out.Should we be surprised? I mean, that’s the story of the West’s relationship with the rest of Canada right from the beginning. The West gets left out of consideration, hence the significance of the early Reform Party slogan of “the West wants in.” In this case, however, the West was left out of an authoritative academic analysis of Canadian ideologies. So much so that a core aspect of prairie politics — populism — was categorized as “foreign.”Here again an important aspect of the West is excluded from what Central Canadians consider to be the essential nature of Canada. This is the West’s historical experience in a nutshell.
