Globe and Mail  -   Jeffrey Simpson

Any week now, we might expect the Correctional Service of Canada to be renamed Punishment Canada.

Corrections – the idea that those in prison might be assisted while incarcerated to be better prepared for life outside jail – is apparently foreign to the Harper government. Instead, it wants to put more people away for longer, then, figuratively speaking, throw away the key. Punishment is in; correction is out.

Just when you think this government’s criminal justice policies, which have been almost universally denounced by experts in the field, can’t get worse, they do.

So it was recently when Public Safety Minister Vic Toews rolled out more mean-spirited, politically motivated and predictably counterproductive policies to make life harder for those in prison. [ More ]

Toronto Star   -  EDITORIAL

There’s no room for hate in our schools – period. That’s why it’s good to see the Toronto District School Board taking quick, firm action to prevent a weekend religious school from using its facilities once it was shown that its curriculum included blatantly anti-Semitic material.

Jewish groups were understandably outraged when they discovered that anti-Jewish statements appeared on the website of the East End Madrassah, an Islamic Sunday school that rented space in a Scarborough high school for decades. Among other things, they referred to Jews as “treacherous” and “crafty” and accused them of “conspiring to kill the Prophet Muhammad.”

Not only Jewish groups should be upset. Such material has no place anywhere sanctioned by a public school system, and the board was right to deny the Madrassah use of its space while the York Region police hate crime unit investigates.

Quite rightly, too, leaders of the Islamic school quickly apologized for the anti-semitic materials. “We unreservedly apologize to the Jewish community for the unintentional offence that the item caused,” they wrote. “Our curriculum is not intended to promote hatred towards any individual or group of people, rather the children are taught to respect and value other faiths, beliefs and to uphold Canada’s basic values of decency and tolerance.” We sincerely hope so.

York police should finish their investigation as soon as possible so that discussions about reopening the Madrassah can begin. Before that happens, the school board will need to take a hard look at the curriculum and online materials being offered. The East End Madrassah has been operating for some 30 years, without previous complaints, but it will have to demonstrate that it has learned a lesson from this sorry episode.

No schools in Canada – of whatever religious affiliation – should be teaching children to fear and hate other Canadians.

Globe and Mail  -   Doug Saunders

If you were in London 110 years ago to watch the coronation of King Edward VII, it would have looked a lot like the scene of this month’s royal jubilee, with one notable exception: In 1902, the route of the royal coach, visited by millions of people, had been transformed into a giant advertisement for immigration to Canada.

The largest public-sector ad campaign in the country’s history had led Ottawa to erect giant sheaves of wheat over The Strand in London, to establish recruitment bureaus from Reykjavik to Moscow promising “homes for millions.”

Prime minister Wilfred Laurier made no secret of its purpose: to increase Canada’s population tenfold as soon as possible, and thereby turn the country from a sparsely populated colony into a major, independent nation with its own culture, its own economy and its own institutions, capable of influencing and bettering the world, rather than simply being buffeted in the world’s tides. [ More ]

National Post   -  EDITORIAL

If Canadians still harbor suspicions that Quebec is not in fact a “distinct society,” the ongoing student strikes in that province, and the provincial government’s reaction to them, may have put those doubts to rest.

After many years of university tuition freezes, the governing provincial Liberals proposed a modest increase of $325 per year — about 34 hours of untaxed minimum-wage labor — for five years, to a total yearly tuition of $3,793. As proponents correctly pointed out, Quebec is in somewhat dire financial straits. Its universities need the money. Financial assistance already is available for low-income students. And besides, $3,793 is 30% less than the national average tuition this year, never mind in 2017.

To many in Quebec, this is irrelevant. Ontario, New Brunswick and British Columbia can charge whatever they like. The “Quebec model” (some might now be tempted to call it the “Greek model”) is simply different: More public subsidies for privately consumed services such as daycare and higher education, and a greater role for the public sector in general. If the government doesn’t have enough money, well, that’s the government’s problem.

In recent weeks, this model has been defended in an appalling and dangerous fashion. There have been violent protests in Montreal, Gatineau and Victoriaville; students and police have been injured. Protesters have vandalized public property. A radical student group organized a rally in support of the alleged perpetrators of a smoke-bomb attack on the Montreal Métro — four 20-somethings face terrorism-related charges — and tried to intimidate reporters there. Perhaps most appallingly, masked thugs have prevented their peers from attending classes, even in the face of court injunctions, and with official support of the province’s teachers’ unions. On Wednesday, thugs roamed the campus at Université du Québec à Montréal disrupting classes, in one case trying to forcibly drag two female students from a classroom. It is literally intolerable.

And yet, so far, it has all gone the students’ way. Their tactics have won some concessions from Premier Jean Charest: a longer phase-in period for the tuition increase; more help for low-income students; input into how universities spend money; even the scalp of Education Minister Line Beauchamp, who resigned this week. Predictably, none of it has been sufficient for the student organizations, whose ideological benchmark seems to be free education for everyone.

It is impossible to imagine similar scenes unfolding in any other part of Canada, certainly for this length of time. Indeed, we suspect many Canadians outside Quebec are simply baffled. As the Ottawa Citizen counseled the protesters in a recent editorial: “You’re not on strike. You’re not performing a service; you’re buying one, at a discount of about 87% [relative to its cost of production].”

As a result, there is a growing view among some Canadians — not just separatist Quebecers — that Quebec’s social contract is simply incompatible with the one in effect elsewhere in Canada. And there is a corollary frustration that the Rest of Canada finances the Quebec model through equalization.

It bears noting, however, that while the protests have been tolerated in the sense that Mr. Charest hasn’t, say, called in the army, polls show a strong majority of Quebecers do not support the students. And while they also suggest Quebecers feel Mr. Charest has mismanaged the crisis, the Premier has actually gotten a boost in the polls, in part because Parti Québécois opposition leader Pauline Marois has embraced the students’ unpopular cause.

It is tempting to call for a general “crackdown,” but Canadians know from unfortunate experience what can happen when police confront jumped-up, overly entitled young people. It could simply make things worse. On Wednesday, La Presse reported that Mr. Charest and new Education Minister Michelle Courchesne were preparing a law that would impose fines on students (and student organizations) who block their peers’ access to schools.

This strikes us as a reasonable approach — the stiffer the fines, the better. If Quebecers’ student debts are as crippling as their self-styled leaders claim, they surely won’t want to add to them.

Globe and Mail  -   EDITORIAL

The Canadian government’s campaign of intimidation of environmental charities has begun to create a chill among charities who wish to participate in public-policy debates, according to a respected national representative of charities known as Imagine Canada.

Even during hearings of the House of Commons finance committee into how this country can promote more charitable giving, the board members of some charities expressed concerns about making presentations, says Marcel Lauzière, Imagine Canada’s president and chief executive officer.

This is a sad commentary on where the federal government’s attacks on environmental charities for accepting foreign donations are taking public debate – charities afraid to speak out at a Parliamentary committee. Is that the kind of Canada sought by those who are demonizing the environmental groups?

In the government’s view, some contributions to public debate are simply out of bounds, if they are “against the national interest” – that is, opposed to a proposed pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the British Columbia coast. Hence, Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver called environmental groups “radicals” serving foreign interests; Environment Minister Peter Kent accused these groups of “money laundering” and Conservative Senator Nicole Eaton added “influence peddling.” Both of these last two would be criminal activities, yet no evidence of crimes has been brought to light.

The implication is that charities should confine themselves to good works – be seen but not heard. That’s a strange view of democracy. Silence the churches? Anti-poverty groups? Breast cancer research fundraisers? Would we have anti-smoking laws if opposing the tobacco companies was seen as un-Canadian?

As Conservative Senator Hugh Segal put it last week, “We are an open society with the free movement of people, goods, services and capital. This has always been the goal of those of us who are free traders at heart. Limiting this freedom for charitable foundations would be a destructive and retrograde step.”

The government’s rhetoric is at odds with the official policy of the Canada Revenue Agency, which oversees the charitable sector: “Through their dedicated delivery of essential programs, many charities have acquired a wealth of knowledge about how government policies affect people’s lives. Beyond service delivery, their expertise is also a vital source of information for governments to help guide policy decisions. It is therefore essential that charities continue to offer their direct knowledge of social issues to public policy debates.”

A country that marginalizes its charities would be so much poorer.

National Post   -  Tom Blackwell

Reviving questions about when and if a would-be immigrant’s health problems should keep him out of Canada, the Federal Court has overturned a government decision to bar a Panamanian man from the country because of the potential financial burden of his HIV infection.

Nestor Ovalle has a job offer from a Toronto accounting firm and qualified for entry under the skilled-worker category. He was denied permanent resident status, however, on the grounds that his need for $18,000 a year in anti-retroviral drugs could unduly strain Canadian health-care resources.

The court quashed that ruling this month and sent the case back for a new hearing, saying the original Immigration Canada officer ignored evidence that a U.S. charity — not Ontario taxpayers — would pay for Mr. Ovalle’s medication.

It is the latest in a string of recent decisions on whether HIV, multiple sclerosis or other illness requiring expensive treatment should be a barrier to entry, including one earlier this month that found an elderly American couple — one of whom has advanced Alzheimer’s — came here simply because they liked Canada’s health-care system better.

Some judges have concluded that promises to cover the cost of drugs and other care privately are unrealistic or would be all but impossible to enforce. Others have decided offers to pay expenses — often by well-heeled applicants — are reasonable and should be considered seriously.

Qualified immigrants are welcome to come to Canada “unless they are sick; except if they are rich — maybe,” one judge wrote in a 2010 ruling, summing up the complex legal landscape.

The law needs to be clarified, said Sergio Karas, a Toronto immigration lawyer, who argues that no matter what kind of commitment immigrants make to cover extraordinary health costs, there is basically no system in place to ensure they will.

“We have in Canada a problem with access to health care, in terms of waiting lists and all that, so it’s not just the cost, it’s also taking the place of someone else,” said Mr. Karas. “Shouldn’t this be a national debate, about whether taxpayers are willing to give access to public resources?”
‘Shouldn’t this be a national debate, about whether taxpayers are willing to give access to public resources?’

The government itself is also concerned about whether seriously ill immigrants will keep their promises to pay for health services, especially when they have access to government-financed care, said Remi Lariviere, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

“There are no mechanisms for CIC to enforce [cost] mitigation plans,” he said via email.

Mr. Ovalle and his lawyer, Michael Battista, could not be reached for comment.

A lawyer who advocates for immigrants in such cases, however, noted the Supreme Court has indicated that prospective immigrants must be given a chance to show they can offset the higher social service and health-care costs they might pose. Canada should generally consider the positive contributions immigrants will make to the country — through paying taxes and in other ways — and not just what they might draw from taxpayer-funded services, said John Norquay of HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario.

“The whole immigration process is premised to a certain extent on hoping for the best,” said Mr. Norquay. “We hope that people are going to give more than they take back.”

Federal legislation excludes foreigners whose medical costs are likely to top the average for a Canadian, currently pegged at about $6,100 a year. A 2005 Supreme Court ruling, though, said the government should consider an immigrant’s ability to offset such expenses themselves.

Mr. Ovalle first came to Canada several years ago, applying for refugee status based on the persecution he said he suffered in Panama as a gay man with HIV, including beatings by his own parents and firings from two jobs. The refugee claim was denied on the grounds the Panamaian government works to protect its gay citizens from discrimination.

Before being removed from Canada, he began working for Zeifmans LLP, a Toronto chartered-accounting firm. It has offered him a job if he returns, calling Mr. Ovalle a “valuable and reliable” worker with skills in U.S. tax accountancy that are difficult to find in Canada.

Back in Panama, he qualified to emigrate here under the skilled-worker class. As with most other Western countries, having HIV does not automatically exclude a would-be immigrant from being allowed to settle in Canada.

But an immigration officer rejected Mr. Ovalle’s application last year, citing the rule on excessive health-care expenses. Anti-retroviral drugs are now allowing HIV patients to live long and relatively healthy lives, but the cost for Mr. Ovalle is about $1,500 monthly.
‘The whole immigration process is premised to a certain extent on hoping for the best’

In Ontario and many other provinces, he would be eligible for funding to cover much of that drug bill, as well as other health care.

Mr. Ovalle offered up a letter from Aid for AIDS International, an American charity that has funded his medication since 2009 and promised to keep footing the bill even if he moved to Canada. He would also receive up to $1,500 a year in medical and dental benefits with his job.

Justice James O’Reilly overturned the Immigration Canada rejection, saying it was unreasonable because the officer seemed to not even consider the charity’s offer.

The Panamanian can now argue his case before another officer.

Toronto Sun  -   Lorrie Goldstein

When Coun. Josh Colle said last week that banning the Sportsmen’s Show from Exhibition Place is how white downtowners pretend they’re addressing urban gun crime, he hinted at an even more disturbing truth.

Colle was slamming left-wing Coun. Gord Perks, who was trying to guilt-trip city council into keeping the Sportsmen’s Show, which promotes traditional outdoor activities like hunting, fishing and camping, out of Exhibition Place.

Perks’ painfully self-righteous and utterly bizarre logic, which failed to carry the day, was that this would be a continuing moral statement by council against the gun crime that plagues communities like Jane Finch and Lawrence Heights.

Basically, it’s an idiotic argument.

Colle, whose ward includes Lawrence Heights, where shootings in which blacks are both the perpetrators and victims are all too common, noted it’s true Toronto has a serious gun problem.

But that debating whether the Sportsmen’s Show should be at the Ex or the provincially-owned Metro Convention Centre, where the previous David Miller regime banished it in 2010 after 62 years at the Ex, is irrelevant to addressing that problem.

Then Colle launched a zinger which reduced Perks to mouthing obscenities, noting communities like Lawrence Heights, “see this as a debate that makes downtown, I hate to say it, white people, feel better that they’ve done something, when they are suffering from this gun violence day after day.”

Indeed, the left’s answer to violent urban street crime is always things like banning the Sportsmen’s Show, more basketball courts and long-gun registration.

But seldom anything about the need for a greater police presence in these communities and tougher bail provisions and sentencing for gun crimes, which are as necessary for an effective crime reduction strategy as is more and better-targeted social spending.

But the deeper problem, shared by whites on all sides of the political spectrum, is that as long as it’s just black people killing each other, we don’t really care.

It’s always been that way in Toronto.

If white kids were gunning each other down in Rosedale, Forest Hill, Leaside or North Toronto, we’d be sending in the army.

Ditto if the violence by black urban street gangs was regularly spilling out into those communities and killing innocent people in them.

In fact, when this kind of crime does occasionally reach out beyond the borders of what we euphemistically call “vulnerable communities” to take the lives of innocent young people we identify with, like Jane Creba at Yonge and Dundas on Boxing Day, 2005, or Georgina (Vivi) Leimonis at the Just Desserts Café in the Annex in 1994, then we go berserk.

Otherwise, not so much, because we believe it’s just black gangsters murdering, wounding and intimidating each other over drugs and turf.

The problem is while these thugs are fighting each other, they’re also terrorizing the vast majority of law-abiding blacks who live in places like Jane Finch and Lawrence Heights.

Want to know why it’s so hard to get black people in these neighborhoods to testify against the gangs?

Imagine you have information about one of these thugs which could help the police convict him of a serious crime.

Then you get a visit at home from one of his fellow gang members, who lives in your apartment complex and who has known you since you were both kids, warning you if you say anything, he’ll kill your little brother. Still feeling brave?

So, good for Josh Colle for calling out Gord Perks for being an idiot.

But the rest of us need to realize that while Toronto is a relatively safe city if you’re white and living in a middle-class community, it can very quickly turn into a shooting gallery if you’re poor and black and living in neighborhoods like Lawrence Heights and Jane Finch.

Until we admit that, and act on it, nothing will change.

Toronto STAR  -  Andrew Mitrevca

If you are a Canadian citizen, landed immigrant or refugee to this country and you are even the least bit aware of the rights and civil liberties that Canada affords you, then you should be deeply worried today.

Late last week, in its familiar stealth-like fashion, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government shuttered the office of the Inspector General (IG) over Canada’s spy service, CSIS.

The IG acted as the public safety minister’s eyes and ears, monitoring whether or not our powerfully intrusive domestic intelligence service was abiding by its policies and, more important, the law as it went about its key counter-espionage and counter-terrorism responsibilities.

I say “stealth-like” because the Conservative government buried its decision to shut down the IG’s office deep inside a budget bill it tabled last week. If not for the industrious work of Canadian Press reporter Bruce Cheadle, Canadians would have been kept in the dark about this astonishingly wrong-headed decision to pull the plug on the only independent agency that provided some measure of oversight over CSIS’s day-to-day operations.

The IG’s office didn’t have much money or staff to do its important job. Indeed, last year it “enjoyed” a paltry budget of $1 million dollars to go about its work. (A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews heralded the closure of the IG’s office as a cost-saving measure. The million dollar savings will, I’m sure, put a large dent in the federal deficit.)

Historically, despite its laughable lack of resources, the IG’s office has done a more than adequate, if occasionally admirable job, keeping watch over CSIS. The ever-circumspect Eva Plunkett, the last IG, proved to be up to the job, producing incisive annual reports that were sometimes bluntly critical of CSIS.

In 2009, for example, Plunkett raised the alarm over what she believed to the spy service’s failure to abide by new accountability standards established by the Supreme Court of Canada. At the time, Plunkett expressed profound concern over inaccuracies she unearthed about how the spy service went about its “key core activities.”

Plunkett’s predecessors, including Maurice Archdeacon and notably the late David Peel, took their work equally seriously and routinely held CSIS and its leadership to account. Peel, a distinguished former diplomat, was a particularly effective IG from 1994 until his retirement in 1998.

He often butted heads with CSIS’s then director, Ward Elcock. Peel was singularly adamant in trying to ensure that CSIS went by the book and the law as it conducted its covert work. To write that Elcock was displeased with Peel’s determination would be an understatement. In fact, Elcock was so annoyed with Peel’s poking and prodding, that the haughty CSIS director refused to have any dealings with the persistent IG. He left that chore to his second-in-command.

But that wasn’t all. In retirement, Peel agreed to an on-the-record interview during which he made a troubling revelation. He told me that CSIS’s leadership often left its political masters out of the loop, despite written instructions that the CSIS director had to keep the minister responsible for the service abreast of its clandestine work.

Peel’s unsettling admissions are precisely the reason the IG’s office should remain standing, rather than be demolished. If Canadians are to have any confidence that CSIS is abiding by the law and its policies, then we need men and woman like Peel and Plunkett to be able to do their jobs without fear or favor.

Instead, Ottawa appears to be suggesting that the IG’s responsibilities will be handed to the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). This supposed cost-saving solution betrays a profound and instructive misunderstanding of SIRC’s responsibilities.

By SIRC’s own admission, it is a review agency, not an oversight body. It’s stated raison d’être is largely to administer complaints it receives from the public about CSIS’s conduct. It does not watch over the spy service’s day-to-day operations. To be sure, SIRC undertakes, from time-to time, “reviews” of the spy service’s policies and operations. But it is powerless to enforce any of its recommendations.

And SIRC is in turmoil. Late last year, its former chair, Arthur Porter, a Montreal physician, reluctantly resigned after what he described as “scurrilous press reports” about his dealings with an Israeli businessman (who has a bizarre, to put it charitably, past) had “challenged his credibility” and raised the “spectre of a conflict of interest” and questions about his “good judgment.”

To date, the Prime Minister has not found the time to appoint a new chair, rendering the review agency essentially rudderless. SIRC has a relatively minuscule budget of $2.2 million and few staff. It’s unlikely that it will be given any more money or resources to exercise any new responsibilities.

So there you have it: no Inspector General, and no new SIRC chair. This is what constitutes accountability over Canada’s spy service today. This, from a government that made a seemingly solemn pledge to make accountability a guiding governing principle. What a dangerous farce.

Toronto Sun  -   Warren Kinsella

Is Canada getting more conservative?

Some days, it sure seems that way. Monday’s Alberta election was a contest between a conservative party and a far-right conservative party. The left-of-centre options didn’t count for much. All of them were much more focused on getting their deposits back than on forming government.

Next door in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, the right rules the roost. B.C. Premier Christy Clark is Liberal in name only, and is surrounded by former advisers to Conservative Leader Stephen Harper. In Saskatchewan, Premier Brad Wall has been associated with conservative causes and parties for his entire life.

Quebec’s Jean Charest, while theoretically a Liberal, was a card-carrying Conservative for decades. In the Atlantic, Conservatives govern in Newfoundland and New Brunswick.

And federally, of course, Harper united the right in 2004, and went on to defeat the once-mighty Liberal Party thereafter, and now governs with a comfortable majority.

Meanwhile, the trade union movement is in decline, and governments everywhere — even non-conservative ones — are pushing tough austerity measures. Conservative voices control Canada’s newsrooms: Only one English-language newspaper, for instance, didn’t endorse Harper in the 2011 federal general election.

But things are not nearly as conservative as conservatives would have us believe.

In Ontario, a legislative vote will be taking place today to determine if another election will be held, just a few months after the last one. Polling I have seen shows that, if an election had been forced today, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals would have won a third majority, and Ontario New Democrats would form the Opposition. The Conservatives would have slipped to third place. But a deal was reached, and an election has been averted — for now.

Out west, B.C. New Democrats are widely expected to win a substantial majority whenever an election takes place. In Manitoba, a New Democrat government that had been considered as good as gone came back to win a huge majority in last fall’s provincial election. Liberals and New Democrats comfortably govern in P.E.I. and Nova Scotia.

It’s premature to declare that progressive politics are dead and dying in Canada. Nationally, polls consistently show that two-thirds of us opposed Harper’s Conservatives in last year’s election — and, if an election were to be held now, there is an excellent chance he’d lose his majority, or more, to the surging New Democrats.

Politically, a significant number of Canadians remain independent — they shift their votes between the competing parties, and resist being labeled as “conservative” or “liberal.”

But that’s just politics. When Canadians are probed about their attitudes and identities — the deep-down, emotional stuff that doesn’t easily lend itself to words, but which drives political choices — conservatives increasingly dominate.

Following the lead of U.S. conservatives in the 1960s, the Canadian right has become far better at communicating (thus its near-total dominance of editorial voices), and it has become much better at promoting conservative values (thus its ability to convince average folks to vote against their economic interests).

Canadian conservatives don’t run everything — yet. But like their U.S. counterparts, Canadian right-wingers have methodically sought to dominate at the level of words and values. They know that if they can capture voters’ hearts and minds, winning elections will be a piece of cake.

What matters most isn’t party affiliation. What matters is an emotional connection — and, right now, it’s conservatives who’ve got it.

Not progressives.

National Post  -   Mark Milke

With Alberta politics taking a turn to the “right,” it is guaranteed that Canadians soon will be hearing more fear-mongering about how Albertan fiscal conservatism is an imported U.S. creed, and thus somehow “un-Canadian.”

The term “fiscal conservatism” describes an attachment to property rights, the rule of law, free trade, sensible (and not overweening) regulation, light debt and a moderate tax structure. Such an orientation rejects the notion that every private problem can be solved through taxpayer money.

In fact, these ideas pre-date Canada, and come both from our classic liberal British heritage (and also from the “liberty” side of the impetus for the 1789 French revolution). More recently, the preference for fiscal conservatism revived first, not in Alberta, but in my native province of British Columbia.

Consider privatization, for example. In the late 1970s, British Columbia’s Social Credit government under Premier Bill Bennett started bundling together, in one entity, companies and assets that the NDP had previously nationalized. The holding company, the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation (BCRIC), was then distributed to each British Columbian in the form of five free BCRIC shares with additional shares available for purchase.

Or consider another conservative notion: limited government. The first government to try to limit the size and scope of government after the expansionist 1960s and 1970s was again Bennett’s, starting in 1983 with its “restraint” program. That was a full decade before budget reductions were a glint in the eye of Ralph Klein, and 12 years before Mike Harris took power in Ontario.

Insofar as anyone wants to “blame” someone for upsetting the high-tax, nationalizing, protectionist and interventionist apple cart in Canada — Bennett and his colleagues in British Columbia should be the ones who get the blame (or, as I see it, credit).

Not only were the pioneering West Coast ideas later picked up by other governments in Canada — including Brian Mulroney’s Tories (privatization), the Saskatchewan NDP, the federal Liberals and Ontario Conservatives (getting budgets to balance, and then lowering taxes) — the ideas spread worldwide, in conjunction with others (Milton Friedman being the most obvious) also plumping for such policy.

Michael Walker, then executive director for the Fraser Institute and an advisor to the B.C. government in the late 1970s and early 1980s, told me in a recent conversation that when 10 Downing Street, under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, looked for solutions to their nationalized industries, “they came to B.C. and the Fraser Institute to get the scoop on the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation.”

Going back further, small-government ideas that foment opportunity and prosperity were embraced by Canada’s founding fathers.

Canada’s first post-Confederation Liberal finance minister, Sir Richard Cartwright, provides an example. In an 1878 speech, he makes clear that limited government is preferable to large government: “It is the sacred duty of the government to take only from the people what is necessary to the proper discharge of the public service; and that taxation in any other mode is legalized robbery.”

Or consider a late 19th-century speech in favor of a general preference for freedom: “The good Saxon word, freedom; freedom in every sense of the term, freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom in religious life and civil life and last but not least, freedom in commercial life.”

That 1894 speech was not, as might be presumed, delivered by some “right-wing” or “Albertan” ideologue. It was then-opposition leader, and later Liberal prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier (who represented the riding of Quebec East). “Conservatism,” whatever its current label and regardless of what political party hews close or far from it, is an inherently Canadian concept, even if these days, it finds its most outspoken defenders in Alberta.