In the arid landscape of our current political debate, a once-thriving Canadian perennial struggles to survive: the Red Tory. Political scientist Gad Horowitz first identified the “Tory touch” in Canadian political thought, rooted in the history of English and French colonization and never rejected through Americanstyle revolution. This “organic” conception of society provided a meeting ground between conservatism and social democracy – the view that all members of society are linked together through shared history, social institutions and common endeavour. It contrasts sharply with the central liberal notion of the independent individual with inalienable rights.

Canadians today have largely lost our sense of Red Toryism. If we think of Red Tories now, we too often refer simply to Conservatives sitting to the “left” of their party, or Liberals to the “right” of theirs. One of the few remaining unabashed Red Tories, Senator Hugh Segal, more fully describes the Canadian conservative tradition as a unique blend of respect for enterprise and compassion for the less fortunate. Red Tories in this tradition, including R.B. Bennett, Robert Stanfield, and Bill Davis, were institution-builders, proposing and creating crown corporations and social programs as instruments of common goals and guarantees of mutual obligations. But the Red Tories Segal extols are now an endangered species, and their principal vehicle, the Progressive Conservative party, has vanished from the federal scene.

Red Toryism is flourishing in Britain, however, where it underpins the current British government’s focus on the “Big Society” as the alternative to “Big Government” in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century. Its proponents, like Phillip Blond and Jesse Norman, both principal advisors to Prime Minister David Cameron, argue passionately that big government bureaucracies have not only failed to deliver public goods, but also eroded the capacity of other social institutions (such as the voluntary sector) to provide them. But they equally criticize a market economy whose concentration of power and wealth brought many countries’ economies to the brink of collapse, with the costs unfairly borne by the most vulnerable. The enemy in the red tory critique is liberalism, whose focus on the individual provided no buffer against either the centralized state or the concentrated market.

To the rescue Red Tories would bring the Big Society, based on three pillars: localism, social enterprise and civic engagement. Blond’s agenda would “resurrect the communal and restore the social” through the “Tory logic of family, locality and civil and voluntary society.” Norman favours the creation of “linking institutions,” bridging the gap in the liberal world view between the individual and the state.

Both views offer a compelling prescription, fraught with a central tension: can an egalitarian vision be grounded in elitism? Old Tory society was hierarchical; individuals were connected by membership in institutions with established traditions, such as the Church, and by prescribed positions, offering limited social mobility. This stratified world clashes with the modern liberal concept of equal individuals with rights of free association and expression. And the ordered society of common values and deference to elites in which Toryism took root no longer exists. Can the voluntary, self-forming institutions envisaged by Big Society advocates rise to take its place? Critics would argue that this belief is at best naïve and at worst duplicitous in the context of the severe cuts in public spending currently proposed in Britain.

Likewise, the decline of Red Toryism in Canada can be linked to the decline of our deference to elites. The original architects of our political institutions – parliaments, courts, parties, and bureaucracies – responded to competing pressures (English and French loyalties, British ties and American linkages, regional differences and distances) by incorporating inconsistent principles. Where else but Canada does one find a “notwithstanding clause” in the constitution? Where else does one (still, in some provinces) find a “Progressive Conservative” party? Indeed, until the term was recently embraced in Britain, where else could one find a Red Tory?

We used to rely on elites – in government and society – to work these tensions out pragmatically, case by case. But they are no longer the only legitimate arbiters of social and political conflict. Our confidence in elites to manage the big questions of our common life died with the Meech Lake Accord on constitutional reform, whose principles collided with the defense of individual rights and resistance to “distinct” status for any one community in Canada.

Can Red Toryism be resurrected in a world that distrusts elites, to create a “Big Society” of vibrant self-forming institutions and social groups and shared values, in England or in Canada? And if so, can the concept be reconciled with our even stronger tradition of liberal democracy? The party that can answer these questions might find a compelling, if elusive, narrative to capture the imagination of Canadians, and rescue political life in this country from its slough of disillusionment and distrust.

BY CAROLYN HUGHES TUOHY. This article is available online at nationalpost.com.