Ron Dart and the High Tory tradition
The political ideal that uniquely shaped Canada has shattered, but we still find evidence of it in our politics today.
What is a Tory? Here in Canada, members and supporters of our federal and provincial Conservative Parties are known as Tories. But what does this mean? Is it similar to the Republican Party to our south? Or is there something distinctive about our Canadian conservative tradition that gives the Tory label a different connotation? Many of our fellow citizens would be at a loss to answer these questions.
But not Ron Dart, with whom I was privileged to talk some weeks ago.
Dart is a retired academic who has taught political science, philosophy and religion at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C., since 1990. Author of some 40 books, he is Canada’s resident expert on what he calls the High Tory tradition. This tradition can be understood only in light of Canada’s history and its longstanding relationship to the British Isles.
Leacock and Grant
Dart’s method consists largely of surveying significant figures in our past who have exemplified the Tory tradition, if not in its entirety, at least in significant respects. Among these are Stephen Leacock and George Grant. Although Leacock (1869-1944) is best known for his humorous writings published late in life, he was a serious scholar who taught political economy at McGill University while spending his summers at the family home in Orillia, Ontario. Leacock was what might be labelled a Red Tory – a conservative with pronounced sympathy for the socialist critique of laissez-faire economics. Leacock’s quite unhumorous book, The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, was published in 1920, right after the end of the Great War as industrial unrest was increasing in the western world.
Geoge Parkin Grant (1918-1988) wrote his famous Lament for a Nation, which, contrary to his own intentions, became a rallying tract for Canadian nationalists. In his later years, Grant increasingly focussed on such issues as abortion and euthanasia, which have come to be associated with so-called social conservatives. Yet, as Dart reminded me during our conversation, these were logical extensions of Grant’s lifelong concern for the vulnerable and for the need to place limits on the will of the powerful.
Back to the roots
Grant rejected the Red Tory label for himself. Dart considers Grant to have been a High Tory rather than a Red Tory. How are these different? According to Dart, a Red Tory accepts the pre-eminence of the state over society in seeking the common good of the larger collective. A High Tory, by contrast, recognizes the important role of the state but is willing to live within the tension between state and society, which must cooperate in pursuing the common weal.
The Tory tradition has its roots in southwest England, a largely rural region which novelist Elizabeth Gaskell contrasted with the industrial north in her North and South (1854-55). From there it made its way to Toronto, where Dart was born and raised. Here Dart came to appreciate the Tory emphases on the wisdom of tradition, concern for the commons, an ethical foundation for economics, concern for the physical environment, the collaboration of state and society, education in the classics, recognition of human limitations and fallibility, the positive role of religion as a basis for social order and a hierarchy of human goods.
Dart himself is a high-church Anglican, following in the footsteps of his Tory predecessors, including Leacock and Grant. Why the Anglican Church? Anglicanism is a magisterial tradition, emphasizing the church’s institutional character. This contrasts with those traditions viewing the church as a mere voluntary association lacking even a semblance of authority within the larger society. Moreover, Anglicans honour the state, with which they seek to work for the common good, but they naturally refrain from worshipping it.
A tradition implodes
The Tory tradition contrasts sharply with what goes by the conservative label south of the border and increasingly in Canada itself. Here conservatism takes the form of an earlier form of liberalism, with its suspicion of the state and its exaltation of individual whims. Traditional Tories of either High or Red leanings find this form of conservatism a false friend at best and an outright opponent at worst.
During our conversation, I couldn’t resist asking Dart whether the Tory tradition he so extols is not a nostalgic reconstruction of an imagined past. Dart responded that, while Tories appreciate the insights of the past, they do not try to identify supposed golden ages from which we have departed. Does anyone still embody the Tory tradition in the 21st century? Dart admitted that “the Ming vase of High Toryism has shattered into pieces,” leaving behind only fragments. As the centre has imploded, we continue to find elements of the Tory tradition among Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats and Greens, but no longer as a cohesive whole. There is thus a tragic element in Toryism, something which Grant already exemplified in his Lament.
Tories today
And finally, what of Donald Trump? Beginning with Sir John A. Macdonald, Tories have valued the tariff as a means of protecting domestic agriculture and industry. So obviously does Trump. But Dart pointed to the important difference between protective and aggressive forms of nationalism. A nation has a right to defend itself, but not to unleash misery on its neighbours.
Dart indicated to me that a Tory seeks to realize an ideal which will always be imperfectly implemented. Although looking to the past, Tories properly recognize the good in the present, seeking the better much as a physician uses a surgical knife – carefully and cautiously, while keeping before them the immutable principles underpinning the cosmic order on which we all depend.
