An interesting statistic was released last week in Canada: According to the Sex Information and Education Council, the nation's teenage birth and abortion rate fell 36.9% between 1996 and 2006. The lead researcher of the report, Alexander McKay, told the Globe and Mail that the decline reflected Canada's attitude toward the issue – that the more societies have an "accepting attitude" to teenage pregnancy, the less of it one finds. As for abortion, McKay said: "It's not that young women are viewing abortion as a form of birth control. Rather they do view it as an acceptable – although regrettable – way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy when it occurs."

As the host government for the upcoming G8 and G20 meetings near the end of June in Ontario, Stephen Harper's Conservative party has planned to make funding for maternal health in developing nations a priority topic. However, that discussion will take place with the knowledge that Canada's financial contribution to family planning programmes will not include funding for abortions. That is to say, the Tories are not about to allow women from developing nations the same kind choice that women in Canada have. Why not?

In late April, when he was asked how the federal Liberal party might try to shake itself from its current stagnant position in the polls, Ekos Research pollster Frank Graves made some interesting remarks to Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail. Graves said that he'd told the Liberals to:

"Invoke a culture war. Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don't like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin."

The cranky (not so old) men didn't like it. Graves appeared on the CBC's Power & Politics to explain his quote and debated with former Tory spokesman Kory Teneycke, who called his comments "offensive". A brief national media debate followed, centered on the notion of a Canadian "culture war" – one that might pit Canuck versus Canuck on the nation's ideological battleground – as if it were an unheard-of possibility.

The thing is, Graves's comments, while somewhat incendiary, trampled upon a silent rift in Canadian society – one that Harper is currently exploiting: the rise of social conservatism in a nation that has historically viewed itself as socially progressive.

Harper's life is no stranger to the influence of faith-based social conservatism and the perceived threat of moral relativism. After all, his political career began under the watch of the "Calgary School" as an early adviser to the now-defunct Reform party that was born in the University of Calgary's political science department. His direct mentor in those early years was Preston Manning, founder of the Reform party and son of former Alberta premier and evangelical radio host (simultaneously), Ernest Manning.

In 2003, when Harper was still the leader of the Canadian Alliance party (a successor to the Reform party), he gave a speech to British thinktank Civitas. He said:

"Rebalancing the conservative agenda will require careful political judgment. First, the issues must be chosen carefully. For example, the social conservative issues we choose should not be denominational, but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths."

For the most part, Harper's successive minority governments have followed this train of thought. Some have alleged that Harper, who "found" religion while in Calgary, is at the heart of a national cabal of evangelicals pushing to reinstate Canada as a Christian nation that must fulfill its destiny as laid out in its national motto ("He shall have dominion also from sea to sea," from Psalm 72:8-9) before the End Times. But the fact is that he is probably much more cerebral, critical, and calculating than that.

To that effect, many of Harper's more contentious social policy moves have been designed to evoke conservative morality rather than religiosity. Whether it has been the party's stance on youth crime, raising the age of sexual consent, or its persistent attempts to close Vancouver's safe drug injection programme, Insite, the Harper government has a record of presenting Canadians not with specifically faith-based policy, but moral wedge issues.

What this means for the average Canadian is that, slowly but surely, the Conservative party is changing the framework of the national debate. Harper's Tories are picking their issues carefully, and appealing to those centre-right voters who have historically sided with the Liberals. The culture war that Graves alluded to is effectively already under way: the progressive Canada that dominated the latter half of the 20th century – the one that legalised the pill, sodomy, abortion, and gay marriage – is changing, buried incrementally by calculated socially conservative policies.

While the press debated Graves's comments, the question on maternal health funding was playing out in parliament. The opposition Liberals half-heartedly pressed the Tories on the abortion funding, but so lax was their willingness to debate the issue, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's motion on the topic died thanks to the absence of 13 of his own party members. This was partly due to party disorganisation, but it implies an unwillingness to engage in the debate.

Since his government's decision not to fund legal abortions overseas, Harper has been adamant that he had no desire to re-open the debate on abortions in Canada, saying he would "oppose" such a move. In doing so, Harper has steered clear of a faith-based domestic political landmine, relegating it to the realm of foreign policy, and effectively out of the minds of most Canadians. At the same time, he has given the suggestion of landing on the righteous side of a religiously charged debate, while keeping himself at arm's length. This way, Harper doesn't alienate himself from the average Canadian – particularly the centre-right voters. It is a repeated, adept, but not at all secretive, pattern of finding and exploiting those secular issues that strike at the heart of a silently religious nation.

It all means that the decision not to allow funding for safe abortions in developing nations most likely has very little to do with the security and health of the approximately 70,000 women who die annually during unsafe ones. Instead, it has everything to do with the Conservative party's own domestic political gains, and pandering to a lucrative – and growing – conservative base. It's decidedly cynical, but it seems to have worked. A recent poll found that, though 58% of Canadians said they were against the government's decision, it was those in favour of the move who held the biggest ever pro-life rally on Parliament Hill to celebrate it.