Article content continued

At best it can hope to profit from the left’s miscues, but even in power it lacks the self-confidence to define an agenda, let alone pursue one. The nastiness of the Harper government may have been peculiar to it, but in its aimlessness and timidity, its unwillingness to invest political capital or confess to an ideology, it has its counterparts in conservative parties across the country — in sharp contrast to the robust self-confidence of the left.

The most striking example of this — and the most glaring missed opportunity — is on the environment, and global warming in particular. Conservatives could have, if they chose, dismissed the scientific consensus as alarmist, which would have been nervy but at least an argument. Or they could have accepted the science, and proposed their own, distinctly conservative solutions. In the event they did neither, publicly accepting the science but offering in response a melange of the most costly, regulatory-heavy policies this side of Charles de Gaulle.

The tragedy of this, from a conservative perspective, is that it has been the left that has taken up the space vacated by the right. A generation of environmentalists has grown up fully versed in the potential for market solutions to be applied to environmental problems; markets, they realize, are social institutions, like governments, each with its own proper sphere. Conservatives could have seized this opening, and run with it. If you like what the market can do for you in the environment, they could have said to voters, can we interest you in what it can do for your schools and health care?