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Today it is the parties of the left who are on the march, with proposals for universal pharmacare, dental care and child care, not to mention plans to completely overhaul the economy in the service of environmental targets that grow more radical by the day. To which the right responds with … tax credits for children’s fitness, free museum admissions and a climate-change plan that is just as meddlesome as the left’s but only half as effective.

Photo by Todd Korol/Reuters

As in other countries, it is not that conservative parties are not winning elections — seven of the 10 provincial governments would answer to the description, if not the name — but that they are doing so at the cost of conservatism. Or at least, a conservatism that is recognizable as such.

Which brings us back to the question that kicked off this essay. To shrug that conservatism is whatever conservatives believe does not get us very far. For different groups of self-styled conservatives believe very different things. Perhaps there is no one “true” conservatism — but if not, on what basis can these competing claims to represent it be resolved?

Perhaps the question is better framed, not as what conservatism is, but what it ought to be. To be sure, it is at least relevant, in any discussion of what conservatism should stand for, to recall what it has stood for, in the past. As long as we understand that it is the principles that matter, not the package they come in.

Conservatism here is less out of control than it is out of ideas

I have always found it odd to hear people cite a particular idea approvingly solely because it is the conservative approach. Surely it is the other way around; you define yourself as a conservative because you believe in certain things.