First Ontario. Then Alberta. Now the entire country.

The appeal of fiscal conservatism — that sensible mixture of balanced budgets and low taxes — is fading in Canada, according to Ian Brodie, formerly Stephen Harper’s chief of staff and now an associate law professor in the University of Calgary. The proof is in the election results and the future is bleak.

“Someday, central bankers may decide to reinstate real interest rates. When they do, the fiscal conservative argument will gain traction again,” Brodie wrote in an iPolitics column last week. Until then, it would seem, patience is the only option.

A number of prominent fiscal conservatives, both politicians and advocates, disagree.

The messengers have lacked credibility, they say, and the message itself — when not incoherent or hypocritical — has at least been devoid of compassion.

Those are things, however, that can change.

“I do believe there is an appetite for fiscal conservatism in Canada. I think the problem for the outgone (federal) government was that they couldn’t make a credible argument that they were fiscal conservatives,” said Brent Rathgeber, who quit the federal Conservative caucus in 2013 to sit as an independent, and lost as one in October.

“They dug themselves into a very significant debt — and to some extent necessarily so — following 2008-09, and then slowly climbed their way out of it. But nonetheless, five or six years after the recession, they were still posting substantial deficits. And it wasn’t until this year that they even made a claim to run a surplus.”

In his home province of Alberta, Rathgeber thinks the same criticism applies to the electorate’s rejection last spring of the dynastic, decades-long rule of the Progressive Conservative Party.

“It’s hard to make the argument that, I would say the post-Klein era — Stelmach through Redford, Prentice never did get budget passed so we won’t even count him — there was a genuine attempt to be fiscally conservative. When oil was high, they spent a lot. And when oil prices dropped, they ran huge deficits,” he said.

“There was never an attempt to rein in spending, so I dispute the premise that the Alberta electorate rejected a fiscally conservative government, because the PC government in the last eight years of its life was anything but.”

As regards the Harper government, Aaron Wudrick, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, made a similar argument. The federal Conservatives didn’t practice what they preached, and they just assumed everyone would understand the urgency behind balancing the budget.

“I do think in this election in particular, the Harper campaign didn’t really explain what the upside would be to keeping the budget balanced. They just sort of assumed that people would want it balanced. And I think that was a mistake. I think they needed to make the case that when you balance budgets, you free up more money for things later,” he said.

“The message itself is not terribly inspiring if you don’t make the case for the tangible benefit down the road. But again, they labour under a credibility problem when they themselves have been guilty of behaving a certain way. So not only are you not selling an inspiring message, you don’t sound credible. How can you tell me deficits are bad when you just finished running a whole bunch of them? So many people have pointed that out. If you’re a Conservative Party partisan, I don’t know how you get around that.”

Rathgeber added that the Conservative approach arbitrarily drew a line in the sand. It was ideological rather than practical, which is how he believes most fiscal conservatives see themselves.

“Balancing the budget cannot be an end in itself. And it became an end in itself. And it became an end in itself for the government in the last year of its mandate,” he said.

Though he didn’t think that explained the election loss.

“Harper lost the election for many, many reasons, and (fiscal conservatism) is not one of them in my view,” he said.

Tim Hudak, Ontario Progressive Conservative leader from 2009 to 2014, was similarly unconvinced the election of Justin Trudeau is somehow proof of a shift in the zeitgeist.

For one thing, he argued, the 2013 B.C. provincial election, in which “fiscal conservatism and a pro-business focus” won out, belied the narrative. He also just didn’t think the federal election ballot question, for most Canadians, was government spending.

“It seemed a bit more of a referendum on — were you pro-Harper or anti-Harper. And the Liberals were successful in galvanizing the anti-Harper vote around Trudeau. I think that’s more so a one-sentence description of what happened than a battle between fiscal conservatism and big spending,” he said.

All the same, as someone who lost campaigns to opponents who ran on additional spending and debt, he agreed with Brodie that a prolonged rock bottom interest rate environment can make an already difficult position harder to sell.

“Certainly the left argument, that if we spend money now and build bridges and roads that you can see in front of you to create jobs, is a simpler argument to make. And so the natural uphill battle (for the) conservative argument has been made more difficult, I think, because there has been so much debt,” he said.

“People will generally comprehend the consequences of debt through their own household budgeting. That’s the best way to explain that, usually. But if consumers are taking on a lot of debt, there may be more forgiveness for government to do so.”

As the Conservative Party and small-c conservatives across the country continue to process what’s now happened in a series of elections, however, there’s another subject that keeps being raised: tone.

Last week, newly-chosen Conservative Party interim Leader Rona Ambrose identified it as something the federal party needs to change. And though she wasn’t referring to the communication of a fiscally conservative message in particular, Peter Coleman, president and CEO of the National Citizens Coalition — an organization once led by Stephen Harper — thinks that’s certainly something conservative politicians in Canada have struggled to grasp in recent years.

The prevailing message has been divisive, not compassionate. Though Coleman thinks that tone-deafness was probably most obviously exposed in recent years by an American: 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who in a leaked private speech dismissed the 47 per cent of the American population who don’t want to take “personal responsibility for their lives”, there are enough examples to highlight in Canada, too.

In the spring 2014 Ontario campaign, when Hudak committed to laying off 100,000 civil servants, Coleman thought there was a similar disregard, as far as communication is concerned, for the human cost of lost jobs. Just as the Harper government’s battle with federal public servants over sick leave came across as callous.

“Conservatives tend to do it with a sledgehammer and say, ‘This is the way it’s going to be. We’re not going to talk about it. We’re just going to hammer you over the head, beat the public sector down all we can — have fights with them over sick days, this — that — keep on going, going,” he said.

“A bunch of people go, ‘They’re not very nice people.’ They’re not getting this message across in a positive way. I think people expect politicians to at least try to portray a positive message through difficult times.”

In Hudak’s case, for example, he thinks the commitment should have been to reduce the civil service through attrition alone. That is, not replacing some retired employees rather than firing people.

“When they talk about fiscal conservatism, they do a lousy job of explaining what they’re trying to do. And it invariably comes back to somebody losing their job…and I think people can relate to that. With Hudak — the 100,000 job cuts — everybody knows somebody who could be affected by that,” Coleman said.

“That election was over the second it came out of his mouth.”

While in hindsight that pessimistic analysis might be true, Hudak himself is actually quite optimistic about the future of fiscal conservatism in Canada.

“Look, I had hoped to be an Ontario version of Ronald Reagan, I ended up being Ontario’s version of Barry Goldwater,” he said, referring the failed 1964 Republican Presidential candidate who went on to become a unique and powerful voice in the party in the decades that followed.

“That’s not a bad second prize. I preferred the first. I’ll take the second. But it doesn’t mean that we give up. It doesn’t mean that we’re wrong. It means that we need to express the challenges here with a very positive tone about how this will make things better for Ontarians or Canadians…I’m confident these issues continue to appeal.”