Almost every observer of Canadian and American political life assumes one basic fact about the difference between the two countries: that Canada is a more liberal and less conservative country than America. This assumption is not entirely accurate. While it is true that Canadians overwhelmingly believe in gun control, public health care and strong public education, the reason these issues have never become major political issues is that Canadian conservatives overwhelmingly share those values. Since 1984, Conservative governments have controlled the Canadian parliament for 18 years, while the U.S. has had a Republican president for only 16 years during that same period. In terms of who actually holds power, Canada is every bit as conservative as the United States.

The Democratic Party in the United States and the Liberal Party in Canada are just not that different in their means and their aims. Both want to use the power of government to effect social change. The real question of how Canada has stayed so sane and cheerful over the past 40 years rests with the right. How have Canadian conservatives stayed so sane and cheerful when the right in the United States and Britain have collapsed into fear and loathing?

Canadian conservatives are increasingly unrecognizable from their counterparts to the south; there is no Canadian conservative in elected office who desires, for example, the end of fiat currency. There is no Canadian conservative like the governor of Kentucky who has openly discussed the possibility of armed revolution if the Democrats win. The cynical explanation for the distinction between Canadian conservatives and American conservatives is that Canadian conservatives have only been able to be as conservative as the Canadian people would let them be. It is true that former prime minister Stephen Harper was a deeply cynical operator who manipulated the Conservative Party into a collection of ideological positions that were more or less palatable to the Canadian people (no debates about abortion, for instance.) But cynicism would be inaccurate if not unfair. Canadian conservatives are creatures of policy; American conservatives have become opposed to policy as such. That distinction is the most important explanation for why Canada has not been subject to the vicious populist swells of the American right wing.

Stephen Harper was in power for nearly 10 years and still represents the face of the Canadian Conservative Party. During his time in power, he earned a great deal of contempt from Canadian liberals because of his notorious hatred for expertise of all kinds and in all fields, from environmental science to the judiciary. He made a conscious effort to restrict any information that could be inconvenient to him. He shut down the capacity of government-mandated scientists to speak to the press; he closed down the long-form census. His mania for personal control over every detail of government was extreme. And yet a decade after he was first elected, it would be hard to trace significant decisions where Harper diverged from his Liberal predecessor Paul Martin. It is true that no progress was made on native and environmental issues but there was no grand attempt to dismantle entitlement spending in any significant way. He cut social programs, slightly, and he instituted minor changes to immigration policy. But on the major issue of his tenure, the 2008 financial crisis, Harper did the right thing even though it flew in the face of his ideology. He lived by deficits. Here is one source of the Canadian exception: Over the past 30 years, Liberal governments tend to run surpluses and Conservative governments tend to run deficits, and it’s to the credit of both, because in both cases, because of the timing, it has been the right thing to do.