Barry Cooper

the new regime

For Canadians who maintain an abiding interest in the political workings of their country, it is difficult to resist a book titled It’s the Regime, Stupid! A Report from the Cowboy West on why Stephen Harper Matters. Authored by Dr. Barry Cooper, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, the content of the book is very much as advertised, with more depth and philosophical probing than perhaps the quirky title would suggest. When asked about the title during a recent interview in his office at the university, Dr. Cooper chuckled and explained that it had two purposes. First, it was meant to get the attention of potential readers by employing a somewhat insulting tone. Second, the provocative heading aimed to introduce the content, which is primarily a study of the Canadian ‘regime’. Both purposes are reflected throughout the book. The investigation of the meaning of ‘regime politics’ in the Canadian context gives the volume a solid foundation. Simultaneously there are a few insults and innuendos scattered on the pages, most of them directed toward Liberal party supporters.

Dr. Cooper states early on that “when we raise the questions ‘What do we stand for?’ or ‘What are our political purposes?’, we are raising the issue of the meaning of the Canadian regime”. He seeks to indicate the origins of the word ‘regime’ in the Greek word ‘politeia’, and how Plato, Aristotle, and later thinkers understood ‘regime politics’. The ‘regime’ is shown to be something greater than a specific political order, and encompasses more than the law of the constitution. Dr. Cooper contends that it is a settled way of doing things, conditioned by a certain kind of government, and it depends greatly on the character or personality of the rulers. He encapsulates the meaning of ‘regime’ in the following way. “To summarize: the regime is, concretely, a ruling group that embodies and defends what its members think is most distinctive and most important about the political community, which is, in classical terms, its collective opinion about the best way of life.”

This understanding opens up an alternative way of looking at Canadian politics. For Dr. Cooper, Stephen Harper matters because he is the embodiment of a new movement in Canadian politics, one that has achieved power without being dominated by, or subservient to, the business elite of Ontario and Quebec. The emergence of western Canada as an economic and political force has disrupted the way in which the country has been governed since the end of the Second World War, regardless of what party formed the government. For a ‘regime’ change to occur, however, it was necessary that there be a real break in the rule of the Liberal party.

The long-term dominance of the Liberals had permitted the entrenchment of a certain form of government and style of leadership, which reached its apogee in the government headed by Jean Chrétien. In conversation with Canadian Interviews, Dr. Cooper remarked that, “… in almost every respect, the Chrétien government was the perfection of a number of tendencies in post-war Canadian history. The nadir or the perfection, however you want to look at it! But it brought together patterns of political activity and justifications for it, the origins of which you can see in the war, but then in the post-war world as well.” What are these patterns of political activity? And what are the justifications of such activity? Dr. Cooper suggests that the Liberal party has given up on liberalism, redefining it solely in terms of maintaining power. The philosophical underpinning of the party has eroded. Originally liberalism involved democratic reform, the enhancement of liberty, and the eradication of privilege, but as Dr. Cooper puts it in his book, “… the Liberals now also strongly believe in directing the affairs of citizens, which is to say, turning them into subjects not of the monarch but of the bureaucracy that rules in the name of the monarch.”

It’s the Regime, Stupid! is most engaging when concentrating on the meaning of ‘regime’ and the potential benefits that might be derived from the impact of western Canadian thinking on our national politics. It is possible that the valuable points of the book may be obscured somewhat by the unflattering characterizations offered by Dr. Cooper along the way. This is most obvious when he discusses Liberal insiders Warren Kinsella and Eddie Goldenberg. His criticisms are also very pointed when it comes to former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, especially with respect to his appointment of Adrienne Clarkson as Governor General of Canada. “Although Adrienne Clarkson had never been elected to office, her career in the CBC made her a Liberal cheerleader lacking only pompoms and a short skirt”.

In the following interview, Dr. Cooper answers questions on ‘regime politics’, the current state of the Liberal party, the meaning of conservatism, as well as what specifically it is about Canada that Stephen Harper is interested in conserving.

CI: When one comes across a book called It’s the Regime, Stupid!, with a subtitle about why Stephen Harper matters, it is reasonable to imagine a potential reader thinking that this is a book primarily based on current Canadian politics and the dynamics between the parties, but it is a lot more than that. It is a political history, a cultural analysis, and an analysis of literature even in certain places. How did the conversation go with the publisher when you were deciding on the title for the book?

BC: A very prescient question! They thought initially that it would be insulting to the reader, and they were leery of it. Key Porter [the publisher] was great to work with. My editor said that there were some questions, and I said ‘well, tell them it’s ironic’. And he said, ‘oh, good idea!’ I don’t know whether they didn’t understand what that meant or what, but the title, in a non-ironic way, was essentially twofold: one, to get the attention of somebody because it seems to be insulting. The other is to draw attention to the content, which is about regimes, and that is something that Canadian historians and Canadian political scientists have ignored, for understandable reasons. Nevertheless, it is extremely important, at least for political scientists like me that think that Plato and Aristotle are the beginning and so far unsurpassed political scientists of the Western world. I suppose that, if I were Chinese, I would talk about Confucius, but I’m not. It is Plato and Aristotle that Westerners have looked to for the beginning of political science. That is why ‘regime’ is so important. It is not really ironic. It is something that we have forgotten about, and in particular we have not looked at post-World War Two Canadian politics as ‘regime politics’. We think of it in terms of this development model, this colony-to-nation stuff that was important in the forties, or multiculturalism, but I think that is completely secondary, or we’re partisan about it, and that’s trivial.

CI: Now it is rare for the key word in the title of the book, in this case ‘regime’, to have an asterisk next to it, and an explanation of it on the back of the book. How would you give a quick summary of the word ‘regime’, specifically in the context of Canadian politics? I noted in the book where you mention that, for Plato and Aristotle, “the key question ‘who rules?’ included the question ‘what is the character or personality of those who rule’.” So, your understanding of the word ‘regime’ is broader than people might immediately think.

BC: Yeah, there is a book with the title The Canadian Regime. It is about the law of the constitution.

CI: This is the book by Patrick Malcolmson and Rick Myers [both professors at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick].

BC: Yeah, it’s a good book about constitutional law, but the ‘regime’, in the way that I was using it – I mean, Plato’s most famous book could be called The Regime instead of The Republic. It’s a more accurate translation of politeia. But the point about personality is important, and it has an ethical dimension to it that is neglected by modern political scientists generally because they have no intellectual tools to deal with ethics. All they’re concerned with is voting behaviour and other sorts of models rather than what is genuine empirical analysis, namely the experience of our political leaders. There is a long discussion in there about myths. Part of the experience that we have is mythical because that gives us images of what the country looks like, what the purpose of life is, and other great questions as well.

CI: In the first chapter, after you give an explanation of what is central to the meaning of the word ‘regime’, you proceed to highlight certain members of the ruling group connected with former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, specifically Warren Kinsella, David Dingwall, and Eddie Goldenberg. Interestingly, you comment that “in a regime such as has been established by the Liberal Party of Canada, the only vice is disloyalty. … If I support Conservatives more than Liberals, it is because the Liberals have given up on liberalism.” How precisely have they given up on liberalism?

BC: They have redefined it in terms of maintaining power. Liberalism at one time had a content, and it was more than simply making sure that their political party stayed in power. It becomes pretty clear, I think, that in almost every respect the Chrétien government was the perfection of a number of tendencies in post-war Canadian history. The nadir or the perfection, however you want to look at it! But it brought together patterns of political activity and justifications for it, the origins of which you can see in the war but then in the post-war world as well. It’s not my opinion about whether I think Warren Kinsella is a jerk or not. The stuff that he wrote, you can read and give textual analysis of it, and his words pretty much speak for themselves. We all have common sense, and we can see what kind of individual he is, or Chrétien is, or Eddie Goldenberg is, or certainly David Dingwall – I mean, he said these things, I didn’t make it up; as the Liberal ads say, “I’m not making this up!” But all we have to do is reflect on the kind of individuals who would say those sorts of things with a straight face, so to speak. They really believed it, and if you look at it analytically, and not just as somebody who doesn’t like Liberals, it’s quite remarkable that they can say these things and act on them. It is the action as well as the words, I think, that we have to take into account. If the words are, let’s say somewhat detached from the experience of reality that I’ve had, then as a political scientist I think my job is, in part, to point this out. If this is unsatisfactory, I am sure that I can be corrected, which is fine. That is how science operates. You have these views, you articulate them, and people criticize them. That’s the game.

CI: In order to illustrate how a ‘regime’ is not connected necessarily to a change in government, you note that the leadership change in the Liberal party from Chrétien to Paul Martin ‘carried hints of a regime change’. With the Gomery Commission and the fallout from that, is there continuity in the regime as embodied first by Martin and now by Harper?

BC: That’s a good question. I didn’t really address it because the partisan differences were pretty clear, and Martin, after all, was a loyalist, a loyal Liberal. Stephen Harper has been a member of several parties, so he doesn’t have this kind of organizational loyalty that Liberals grow up with. But yeah, both Martin and Harper made, I think, partial breaks with the previous regime: Martin, by the Gomery Commission – I mean, if you just look at the responses of the Chrétien loyalists to his appointment, let alone what they found, they were extremely critical; and Stephen Harper has both the partisan distance, plus he has had some Western influence on the way that he looks at the country, and he’s an economist, and he thinks that policy is more important than simply retaining power – although he has certainly made some compromises on policy too! I certainly prefer Stephen Harper over Michael Ignatieff today, but I’m not a blind Harper partisan. I think he’s done a reasonably good job, and where he hasn’t done a good job, he has understood it as being a compromise, which is to say something that he would rather not have done but political circumstances have compelled him, or he found it attractive to do. Whereas the Liberals, it wouldn’t have been seen as a compromise; it would have been seen as profoundly intelligent policy. That is the big difference between Harper and his predecessors. The other big difference with Martin is Gomery. Martin is fundamentally, I think, basically an honest guy. I would hesitate to say that about some of his predecessors on the basis of their words. I don’t know anything more than what is in the public realm, and honesty does not seem to be high on their list of virtues.

CI: From my perspective, the most interesting chapter is the one called ‘Myths of Disunity’. You focus quite a lot on culture in Canada, and you note that culture has political implications because it is ‘an expression of identity’. A lot of the discussion in that chapter centres around the work of Northrop Frye. You observe that “the question of ‘Canadian identity’ or ‘Canadian culture’ is not, properly speaking, a Canadian question at all, but a local, and at most a regional, one.” There is also in that chapter a fairly clear resistance to what you call the Laurentian perspective. Reading that, I am just curious, who precisely did you have in mind as an audience for that chapter? The reason why I ask the question is that I am thirty years old, and as I grew up we had the failure of Meech Lake and Charlottetown, the 1995 Quebec Referendum, and the rise of the Reform Party. I came of age sort of taking for granted that this is a country of regions, and the regional identities are part of a larger political construct called Canada. Is your argument targeted to Laurentian Canadians of a certain vintage, or do you think that the Laurentian perspective [which privileges Quebec and Ontario as the true centre of the country] persists in that part of the country?

BC: That is also a very good question. The origin of the argument comes from when I was teaching at York a long time ago, a generation ago. The students I had then, I didn’t understand the way they looked at things. I started teaching a course, and Don Forbes was teaching a similar course at U of T, and we would talk – he’s a good friend of mine, and back then we talked a lot, and now I see him about once a year at political science meetings – but we talked about Canadian political thought. I read all the stuff that historians did on regionalism. Then, in Canadian literature, the differences between the symbolic meaning presented through various fiction, and what was the origin of that? Well, the origin of all these things is in historical experience that gets transmitted through fiction and through myth, you know, what your granny tells you when you were a little kid. And we just got told different stories. My students were told different stories than I was.

Now, I’m not sure that that much has changed. You may be right, and there is a greater tolerance for western myths in Laurentian Canada. But in everything from public opinion polls to the difference between the latest musings of Margaret Atwood and Aritha van Herk, both women about the same age – well, Atwood is a bit older – but what they write about, and the assumptions they make about humans and how they get along with their lives, I think are quite different. Then that gets transmitted through everything, like in journalism. If you read Jeff Simpson, that guy has not spent enough time in Calgary, and when he comes here, he talks to the same people, who are the people that agree with him. He hasn’t talked to people up here [in the Department of Political Science] for ten or fifteen years. He used to come here and come to the university, and we would sit around and talk and give a seminar and tell him how wrongheaded he was! I don’t think he does that now. Maybe he talks to [University of Calgary professor Tom] Flanagan, I don’t know, but he hasn’t had this kind of exposure to an alternative way of looking at things. I think this is expressed in his columns in the same way as Margaret Atwood’s basic themes of literature are expressed in her novels.

I’m sure there is another generation of Ontario writers that I know nothing about because there’s only so many books that you can read in your lifetime. I’ve tried some of them, and I didn’t find them that interesting. I’m not going to name names, but I just didn’t. But I would bet you that there are still significant regional differences in the literature of Canada. I’ve read some Newfoundland novels, recent novels, and they are quite different from what you would find here. I’ve read some from B.C., and they are quite different again, the themes are different. It’s not just that the settings are different, but the themes about life are different. I read Noah Richler’s book that came out a year or two ago. It was like I didn’t have to read all the stuff because what he found in his reading of a new entire generation of writers of fiction pretty much confirmed what I read fifteen or twenty years ago. There may be a difference, but somebody else will have to find it because I can’t.

CI: Well, there is one theme that I was thinking about. You mention at several points in the book different thoughts from George Grant, and over the years I’ve read a fair bit of George Grant and admire him for a lot of his insights. What I’m getting at with the younger generation perhaps is that the universalizing, homogenizing power of technology makes us sit in similar chairs in front of similar computers from coast to coast. I find that one of the redeeming features of Canada is the way that we are able to maintain distinct regional identities to give us something other than the technological. There is a poet, who is originally from Toronto, I think, but now he teaches here in the literature department at the University of Calgary. His name is Christian Bök. He wrote a book called Eunoia, which I thought dealt with this idea of the homogenizing power of technology. It is a book of poetry where every word in each chapter has to contain one of the vowels, almost a technological way of writing poetry, but at the same time I thought he was trying to point to something beyond that.

BC: There were some poets from Saskatchewan about six or eight years ago that I read. I went to a conference in Saskatoon and picked up some of their stuff. They were about the same thing, about grain farms being basically wheat mines. Now, that image was present in the 1920s. I think that there has always been a sensibility in the west that has objected to the imposition of technological forms on the landscape, and I agree with that. I think that it is true that you can find the same kind of theme in New Brunswick, I suppose, and you can find it in the United States in southern writers in particular. Certainly George Grant got a lot of his insight from Jacques Ellul, who was French and a law professor. That part of it is a kind of common response to aspects of technology that, if you think about rather than integrate yourself into the operation of, is not very pleasant to contemplate. I think it is a fairly long-lasting response.

There is a line in Technology and Empire when Grant says ‘when you go to the Rockies, there may be gods there, but they are not our gods’. I remember asking him about that after I moved back here. I said, ‘George, when was the last time you ever went mountain climbing?’ He said, ‘Ah, Barry …’. I said, ‘well, sometimes you get up there and you can see your way up but you don’t know how the hell you’re going to get back down. They’re not foreign gods that you’re worried about, they’re right there!’ And he said, ‘well okay, okay!’ I have a great admiration for what Grant did, starting with Lament for a Nation, but it is limited, too. He and I had a number of really interesting conversations on what I took to be his vision of reality, but I just loved the guy, thought he was terrific. Even if I criticized him, I really liked him!

CI: The last thing that I want to touch on is the idea of conservatism. Later in the book you set out to examine what conservatism means in the Canadian and especially the western Canadian context. In the Canadian context, you trace how Sir John A. Macdonald’s vision of a transcontinental empire, a strong united commercial empire, really eroded theories of conservatism that came from Europe. It replaced an understanding of conservatism based on loyalty with an understanding of conservatism based on prosperity. Is this understanding of the development of conservatism, that trajectory of conservatism, unique at all to Canada, or are there variations on the same theme in most Western countries?

BC: Yeah, I think there are [variations on the same theme]. Both the terms liberal and conservative in their political context are responses to the French Revolution, and they are essentially ideological symbols. They are not concepts that political scientists can clarify sufficiently to make them analytically precise. People who call themselves conservatives, let’s say in the United States, can be quite different from people who call themselves conservatives on just the other side of the street in Canada. It is a very malleable symbol, and it is one that is used for political purposes rather than for political science-scientific analysis.

The distinction or the change that Macdonald affected from loyalism - although he maintained a large chunk of that, and the anti-Americanism that comes from loyalism, he maintained a fair bit of that, too – to a kind of Canadian imperial growth and prosperity with this part of the country being the periphery from the Dominion; from the river to the ends of the earth, this is the ends of the earth. The Dominion over the ends of the earth from the Laurentian river valley is a change, but it is one that historians have talked about. Again, it is not some idiosyncratic view that I think is a terrible thing. It is a well-attested historical interpretation of Macdonald’s achievement. What we need to do, we - so long as we are all fellow citizens – need to do, is understand that the effect that is celebrated in one part of the country can be resented and resisted in another. In that respect in particular – we were talking earlier about C.B. Macpherson, and the view of western politics as being deviant in one way or another because from the beginning it didn’t accept the dimensions of parliamentary government and the ‘appropriate’ political parties. We’ve had all these strange parties like Reform, NDP or CCF, Social Credit and United Farmers and so on. There is a good historical reason for that. It was because there was a response by liberal – small ‘l’ liberal, small ‘d’ democratic – settlers, who knew about self-government, but were denied the institutional tools of self-government by the Dominion government from the beginning. There was agitation, even before the northwest was part of Canada, to have self-government.

The analogy that I drew was with the seventeenth century colonists in Massachusetts Bay, that initially they founded the settlement for the glory of God, the power of the King, and their own just order – something in that order. And then the King dropped out of it because he wasn’t there. There was no British regal presence in the colonies of British America. Well, it was analogous historical development in western Canada: you had settlers who were perfectly capable of self-government but were not allowed to govern themselves because they were governed from Ottawa. They found a whole bunch of ways of getting around this unfortunate institutional denial, a self-conscious and deliberate denial by the government of Canada, which then becomes stigmatized by learned historians and political scientists at the University of Toronto as being weird. Well, it’s not weird. It’s an understandable response of people who are capable of self-government to govern themselves outside the institutions that they had imposed on them.

I tell some anecdotes in the book about my grandparents, my two grandfathers and what they thought of this. One was from Newfoundland and thought Canada was kind of a foreign country. The other grew up here long before it was a province, and his understanding of central Canada was, let’s say, tinged with ambivalence, precisely because of the impossibility of self-government of Canadian citizens, or British subjects as we were then, in this part of the country. The effects of that part of western Canadian history, I don’t think have been properly assimilated, even by political scientists who have grown up here. Most of them accept the Macpherson or ‘Macphersonite’ view of the weirdness of western politics. It’s certainly different than central Canadian politics, or the Maritimes, but that needs to be understood, I think, in the historical context, and by and large it isn’t.

CI: The beginning of the chapter on conservatism is one of the places where you quote George Grant: ‘the impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada’. At the end of that chapter, which is called ‘Cowboy Conservatives’, you wrote “there is no cowboy conservatism because there is no Canadian conservatism. There is, however, a political and spiritual cowboy resistance to the Canadian state and a cowboy vision to change the Canadian regime.” It seems to me that we have a Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who is the leader of the Conservative party, yet you are suggesting that perhaps he is helping to usher in a regime change. There is maybe a tension there. What I am trying to get at is, as the leader of the Conservative party, at this point what is Stephen Harper conserving? What is the Conservative party conserving? Grant always said that conservatism involves conserving what is good about a society. My curiosity is about what is being conserved at this point.

BC: Yeah, that is also a thoughtful and very good question. I don’t know if I quoted this one passage from Harvey Mansfield, who is, in my view, the most important living political scientist or political philosopher around. Mansfield has been teaching at Harvard for I don’t know how long, but quite a while. He said that what conservatives want to conserve is liberty, and liberty is the centre of liberalism, as ‘properly understood’. Well, what Grant was saying is that he did not see liberty as the centre of what needed to be conserved. He had other things that he thought needed to be conserved, and that, I think, are quite properly expressions of his understanding of Canadian history – not mine, but it is a legitimate one.

With respect to Stephen Harper, I think that liberty is important to him, both individual liberty and, I would say, especially the fact that section ninety-two of the British North America Act, or the Constitution Act of 1867, has not been repealed, and that is where provincial powers are located. And they are still significant, which means that the government of Canada, in the sense of the bureaucracy centred chiefly in Ottawa, its intention and its activities are contradicted by the responsibility given to the provinces. If there is to be a kind of articulated, institutional space for political liberty in Canada, it will have to recognize provincial responsibilities, not just in a formal sense but in terms of an actual devolution, a re-devolution of responsibility and therefore of power, including taxing power, to the provinces. This is what has been eroded since 1945. The increasing centralization - and for reasons that people think are just terrific, all of which have to do with prosperity and none of which, really I don’t think, have to do with liberty and responsibility – that is the regime change that I think Stephen Harper is aware of. Whether he is capable, or in his heart of hearts whether he wants to change things in that direction, I don’t know, but he is certainly aware that that is a problem. Let’s say maybe he really wants to give the provinces their section ninety-two responsibilities. The structure of political forces in this country makes it extremely difficult, particularly with Quebec. It makes it difficult to do that. You can make concessions to Quebec, but do you really want to make them for Alberta, too? I would say, yeah! Quite frankly, I would say yes. We should have, if not an embassy in Washington, we should at least have somebody who is not working out of an office in the Canadian embassy, where we have some guy who is there now, but he’s in the Canadian embassy. I’ve seen the Quebec flag on that street in Georgetown, whatever the main street is. I don’t know if they’re still there, but I think Alberta should have its own representation in Washington. Maybe even in Paris. That would be terrific!

Date of Interview: 07/21/2009
Location: University of Calgary, Calgary, AB
Link: www.poli.ucalgary.ca/profiles/barry-cooper