Conservative leader and Stephen Harper talks with Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar before the start of the Canadian premiere of Kumar's film "Thank You" during a campaign stop at a theatre in Brampton, Ontario April 8, 2011.CHRIS WATTIE/Reuters
With concrete policies, the Conservative Party is making a sensible play for "values voters" in this election. But showing support for these values costs billions of dollars, undermining the Conservatives' other oft-touted value of fiscal prudence and limited government.
Its Reform predecessors would have flirted with capital punishment and opposition to abortion or official bilingualism. As Prime Minister, Stephen Harper has wisely dispensed with such views. And yet the temptation to rally voters around moral questions is tantalizing, particularly when the Liberal Party, whose philosopher-in-chief ceased to be prime minister in 1984, is tacking both left and right.
Moral values can be unify. New planks in the platform make a moral case for the importance of Canadian history and identity, with money for celebrations marking the bicentenaries of the War of 1812 and Sir John A. MacDonald's birth. The protection of our natural heritage is also a moral imperative - a new national park in the Rouge Valley in northeastern Toronto is a welcome and overdue move to put a national park in a Canadian city.
The Conservatives signal their support for hard-working immigrants with anti-human-smuggling legislation and fewer family-class immigrants. This approach may be divisive, but it is right one and encourages economic growth.
But on other issues, the Conservatives pursue their values at too high a cost. To elevate a moral ideal of the nuclear family, they offer costly, unnecessary middle-class tax credits for children's fitness and arts activities, though the money would be best spent elsewhere, or saved. They are proposing more such inducements, and suggest that they will now be in place by Jan. 1, 2015, making their budget-balancing commitment look even more tenuous.
And when it comes to crime, the Conservatives jettison fiscal prudence in order to assert moral values. New planks include an omnibus crime bill within 100 days; mandatory drug testing for all prisoners; and mandatory jail time for repeat cigarette smugglers. To their credit, the Conservatives account for the cost of new proposals. They failed, however, to acknowledge the far greater costs of their original proposals, now expected to reach an extra $1-billion a year - a failure that led to a parliamentary finding of contempt, which led to this election.
The Conservative approach is, in some ways, a manifestation of social conservatism, but one that leaves behind some of the accompanying moral debates. But there is still a moral argument behind it all, one that celebrates hard-working immigrants and the law-abiding family. And behind that, a very big bill.