Canadian social conservatives? Meet my mom!

By Vivek Krishnamurthy

Canada's Religious Right: Whiter Than Thou

Today's New York Times has an interesting article about the legalization of gay marriage in Canada is giving the religious right in the true north a new lease on life. The article documents how organizations like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and REAL Women have grown in size and influence, particularly since Stephen Harper's Conservative Party formed a minority government earlier this year, but the author is far off the mark in his conclusion that "the Christian right … is coalescing with new clout and credibility, similar to the evangelical Christian movement in the United States in the 1980s."

While the article admits that this coalescence is "not nearly on the same scale" as in the U.S., that Christian groups have been noisy in their protests against gay marriage does not mean that they are about to become a major political force in Canadian political life. The problem, quite simply, is that "family values" issues simply don't have enough traction with religious and traditionally-minded Canadians to become the ballot issue even for this segment of the population.

My mother exemplifies the conundrum facing the "religious right" in Canada. Like many first-generation Canadians, my mother is devoutly religious and rather conservative on questions of personal morality, but she couldn't care less whether or not Canada allows same-sex couples to marry. In her view, the whole gay marriage debate is a pointless polemic that diverts attention from the real "family values" issues such as education, health care, and pensions.

Perhaps my mother cares less about gay marriage than other similarly situated foreign-born Canadians, who make up 20 percent of the population, because of the influence of her two extremely liberal sons. This may be, but it still doesn't obviate the fact that social conservatives face an uphill struggle in winning foreign-born Canadians and visible minorities to their side. The problem is fundamentally one of policy bundling. As in the U.S., the Canadian social conservative base is conservative on economic issues as well, meaning that their homophobic rhetoric usually comes with side dishes of charter schools and private hospitals. Such slash-and-burn economic policies are distinctly unappealing to new Canadians and visible minorities, who have traditionally been the strongest supporters of the Canadian welfare state, and are traditionally the most reliable supporters of the Liberal Party. Thus, unless Canada's social conservatives can find a way out of this particular box and combine their moralizing with progressive economic policy, their scope for growth is limited -- especially since foreign-born Canadians and visible minorities are the only sections of the Canadian population that are growing.