The coronavirus pandemic has not been an easy time for Conservative partisans in Canada eager to erode the high levels of support Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has enjoyed amid the crisis. A similar problem has befallen American conservatives wanting to steer public accountability for the pandemic away from President Trump. As a result, in both nations, China has risen as a favored villain of the right.
Derek Sloan, an also-ran candidate in the race for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, touched off a swirl of controversy last month after speculating whether the country’s top medical officer, Theresa Tam, works for Canada “or for China.” To progressives, Sloan’s words were textbook racism, tainting the patriotism and professionalism of a Hong Kong-born doctor with dark allegations of “dual loyalties.” On the right, the line was widely dismissed, and a formal effort to remove Sloan from the party gained little traction. The blasé response was foreseeable, given that accusing rival political figures of carrying water for China has become a standard tic of conservative rhetoric these days. In either case, the Sloan episode highlights the growing eagerness many Conservatives have in seeing China serve as the central issue around which the Canadian party system polarizes.
Erin O’Toole and Peter MacKay, the two main rivals for the Conservative leadership, have also swiftly oriented their campaigns around maximalist anti-Beijing rhetoric.
“It's time for Canada to practice social distancing with the Chinese Communist Party instead of bowing to their every command,” thundered O’Toole in an April 16 fundraising email.
O’Toole, a former Air Force officer, is running as the more aggressively conservative front-runner. He accordingly promotes language of strident ideological combat, accusing Beijing of being “at war with freedom” as he endorses dissidents in Taiwan and Hong Kong. “The threat of authoritarian communism did not disappear when the Berlin Wall fell,” he tweeted last month.
MacKay, who hails from the party’s progressive wing and has been edging toward a more protectionist public brand, has meanwhile sought to shame Trudeau’s government for outsourcing too much of Canadian industry to Chinese manufacturing. It was an issue that gained particular salience after news broke that a significant amount of Canada’s supply of Chinese-made face masks and swabs had to be sent back due to concerns over defectiveness and contamination.
“Here, not there” declared a MacKay meme on Twitter, pointing an angry arrow at an outline of China.
Both campaigns have similarly made much of China’s purported “coverup” of covid-19’s early spread, emphasized their opposition to the Huawei corporation, and repeatedly brought up the plight of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who have been in Chinese captivity for over a year in what’s widely believe to be a tit-for-tat response to Canada’s 2018 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.
Though the current crisis has helped accelerate the project, reimagining the Conservatives as Canada’s “anti-China” party is an evolution a long time in the making.
A fascination with the “possibilities” of a liberalizing China was certainly prevalent on both sides of Canada’s partisan divide during the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet it was ultimately the Liberal Party that seemed to have the most stars in its eyes, captivated by the possibility of a powerful new ally to offset “dependence” on the United States — a traditional preoccupation of Canada’s left.
The ability to caricature the administration of Trudeau, specifically, as a Chinese “bootlicker” (in MacKay’s words), likewise owes heavily to one of the most infamous gaffes Trudeau ever made — an offhand admission in 2013 that he admires their “basic dictatorship” as a model of efficient governance. Virtually every China-related thing Trudeau has done since then has been accordingly filtered by the Conservatives through a narrative that the prime minister is unhealthily credulous about the Beijing regime — from his push for a free-trade deal to his health minister’s recent insistence that there’s no reason to doubt China’s covid-19 statistics.
Conservatives are always comfortable speaking from a position of judgmental moral clarity, yet the party’s nervousness about offending the skittish has inspired tight self-censorship on a number of traditionally right-wing populist fronts, including abortion, LGBT rights and immigration. Fierce opposition to a totalitarian foreign power fills this void of principle nicely, awarding conservatives the ability to rebut growing critiques that their movement has no animating purpose beyond tax cuts.
Conservative voters also tend to lean older, and it’s easy to forget just how central anti-Communism remains to many conservatives’ sense of political identity. Communism, after all, is the most extreme antithesis of those virtues conservatives believe themselves keenest to defend, including freedom of religion, free speech, and capitalist economics. It is the enemy many conservatives over 40 first signed up to fight.
O’Toole has written of a “new Cold War” against a new Red Empire. Such framing will excite many on the Canadian right desperate to emerge from a wilderness of self-doubt and onto a battlefield where they can once again thrive.
Read more: