William Davis waves to the crowd after leading the first ballot during the Ontario PC leadership convention in Toronto, Feb. 12, 1971.Staff/The Canadian Press
When William F. Buckley Jr. founded the National Review in 1955, he declared that a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” That became a rallying cry for a philosophy that opposes liberalization of values, seeks to halt the expansion of social programs and sees government as somewhere between a problem and an enemy.
But there are other ways of being a conservative. The late premier of Ontario, Bill Davis – who died on Aug. 8, at 92 – did not subscribe to the Buckley creed. Obviously not: He was a Canadian, from a time when Canadians were far more culturally separate from our neighbours, and didn’t mistake their politics and history for our own. He was an old-fashioned Red Tory, more interested in gently ushering progress along than thwarting it altogether. Davis was inclined to take history by the hand and say, “Maybe this way?” between puffs of his pipe.
As minister of education and higher education through the 1960s, and as leader of the country’s most populous province from 1971 to his retirement in 1985, it was a winning approach. Davis was the last conductor of the Big Blue Machine that governed Ontario under Progressive Conservative rule for 42 years; he personally never lost an election.
His record in office included: a massive program of school building; major education reforms; a huge expansion of postsecondary education, including new universities and the creation of the college system; strong environmental controls; quashing Toronto’s planned Spadina Expressway; and being central to the deal-making that patriated the Constitution and created the Charter of Rights. Even his last big gesture as premier – full funding for Catholic schools – was conservatively progressive for the time, by keeping a Confederation bargain on minority education rights, though it looks bafflingly anachronistic today.
Hawkishness of any kind just wasn’t in his character. There’s a scene in a National Film Board documentary where the premier leans back during an economic summit, takes his pipe out of his teeth and grins, “My mother always said, ‘Moderation in all things.’”
Ontario was a frantic hive of transformation and growth during his nearly quarter century as a minister and premier, yet Davis always suffered from a bit of a reputation for complacency – for shrewdly doing nothing, to avoid rocking the boat. He even played into this perception with a series of memorably self-deprecating sayings about the secrets of his political success. None is better known than “Bland works.” It captures his electoral strategy (and comes close to distilling Ontario’s very soul).
More interesting, and more revealing of his approach to government, is another running joke about his leadership: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid doing altogether.” It fed into the idea that Davis was a prevaricating do-nothing.
But seen in another light, the joke speaks to a valuable conservative philosophy.
His former protégé Hugh Segal described it to the Toronto Star as: “An opportunity missed will most probably come again, but an opportunity improperly seized or executed can make things considerably worse.”
It expresses an attitude of caution in power that comes out of an understanding about the preciousness of certain things as they are – not a slavish devotion to the status quo, but a healthy aversion to breaking the good china.
One of the challenges for current Canadian conservatism is that it owes far too much to Buckley, and not nearly enough to Davis. What’s more, much of the U.S. right has moved on from Buckley’s conservatism to a kind of break-the-china nihilism. That’s not Canada, or Canadian conservatism. But the tendency among conservatives on both sides of the border to disdain government, and make its diminution a goal, has made the movement shrill and often ineffective.
In Ontario today, all schoolchildren must be vaccinated against a host of childhood diseases – thanks to a Davis-era law. Those opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates or passports as attacks on “freedom” are singing from an American conservative songbook – not the Canadian peace, order and good government hymnal.
Davis’s Red Tory tradition offers a way out of the conservative dead end. Start with caution, modesty and a habit of standing not athwart history, but with it, saying: “Forward.”
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