Conservatives must cull of the bureaucracy to save Canada

Many Canadian conservatives speak of Edmund Burke as they would their first love. Their tributes are fond and wistful.

From Reagan-esque paeans to talk of common sense and gradual change, our intellectual and political right still speaks like it lives in a cohesive, recognizable country that treasures inherited norms and trusted institutions.

In practice, Burkean conservatism in Canada is mostly an illusion and an aspiration, not a serious program. The Canada that Burkeans describe, in which institutions broadly respect the past, simply does not exist.

Howard Anglin has argued that liberalism “dissolved most of the familiar pre-liberal bonds of stigma and prejudice that had bound society together below the level of the state, it left our social order hanging by a few thin procedural thr