The Personal Is Not Political: The Progressive Conservative Response to Social Issues

The American religious right is often taken as the paradigmatic illustration of how conservatives responded to contestation over social issues such as same-sex rights and abortion. This article establishes that the response of Canadian conservatives – as expressed by the Progressive Conservative party – was quite different. The Progressive Conservatives held to a norm, grounded in their party's version of conservative ideology, that rendered partisan mobilization on social issues illegitimate. Rather, the party treated such topics as moral issues on which decisions, if they had to be made at all, ought to be made on grounds of personal conscience. The norm helped limit social conservative mobilization in Canada until the early 1990s, when the Reform Party replaced the Progressive Conservatives as Canada's major right-wing party.