Was PM Harper a Tory? Terry Gavin on Ron Dart and the Red Tory tradition (2006)

Editor's comment: In 2006, the Georgia Straight published an article asking if PM Stephen Harper was properly termed a Tory. The article focused on Ron Dart's insights into the 'Red Tory' tradition. The article is an interesting read as a retrospective of the Harper regime.  

Stephen Harper is no Tory

by Terry Glavin on February 2nd, 2006 at 9:00 AM

 

Milton Acorn was Canada's "people's poet". He was a founder of the Georgia Straight. There was a time when his poetry readings filled union halls across the country with adoring legions of communists, feminists, and student activists.

Stephen Leacock was the founding father of the Canadian sense of humour, but he was also the chairman of the political-science department at McGill University. His Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich was a bestseller in Moscow in the heady days following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

Just a few steps from the plot where Leacock is buried, at Sibbald Point, Ontario, is the grave of Mazo de la Roche, who was once Canada's best-loved novelist. She authored the internationally acclaimed Jalna series, which was a sort of multivolume, epic Brideshead Revisited.

Then there was Eugene Forsey, proud Newfoundlander, socialist, Rhodes scholar, and constitutional expert. He was a founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of the New Democratic Party.

Apart from being dead, the thing these people have in common is that they were all Tories.

Here's another Tory: Ron Dart, a prolific, polymathic, and very-alive political-science professor at the University College of the Fraser Valley. 

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