The pendulum swings back toward Canada’s ‘common sense’ Conservatives

Allow me to begin by brutally beating a joke to death in order to make a point.

We are often told that the biggest problem with common sense is that it’s not very common. Like many jokes, it works by playing with an unconscious contradiction within the concept being addressed: that “common sense” and “good sense” are not actually synonymous, even though we almost always use the former to mean the latter.

Whether or not something constitutes good sense is open to interpretation or argument. But if something is common sense—an idea so obviously correct that everybody agrees (or should reasonably be expected to agree) it’s correct—then the only people who would think otherwise are dumb, deficient, deviant, and/or demented in some way. As a case in point, philosophy student Liana Gordon defined common sense in the National Post earlier this year as “self-evident truths, accessed using simple reason, applicable to the public conscience and written on the heart of the common man.”

References to common sense, then, effectively kill two birds with one stone: they police the boundaries of in-group/out-group membership at the same time as they shut down curiosity and critical thinking with an appeal to popular authority.

As you can see, it’s an effective rhetorical strategy when you’re trying to win over a crowd and don’t want to get lost in details or nuanced debate. Small wonder, then, that appeals to people’s “common sense” get so much play in Canadian politics.

The Common Sense (Counter-)Revolution

The Pierre Poilievre-era Common Sense Conservatives™ branding has a long pedigree. Mike Harris, Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario from 1995 to 2002, was swept into office on the promise of a “Common Sense Revolution” steeped in the standard right-wing values of the Reagan-Thatcher axis: cutting taxes, slashing social programs, and hammering organized labour. (This hasn’t been peer reviewed, but my personal theory is that Canada is roughly 8-12 years behind political culture shifts elsewhere in the Anglosphere.)

Notably, Harris’s Common Sense Revolution also took aim at the outgoing NDP government’s employment equity legislation on the basis that so-called “affirmative action quotas” rewarded “special interests” instead of hard work and merit. Replace “affirmative action” with “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” and “special interests” with “identity politics”—and the implicit “political correctness” with “woke mind virus”—and it very quickly becomes clear that everything old is new again as far as conservative culture warriors are concerned.

The ascendance of right-wing populism in both Canada and the United States over the last decade has made appealing to common sense a potent political manoeuvre. Doug Ford successfully leveraged it to win the 2018 Ontario election, and we can see his suburbanite folk wisdom underpinning plans to override municipalities and tear up bike lanes in order to improve traffic congestion (a seemingly straightforward and intuitive solution that absolutely does not work). Alberta under the United Conservative Party is a special case because what passes as common sense among conservatives in Wild Rose Country would seem comically nonsensical to the rest of Canada—like abandoning any emissions reduction efforts because the UCP recognizes carbon dioxide as “a foundational nutrient for all life on earth,” for example, or trying to punish trans people for existing in public.

Of course, rhetorically gesturing to obviousness as a means of shutting down thought and discussion isn’t limited to reactionaries. Justin Trudeau was appealing to a liberal variant of common sense when he pithily explained that his rationale for a gender-parity cabinet was “because it’s 2015,” and anyone who spent time in progressive spaces in the 2010s likely heard—or said—“it’s not my job to educate you” as an earnest response to questions. This attitude most recently paid big dividends for the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, because it turns out that voters love to be told their opinions are wrong—even when, by every available objective and subjective measure, they are. (The federal Liberals, sensing blood in the water, have since decided that the “vibecession” is real. It’s a Christmas miracle!)

The approaches differ in style according to the underlying ideological orientation; liberals make you look stupid for dissenting while conservatives make you look crazy. But they are two sides of the same coin, opposing ends of a pendulum arc that swings between shame and disgust, preening elitism and vindictive vulgarity, united in the certainty that the average voter is a total fuckin’ rube.

The closing of the Canadian mind

Looking at the bigger picture, this thing we call “common sense” isn’t really a thing at all. At the broadest level, common sense is more of an atmosphere: the cultural air we breathe, a collective framework for understanding the world. It represents the limit, horizon, and structure of shared social meaning. What passes for common sense is historically and culturally conditioned, a mass of conscious and unconscious ideas and associations rife with contradiction and incoherence, containing elements of truth and falsehood, insight and superstition, wisdom and foolishness.

This is not to say that the concept of common sense is good or bad, so much as pointing to it as though it is self-evident or obvious—or otherwise “written on the heart of the common man”—tells us much more about the person doing the pointing than anything about reality. 

Lots of things that seem self-evidently true when accessed by “simple reason” are more complicated than they first appear: the sun does not revolve around the earth, for instance, despite this being a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw based on simply looking at the sky. 

What counts as common sense depends more on who is talking, and who is listening, than on what is actually being discussed: it names a social relationship whose content and form is shaped by systems of power. One way of understanding politics, then, is as a contest between social groups over who gets to define what counts as common sense—who gets to mobilize its thought-terminating cliches to shut down discussion, or wield its wordless intuitions in a way that opens the horizon of what can be imagined.

In Canada, at this moment in time, the pendulum is swinging back toward the Conservatives. There are many reasons for this, but the most salient for this discussion is that the world is rapidly undergoing extensive and destabilizing changes, and the material conditions of many people are deteriorating. We are part of an extraordinarily complex global socioeconomic system which most of us only dimly understand and over which we have almost no control or influence. Hence the appeal of self-evident truths, accessed using simple reason, endlessly repeated across the crumbling remains of Canada’s shared cultural institutions as a soothing reassurance: everything sucks and it’s the government’s fault.

You can’t afford a house because there are too many immigrants. You can’t get a job because you don’t meet DEI criteria. You can’t make your relationships work because radical gender ideology is making men too soft and women too hard and children too confused. Criminals need to be punished, drug addicts need to be forced into rehab, and the police need way more money. Climate change is a scam to take your truck and raise your taxes, which will be wasted anyway because the government is too big and does everything wrong. You’re not even allowed to be proud of Canada anymore—just look at what they did to Don Cherry. So wouldn’t it feel good to say “Fuck Trudeau” and vote for vengeance?

All this stuff is obvious; there’s no need to commit sociology. It goes without saying; it speaks for itself; it’s just common sense. Only some kind of wacko would think otherwise.