Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren on the relationship between Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his large social conservative base:

Now, Harper made a fairly explicit pact with all the millions of Canadian “social conservatives,” including those in his own caucus. It was, “Support me, and I will give you nothing.” This compared favourably with what the other parties were offering: more social engineering, on the current “progressive” agenda.

We have, most likely, an extended timeout from legal euthanasia and whatever comes next after same-sex marriage. But we would be wrong to think the government in Ottawa is even slightly sympathetic to those old-fashioned Judeo-Christian civilizational values. We are, to them, a lobby like any other.

In Harper’s world, as I understand it, the Canada that was once dominated by the Christian religion, has been replaced (thanks largely to social engineering) by a Canada with two major religions, which are mutually antagonistic. There are people who believe in God, and there are people who don’t think that question is important. Both have their priesthoods …

Harper flourishes, politically, by appeasing both camps, while vacating any ground where they are clashing.

Harper’s political success stems from getting support from social conservatives who either believe he will do something about moral issues or, at the very least, stop the state from pushing the envelope on moral issues, while garnering just enough votes from secularists who understand that he won’t touch moral issues. Harper is probably one of the few people who can pull off that trick and as Warren notes, it is a matter of cold political calculation than any deep-seeded belief. (Pop quiz: what does Stephen Harper really think about abortion and same-sex ‘marriage’? No one really knows and I would suggest that Harper has been thinking about these issues in analytical terms for so long that he might not even have a moral position on these issues.)

The challenge for social conservatives is to understand when taking defensive action politically is insufficient to the moral challenges facing society and persuading enough secularists that they need not be afraid of a reversing course on a couple of social conservative policy items. We are probably not there yet even though the moral crisis we face — the loss of 100,000 unborn babies slaughtered in the womb each and every year, family dysfunction that tears at our social fabric — is serious. For now, not having to fight battles over euthanasia and transgender rights is a relief that should be embraced, but eventually socons and the politicians we help elect need to restore legal protection for the unborn and enable families to flourish.