Defining what it means to be a conservative in Canada is an endeavour scarcely worth the effort. The movement often appears less like a coherent viewpoint than a loose coalition of instincts. Recent commentary in the pages of the National Post has made this especially clear.
In a widely discussed series titled “What We’ve Lost,” the paper lamented the erosion of a range of social goods: friendship, resilience, service and nationalism, among others. These claims resonate with many Canadians. Something in our social fabric has clearly weakened. Communities feel thinner. Loneliness is more common. Institutions that once formed character struggle to maintain their authority.
Alongside this, the Post also released several essays celebrating the virtues of economic self-interest in the tradition of Adam Smith — one feature even coming from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Such essays emphasize the familiar claim that societies flourish when individuals pursue their own interests within systems of free exchange. Markets harness self-interest and transform it into prosperity.
This is not an incidental tension. It reflects a deeper and recurring ambiguity within contemporary Conservatism that needs to be addressed.
Both observations — the loss of social values and the goods of market economies — contain truth. Taken together, however, they raise an uncomfortable question: If so many of the formative habits and norms that once shaped individuals are eroding, to what exactly do we think self-interest now refers?
Smith himself did not imagine self-interest as raw appetite or selfishness. His economic theory, articulated in “The Wealth of Nations,” rests on moral foundations explored in his earlier work, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” His ethical work emphasized sympathy, moral judgment and character. The individual whose interests guide the market is not an isolated bundle of desires but a person already shaped by decency and virtue.
Said otherwise: The idea works only if the self in “self-interest” is already morally grounded.
That assumption is precisely what the “What We’ve Lost” series calls into question. Friendship, service, moral judgment and the rest are all goods that Smith recognized in one form or another, and it is not clear that he believed his economic thought could persist in their absence. These values are the habits through which human beings govern themselves. They discipline desire, cultivate responsibility and orient individuals toward goods that extend beyond immediate gratification. In brief, they are the regulations for a “free” market.
Remove such moral norms and the appeal to self-interest becomes something quite different. Instead of guiding productive cooperation, it risks becoming little more than a polite name for self-assertion and the sin of greed.
From a Catholic perspective, this problem points to something deeper than cultural nostalgia. It points to a crisis in our understanding of the human person. Catholic social teaching has long insisted that human beings are not merely individuals pursuing private advantage but persons embedded in relationships within families, communities and ultimately before God.
The Catholic tradition, therefore, treats the moral formation of the person as a central social concern. The virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude are not private accomplishments but the conditions that make genuine freedom possible. Without them, liberty collapses into the licensing of impulse — and a true society is no mere collection of impulses.
Seen from this perspective, the tension visible in Conservative commentary reflects a deeper confusion. On the one hand, many observers sense that our society has lost the habits that once formed responsible citizens. On the other hand, they continue to rely on a model of social order that presumes those habits still exist.
The real question, then, is not whether markets or prosperity are good things. The economic achievements of modern societies are undeniable. The more fundamental question is what kind of human beings such a society forms — and whether its members possess the moral resources required to sustain proper freedom, economic or otherwise.
Here the Catholic tradition offers a perspective that Conservatives and, frankly, all political parties in Canada often overlook. Freedom and prosperity ultimately depend on the formation of persons capable of self-governance. Families, churches and communities play an indispensable role in cultivating the virtues that make such freedom possible. Insofar as free markets and self-interest contravene those formative environments, they ought to be called into question.
Without this deeper insight, appeals to self-interest, however well-intentioned, are unlikely to restore what our society increasingly senses it has lost. If anything, these appeals accelerate the disappearance of virtuous conduct such that greed and exploitation might appear.
Before encouraging individuals to pursue their “interests,” we must first recover a richer understanding of the selves we are and (re)discover what should interest us.
