On the bus, tonight, reading the Georgia Straight - still the best of our free newspapers for trips to the burbs - I came to the “Stephen Harper is no Tory” commentary by Terry Glavin.

Being one of the former legions of Canadian high school students who didn’t pay attention in Canadian history classes, I decided to be productive with my bus time and make up for years of doodling my crush’s name prefixed with “Mrs.” all over my binders instead of remembering who Louis Riel was or what this Confederation thing was all about.

The article points out that conservative in Canada did not always mean conservative in the American sense: “To an American, for instance, to be “conservative” is to be right-wing, strongly suspicious of the state, and most likely some kind of Christian fundamentalist.”

A Canadian conservative is a sheep grazing on an entirely different patch of the field:

“Canada’s distinct ‘Red Tory’ conservatives had always been wary of American empire, firmly federalist, politically centrist, and as suspicious of antiestablishment socialists on the left as they were of the individualists and free-market advocates on the right, in the Liberal party. To be a Tory in Canada was to cleave to the principles of universality and the common good, and to welcome the progressive role of the state in nation-building.”

What this means is that Matthew Cuthbert is exonerated.

Matthew, Anne of Green Gables’ beloved elderly guardian, admitted to being a conservative in Chapter 18 where Anne saves the day for a feverish infant and returns to the good graces of the Barry family (whose daughter Diana, Anne had previously intoxicated with a bottle of currant wine instead of the virgin raspberry cordial the girls were meant to drink). The revelation comes right before a panicked Diana stumbles into the room for Anne’s help: “To vote Conservative was part of Matthew’s religion.”

As sweet in the book by Lucy Maud Montgomery as in the 1985 where he was played by Richard Farnsworth, Matthew had only this shortcoming. My idealist teen Maoist eyes could not believe what they had read: the sweet, shy Matthew was not a man of the people but a money-grubbing capitalist. I approached Matthew from then with suspicion.

Matthew is decent and fair by Glavin’s definition. I sure hope the Annotated Anne of Green Gables contains this distinction for the younger generation.