Very Good Np Editorial...

sir_springer · December 24, 2003

Mulroney, the West and the last laugh

National Post

December 23, 2003

Were the last 15 years of division on Canada's political right necessary? The disunity consigned the country to three consecutive Liberal governments under Jean Chretien, not one of which captured more than 41% of the popular vote. Each one gained a solid majority of Commons seats thanks to vote-splitting between the Tories and the Reform/Alliance rivals. Watching the unveiling of the logo for the newly amalgamated Conservative Party of Canada last week, it is only fair to wonder: Was there some way to avoid the schism that ensued from the creation of the Reform party in 1987?

The short answer is no. Maddening and petty as this schism often seemed, its emergence was made inevitable by the events that preceded it: Preston Manning's feud with Brian Mulroney and then Joe Clark, Ottawa's 1986 decision to shift $1.2-billion worth of maintenance work on CF-18 warplanes from Winnipeg to Montreal, the Meech Lake Accord, Westerners' loss of faith in all the "old-line" parties, and Red Tories' contempt for Westerners all led to a very real regional split that could not be papered over with tactical appeals to unity.

The CF-18 reference included in the list above may seem obscure to young readers. But for Western Canadians at the time, nothing better symbolized Mr. Mulroney's disregard for the region. Winnipeg's Bristol Aerospace Ltd. had not only made a lower bid for the CF-18 work than Montreal's Canadair Ltd., but also one judged by three government departments to be technically superior. It wasn't patronage the West wanted, but impartiality.

The event demonstrated to Westerners that it didn't matter who was in power -- Liberals or Tories: Fair treatment of the West would always take a back seat to appeasing Quebec. The signing of the Meech Lake Accord six months later -- with its constitutional recognition of Quebec's "distinct society" and a veto over future constitutional change, but only a vague promise of some unspecified future negotiations over Senate reform -- merely added insult to the CF-18 injury.

By the time Preston Manning convened his Western Assembly in May, 1987, to discuss what action the West should take, few in the region were in the mood for anything but a new entity, one beholden to neither Quebec federalists nor nationalists. That meshed well with Mr. Manning's personal ambition to create and lead a populist party. At this Vancouver gathering -- the precursor to the Reform party's founding convention in Winnipeg that fall -- the enigmatic son of long-serving Alberta Social Credit premier Ernest Manning laid out three options: Attempt a takeover of one of the existing parties, separate from Canada, or start a new federal party. Three-quarters of the delegates voted for the latter.

Developments from there tumbled out of one player or another's ego. What was to be a purely Western-based party -- Reform -- expanded into Ontario in 1991 because Mr. Manning had dreams of becoming prime minister, not just the leader of an "NDP of the right." And it morphed again into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 because Reform could not make good on Mr. Manning's ambition.

Interestingly, though, Mr. Manning could never bring himself to do the one thing that might have propelled him into 24 Sussex Drive: put the federal Tories out of their misery. An idealistic man, he was preoccupied with "doing politics differently." And so whenever Kim Campbell or Jean Charest or Joe Clark would stumble, Mr. Manning would hesitate to recruit talented Tories away from the older party or steal their donors, until finally the Tories regained enough strength that they could not be crushed or ignored.

The Tories, for their part, were captives of their "red" rump after Mr. Mulroney resigned. And Red Tories, particularly Mr. Clark, were motivated more by keeping Reform and then the Alliance down than by defeating the Liberals, with whom they had more in common policy-wise anyway. Even in the recent merger ratification campaign, successfully stewarded by PC leader Peter MacKay, Red Tories agonized that they could not bear the idea of sharing a caucus with "those people."

It was not out of sheer stubbornness or inaction, in other words, that the right has been stuck between gears these last 15 years: A very real dispute about regionalism led to the creation of a new entity with a new leader that, in turn, established its own equally real political dynamic complete with institutional jealousies and suspicions. Until Preston Manning and Joe Clark had left the scene, until new wounds inflicted on the West by the Chretien Liberals stung more than the old scars left by the Mulroney Tories, and until the Red Tories no longer dominated the PC apparatus, Canada's right was going to be divided.

If Brian Mulroney knew back then that things would unfold as they did, would he still have treated the West the way he did? We're not sure. To our knowledge, he has never expressed regret for his disastrous treatment of the CF-18 service contract and his other mistakes. But in the end, there is a certain poetic justice in the way things turned out. As the 1990s rolled on, the locus of conservative politics moved westward, and the Tories languished in the Commons. Now, Mr. Mulroney's party is no more. And as for the merged entity that will spring from its ashes -- the Conservative Party of Canada -- it will likely be headed by a Western rights advocate, Stephen Harper. The complaint one now hears about the new party isn't that it will exclude the West, but the East.

It might have taken 15 years, Mr. Mulroney. But in the end, the West will likely get the last laugh.