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Apparently she's a good guy.

Belinda Stronach Great Right Hope

The question is whether she can emerge as the next heavyweight champion of Canadian conservatism.

BRUCE CHEADLE, CP 2004-01-18 06:04:55

OTTAWA -- She is political pugilism's version of the Great Right Hope, the poster-girl package touted by the backroom boys as the next heavyweight champ of Canadian conservatism. But whether Belinda Stronach, the millionaire chief executive of Magna International, can dance in the squared circle of federal politics -- or take a punch from her many adversaries -- is virtually impossible to handicap on the eve of her formal entry into the fight for the leadership of the new Conservative Party of Canada.

Since word leaked two weeks ago she was seriously considering a bid, followed up last week with word Stronach definitely would run, she has made but a single, spare public statement.

"Citizens are encouraging me to run," Stronach told a CBC reporter in Detroit during the North American International Auto Show. "It's something I'm looking at and considering very seriously."

All subsequent interview requests have been put off until her official campaign launch, expected Tuesday.

Her reluctance to say anything beyond those carefully measured words was made abundantly clear Friday when she was reached directly on her cellphone and asked about MP Chuck Strahl's decision not to run for the leadership.

"I'm going to hand you to someone else," she said quickly, then passed the phone to an aide.

Many of her myriad organizers, among them some of the most experienced conservative political operatives in the country, have been almost as difficult to reach.

Yet there's been no want of media coverage, despite the absence of the "air war" typical of most leadership campaigns.

Stories about her political ambitions have been near the top of the news, including huge front-page photos in several major Ontario dailies.

Politically correct letters to the editor already have groused that few news stories fail to mention Stronach's looks.

But apart from the 37-year-old's lofty corporate title (she's president and chief executive of her father Frank Stronach's auto parts company), multimillion-dollar pay package (worth $12.5 million in 2003) and elegant appearance, not a great deal else is known about the twice-divorced mother of two.

Unlike Brian Mulroney, another political outsider who once vaulted to leadership from the corporate sector, Stronach has not honed her public speaking skills as a favoured speech-maker at business gatherings.

Business analysts in Toronto are loath to talk on the record about Stronach and even in anonymity one would only say "she's an unknown commodity. They keep her hidden."

Another called Stronach "a bit of an enigma."

Magna's decentralized corporate structure, in which individual manufacturing plants are largely independently run, makes it difficult to assess Stronach's managerial contributions, said one market watcher.

"It's not a company where you can easily point to one person and say they've done, this, this, this and this."

Rick Anderson, a longtime political strategist for the PC, Reform and Alliance parties, has known Stronach for 10 years and calls her a "next generation" manager who uses consensus to fuse a wide variety of advice.

"She's got this amazingly interesting ability to keep sussing out of people parts of this (political process) that are actually interesting and different and varied and not all of a kind -- and building confidence with people in her," said Anderson, adding he is not part of her campaign team.

Stronach's politics are virtually unknown. Her father once ran for office as a Liberal and Magna has contributed corporate funding to a variety of political parties and politicians.

Stronach herself played a brokerage role in getting the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives to the negotiating table last summer. Former Ontario premiers Mike Harris and William Davis are endorsing her leadership bid.