Posted on 09/20/2003 7:27:41 AM PDT by knighthawk
Brian Mulroney, Preston Manning, and Joe Clark are politically dead. Their feuds should die with them. Every Canadian who is not satisfied with the state of our national politics ought to cheer on the negotiations to create a new Conservative party.
It is not so much a matter of "uniting the right" as it is trying to end the prospect of Canada being a one-party state for the next two decades. Despite the best efforts of so many loyalists to the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative parties, it's clear neither has the capacity to make a national breakthrough on its own in any foreseeable national election. The most likely scenario in the next election, in fact, is that the PC's tally would shrink to three or four MPs and the Alliance to about 30 in a Paul Martin landslide. This helps explain why the initiative to hold merger talks appears to be coming largely out of the party caucuses and from strategists rather than from grassroots workers. Alliance and Tory MPs know they have no useful future on their present course.
The new party would be a big-tent, only slightly right-of-centre initiative. The genius of calling it simply the Conservative Party is to appease current PC loyalists while also discarding a Canadian Alliance brand that has simply failed to attract a national following. Most Canadian Conservatives have been in broad agreement through the 1990s on a political agenda: They favour lower taxes, more responsible government spending, higher ethical standards, and a better role for Canada in North American and world affairs. Extremists on the right, such as Western quasi-separatists and Christian fundamentalists and David Orchard Red Tories, would do a union a favour by breaking away and setting up dissident splinter groups, much as the national NDP serves the Liberals as a safety-valve for dedicated leftists.
The past has to be put behind us. Leave it to historians, and only historians, to rehash the reasons why the Mulroney coalition fractured at the end of the 1980s. Forget about the aging coterie of Senators, Canada's most irrelevant politicians, who have nothing better to do than refight old wars.
At best, creating a new party will be a hard sell, especially among CA and PC riding loyalists, who work so hard against one another. It's become clear there will never be voluntary cooperation at the constituency level. It has to be forced from the top down by the politicians whose vision extends forwards rather than backwards, who see further ahead than the next Kicking Horse Pass constituency barbecue.
The current discussions probably are the last chance of avoiding not only a huge electoral disaster sometime next year, but many further years of frustration, irrelevance and demoralization by most associates of the Alliance and the PC party -- not to mention further years of arrogance, corruption and drift by over-confident Liberals.
Yes, there's very little time to overcome huge obstacles to merging the Alliance and the PCs, but perhaps a sense of urgency will help break down resistance. (As well, an election in the spring of 2004 is not as certain as some pundits suggest, and would be seen as unfair if a new party was still organizing.) If the negotiators now face crossing the Rubicon -- i.e. making a serious commitment -- it has to be realized that the alternative is to continue to scratch out a miserable, debt-ridden existence in the buttes, badlands, and dry salt flats of Ottawa's back benches.
With a new party, there is the possibility of rejuvenation, new candidates, provincial support, money, enthusiasm and vitality. Taking on the Liberal Goliath would still be a huge challenge to the new Conservative leader, whoever he or she might be. But at the very least, there would be some hope rather than the nearly complete despair felt by virtually every non-Liberal in Canada. Before we heard about the negotiations this week, some of us were predicting that it would take 12 to 20 years to rebuild Canadian conservatism.
So kudos to the moderates of both parties, especially Don Mazankowski and Bill Davis, who are trying to bring about the merger. During bleak moments this summer, I was wondering whether appeals to Preston Manning and Brian Mulroney to work toward a merger would be useful. But I doubted they would be interested, and in any case their time is past. The best service the battle-scarred veterans can give now is to subside and let the true elder statesmen take over, while also passing the word to their loyalists that it's time to let go. The alternatives are to move on or to fall down.
Michael Bliss is a professor of history at the University of Toronto. His books include Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney.
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