Читать книгу Full Circle: Death and Resurrection In Canadian Conservative Politics - Bob Plamondon - Страница 15

Preston Manning came to national politics with all the credibility and sophistication that we would expect of the son of one of Canada’s right-wing political icons. Ernest Manning not only directed Canada’s National Back to the Bible Hour, a radio broadcast syndicated to more than ninety outlets, but was also, for twenty-five years, the Social Credit premier of Alberta.

Born June 10, 1942, Preston was raised in the evangelical Christian tradition. His faith is deep, profound, and the foundation of his life. From a very young age, Preston lived with a strong sense of civic duty. This is not something he picked up casually over time at the dinner table. He had a small side office in the Alberta Legislature beside his father’s. While other kids played in the streets after school, Preston did his homework in the office next to the premier. As a child, Preston was immersed in more than the family farm; he was entrenched in the family business of politics and religion. He read the Alberta statutes as a way to understand what his father did for a living. The accomplishments of the senior Manning helped instil in Preston a strong sense of destiny, a high dose of ego, and a legacy on which to build.

Preston’s older brother, Keith, was the victim of oxygen deprivation at birth. Keith was unable to attend school and suffered from seizures and arrested mental development. He died in 1986 at the age of forty-six. Manning describes the suffering of his brother as his family’s “greatest sorrow.” Sometimes a struggle of this magnitude draws a family together, but Preston confided that his was not a particularly close or emotionally supportive family. In his second autobiography, Preston laments the difficulty he had expressing his emotions and passions about Canada, and this difficulty appears to have limited his ability to connect with Canadians about his most deeply held convictions. In this regard, his childhood appears to have left its mark.

Parents of five children, Preston Manning and his wife, Sandra, have struggled with how best to integrate their faith with a life in politics. In his first autobiography, Preston devoted an entire chapter, called “The Spiritual Dimension,” to the subject of faith. One approach Manning has followed is to “work Christianity with the urgent or existing public agenda... trying to influence it from within the application of one’s most deeply held values.” Manning wrote words to this effect in the constitution of the Reform Party of Canada, under section 11, which stated: “We believe in freedom of conscience and religion, and the right of Canadians to advocate, without fear of intimidation or suppression, public policies which reflect their most deeply held values.” However, on matters of morality and conscience, Manning is a fervent democrat and believes that citizens, not politicians, should determine public policy on matters such as abortion. Even though his faith and conscience would consider the procedure abhorrent, he would vote for legislation that would enable the procedure if that were the clear will of his constituents.

Manning was raised to be suspicious of the intentions and deeds of the mainstream political parties and was deeply rooted in the populist political traditions of Western Canada. The Social Credit movement, where his father left his mark, heavily influenced Manning. In addition, Manning cites the Progressive Party and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, which later became the left-wing federal New Democratic Party) as sources of inspiration. Although there is nothing in the Social Credit name that implies conservatism, most historians would agree that it was a conservative party through and through; it just had a different name.

Manning’s appreciation for the power that can be unleashed by a populist movement is not academic or theoretical. He grew up with it. His father, at the age of twenty-six, was one of fifty-six Socred candidates who were thrust into power in the provincial election of August 22, 1935, a scant five months after the party was founded. When Preston Manning talks of a spark that can ignite a prairie firestorm, he only has to think of the rapid and overwhelming ascent of Social Credit in Alberta in 1935. If it could happen once, thought Preston, it could happen again.

Manning also carried with him a sense of destiny, a belief that he would one day form and lead a populist western-based political party. This would be his vehicle to transform the alignment of traditional political parties and ultimately reshape the country. From this perspective, the formation of the Reform Party of Canada was not a question of if or why, but a question of when. Manning waited for the right conditions to launch the new party for nearly two decades before Mulroney’s 1984 election victory.

Manning might well have been permanently turned off by main- stream political parties when he saw his father’s cherished and aging

Social Credit Party replaced in Alberta by the vibrant and youthful Progressive Conservative party under the leadership of Peter Lougheed. Preston thought enough of Lougheed during the Socred twilight to advocate a merger or coalition between Social Credit and the provincial PCs. And thus, in the mid-1960s, Preston Manning led a process similar to the one that would ultimately bring the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties together in 2003. Small groups of emissaries from both the Socreds—represented by Preston Manning and Erick Schmidt—and the PCs—represented by Joe Clark and Merv Leitch—led these strictly confidential negotiations. The meetings went so far as to suggest a new name (Social Conservative), produce a statement of principles, and choose party colours. In the end, however, the leadership of each party concluded it did not need the other party to win government. Lougheed won the next election, and the PCs were proven right.

Preston Manning was stung by how the traditional parties treated his father’s predecessor, William Aberhart. As the retired Social Credit premier, Aberhart was nominated for an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta. The partisan Liberal members of the university senate refused to ratify the nomination. According to Preston, “Liberal members of the Senate, still smarting from their electoral defeats at Aberhart’s hands, could not bring themselves to be magnanimous towards their old foe.” This incident might well have been on Preston’s mind in the late 1990s when he was seeking co-operation from the federal Tories his Reform party had decimated in the 1993 general election.

The Liberal party was kinder to Preston’s father than to Aberhart. Ernest Manning resigned as premier of Alberta, then was appointed in 1970 to the Senate of Canada by Pierre Trudeau, where he served for thirteen years until his retirement on September 20, 1983.

Although a conservative by nature, Preston Manning was never an advocate or supporter of the Progressive Conservatives. Like his father, he was ensconced in the Social Credit Party. He ran for federal Parliament as a Socred in 1962 at the age of twenty, when Diefenbaker went from a record-breaking majority to a thin minority government. The Socreds received a substantial portion of the conservative vote, rocketing from zero seats in 1957 to thirty seats in 1962. Manning lost to Progressive Conservative candidate William Skoreyko, who had more than twice as many votes as Manning.

With his father out of office, Preston decided to lay low. Rather than join the only conservative option available in Alberta, he bided his time. He believed that every generation or so, an opportunity would arise that would invite fundamental reform of political parties and institutions. This sense of destiny was imparted to Preston by his father and was articulated in Ernest Manning’s book on political realignment, which they researched and wrote together in 1967.

A central thesis of the book was that meaningful political choice did not exist in Canada because the federal Progressive Conservative Party and the federal Liberal Party were ideologically indistinguishable. What was needed, argued the elder Manning, was a social conservative movement, which he said would bring “the humanitarian concerns of those with awakened social consciences to the economic persuasions of those with a firm conviction in the value of freedom of economic activity and enlightened private enterprise.” The belief that the Liberals and Conservatives are indistinguishable was alive and well in Preston Manning twenty years after it was posited in his father’s book.

While a small-c conservative by nature, Manning never attempted to influence or ingratiate himself within the Progressive Conservative party. He resisted efforts by Joe Clark and others in 1972 who wanted him to run as a PC candidate in Pembina, Alberta. Manning thought very little of the PC party and wondered “whether the Conservatives had been born under an unlucky star, with a con- genital inability to govern themselves, let alone the country.” Manning had a different approach. “Rather than participate politically... through either of the traditional parties, I would wait, complete my political and economic education in the real world, and become politically active again if and when the winds of the Western reform tradition once more began to blow.” While surely a conservative, Manning was more influenced by populism than by the world’s great conservative leaders of the era, such as Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain. His heroes were more likely to be Canadians who countered established norms and order, for example, Louis Riel, Joseph Howe of Nova Scotia, and the visionaries and builders of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Preston Manning, remember, was a reformer.

Manning could not implement his plan while the Liberals were in power because most western Canadians had pinned their hopes for reforming their national government on the Progressive Conservative party. In the five elections before 1984, Progressive Conservatives had won 95 seats in Alberta, to the Liberals’ 4. Even the Trudeaumania sweep of 1968 did little to threaten the Tory dominance of Alberta politics. When Joe Clark’s short-lived conservative government went down to defeat in 1980, the Liberals elected only two MPs in Western Canada. Westerners must surely have been wondering if they would ever have influence in Ottawa. It was this perceived repudiation that gave rise to the phrase often quipped by Preston Manning and Reform party supporters: “The West Wants In.”

Some might be surprised that the West wanted in after Pierre Trudeau introduced the destructive National Energy Program (NEP) on October 28, 1980.The NEP increased Canadian control and ownership of the energy industry while shielding the country, and the East in particular, from rising oil prices. The NEP imposed price controls and federal taxes on oil and gas production, which most Albertans and many Canadians thought was an intrusion into provincial jurisdiction. Companies operating in the oil patch responded by leaving the province, increasing unemployment in Alberta. “The NEP wiped the Liberals out of the West for a generation,” said Preston Manning. In the early 1980s, the NEP was a rallying cry for the loud and growing voices of western discontent, most of which found a home in the Progressive Conservative party.

When Brian Mulroney was elected to office in 1984, Preston Manning was forty-two years old. We can conclude from Manning’s writing that he never wanted Brian Mulroney’s PC government to succeed. For the twenty years before Mulroney was sworn in, Manning had been advocating a new western-based, conservative- minded, populist movement. The national political spotlight would soon be shining upon him.