Читать книгу Full Circle: Death and Resurrection In Canadian Conservative Politics - Bob Plamondon - Страница 3

BY LAWRENCE MARTIN

Canadian conservatives have had a turbulent, luckless and losing history woven in cycles of despair. When the party occasionally did triumph in elections, the prize was quickly squandered. R.B. Bennett was derailed by the biggest depression the country ever saw. John Diefenbaker’s mismanagement of a golden opportunity was catastrophic. Joe Clark, unbelievably, dismantled his minority government in nine months. The party was jinxed. A death wish seemed to hover it. If further proof was needed, it came later in the 1980s. Brian Mulroney had seemingly put an end to the long run of grief. He’d won a record-shattering majority in 1984 and seemed well on his way to another robust victory. He had built a coalition of the West and Quebec. Not since John A. Macdonald had the party been so comfortably situated in power.

But as if further proof of an eternal curse was needed, Preston Manning chose this advantageous moment to launch a full-scale revolt in the form of the creation of a new conservative party—one which would splinter the old and send conservatives into nearly a generation of new turmoil, virtually guaranteeing the Liberals a slew of majority victories under Jean Chrétien.

While many could have imagined a protest party being launched when Pierre Trudeau was in power and inflicting the West with assaults like the National Energy Plan, few could have foreseen it happening when the party controlled the power levers and when, as Brian Mulroney could well argue, many Western grievances were being addressed.

The Mulroney Conservatives not only lost their Western base. The Quebec end of the coalition was shattered as well. Lucien Bouchard bolted the party over a dispute over the Meech Lake Accord and formed his own splinter party, the Bloc Québécois.

The old party was divided in a way it never had been before. More than that, its collapse had left the unity of the country imperilled. There was but one dominant governing party and in Reform and the Bloc, two regionally built formations riding a wave of regional grievances.

The astonishing story of the crash of conservatism and its rebirth is the subject of Bob Plamondon’s Full Circle. The author comes at it with a unique perspective. Party insiders sometimes do such books. Academics sometimes do them and often it is journalists who take up the challenge. Plamondon provides the advantage of bringing all three perspectives to the table. He has taught at several universities, he was a party insider, having run once for the Tories and worked for the party in elections and leadership conventions. In researching the book, he has done the journalists’ labour, interviewing more than thirty key figures in the drama.

His voyage through the last two decades brings new twists and astute analysis to the narrative. Because the post-Mulroney conservative factions could never manage to pose a legitimate threat at winning power, they were hardly the subject of a profusion of books and studies. Plamondon’s is the first to chart the fall and rise with such thoroughness.

Having created the Reform Party, Preston Manning was soon to learn that as a right-leaning Alberta-based rump, he could not win on the national level. He was an historian of sorts. History, as Plamondon amply records, demonstrated that the Conservatives only won when they built coalitions to broaden their tent. Manning had narrowed it.

Having divided the right, the Reform leader, with a straight face, now launched a bid to unite it—to fold the party that he had only just broken into two back into one. Canadian politics had seen a lot of chutzpah, but rarely anything to match the gall of this. Manning didn’t quite see it this way. He tells Bob Plamondon that his creation of Reform (later turned into the Alliance) may well have saved Canada.

For Canadian conservatives, what he had created had the look of despair. In 2003, as the Liberals were moving to replace Jean Chrétien with Paul Martin, polls told the story. The Liberals were in the 50s, the Progressive Conservatives were at about 15 per cent and the Reform/Alliance was closer to 10.

But the utterly depressing prospects were ironically what saved the right. Neither of the leaders of the two conservative parties had anywhere to go. For the Tories, Peter MacKay was crippled by the backroom dealing he had engaged in to win the leadership. The Orchard affair, for the first time, gets a full hearing in this book. As Plamondon points out, leadership conventions have often been marked by secret plots and secret deals. The pact between MacKay and the left-wing Tory David Orchard took on a more sinister life than the others.

For the future of conservatism, it was good that it did. Without this albatross, MacKay might well have determined he could have led the Tories back to glory.

But now, in what was probably the pivotal decision in the entire piece, MacKay quickly decided he would surrender his leader’s status and the entire status of his party for the sake of trying to achieve unity on the right. He did so knowing he would break the pact with Orchard, earning him yet more condemnation on that score. He knew he would alienate party stalwarts like Joe Clark forever. He was closing down a party with a century and a half of history. He was surrendering his leadership status without even being afforded one chance of going to the polls.

For things to come full circle, Stephen Harper had to bow down as well. That would only come about if he too saw scant hope for growth. Fortunately for merger prospects, the party was just as immobile under him as previous leaders. Harper lacked personal appeal, a public personality, but was strategically adept and had a capacity to compromise. Realizing that despite the big edge in seats his party held over the Tories he couldn’t make gains without them, he plotted his own party’s demise as well, being prepared, in so doing, to be conciliatory on some of the party’s right-wing leanings.

Full Circle details the story of how the surprisingly quick merger was conceived and executed. What effective authors of history do is get underneath the running accounts of journalism to provide new information, insights, and meaningful context.

Plamondon’s account reveals how an obscure event, the Perth–Middlesex by-election in May 2003, changed Stephen Harper. It reveals special moments, such as the fateful one when MacKay came across Harper in the Commons corridor and uttered the words, “You and I have to talk:” It shows how Belinda Stronach, credited in the media as a significant player in the merger, was in fact of little significance. How Brian Mulroney was pulling the strings telling everyone how Jean Chrétien had been going to bed every night saying, “Merci beaucoup, Preston Manning:” How Harper emissaries shocked the Tories in initial secret merger meetings in a hotel room booked under the name “John Macdonald” by being prepared to give away the store on almost every demand the Tories put forward.

The merger produced little initial excitement—and not much of a jump in the opinion polls for the new Conservative party. But Canadians politics was dramatically altered by this event. The right was unified and it was unified in such a way—with MacKay letting Harper have a free run at the leadership of the new party—that it gave the West the prominence it had long sought. The old Progressive Conservatives had sometimes been almost indistinguishable from the old Liberals. Not the new party.

Difficulties lay ahead after the merger. Harper’s leadership was in question after he let a chance to win the 2004 election slip away. But he recovered and the new formation held and it got the big break in the form of a governing party scandal that opposition parties thrive on. In the 2005 election, it took advantage.

In just two years, the conservatives in Canada had moved from their ruinous divided status and some 40 percentage points behind in the polls to unity and to strength. Against all odds—with a leader who so many in the press and the public had written off as a dud— they had moved to governance.

All had changed. From the bottom of the pit they had climbed to the top. They now had hope, legitimate hope, that their history of grief was over. They now had hope, legitimate hope, of a long and wedded future, one which would change the country.