Oliver's Twist (26 page)

The final humiliation for Campbell was that she had trouble finding work after the election defeat. Chrétien sent her to Los Angeles as the Canadian consul since, as Eddie Goldenberg remarked, we could not have a former prime minister on unemployment insurance, even if she was a Conservative.

The Tories attempted to rebuild over the next ten years under the leadership of Jean Charest, one of the most genuine people I have met in politics, and then under the good soldier Joe Clark in his second tour of duty. Neither could stop the tide of change demanded by the hard right from within the party ranks.

Political influence comes in many guises, and we in the media don't always recognize a game changer when we meet one. In the late 1990s, a political outrider, a man the press gallery gently derided as “Parson” Manning, undeniably shaped the national agenda. His utter faith in the rightness of his views and the conviction with which he expressed them seemed very like sermons from the pulpit, but I expect history will give favourable reviews to Preston Manning, if only in a sidebar.

The issues that Manning chose to push into the spotlight— taxes, the deficit, crime, and tough love for Quebec—became the country's major political preoccupations for nearly a decade. He created a space in the public arena for serious discussion of ideas that were barely mentionable by the mainstream parties. At the close of the twentieth century, the reigning Liberals were once again happy to co-opt the positions popularized by their rivals, and Manning succeeded indirectly in shifting the country to the right. His railing against government debt fed public
concern, which allowed Chrétien and his finance minister Paul Martin to take the drastic measures they did to straighten out the nation's finances.

Preston's father, Ernest C. Manning, was the Social Credit premier of Alberta during much of my tenure as a CBC reporter covering the Prairies. Beloved by Albertans for his famous
Back to the Bible Hour
radio show
,
Ernest was to me an austere, humourless figure who barely tolerated reporters and rarely spoke to them. Communicating with the press was not a part of public duty as he saw it. We were a pack of peeping Toms, and how he ran his government was none of our business.

I expected the worst when in 1987 Preston was chosen to lead the newly created Reform Party of Canada at its founding “assembly” (not convention) in Vancouver. First impressions from the stump seemed to reinforce the hard-line schoolmaster image, so it was a surprise to discover a very different man in person. Preston Manning had a quick laugh and, unlike so many political leaders, was a keen listener. As for the party he created with a corporal's guard of discontented Westerners, it was a modern version of the traditional agrarian protest movements of the 1930s, with the added feature of a strong right-wing religious component.

But Manning was thinking beyond regional grievances. He believed real change was possible only by taking hold of the levers of power at the national level. If Reform's activism were confined to one or two provinces, its ambitions would be frustrated. In the early going, even after Reform had won its first federal seat with Deborah Grey's victory in a 1989 by-election, most of us in the national press corps regarded the party as a prairie fire that would burn itself out as quickly as it had ignited. I began
to pay more attention when two old Vancouver friends confided that they had become financial supporters. One was my cousin, Tony Allen, a criminal lawyer and long-time NDP supporter; the other was a wealthy businessman and a Conservative. These were no Prairie rednecks.

While I may have been late seeing Reform coming, Brian Mulroney was not. During Mulroney's second term, his office called me to advise that the prime minister would be making a keynote speech to an audience of heavy hitters at the Palliser Hotel in Calgary. Recognizing that Manning posed a serious challenge to the Tories in the West, Mulroney focused in his speech on the evils of Reform. He hinted strongly that the Reformers were a nest of racists and bigots, and warned that an economic policy based on massive tax cuts and deficit elimination would break the country and destroy its social fabric. No doubt he also recognized that this upstart movement could undermine the western pillar of the coalition that sustained his own success. When I spoke to audience members afterwards, I was surprised at the hostile reaction to Mulroney's words from individuals whom I expected to be loyal Conservatives.

No better rule obtains for a reporter than to go and see for himself. In the fall of 1989, I went on the road with Manning, touring Manitoba and northern Ontario. Not since the days of the CCF in Saskatchewan had I witnessed such earnest grassroots politicking. There was almost no advance work beyond renting a hall, and there was no attraction beyond a slight man with a Prairie twang, owl's glasses, and a stock speech that was long on detail and short on bombast. Yet he packed them in. All it took were handwritten notes nailed to telephone poles or circulated in stores and the crowds appeared out of nowhere.
Manning was a preacher, sure enough, though personally anticharismatic. The power was in the message. The crowds were not jaded enough to dismiss his ideas—direct democracy, an elected Senate, no special status for Quebec—as impossible objectives, though they seemed like pipe dreams to hardbitten reporters.

I found Manning sometimes irritable with reporters but also candid in his relationships with them. He was not a man to tell an easy joke, but he did not lack a sense of humour about himself. The CTV cameraman assigned to Manning's first national campaign, Bill Purchase, had a great talent for mimicry and his imitation of Manning could fool the leader's own staff. One day Purchase was re-enacting a speech in that familiar high-pitched drawl when the man himself walked into the press room. Purchase froze, but Manning immediately picked up the recitation where Purchase had left off.

In public settings, Manning was serious and occasionally distant. Fortunately for him, his wife, Sandra, possessed an outgoing friendliness that helped warm her husband's image. The three of us went horseback riding together in the Alberta foothills and I could not help but be impressed by Manning's obvious delight in his wife. At dinner in the ranch house later, Sandra took the lead in the conversation around the table, while Manning listened with respect and admiration. They made a good team, each complementing the other's personality.

After the 1997 election, when Reform ousted the Bloc Québécois to become the Official Opposition, friends who represented a Canadian Jewish organization visited me in my office. We made small talk while I tried to guess why they'd wanted to see me. Finally, after some delicate tap dancing, they came to the point. I had covered Manning and his party for some time, they
noted. Was there, as some believed, an anti-Semitic bias in the leader and the organization?

Though the party had its share of right-wing zealots and haters of gays and lesbians, Manning used precious political credit to heave them out. No party can control the private prejudices or statements of its members, but I never heard from Manning or any of his senior people even a whiff of anti-Semitism or intolerance of any kind. Those few closest to Manning were thoughtful and honest characters, fired up with the need for change. They included the wise Ray Speaker, the acerbic Rick Anderson, and the rough-hewn but fair-minded Jay Hill. All were moderates from the centre right but far from typical among the early Reform MPs.

My impression was that most of these rookies had never visited eastern Canada, let alone travelled abroad. They brought a fierce partisanship and a stiff moralism that verged on the sanctimonious. To them, Ottawa was Sodom and Gomorrah on the Rideau, full of soft-on-crime judges, lazy civil servants, spendthrift Liberals, and a complicit national media. They were the “antis”—anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-government, and anti-Quebec.

In time, however, more than a few of the rookies showed themselves as susceptible to human frailty as the rest of us. During the sixteen years between the arrival of Manning and the Harper government's second re-election, quite a number retreated from politics after finding public life more than they could handle. Some left to save their marriages, others abandoned their families for the doe-eyed assistants who provided the admiration they did not get at home. At one point I estimated that as many as 20 percent of the 2010 Harper Cabinet had left their spouses,
openly taken lovers, switched sexual preferences, or otherwise been undone by lonely nights and alcohol. None of this was new to Parliament Hill; the difference was that their fellow MPs did not pretend to moral superiority.

Manning at least was flexible and open to ideas. While he was a dedicated Christian fundamentalist, he did not wear his religious heart on his sleeve. For that reason, few thought he would try to impose his personal moral beliefs on the country, as might some of his caucus.

In the moment of Canadian history that Manning inhabited, he may have done the country a great service in another way. The Western provinces and the Prairies in particular nursed a cauldron of resentments and grievances against centralized government and eastern Canada. Manning could have exploited and inflamed those sentiments; instead, he chose the slogan “The West wants in.” By doing so, his movement caught the voice of the West, but also spiked the guns of growing Western alienation and Western separatism.

In 2000, the momentum to unite the right led to the formation of the Canadian Alliance, a coalition of Reformers and a few prominent members of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. The Alliance chose Stockwell Day over Manning as party leader, assuming the youthful, photogenic Day could win the new entity votes in Ontario. But Day communicated a message that most Ontarians didn't want to hear, backed up by a perceived record of anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-gun, and pro-hangman rhetoric—all of which his opponents put to devastating use in the election campaign later that year. The party seemed headed for the extreme right, rather than the political centre that Manning had steered for
and where the vast majority of voters in eastern Canada felt comfortable.

Had Manning contested the 2000 election, I have no doubt he would have been a formidable challenger to Jean Chrétien. Normally we hope for too much from fresh arrivals on the political scene: We want perfection and they inevitably disappoint. With Preston Manning, it was different. Little was expected from him at the start, but by the time he left in 2001, I felt that Manning and his wife, Sandra, had lent a fleeting grace to the political life of the country.

It would be hard to say as much for Kim Campbell or Stockwell Day. They are the unforgiven, never to be forgotten for taking their respective parties into the abyss. Both soared unexpectedly to the top of their parties' hierarchies, even though they were relative newcomers. They barely knew the key aides and advisers they'd inherited, inviting mistrust on both sides, and their campaigns were hobbled by infighting. The contrast with their common rival, Chrétien, who had operated for thirty years with the support of a savvy kitchen cabinet, could not have been greater.

Certainly Campbell and Day had charisma. They looked like leaders, and in the early going, their glibness was taken for profundity. Unlike Campbell perhaps, Day was never a serious contender, especially after a devastating CBC mini-documentary featured his evangelically inspired view on evolution. Canadians began to believe Day was simply an oddball, possibly a dangerous one. He had embarked on a campaign with all the superficial elements in his favour, and then talked voters into defeating him with a series of embarrassing pronouncements. On election day 2000, the Canadian Alliance added two seats
to their Opposition ranks, but the breakthrough in Ontario never materialized.

Thereafter the internecine struggle to oust Day was a circus of intrigue and betrayal. Almost daily, willing caucus sources kept me informed of the latest plans and timetables to remove the leader. My informants will remain unnamed, as Stephen Harper later gave many of them plum Cabinet posts. Day at least had the satisfaction of becoming one of the most competent and mediafriendly members of that front bench and of shifting attention away from the most contentious of his early beliefs.

Harper elbowed aside all comers and won the leadership of the Alliance in 2002. After that one of his closest advisers, John Reynolds, admitted they were watching greedily when, on May 31, 2003, Peter MacKay won the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. The defeated candidates, including Jim Prentice and Scott Brison, were furious when it emerged that MacKay had secured the backing of another rival, David Orchard, by signing an agreement promising never to merge the party with the Alliance. The race was tight, and MacKay captured it only on the fourth ballot amid accusations of duplicity. By that August, polls showed that his personal standing with Canadians was in the low single digits and support for the party near an all-time low. None of that much mattered, because before long MacKay took the party and his own leadership of it and smothered both in the cradle. In mid-October 2003, following a series of secret meetings, Harper and MacKay shook hands on a deal to merge the two parties.