| Judging by the media’s reaction to events at the federal Progressive Conservative party leadership convention two weeks ago, you’d have thought leadership candidate David Orchard had sprouted horns and cloven feet to go along with his showroom-salesman moustache. "Deal with the Devil" and "Faustian pact" were just two of the phrases used to describe the merger between Orchard and Peter MacKay that helped secure the latter’s victory over Jim Prentice.
OK, so it was an unlikely pairing. MacKay was the clear favourite of the Tory party old guard, promising a return to the slick style of Brian Mulroney. Orchard, on the other hand, was the anti-free trade maverick who threatened to scupper his party’s most treasured achievement. But a deal with the Devil? Let’s be reasonable.
To hear such nonsense from the likes of Jeffrey Simpson and John Ibbitson in The Globe and Mail was surprising, to say the least. For they surely know that Canadian politics is fundamentally about making deals. Always has been, always will be. The pact between Robert Baldwin and Louis Hippolyte-Lafontaine that brought English- and French-Canadian Reform opposition together in the 1840s? Deal. The backroom talks that produced Confederation itself? Deal. The aborted Meech Lake Accord? Deal. And, of course, both the FTA (Free Trade Agreement) and subsequent NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) were very big deals.
More to the point in this case, it very soon became apparent that frontrunner MacKay was unlikely to muster more than 40 per cent of the delegates’ support. Given this simple fact, some sort of deal was inevitable. The only question, really, was whether it would produce a MacKay-Orchard pact or an Orchard-Prentice-Brison merger in an "anyone-but-MacKay" bid to win. The latter, surely, would have smacked far more of desperation and disunity than the actual outcome.
Still, the whole episode did have its unsavoury moments. Joe Clark hustling over to Orchard midway through the final ballot gave the appearance of the outbound ex-leader trying to influence the democratic election of his successor. MacKay’s public revelation of the deal’s contents even before the votes were cast looked very much like a bid to sink a free and open election.
The point in both cases is that, for good or bad, appearances are everything in politics these days. They have been for quite a while, in fact, which means that everyone involved knows how the game is played. As such, the Tory convention should have been a great opportunity for the party to take advantage of three days of unlimited media coverage to show that it was truly a united party with the potential to govern once more. Instead, we saw a party unable to govern itself, let alone the nation. Ten years of toiling in the shadow of the Great Tory Massacre of ’93, and still nothing has been learned.
It’s tempting to ask: just what is it with the Conservative party? This is, after all, the third time in the past century or so that the failure to build a strong and lasting leadership has left it in the political wilderness and Parliament in the hands of a gleeful Liberal government. After the death of Sir John A. Macdonald in 1891, the Conservative party ran through no fewer than four leaders over the next five years. The result was the party’s defeat in the 1896 election and the ushering in of the first great Liberal era under Sir Wilfrid Laurier, one that lasted until 1911.
The second leadership crisis came in the wake after the defeat of R.B. Bennett in 1935. Bennett’s victory in 1930 had ended nine years of Liberal dominance in Ottawa, but he now faced a public angry at his failure to deal with the Great Depression. The result was the Tories’ poorest result up to that time: just 40 seats in Parliament. Obstinately, Bennett clung to his job as party leader for another three years, thus damning his party to further decline and dissolution. Between 1938 and 1956, the Conservatives went through three increasingly ineffective leaders, before another party maverick – John Diefenbaker – emerged to lead them back into power in 1957.
One result of successive Conservative leadership crises has been to allow the Liberals to govern by default. For almost 70 per cent of the 20th century, the Liberals have held office, often for decades at a time. Only in extreme circumstances, aggravated by a Liberal tendency towards arrogance in power, do the Conservatives prevail, it seems.
You don’t have to be a supporter of the Tories to wish they’d get their act together and start acting like a real opposition party or even one prepared to govern. It clearly does the country a disservice to suffer long bouts of single-party rule, characterized by a dwindling public interest in politics and a supreme arrogance inside the Prime Minister’s Office. Sometimes, any change is change for the better.
Are we there yet? Are the Tories ready to govern once more? The recent leadership convention suggests not. MacKay is the fifth party leader since Mulroney, but there is little reason to believe that he will succeed in reviving his party where his predecessors failed. In the short term, he has to convince his own supporters and party skeptics that his deal with Orchard was worth it. In the long run, he has to work out an electoral strategy that doesn’t involve formal co-operation with the Alliance.
Sounds like the Devil has a lot on his plate. |
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