October 19, 2003
Manning's reform movement is dead
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun

Negotiators for the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives reached an agreement last week intended to see the two parties merge into the Conservative Party of Canada. The agreement was hailed as the appearance at last of a single right-of-centre political option.

But the merger had another significance. It represented the death of the movement that began 14 years ago at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Vancouver when about 800 people from all four western provinces - at least two-thirds of them from Alberta - came together as the "Western Assembly" and adopted the slogan, "The West Wants In."

Out of the Western Assembly came the Reform Party and out of the Reform Party came the Alliance, an attempt to win Ontario support for what had become a purely western phenomenon.

The point to note is that all three of these endeavours failed. Not one of the objectives they established - the Triple-E Senate, social issues to be settled by national referendums, a process of recall for MPs, parliamentary approval for Supreme Court appointees, and so on - none of this has happened. In short, the movement, which involved the tireless effort of thousands of people, was a complete flop.

We now know why. It was doomed from the start because it was founded with a false assumption.

It assumed the Ontario voter would vote against his own interests and it discovered he or she would not.

The man who advanced that assumption was the man who built the movement, Preston Manning. His own background explains his reasoning.

He had been raised in a political family. His father from youth on had been central to the success of the Social Credit in Alberta, a movement that began with a theory that failed, but elected a government that eminently succeeded and held office for 37 years.

However, Social Credit became so entwined in the public mind with the province of Alberta and particularly with the Alberta Bible Belt that it failed to take hold anywhere else. (A Social Credit government was later elected in British Columbia, but it had little in common with the one in Alberta.)

From all this Preston Manning drew conclusions. He saw that populist movements can succeed in Canada, but they must not be identified with any one province, nor above all allow themselves to be viewed as a closet religious endeavour.

From the start, therefore, he advanced the Reform Party as national, suppressing the formation of provincial parties, and always cherishing the assumption that the Ontario voter would see the common sense and the ultimate justice of the party's goals.

But every objective of the Reform-Alliance movement either eroded or threatened the interest of the Ontario voter.

Why should he change a system under which he or she has always prospered? Why should he or she change the rules of a winning game?

Manning had no answer for this. Neither did anybody else. Unless, that is, they were prepared to play the separatist card, declaring: If you don't fix things, we'll get out.

If such a case could have demonstrated that it had popular support behind it, changes would have been made forthwith because then it would have served the interest of the Ontario voter to make them. Toronto prospers as the financial capital of a nation. The smaller the nation, the smaller Toronto.

But since Manning could not play this card, his party spread east to the Ontario border and there stopped cold. Now the whole movement is dead.

So is the cause lost? I don't think it is. Ironically, I can't remember a time when people in the West seemed more dispassionately resolved that changes must be made, that we cannot have a country run by a single office-holder in Ottawa, who is elected solely on the basis of how well he serves the interests of Ontario and Quebec.

It's therefore probable that another movement will appear very quickly, that it will begin in Alberta, that it will focus on provincial matters rather than federal government, and that it will be much cleverer in the way it goes about things.

There's an old Indian saying: If you destroy a wasps' nest, be sure to destroy also the wasps.

Well, they've destroyed the nest, but there are now more wasps around than ever.