More than 700 showed up last year for the Manning Networking Conference — old time Reformers, cabinet ministers and Conservative caucus members, think tanks, activists and lobbyists all gathered at Congress Centre in the capital’s downtown. The topics on the table included energy policy, national defence and moving beyond the welfare state. Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave a speech.
It’s a high-profile event that illustrates the enduring links between the two key political figures of the last two decades, Manning and Harper — the old Reform movement and the new Conservative government.
Twenty-five years ago, Manning was in charge, leading a western protest movement to Ottawa and Stephen Harper was the hardworking, behind-the-scenes policy wonk. The roles have reversed with Harper in the prime minister’s office while Manning continues to build the base in new think tanks, on campuses, in cities and in business circles.
Manning and Harper rode the winds of change out of the West in the late 1980s, bringing about major change on the political landscape. The Conservatives are back in power after years on the sidelines, the old Progressive Conservatives no longer exist, the Liberal party is in tatters and the country may well be on the way to a polarized, two-party system with the New Democrats on the left.
A handful of the Young Turks who started in the late 1980s with Manning are still there, among them Jason Kenney, John Baird and Diane Ablonczy.
Manning said he’s proudest of bringing fiscal conservatism — balanced budgets and lower taxes — to Ottawa. He’s also happy that fact West is ‘in’ and there’s been a shift in Canada’s centre of gravity, putting Alberta’s energy economy at the centre of the country.
“The old centre was rooted in an unspoken alliance between Ontario and Quebec,” said Manning. “And on May 2, 2011, (the last federal election) that shifted to a new alignment between Ontario and the West.”
But whether the Reform-Conservative movement has managed to shift Canadian voters permanently to the right is much debated by observers and critics — as is the contention that Harper can achieve his goal of making the Conservatives the country’s so-called “natural governing party.”
Manning’s Reform party can certainly take credit for changing the policy direction of the country in the 1990s, said Tom Flanagan, longtime party insider and political science professor at the University of Calgary.
Pressured by 52 Reform MPs storming out of the West in 1993, the Liberal government adopted much of Manning’s fiscal agenda — balancing the budget, paying down debt and lowering taxes, said Flanagan.
In three years, Liberal finance minister Paul Martin balanced the budget, and “since 2002, there (have been) a series of tax cuts by both (Liberal and Conservative) governments — GST, corporate tax, personal income tax breaks,” said Flanagan.
Reformers can also take credit for stiffening the country’s backbone in dealing with the separatists, said Flanagan. After the nearly disastrous 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty, a young Reform MP named Stephen Harper introduced a private member’s bill — the precursor to The Clarity Act later put forward by the Liberals, which put conditions around Quebec separation.
Flanagan doesn’t think the Harper government is necessarily pulling public opinion to the right. He won the election with about 39.6 per cent of the popular vote, and hasn’t gone any higher in the polls, Flanagan noted.
In the past, it took at least 45 per cent of the popular vote to win a majority, but with the splintered opposition Harper showed it can be done with less, said Flanagan.
Link Byfield, former publisher of Alberta Report and an early champion of Reform, said Manning’s greatest achievement was blowing up the old PC party, which paved the way for the hard-nosed Harper to put together the new Conservative Party to win government.
“We lost our populism but we did retain a right-wing approach under Harper,” said Byfield. “It’s a very different party but it’s truly a conservative party in spirit and policy to a great degree.”
Harper as prime minister had to learn to temper his ideological approach, said Byfield.
“Most people in the country don’t want radical change, they don’t trust it and you have to respect that. Preston, the populist, knew that and Harper had to learn that lesson when he was in office. Where Harper used to bring aggressiveness to policy, he now brings it to partisanship.”
Critics, however, say Harper has moved a long way from those populist Reform roots.
After passing the Accountability Act, Harper quickly turned his back on “the Reform promise of open, accountable and transparent government,” said Edmonton Strathcona New Democrat MP Linda Duncan, currently the only non-Conservative MP elected in Alberta.
Harper’s use of omnibus bills — combining all sorts of proposed policy into one big budget bill — is just one new strategy to avoid detailed scrutiny by parliamentary committees, said Duncan. He has concentrated power in the PMO.
This government is the most secretive ever, she said. “We can’t even find out what departments the government is going to cut.”
Harper is definitely moving to the right policy-wise, said Duncan. Federal environmental protection law has been gutted, for instance, to help get controversial pipelines approved, she said.
Ralph Goodale, former Liberal finance minister and the only Liberal to win a seat in Saskatchewan last year, also doubts public opinion is shifting right. Harper’s success, he said, was founded on “divide and conquer” tactics, not persuasion or building consensus.
Harper has perfected wedge politics, which is how he got a majority of seats on less than 40 per cent of popular vote
“I think his purpose is to kneecap the federal government,” Goodale said. “He has a Tea Party mentality and that’s not what Canadians want.”
By Goodale’s calculation, Harper’s support is confined to the 25 per cent of voters who are hard-core conservatives.
“If you look at the 40 per cent who didn’t vote and the opposition total vote of 36 per cent, that means 76 per cent of people did not vote for Harper. As soon as the 76 per cent of the electorate figures out the appropriate response, Harper will be done.”
Harper quickly abandoned Manning’s democratic reforms that called for free votes, independent committees and more powerful backbenchers, said Goodale. But his biggest betrayal of the Manning legacy comes in fiscal policy, said the former Liberal finance minister from 2003 to 2006.
Manning called for balanced budgets in the 1993 election, and the Liberals delivered for the 13 years.
Finance minister Paul Martin brought in major spending cuts over the next three years. In 2005, Goodale, by then finance minister, had built up a healthy treasury with a $13-billion surplus. But he said within two years, all that was squandered by Harper, who won a minority government in 2006.
“And that was before the recession of the fall of 2008 when the government was finally forced to spend on the stimulus package,” said Goodale.
Steve Patton, a political scientist at the University of Alberta and expert in populist politics, said the country’s political culture was already shifting uneasily in the late 1980s when Manning and Harper came along.
In the West, tensions were rising, partly fed by Mulroney’s alliance with Quebec nationalists. Anger flared in the fall of 1986 when the federal government pulled a $1.2-billion aircraft maintenance contract out of Winnipeg and awarded it to a Montreal firm.
Those regional tensions grew in the wake of the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords which proposed special status for Quebec. It all gave impetus to Manning’s “The West Wants In”, he said.
Also in the early 1990s, voices on the right, the Fraser Institute, the Calgary school of academics, were getting louder, calling for an end to big government, big deficits and big spending — issues championed again at the end of the decade by the new National Post newspaper, said Patton.
Premiers Ralph Klein in Alberta and Mike Harris in Ontario were at the forefront of that shift with their “small government” and “common sense” revolutions, low taxes and war on deficits.
“One of the pivotal moments of Canadian politics was the 1995 budget, when Paul Martin turned the Liberal Party on its head and introduced his most conservative budget. Manning had been pushing for that from his side of the house.
“To me, it was a high point of neo-liberalism — the anti-welfare state, push back on special interests. You can’t say Preston Manning caused that to happen, but he’s a big part of that.”
Community-based advocacy, women’s groups, anti-poverty groups, environmentalists, NGOs — all once seen as legitimate players in public debate — were suddenly labelled by right-wing provincial governments as “special-interest groups” accused of shutting ordinary Canadians out of major decisions, he said. (Harper took aim at such groups after 2006, cutting funding to about two dozen.)
Manning grew up doing homework in the Alberta legislature while his father, Ernest, ran the Social Credit government from 1943 to 1968. It was then that young Manning developed his theories about a grassroots approach to politics, “the common sense of the common man,” as he used to say.
He and his father wrote a small book in 1967 called Political Realignment, a clarion call for a two-party system of the right and left to give voters a choice, said Patton.
From that time on, Manning was a politician in search of a movement. But his populism didn’t catch on outside Western Canada.
Under the more calculating, ideological Harper, that realignment may well be coming about.
Will Harper’s hardball politics, his hyper-partisanship, bring about a permanent change in the country’s political culture?
Flanagan said all parties play hardball in government then complain about it when they are in opposition.
“Jean Chrétien played hardball, he cancelled the Somalia inquiry (into the beating death of a Somalian teen at the hands of two Canadian soldiers in 1993) when things got hot. I bet other parties will start to use omnibus bills too.”
Conservative columnist Andrew Coyne decries the current government’s impulse to shut down parliament and limit debate with the use of omnibus bills containing multiple new policies. “When Stephen Harper prorogued (parliament) rather than face a confidence vote in 2008, it was shocking enough, even in light of the extraordinary circumstances of that vote. When, under fire over the treatment of Afghan detainees, he prorogued again the following year, it seemed he might have tripped the wire of public consciousness: The Conservatives plunged 10 points in the polls. But a little more than a year later he was re-elected with a majority,” Coyne, a writer for Postmedia News, said in a recent column.
“The Harper government’s omnibus bill, likewise, is hardly its first such effort: It was only last spring that the government presented Parliament with a similarly bloated package of legislation, then as now under the pretence of simply enacting ‘certain provisions of the budget.’ ”
Lawrence Martin said Harper has taken hardball to new heights.
“Most observers would agree he’s one of the most undemocratic prime ministers,” said Martin, a columnist and the author of Harperland: The Politics of Control.
“One of the keys to Stephen Harper’s success is the autocratic style of his governance, bringing everything to marching order under him, not allowing for any dissent. This has cost him popularity,” said Martin.
“I think he’s a very unloved prime minister by Canadians, and that’s why he’ll never get the support of more than one-third of them, I guess. On the other hand, you only have to have the support of maybe one-third of the population to win now.”
Flanagan said if Harper is reduced to a minority in the next election, the New Democrats and Liberals could work together to defeat him. But as long as the opposition on the left is divided, he wonders how likely that is to happen.
In the end, it took the unique skills of both Manning and Harper to finally break the Liberal grip on power, said Patton.
“Manning shook up the political scene, he built legitimacy for ideas that were more marginalized, and harnessed western alienation. He gave legitimacy to another view of Canada that rejected the Liberal view of official biculturalism, big government and even multiculturalism.
“You need to shake things up like that if you want to change the dominant consensus, or you’re never going to get change.”
Manning was the right leader for that job with his populist touch and personable style, said Patton.
But it took Harper, more aggressive, more to the right, more strategic, to carry the movement into power.
Original Article
Source: edmonton journal
Author: Sheila Pratt
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