Wherever there's Alberta unite-the-right chatter, Preston Manning's name keeps popping up

He's really sorry about the last time, but it sure seems as if Preston Manning just can't keep away from that Alberta unite-the-right thing.

Consider these recently noted items in which the former Reform Party leader, now 73, has had a part:

    His annual market-fundamentalist bunfest in the nation's capital last week was backdrop for a matchmaking effort for Alberta's disunited conservatives, complete with a sleepover at Stornoway
    Breakfast at the Palliser with a well known Wildrose politician, courtesy the Alberta taxpayer, made headlines -- topic not specified, but we can guess
    The Alberta Prosperity Fund, the self-described "Super PAC" set up to get around election financing laws and unite the right, turns out to have offices in the building that houses Manning's Calgary headquarters

How Preston Manning convinced Wildrose MLAs to join mass defection

A whirlwind three weeks of negotiations to set the terms for one of the most dramatic mass defections in Canadian political history ended in the Edmonton apartment of a Wildrose MLA on Tuesday night.

Pizza, pretzels and “beverages” were served as the “Wildrose Nine” — the collection of MLAs who crossed the floor on Wednesday to join Alberta’s long-governing Progressive Conservatives — held an emotional meeting with Premier Jim Prentice.

Mr. Prentice spelled out his plan to improve the Alberta government, everything from the pending oil bust, to the fiscal crisis, to a creeping culture of entitlement.

Manning Centre founder and namesake lectures Ottawa Press Gallery on ethics

Let me get this straight: the founder and namesake of the Manning Centre presumes to lecture Ottawa’s Parliamentary Press Gallery on a supposed dearth of ethics because one disreputable Conservative Senator was once a member of the exclusive journalistic club and another worked as part of the Fourth Estate?

Preston Manning, the godfather of the Canadian Organized Right who acts as its chief financial matchmaker, teaming politically ambitious young market fundamentalists with well-heeled donors, launched his broadside at the Press Gallery yesterday, purportedly for the sin of having once been the professional home to Senator Mike Duffy.

As for Senator Pamela Wallin, Manning wrote, well, she was a journalist too. Ergo, there is a likelihood "that the ethics of both are at least partially rooted in their training and experience as prominent members of the media."

Got trouble with 'overbearing urban planners'? The Manning Centre wants to help!

If on Oct. 21 the market-fundamentalist slate trained and sponsored by the so-called Manning Centre for Building Democracy should fail to sweep most of the seats on Calgary City Council, the wealthy developers who bankrolled this effort can take comfort in the knowledge they received their money's worth in other ways.

Leastways, the Calgary-based Manning Centre -- set up in the mid-Zeroes by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning to be a key facilitator in the coast-to-coast network of think tanks, Astro-Turf groups, media bloviators, academics, pollsters, campaign operatives and other ideological agents that comprise the Organized Right in Canada -- is likely to place undermining democracy in Canadian city halls high on the agenda of its next national conference.

The details in a moment, but first, a little background:

Secretly recorded video reveals scheme to thwart Calgary’s popular mayor

CALGARY—There is no sign of drugs in a secretly recorded video that involves Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi. And it is not being shopped for $200,000 by shadowy figures.

But despite that, this video has garnered a lot of attention in Calgary because it involves money and some very powerful people: Nenshi, former Reform party leader Preston Manning and Cal Wenzel, one of the city’s most prominent and prosperous homebuilders.

The Annals of Digital Recording: 'Preston is out of the country and cannot comment'

Is somebody going around trying to pull a Mitt Romney on Preston Manning and the boys.

Romney, alert readers will recall, was the U.S. Republican presidential candidate who not so long ago was captured in a digital recording telling a bunch of well-wishers that, oh, about 47 per cent of the American population is made up of lazy bums so dependent on government handouts they're willing to do anything -- even vote for Barack Obama -- to stay that way!

If you enjoy playing Clue, you'll appreciate the irony that it was the Bartender, in the Dining Room, with a Cellphone, who did in Romney.

Manning Conference III: The right's strategies for dominating cities and wrecking medicare

Preston Manning and his self-titled hothouse for conservative scheming March 7-9 in Ottawa didn't really help the credibility of Canadian conservatism by scheduling speakers from the fringiest fringes of their movement.

But then, why worry? After all, the mainstream media that attended the conference in large packs treated everything that went on -- seminars on how to sell a kidney and all -- with the utmost seriousness and respect.

Manning Conference II: Cons' pipeline sales pitch sure to feature 'Green Conservatism'

When they weren't imaging the end of the world in a fiscal holocaust brought on by Keynesianism or worrying about the political end of the world caused by Liberal Dauphin Justin Trudeau's political talents or banished neoconservative hero Tom Flanagan's embarrassing shenanigans, conservative "big thinkers" at the Manning Centre's conference March 7-9 in Ottawa were demonstrating a remarkable tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

Leastways, the obvious differences between the current policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the prevailing "libertarian" views of the majority of conference participants seemed remarkably un-troubling to the conservatives in conclave.

Apocalypse Soon: Preston Manning, Ron Paul and the Angry God of the Market

Last weekend, the priests and priestesses of the Canadian branch of the international market fundamentalist religion gathered in Ottawa and called, as they always do, for more human sacrifice.

I speak, of course, of the annual networking conference of the inaptly labelled Manning Centre for Building Democracy, named for Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party that now governs in Ottawa and Canadian pontifex maximus of the cult of market fundamentalism.

"Conservatives" at the Manning conference -- who virtually to a man and woman are not conservative at all, but adherents of an extreme and radical ideology that borders on theology -- didn't need to elect a pope. They already have one, in the body of former Texas Congressman Ron Paul. So they invited Dr. Paul (he's a physician by profession) to be their keynote speaker.

Building the charlatan movement

Whoever decided to invite retired U.S. congressman and perpetual presidential candidate Ron Paul to the annual Manning Centre networking event must be perplexed. The Manning Centre has as its official goal: Building the Conservative Movement. Paul admitted others call him a conservative, but he did not want to wear the label.

Paul told the conference attendees: Like you I believe in liberty. As reported by Aaron Wherry, Paul opposes "interventionism," his own word.

His creed is free markets, and a hands-off state. No income tax, no social programs, and no central bank. He wants competition, even in currencies.

Manning Conference makes one wonder how long conservative movement can keep from tearing itself apart

Cognitive dissonance is a term from psychology describing the state of mind of a person who holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The conflict between the reality conveyed by the senses and prior belief commonly gives rise to feelings of immense anxiety and frustration, which the patient attempts to resolve in various ways.

Then there is the Canadian conservative movement, which seems capable of convincing itself of any number of conflicting ideas without visible discomfort of any kind. Nowhere is this particular case of cognitive dissonance on better display than at the annual Manning Networking Conference, where the movement’s core gathers every year to congratulate itself on two things: the rightness of its beliefs, and the greatness of the government of Stephen Harper.

What Preston Manning Didn't Say

Preston Manning's politics have always been out of step with those of the great majority of Canadians. But he is an unrecognized political wizard who has remade us before our eyes.

Manning is also the heir of the most successful political dynasty in our history. His father Ernest Manning took a lunatic-fringe Depression movement called Social Credit and turned it into a political force not only in Alberta but in British Columbia and Quebec as well. He ruled Alberta for 25 years, from 1943 to 1968, and made that province a one-party state that has endured for 70 years.

Manning's Map to Victory

Preston Manning, like Al Gore, never quite made it to the top job. Like Gore, this has freed him to dispense inconvenient truths, like this one. "Conservatives are generally considered, and this by our friends, to be weak or disinterested on the environment -- the issue of greatest concern to many of our children and grandchildren."

A thousand conservatives from across the country are gathered in Ottawa for the Manning Networking Conference. Some shift in their seats. A few nod. Their leader continues. "Whether it's fair or not, the bad news is that this perceived deficiency on the environmental front has become a political and economic liability."

Preston Manning On Tom Flanagan: Speaking For The Party Sometimes Means Shutting Up

OTTAWA - Conservatives gathered in Ottawa this weekend to learn how best to spread their party's message are being told one way is to know when to shut up.

The Achilles heel of the modern-day conservative movement is people who end up discrediting it when they speak their mind, suggested Preston Manning, the founder of the Reform party, which gave today's Conservative government its start.

Manning referred directly to the case of Tom Flanagan, a long-time party strategist who found himself swiftly ostracized last month after suggesting people who look at child pornography shouldn't be jailed.

Preston Manning's talk fest hits Ottawa

Ron Paul is a Texan who has made three marginal runs for the American presidency and who is also considered by many to be a godfather of the Tea Party movement that has driven the Republican Party to the far right. The Huffington Post reports that Paul’s campaign in the Republican primaries in 2012 foundered “when newsletters published under his name back in the 1980s and '90s were found to contain anti-gay and racially-charged statements.” Paul says that he did not write those comments even though he acknowledges they appeared in his literature. Paul is a headline speaker at the March 7-9 conference of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy in Ottawa. Paul has already held forth in a series of Canadian interviews in which he says he opposes public health care and all gun registries but wants to see the Keystone XL Pipeline built as soon as possible to deliver Alberta oil to Texas refineries.

The Conservatives Party

"I caution Conservatives, don't ever call yourself the natural governing party of Canada," says Preston Manning. We're speaking over the din of a thousand excited delegates, packed into a ballroom in Ottawa for the opening-night mixer. "This is a conference of self-examination," says Manning. "Every party has strengths, every party has weaknesses."

Lately, one could argue, it's the strengths that have been more in evidence. Certainly the crowd feels buoyant.

Manning and Broadbent find common ground

A political odd couple is backing an opposition motion allowing Canadians to sign online petitions, and even trigger a House of Commons debate, on issues that concern them.

Reform party founder Preston Manning, one of the most respected voices in the Canadian conservative movement, is endorsing B.C. New Democratic Party MP Kennedy Stewart's motion to be voted on before the summer break.

He joins former NDP leader Ed Broadbent as well as 20 MPs, including two Conservatives, who have formally endorsed the motion.

Preston Manning's well-funded ideological hobbyhorse takes aim at civic progressives

Is the so-called Manning Centre for Building Democracy preparing to target Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and other progressive city councillors for a corporate-backed reprise of the far right's domination of federal and provincial politics in recent decades across Canada?

So it would seem.

Indeed, it would be fair to say the benevolent sounding Trojan Horse founded by Preston Manning, the former Reform Party leader and unflinching market ideologue, has its sights set on finding ways for the ideological right to take over municipal councils all across Canada. Calgary is just to be the first conquest in its ideological blitzkrieg.

Populists, policy wonks and prime ministers

EDMONTON - For the last few years, Preston Manning has headed to Ottawa each March for a major huddle of the country’s Conservative establishment.

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.

How to reframe beginning-of-life issues

Last week’s parliamentary debate on whether to have a committee examine the issue of when life begins illustrates the need to reframe how we in Canada approach “beginning of life” issues.

The proponent of the parliamentary motion, and cabinet ministers such as Jason Kenney and Rona Ambrose who supported it, insisted that its aim was to address a more fundamental issue than abortion. But the opposition and most of the media insisted on debating it within the historical abortion-focused framework – still polarized between pro-choice and pro-life positions developed in the 1970s and 1980s.