Assignment 2: The West and the Rest

This assignment is geared to understanding two things: 1. Western alienation; and 2. the emergence of conservative media voices that dominate in the Prairies.
Preston Manning was leader of the Reform Party from its founding in the early 1990s until he was forced out in 2000 by Stockwell Day, the former finance minister of Alberta.
Manning, the son of an Alberta premier, started the party when Westerners began vocally complaining that all the important political and economic decisions were made in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Albertans were particularly opposed to any federal role in energy policy. The Reform Party also fed on anger over concessions made to Quebec in constitution talks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Manning led the Reform Party to a strong third-place finish in the 1992 election, and became leader of the Opposition in 1997. This occurred despite Manning's original opposition to running candidates for Parliament in eastern Canada, and his later decision to run Reform candidates against Progressive Conservatives everywhere. That decision, which split the conservative movement, may well have been the main reason Jean Chretien won three majority governments -- in 1993, 1997, and 2000. Often, Liberals were elected in three-way fights with juts 34 per cent of the vote. Many of the reasons for Manning's inability to win nationally are mentioned in the Gunter piece.
After Day was trounced in the 2000 election, Stephen Harper gained control of what was left of the Reform Party and merged it with the Progressive Conservatives. In 2006, Harper won a minority government.
Almost all the work on this assignment can be done through Google and Google Scholar. You should cite all of your sources, including web pages.

1. I want you to explain what writer Lorne Gunter says Preston Manning did that makes him a Canadian statesman (it's in the text. You don't need any other sources). 

2. I want you to discuss regional parties like the original Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois and argue whether they strengthen democracy and the federal government or harm it.

3. I want you to think about why the Reform Party no longer exists and talk about the reasons you come up with. As well, keep in mind that the Bloc Quebecois, which, in 1993, was the second-largest party in Parliament, has just a handful of members now.

The paper is due Friday, Nov. 8

Preston Manning, profiled by Lorne Gunter, National Post, Nov. 11, 2005

 

'The West Wants In!" With those four words -- originally coined by magazine publisher Ted Byfield -- Preston Manning saved Canada from a two-front war for national unity.

 

 

 

The National Post is conducting a search to find Canada's most important "public intellectual." In today's instalment, Lorne Gunter profiles Preston Manning. Other profiles, as well as contest rules, appear at www.national post.com/beautifulminds.

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'The West Wants In!" With those four words -- originally coined by magazine publisher Ted Byfield -- Preston Manning saved Canada from a two-front war for national unity.

Indeed, it was just one of Manning's words -- in -- that prevented the West from joining Quebec in agitating for the break-up of the country.

If Manning had raged "The West wants out!" at his Western Assembly in Vancouver in the spring of 1987, most of the nearly 100,000 Westerners who eventually joined his Reform Party (born four months later in Winnipeg) would have joined a Manning-led separatist movement instead.

All Western alienation lacked to transform it into Western separatism two decades ago was a credible leader. And while Manning was barely known back then, he was credible. Instantly. At least with Westerners.

With his Sunday-school-teacher appearance, his pinched, staccato speaking voice, his long, meticulously researched speeches and his genuine respect for ordinary people (one of Preston's favourite expressions is "the common sense of the common people"), Manning didn't seem capable of guile. He was to Western conservatives what Tommy Douglas had been to an earlier generation of Western socialists: the font of all knowledge and wisdom on the issues that mattered most.

Peter Lougheed, Allan Blakeney or Bill Bennett may have had more name recognition -- and arguably more charisma -- at the time. Each of them would have been a more natural choice as separatist leader, at least from an image-maker's perspective.

But there was just something about Manning. Maybe it was his preacher-like style or the qualities he shared with the ideal Scout master (honest, loyal, dutiful, modest, prepared). Perhaps it was his encyclopedic knowledge of the West's history, or his thorough understanding of how Canada's institutions worked (and didn't) and what could be done to rescue them and make them fairer.

Whatever it was Manning possessed that made people follow him, they followed him in droves, as loyally and fervently as I have ever seen voters follow a politician, with the possible exception of Pierre Trudeau. As Manning stumped from community hall to farm kitchen to church basement, they joined up to follow him toward the centre, toward Ottawa and a renewed Confederation, rather than away from all that.

As a public intellectual, Manning's greatest achievement may have been re-channelling the growing desire among Westerners to pull up their tents and leave Canada.

He's a different man now -- and I don't mean the coiffed hair. He was forced during and after his fight in 2000 for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance to become a politician. There is still more of the manse than the backroom in him. But his tactics at the time showed he could fight dirty, if not well, to retain and then reclaim his leadership.

And his vow to "do politics differently," which he made when he came to Ottawa at the head of the 52-seat Reform caucus in 1993, didn't turn out exactly as planned. It was naive to think the rest of the country would transform its institutions and political practices just for him, or his vision of a "New Canada," or his brand of populism, or even just to placate the West.

Still, it is hard to think of another politician -- prime minister or otherwise -- who has done more to transform Canada since Brian Mulroney.

Manning founded not one, but two political parties -- Reform and the Alliance -- that both became the official opposition. And now, with his new Manning Centre for Building Democracy (www.manningcentre.ca), he is seeking to build an intellectual and political infrastructure that can seed and grow conservative thinkers, activists, lawyers, writers and politicians who will, in time, achieve the intellectual transformation of the country's institutions that his political forays began but never completed.

With his books and reforming zeal, Manning has long been ahead of the curve. In 1967, along with his father, former Alberta premier Ernest Manning, Preston wrote a treatise entitled Political Realignment in which the two of them advocated a "social conservatism." Not conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay rights -- conservatism with a social conscience, with people rather than government as the agents for social justice. It predated George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" by more than 30 years.

At least Manning is consistent. He's still using his public intellectualism to stir the pot for political realignment.