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10/15/2003 Archived Entry: "Tories, CA close to deal"

TIL DEATH DO YOU PART: Conservatives have something to cheer (?) today as it seems a merger between Canada's conservative parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, seems to be moving forward again.

Alliance Leader Stephen Harper cancelled a town hall meeting in Calgary and was flying back to Ottawa to hold last-minute negotiations with Tory Leader Peter MacKay, who was flying in from Halifax.

"I do think we're approaching something that is very historic," Harper said in Calgary.

"It's not often that the political landscape is altered in a big way so quickly, but I think we're very close to doing that."

A merger would reunite the western-based and more socially conservative Alliance with Eastern Canada's progressive Tory wing, ending a 15-year split in their ranks.

I've wrote in the past that a merger between the two would be a waste of time. The Progressive Conservatives aren't conservative anymore and a merger would only weaken the populist conservatism of the Alliance. Anyone who was a conservative already left the federal PC Party...that said, end result of this merger? Liberal Paul Martin is elected prime minister next year.

Read on.

Kevin Michael Grace also recently wrote on the merger talks after they collapsed here and if you click on [more] you can read an article I wrote about it last month.

The right is already united

By Steven Martinovich

Like bad episodic television the ongoing drama of uniting the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives once again ended in failure with both accusing the other of pulling the plug on negotiations. According to both sides, the parties were reasonably close this time in creating a united right-wing in Canada, but Tory concerns that the Alliance would essentially subsume it was the obstacle.

Although Alliance Leader Stephen Harper and Tory Leader Peter MacKay pushed for the merger, thanks should perhaps go to the Liberal Party. With the right wing vote fractured among the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives -- itself the product of a 1943 merger between the Conservative Party and the Progressive Party -- the Liberals, or more accurately Paul Martin, seem to have a firm grasp on the throne for the near future. The very notion of that apparently prompted the two parties to once again pursue a merger.

Both Harper and MacKay seem to have bought into Preston Manning's belief that the two parties share a common purpose. Said Manning back in 1998, "this realignment is particularly necessary since the old political paradigm which still frames the Canadian political discourse no longer reflects the way Canadians perceive themselves in relation to the political process" and the only thing necessary was an alliance of politicians who believed in "fiscal responsibility, social responsibility, democratic accountability, and a strengthened federation characterized by equality and rebalanced powers."

Old political paradigms and alliances aside, the idea of merger between the Tories and Alliance is a poor idea to begin with since you have to ask yourself if there is even a right-wing left to unite. The movement is the attempted wedding of two very different political forces. On one hand we have the Canadian Alliance, a political movement clearly different from all others on the federal scene. Adopting U.S.-style rhetoric about free markets, smaller government and morality, the Alliance became popular in Western Canada thanks to its largely populist approach and old-fashioned conservative politics.

On the other hand we have a mainstream Progressive Conservative party which these days are much more progressive than conservative. Past federal elections have seen amazing similarities between the Tory platform and that of the Liberals. In some cases the Tories were to the left of the governing Liberals, calling for a few years ago -- as an example -- a regulation to force banks to loan money to communities they operate in, something not found even in the Liberal platform.

Simply put, if there are any conservatives outside of the Canadian Alliance, they aren't among the Progressive Conservatives. They have already made the switch to the Canadian Alliance. They either vote Tory to park their votes until a real alternative to the Liberals pops up or they are in denial about their own politics.

What neither the Tories nor the Alliance seem to understand is that they are losing at the polls for two reasons which they can do little to change whether they are merged or not. The first is the remarkable ability of the Liberal Party to co-opt an issue by playing two sides against each other. In each region the Liberals employ a different strategy, often at odds with what it's promoting in another part of the country, and reap the benefits. A conservative party in this country will only have a chance at real electoral success when politics at the federal level realigns due to anger over the Liberals' successful divide and conquer approach.

The second reason is an even bigger obstacle for the right: Canadians are centrist today to the point that a core set of conservative beliefs is not a major drawing card. Conservatism in Canada is stuck in the same position that the conservative movement in the United States was placed in after the massive victory Lyndon Johnson scored against Barry Goldwater. Like its American counterpart several decades ago, the Canadian conservative movement should stop expending energy in fruitless endeavors and begin rebuilding for the long haul. It should begin the slow tough work of building up a grassroots movement outside of Western Canada so that one day a truly conservative party can reap the benefits.

Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario.