CKNW Editorial
for October 22, 1999

Yesterday, after my interview with Preston Manning, I figured out why I’m having trouble with his party.

First, though, I thought it was an interesting interview because for the first time I saw Mr Manning rattled and actually fumbling for an answer. I don’t think he’s ever been questioned specifically on the matters we discussed – at least not to the point where his interviewer was insisting on straight answers.

I diagnosed my problem and it is this – any party I support must be all inclusive. By that I don’t mean just that it permits folks it doesn’t much like into the fold – I mean a party where anyone within the broad confines of the party’s platform is welcome. And becomes a sort of dog chasing its tail bit because, if the platform makes people uncomfortable they won’t join even though the party and its leader say their welcome.

I have a very high regard for Mr Manning as a person. He is a thoroughly decent honest man and he has done a creditable job as opposition leader. Although he seems to have backed off a bit, I applaud his constitutional stand which I think has provoked many of the good things which have happened in that area lately. I think that with one or two exceptions he has a fine contingent of MPs from British Columbia.

Now the howevers. Neither his party nor Mr Manning himself are all inclusive. This is not to say that the party openly discriminates against otherwise acceptable people, it just makes them feel unwelcome.

After listening to him yesterday, do you think gay people would feel welcome in that party? I sure as hell don’t … or ethnics? I doubt it and I know they have an East Indian MP which proves nothing. Would divorced people feel at home? I’m divorced and I certainly don’t.

I think it’s the preachiness of it all and the feeling that certain words and terms are code language for something else. I don’t like being preached to, least of all from a politician. My priest perhaps – only perhaps – but not my politician. I get the impression that I owe the Reform Party an apology and a sworn promise never to sin again. When I hear the term "family values" I hear a party not laying out a legislative strategy but saying, in essence, we Christians who have never been divorced are superior to you sinners and we’re never going to let you forget it. I hear the Book of Leviticus and its injunctions against homosexuality, something Christ never dealt with, incidentally. I get a faint sense of disgust at people whose marriages have failed leaving them in charge of the children. I get the feeling that those of our fellow citizens who, for one reason or another have trouble coping are, under Reform, to pull up their socks or else. Ted Byfield is the father of the Reform Party and he is continually taking me to task for not being his kind of Christian … he even printed a letter last issue that sneered at me because I got permission, as a divorced man, to be married in the church.

I guess I’m just not interested in a government which concerns itself with the spiritual side of life – I want clean honest government and prefer leaving the spiritual to the individual and his priest or pastor, if any. I don’t want to be reformed, however much I’m sure I need it.

I have Jewish friends who feel very uncomfortable with Reform not because of any anti Semitic policy or utterings of Reform but they feel uncomfortable because of the intrusion of Reform into spiritual matters, feeling that they can’t be welcome in that party.

It’s not, I freely admit, any specific thing Reform says but the totality of a lot of little things. There’s a knee jerk reaction that refugees are criminals … that gays should work in the back room away from customers … that Indians are lazy like South Sea Islanders … that judges are going out of their way to send criminals into our houses. And there is the constant playing and braying to the cheap seats. If there’s a hot button to be pushed you can count on a Reform MP to push it.

Supporting a political party isn’t just a matter of platforms in black and white … or the eloquence or otherwise of a leader … it’s about the feeling you get in the pit of your tummy. The feeling I get in the pit of my tummy is that because I don’t measure up to the Reform Party’s code of fundamentalist precepts I’m not welcome.

These may be lousy reasons and they may be unfair for lack of specificity … fair enough. But my Dad taught me to listen to my tummy and my tummy tells me that the Reform Party not only wants to reform the government but me as well. However much I might need it, I won’t accept the moral preachings of politicians either directly or in code language.

I guess, when it gets right down to it, I’m just not a good enough person to belong to the Reform party of Canada.