CKNW Editorial
for December 18, 2000

Today is the first of a two part series on the election last month. First I'm going to look at it from the point of view of the Canadian Alliance and then from the position of a British Columbian. I hope you'll understand that I am composing today's editorial without the benefit of hearing or reading the opinions of others since I was in Honolulu on election night and have read and heard nothing since.

The Alliance made a leader change last summer which went remarkably smoothly considering the fact that their founder, Preston Manning, was dumped. But there was a reason the party changed leaders - Preston Manning, it was said, couldn't win Ontario. Well it turns out that neither could Stockwell Day. Without putting too fine a point on it, there is no longer any compelling reason to keep Day as leader and a lot of reason why the party might consider going back to Manning. In fact, Mr. Day would do very well to consider his position with a view to making the journey back to Mr. Manning a smooth and peaceful one. Let me elaborate.

The reasons that Mr. Day failed were obvious during the election and were commented upon by me and others. He calamitously allowed abortion to become an issue. That took a bit of doing but he managed it. By successfully marrying Day's personal views on abortion to the referendum plank in the party manifesto - a plank spelled out in a private bill of Ted White - the liberals managed to paint the picture of an Alliance prepared to scare pregnant women down back alleys with coat hangers in their purses. It was dumb politics and it was clearly the amateurishness of Mr. Day that made it happen.

Mr. Day also put his religion clearly in issue with his decision not to campaign on Sundays. No one would deny him this right but it gave the Liberals, through the government organ we call the CBC, to show that Mr. Day believed in a literal translation of the Bible so that the earth is only 6000 years old. It mattered not that Roman Catholics, Protestants, Muslims have also got core beliefs which are utterly unscientific - Day shoved his religion onto the agenda and the Liberals, who didn't get to be where they are by not paying attention, successfully built a campaign around it. Whenever I talked to a Liberal - even those who pretended that they were fed up with Jean Chretien and his bunch, they would say "Stockwell Day scares hell out of me" which might be a laudable objective in a religious sense was lousy politics. And it cost him any chance he might have had east of the Lake of the Woods. And though Preston Manning holds similar religious beliefs, the plain fact is that he doesn't scare anyone.

Worst of all, I suppose, the country had a big hee-haw at Day’s expense as the CBC – again – asked people to support a referendum calling upon Mr Day, if elected, to change his name to Doris. When they’re laughing at you, not with you, you’re dead in the political game.

Moreover, the Day Charisma never materialized. The roll never started. Stockwell Day, when the trigger was pulled, turend out to be a dud.

Where does all this leave the Alliance?

It leaves them in opposition for a long time to come unless there is a sea change in Canadian politics. They are not going to go away if only because there's no one to take their place. The NDP are on the wrong side of the ledger and they are dead in the water. The party on the right side, the Tories, are even deader. The Progressive Conservatives, as led by Joe Clark, are born again appeasers of Quebec. They believe the two founding nation nonsense and would be quite prepared to make special deals with Quebec until hell freezes over if it would, however temporarily, stave off the separatists. This leaves the Alliance in the driver's seat, especially in the far west but what does that mean?

It means - and make no mistake about this - that the Alliance will move closer and closer to being the western separation party. I don't suppose anything summed up the gulf between east and west better that Health Minister Allan Rock, Ontario personified, triumphantly dancing on the Alliance's grave on election night. This arrogance and the attitude of the Liberals painting the Alliance as all but treasonous, has set the stage for the next round of politics in this country. And it isn't going to be pretty.