CKNW Editorial
for January 29, 2001

The temptation must be very strong in Canadian Alliance members to tell Joe Clark to go to hell … we don’t need him and his bloody Conservatives after what he did to us in the election. After all, Clark’s intransigence … indeed patronizing stubbornness … not only cost the Alliance any chance of making any inroads in Ontario but also cost them their seat in Calgary Center. Why make any deal with a guy like that who has only 12 seats anyway?

Well there is a very good reason you swallow your pride. And its called politics. And just plain common sense.

Joe Clark is done. He has no future in politics … hell, he hasn’t got much of a past, either. But he does have a name that is enough to keep Ontarians and Atlantic Canadians from voting Alliance. And while that is Clark’s only bargaining chip it’s a big one.

Mr Day should take his party to the table and there should be a deal made. Otherwise the Liberals bid fair to be the PRI of Canada and rule as the PRI did in Mexico damn near forever. The NDP is a completely spent force and the BQ will continue to share Quebec with the Liberals. A deal with Joe Clark to buy his party label … and why not the Conservative Alliance if that’s the price … makes a lot of sense.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it. What is the price tag? As always, the devil is in the details.

Joe Clark may want a lot of things but all he’s entitled to get is a new party dedicated as a philosophy to conservative tenets in which he and his party are members with the same rights as all members to create the party platform.

But we know where this is going to become unraveled, don’t we? It’s that word that the politicians thing we the public don’t care about – the Constitution. And the difference isn’t in some arcane subsection buried somewhere in that Constitution. No … it’s the fundamental vision of Canada that’s at stake. Joe Clark and his Tories believe in the two founding nation theory while the Alliance stands for ten juridically equally provinces. This is not a small issue – indeed it is as big as an issue can get.

Clark and the Tories are dead wrong in history and I suspect Clark knows it. This country didn’t come together as "two founding nations", a phrase unknown in the debates that let to the deal of 1867. In fact the phrase is the invention of Lester Pearson or one of his wooly-headed bureaucrats, of which he had an abundance, back in the famous Bi and Bi Commission in 1967. That this phrase has been seized upon by Quebeckers and adopted as holy writ doesn’t make it genuine, which it clearly isn’t.

But Joe Clark has adopted the "two founding nations" theory and has pronounced himself in favour of asymmetrical federalism, that is to say special powers for Quebec if that’s what’s necessary to keep Canada together. It is this theory and this commitment to inequality that divides, at the philosophical level, the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance Parties.

How to bridge this gulf?

There is only one way and that is to meld the parties first then let the new party decide what its basic commitment will be.

Clark will resist such a move for obvious reasons. But he has no choice. He surely can’t expect Stockwell Day who is, after all, the Leader of the Opposition with 66 MPs to alter his party’s philosophy just to get the Conservative name.

Joe Clark, if he is to save his party’s name and give his supporters a viable political option must settle for an agreement which states conservative philosophical principles then trust that he and his supporters can convince the new party so formed to adopt his position on constitutional matters.

Frankly, I don’t think that will happen. Joe Clark is like a beleaguered general commanding troops that no longer exist except on paper. Mr Clark still believes that the Progressive Conservative Party and he himself matter in the political affairs of the country. At least he feels as a matter of personal pride that he must maintain that stance. But if he does stick to that position there will be no unified party of the right. For he must know that Stockwell Day, who has problems of his own, would be thrown off the sled to the wolves if he even hinted that he might buy into the Progressive Conservative view of the nation.

The merger is one that should happen. It should have happened before the last election. But it won’t happen if Joe Clark insists that the new party adopt, as a condition of a merger, the Tories constitutional position. That’s what it all boils down to.