CKNW Editorial
for June 18, 2001

I don’t know whether to be astonished or amused at what I heard from the lips of Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day last Friday during my interview of him. He compared himself, or at least his perilous political position, to that of Trudeau and indeed Churchill. I mean no sacrilege when I say I expected him to declare some similarity between himself and his position of martyrdom and that of Christ himself. There was no fault in Mr Day – only in his tormentors. Even Deborah Gray, the sainted den mother of Reform/Alliance was, Mr Day hinted, not quite the icon of the right we have come to see her as.

It is true, of course, that by staying the course through thick and thin many have seen greater days following years of political torment. Joe Clark, the boy wonder of the seventies, the assassinated failure of the eighties, the reinstated constitutional catastrophe of the nineties has, by simply continuing to inhale and exhale – plus an inability to find anything else useful to do – found himself as an object of respect, if only by comparison.

The trouble is that Stockwell Day doesn’t have the luxury of either time or a stable political base. Nor, one must sadly conclude, does he have the reservoir of personal talent possessed by Trudeau much less Churchill. In fact Mr Day has no time at all, it all having been effectively spent on election night last November.

It is sad to see the voice of Western dissent, the Reform Party, rot away in its new incarnation as the Canadian Alliance. The fundament of that dissent has not disappeared with the follies and failure of the Alliance – it has only become rudderless. And that’s a shame because in the unlikely event that we keep this country together, that will only happen because a settlement between Central Canada and the extremities of the country happens. And that won’t happen if the feelings of those in the western part of the country, no longer expressible in any intelligible way in parliament, become simply sullen resentment waiting for a leader to turn that resentment into active hatred.

The Reform Party had an easy birth and a difficult after birth in that many unsatisfactory people like Doug Collins and his ilk flocked to the colours believing that western dissent included racist nastiness. It took nearly 10 years for Preston Manning to root out the nastiness and though he didn’t completely succeed, he had most of the job done before the Stockwell Day coup d’etat. Then the party got impatient. It had to win – not improve its position but win – the next election. It violated Kim Campbell’s famous aphorism that "charisma without substance is a dangerous thing" and tossed out the steady pilot for glibness. The Alliance, which Preston Manning had fathered, impatient to win favour in Ontario and thus break the Liberal stranglehold on that province, tossed its founder aside and opted for good looks with some roots in Ontario. The sad thing is that it may well be that, if not now in the very near future, Preston Manning would start to look good, if only by comparison, to central Canadians.

Now we see the Vander Zalm Socreds on the national scene. A charismatic leader, selected not for talent but looks and glibness, stubbornly places himself ahead of party and the party implodes. The parallels between Mr Day and Mr Vander Zalm are striking. Both succeeded in spite of the fact that the core of their party rejected them. Each has a distaste for consensus and will instinctively break one up whenever it rears its head. Both carried the hardcore Christian element of their parties and both are good looking, nice people with straight from the parish bulletin good looking wives and families. The other commonality, sadly, is that both, upon reaching party leadership reached and surpassed their level of incompetence. Bill Vander Zalm refused to acknowledge the dissent within his caucus – so has Stockwell Day. Bill Vander Zalm placed his own ego ahead of his party – ditto Mr Day.

There is no salvation for the Alliance. They will chew themselves to bits by the time next April’s convention rolls around. They will go the way of the Social Credit Party though perhaps it will take two elections to do it.

So much faith, hope and hard work of so many has been invested in the Reform cum Alliance party – all the same the old Socreds. All of that is for naught. The leader puts himself ahead of the party and the forfeit, as is always called for in politics under such circumstances, must be paid. And it will be paid.