Vancouver Province
for November 22, 2001

Senator Thomas Riley Marshall once complained “what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar” to which Franklin P. Adams replied “what this country needs is a good five cent nickel!” Neither got their wish nor will Canadians who say “what this country needs is a united party of the right”. It’s not going to happen for a couple of very good reasons.

  First off, the so-called right is in a permanent state of tatters because it is split along both philosophical and regional lines. In Central Canada it tends to be “red Tory” and prepared to give Quebec a special deal. In Western Canada it tends to the right fiscally and is devoted to the principle of ten equal provinces.

  The Conservative party has, in modern times, been badly split by region. John Diefenbaker, the Prairie radical, faced an impossible task in 1957 as he tried to come to terms with the Bay Street Tories. Though he was to win a landslide in 1958, Dief could never reconcile the two wings of the party, the establishment in Ontario and the protest on the Prairies. Neither could Joe Clark even though he personally became more central Canadian than Western as he went on. It was the regional struggle that did in Brian Mulroney as he tried to preserve Central Canadian hegemony over the rest of the country with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords which not only pissed off Western Canada because it offered Quebec too much, but did the same to Quebec because to them it offered too little. Ontario, as always, stayed right on the fulcrum of the teeter totter and rejected Mulroney not for what he tried to do but because he failed.

  The Reform Party was doomed to fail once it went outside its base of support and ogled Ontario seats. Whether it was the redoubtable Preston Manning or the tissue thin Stockwell Day, the Reform/Canadian Alliance party came the same cropper as did John Diefenbaker and Joe Clark when they tried to take the western show into Ontario.

  I would argue that Canada doesn’t need a united right – it needs a better Liberal Party. A hell of a lot better Liberal Party. Indeed a whole hell of a lot better Liberal party.

  Why do I say this?

  Because while Canadians often seem to have few things in common across the land, they generally agree on one thing – with some notable exceptions, they are pretty middle of the road folks deep down. To prove the point, one need only look at the Mulroney government. It could easily just have been another Liberal Party with fresh faces.

  In the past three elections, British Columbians have supported the Reform/Alliance while in two provincial elections during that span they voted NDP. Recent successful governments have always held the centre. W.A.C. Bennett, seen wrongly as the arch conservative, was in fact a populist reformer under whose aegis great social and economic reforms took place. His “nationalization” of the B.C. Electric Railway Company forming B.C. Hydro was classic left tinged populism. The Bill Bennett governments may be remembered for the “restraint” program and resultant civil disorder of 1983 but his was, on the record, a very middle of the road government that was very strong on social policy. Bill Vander Zalm and the recent NDP governments failed because they couldn’t hold the center.

  Why, with this record, doesn’t B.C. vote Liberal federally?

  Because British Columbians, in huge numbers, hate the Federal Grits.

  Why the hatred?

  Because the Liberal Party of Canada, since the Trudeau years with Keith Davey and  Jimmy Coutts, have run the party as if they only needed to carry Ontario and Quebec to win … and they were right. The Liberal Party, once upon a time the party of all the nation, has been the party of the Central Canadian establishment for 35 years. Arrogant, run by a petty dictator subject only to periodic elections, it just doesn’t give a damn for anything outside Ontario and Quebec.

  The tragedy is Canada’s. We have a national governing party elected on a regional basis even though philosophically there should be support for it right across the country.

  It’s not the lack of unity on the right that threatens to do this country in – it’s the inability of the center to make a presentable case anywhere other than Ontario and Quebec.