Vancouver Province
for January 3, 2002

Welcome to 2002, the year "unite the right" efforts go all for naught for reasons so obvious that no one wants to recognize them.

The fundamental problem is that there’s not that much "right" to organize – most of it is clinging desperately to the "centre". Perhaps the best example of this is in the UK. Tony Blair has indeed moved the Labour Party far to the right to become the natural governing party of Britain after the pundits had written them off after John Major’s amazing upset of 1992. What Blair instinctively understood is that both the left and the right have mostly vanished from the political scene in favour of a center fortress, all but impregnable – so he stormed and captured it. The Liberals know this and combining this knowledge with the fact Trudeau discovered, namely that Canadian elections were all about Ontario and Quebec, and nothing else, have a stranglehold on power.

Into this mix comes an incoherent babble from those who hate the Liberals with a passion. One, Stephen Harper, would make the Canadian Alliance over into a "new right" party and in a passion of conservative righteousness, sweep the country en route to 24 Sussex Drive. No truck or trade with Joe Clark and the Tories for our Stephen – they’re as far left as the Liberals. Maybe more so, And Harper is right – unfortunately it’s the same sort of "right" that has one killed in an accident where they had the right-of-way. The Tories are indeed in the same political slot as the Liberals but the unadmitted, terrible truth for Mr Harper is that there aren’t enough right-wingers in Canada to elect anyone outside the province of Alberta.

One of the potential scourges of the hated Liberal party is Dr Grant Hill, the oh-so-earnest physician and family mediator from Alberta who, upon effecting the long sought alliance with Joe Clark’s motley crew will present an alternative party that all Canadians can flock to. He has a terminal illness, politically speaking. The party he seeks to lead became popular in much of Western Canada and all of British Columbia not because they weren’t Liberals but because they weren’t Tories. He forgets that from 1972 until 1993 British Columbia (which is key to the Alliance’s success) voted Tory not because the province is "true blue" but because the Tories were the party of protest. When Mulroney rode to power and showed that he was just another sort of Liberal that saw the country as nothing other than the never ending struggle between Upper and Lower Canada, he and his party became about as popular as a skunk at a christening and were banished from the scene. British Columbians remember the Progressive Conservatives as the party of Meech and Charlottetown and know that Joe Clark believes in "asymmetrical federalism" (a term he popularized) where Quebec gets perpetual special treatment. In short, the Alliance sees Canada as a union of ten juridically equal provinces; the Tories see it as a perpetual appeasement of Quebec. If the Alliance and the Tories were to join hands it would be like two reluctant room mates in a flat that contained an elephant they both agreed to just ignore.

If I were to make a prediction it would be that the Canadian Alliance, in their forthcoming leadership process, will decide that Stephen Harper can’t win because he has no natural power base, that Dr Hill and Diane Ablonczy will kill the party trying to embrace the Tory corpse, and that, after all, fumbling along with Stockwell Day is about the only alternative they have.