The Written Word
for May 3, 2000

What’s happening to Joe Clark is pathetic. Here is a man who was Prime Minister of the country now reduced to pleading for time with his caucus … that is as much of his caucus that remains.

Joe Clark never was very good on his timing. And his leadership has always been out of step and out of date .He became leader back in 1976 and he should have had, considering how badly the Liberals had pissed off the country, a solid victory in the election of 1979. Instead he squeaked through with a minority government which seven months later he squandered either because he couldn’t count or because he couldn’t make a deal with the Creditistes or both. He went into opposition limping badly but like a racehorse that loses stride, he was never able to recover and within four years he was subject to a leadership review which he handily won … but then he decided that the margin of victory was not large enough and called a leadership convention where he lost to the Brutus of Canadian politics, Brian Mulroney. Mulroney gave him what was then the sinecure of Foreign Minister and later, just to make sure that the blade was firmly part of Clark’s shoulder blades, Mulroney put him in charge of constitutional matters just after Mulroney had seen his beloved Meech Lake Accord blow up. Clark cobbled together an agreement which Mulroney promptly screwed up by making an add-on deal with Quebec’s Bourassa. The deal, the Charlottetown Accord, was resoundingly defeated and the following year, so was Clark. Last year, with this brilliant track record behind him, Joe Clark was once more made Tory leader over a backroom boy from Bay Street no one had heard of, a Farmer from Saskatchewan only the left had heard of and a Manitoba Cabinet minister that even his colleagues had ever heard of.

There is a reason that Joe Who? and his Tory party are in mortal peril – the Progressive Conservative Party was killed in the election of 1993 and despite the slight twitching of the corpse in 1997, remains dead as a doornail. Clark will not even win his seat in Calgary Center.

What we are seeing now is the operation of a political vacuum which is rapidly being filled by the Canadian Alternative which, against all the pundits, Preston Manning has brought off. Ontario Tories are flocking to the Alliance though, in fairness, it remains to be seen what will happen if Preston Manning wins the leadership. There will be some cracks in Tory power in Atlantic Canada which power is only an expression of dislike of the Liberals.

Joe Clark is a very nice man – but he has failed at every turn in the only thing he has ever done, politics.

How sad it is that the man who only had a sniff of the majors, was a marginal player in the minors at best, must continue this self humiliation to the bitter, and I mean bitter end.