By Barry Stagg
July 1995
Unfinished Business
The June election of Mike Harris as premier of Ontario may be a political watershed for the politics of Canada as a whole. The Harris government is the first Tory administration east of Manitoba since the ignominious demise of the federal party in the 1993 election/extermination. The rise of a blue collar brand of Conservative support in Ontario shows the way back to acceptance for the Jean Charest but a lot of re-tooling of the federal mindset must happen before there is any semblance of a populist revival of the party of John Diefenbaker and John A. Macdonald.
In my estimation what is more pertinent in the Harris win is the sense that Canadian politics is in a familiar cycle similar to the situation that existed after the 1968 "flower power" election of Pierre Trudeau as Canadian prime minister. The supposition that any discernible pattern of Canadian politics exists today is reason for optimism. With the sour fracturing of federal -provincial affairs since Meech Lake it has been difficult to discern any pattern other than chaos itself.
Harris embodies a truly conservative political beachhead in eastern Canada and twins quite nicely with Ralph Klein's western duchy of popular frugality. Perhaps a comparison to the 1968-1972 era would shed some light on how events might unfold in the next few years. During those years the Ontario Tories passed the torch of leadership from John Robarts to Bill Davis and Conservative Peter Lougheed began the string of Tory administrations in Alberta that continue to this day under Premier Klein. That most enigmatic of Quebec Liberals, Robert Bourassa came to power and both Newfoundland and New Brunswick threw off the heavy yokes of decaying Liberal fiefdoms and elected young Conservative premiers.
In Newfoundland the voters took two elections in 1971 and again in 1972 to exorcise the Smallwood regime from the Confederation Building and to elect a young Frank Moores as the province's second premier. In New Brunswick, in 1970, Richard Hatfield led the Conservatives to victory over Liberal strongman Louis Robichaud.
The cycle of action and political reaction is at work in Canada again providing a healthy structure for a country in immediate need of some certainty and political firmness. The focal point is still the federal administration with Trudeau acolyte Jean Chretien at the helm of a Liberal government showing signs of the same political drift that just missed sinking Trudeau in the 1972 election that gave Canada a minority Liberal government and very nearly made Nova Scotia's Robert Stanfield prime minister. Trudeau was saddled by self-indulgence both personally and among his spendthrift cabinet who gave us wonders of the modern Canada such as Canada Works projects and the twenty year embarrassment of "10-42" unemployment insurance obscenities. Chretien has similar problems as he tries to implement a fiscally conservative agenda with a pack of cabinet ministers like crypto-socialist Lloyd Axworthy. Fellows like Lloyd are not set up to save money, they are programmed to spend lots of it especially if it is tax-payers dollars marshalled against the perils of defeat in a Liberal riding.
It appears that Chretien's mandate is as hollow and amorphous as the mandate Trudeau received in 1968. I well remember the June election of 1968 as I marched into my grade nine public examinations the morning after election day to hear examination supervisor Les O'Reilly remark about the six Tory members Newfoundland had sent to Ottawa in the face of the gale of Trudeaumania that swept the mainland. I always figured that Premier Smallwood's backing of Robert Winters over Trudeau for the Liberal leadership had a lot to do with that result. In any event the 1968 election gave my district its first Progressive Conservative M.P. in the person of Corner Brook's Jack Marshall. Now as Senator Marshall he has led the good fight against the odious attempts to paint Canadian efforts in World War Two as immoral and genocidal. He is the bane of Terence McKenna's existence. Senator Marshall, the combat veteran of World War Two also became the first Jewish M. P. from Newfoundland upon his 1968 electoral defeat of longtime incumbent Herman Batten.
However I do digress from the topic nominally at hand but the chance to note the good Senator's political debut in 1968 was irresistable.
Back on topic, it appears that the Harris-Klein link will present an opportunity for the citizens of Canada to support a truly conservative alternative to the dubious commitment of Chretien and company to such an agenda.
The political waters become quite a bit more cloudy when the matter of a successor to Chretien arises. For certain career ambition-junkies like Sheila Copps, Allan Rock and our own electoral successor to Senator Marshall, Brian Tobin are going to fight a truly vicious political war in the worst traditions of Liberalism ,to ensure that no upstart fiscal conservative like New Brunswick's Frank McKenna gets into Chretien's saddle. That is when the voters need a proper alternative to the Liberal in the next election. That can only happen if Klein and Harris bring the conservatives of the Progressive Conservative party together with the conservatives of the Reform party. Unless that happens neither Preston Manning's Reformers nor Jean Charest's P.C.'s can defeat the Liberals.
Beating the Liberals this time around is the unfinished business left over from 1972 when noble Robert Stanfield came a few seats away from ending Trudeau's career before that vain-glorious dilettante could sink Canada into the quagmire of debt he left as his putrid legacy when he finally departed in 1984. The burden on Harris is great and the expectations are high. Remembering and dissecting a little recent history can only help the new Ontario premier.